Professor Tim Walton is the son of U.S. Navy aviator and was born in the naval hospital at Pearl Harbor.  He did his undergraduate work at the College of William and Mary.

After graduating, he went into the Navy and served at bases and on ships in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.  He was on the Sixth Fleet flagship in the Mediterranean as a witness to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, one of the most famous intelligence failures in history.

He did his graduate work at the University of Virginia, earning a Ph.D. in modern European history, with a specialty in diplomatic history.  While working on his dissertation, he received a Fulbright Grant to study for a year in Paris, where he did research in the archives of the French Foreign Ministry.

Dr. Walton spent 24 years as an analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency.  His assignments included helping to set up the Counterterrorist Center, as well as being posted to the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon as an intelligence advisor to the Secretary of Defense during the implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords that ended war and genocide in the Balkans.

Over the years he has visited or worked in more than fifteen countries.

He has taught classes for Johns Hopkins University, Mercyhurst University, and the Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis, the CIA’s analytic training academy.  Since August 2011 he has been on the faculty of the Intelligence Analysis Program at James Madison University.

He is the editor of The Role of Intelligence in Ending the War in Bosnia in 1995 (2014), and the author of Challenges in Intelligence Analysis: Lessons from 1300 BCE to the Present (2010), a collection of case studies for use in courses on analysis. One of Professor Walton’s hobbies is coin collecting, and he is also the author of The Spanish Treasure Fleets (1994), which is a history of the legendary pieces of eight, the first global currency.