Zoom chat with Jeff Grant
123 fellow retirees and members of the NG/TRW Facebook group signed up to join Jeff Grant for a virtual chat on September 18. The participants spent time catching up with old colleagues before spending an hour getting insights from Jeff about his experiences in the intelligence community, working at TRW and then NG, and life as a retiree.
Most of us know Jeff as the former Vice President and General Manager of the Space Systems Division within the NG Aerospace Systems Sector, a position Jeff took after the retirement of Dave DiCarlo in 2011. Prior to joining Northrop Grumman, Jeff was TRW’s customer on a commercial satellite effort called Astrolink during the period that Wes Bush lead the TRW Ventures organization. TRW Ventures was an effort to leverage TRW’s advanced technologies in commercial application.
Prior to Astrolink, Jeff spent 22 years at the CIA within the Directorate of Intelligence, the Directorate of Science and Technology, and as office director in the Community Management Staff working under then CIA director Jim Woolsey. During that time, he learned the extraordinary value of protecting sources and methods–and how hard it was to do so while making the data product a valuable new collection capability available to the analytic community, while still managing to protect it from being revealed,
Jeff retired in 2018 with no plans for his retirement. After considering writing a book about his experiences at the NRO, he found himself challenged by Heather Laychak (formerly NG Human Relations) to write a book about what could be true. The end result is “The Swamp: Deceit and Corruption in the CIA,” a work of fiction described by James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, as a “spell-binding spy mystery which has an unnerving resonance with events of the day.”