On a phone call from CIA headquarters in the spring of 1993, the agency's new director asked engineer Abe Karem a blunt question: how fast, and how cheaply, could a shelved reconnaissance aircraft be flying over Bosnia with pictures showing up on a screen in Washington. Karem told him six months and five million dollars. Before he left the agency, the director asked what to call the stretched, more capable version of that aircraft, and settled on the name Karem's team had already been using for it: Predator.

R. James Woolsey Jr., the lawyer, Rhodes Scholar and national-security veteran who ran the Central Intelligence Agency during that call, died July 21, 2026, at his home in Washington, D.C., at 84, according to The Washington Post.

The drone was not the only Cold War tool Woolsey turned toward an unlikely civilian use. As director he asked the National Reconnaissance Office to test whether the image-recognition software it had built to spot Soviet missile launchers in satellite photographs could also spot tumors in mammograms, an initiative that came to be known inside the intelligence world as Missiles to Mammograms, according to his own account in an oral history recorded by the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. He also pushed to declassify the CIA's earliest spy-satellite photographs and to let private companies build and sell their own imaging satellites, helping launch the commercial space-imagery industry, and he backed a related effort, championed by Vice President Al Gore, to mine the same reconnaissance archives for environmental data under a program called MEDEA.

Born September 21, 1941, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Woolsey earned a Bachelor of Arts with high honors from Stanford University in 1963 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. A Rhodes Scholarship took him to St John's College, Oxford, for a second undergraduate degree completed in 1965, and he went on to Yale Law School, graduating in 1968 as managing editor of the Yale Law Journal.

The next quarter-century moved him between law and national security, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. After two years as an Army officer advising the American delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, he served as general counsel to the Senate Armed Services Committee from 1970 to 1973, then as Under Secretary of the Navy under President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1979. In the 1980s he represented the United States at arms-control talks with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and from 1989 to 1991 he was Washington's ambassador to the Vienna negotiations on reducing conventional forces in Europe under President George H.W. Bush, a run of appointments that spanned the Carter, Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations.

President Clinton picked Woolsey to lead the CIA, and he was sworn in as director on February 5, 1993, taking charge of an intelligence community still reorganizing after the Cold War. He spent much of that first year defending the agency's budget on Capitol Hill, keeping 205 appointments with lawmakers in 1993 alone as he fought proposed cuts pushed by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dennis DeConcini. His tenure was upended a year in, when CIA counterintelligence officer Aldrich Ames was arrested on February 21, 1994, and charged with spying for Moscow, a case the White House called "a very serious case involving our national security" in a statement naming Woolsey among the officials assigned to examine its fallout. Woolsey later recalled having little direct access to the president during those years. "We essentially did not do the morning briefing," he said in his Miller Center oral history. "We would have liked to have it, but didn't."

He tendered his resignation in a letter to Clinton on December 26, 1994, effective the following January, and the White House released both men's statements two days later. "Jim Woolsey deserves the gratitude of all Americans for his service to our country," Clinton said in accepting the resignation. "He has my deep appreciation." The president called him "a staunch advocate of maintaining an intelligence capability that is second to none." Woolsey, for his part, pointed to years of lost evenings and weekends: "In making the decision to return to the private sector, however, my family figures prominently," he wrote, according to a White House transcript of the exchange.

Out of government, Woolsey chaired the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and became one of Washington's most persistent voices warning that the electric grid was vulnerable to attack. Testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on July 22, 2015, he urged lawmakers to harden the grid against electromagnetic-pulse and solar-storm threats, one stop in a long campaign for energy and infrastructure security that continued for years afterward, according to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

The aircraft he helped revive over a six-month deadline flew reconnaissance missions for the U.S. military for decades afterward under the name he chose for it. The imaging techniques the National Reconnaissance Office adapted at his request fed into methods radiologists still use in reading mammograms. And the institution he chaired kept pressing the warnings he had carried to Congress about the power grid, long after he had stopped needing to introduce himself as a former director of central intelligence.