Conference sponsored by:

Center for Biosecurity of UPMC

Deutsche Bank

The Contingency Planning Exchange

Pandemic Flu as a Major Security Threat
James Pavitt, Principal, The Scowcroft Group; Former Deputy Director of Operations at the Central Intelligence Agency

Speaker biography  |  Video

Four years have passed since the tragedy (9/11) that took place in this town not far from where we are today, when an organization called al Qaeda directed attacks here in New York City and in Washington, DC. Let me posit some questions as I speak to you today.

Are we safer today than we were four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, a year ago? For all that we have done as a nation, for all the changes that we have made, for all the efforts that you have made from a contingency perspective to deal with business disruption, let me posit a question. Are you comfortable with where you are in those contingency plans? Are we better prepared to deal with the next attack? And there will be another attack. Are we better prepared than we were in 2001? I think the answer is yes, a bit, but not sufficiently better prepared.

Let me give you some facts, some facts as I see them. The staggeringly slow response to Hurricane Katrina was nothing this nation is proud of. The president has said it was not good enough. State and local officials have said the response was not good enough. We found ourselves, despite all the preparations we made for a catastrophic attack, woefully unprepared to deal with a natural attack. Nothing went right. We did not communicate properly. We did not talk properly, up and down, or laterally. We did not coordinate properly. We could not move school buses from point A to point B or water from point A to point B. We could not get helicopters on the ground fast enough. We frankly did it all wrong.

Now, as a former intelligence officer, I spent a great deal of my career trying to assemble facts, to collect information, to get what some have -- I think, improperly -- characterized as perfect intelligence, perfect warning. We need to know exactly what is going to happen. Well, we had damn near perfect intelligence four weeks ago on Hurricane Katrina. We had as close as we will ever have--near perfect warning. [There were mix ups] for a variety of reasons, none of which I believe were mean spirited. We did not do it very well, and I think we have learned from that. As we sit here today, a hurricane is moving toward Texas with category 4 force, and we meet here 4 weeks [after Hurricane Katrina] better prepared. That is good news. But we didn't come here to talk about hurricanes, did we?

An H5N1 pandemic would be devastating to the world and to our nation. I think it is important that we learn from what has happened in the past. If we do that, perhaps we can find a way to better deal with what might come and, as you say, whether it comes next year or the year after, it certainly will come. Are we ready for a pandemic? I suggest we are not. Is there a tougher mass alert response in place? I think we are working on that. Do we have a strategy? Clearly we're developing a strategy. But are we driving this issue with sufficient intensity and focus, that we will not find ourselves when it comes -- not if it comes, when it comes -- saying we did not do it right?

We did not have school buses in the right place. We did not have medical records in the hospital system that were able to be shared electronically from one hospital to another. We have 50 public health services, 50 in 50 states, each of which does their work differently. Could we do something about that now? I suspect we could.

In the global society in which we live today, I think it is important that we understand that there is no easy way short of sealing our borders to prevent infected, particularly non-symptomatic, individuals from entering our country.

There was a lot of warning -- a lot of warning -- in advance of the attack that took place on the 11th of September 2001, of the risk to a city other than Washington. In 1993, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden tried to blow up a building in this city. What building was that? They drove a truck packed with explosives into the garage of the World Trade Center, parked it, walked away, and set it off. And some people died. We all remember that image, 1993.

If that was not strategic warning, I don't know what strategic warning is. What should we have done? What would we have done then, or in 1995, that you have all just read in the press? Now, some declassified information in the 9/11 Commission Report said the Federal Aviation Administration started receiving intelligence warnings in 1995, that terrorists would use aircraft as weapons to attack monuments or high-profile buildings in our nation. Could we or should we have shut down all air traffic in the United States? Could we have done that?

Well, in a pandemic context, sealing our borders, would that help? No one gets in? Probably. Will we do that? Of course not, we cannot.

The United States government has got to demonstrate that it has a sophisticated, highly motivated plan in place to deal with this issue. I do not think we have demonstrated that to date. Again, not because of mean-spiritedness, and not because we are not concerned about it, and not because we do not recognize that it is a problem, but because it is very hard. Solving issues like this is hard.

In the event of a global pandemic, some countries are likely to seal their borders, and that's going to have an inevitable impact on what many of you know about--International trade [and] international business. We, the United States, are dependent upon critical capabilities and materials that come from abroad. A tanker has to come into a port in the United States that originated in Asia [carrying] minerals, precious metals, semiconductors -- I can go on and on.

All of that is going to be impacted in the pandemic context. How is that populous going to respond? What are we going to do? There are people who are not sophisticated scientists, not people such as myself or those of us who are in "the business," but what is the average American or, for that matter, the average person in the room going to do in the context of a pandemic? How will they respond? Will workers report to work? Will we worry about family members?

As a former senior official of the United States government, I was at one time told that in the event of a certain disaster I was to go to Place A where a helicopter would pick me up and sweep me off to survive a terrible disaster of some kind. And I was going to leave my family in Great Falls, Virginia? I don't think so. That's a real issue. How will human beings respond, and do we have the time to deal with that?

Many of you here are engaged in contingency planning in the event of a natural or terrorist disaster of some kind that would impact your ability to function in a commercial context. All of you have contingency plans -- or I hope all of you have contingency plans. But how often do you exercise those plans? How often are you out there actually doing something to make sure you know what will happen and know how people will respond in a true crisis?

There is probably no one in this room who was alive in 1918 when a pandemic swept through this nation and killed hundreds of thousands of people. Tara O'Toole rightly describes what would happen if we had a similar pandemic today.

On the 11th of September, 2001, tragically, we lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 innocent people. We have lost hundreds of people in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. How would we deal, as a nation, with losing hundreds of thousands of people? Are we ready to deal with that? Have we thought about that? Is that motivating us sufficiently?

H5N1 avian flu pandemic -- to me those are numbers, letters, as they probably are to most of you. These could be, literally, the most important two numbers and two letters you've heard in your lives. The United States government has, in May of this year, invested $25 million to try and deal with avian flu from Asia, and I commend that. But I also note that I think it is woefully inadequate to the issue out there. If there were cynics in this room among us, some might say now is the time to simply go ahead and create the presidential or the congressional commission, naming the commissioners who will do the investigation of what went wrong and why our nation suffered a loss of hundreds of thousands of people because a pandemic struck [and we were unprepared].

In the three decades I spent as an intelligence officer, bad news was my business, as I said at the outset. I collected information, always incomplete. I collected tidbits, nuggets of information. I witnessed the way that collection took place. In the business I used to be in, I recruited spies to steal secrets. In the dead of night somewhere, a spy would deliver a secret to an intelligence officer, a nugget, a piece, never the whole picture, and we tried to cobble that together.

We do not need spies to tell us about the pandemic that is coming. We do not have to recruit a single spy. We do not need a single intelligence officer to intercept a signal anywhere in the world to tell us a pandemic is coming, and we do not need to take a picture from the sky that says a pandemic is coming. We have the intelligence. The director general of the WHO and others have all said it is coming. We have to prepare for a pandemic. We have strategic work [to do]. I posit we will not get tactical warning. If we are sitting around waiting, in the pandemic context, for the tactical warning to tell us that it is coming, that we need to be prepared, that we need to do something, I do not think that will happen.

We do live in troubled times. We are talking about a pandemic in the context of this conference and I think it is altogether appropriate that we are doing that, and I hope this conference generates another, and I hope those conferences and this kind of activity generate greater focus on what is coming.

We learned a lot about terrorism. We have spent an immense amount of money in preparing for the next terrorist attack, and I think that was right. We do not want to be unprepared. But there is nothing we can do that will stop every attack that is directed at us. Pandemic and biology -- how about the fact that we have been attacked? We have been attacked biologically with anthrax here in this city, and there was an anthrax attack in Washington, D.C. Thank God it was in a very focused, limited context. There was terrible loss of life, but it was controlled. We do not know who did that. But imagine people [dying] because a pandemic is here.

Can't we lash up that which we do in the fight against terrorism with preparing for this kind of a disaster? I could go on, but I must not. Let me talk briefly about what I think is the responsibility of the United States in this context. We bear, I believe, a very special responsibility in the context of this global threat because of who we are and what we represent as a nation. Our unique science, and that is going to be shared with all of you today, our extraordinary economic power represented by many in this room today -- all of those things make our nation uniquely capable, and indeed responsible for dealing with this issue.

To look the other way and not do something would be really irresponsible! It cannot be solved easily. It is going to require incredible focus. It is going to require incredible determination to do something. It is going to require us to shake things up a bit.

But remember four years ago when this nation was shaken up because a bunch of thugs came in and killed a bunch of innocent people. We had strategic warning it was coming -- 1993, Nairobi, Dar Assalam, the USS Cole. We had strategic warning, and I can tell you, we are never going to have that kind of hard tactical warning for a pandemic. But those [terror attacks] happened, and now we should be better prepared to deal with not only when that happens again -- and I think we are -- but for other things, including natural disasters, or something as devastating as a pandemic.

The experts will speak to the specifics, and the specifics, I think, are bad news. I do not think there is a lot of good news in what we are going to hear about today. But, there can be better preparation, and we can be better able to deal with what I used to do as an intelligence officer -- deal with that "skunk" when he or she walks into the party.

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