Leo Darwin Carl

Background

Leo Darwin Carl was born in 1918 in Brooklyn, New York, United States.

Education

Leo Darwin attended the City College of New York and Defense Language Institute. Also, he studied at the University of Maryland, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Master of Arts degree.

Career

After completing his education, Leo Darwin Carl began his long involvement with the military. He enlisted in the United States Army prior to World War II as a non-commissioned officer. During World War II he was stationed in England and after the war, in 1947, when the United States Air Force became an independent branch of the military, Carl transferred there. With the United States Air Force, he served in Japan and then later in Germany as an intelligence officer between 1947 and 1968. In the late 1950s, he returned to the United States and served on assignment with the Central Intelligence Agency. During his career with the Armed Forces, he was involved with the United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations and the army's Counterintelligence Corps, eventually reaching the rank of colonel. Upon retiring from the military in 1968, he worked at the Pentagon in Washington as a civil servant.

After retiring from the United States Air Force, Carl began his own company, the International Defense Consultant Services, a publishing, and database project service. It was during these latter years of his life that he compiled two comprehensive dictionaries. With this extensive background in intelligence, Carl undertook the task of compiling the vocabulary used not only by United States intelligence agencies but by foreign agencies as well. The first, The International Dictionary of Intelligence (1990), consists of almost five hundred pages with over six thousand entries. The second book, The CIA Insider's Dictionary of U.S. and Foreign Intelligence, Counterintelligence & Tradecraft (1996), is actually an updated version of the first and includes more than seven hundred pages with nearly ten thousand entries. Carl spent most of his career, both in the military and as a civil servant, involved in intelligence work, and this gives his dictionaries special authority. His dictionaries include the names of security organizations, state-sponsored terrorist groups, arms-control terminology, and types of weapons. Also incorporated in the books are appendixes, which some critics found to be the dictionaries' most interesting feature. One such index provides the names of the heads of Russian/Soviet security services. Also included are definitions of intelligence terms, code names, and the name of intelligence organizations throughout the world.

Achievements

• Leo Darwin Carl was a well-known author, military man, as well as an outstanding lexicographer, linguist, who founded the International Defense Consultant Services.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The International Dictionary of Intelligence 1990
  • The CIA Insider's Dictionary of U.S. and Foreign Intelligence, Counterintelligence & Tradecraft 1996

Membership

Leo Darwin Carl was a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers.

Personality

Physical Characteristics: Leo Darwin Carl died of cancer.

Connections

Leo Darwin Carl was married Otilla "Tommie" Ewert. They had one son, David.

Son:

David Carl

Wife:

Otilla (Ewert) Carl