John Rizzo ’69

John Rizzo ’69, of Washington, D.C.; Aug. 6, of a heart attack. After Brown, he enrolled at George Washington University Law School and interned at corporate law firms. Upon graduating in 1972, he worked for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. But in 1974, after reading an article published in the New York Times about the CIA being engaged in illicit and covert operations for years, he was prompted to apply for a position at the CIA. He was hired in 1976, and by 1986 he was the liaison between the CIA and the congressional investigators studying the Iran-Contra affair. He held the titles of deputy counsel and acting general counsel. In 2006, President George W. Bush nominated him to become the CIA’s permanent general counsel, but he did not receive Senate confirmation and continued to serve as acting counsel until he retired in 2009. When he retired he received the agency’s Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal and became a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and senior counsel at the Washington law firm Steptoe & Johnson. During his tenure, he was responsible for the CIA’s detention and interrogation program established in response to the attack on the U.S. on 9/11 and the CIA-directed drone strikes. During the course of his career he worked for 11 CIA directors and seven U.S. Presidents. He published his memoir Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA in 2014. In an interview he once said that he always tried his “hardest to do the right thing, even when things were the hardest.” The BAM profiled him in the 2014 “Clear Conscience” story (brownalumnimagazine.com/articles/2014-09-03/clear-conscience). He is survived by a son, a stepdaughter, a granddaughter, a step-grandson, and two sisters.