Former CIA Head Joins VC Firm VantagePoint

Venture firms have made partners out of the rich, the famous and now the spooky. VantagePoint Partners has added R. James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, as a Venture Partner. Woolsey joins as part of VantagePoint’s cleantech team expansion, which also included the addition of former Morgan Stanley cleantech analyst David Edwards and the promotion of Marc van den Berg to managing director.

Woolsey has been a long-time proponent of alternative energy sources, especially distributed generation. His farmhouse home is solar powered and he drives a hybrid with a “Bin Laden Hates This Car” bumper sticker on it, according to some past interviews. Professionally, Woolsey sits on the board of smart grid startup GridPoint, of which VantagePoint is not an investor.

Woolsey joins Al Gore and Colin Powell as governmental bigwigs looking to cash in with the Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Woolsey brings with him an extremely intimate knowledge of government operations, classified and otherwise. The new venture partner sees energy independence and distributed generation as the logical extension of the Jeffersonian ideal of a country of independent yeoman farmers.

Like fellow green VC Gore, Woolsey has graced the silver screen, appearing in “Who Killed the Electric Car?” as well as Thomas Friedman’s Discovery Channel documentary “Addicted to Oil.” An outspoken opponent of our dependence on Middle Eastern oil, Woolsey is particularly intested in electric transport and biofuels, so keep an eye out for new investments in those arenas from VantagePoint.

Currently VantagePoint’s cleantech investments include solar plays with BrightSource and Miasolé, biofuel plays in Mascoma and Cobalt and electric transport investment in Tesla Motors and Project Better Place.