Clare M. Lopez

Clare M. Lopez (born 1953) is an American former CIA officer who has served as Vice President for Research and Analysis at the Center for Security Policy. She has been described as an anti-Muslim conspiracy theorist.

Career
Lopez received a Bachelor of Arts in communications and French from Notre Dame College, and a Master of Arts in international relations from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, before completing Marine Corps Officer Candidates School. She then declined a military commission to instead join the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a career operations officer, gaining deep experience in the Middle East.

During her service she acquired "extensive expertise in counterintelligence, counternarcotics, and counterproliferation issues with a career regional focus on the former Soviet Union, Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans," and "has served in or visited over two dozen nations worldwide, [and] speaks several languages, including Spanish, Bulgarian, French, German, and Russian." Lopez worked for the CIA for two decades before later joining Frank Gaffney's Center for Security Policy (CSP) as Vice President for Research and Analysis from 2014 to 2020. In the CSP she described her work as "project manager" in the "counterjihad movement".

Lopez has also been vice president of the Intelligence Summit, a senior fellow at the Clarion Project, co-founder of the Iran Policy Committee, professor at the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, Senior Scientific Researcher at the Battelle Memorial Institute, a Senior Intelligence Analyst, Subject Matter Expert, and previously produced Technical Threat Assessments for U.S. Embassies at the Department of State.

Views and activities
Lopez has published papers for the Gatestone Institute and the CSP, and given interviews and presentations claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood, which she considers to be a terrorist organization, has "infiltrated the United States government, and that Sharia law is taking hold in American courts." She "believes President Obama and his administration have a 'pattern' of 'enabling' or directly supporting Muslim terrorist groups," and "claims that Obama and Huma Abedin, an aide of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood." She has said that because Obama's father was Muslim, that "de facto makes him [Obama] a Muslim," and that the "Obama administration very clearly has switched sides in the war on terror." Furthermore, she asserts that the Muslim Brotherhood has an "unholy alliance" with the Black Lives Matter movement, that 80% of American mosques promote extremism, and that there are Muslim no-go zones in Minnesota.

Lopez was featured in the documentary The Third Jihad: Radical Islam's Vision For America in 2008, was a co-author of the CSP "Team B II" report Shariah: The Threat To America in 2010, and she has written for news websites Breitbart News and WorldNetDaily. She was named one of the twelve most hardline anti-Muslim women in America by the Southern Poverty Law Center in 2015. In 2016 she was an advisor to the Ted Cruz presidential campaign for national security, and was later reportedly being considered for deputy national security advisor to President-elect Donald Trump. According to a Trump adviser, Lopez was considered "one of the intellectual thought leaders about why we have to fight back against radical Islam." Trump also cited her work to support his proposed Muslim immigration ban.