R. James Woolsey, Jr.

CIA Director

Aldrich Ames

Woolsey was CIA director when Aldrich Ames was arrested, on February 21, 1994, for treason and spying against the United States. The CIA was criticized for not focusing on Ames sooner, given the obvious increase in Ames's standard of living; and there was a "huge uproar" in Congress when Woolsey decided that no one in the CIA would be dismissed or demoted at the agency. Woolsey declared: "Some have clamored for heads to roll in order that we could say that heads have rolled... Sorry, that's not my way." Woolsey abruptly resigned on December 28, 1994.

Later career

Woolsey joined the board of directors for The Arlington Institute in 1992.

He was at the time of his death a member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) Board of Advisors, Advisor of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security, co-founder of the United States Energy Security Council, Founding Member of the Set America Free Coalition, and a senior vice-president at Booz Allen Hamilton for Global Strategic Security (from July 15, 2002).

Woolsey was a Patron of the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank. Woolsey had long-standing contact with Central and Eastern Europe and as a Member of the Board of Advisors for America of the Global Panel Foundation based in Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, Sydney, and Toronto. He was a past chairman of the Freedom House board of trustees. He was a member of the International Advisory Board of NGO Monitor.

He was a member of the Project for the New American Century and was one of the signatories to the January 26, 1998, letter sent to President Clinton that called for the removal of Saddam Hussein. That same year he served on the Rumsfeld Commission, which investigated the threat of ballistic missiles for the U.S. Congress.

Woolsey earlier served as chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonprofit, nonpartisan D.C.-based research institute that focuses on foreign policy and national security.

In 2008, Woolsey joined VantagePoint Venture Partners as a venture partner.

John McCain hired Woolsey as an advisor on energy and climate change issues for his 2008 U.S. presidential election campaign.

In April 2011, Lux Capital announced that Woolsey would become a venture partner in the firm.

In July 2011, Woolsey, in cooperation with Robert McFarlane, co-founded the United States Energy Security Council. Woolsey was sitting on the board of advisors for the Fuel Freedom Foundation at the time of his death.

He received an honorary doctorate from the Institute of World Politics in Washington, DC, in 2011.

Woolsey was a board member and vice-chairman of The Jamestown Foundation, and sat on the advisory board for nonprofit America Abroad Media.

He sat on the Strategic Advisory Board for Genie Energy with Dick Cheney, Rupert Murdoch, and Lord Jacob Rothschild. Genie is known for discovering a "massive" oil stratum in Syria's Golan Heights near Israel.

Woolsey served as Chancellor at The Institute of World Politics and the independent non-executive director of Imperial Pacific.

He joined as a senior adviser to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in September 2016. He resigned on January 5, 2017, amid Congressional hearings into cyber attacks and public statements by Donald Trump critical of the United States Intelligence Community.

On October 27, 2017, Woolsey's spokesman told NBC News that Woolsey had cooperated with the investigations of the FBI and that of Special Counsel Robert Mueller into a meeting that then-Donald Trump campaign advisor Michael Flynn held in September 2016. Woolsey alleged that, during the meeting, Flynn offered to help officials of the Turkish government return Turkish dissident Fethullah Gülen to Turkey.

In April 2021, Woolsey was officially banned from entering Russia with the countersanction set by the Russian government in response to sanctions under the Biden administration. He also accused the Soviet Union of being responsible for the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in a book published in 2021. According to Woolsey and Ion Mihai Pacepa in their 2021 book Operation Dragon: Inside the Kremlin's Secret War on America, both Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina Oswald Porter were Soviet agents.

On July 15, 2023, the Washington Post published an article that the U.S. Justice Department had unsealed its indictment of Gal Luft, a dual Israeli and American citizen who ran a Maryland think tank. The indictment describes what it casts as an effort by Luft and a PRC oil company representative to "recruit" a "former senior U.S. government official" and get him installed in a position of power in Donald Trump’s orbit, even before his election. The PRC business executive and the former senior U.S. government official aren’t named in the indictment, but the context indicates they are Patrick Ho (identified as "CC-1") and former CIA director James Woolsey (identified as "Individual-1"), respectively.

Woolsey was married three times, firstly to Suzanne Haley Woolsey, but they divorced after 48 years. Secondly, he married Nancye Miller, who was a registered foreign agent. She died of cancer in March 2019.

He was a descendant of George (Joris) Woolsey, one of the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam, and Thomas Cornell.

According to the website Benzinga.com James Woolsey's net worth was estimated to be more than $7 million as of 2024.

Woolsey died from a stroke at his home in Washington D.C., on July 21, 2026, at the age of 84. Prior to his death, he had been in failing health which was attributed to "Havana syndrome" according to his third wife and widow, Conchita Sarnoff Woolsey.