Owen R. O'Neill

Owen R. O'Neill is a physicist, a writer, an amateur historian and the descendant of a long line of engineers. After three years working for the US Navy as a missile systems engineer, he became a member of the intelligence community and spent the rest of his career there. One of the last generation of Cold Warriors, he worked on topics as diverse as satellites, IR semiconductors, telecommunications and C4ISR. He is an expert on technology projection and threat assessment, and did groundbreaking work on IW/IO before it was cool.

These days he writes, exercises a passion for photography he inherited from his father, and indulges in his two principal vices: cooking unhealthy food and ferreting out exceptional but underappreciated wines. He lives on nine rural acres in northern California where, when not engaged in the foregoing, he listens to his tenants (bullfrogs and coyotes) and watches over his infant vineyard.