Welcome to our new occasional feature, SpyFaces in the Crowd, in which we’ll offer mini-profiles of important players in U.S. intelligence that readers might not be familiar with.

Michael W. Ellis was on an ambitious Republican flight path even as a freshman at Dartmouth in 2002, although few of his classmates probably would have envisioned his swing far right into MAGA-land and eventual appointment two decades later as deputy director of the CIA in the second Trump administration.