Moderator: Welcome
Ronald Sugar: Thank you very much, Ambassador Jones. You know, I am also a member of the board of one of your farm team organizations, the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, which also does wonderful work. I remember as a young engineer, my wife and I used to wander up to go to some of the presentations, and it was really important for us to get some connectivity to the rest of the world, and it was fabulous, the kinds of folks that come to this kind of a forum, and the 84-86ers, so they're around the country. In fact, I remember I commented to my wife yesterday, I'm gonna be on the stage here, and I remember as a youngster, looking up at some of the great people who were up on the stage and some of the great people who get to introduce the people who come up on the stage, and I get to introduce one of the great people on the stage. Well, thank you very much for being here tonight, this is an important forum, and during times like these, understanding viewpoints that drive world events is inevitable. This is why the World Affairs Council is invaluable to us. This organization has advanced the cause of international communication and understanding for years. In this manner, the World Affairs Council has made a sizeable contribution to peace, diplomacy, and friendship among ally and adversary alike. And for this reason, Northrop Gruman is a proud sponsor of the Council and its mission. One of the ways it achieves that mission is as a forum for speakers. The speakers hosted at the Council are consistently at the center of events, and tonight's speaker is no exception. Ambassador John Negroponte currently serves as the President's Director of National Intelligence, but that title does very little to convey the importance or challenges of his work. Nor does it convey the magnitude of his contributions to our nation, the world, and the principles that are its best hope. Having served every president since Dwight Eisenhower in just about every conceivable State Department function, John Negroponte's resume is too long to recite. The one thing that you don't see in the resume is that he's a college dropout. Sort of. He reminded me that even though he graduated from Yale, he had an opportunity to go to Harvard Law School and within, what, the first week or two, was then asked by the State Department if he'd like to have him come join them in foreign service, and he basically went and did that, and so I guess you weren't quite a dropout in that you got your tuition back, but it was a good choice, I think, certainly for the nation, and I hope it was for you too, sir. His Foreign Service career has taken him around the world as a career foreign service officer, and then of course later as an ambassador to Honduras, to Mexico, the Philippines, the United Nations, and Iraq. And somewhere along the way, he had a private career in industry with McGraw Hill, so quite a range of accomplishments. And it's clear why our leaders so often go to him first whenever there's a difficult job to do. Today he serves as personal intelligence advisor to his tenth president. This job may be his most challenging yet. His office is among the newest in government, and its task is nothing less than to insure that our nation's intelligence agencies work as a single, unified enterprise. This is a tall ship indeed, which explains why Ambassador Negroponte was placed at its helm. So would you all please join me now in giving a warm welcome to Ambassador John Negroponte.
John D. Negroponte: Thank you very much for your kind introduction, Ron, I appreciate it very much. It's a pleasure to be with all of you here this evening, ladies and gentlemen, and I also want to note that in the reception beforehand, I had a chance to meet with, again, with a number of people that I've known before through the course of my career, a number of whom represent your councils across the country, whether it was Los Angeles or New York or Stamford, Connecticut, or other places where I've had a chance to speak during the course of my time in public service. I've always appreciated greatly the work that World Affairs Councils do around our country. I think you play a vital role in promoting an understanding and an awareness of foreign affairs and national security issues, and I want to encourage you to keep up the great work. I also want to thank Dr. Sugar, not only for the introduction, but for the great contribution that your corporation makes to the national security of our country, and I wanna express my appreciation to the various sponsors of our event this evening. I want to greet the Ambassador of Brazil to Washington, a good friend, I'm happy to see you again, sir, and above all, I want to thank Ambassador Jones for having invited me to speak to you this evening. Jim and I have known each other a long time, but I suppose the time where we were the most closely associated professionally was when Jim succeeded me as ambassador to Mexico, and I think we both, we don't fight over this, I think we both share great pride in the fact that we accomplished the North American Free Trade Agreement during our respective tenures. I guess I would take credit for, mostly for the negotiating part, and I think Jim would take credit for having helped get it through the Congress. I think that was a division of labor, and I think that President Clinton was, it was an inspired choice on his part to ask Jim Jones to be our ambassador to Mexico at that critical moment in the history of the United States/Mexico relations. As I said earlier, over the years I've had a number of opportunities to address World Affairs Councils around the United States, and I've always been impressed at the size, the diversity, and the expertise of your membership. There are many ways to try and stay abreast of development in today's world, but surely one of the most important and effective is direct contact and dialogue between public servants like myself, and civic, business, and cultural leaders like the World Affairs Councils. I also value your many initiatives that go beyond speakers' programs. Your exchanges, your people-to-people public diplomacy, your workshops, outreach to schools, support for the model United Nations, and efforts to promote discussion of international news on radio, television, and print media. In an era of global interdependence, the World Affairs Council plays an indispensable role in ensuring that we have an informed citizenry that can make judgments and take stands on matters that affect all Americans. So I accept your award with gratitude, for your recognition of my career as a diplomat, but I speak to you in my capacity as Director of National Intelligence, a position created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 which has the rather unfortunate sounding acronym of IRTPA, if you could... gotta get a new name here, huh, IRTPA. Having served as the Director of National Intelligence for nine months now, with my principal charge being to implement the Act, let me say that I believe the nation's efforts at intelligence reform are headed in the right direction. But before I expand on this topic, I would like to emphasize two points. My first is that even as we implement intelligence reform, the intelligence community is supporting the nation in fighting a war. This war has fronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, where our military confronts deadly enemies, but it also has fronts elsewhere, and much closer to home. The terrorists who struck on 9/11 have never stopped trying to strike us again, but this does not mean that our adversaries are winning or will win this war. Neither is the case, and that is at least in part attributable to the efforts of the patriotic, lawful, dedicated efforts of our intelligence community. Even as we discuss and consider what we must do to protect American lives within the framework of our constitution. We should keep in mind that many intelligence community professionals are taking life-threatening risks to keep us safe. Unlawful disclosures of classified information put us all in greater jeopardy and demonstrate disregard for real sacrifices on the front lines of a dangerous conflict. My second general point is this: Conducting a war and implementing reform, what President Bush has called the most dramatic reform of our intelligence community since President Truman are both daunting challenges, each in their own right. Doing them both at once is even more daunting. But as we have no choice when it comes to the war, and the fact is, that we need intelligence reform to help address to national security that go beyond terror. Countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction, to cite an additional threat, is an essential task for the intelligence community, and unfortunately, there are many more. Here's a simple way of looking at reform that may resonate in particular with those of you in the business world. Prior to the reform legislation, our intelligence community was a federation of business units directed by a CEO whose overwhelming preoccupation was operating the lead business unit. By this, I mean that the director of the CIA was dual-hatted. He also was director of central intelligence, coordinating and guiding fourteen other intelligence agencies. Further, the intelligence community had a structural challenge. It wasn't well organized to respond to transnational threats confronting the homeland. Various studies and inquiries, notably those produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the 9/11 Commission, and the Silberman-Robb Commission, did the nation a great service by documenting the requirement for change in our intelligence practices and posture. Now, the IRTPA has put that requirement into law. It created the position and office of Director of National Intelligence to make the United States government collect and produce more sophisticated and accurate intelligence, to disseminate it more quickly to more of the people who need it, and to make the necessary organizational changes required to accomplish all of this. As a consequence, while making a number of decisions and setting various initiatives in motion, I have spent my first nine months building a leadership team whose job it is to help me optimize the intelligence community and to develop a strategy for them to execute. I will speak about some of our specific decisions and initiatives in a moment because they are the stuff of real, tangible reform. But first, let me talk about the leadership team of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and our strategy. My principal deputy. Air Force General Mark Hayden, and I have recruited an experienced core of executives in whom we have great confidence. If there is a single reason to think that our office will make good decisions and ensure that they are carried out, it lies in the quality of our four Deputy Directors of National Intelligence, the Associate Directors of National Intelligence, the directors of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, and the National Counter-Proliferation Center, the Program Manager for Information Sharing and many others. In the Washington scheme of things the leadership team of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was assembled very quickly. What is this team's job? In my mind, it has been assembled to do four things: Preside over the intelligence community's strategy, policies, standards, and budgets. Again, four things: strategy, policies, standards, and budgets. And the Directorate of National Intelligence is not here to manage the intelligence community's individual business units. Their own leadership can do that. It is here to integrate. this is a real watchword for us. to integrate into what President Bush has called for. That is to say an intelligence enterprise that is, and here I quote, "more unified, coordinated, and effective," end of quote. So one of our leadership's team's first tasks was to devise a national intelligence strategy that would bring about comprehensive reform while preparing to meet our intelligence needs as the 21st century unfolds. The national intelligence strategy, and I do have to put in a plug here, I invite you to review it at www.dni.gov, because it is, and I think this is probably something of a first for the intelligence community, it is an unclassified document, public document, and we believe that it gives everyone in the intelligence community clear direction. We need to move from a loosely federated intelligence community to a well-integrated one, and we're doing that. The leadership team of the Directorate of National Intelligence began consulting with the 15 intelligence community leaders last summer to define and align our objectives. This integrated planning process will continue, serving as a forcing function for innovation. It also will provide the data necessary to make budgetary decisions in the context of the whole enterprise. And as we budget, we will measure. For every strategic object, we will stipulate outcomes that are both quantifiable and intuitively right. This process is consistent with the best practices of industry and the public sector. In addition to overarching objectives, the national intelligence strategy points to many of the strategic reforms we have undertaken, consistent with the legislation and the 70-plus recommendations of the Silberman-Robb foundation and our commitment to protect American civil liberties and privacy. In nine months, we have, and I cite a number of these achievements, established the National Counter-Proliferation Center, the Directorate Open Source Center, the National Clandestine Service, the National Intelligence University System. We have worked with the Department of Justice at the FBI to establish the FBI's National Security branch. We have commenced the development of an integrated human capital plan that includes both joint ness requirements somewhat along the lines of the Goldwater Nichols legislation as it applied to our military a generation ago so that intelligence officers obtain experience outside of their own agencies and flexible pay to put in place their own incentives. We have expanded the analytic expertise that the President and his senior advisors draw upon in their daily intelligence briefings. We've transformed the role of the National Intelligence Council to strengthen the quality and integrity of analytic assessments across the community. We've established the first-ever Office for Customer Outcomes to ensure that the consumers of intelligence are satisfied with the product that we produce and are engaged in constant dialogue with us about their requirements. We've created a national terrorism bulletin to synthesize the key terrorism intelligence, provided daily to senior policy makers, and we've put our own office on track to consolidate our workforce in a new headquarters at Boling Air Force Base. We have established strong relations with the Department of Defense by rationalizing budgetary decision making for national and defense-related budgets. We have appointed mission managers for North Korea, Iran, for Counter-terrorism and Counter-proliferation who will manage the entire intelligence enterprise for their respective subjects and serve as my go-to people on these key topics. And we have established an office of Inspector General and appointed a highly experienced individual from the private sector to fill that role, and finally we've appointed a civil liberties protection officer to help insure that the intelligence community's policies appropriately incorporate protections of privacy and civil liberties, safeguarding the rights of all Americans and maintaining the trust of the American people is a vital part of everything we do. So, in addition to team building and strategy development, I view our first nine months as a period of quick action in areas where immediate reform and structural reorganization were necessary. Urgency is our watchword as we strive to achieve cascading effects that make it possible for everyone in the 15 intelligence agency community to work more effectively with each other and better serve the President, the Congress, our troops overseas, and our law enforcement officers at home. Now, having received your recognition this evening and availed myself of your attention let me offer to reciprocate by trying to ask a few questions. In so doing, let me note that even though I was asked to speak about intelligence reform this evening, I share your great interest in this conference's major theme: The World's Rising Powers. China, India, Russia, Brazil, and others. The point of intelligence reform, of course, is to make sure that we have a good understanding of this and similar topics. As the President's principal intelligence advisor, that is an essential element of my job. I would also like to take note of the award you plan to give Ann Garrols for her news coverage from Iraq. I have admired Annie's journalism for a long time and I can tell you that her contribution to the public understanding of events in Iraq are not only outstanding, but heroic. The tragic element of unpredictable danger in Iraq remains far too high, even though it is an uncertain indicator of the progress that the Iraqi people are making as they shape their political destiny. The two elections and constitutional referendum the Iraqis have held in the last 12 months have had a much larger and more lasting impact in Iraq and the entire Middle East than any insurgent or terrorist attack could ever have. When we talk about nation building, we often think about schools, hospitals, ports, and bridges, but the central element, especially when confronting terror and insurgency is less tangible, though more durable. Nation building is first and foremost an act of political will calling for courage, leadership, and sacrifice by skillfully reporting and recording what she has seen and heard throughout Iraq, I think Ann Garrols has given her audience an opportunity to get to know the Iraqi people's political will firsthand. Despite the costs that they have paid, their determination remains strong, and that's what ultimately will be decisive in defeating the insurgency and terror alike. But again, I think dialogue is what makes the World Affairs Council so special, as Jim mentioned earlier, I understand that he may have collected a few questions from you, and if they're as good as the ones that I've always received at the World Affairs Council events, I'm sure they'll be first-rate, and so Jim, I'm ready if you are. Thank you very much. Q & A
