 Thanks to everyone for coming. I'm Kathleen Hicks. I direct the International Security Program at CSIS. And I also have the pleasure of running the smart women's smart power initiative along with many of my colleagues here at CSIS who make this program possible. I am going to get off the stage and invite up Candy Wolf, who is joining us from Citigroup and Citigorp. And she is the wonderful sponsor of our program. And without further ado, Candy, please come on up and give us a few remarks. A little lack of gracefulness there. I'm trying to get up with no steps. Well, welcome. And thank you for coming through what was rain to begin with. I want to welcome everyone to our sixth event. This is our sixth in the smart women's smart power series. And as Citi, we've been proud to sponsor events that have showcased so many strong women leaders on this stage. And tonight is no exception. And it's exciting for me to be able to help to speak at this particular event because I had the privilege of working with Fran at the White House for a number of years when we were both working for then President George W. Bush. And a new era of terrorism was shepherded in with the 9-11 attacks. And Fran spent her tenure at the White House in the most grueling of jobs. First is deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism. And then as a president's advisor on Homeland Security and counter-terrorism. And she chaired the Homeland Security Council. So when I look back in a world where we have to be right every time and the terrorists only have to be right once, I'm not sure how Fran ever slept at night. Or if she did, frankly. Because I'm not sure in many of those days that you did. But I always felt we were safer with Fran in the sit room. Terrorism continues to evolve beyond our physical attacks and one of the largest dangers to our welfare is cyberterrorism. And a company like Citi, which is the world's most global bank with operations in more than 100 countries, the threat of cyberattack keeps many of us up at night and certainly keeps our CEO up at night. Whether in the form of crippling malware on our systems or the threat of sensitive client data. Cyber terrorists, whether they're hacktivists, state-sponsored nations, or simply criminals, present a growing and grave threat that will keep the business community and experts like Fran busy for the foreseeable future. So I want to thank all of you for coming. And Fran, thank you for taking time out and for joining all of us on what is going to be a very relevant discussion. And thank you, Nina, always for hosting these. I know it'll be a really lively discussion. Thank you. Thank you very much to Kandi. Just a quick note on our social media. You can follow us on Twitter. We hope you do. We are at Smart Women. That's not too hard to remember. We also want to, as always, make sure you are subscribing to the Smart Women podcast that we have on iTunes and Smart Women iTunes U course that we have. I think we have something like 20,000 subscribers. And we have, I want to say, close to 200,000 people who viewed at least one episode before. So please, if you're not already joining that community, please do so. We are very pleased to have Fran Townsend here with us tonight. She is currently the executive vice president for worldwide government, legal, and business affairs, and McAndrews and Forbes holding. But she, of course, spent more than two decades as Kandi noted in public service, including time as a prosecutor and assistant district attorney in her native New York, as well as in senior positions at the Justice Department and US Coast Guard before serving in the Bush 43 White House. I'm sure many of you have seen, if not all of you, Fran on CNN, where she serves as an analyst on counterterrorism, homeland security issues. And our moderator tonight, as always, is the incomparable Nina Easton, senior associate here at CSIS, and also a columnist at Fortune Magazine and chair of Fortune's Most Powerful Women International Summit. So without further ado, over to Nina and to Fran. Thank you very much. Thanks so much, Kath. So before we get started with our incredible guest, I just wanted to reinforce the idea of listening to these podcasts. Fortune is a media sponsor of this event. And we've actually been able to draw on some fortune material to fill the podcast or really to amplify the podcast. Right now, there is a podcast up, a half hour conversation with Zippy Livny of Israel. And I did that interview in London just two nights ago as part of our Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit. And so in this interview with Fran, we'll go up on that podcast. And that's something that you can not only download, but you can share with people. We'll also have coming up on that podcast in my interview again at the London Summit with former Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Giard. So it's a really tremendous resource and I encourage you all to check it out and pass it on. I am just thrilled to have Fran here again. We've been on stage before together and I'll tell you the circumstances momentarily. She is truly a renowned expert and as you've heard, just really been at the center of our war on terror. But as I always like to do, I like to get to know our guest first a little bit, the big get to know you as we like to call it. Fran grew up, she was actually the first in her family, not to go to college. I mean, you hear that a lot. I'm the first in my family to go to college. She was the first in her family to go to high school. To graduate, to graduate. To graduate from high school. Talk about your parents. So my father was a roofer, had his own business. My mom was a bookkeeper working in a construction company. And both of them were children of the depression. They didn't have much. My father had served in World War II, was injured now what we would think of as PTSD. And so he suffered for his whole life as a post war veteran. And neither of them, so neither of them had the privilege. I didn't know that my mother had not graduated from high school. She was sort of embarrassed by that. And so it wasn't until I was graduating from law school, she went back unbeknownst to me and got her GED. And so when I graduated from law school, she finally confessed to me that she had not completed high school. But because she was embarrassed and very proud that I had gone all the way not just to college, but to law school that she had gone back and gotten her GED. Was that always in the front of your mind to go to college and to go to law school, even if that wasn't the model? It was. I mean, there really wasn't anybody in the family. Even my mother had been an only child. My father had had two brothers. Nobody had gone on to a higher education. So my parents were absolutely thrilled. Their goal was to get me through college. Wasn't a lot, I mean, I tell people, if you described my family as middle class, you probably would have been exaggerating. So they really, they struggled. I took lots of student loans like many kids. And jobs. And jobs, right? And I got my way through college. They said, graduate school would be great, but you're on your own. And so I did that on loans. And I went knowing I wanted to go into public service. It was never about the private sector. I was going, I knew I wanted to be a prosecutor. I had been a victim of a crime in college. I had been a victim of a crime. What kind of a crime? In college, a guy forced his way into my room, threatened to sexually assault me. He didn't. He was obviously either on drugs or intoxicated. I sort of stalled him and I managed to get out of the room. And he was never prosecuted. And that really made me angry. And I had, also earlier in my life, had also been a victim. And so I had made it my mind that victims don't have much of a voice in the system. You know, the prosecutor represents the state, not the victim. Most people don't really appreciate that until you're a victim and you say, well, but where's my voice? And so I decided you could be a prosecutor. You could be both. And I wanted to become a prosecutor. So I went, I was one of the few people in my class. I went to law school to become a prosecutor. And I knew that. That's so interesting. And then you went on with a really a prosecutor's career, the Southern District of New York, which is, of course, the famed Southern District of New York. And then you went to the Justice Department. You prosecuted white-collar criminals and international criminal organizations. And I was curious. And then you, of course, went on to fight terror or terrorist. Aside from ideologies, there's the obvious difference between the two classes of criminals in that one has a driving ideology. Did you see common characteristics between your criminals that you were dealing with here and the terrorists that we fight overseas today? Yeah, it was interesting. I was still in the US Attorney's Office. It had been during the period in the Southern District of Mayor Giuliani, then the US Attorney, to use the RICO, Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations, that statute to prosecute the mafia. And the theory there was these were much more structured organizations, although gang-like, they did have a hierarchy. And so you could use the RICO statute to prosecute the mafia. And that was not so dissimilar as we saw the rise of terrorism. I'd wound up working when I went down to Maine Justice, whether it was the East Africa Embassy Bombings, the USS Cole Bombing, all prior to 9-11. And we realized that the al-Qaeda at the time was a much more structured organization. And so while the ideologies were quite different, you could use the same investigative techniques, the same theories in terms of the prosecution as we had used against the mafia. It wasn't so different from a prosecutor's point of view. Was this pre-9-11? Pre-9-11. And so in the 90s, you were looking at it for the Justice Department and the Coast Guard? At that point, I was at the Justice Department. I had come down. I worked as the Chief of Staff in the Criminal Division. I then went on to head the Office of International Affairs. And so interestingly enough, it was sort of a logical progression. So I was prosecuting in the Southern District large international organizations. I came down to Maine Justice, having gotten international experience. I understood the importance of tools in the international environment to a domestic prosecution. And so I headed that unit that allowed the exchange of evidence. I then moved on to sort of a higher level in the Criminal Division. I was an acting Deputy Assistant Attorney General where I was responsible, not just for the unit I had run, but for international training. We think of not yet Commissioner Ray Kelly going down to Haiti and training the police forces. We understood that internationally having cooperative relationships with law enforcement was very important. Louis Fried at that point in time at the FBI was deploying legats. And so I moved, once you're in the international arena, you kind of naturally begin to bump up against the intelligence community. I then moved to run the unit. It was at that time, the acronym was OIPR, the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review. It's now the National Security Division in the Justice Department that's responsible for the FISA wiretaps. And so I was running the intelligence unit at the Justice Department. At that point, we also reviewed covert action. We worked with the Office of Legal Counsel to review covert action. And so I became very involved with the intelligence community as well. And you did intelligence for the Coast Guard as well. I did. So President Bush was elected. There was, Attorney General Ashcroft came in and I decided it was time for me. I was one of the few career people who was a direct report to the Attorney General. I decided it was time for me to think about actually running an intelligence operation as opposed to giving legal advice to others about how to do it. The Coast Guard intelligence capability at that time was really focused on drug queuing. So in the Pacific and in the Caribbean, the interdiction of narcotics on the water. But they didn't have a real intelligence operation. I go. I literally got there, gosh, great story. So a woman's story. I go for my interview. I'm about seven and a half months pregnant and I sit on a couch that I have trouble getting up from at the end of the interview because it was so low. The Coast Guard didn't have a whole lot of senior women. They hire me. I start very late August 2001. And literally two days later, I give birth to my second son. So I call in and I'm not coming in. It's the end of August. And I'm not home sort of, you know, less than two weeks with my infant when 9-11 happens. And God bless, this is when you're grateful your mother has come down to help because I hand off this brand new infant and I go back to work initially part time and then full time in the aftermath of 9-11. And so I'm at the Coast Guard. In that last part, that last quarter of 2001, I am crazy busy. We get Coast Guard admitted as one of the 16 organizations in the United States intelligence community. So we have all sorts of authorities. We suddenly become part of the signals intelligence community, the human intelligence community where we're collecting in U.S. ports and ports around the world. I mean, I suddenly I have what we call a black classified budget. I have a unclassified budget. I'm working as part of sort of the law enforcement department of Homeland Security. We're getting integrated there. I also have a role in the military intelligence community. I see Tish Long here who helped guide me through that because that was entirely new for the Coast Guard. And we were partners with the Naval Intelligence. So it was an incredibly busy time. Did you feel like you had a map and direction where to go or did it? The most wonderful thing about this was there was no map. It was a complete blank slate. So I could make anything I wanted to. And by the way, nobody at the Coast Guard understood the intelligence community. So they couldn't even supervise me. It was fabulous. It was just fabulous. So I could make it up, right? And it was really, and so it was incredibly important because lo and behold, at that point, the Coast Guard is part of the department initially of transportation. So Secretary Norm Annetta suddenly finds he's in these national security meetings and somebody says, well, who's responsible for port security in the United States? Nobody raises their hand. And they point to Norm Annetta and said, we think that's you, because you've got the Coast Guard. Next thing I know, I'm in the White House situation reports. Security. Exactly, because we had the capability. Huge. Right. Only because we were the only people with the capability to do it. So then you end up in the White House. How did that happen? So again, I often tell young people it's about relationships and the people you work with. When I had been at the Justice Department, the deputy director of the CIA had been a general, an Air Force general named John Gordon. Fast forward many years and at the time, I'm over at the Coast Guard who is the deputy national security advisor at the White House for combating terrorism, but General John Gordon. And so suddenly I show up there and we know each other, we've worked together. And when Tom Ridge leaves the West Wing as the homeland, the first homeland security advisor to go over to run the Department of Homeland Security, John Gordon is promoted to replace Tom Ridge in the West Wing. And there's an opening at the White House. And John Gordon is asked, well, who should do that by Condi Rice's national security advisor? And he said, I know the perfect person who's worked all these terrorism investigations. She knows the interagency. And by the way, she's now the person you look to for port security. So I was invited in to come in for an interview, a quick side note, I'm at the Coast Guard. I am at lunch, I come back and there is a voicemail from a doctorized call. And of course, like most women, I've gone back to work very quickly after my second child and I've not done any of the follow-up doctors appointments and I'm getting harangued at home. And so I get this voicemail and I think, oh my God. So I call my husband at his office and I say, I can't believe you've got some strange doctor call on me to go for my GYN appointment. Needless to say, I realize, oh, oh, it's that doctor. She's had great fun, by the way, saying, I'm the only person who ever thought she was a GYN. So you end up in the White House and you will go on to become the third Homeland Security advisor, the only woman that, there was a good question raised earlier, did you lose sleep? I did. It's one of those things you feel the burden of responsibility, oh my God, not on my watch, let nothing happen to the country, to my fellow citizens. But you also have, on the other hand, a great sense of calm. I had no doubt that I was doing everything humanly possible to try and ensure that that didn't happen. Look, the odds are against you. Candy said it and I said it a bunch of times and I was in the job, I had to be right every day and they only had to be right once, and so, but you had a great sense of comfort of that there are tens, I wasn't doing this alone, there were tens of thousands of dedicated public servants around the world, working around the clock to make sure nothing happened. And I had real confidence in their passion and their commitment for the mission, you know. So somebody who's been inside and seen the plumbing, basically, and knows behind the scenes, I always wonder what's going on in those tunnels in New York. You always hear about sort of a New York-based CIA, but what was the most important thing that's happened to protect this country since then? You know, my proudest moment was, the summer of 2007 was the liquid bomb plot. And that, what the American people didn't see, you can blame me for this crazy three-ounce rule that we still live with, but in leading up to the takedown, that investigation was ongoing and every day, planes would take off from Heathrow in groups, right? So I don't remember what it is now, let's call it a dozen planes in a window of a couple hours takeoff. They're all over the Atlantic for a period of time before they land in sort of a window of time along the East Coast. Those planes were taking off while we knew about the plot, while we were investigating the plot. No one would have criticized us if the minute we found out about the plot, we took it down, right? We would have lost intelligence about the network, but if we'd taken it down, there would have been no risk to our fellow citizens. We made calculated decisions every night while you all slept about where we're gonna let that whole group of planes take off, where we're satisfied, we have mitigated the risk that it was unlikely that anything could have gotten on that plane, that there was nobody on those planes that we believed wanted to do folks harm. But I will tell you, every day while those planes were in the air, you sort of held your breath. And so here's the other, so it took real courage on the part of the DNI and the Secretary of Homeland Security and FBI director and the CIA director to say, yes, my recommendation to the president is we gotta let this investigation keep going because we all knew if we were wrong and those planes had exploded, at best we were all fired. At worst we were gonna be publicly excoriated. And during that time, you never think there may be a personal element. So the deputy press secretary and her husband were gonna get on one of those planes. The deputy national security advisor's daughter was coming home and there's a no double standard rule. Unless we were willing to make it public, none of us could take personal actions based on the classified information to change our plans because that would have been a violation and no double standard. So these weren't just policy and operational decisions we were making, they had a very human aspect to it. And I think we made those right decisions anyway in the best interest of the country. But I was really proud as I looked around the table and said, you know, every one of these people could have made a different personal decision because they wouldn't have been criticized. So what did you learn about how to make a judgment call in that kind of really high wire situation? You know, it's interesting because I think, you know, when you sort of say, what does your gut say? But I will tell you, it got to a point and that's really what is your experience telling you, right? I can't tell you how many times Condi Rice or Steve Hadley would come down to my little office. It's got a low ceiling, it's a skiff in the bottom floor of the West Wing and say, what does your gut tell you about this plot, the intelligence we're seeing? And the answer is you really did have to, based on your experience, make judgment calls that had life and death consequences if you were wrong, I depended tremendously on incredible career professionals like John McLaughlin, who had been the deputy of CIA, George Tenant. I mean, these were people who had been doing it for years and would have a sense about the sourcing of the information. Keith Alexander was already at NSA asking him what he was seeing and Bob Mueller, what were we looking at domestically. And so when you began to stitch together those pieces of the mosaic, you had more confidence about the decisions and recommendations you were making. Do diligence. Yes. So let's fast forward to the situation now. You and I last shared a stage at a fortune dinner at the State Department. And it was within days, I think it was 24 hours after Bin Laden's death had been made public. Talk about a timely guest, although as I told you in the agreement, we were frantic that we were gonna lose you to CNN in a minute. But now, of course, this week, the latest news is the killing of a top al-Qaeda lieutenant in Yemen. How important is that? The individual, the al-Qaeda AQAP leader killed in Yemen this week was incredibly strategic. I mean, he's not just an individual node that's been taken out. This is the guy who was helping and inspiring and working on developing sort of the new bombing techniques to evade detection. He was one of the leaders who was behind the computer cartridge bomb, the vest bomb, the underwear bomb. These were all designed to try and evade US and international bomb detection equipment. And so taking him out has a huge disruptive effect beyond just the one individual. It clearly could not have been done by US intelligence alone. We had to have been working with our partners, although I don't read the intelligence anymore, but it's not possible we could have done it alone. And so I think it's really very much to the credit of the intelligence community, the CIA and its international partners that they were able to do it. He had been on target for a long time. That's interesting because there's also a sensibility that you take out somebody like this and somebody replaces him, but you're saying that he had such expertise and such ability to evade our protections that it was worth, right. I mean, it was valuable. Absolutely, yeah. Beyond, he was more than just a single individual. He was a very important node in the organization. And so it's a strategic win for the United States and it's a strategic liability for al-Qaeda and the abrasion peninsula. So what do you think about this drone strategy? Look, you know, this is, we saw the rise of it throughout the Bush administration and then the current administration, the Obama administration took it to a whole new level. But everybody, I think it's fair to say, believed that the trajectory of the drone program was not gonna continue forever. You were gonna get to a point where it would drop off because you were always doing a cost-benefit analysis. The hit in Yemen is a tremendous, I mean, I don't begin to say who takes responsibility for the drone hit, but you look at that kind of a drone hit. It was a signature strike. That was reported in the Washington Post. And there had been a big debate about the value of those. And yet you see something so strategically significant and say, we are gonna have to be able to make judgments about when is that worth the risk? We are no longer in an upward tech, I think, for the drone program. I think now you must make very calculated decisions about the cost-benefit analysis of making these strikes. This one was clearly worth it, but often it's not quite as clear and you're gonna rely on folks inside the intelligence community to make recommendations to the executive branch. And of course we've got the rise of ISIS as well and you've got a range of terror groups now. And when you look at ISIS and Al Qaeda, they're actually quite different. I mean, ISIS is really about controlling territory and as I understand it, takes a very different approach to the local population than Al Qaeda does. Can you talk about the differences? I find, I think in that sense, that ISIS is a much more dangerous enemy. So Al Qaeda, the caliphate, was this notional esoteric idea for Al Qaeda. For ISIS, it's a real territorial thing. And the fact that they've established territorial superiority in places and in a large swath of territory makes them an easy military target for a real capable adversary like the United States. But it also creates a sense of urgency and a sense of reality that they actually have the ability to control a caliphate where Al Qaeda was sort of aspiring to it. Al Qaeda tried to mobilize their forces against the far enemy. They made sort of the targeting of the entire Muslim population sort of the driving force so that others would attack the West. And they said the West was the enemy. ISIS has a near enemy. They're attacking in local populations, local governments, so they can take control. So ISIS has got this reality. So Al Qaeda was a war of attrition. They wanted to bleed the West economically and bleed our forces, kill our forces. ISIS has got a strategy of acceleration. They get momentum from their killing inside the caliphate area and territory that they're protecting. So it's a quite different strategy. I worry because you've seen this bleeding effect. You know, we used to call it the ink blot strategy. If you think of ink hitting a page and it's seeping out, we see the acceleration of ISIS in places like Afghanistan where they've recently just killed police officers in Yemen, in Libya. We see them in Lebanon. I mean, there's this real bleeding strategy. There are areas in Saudi Arabia where they've raised the ISIS flag. This is really, really dangerous. When you think of the potential for ISIS in a place like Pakistan that has a nuclear program, I think we've got to take ISIS incredibly seriously and worry that we haven't shown that we have a strategy that will be effective against it. You mentioned Saudi Arabia, which some would argue has a mixed record on the terror front, certainly in some of the messages that come out of its religious sector. Do you think this is going to change the approach of Saudis and others towards terror groups? I'll tell you, we saw it in 2003 when al-Qaeda attacked the housing compounds in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia really changed its approach to terror and became very active partners. I'll tell you, without Saudi Arabia, you would never have disrupted the Yemen plots, the computer cartridge or the vest plot. Those were entirely disrupted due to Saudi intelligence. So much so, the interaction between the Saudi, and I know this from foreign intelligence services, the interaction between the Saudis and the American intelligence community on the cartridge one is really instructive. So there was an exchange of information that there was this plot. American intelligence and law enforcement couldn't find the planes that those cartridges were on. The Saudis really were so concerned, they risked burning their source, and they provided the bills of lading so we could find those planes and find those cartridges. And so, while you can take issue with their brand of Islam and what they preach, I will tell you, as counterterrorism partners on an operational and tactical level, they rival our relationship with the British intelligence service. That's very interesting. So going back to ISIS, and then of course, as we all know, one reason we're especially fearful of them is their ability to recruit globally. And let me start with this piece first, the woman piece. It's very interesting that they've been able to appeal to women, both as kind of come over and marry somebody who will be a martyr and that enhances your status or they find ways to appeal to them through Saudi Arabia, through social media. And I was in London this week and the top of the news, of course, was those three women who had gone with their nine children to Saudi Arabia on a religious excursion and then ended up going, we believe, to Syria. Their father, the fathers, two of the fathers were weeping on air every night. What do you make of their ISIS's ability to attract women? You know, it's interesting. Al Qaeda didn't sort of actively go out and recruit women in such a public way. What I find interesting about ISIS is it's not only that you can come and be a wife to a fighter and that that is a noble role, that you can give him children, you can be part of the caliphate. They also recruit them actively as operators. You'll see videos all over the internet of women in ISIS who are actually being militarily trained to fight. It's interesting because it's sort of in many ways takes advantage of what is a tactical vulnerability for the West. We are raised, my sons have been raised, to hold doors and to think of women as while obviously they've got a very strong mother, very capable, but to honor women. And so in some ways, they've decided clearly ISIS while they take a dim view of the role of women, they understand that operationally that there is also a role for them and that that is leveraged that they can use. What do you think is the foremost way to fight these recruitment efforts for men or women? Right, there are two, in my judgment, there are two major pillars to this. One is you have to deny them that battle space that they use and that's the internet by and large and communications. But you also then have to fill that with something, right? And that's the counter narrative piece. I will tell you is a frustration, no administration has been particularly good at the counter narrative. I've come to really believe having spoken to folks around the world, there's a movement in London not in my name, which is quite active. I think as a government we have to make up our minds, we are never gonna be good at this, not because we don't wanna be, but we ought to have mechanisms by which we can fund it and not control the content for those who will create the counter narrative like folks like not in my name. But I don't, the State Department effort has been not very effective and not very good. And that's not a criticism of this administration, none of us have been very good at it. And so I think we gotta accept that we're not good at it and have others do it outside of government. On denying them the battle space, that's where government can and should be better at it. That's where the government must work with the private sector. We are blessed with a First Amendment freedom of speech, but that doesn't mean that all speech is permissible. And so there are, there have gotta be rules and an understanding about what is unacceptable. I see an example. Okay, so beheading videos are not protected First Amendment speech, they just aren't. And so the notion that Western companies and social media platforms can be used to distribute this sort of trash that is very much key to our adversaries recruitment is ridiculous. And so we've gotta find ways and we've gotta work with government and private sector to deny them the battle space and get that stuff off. What's your counter extremism project? So the counter extremism project I launched, it was around the UN General Assembly last year along with Ambassador Mark Wallace who had served in the UN during the Bush administration and Senator Joe Lieberman. And that was all about denying them social media platforms, whether it was YouTube or there's a thing called Man Barn Me. There's all sorts of sort of dark web programs. And Twitter, and get that stuff off. I will tell you, it has been, we now have been enormously successful. It was very frustrating because Twitter wouldn't engage. It wasn't, I was happy to have a dialogue and disagree, but they wouldn't even engage with us. And so we began to take this campaign, we called it the counter CEP, Counter Extremism Project Digital Disruption where we named and shamed and we would go out and we did it both in our public account that is the CEP Twitter account and I did it in my personal account. The problem, and ultimately we have been reasonably effective at denying them this battle space. We also talked to companies when we find that companies inadvertently have supported the transfer of goods or money to ISIS or a terrorist group. The problem with doing it in an individual capacity is ISIS then targeted me and was threatening me with beheading. And so what you find is the government's got to take responsibility for helping to deny them the battle space and then nonprofits and others can come in to assist them. But it's real hard to do just from the private sector standpoint. So looking at two other fronts, and that's one front on war on terror, the other front of course is military. We talked a bit about drones. Do you think that the war on terror in the Middle East and against ISIS in particular, although Al Qaeda too, can that be done with that boots on the ground to a much larger extent than it is now? So look, we can't fight the battles on behalf of all the other countries in the Middle East. But I think what we're seeing now is an unprecedented commitment on the part of our Arab allies, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain. I mean they now have skin in the game which was the big complaint and I think rightly so for decades that we were fighting this war and they were the beneficiaries. They would provide funding, they would provide intelligence support but they were not providing military support. They're doing that now. But just like we couldn't be successful alone, I don't think it's fair to think they're gonna be successful alone. And so I do think that we need some number of military advisors and trainers to be able to be there to help them with targeting intelligence and logistics support. I think you can expect that sort of Afghan forces who relied on the American military, for example, for air support, airlift support to be successful without us being there. The Iraqi military's performance has been disappointing but I think on the other hand, a lack of an American commitment to them including air support and advisors can't be sort of dismissed either. And so I think on both sides, we've gone from one extreme of having tens of thousands of boots on the ground to having none and I think somewhere in between there in terms of military support to our allies is the right answer. One country we haven't, people really haven't focused on that seems like it could be a way to second American military is Libya which is becoming a failed state to some extent a transit way for ISIS and being quite close to Italy, for example. What are your thoughts on Libya? So, I mean, look, this is, during the Bush administration, we had been criticized for failing in phase four operations. That is the coming behind the military operation and build civilian institutions. So I was slack-jawed, frankly. I had been in Libya about 10 days before the Benghazi attack that killed Chris Stevens. I'd been with Chris Stevens and I was slack-jawed to see a failure of phase four operations in Libya. That was a coalition effort. I think it was very well executed but the fact remained we had to help organize not just military campaign but phase four operations. And so Libya's another example of losing the peace. So what was a failure exactly? Well, this is, once the military operation, Gaddafi fell, it was clear that the government was having trouble getting on its feet. And frankly, it needed security assistance and security training and support. You needed institution building for political parties. There was a whole series of things like that sort of phase four, typical phase four operation that we lost our attention. We did because at that point, if you remember at that point, Syria was falling apart and Syria was in sort of complete demise. And it raises the other issue, frankly, that we ought to talk about. We have the largest refugee crisis since World War II, millions upon millions of internally displaced persons. It's around the world, including Africa, but the one, the area that concerns me the most, 11 million, more than 11 million displaced persons in Syria, that is the recruiting pool for al-Qaeda and ISIS for the coming generations. Our children and our children's children will be fighting the next wave of terror that's gonna come out of those displaced person populations with children who have watched their fathers slaughter, their mothers abused sexually and otherwise, and while the West did by. And I will tell you, if you're not persuaded by the absolutely tragic humanitarian crisis that's caused by the displaced persons, there is a national security threat. I wanted to ask you on another front and then we'll turn to the audience. Another front in the war on terror is, of course, intelligence gathering. How important is NSA bulk data collection? So, you know, it's funny that the media, look, put me in that group. You are the media. Right, I know. So put me in that group. But the media has focused sort of obsessively about the point to a case where it disrupted a plot. And what I would say to you in my experience was it was one of those programs that provided a mosaic. The mosaic alone didn't paint the picture, but I needed all the points. Sometimes the points that you got was the absence of data, right, that you learn something from that. And so you can't underestimate that. The other piece to that was you got roving wire taps. You got the ability to get subpoena information in bulk. There were other ways without wholesale doing away with the program that you could have put controls around it and had judicial oversight, it seemed to me, as a way of ensuring the privacy, civil liberties, and due process concerns, and I understand those without wholesale doing away with it. The problem with that is in the absolutely polarized political environment that has become Washington, I was saying before we came in here, you can no longer disagree without being disagreeable, which I find frustrating. It's very hard, it seems, here to have a real conversation about the substance without getting political. And it's one of those things, both parties, we're on the same page on not all that long ago. Questions, and when I, questions meaning, it needs to end in a question mark, it needs to be short, and please identify yourself. Identify yourself. Julia, you with Citigroup, I was just wondering, what are your views on the effectiveness of the proposed agreement between the P5 plus one and Iran in terms of stopping Iran's development of a nuclear weapon and in terms of cooling other Middle Eastern countries' interest in developing a nuclear weapon? And I actually, I wanna hear that, and I actually have to interject too, because I didn't ask you a key question we wanted to talk about, which was you believe in Iranian regime change, and you've been involved in some activities recently promoting that. So can you talk about that as well as, that was a very good question, thank you. So let me start with, look, let's set a little bit of context, because I think my views are informed by this. One, the Iranian regime is illegally holding at least four Americans, including a journalist, including a retired FBI agent and a United States Marine, and we get no information and we don't know the whereabouts or the wellbeing of those people, and they're not treated fairly, they don't have access to consular affairs. I mean, it is abhorrent. They are the single largest state sponsor of terror in Hisbalah. Yes, not every country in the world views Hisbalah as a terrorist organization having killed Jews in Argentina and Americans in Lebanon. Let's agree, in this country, they are viewed as a terrorist organization and they're the single largest state sponsor. You take that, and you take the likelihood of any sort of nuclear material to me, which means you increase the likelihood of an improvised nuclear device, and I say you can't go there. So these negotiations start from a premise that we're gonna deny them a nuclear weapons capability, and it seems to me we have now backed ourselves into not will they have that, but how large will it be, what will the breakout period be? We've gone a very far way down that path of allowing them sufficient capability that they will be a danger to the region and to the United States, and they continue to call for the destruction of our single democratic ally in the region, which is Israel. So I got real problems, as you can tell, with the current structure, as we understand it, of the agreement. So I am pessimistic that it is possible to cut any deal that is not a bad deal at this point. Having said all that, in fairness, I think we've gotta wait to see what does the deal look like. I do think Congress is right to say that they have a right to review this deal and have a say on it. In fairness now to the administration, many times you will do an agreement that is not a treaty that requires Senate approval. I don't think the administration did a very good job in explaining the difference about what's an agreement and what's a treaty and why. Sometimes you want an agreement because you don't wanna be bound by it. I think they would have done well to explain that and to talk to the Senate, but I do think that Congress, given where we are right now, the Senate has a right, and I think that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is right to say, we are gonna take a look at this and hold hearings, and then they're gonna have to go through the process and see whether or not they can get a veto-proof majority on it if it's not a good deal. Regime change. Regime change. Look, I think that the Iranian people have an absolute right to have their voices heard. I think it is unfortunate that when, in the beginning of the Obama administration, when there was a democratic movement in Iran, we were not supportive in the same way that we were in Egypt because I think that if we had breathed some air and life into it, they would have had that opportunity. I don't believe that women should be treated the way they are in Iran. I don't believe that women should be treated anywhere in the world the way they are in a large swath of the Arab countries, and so I believe that if the Iranian people had the democratic ability to go to the polls without fear and without favor, you would see quite a different Iran, and you would see an Iran that much more resembled decades earlier when women were a part of the population where they weren't controlled, and I think that sense of freedom is far more important than Iran having nuclear weapons. But that's also a very provocative view, and talk about specifically what kind of policies you have been involved in. So I have spoken along with, by the way, the most fascinating thing about this is when I speak to this group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran. Previously it was the MEK, MEK had been a terrorist group, had renounced violence, had cooperated when I was in the Bush administration in turning over intelligence information related to the Iranian regime and the Iraqi regime when it was Saddam Hussein. And so having renounced weapons, having cooperated with us, there was an agreement to take them off the terrorism list. That didn't happen until this administration. They were taken off the list. They are one aspect of the Iranian opposition. They are an Iranian opposition group that believes in democratic principles, does not believe Iran should have a nuclear weapon, believes women should be able to vote and to work, and many of them, they believe in a free press and freedom of religion. And so I have supported, I, Ed Rendell, the head of the DNC, Howard Dean, who had been a major spokesperson and supporter of Senator Kerry when he was running for president against President Bush when he was re-elected. One of the few bipartisan efforts in this country is- Rudy Giuliani is involved in this. Rudy Giuliani is a part of it. Generally, you, Shelton, I mean, a whole bunch of military leaders, George Casey, also appeared. Oh God, Bill Richardson, who observed as the secretary of energy in the Clinton administration. It's in very interesting bipartisan view supporting Iranian democratic opposition and regime change. That's interesting. Questions right here? I see so many friends. That's so wonderful. Thank you so much, Renina. Thank you for your presentation. My name is Rosemary Seguero. I'm a president of an organization called Hope for Tomorrow. We focus on conflicts and violence prevention. I was in Kenya at the time of the USA POM in 1998 and also here in 2009, 11. What did you see the difference between the Kenya POMing and Tanzania POMing and the USA POMing and the other going on POMings around the world? What would you talk about them and the prevention for further POMings around the world and what's happening? So as we, what we did in the wake of the East Africa Embassy POMings, what we understood was our installations, as we hardened targets, our installations around the world like military bases and embassies were very vulnerable. Why? Because they were accessible. It was easy to get to them. It was easier to get to them than it was to get into the United States. And so, I mean, I think it was a real wake up call for law enforcement and the State Department about hardening our facilities. I'll tell you, when you harden your facilities, when you go to an embassy, a post East Africa embassy like Baghdad, you realize that by virtue of our hardening it, we interact less with the people that we're there and living among. So it's very hard for diplomats in a place like Baghdad to go out into the population, to talk to sort of our allies around the world. And that's not true just in Baghdad, in many of our embassies around the world, in Pakistan, in Saudi Arabia. It's very difficult for our diplomats to get out and for local populations to get in to talk to them. We have to do that to protect our people and to prevent tragedies like Benghazi, but it comes at a tremendous cost. And so I worry about that. Our intelligence community worries about it, and so do our diplomats. They have to make a much greater effort, but there's not much choice in the world we live in, I think. I think you had a question right here. My name, Hameen Mahmoud, I'm with the Center of Egyptian American Relations. We have, CC is a fulfillment of Ayman Zawahari prophecy, really, that military rules will never give you freedom or democracy. And being documented, that CC commit crime against humanity. What's your advice for the United States and the EU to stop supporting military and political support to somebody? Countries look at Egypt and they've been recruited to ISIS from Egypt, from Tunis, from Saudi Arabia in particular, because the attachment to Egypt, teachers and the other issues. What's your advice to them to stop that then we can reduce the number of recruitment to ISIS? I want to make sure I understand the question. Yeah, I was... What is my advice? What's your advice to the United States administration and the EU administration to stop supporting a dictator, fascist dictator, which is CC, documented by all human rights organization that's he commit crime against humanity. And that's when encourage people to join ISIS when they don't have any. And if you follow Egypt closer, you will see people going through that. Okay, so this is part of the difficulty and it doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or a Democratic administration. You are constantly balancing a whole menu of foreign policy issues. The president has said we need to be true to our values, but you look at a place, whether it's Egypt, I look at the Iran negotiation. Iran has had more executions under Rouhani than at any other time, including Ahmadinejad. And yet we're sitting across the table negotiating the nuclear deal. You mentioned Egypt, but there's a constant balance. What is more important? We do care about human rights, but we must balance that against a whole host of other foreign policy agendas in China. We have a tremendous foreign policy agenda with China and it's a long list. Does that mean we don't engage with them because of their views on privacy and restrictions on the internet? No, we engage with them anyway. Sometimes that's a really painful discussion and it's a very difficult balance. We engaged during the Bush administration with Mubarak. We pushed him on human rights issues, but we didn't stop engaging with him because we disagreed with him. I guess what I would say to you is you make this constant trade-off and this constant balance. You don't abandon your fundamental principles, but sometimes you engage with people that you don't always agree with on a broad spectrum of issues and it's a difficult balance. I think we have time for one more question right here in the front. Oh my goodness, this is an old friend. Uh-oh. Hi friend. Mike Rowles, retired FBI and now consulting on countering violent extremism. When the initiative came out of the White House three and a half years ago, along with the implementation plan, those in and out of the government who were focused on it observed three things that haven't changed and that it was rolled out by your successor generation, absent funding, staffing, and no one really in charge. That's different from how it's done elsewhere. Put yourself back in whether you wanna be the National Security Council or justice or wherever you wanna go and think for a minute that this proposal is handed to you next week. This initiative is given to you to figure out what have we done, what haven't we done, where do we go? Where do you go? Mike, tell me the three points that you mentioned. Tell me what that is. No funding for any of the whole of government which has really been reduced to four agencies now. No staffing to come along with it to implement the strategic implementation plan and no one in the government really responsible to coordinate the overall efforts of those who do wanna participate. This is on the counter extremism side. Right, yeah. What would you do with it? Yeah, look, I think you've gotta make it, you know, this is the old story. Where you spend money is what your priorities are. You can say your priorities are countering extremism but if you don't put the money and the staffing and the policy against it, it's not true. You can say it's true but it's not true. And so I absolutely think this is a very hard thing to matrix, right? Because you're not only, what people don't appreciate is you can say I'm gonna counter extremism but you've got a diplomatic effort, you've got financial sanctions, Wanzirati knows more about it than anybody in this room. You've got the intelligence and covert action pieces and so it is uniquely what the White House does. There's gotta be somebody at the White House who owns it. Owning it means you are responsible for it and you are held accountable for it and that means ensuring that each of those agencies has the legal authorities, the resource staffing and the money in order to execute against their responsibility. We haven't seen that and the answer is I found quite frankly the White House summit on countering extremism to be a disappointment so much so I was invited and didn't attend. I just didn't think it had, I'll give you an example of what I'm talking about about being responsible and accountable. The President Bush had a strategy for pandemic flu and so he did an announcement, I wound up, God help us all, I was responsible for the strategy and then assigning responsibility. We actually had what we call affectionately in government a horse blanket. Every agency had deliverables by dates and we told the Cabinet Secretaries, by the way I'm gonna go to the National Press Club and we're gonna score you and I did it and guess what, it got implemented and lo and behold when the Obama administration came in and they had to face a pandemic flu, they had a strategy. Did they make changes to that? Yes they did. Were they absolutely grateful that they had something to work from? Yes they did and so when I say you need that same sort of very disciplined organized effort in countering extremism if it's ever gonna work and it must come from the White House. You've gotta have somebody at the White House who's responsible for it. So we next have a question, a remote question from Lori Bertman in Louisiana. What can the average person do right now to help prevent terrorism? What's your actionable advice? Sure, the single most important thing, you've heard these, it started in New York, it's called See It, Say It and it's really what that's a sort of tagline for is active engagement in local communities. The honest answer is it is unlikely that if there is gonna be a terrorist attack inside the United States that the federal level with its limited resources are gonna know at first. Truthfully, those people may be in your communities, those people, you've gotta work with your local law enforcement and you've gotta be willing to stand up and say I've seen this and this is unusual. This makes me uncomfortable. This is an individual who's changed his behavior. It's about having community involvement, engagement and leadership. I would add that too with just mass killings here that if you had more See It, Say It sensibility. So on an end note, this is a very broad question but so we've had a lot of protective measures come into play since 9-11, yet we've also seen a morphing and an expansion of the threat. So are we safer now? How would you gauge that? Well or not. So here's the bad news. If you look just at statistics, 2014 was the deadliest year on record since they kept statistics going back to 1970 this is, these are statistics kept by a program called Start at the University of Maryland and by a long shot, both by the number of incidents and by lethality if you look worldwide. And so I think statistically the answer is we are absolutely in a more dangerous time than we have ever been in. Some of that is this fracturing and this capacitizing of the terrorist threat around the world. The good news is you've got more capability and more resources devoted to it than we ever have but I think we've gotta be realistic. The likelihood because now we have seen terrorists can inspire action here inside the United States without ever crossing a border, the likelihood of other incidents here inside the United States is higher than ever. On the other hand it is less likely that it will be a mass casualty event like a 9-11 killing thousands of Americans. Does that make you feel any better? No, right, you worry but I think we've gotta be realistic. We're likely to see small scale attacks inside the United States because they can. Well on that less than cheering note, but important note, this was a huge topic and I know we just barely scratched the surface but your insights were just incredible and I think we all walk away a lot more educated about this. Thanks so much, Fran. Thank you. Thank you.