Keith Raffel

While senior counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, Keith Raffel worked with then-Senator Joe Biden and his colleagues to monitor the activities of the CIA, NSA and other three-letter agencies. In his checkered past, Keith has also run for Congress, founded a pioneering internet software company, managed a DNA sequencing business, developed and co-taught an engineering course at Harvard and published five novels.  

Keith left the Intelligence Committee to return home to California and run for Congress. While losing that race is still a painful memory, Keith counts himself lucky for escaping the morass of congressional politics when he did. With an engineer father and hometown of Palo Alto, he followed the path Fate had laid out and embarked on a tech career. He founded and then sold Silicon Valley’s first cloud-computing company. For the past six years, he’s been a lecturer and resident scholar at Harvard. While there, he developed and co-taught a course on technology, ethics and society. (How a history major became a lecturer in the engineering school only proves the role of Fate in one’s life.) 

Keith has also established a career as a writer of note. The New York Times deemed his first novel, Dot Dead, “worthy of a Steve Jobs keynote presentation.” A Fine and Dangerous Season, which focused on John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis, reached the top five on Amazon’s bestseller list. All told, he has five published novels: two Silicon Valley mysteries, an archeological thriller, a spy story and a historical novel. He has also written opinion pieces for the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Haven Register, Harvard Magazine, the Forward and other publications.  

A long-time denizen of Palo Alto in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, Keith is now spending the academic year as a scholar-in-residence at Harvard. While there, he lives in an apartment in the same 400-student dorm as he did when an undergraduate himself.