President Biden on Tuesday nominated Harry Coker, Jr., a former Navy officer and intelligence official, to be the National Cyber Director.
Coker has been an operating partner with the London-based venture capital firm C5 Capital for the past year and is a senior fellow with Auburn Univ.’s McCrary Institute for Cyber and Critical Infrastructure Security. C5 invests in cybersecurity, space, and energy security companies.
He retired from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2019 as executive director following two years with the agency. He also served on Biden’s national security and foreign policy presidential transition team from November 2020 to January 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Before working for the NSA, Coker served 17 years with the CIA with his last job being director of Open Source Enterprise. At both the NSA and CIA, Coker was involved in leading diversity and inclusion efforts.
“Tolerance is a low bar where one can merely acknowledge and allow differences to exist,” Coker said in a statement published by the NSA’s Central Security Service in February 2020. “Acceptance is welcoming and embracing our differences and leveraging them to make our agency and nation stronger.”
Coker graduated in 1980 from the United States Naval Academy and has a master’s in computer science from the Naval Post Graduate School and a law degree from Georgetown Univ. He was a surface warfare officer and later an engineering duty officer in the Navy before retiring in 2020.
If confirmed, Coker will succeed Chris Inglis, the nation’s first National Cyber Director, who resigned in February. Kemba Walden, the principal deputy NCD, has been the acting director since Inglis stepped down.
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) and Sen. Angus King (I/D-Maine), who are co-chairs of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, welcomed the nomination.
Base on his experiences in the intelligence community and Navy, they said in a statement, “We firmly believe that this experience and the expertise and skill set it imbued him with, makes him highly qualified for the position of National Cyber Director.”
Gallagher and King have been pressing for Biden to nominate a new director ever since Inglis resigned. They previously supported nominating Walden to the position and praised the “fantastic work” she has been doing in an acting capacity.