Sir David Omand GCB

Sir David Omand is Visiting Professor in the War Studies Department, King’s College London. He held senior posts in British security, intelligence, and defence and served for seven years on the UK Joint Intelligence Committee. He was UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office (2002 to 2005), Permanent Secretary of the Home Office (1997 to 2000), and before that Director of GCHQ (the UK Signals Intelligence and Cyber Security Agency). He served in the Ministry of Defence as Deputy Under Secretary of State for Policy and was Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence during the Falklands conflict. He served for three years with the Diplomatic Service as the UK Defence Counsellor in NATO, Brussels. For twelve years he was a non-executive Director of Babcock International Group plc (for eight years the Senior Independent Director).

He is an honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and has honorary doctorates from the Universities of Glasgow and Birmingham. His published books are Securing the State (2010), Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence (with Prof Mark Phythian) (2018) and How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence (2020), now published as a Penguin paperback.