Dr Mark Stout is a scholar-practitioner in intelligence and security studies. He is retired from Johns Hopkins University where for eight years he directed the MA in Global Security and for four concurrently directed the Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Intelligence. In his first career, he spent twenty-one years in the United States national security community, twelve of them as an intelligence analyst or manager of analysts and one as Deputy Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence for Foreign Intelligence Relationships. He also worked for the US Army and for the Institute for Defence Analyses where he worked on the Iraqi Perspectives Project and then headed the Terrorist Perspectives Project, both multi-year Defence Department-funded efforts. In addition, he spent three years as the Historian for the International Spy Museum.

Dr Stout has chapters in several edited volumes and has been published in Intelligence and National Security, Cold War History, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Studies in Intelligence, and other journals. His book World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence was published by the University Press of Kansas 2023. He is also the co-author or co-editor of several other books in the intelligence, strategic studies, and military history fields. Dr Stout is on the editorial boards of Georgetown University Press’ Studies in Intelligence History and Concise Histories of Intelligence series. In addition, he was the founding President of the North American Society for Intelligence History (now the Society for Intelligence History).

Qualifications:

• PhD in History, University of Leeds, 2010
• Master of Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 1988
• Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Political Science and Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Stanford University, 1986

Research Interests

• US intelligence history
• Comparative intelligence
• US 20th century military history

Albeit with excursions into nearby topics, Dr Stout’s current research is largely on American intelligence during the First World War era and the early Cold War, particularly its cultural aspects. He is preparing articles on intelligence analysis in the late 19^th and early 20^th century US War Department and on NATO’s annual strategic intelligence estimate of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat during the Cold War. He is also working on an article on the memoirs of American First World War intelligence veterans and writing a book on John Grombach, a mid-century intelligence officer who ran an espionage organisation first as part of the War Department and then as a private company on contract to the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Publications

Books

• Magda Long, Rory Cormac, Genevieve Lester, Mark Stout, and Damien Van Puyvelde eds., Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention, forthcoming in November, 2025 from Georgetown University Press.
• Mark Stout and Sarah-Jane Corke, eds., Secrets on Display: Stories and Spycraft from the International Spy Museum, (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas in June, 2025.
• Mark Stout, World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2023).
• Christopher Moran, Mark Stout, Ioanna Iordanou, eds., Spy Chiefs, Volume 1: Intelligence Leaders in the United States and United Kingdom, (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2018).
• Kevin M. Woods, David Palkki, and Mark Stout, eds., The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978-2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Mark E. Stout, Jessica M. Huckabey, John R. Schindler, with Jim Lacey, The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of Al Qaeda and Associated Movements, (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2008).

Chapters

• Magda Long and Mark Stout, “The United States: Covert Action from the Nineteenth Century to the War on Terrorism” in Magda Long, Rory Cormac, Genevieve Lester, Mark Stout, and Damien Van Puyvelde eds., Covert Action: National Approaches to Unacknowledged Intervention, forthcoming in November, 2025 from Georgetown University Press.
• Mark Stout, “Intelligence in the Great War,”1084-1086, in Paul Bartrop, ed., The Routledge History of the First World War (New York: Routledge, 2025), 598-610.
• Mark Stout, “How Al Qaeda Assesses Its Progress,” in Hy Rothstein, et al, eds. Assessing War: The Challenge of Measuring Success and Failure (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2015), “Monitoring from Afar: How Al-Qaeda Assesses its Progress,” 234-252, ISBN: 978-1626162464.
• Mark Stout, “American Intelligence Assessments of the Jihadists, 1989-2011,” in Paul Maddrell (ed.), The Image of the Enemy: Perception of Adversaries since 1945, (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2015), 248-278.

Journal Articles

• Katalin Kádár Lynn and Mark Stout, “Early Cold War Intelligence Paper Mills and the Case of the MHBK (Association of Hungarian Veterans),” Cold War History, 24:1 (2023), 23-44.
• Mark Stout, “The Men and Women of American Military Intelligence before the CIA,” in Cultures of Intelligence in the Era of the World Wars, Gestrich, A., Gassert, P., Neitzel, S. & Ball, S., eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2020).
• Mark Stout, “Former Intelligence Officers in the Public Square: Cause for Concern?” a contribution to John A. Gentry, “An INS Special Forum: US Intelligence Officers’ Involvement in Political Activities in the Trump Era,” Intelligence and National Security, 35:1 (2020), 1-19.
• Mark Stout and Michael Warner, “Intelligence Is as Intelligence Does,” Intelligence and National Security, 33:4 (2018), 517-526.
• Mark Stout, “Covert Action in the Age of Social Media,” Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, 18:2 (2017).
• Mark Stout, “World War I and the Birth of American Intelligence Culture,” Intelligence and National Security, 32:3 (2017), 378-394.

Media Articles

• Mark Stout, “The National Security Case for Immigration: How Immigrants and Minorities Have Boosted U.S. Hard Power,” War on the Rocks, February 28, 2018.

• Mark Stout, “Were Hillary Clinton’s Emails Classified? Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit,” War on the Rocks, March 8, 2016.
• Mark Stout, “Even Allies Have Secrets: U.S. Spying on Friendly Nations is Standard Practice for Good Reason,” US News & World Report, August 18, 2014.