Events. Before we get started i ask that you please silent your mobile devices and cell phones. Please note this conference is open to the press and it is being webcast live and being recorded. The comments from the stage of all the speakers, panelists and moderators are all on the record. As theme for the conference this year is achieving advantage and we will attempt to provide insight on how america can continue to achieve strategic advantage to address current and future global challenges. Our opening keynote speaker today is someone who daily looks at, addresses and is at the heart of National Security challenges. As director of the Central Agency mike pompeo manages intelligence collections analysis, covert actions, counterintelligence and critical liaison relationships with foreign Intelligence Services. Dci pompeo was sworn in as director on january 203rd, 2017. Before becoming the cia he served four terms as a member of congress and came to his position as director with a solid understanding of the role cia plays in National Security as a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on intelligence. It is my great privilege and great pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker, the director of the Central Intelligence agency, mike pompeo. [applause] thank you, frank. Good morning everyone. I know you are all looking forward to the Panel Discussions that are about to get underway so i will be brief. I do want to say a few words about the subject that brings us together today and that is the profession of intelligence. I want to talk to a few minutes about what it means to practice that profession in todays world, a world that is marked by speed, adaptability and constant change. Lets imagine for a moment that an agency operative is traveling on foot right now to the streets of a gritty foreign capital, dodging surveillance while on a critical mission. The officer is tracking an adversary that moves with lightning speed and for a moment an opportunity presents itself, an opportunity to spell the difference between success and failure of a critical mission. Between the success of collecting Vital Information on a hostile target. If the officer hesitates the window will slam shut and the chance will be gone. In fact, in a few hours, in a faraway place halfway across the world night will fall and officers who worked for the Central Intelligence agency will put their life on the line working with our Partner Forces to accomplish a National Security mission on behalf of the United States of america. Hard many women working in hard places on hard missions. You no, our officers find themselves in those places in great because he and i consider it when a mighty response abilities as the director of the cia to make sure they are empowered to seize that very moment to make sure they have the authority, the teammates and tools and support to take action. Speed and agility have long been the heart of good intelligence work but they have never been as critical as they are today. This is true across every facet of our mission, weather operations, analysis, support, science, technology and the digital realm. In each place the rate of change matters and we must keep up with it. Many of our adversaries today are incredibly nimble and they are viciously fast when deciding how they are going to attack america. That poses immense challenges for institutions charged with helping our government to keep them. The size and complexity of our government along with the need to coordinate efforts across organizational lines and operating in a democracy make it hard for us sometimes to move as quickly as we would like. In fact, i was attending a meeting a couple months back and we were doing planning with the Senior Leaders and i was asked by our adversary if they took a particular action how or if we took a particular action our adversary might respond. We had been at this meeting for some time and i said well they sure as heck wont have a meeting like this. Not everyone laughed but i meant it. Our adversaries do not spend a lot of time on process. Instead of talking about what they do, they go ahead and do it and that gives them a big advantage. But is not insurmountable. There are things our government can do to shorten our time of response, separates the moment from which we conceive an idea that we are able to put it into action. For the cia one the most important ways to do this is to have faith in our workforce. Our officers and our National Treasure have more than enough talent,s courage and talent to do what they need is the freedom to carry it out. We need to remove bureaucratic barriers that prevent them from taking swift and aggressive action. I am not talking about action that exceeds their authority and not advocating for reckless freelancing, quite the contrary. We believe in review but we cannot tolerate her aiming to achieve our mission redundant review. Every step and every person should add value to the process. As a large Government Organization illuminating barriers is a neverending challenge. One of my predecessors serving on one of the panels today noted that the problem during his tenure as cia director under president george w. Bush. Compared to what he saw as a young officer in the 1960s he was struck by how much bureaucracy had grown up around the cias mission. He likened the bureaucracy to bureaucratic layers to virginia creeper vines and i think of it more as a kansas perry grass. But he said unless this was hacked away and bureaucracy was being back or threatened to stifle the good work that we need to do. Porter and many of my predecessors did admirable work to cut back those fines and im honored to continue their efforts. They recognize the need to reduce the deficits on process unleashing in the awesome talent that has defined the cia since its very founding. The truth is in our blood in our culture and its a tradition that goes back to world war ii and our agencies predecessors at oss. The cia director William Casey pitt he said [inaudible] you gambled that it might and you did it. More recently we have seen that agility and ethics. After the attacks of 911. Only 15 days after the towers fell, cia for the First American boots on the ground in afghanistan acting on orders from president bush. Think about that. Only 15 days the cias leadership didnt gather to look at proposals and they didnt think the president or send him with a recommendation, it acted. On day 15 an agent he was already stepping out of a helicopter in northeastern afghanistan, hauling a crate of weapons in a suitcase of cash and taking the fight to the taliban and al qaeda. The agency speed and agility are ingrained into who we are, its in our dna. We look for it in the young people that we recruit. For me it is not a question of recreating a culture that isnt there but clearing away things to get in our officers way and restrain them. It is about enabling the culture to . The challenges of today require nothing less. Change is a defining trait of our contemporary life. Most organizations across every discipline i can think of are under tremendous pressure to respond immediately to challenges that come their way and that holds true for University Like the ones we are at today. I iran in Aerospace Company before i was in congress. After the attacks of 911 demand for all things aerospace plummeted in our business was devastated. What saved us was acting quickly and aggressively. We cut cost, overhauled our Business Plan and we survived. We defeated our competitors. That crisis taught me that good analysis and quick decisionmaking matter an awful lot. Immediate action to save our companies and hundreds of jobs in families that depended on our success. Government is tough to move that fast sometimes and for one thing the feedback loop is slower. In the private sector, you know right away whether you are being outpaced by your competitors, customers stop by your product, profits dry up and before you know it the board of directors is knocking on your door asking how you will fix it. Then the bureaucratic impediments that inevitably crop up in government and it is not the people are trying to gum up the works with red tape, red tape just happens in government. It often starts with the best good intentions and it can sometimes add value and reduce the chance of error and the idea, of course, is to risk risk but there is a cost to every one of those things and each of those process as its own former risk. If mechanisms are already in place to guide the effort to reduce this bureaucracy we need to make sure that we dont create a second one at the cia. You no, this risk of the absence of agility and speed is a price that our agency cant afford to pay and one that america cannot afford either. With each passing year the pace of global events accelerates and does so as policymakers and the president are getting more and more on the product and the work that the cia performs for information, for insight and for options. We cannot begin to meet the needs of President Trump and the National Security team if we allow our great strength, speed and agility, to whether to neglect. We must have the power to become more quicker, more flexible and in short, make sure that we can move at the speed with our mission demands. You will get a chance to hear from some of the fine officers that work as part of my team and i know that every one of them has heard me say this over and over. We have to be better, faster and more responsive and if youre in a process and not any value, get out of the way. We are surging forward on several fronts in this regard. More specifically, first, as i said, were impressing on every officer and the need to push decisions to the lowest level that has a Value Proposition for being involved in the process. When it comes to our operations outside of the United States we want the leaders of our stations and stations to call the shots to the maximum extent possible. If the need to consult with us here at headquarters we want them to coordinate with those who know the most about the issue and with no one who doesnt need to be involved in the process. If it is a tactical issue that is rarely me or anyone in my Senior Leadership team for that matter. I have confidence in them that they have good judgment and have been trained well and they understand the commanders intent and know the rule of law and they know how to prosecute our efforts against our adversaries. We have to make sure that those decisions are made by officers closest to the issue at hand. After all, they almost always have a firmer grasp on the details and they should therefore be the ones leading the way. This is certainly true of all of our endeavors. Including those related to our most difficult missions. Second, we have endeavored to streamline decisionmaking and our Mission Centers and organizational framework. We are trying to reduce the number of people who sign off in review proposals and the question is always are they speeding things up and adding value for are they simply deadweight loss. The result i expect will be the ability for the cia to be faster and more rigorous, both at the same time. Third, we are investing in technology. Our ability to collect intelligence today far outstrips our capacity to process it. The volume of information is simply too great, too overwhelming to be absorbed and synthesized by the human brain. We need technological help and of course, really smart operatives can come up with brilliant insight but we have to have tools to help them zero in on the really important stuff. Finally, we are sending more of our teams to the field and that is where our adversaries are training and that is where they are preparing to take america down. That is where our partners are providing safer and more prosperous world. In short, its where our mission is in the closer we can get to the center of it, the point our people, tools and resources into the heart of the fight, the more quickly we will engage those who threaten us and the more likely we will keep america safe. And the more likely we will quickly crush our adversaries. If you do all these things well, and i know our officers will hit it out of the park, we will carry our Mission Forward with the fighting spirit of our predecessors at the oss. We will safeguard our nation. Before i turn things over to frank, i want to say a few words about the panels and the conference agenda. Before i do that, i also want to think George Washington university, cia office for Public Affairs and everyone who put this conference together, i thank you all for being here. I especially want to think thomas, the new president here at gw for hosting us on his campus. We are deeply grateful to frank for serving as rmc and organizing todays proceedings. He is keenly aware of the unique challenges that face the Central Intelligence agency. You will hear some of this today or more properly there will be some things you dont hear today discussing sensitive world of intelligence in a public forum is always tricky but its a thousand times easier when we are partners like frank and so i deeply appreciate the work he has done. The theme of our conference this year is achieving strategic advantage in the timing couldnt be more fitting. Exactly 60 years ago today the soviet Union Launched Sputnik into space stunning the public, but not american leaders. Cias office and previously informed eisenhower about soviet planning to launch an earth satellite providing him with the strategic advantage he needed to guide our nations response. Later today cia will be releasing a declassified article about our work on the sputnik along with hundreds of pages of related documents of the historians tell the story. You will be able to find it on a public website cia. Gov. It is now time to begin the panel discussion. Students of espionage and National Security, leaders are in for a great treat today. Each of the panelists today is an expert in their field who not only have the issues inside out but know how to talk about them and talk about the intelligence nature of what they do and they will do so, i expect, with clarity and sophistication that you will appreciate. I hope that you wont limit our discussions to the bright shiny objects making headlines because we will try to delve in deeper. We will get at the heart of what is driving some of the most complex issues facing, not only the world but our profession, the profession of intelligence. We will also discuss the challenges connecting espionage and transparent and interconnected world and in doing so under the rule of law. Then we will have a real treat. We will convene a panel of fascinating former cia members. It should be a memorable day full of informed discussions and lively debate and i wish i could stay for the whole thing but i am headed for the white house here shortly. I have a long list of work to do with my team, to keep us all safe. The president is an avid consumer as is the entire cabinet in which i served and i know he is grateful for the intelligence professionals were here today both present and former. Thank you all for your service. For all the work that so many of you have done over the world to protect our country. Thank you all and i hope that you enjoyed the conference and now i will turn it back over to frank. Thank you and have a great day. [applause] thank you, director pompeo. Thank you for your Incredible Service and things for insuring your providing the leadership to the men and women we lead. Thank you for that. The director just spoke to the need for speed, and agility and constant change when it comes to the profession of intelligence. Im reminded of all the movies growing up, james bond, and i never saw him once go out a form but obviously there are forms that need to be filled out in our adversaries dont adhere to the same schools. All of our panelists today will deal with the three things that we just heard, speed, and ability, and constant change and the benefit and sometimes the consequences that may accompany them. Before i kick off the first panel i want to express my gratitude and thanks for the staff at the cias office of Public Affairs. Public affairs in cia dont often go in the same sentence but let me tell you they are phenomenal, most professional group i had the privilege of working with over the years. And to my own staff at gw center for cyber and homeland security, for all the effort that goes into planning for this conference. I also want to thank all of our panelists for sharing their thoughts and expertise today. With a few ground rules and information to share with all of you before our first panel takes the stage. You are allowed to take photos of speakers on the stage but request you do not take photos of your fellow audience members. Food and drink are not permitted inside the auditorium but you are welcome to bring in bottled water. Each panel today will have a discussion and a q a portion. For questions please line up at the microphone placed throughout the auditorium. In consideration of other speakers time and all those attending the conference i encourage you to be precise and ask pointed questions directly relevant to the panels topic. If i have to be a tyrant, i will. Lets get started. Experts on the first panel will tackle the vexing problem posed by north koreas official launches in nuclear program. Chinas move in the south china see, critical Economic Issues in the icus role in providing strategic advantage to policymakers advancing us interests in the region. To discuss this topic we have an Amazing Group of experts with many, many years of expertise in the asiapacific region. Our moderator jim should go watering the panel and quickly to list off the