[citation needed] Francona and his wife Emily, also a retired Air Force intelligence officer, reside in Port Orford, Oregon.

Francona enlisted in the United States Air Force in 1970, and served as a Vietnamese linguist until 1973, conducting combat aerial reconnaissance missions over Vietnam and Laos in a variety of strategic and tactical aircraft.

After Arabic language training, he served at a variety of locations in the Middle East from 1975 to 1977, and supported the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1976.

During this assignment, he spent much of 1987 and 1988 at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, as a liaison officer to the Iraqi armed forces Directorate of Military Intelligence.

[citation needed] From 1995 to 1996, Francona served with the Central Intelligence Agency, and participated in a variety of sensitive operations in the Middle East.

[citation needed] In 2010, Francona appeared as a subject matter expert on the Iraqi military and Saddam Hussein in an episode of Spike TV's "Who is the Deadliest Warrior."

In 2013, he began working as a military analyst for CNN, commenting on the Syrian civil war and chemical warfare issues, and in 2014 on the deteriorating situation in Iraq.