http://federaltimes.com/index.php?S=2945016 Scott Redd Imagination, collaboration keys to counterterrorism
Director of the new National Counterterrorism Center August 06, 2007 Over his four-decade career, Scott Redd has created a new Navy fleet, helped administer Iraq's first occupational government, and now serves as the first director of the new National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). Nobody ever accused the retired vice admiral of shying away from startup organizations. And Redd's latest startup may be the most important job of his life. NCTC is the nation's repository for counterterrorism intelligence and sets the nation's war plan for fighting terrorists. The center has few employees of its own and, instead, brings together about 400 analysts and other employees from agencies such as the CIA, Homeland Security Department and FBI to pore over data collected by other agencies. NCTC houses the nation's terrorist watch list and distributes it throughout the government nightly, and holds video teleconferences three times a day to keep the White House and the intelligence community informed about terrorist activity and counterterror operations. "We say, 'Mr. President, here's what the intelligence community believes, and here's where agencies disagree,'" Redd said. "So now he can see what the disagreement is and why. Because intelligence is not an arithmetic thing, there's a lot of judgment that goes into it." In June 2006, President Bush approved NCTC's National Implementation Plan, which for the first time assigns agencies throughout the government specific roles and responsibilities for contributing to the fight against terrorism. A graduate of the Naval Academy in 1966, Redd in 1995 founded and was named commander of the Navy's Fifth Fleet - which operates in waters surrounding the Middle East and is the only new fleet since World War II. He served as director of strategic plans and policy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1996 until he retired from the Navy two years later. Redd was also named chief operating officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority in March 2004, but the White House recalled him a month later to lead the commission that examined the intelligence failures that led up to the Iraq war. Congress confirmed Redd as NCTC director in August 2005. He laughs at how wrong television and movies portray counterterrorism operations, but he admits the NCTC took some cues from Hollywood when it designed an around-the-clock operations center two years ago. The center brought in a former Walt Disney Co. "imagineer" to help build a center that would ease collaboration and let analysts visualize the mountains of information they receive. With rotating red or blue lights warning analysts about incoming alerts or outside visitors, and walls filled with flat-screen televisions displaying incoming intelligence and news channels such as Al Jazeera, the dimly lit operations center could easily double for the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit on "24." "One thing we don't do here is [field] operations. Jack Bauer does not live at NCTC, as exciting as it may seem," Redd said during a July 13 interview in his Northern Virginia office. The operations center, which also has wings housing analysts from the FBI and CIA, "is about as close to Hollywood as we get." Following are edited excerpts from the interview: Redd: I learned to focus on the basics and get good people. In some cases, it got very tactical. It's amazing: In a country that has the second largest proven oil reserves in the world, one of the biggest shortages was refined petroleum product. And electricity - the only way to get electricity quickly was to bring in petroleum and fire up fossil fuel generators. That takes refined product. And there was no easy way to find people who were used to running part of the government in a country where they've never lived before. Redd: The war is ongoing, so you don't have the luxury of saying we're going to stop the U.S. government, rebuild it, reopen for business in a year. Add to that the fact that as a result of the peace dividend in the '90s, the intelligence community overall is substantially smaller. One of the first things we set out to do was to take a look at what was out there in the analytic community for counterterrorism. It was a very young and fairly inexperienced group of people. That wasn't surprising. There's only one way to build an analyst with five years of experience - that's over five years. The first thing we did was to get the structure in place, both on the strategic operational planning side and the analytic side. You build that up as fast as you can go - but in a responsible way so you don't break something in the process - then you start growing that [analytic] capability. It's an evolution rather than a revolution. It's frustrating to me - I'd like to do it all very quickly. But we've come a long way, and we've come very fast. Redd: We bring people together and we write the plan, but the president signs it. So it's on the president's authority that [Defense Secretary] Bob Gates or [Secretary of State] Condi Rice is assigned a certain task. But if they don't agree, then the president makes a decision. Congress gave me rank equivalent to the director of the FBI or CIA, so I could go into the White House situation room and interact with the Cabinet. State has the primary responsibility [under the plan] for winning the war of ideas and countering violent Islamic extremism. Most people would tend to think, well, we use the term war on terror, so the Defense Department would naturally be leading all of that. It is a full-spectrum operation and many of the things which we do are more involved in the soft side. Redd: I won't grant the criticism because I wasn't there. But I will say that the quality of analysts we have now is very high and improving. Analysts have access to more information here than they ever did at their home agency. This is the only place in the government where foreign and domestic intelligence come together, by law. [NCTC] is the poster child organization of just about everything that the [Office of the] Director of National Intelligence is trying to do across this country, [such as] joint duty. Everybody here - with very few exceptions like me - is on detail from another organization. They come here for two or three years, they get that experience, and then they go back. And when you go back, you're a much better analyst - you understand things you didn't before. Redd: There's only one place in the 100-day plan which really doesn't apply to us, and that's acquisition. But in most of the areas, we are the prototype. We define collaboration in the sense that everyone who's here comes from a different agency. Information sharing - we've been doing this for a couple of years, and so we're probably ahead of the rest of the community. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? Head on over to our discussion list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Brooks Isoldi, editor [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellnet.org Post message: osint@yahoogroups.com Subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** FAIR USE NOTICE. 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