Dexter Ingram (LinkedIn; Website) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss his varied career. He has a very cool private collection of spy gadgets.

Dexter Ingram is the Acting Director at the Office of the Special Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS and in his spare time a passionate collector of intelligence artifacts and gadgets.

He has performed a variety of roles at the Department of State – he was on a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan, he was a Counterterrorism Coordinator at Interpol in Lyon, France, and has a deep interest in counterterrorism, counterproliferation and WMD. He was formerly a Naval Flight Officer and White House Intern with the US Navy and has studied at Hampton University, University of Oklahoma, and the National Defense University.

In part of our ongoing effort to look at consumers of intelligence as well as producers - i.e., who eats the sausages as well as who makes them - we touch on the various parts of Dexter’s career that intersect with intelligence. 

And…

Hampton University, where Dexter studied for his undergrad, is one of over 100 Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) in the United States. It sits near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay (incidentally on the same peninsula as “The Farm,” a covert training facility for CIA operations officers). Many leaders of the black community have attended HBCU’s, such as Booker T. Washington (Hampton), W.E.B. Du Bois (Fisk), Martin Luther King (Morehouse), Jesse Jackson (North Carolina A&T), and Kamala Harris (Howard). 

"It's about real people. These are real gadgets better than the movies. It gets my blood pumping." – Dexter Ingram on collecting artifacts.

• Historical Documents, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS)

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