Receiving national honors

As director from May 2006 to August 2008, Ennis was responsible for integrating HUMINT capabilities within the intelligence community.

“Clearly, Mike’s distinguished record at CIA has been one of moving to contact on some of the most challenging issues we face,” stated CIA Director Mike Hayden, who presented the award. “Thanks in large part to his energy, pragmatism, expertise, and good humor, we’re making HUMINT collection a joint effort in ways that were hard to imagine before September 2001.”

Ennis was also presented with the William J. Donovan award for distinguished service to the democratic process and the cause of freedom. It is a CIA National Clandestine Service award of merit.

Ennis said that it is rare for someone outside the CIA to receive the award.

“I was not expecting the Donovan award,” he said.

Hayden credited Ennis, who came to HUMINT in 2007, as a crucial component to initiating the CIA-led, Enterprise Board of Governors consisting of 31 government organizations overseas.

“That was a tough bureaucratic slog, and Mike was instrumental in reaching consensus and getting it done,” Hayden added.Ennis said this past year with the agency was the best in his stellar career.

“Despite my career in intelligence I had no idea what they were doing and were capable of doing,” he said. “It was wonderful to be associated with this unbelievable organization.”

When Ennis retired last month from both the Marine Corps and the CIA, it marked the end of a 37 year military career. Several friends and family from Borderland were present at his Marine Corps retirement ceremony.

“Borderland is my home town and a lot of what I attribute to my success is from what I learned growing up,” he said.

Now residing in northern Virginia, he is looking for work that will allow him to draw on his talents, but says his official public service has come to a close. “I have no ties to Washington,” he added.

As a teenager, Ennis worked summers for Boise Cascade building campsites in what is now Voyageurs National Park. He looks forward to taking his son to the park in a few weeks to visit the interior peninsula and for a week of hiking, canoeing and camping.

Ennis said his parents and teachers, along with life in rugged northern Minnesota, taught him very early on how to be independent.

“This doesn’t mean not relying on others,” he said. “It was simply that in the absence of electricians, plumbers, furnace repairmen and other professionals in our small town of Big Falls, we learned to do all this ourselves. We were taught how to figure things out and then were expected to do them.”

He said that prepared him well for life in the Marines, where he said an independent spirit and resourcefulness is essential to succeed in a mission-oriented culture.

The Ennis family moved to Big Falls from Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1947. Arthur Ennis, his father, was a forester who went to work in the Big Falls office of the Minnesota & Ontario Paper Company. He was also the Boise public affairs officer from 1970 to 1977.

Ennis’ mother, Dorothy, was a homemaker and an educator.Michael Ennis was born at Littlefork Hospital in 1949 and attended local schools, played football and ran track.

“We had superb teachers who were strong disciplinarians, with strict adherence to the three R’s,” said Ennis. “I had teachers to pushed me hard to do better and foster a desire to learn. I cannot overstate the importance of my teachers and the value of my first 12 years of education.”

When he wasn’t in school, Ennis was canoeing the Big Fork River, hunting deer, grouse and ducks, or running a trap line for weasels. He worked for his father spraying mosquitoes and brush as a teen.

After graduating from Littlefork-Big Falls High School in 1967, Ennis studied French and international relations at Concordia College in Moorhead. He graduated in 1971 while on a year of travel study at the University of Paris at Sorbonne.

After graduation, Ennis was notified by the draft board that he had to enlist in the service of his choice or be drafted into the Army. He had never given military service much thought, he said.

His grandfather was a career Army-Air Corps pilot. His father served as an Air Force photo interpreter in WWII. Yet, his boyhood heroes and many friends were ex-Marines.

“They are a band of brothers that attracted me,” he said. “I wanted to be an ex-Marine.”After service as an infantry officer and recruiter, Capt. Ennis entered the Foreign Area Officer program in 1978 and spent two years studying Russian.

He recalls taking part in clandestine patrols in East Germany, and would serve in other surveillance, reconnaissance and intelligence roles in Europe and the United States.

Ennis said his role as a military professional would grow to become part translator, diplomat and clandestine operative. He had no idea as a young infantry officer that he would end up working on important issues of national security.

“I got it in spades,” he added.

Ennis would earn a master’s degree in government and national security studies from Georgetown University while serving as a translator on the Washington-Moscow Hotline in the Reagan White House.

He was also on the Intermediate Nuclear Forces inspections team, visiting missile bases in Russia for two stage missile compliance reassurance. He was also the assistant naval attache and U.S. military representative to Azerbaijan in Moscow.

After making Colonel, Ennis began serving in intelligence leadership roles including commander of the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific in Hawaii. Ennis was promoted to brigadier general in 2000, and major general in 2005, when he was named director of human intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, where he began his work to coordinate intelligence networks.

This position led to the CIA, said Ennis, who described the work as a long-term restructuring of clandestine services and information collection methods worldwide. He initiated a process of bringing together the capabilities of international government organizations.

Where the Department of Homeland Security handles domestic coordination of agencies, Ennis filled the gap with the overseas agencies at all levels.

“It has only to do with authorities and capabilities, of who has the authority to do what and the capability to do what,” he said. “No one organization has all of them, and they need to integrate.”

Ennis compares the tapestry of organizations working separately and together as a chess board. The individual pieces have different degrees of capability and must interact effectively, both offensively and defensively, to accomplish a desired result.

“My job was to get them to understand, incorporate and work together,” he said. As for the work of the clandestine services in the present war on terror, Ennis said simply: “We, as Americans, should be proud and pleased that a group like that is working right in the middle of it, and should sleep better at night knowing that.”