About the topic: The General Counsel takes on the persistent misconception that the Agency operates outside the law

About the Speaker: Stephen W. Preston is General Counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency.  He was sworn in on July 1, 2009.  By statute, the General Counsel is the chief legal officer of the Agency. 

Mr. Preston was previously a partner at the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP in Washington, DC, where he was co-chair of the Defense and National Security Practice Group, as well as a member of the Regulatory and Litigation Departments.  He joined the firm in 1986. 

Between 1993 and 2000, Mr. Preston served as Principal Deputy and Acting General Counsel of the Department of Defense, and as General Counsel of the Department of the Navy. 

A member of the District of Columbia Bar, Mr. Preston is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  He has been active with the American Bar Association Standing Committee on Law and National Security Advisory Committee and, prior to his appointment, served on the board of directors of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. 

Mr. Preston has received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service (with bronze palm in lieu of second award) and the Department of the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award.  He is a two-time recipient of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Director’s Award. 

Mr. Preston received a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard University.

July 10, 2011 was a milestone in history, marking twenty years since South Africa acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).  To this day, South Africa remains the only country to have produced and assembled nuclear weapons and to have later relinquished that arsenal.  Moreover, that denuclearization came without any direct external intervention, and involved opening-up the former top secret program to international scrutiny, voluntarily, beyond that required by the NPT.  While each example of nuclear weapons proliferation has a unique history and basis, South Africa is a particularly instructive exemplar as a result of its unprecedented rollback. That rollback provided sufficient transparency for clear insights into:

1) Why a nation might seek to acquire nuclear weapons,
2) What tactics might a nation employ to conceal the existence of nuclear weapons program under a “Peaceful” nuclear program umbrella,
3) What strategies might a nation consider with respect to the potential use of such weapons, and
4) Why a nation might choose to renounce its nuclear weapons.

This seminar will focus upon a few less reported, but nonetheless salient, aspects of the South African nuclear weapons program pertinent to the monitoring and assessment of the capabilities and intent of other threshold nations whose nuclear programs remain suspect (despite having been repeatedly declared as being solely for only peaceful purposes).  They include object lessons derived from the various efforts that the minority-ruled government of South Africa took to conceal its nuclear program from external discovery, and to ensure sufficient ambiguity to allow that program to progress unabated, despite externally imposed restraints and sanctions, (and only up until termination was self-imposed through internal decision making). The lessons thus learned also provide an objective basis for comparison and assessment of alternative intents represented by the various capabilities, activities, and statements associated with those of contemporary nuclear threshold states exhibiting similar ambiguity.

About the speaker:

Frank Pabian is the Senior Geospatial Information Analyst at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Global Security Directorate and a visiting scholar at CISAC. Frank has nearly 40 years in the nuclear nonproliferation and satellite imagery analysis fields including 30 years with US National Laboratories. During 1996-1998, he served as Nuclear Chief Inspector for the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) during ground inspections in Iraq, focusing primarily on equipment/materials “Hide Sites”, and “Capable Sites” that were deemed potentially associated with weapons of mass destruction development and/or production.

His responsibilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory include “Rest-of-World” infrastructure analysis involving the exploitation of all-source information, particularly commercial satellite imagery in combination with openly available geospatial tools for visualization. Frank has published in numerous peer-reviewed scientific journals on the use of commercial satellite imagery for treaty verification and monitoring, and his work has been featured on magazine covers and in textbooks for training in the nonproliferation and intelligence professions. Frank is a recipient of the US Intelligence Community Seal Medallion (gold medal) for “sustained superior performance” for Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty verification support to the IAEA during South Africa’s denuclearization, and for associated discoveries derived from original analysis of all-source, including open source, information. Frank is also a “Certified Mapping Scientist, Remote Sensing” with the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASP&RS).

About the topic: When democracy returned to Pakistan, Americans and Pakistanis had high expectations of an improved partnership. Those expectations have not been met: The events of 2011 were hard on both sides, and pushed the relationship to a series of dangerous crises. What can we expect in 2012 and beyond, not only in bilateral ties, but in the plans both countries have for regional stability in South Asia?

About the Speaker: Cameron Munter was sworn in as U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan on October 6, 2010. Prior to his nomination, Ambassador Munter completed his tour of duty at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. He served there first as Political-Military Minister-Counselor in 2009, then as Deputy Chief of Mission for the first half of 2010. He served as Ambassador in Belgrade from 2007 to 2009.

In 2006, he led the first Provincial Reconstruction Team in Mosul, Iraq. He was Deputy Chief of Mission in Prague from 2005 to 2007 and in Warsaw from 2002 to 2005. Before these assignments, in Washington, he was Director for Central Europe at the National Security Council (1999-2001), Executive Assistant to the Counselor of the Department of State (1998-1999), Director of the Northern European Initiative (1998), and Chief of Staff in the NATO Enlargement Ratification Office (1997-1998). His other domestic assignments include: Country Director for Czechoslovakia at the Department of State (1989-1991), and Dean Rusk Fellow at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (1991).

About the topic: This talk examines the organizational roots of disaster.  Using the 2009 Fort Hood terrorist attack as a case study, she explores why the Defense Department and FBI were unable to stop a self-radicalizing terrorist within the Army who was openly espousing his beliefs, failing to perform his duties, and known, nearly a year before the attack, to be communicating with Anwar al-Aulaqi.  In publicly released investigations of the attack, much attention has been paid to political correctness and failures of individual leadership. She finds, by contrast, that fundamental aspects of organizational life -- the structure of organizations, the incentives influencing employees' choice of tasks, and the cultural norms that color "how things are done around here" --- played a crucial and overlooked role.  Organizational weaknesses, not human ones, were the root cause of disaster.

About the Speaker: Amy Zegart is an affiliated faculty member at CISAC and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.  Before coming to Stanford, she served as professor of public policy at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs and as a fellow at the Burkle Center for International Relations.  She is the author of two award-winning books. Flawed by Design, which won the highest national dissertation award in political science, and Spying Blind, which won the National Academy of Public Administration’s Brownlow Book Award.

Zegart was featured by the National Journal as one of the ten most influential experts in intelligence reform.  Her commentary has been featured on national television and radio shows and in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.

About the topic: Mr. Painter will discuss the cyber threats we are facing, and U.S. diplomatic efforts to achieve an open, interoperable and secure cyberspace.

About the Speaker: Christopher M. Painter has been on the vanguard of cyber issues for twenty years.  Most recently, Painter served in the White House as Senior Director for Cybersecurity Policy in the National Security Council Staff.  During his two years at the White House, Painter was a senior member of the team that conducted the President's Cyberspace Policy Review and subsequently served as Acting Cybersecurity Coordinator. He coordinated the development of a forthcoming international strategy for cyberspace and chaired high-level interagency groups devoted to international and other cyber issues.

He began his federal career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles where he led some of the most high profile and significant cybercrime prosecutions in the country, including the prosecution of notorious computer hacker Kevin Mitnick.  He subsequently helped lead the case and policy efforts of the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the U.S. Department of Justice and served, for a short time, as Deputy Assistant Director of the F.B.I.'s Cyber Division.  He is a graduate of Stanford Law School and Cornell University.