Michele Kernitsky

Michele Kernitsky is a national security executive with extensive experience responding to global crises and threats and addressing complex foreign policy and intelligence challenges. She is currently a Partner at Aardwolf Global Solutions and Senior Vice President of its geopolitical advisory practice. Previously, she was a senior executive at the Central Intelligence Agency and also served at the White House and the State Department. Exclusively represented by Leading Authorities speakers bureau, her perspective is grounded in real-world consequence, offering audiences tools to anticipate risk, interpret global developments, and act with confidence in volatile environments. 

During her 26 years in public service, Michele advised U.S. civilian and military leaders on emerging threats and opportunities. As a senior leader at the CIA, she ran analytic programs on Eurasia and the Middle East that delivered timely, insightful, and objective analysis to U.S. decision-makers as they confronted international crises, ranging from wars to nuclear proliferation to widespread social unrest. She also oversaw the Agency’s analysis on emerging technical and insider threats, helping U.S. leaders keep the nation’s most sensitive networks and facilities secure. In recognition of her service, Michele received the Presidential Rank Award, the country’s highest honor for a civilian executive, in 2024. 

Michele led some of the CIA’s largest and most complex analytic programs during times of war, political turmoil, and economic crisis. For her extraordinary and lasting contributions to the CIA and its Directorate of Analysis, she received the prestigious William L. Langer Award in 2024. She also drove innovation and integration across analytic and operational lines, earning the George H. W. Bush Intelligence Officer Award in 2018. 

Michele has a strong track record of building partnerships across the policy world, the military, and the intelligence community. In multiple overseas tours and as Director and then Acting Senior Director for Russian Affairs at the National Security Council, she built cross-agency relationships to achieve better outcomes and engaged foreign partners to advance common goals and counter shared threats. While serving in the Political Section at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, she engaged Russian figures across the political spectrum and in the private and nonprofit sectors to understand their perspectives. In recognition of her work building a broad network that helped the Embassy provide Washington policymakers with ground-level insight from Moscow, she received the State Department’s Superior Honor Award in 2005. 

Before entering government, Michele worked at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she ran the U.S.-Russia National Security Project. This program brought U.S. and Russian military leaders together on neutral ground to discuss shared security threats in the post-Cold War era.

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