Christopher Heffelfinger is a researcher and consultant for the Combating Terrorism Center at the United States Military Academy. From November 2005, he contributed to the Militant Ideology Atlas, the CTC Harmony project, and the continuing CTC-FBI education collaborative.

Prior to that Mr. Heffelfinger was the publications coordinator at the Jamestown Foundation, where he edited two volumes on terrorism (Unmasking Terrorism, with forewords by Michael Scheuer and Gen. William Odom), and also served as editor of the weekly Terrorism Focus. He is a fluent Arabic reader and speaker, having spent time in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco. Mr. Heffelfinger lived in Sana`a, Yemen in 2000, and attended the same language school as John Walker Lindh. He also lived and studied with the Naqshbandi Tariqat, where he studied with native speakers refuting militant Salafi ideology through Islamic source texts.