Michael D'Andrea (born 1954) is a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer who played an instrumental role in American counterterrorism efforts during the War on Terror.

[6] She serves as a senior director of Currimjee Group, a business conglomerate owned by her family with holdings including print media, telecommunications, real estate, tourism, financial services and energy.

[2] He later received blame for the Camp Chapman attack in Khost, Afghanistan, when seven CIA officers were killed by a suicide bomb detonated by a triple agent allegedly backed by Pakistan's ISI.

[5][8] The bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, an Al Qaeda affiliate recruited by Jordanian Intelligence, had been invited to Camp Chapman after claiming to have information related to senior al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.

D’Andrea's biography and quirks became part of his legend: the soft-spoken, professorial figure notorious for keeping all the lights dimmed in his office; the chain smoker who would spend hours exercising on the elliptical, drinking Mountain Dew; and the middle-aged convert to Islam who ran a lethal campaign targeting Muslim religious extremists.

[2] Despite years in a prominent CIA assignment, D'Andrea's real name did not become public until a 2015 profile by Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times,[9] one month after leaving the role of CTC director.

[19][20] In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, conservative author Marc A. Thiessen said that Iran often targeted Americans it considered enemies, such as with the murder of Bill Buckley, the Beirut station chief kidnapped, tortured, and executed by Islamic Jihad in 1985.

[21] Mazzetti defended his decision, contending he was compelled to act after a January 2015 signature strike in the southern Pakistani region of Waziristan, which led to the collateral deaths of aid workers Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto.

The strike was authorized by D'Andrea and CIA leadership independent of White House oversight, and also killed American-born al Qaeda commanders Adam Yahiye Gadahn and Ahmed Farouq, who were the intended targets.