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# 									A Historical Overview of the Global Engagement Center:  ACPD Official Meeting Minutes							

George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs

Washington, D.C.

February 26, 2024

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**U.S. ADVISORY COMMISSION ON PUBLIC DIPLOMACY**

Minutes and transcript from the May 15, 2024 quarterly public meeting on the ACPD special report, The Global Engagement Center: A Historical Overview 2001-2021.

U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy Quarterly Meeting

Wednesday, May 15, 2024, 12:30 PM – 1:45 PM ET

In Person: The George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, 1957 E St NW, Washington, DC 20052

Online (Zoom) access

**COMMISSION MEMBERS PRESENT:**

TH Sim Farar, Chair

TH William J. Hybl, Vice-Chair

**COMMISSION STAFF MEMBERS PRESENT:**

Dr. Vivian S. Walker, Executive Director

Mr. Jeff Ridenour, Senior Advisor

Ms. Kristy Zamary, Program Assistant

**MINUTES:**

The U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy held a public meeting from 12:30 p.m. to 1:45 p.m. on Wednesday, May 15, 2024, to present the Commission’s special report, *The Global Engagement Center: A Historical Overview**,*which examines the Center’s past relevance and capabilities, as well as lessons learned for future U.S. government counter-disinformation initiatives.

A distinguished panel of experts, including former State Department officials and longtime research and policy partners, reflected on their contributions to the development of the GEC. Panelists included **James Glassman,**Chairman and CEO, Glassman Advisory;**Kitty DiMartino**, Chief of Staff to John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, U.S. Department of State; **Graham Brookie,**Vice President for Technology Programs and Strategy, Director, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Atlantic Council.

ACPD Executive Director Vivian Walker opened and moderated the session, Chairman Sim Farar provided introductory remarks, and Commissioner Bill Hybl closed the meeting. The speakers took questions from the Commissioners and the audience, as detailed in the transcript below.

**AUDIENCE:**

Approximately 30 attended this in-person public meeting, and seventy-five logged on to the Zoom platform to view the event virtually, including:
        - PD practitioners and PD leadership from the Department of State, USAGM, and other agencies;
        - Members of the foreign affairs and PD think tank communities; 
        - Academics in communications, foreign affairs, and other fields;
        - Congressional staff members;
        - Retired USIA and State PD officers; 
        - Members of the international diplomatic corps; and 
        - Members of the public.

**Note: The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.**

**Vivian Walker**:  Hello everyone.  I’m Vivian Walker, the Executive Director and Designated Federal Officer for the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.

Together with ACPD Commission Chairman Sim Farar and Vice Chairman Bill Hybl I am pleased to open this quarterly public meeting in fulfillment of the ACPD’s mandate to keep the American people in the know about USG public diplomacy activities.

As part of the Commission’s responsibility to produce informed assessments of key State Department public diplomacy programs and institutions, today’s meeting focuses on the history of the Global Engagement Center and its predecessor organizations, and how these Centers have contributed to national security over the past two decades in a highly competitive and often adversarial information environment.

Today we are delighted to present a distinguished panel of experts, including former State Department officials and longtime research and policy partners, all of whom have contributed to the development of the GEC.  Panelists include:
        -  James Glassman , who served as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs at the Department of State from June 2008 to January 2009;
        -  Kitty DiMartino,  who served as Chief of Staff to Undersecretary of Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Judith McHale from March 2009 to July 2011;
        -  Graham Brookie , who served as the Advisor for Strategic Communications at the National Security Council from September 2015 to January 2017.

Our panelists will also comment on a new Commission special report, *The Global Engagement Center: A Historical Overview**,*which, as the title implies*,*examines the Center’s past relevance and capabilities, as well as lessons learned for future U.S. government counter-disinformation initiatives.

Today’s panelists include, in order of appearance: **James Glassman,**Chairman and CEO, Glassman Advisory;**Kitty DiMartino**, Chief of Staff to John Kerry, Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, U.S. Department of State; **Graham Brookie,**Vice President for Technology Programs and Strategy, Director, Digital Forensic Research Lab, Atlantic Council.

Please note that the panelists will present consecutively, followed by a question and answer session.

A video recording and full written transcript of this quarterly meeting will be made available shortly on the ACPD website.

Now, it is my pleasure to turn to Chairman Farar for his welcome remarks.

**Sim Farar**:  Thank you, Vivian.

With my distinguished colleague from the Commission, Vice Chairman Bill Hybl, I am pleased to welcome you to this quarterly meeting.

I would like to express our sincere appreciation to William Youmans, Director of the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication for partnering with us to host today’s meeting.

A very warm welcome to our in-person and online audiences from around the world, and a special thank you to our distinguished panelists for agreeing to share their expertise with us.

Today we are proud to be presenting the Commission’s most recent Special Report on the Global Engagement Center to the White House, Congress, the Department of State, and, above all, to the American people.

As you know the GEC is tasked with countering foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation targeting the United States and U.S. interests.

Although the GEC and its multiple antecedents have played a crucial role in the defense of U.S. national security interests in the global information space since the 9/11 terror attacks, the role and function of these Centers have not been well documented.

To fill this knowledge gap, our Commission offers this report, a historical overview of the GEC from 2001 to 2021, which provides an account of the Centers’ origins, development, principal objectives, programs, tools, and impacts.

With this report, the ACPD aims to improve public understanding of the GEC’s role in the support of USG information and influence activities over the last two decades.

Finally, before I conclude, I’d like to take a personal moment to acknowledge our Executive Director, Dr. Vivian Walker, who has been with our Commission for over five years and has elevated us here at the commission dramatically. Vivian has been a true leader who has touched many, many lives. She’s been an incredible and inspirational person to work with. Today is Vivian’s last meeting with us, unfortunately, and I just wanted to say that she will be truly missed.

Vivian, it has been a wonderful experience to work with you.  I want to thank you. You’ll be truly missed.

**Vivian Walker**:  Thank you, Sim. It is now my pleasure to open the floor to our first speaker, James Glassman. He will be followed by Kitty DiMartino and then Graham Brookie.

Just a reminder that there will be no break between presentations, but there will be an opportunity to ask questions once the panelists have made their remarks.

**James Glassman:**Thank you, Vivian. Thank you, Sim. and thank you everyone for being here. You know, I have a fondness for the Elliott School. I gave my valedictory address here as I was leaving government. Just before I got out of the car to enter the building in January 2009, I got a call from Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary.  I’d never talked to her in my life,

but I had left messages. On the phone, she said, “Jim, I’m sorry, but President Obama isn’t holding anyone over.” I had asked, of course, but I knew what the answer would be. Completely understandable, I guess.

But as this important study shows, through one of its invaluable timelines, there was a five -month hiatus between the end of my term as R [Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs] and the beginning of Judith McHale’s term. And as the authors write, the GSEC’s [Global Strategic Engagement Center] previous leadership of the PCC devolved into a supporting role. The GSEC also lost its leadership role in the interagency strategic communications planning process, functioning as a support rather than as a guiding influence.

The GSEC could also not secure staff from other agencies, making it, quote, “less than fully equipped to engage and coordinate.” Of course, this might have happened anyway. [I was warned by] the Obama transition team [that they] did not want any more talk of the war of ideas, but that would change.

The lack of continuity is a shame, and so are the damaging and perennial delays in confirming the Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. These are just some of the conclusions of this very important report, with which I agree completely. I just want to thank, first of all, Vivian Walker. I didn’t realize, Vivian, that this was your last meeting. You’ve done a wonderful job and Sim knows better than I. And [thank you to] Adele Ruppe for producing such an excellent document.

This is the kind of research that I’d like to see across government. It shows how institutions within government wax and wane, how they toss out the ideas of previous administrations, but frequently come back to them. How they shift missions and personnel, how they cope with different priorities, and how they struggle to gain constituencies in Congress and the White House. I’d like to see this report widely distributed throughout the Biden administration, and I’d like to see other reports along these same lines.

So let me just talk briefly about what I was trying to do with the GSEC, as we called it, the Global Strategic Engagement Center. I have to say that I made up this name using four completely anodyne words. You can always say strategic for anything and engagement, of course, that’s a wonderful thing. So anyway, let me just talk about what we were trying to do with the GSEC, which was the modest precursor to the GEC [Global Engagement Center].

First, I want to credit Adnan Kifayat, who came to work for me from the National Security Council. Adnan is in California. I believe he’s listening today. I hope he is. Adnan knew far better than I did how bureaucracies work, and he crafted the GSEC from thin air.

What I wanted was an institution that was operational, that could do things. And I knew that I didn’t have very much time after my nomination was held up. The reorganization of public diplomacy in the late 1990s was, in my view, largely a mistake. It stripped government of an accomplished organization with real esprit de corps, the USIA. It left public diplomacy without much of a budget and with almost no control over public affairs officers in the geographical bureaus. We needed to create something new and necessarily small. We had no money.

Thanks to my predecessor, Karen Hughes, we had the PCC, a policy coordination committee to work with. It included all 17 (as I remember it–I could be wrong) of the agencies that had anything to do with public diplomacy, including Treasury, agriculture and so on. We were already trading information with the intelligence community and DOD. This is important. There were positive forces on the demand side.

From my very first week, SOCOM told me that it would back R to the hilt, back the public diplomacy bureau to the hilt in order to meet the military’s force protection mission, which dovetailed with our own mission, which was to use the tools of ideological engagement, words, images, and deeds to create an environment hostile to violent extremism. We did that in two ways: by undermining extremist ideologies and by encouraging young people to follow productive paths that lead away from terrorism.

I also want to credit Jared Cohen, who at the time was like 19 years old– no, it was like 24 or something– with helping me to formulate that mission. As I told Adele, and she quoted me as saying, “Right from the start, it was clear to me that the White House wanted me to spend my time focused on soft power, and specifically, the use of soft power against terrorism.”

The intelligence community, the IC, I think we can say, was less motivated to help. But we did have the support of the NSC to encourage them to cooperate with us. And we had excellent representatives from the CIA on the initial GSEC, as I think Peter [Kovach] would testify. We added a small table group led by Adnan that met weekly, I believe, at the NSC, to plan and de -conflict, and we had exceptional leadership from Peter Kovach, a skilled Foreign Service officer. In all, we had eight to ten full -time staff from three agencies, plus eventually a dedicated budget allocated from State and DoD.

What did the GSEC do? A campaign in Pakistan to convince key elements of the public and leadership that this war against terrorism was their war, a strategic engagement support team, including Jared and Farah Pandith that traveled to embassies and distributed $50,000 chunks of cash as an incentive for specific projects, public service announcements in Iraq, and other things that I don’t want to get into.

This country has long neglected soft power. I think we can all agree there were times when it was more important than other times, but in general, it has been a failing. And it’s an area in which the United States should excel. It makes sense. We’re very good at marketing, we’re very good at communications, we’re very good at entertainment, but somehow, we neglect soft power. We never could have gotten the GSEC off the ground if it hadn’t been for our champions in the White House, as this report clearly says. President Bush gave Karen [Hughes] and me explicit leadership of strategic communications across government in April 2008.

On my first day in office, the National Security Advisor, Steve Hadley, pulled me into a principals committee meeting (I didn’t even know what that was) in the situation room at the White House.  I was there with a bunch of cabinet secretaries and four stars, and [Steve told me that] my job was to fight terrorism with soft power. That kind of support is critical, but it’s unfortunately rare. It can cut red tape; it can get the slow walkers on board.

Finally, let me say that the GEC has done a remarkable job in shifting its mission as geopolitical conditions have changed. Fighting disinformation is crucial today and I wish we did more of it. Why are we constantly on the back foot against disinformation from Hamas, from Russia, from Iran, just as we were against al-Qaeda? GEC is fighting the good fight. We need a dedicated institution like the GEC housed in the State Department to counter these threats and the threats to come. Thank you.

**Vivian Walker**:  Thank you. Ms. Martino, please.

**Kitty DiMartino:**Thank you so much Vivian. Thank you so much for your service, and thank you Adele, Mr. Chairman and Vice Chairman. And thank you so much, Jim, for your remarks and for your public service.

**James Glassman:**Thank you.

**Kitty DiMartino**:  Everybody here is very accomplished, very smart, knows history. Maybe some of you have written books on history. But I feel like my job is just to lay down a little bit of what else was happening when Judith McHale came in as Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy at the beginning of the Obama administration and to pick up a little bit on the story.

There are so many things in the report that I agree with, including the concept that change is constant. It is just what happens in a policy environment. What any administration, regardless of the party, needs to do is understand what the policy imperatives are and what tools can be used to advance those policy imperatives.

In 2008 there was a pivot from the War of Ideas. The Obama administration came in, and voters wanted change. There had been a lot of kinetic activity in the Middle East and in Afghanistan.

President Obama, early in his administration, was very clear in laying out to U.S. and to international audiences that the administration would double down to improve mutual understanding and relations between the Islamic world and the West.

And a side note I think this administration would have envied the speed at which McHale was confirmed. President Obama was sworn in on January 20. Secretary Clinton was sworn in, confirmed and shortly thereafter sworn in on January 20. McHale was confirmed and sworn in by late May of 2009.

On June 4th [2009] President Obama headed to Cairo to deliver a speech about turning a new page. In it, he implored both the Islamic world and the West to do more to confront violent extremism. He called for working with the Muslim world to confront violent extremism in all of its forms. And he underscored that, quote, “America is not and never will be at war with Islam.”

This drew protracted applause from the audience in Cairo, which included Egyptians as well as people from across the Middle East. He also went on to explain that we will, however, relentlessly oppose violent extremism and violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security because we, like all people of faith, reject the killing of innocent men, women, and children. Later on in that speech, he talked about [extremists in] Afghanistan and Pakistan specifically, [noting that] they have killed people from many countries and of different faiths, but more than any others, they have killed Muslims. Their beliefs are irreconcilable with Islam. Finally, President Obama recalled to this audience that that his first duty as Commander -in -Chief was assuring the safety and security of the American people.

That sets the stage  for the next several months. There was no  lack of focus on strategic engagement or deprioritization of efforts to  counter violent extremism. Secretary Clinton was also very focused on this. For her soft power was a powerful tool  to promote our national security and  foreign policy objectives.

Judith McHale was likely picked to be the undersecretary because she was very much on the same page as the White House and the State Department in terms of the tools that would help to maximize our foreign policy goals and objectives and our national security interests.

In terms of Judith’s background, she, like each undersecretary before her, starting with Evelyn [Lieberman], brought a level of expertise to the job that created a foundation for the next undersecretary. As the CEO of Discovery (now Discovery Warner), soft power was part of her corporate and personal DNA.

The mission of Discovery was to engage global audiences with high-quality entertainment while driving successful financial outcomes. At that time, Discovery had the largest global infrastructure of any media company in the world. It understood and engaged very broadly and deeply with its audiences. It used its very large global infrastructure both on the technology side and on the human side to continue to build those audiences. [Discovery] founder John Hendricks and Judith would often talk about the trust that audiences had in Discovery’s content and the need to not take that trust for granted.

It was, again, a completely different world. You had people gathered around the television, right? But there was an intimacy in inviting someone into a household as a source of information or as the storyteller, which has been part and parcel of our human history.

As you know, she had structured the biggest joint venture partnership in media at the time, a global joint venture with BBC, and she was very good at figuring out how to get two plus two to equal more than four.   Not surprisingly, she came in with her CEO background  and said, “We need to do a top -to-bottom” strategic review of PD resources. “Show me the books. Where’s the money? Where are the people? What are the tools? What’s the efficacy?”

That’s not to say that that wasn’t done by [her] predecessors. It certainly was. But she brought a different sort of granularity to that [process]. She was very grateful for the work that had been done so that she could build on what had been tried and what was effective.

I am going to focus  on the CVE portion of [the new] strategic framework. The tagline produced was to get out into the marketplace of ideas. That [required] meeting audiences where they were, not waiting for audiences to come and engage with us. [The strategy] was also about two-way engagement–not just pushing messaging out to audiences, but really understanding what was affecting their belief systems, what information they were sharing, and what information they were putting back.

[As the report mentions, there was also a discussion about the] rebalancing of resources. Members of Congress suggested  that more resources go to the State Department from DoD. Secretary of Defense Gates advocated for it during Hill testimony. This wasn’t just about where the money sat in a ledger, or who got the appropriation. It was because these leaders recognized that more U.S. engagement with foreign audiences needed to be done through a civilian lens rather than solely a military one.

The tipping of resources to DoD meant that our messaging on [issues such as] science diplomacy or health diplomacy was now done through a military lens. As patriotic Americans [we may] think this is a great thing. But  it wasn’t always the best way for the audience to receive information.

In this period, we were meeting with the interagency constantly. Judith again brought her CEO expertise to the table, and she was very good at building teams and partnerships. We had open door conversations with Dennis McDonough, Ben Rhodes, John Brennan, Ambassador Bob Godec, and Dan Benjamin, the coordinator for counterterrorism. We were strategizing, ideating, presenting, and operationalizing together.

Judith understood how to recruit the best in the business. When we were in the process of doing the strategic framework for public diplomacy, we realized that we needed a very senior level person to head the CSCC [Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications], we reached out to Ambassador Richard LeBaron to recruit him to come back to run it.

Ambassador LeBaron actually had the name that fit his profile.  He was a “baron” at the building. Having served as ambassador and other positions in the Middle East, he worked very closely with the DoD. He was well known within the military and intelligence communities, and he brought a lot of prestige to the thinking and the strategizing and then, ultimately, the operation. The team in R–Andrew Cedar, Betsy Whitaker and others—also worked hand in hand with CT and brought a lot of good thinking on how to structure this.

The only thing that I will say about my own role in all of this is having run through the State Department a couple of times during my career, I was someone who knew which levers to pull. Judith knew that when she brought me on. In 2010 and 2011, it was no small thing to get a budget put together for the CSCC and  to pull positions from across government. Even something as  simple as getting office space [was a challenge because we needed] a special space that needed to be built out in a special way in a special part of the building. Being able to get that all done rather quickly was important.

Again, just a bit of history. In 2010  there was a series of events: On July 11th, there was a suicide bombing carried out during a World Cup screening party in Kampala. Seventy -four people were dead, and eighty -five people were injured. Al-Shabaab was the perpetrator of that event. Later that month, a 78 -year -old French aid worker was beheaded in Mali. Al -Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, who took credit for that. In that same timeframe, a news organization  was bombed by Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

These attacks were motivated by grievances. Al-Qaeda, Al -Shabaab and others were shaping the narrative of who we were, tapping into grievances against the West. We knew we had to do a better job of not only shaping the narrative [about us], but also shaping the narrative of who these extremists were–people who were killing sports fans and aid workers and journalists who were trying to exercise their freedom of expression and do their jobs.

[These events] kicked everything into high gear. The door had been open at the White House and we had already been in conversations, but that series of events allowed us to move things forward quickly.

With limited financial and human resources, we had to be very focused. We worked with other parts of the U.S. government to leverage expertise–either at SOCOM or CENTCOM or in the intelligence community. We also had to figure out with whom we could partner outside of the U.S. government and who would be most effective at engaging with critical audiences.

Things have changed so much since then.  Artificial intelligence was not something that we were worried about in 2011. Today, [the GEC] is integral to the fight against the foreign manipulation of information that is done in a purposeful and adversarial way. Government policies are constantly changing in response to the needs of the current environment. [The role of public diplomacy in countering violent extremism and the work of our public servants continue to be essential to our democracy.]

**Vivian Walker:**Great. Thank you so much.  Our first two speakers provided us with perspectives from within the Department of State focusing on the early evolution of the GEC and efforts to counter violent extremism from about 2008 to 2011.

With our third panelist, Graham Brookie, whose experience with the NSC dates from a later period, we will now have an opportunity to understand how the work of the GEC evolved and expanded across the interagency.

Graham, over to you to handle that piece of it.

**Graham Brookie:**Hi, my name is Graham Brookie and I served in government when we switched from Blackberries to iPhones. I think that’s a good intro. And I’m not wearing a tie because I had to speak about TikTok for most of the morning.

Thank you very much to the chairs.  Thank you to Jim and Kitty for your service within this broader ecosystem. It’s good to see you both here today.  I’m very thankful for Adele’s work on this report, and very thankful for Vivian’s leadership across this work for a significant tenure of this commission.

As a special treat, every single semester I get to go and speak with Vivian’s students at Georgetown.  We get to talk about the weird things that we’re seeing in the research space. And those conversations are always very interesting and informative for our work.

I think one key point about this report is that it is a useful history to understand the future of the GEC and why it’s necessary. In terms of a frame, just a couple of basic facts. We are right now in an era of increasing geopolitical competition, of rapid technological change, and increased global interdependence around the world. That’s the reality we face.

To boil it down to the implications for public diplomacy, that means that we’re in a global competition for information. That is, in my opinion, truly catalytic to every other discrete or systemic or global or collective challenge we face, whether that’s climate change, or counter-terrorism, or cybersecurity challenges. This is a space that touches on everything, and we have to get it right.

Given that reality, the function of the Global Engagement Center, which is to understand and analyze the global competition for information, and specifically how non-democratic actors, whether those are authoritarian states, or non-state actors, interact or compete in a global competition for information, is absolutely essential. And that’s a bottom line.

I think that the report could probably go back a little further in history. I understand that time and resources are a major constraint as we’re engaging in the information environment, but from an academic perspective, you could trace this back to a (depending on your point of view) famous or infamous cable, the inauguration of political warfare by George Kennan.

[However], I think this is a really, really useful report in showing how the U.S. has adapted its strategy over time commensurate with (A)  technological change; (B) adapting strategies that are commensurate with our values; and (C) figuring out how to engage with the world as it is.

The reality of this moment is that humans are more connected than at any point in history and have more access to information than at any point in human history, even though that access is industrially or structurally unequal around the world. These two trends are not likely to be reversed, and they will continue to converge in interesting ways.

So how do you create doctrine that [addresses] the fact that it is harder to hide things in the world? And how do you create public diplomacy given that it is harder to hide things in the world? That is a challenge.

For my part, when I was in government, not only did we switch from Blackberries to iPhones, but I was there at the creation of the Global Engagement Center. To Jim’s point about Jared Cohen, I have to admit that I was about Jared’s age when the decision was made at the White House to work with the Department of State to [create] what is now the Global Engagement Center.

In that moment, the decision was made to shift $100 million of funding from the Department of Defense over to the Department of State to [establish] analytical standards and to create a more formalized bureaucracy around this set of issues. I can say with confidence at this point that the Department of Defense was not overly enthusiastic about that decision at the time.

This is one of the only venues in which I get to truly nerd out in terms of bureaucracy so excuse the acronyms, but it was OCO [Overseas Contingency Operations] funding that was shifted over to the Department of State.

The focus was non-state actors. This was contextually, in history, a moment where we were adapting for the rise of ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh, depending on which partner country you’re talking to. And at that point, the non-state actors, in particular, were extraordinarily good at recruiting online or in online spaces — convincing people to take one-way tickets and travel to Turkey then across the border into Syria.

Interestingly, it wasn’t their violent propaganda that was convincing a lot of people to travel to Syria. [Rather] it was their narratives of strength and warmth and purpose. As a government  organizing a strategy to counter that, how do you engage with [people where] they’re at, noting that those who were predisposed to see themselves in those narratives don’t actually fit any given profile?

It wasn’t just single males from X demographic or X location around the world. It was a teenage girl in Denver, or a middle-aged man in Alabama, who were getting those messages in the United States. Extrapolate that around the world. There wasn’t a specific profile. [The challenge became] figuring out how to adopt a strategy for that.

[Then the challenge became] adapting a strategy to address a global competition for information in which state actors have very clearly defined strategies and do not play by the same rules that the United States does. And that’s the mission of the GEC today.

For my part, outside of government since 2017, I’ve built a team of open source researchers at the Atlantic Council. It’s a team of now 50 people spread across 17 different countries that do open source research to build standards and communities of action to address [issues such as] foreign information manipulation and working with industry, [which has become] an increasingly important stakeholder in this space.  Specifically [we are working with] social media platforms and civil society groups and governments around the world to align strategies in this space to adopt a strategy for the world as it is today. We’ve worked very closely with the Global Engagement Center in that mission.

I can say with a high degree of confidence that without the Global Engagement Center, we would not have a civil society community around the world that is adapted for action in this space. It needs to exist.

Going forward, looking at the future, I think [there are both] opportunities and challenges for the Global Engagement Center. The opportunities are many. Number one, this is a high impact area. It’s a new field that’s being built on past lessons from a global competition for information [as well as] rapid technological change and [evolving] standards for engagement in this space. And it’s been built up in earnest in government, which is an interesting trend.

I think the second opportunity is that there is an enormous amount of signal demand for the GEC to exist from allies who are building up similar bureaucracies or similar government structures to work with the U.S. on this global competition for information. With industry in particular, many of the platforms on which global competition for information occurs are trying to figure out what their responsibilities are, what their values are, what their roles and obligations are. There is also high signal demand across the interagency for the GEC to exist. [For institutions like the] DoD, without a strong partner at State, it is harder for them to engage in a global competition for information.

Number three, there is a need to update our collective understanding of information operations–what is useful and impactful and what is not. Something like running a 15 account Twitter network to change the narrative in a specific AOR [area of responsibility] probably doesn’t work anymore. [So, figuring out what works is important.]

The last opportunity is how to connect the Global Engagement Center with other parts of a broader strategy. What happens in the engagement space–especially in the online engagement space–has to be connected to how we try to govern the [broader] information space. That’s a big tech policy space. Or [connecting] industrial policy [to] how we engage online, all the way down the tech stack to the standards for laying cables.

[An important challenge for] the GEC right now is to figure out how to fit in within the rest of the Department of State. That remains a key tension point. Also, the elephant in the room that many of us have dealt with–how to make sure that a tour for a foreign service officer at the GEC is a tour of growth–is a consistent challenge that we have to solve for.

The greatest challenge for the Global Engagement Center right now is domestic, which is interesting because [the GEC has a] foreign mandate. The work of the Global Engagement Center is nonpartisan and has bipartisan support. To put it simply, we have to understand what state actors are doing in the global competition for information in order to compete effectively. The  question of whether the Global Engagement Center should exist has an obvious answer. We have to make sure that there is a shared understanding of what that obvious answer is. This report is a really important step in that direction.

Those of you in the room can probably see the quote that is on a column here. It says “Knowledge is power. Information is liberating.” That’s a quote from Kofi Annan, which I assume was not planted by Vivian in this space.  I think that’s a fitting theme for the Global Engagement Center. It has to adapt, and that being the reality, it should be an empowering North Star.

Thank you very much, and I look forward to the questions.

**Vivian Walker:**Thank you very much Graham, and thanks to all our panelists, first of all for their service, but also for their extremely helpful insights into the evolution of the GEC and the political and historical contexts that shaped it.

I am going to exercise the moderator’s right to ask the first question, and then I imagine there are plenty of questions from the audience.

I want to follow up on one of your closing points, Graham, with respect to future challenges for the Global Engagement Center, specifically how it should fit into the Department of State. department. Certainly at this table we have consensus that the Global Engagement Center does belong in the Department of State as the lead foreign affairs agency. It makes sense.

But there is a lot of debate about how future iterations of the GEC should fit into the structure of the Department. What do you think? Would one or all of you like to share some your views?

**Graham Brookie:**I have a somewhat short answer. At the beginning of this administration, there was essentially an audit of all of the things that the department does with regard to tech policy. That included the cybersecurity coordinator, the work that’s being done on the digital economy, and the work that’s done on what’s now called digital freedom or internet governance. That was all consolidated into one new bureau. Now interestingly, in that audit, the Global Engagement Center was not included.

I think that the Global Engagement Center has to remain in and inform the public diplomacy space. I think that’s a reflection of the fact that strategic communications is not only a function, it’s not only something that you do, but it is also a policy space. It must have policy around it, supporting it.

At the same time, given the reality of rapid technological change, [the GEC] has to have really strong coordination with the tech bureau, so that the folks who are showing up to things like the Freedom Online Coalition, which has existed for eleven years, [work closely with the]  global engagement centers to understand what state threat actors are doing and how we can act proactively and affirmatively in other spaces, especially tech governance. Figuring out how to [establish] those linkages in a strong and collaborative way [while keeping the GEC firmly] in the public diplomacy family is critical.

**Vivian Walker:**Thank you. Mr. Glassman, did you want to add to that?

**James Glassman:**Yeah, I think what Graham said sounds right to me. I have been out of it for so long. It’s very hard for me to say. I would say [the GEC] definitely needs to be within State  and I think it needs to be within the public diplomacy cone. But I also think it needs to be very much directed toward and part of the interagency. I think that was really important to us.

Let me just correct for the record, I think I called your ex-boss Hale, rather than McHale. So let’s just fix that. And the other thing I wanted to fix is — I didn’t give Bill Hybl, my old friend, enough credit here. He’s been on the commission for a long time and has done terrific work.

**Vivian Walker:**Okay, let’s turn to the questions. Peter, if you wouldn’t mind reminding everybody who you are–although we all do know you.

**Peter Kovach**:  I was mentioned as the brief but engaged head of GSEC under Mr. Glassman. I would say that to me the singular accomplishment there was we inherited a whole of government staff.  But the research piece was also extremely important.

I remember Charlotte Beers once leaning over to me after a meeting right after 9 /11 saying –pardon my language, but I’m just quoting her–Peter, you mean we’re doing this communication on the basis of an old guy like you learning a language at age 45 and going out and putting his finger in the air. And I had to say, somewhat sarcastically, Madam Undersecretary, you pretty close to nailed it.

I took that research piece very seriously. And I think our greatest accomplishment, in my memory of GSEC, is that we did these whole of government deep dives, including major private sector research points on specific audiences that we felt were key to the CVE effort.

I headed a whole of government StratCom group and co- drafted Presidential Decision Directive  NSC-68 which President Clinton signed on April 30th, 1999.  It created a what we hoped would be a permanent structure at the NSC to support whole of government strategic communications, no matter what the issue or focus was. 

My question to the group would be, if you were to sit down right now and draft a model for an ongoing and enduring NSC structure that would support  all of government strat comm, how would you do it?

**Vivian Walker:**Thank you. Graham, we’re all looking at you.

**Graham Brookie:**This is the only time that I get to talk about non-research questions. I get to masquerade as a tech policy expert a lot of the time. The only thing that I’m actually expert in is government bureaucracy, having worked at the NSC for four and a half years.

Having lived through a number of the debates about bean counting at the NSC, I would say that despite the charge that the NSC under the  Obama administration was too large, we had a staff of 300 people, which is not enough to meddle in interagency affairs, as many of you know.

I think you have to consider the StratCom directorate at the National Security Council as a policy directorate. At the NSC, you have functional bureaus or directorates, regional directorates, and service -oriented directorates. Those functionals directorates cover the global economy, energy, counterterrorism, etc. The regionals are obvious: Europe, East Asia, et cetera. Then there are the service-oriented directorates that are not explicitly known as policy-making bodies, including the press team, StratCom, which I’ll come back to in a minute, and the legislative team.

In order to have a coherent approach to StratCom as a policy–a doctrine that is managed across the interagency–you have to have a StratCom directorate that is seen as a policymaking body, as opposed to what it has traditionally been in the last 10 or so years, which is a really good directorate for planning overseas engagements and conferences like the president’s trip to APEC every single year, or the Global Youth Summit. These [events] are major statements of policy for sure, but don’t necessarily answer  the policy question of what our doctrine is for a global competition for information in the year 2024. I think you would have to resource that directorate in a way that does that.

**James Glassman:**I’m not going to answer Peter’s question directly, because it’s beyond my area of expertise, so I defer to Graham. But I want to make two points around your question. The first—and the single most important thing for me from a leadership point of view, and I alluded to this–was that in April 2008, when Karen [Hughes] was still the head of R, President Bush issued a directive that said very clearly that the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy is the lead in the interagency for strategic communications. No one had any doubt about that. As I said, the IC was a little reluctant to go along, but you’ve got to figure that [would happen]. That was really enormously important.

The second thing I would say is that I had the advantage of having my nomination held up for six months. During that time, I spent a lot of time at the NSC because I thought the NSC might take over my job and I didn’t want them to do that. But I also just wanted to develop personal relationships with people there.

I want to emphasize something that is maybe obvious to everybody in this room–the importance of these personal relationships. We had terrific relationships with people at the NSC without which I don’t think we could have ever gotten the GSEC off the ground and we couldn’t have made the PCC as effective as it was in areas like research.

**Vivian Walker:** Is there another question?

**Tova Norlen:** Hi, my name is Tova Norlen and I work at the DSCU [Defense Security Cooperation University] in a newly created institute called the Brigadier General Charles Young Institute within the DSCA [Defense Security Cooperation Agency]. It is a research institute that was created to produce evidence-based knowledge on security cooperation in order to try to figure out why do we do what we do, how do we do it better based on real evidence and data, and how we make some of that data publicly available.

I would love to hear about some of your experiences working with DoD, especially when it comes to civilian leadership of public diplomacy.

**Graham Brookie:**The structure at DoD that is a natural partner for the Global Engagement Center remains under SOLIC (Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict). Fairly recently, Congress saw fit to give DoD $200 million that it didn’t necessarily ask for, but it was thankful to receive, I’m sure, to restructure an office called the Principal Advisor for Information Operations, which has the remit over DoD’s doctrine in this area.

First, this office was asked to revise and reconsider what a strategy looks like in that space, and how to work with combatant commands. Second the office was asked to create a larger analytical function that does research and analysis much like the Global Engagement Center. Everybody involved in that process within the DoD ecosystem looks at the Global Engagement Center as a necessary lead. I think there’s a lot of risk and vulnerability for the Pentagon in particular, but also for combatant commands not to have strong diplomatic partners both at main State as well as at missions around the world on this issue set.

Another interesting aspect is the tension that arises in the absence of confirmed ambassadors  (which is for this administration is at a higher level than recent administrations).  DoD has had to step in [to fill the public gap.]  A prominent example of this is General [Laura] Richardson in SOCOM [United States Special Operations Command] across Latin America, where we do not have an ambassador in 10 plus countries. SOCOM has taken a lead on public diplomacy issues. General Richardson, who has been extraordinarily adept at that, should not have to be.

Figuring out the balance between those two things is, I think, really critical. So is the information sharing component where a state plays a very public-facing role. What are the rules for engagement within the DoD ecosystem? And who should have the lead on intelligence gathering in coordination with the IC? Those are really interesting questions that have to have pretty consistently updated answers.

**Vivian Walker:**Did you want to add to that?

**Kitty DiMartino**:  I’m glad that Graham is here and has a lot of detail because I do also feel like I’ve been out of it for so long. I just would say that I don’t think I’m looking through rose colored glasses to say that our partners from DoD were really supportive. They wanted the State Department to take the lead on this, not just here in Washington but at posts around the world.  Admiral Eric Olson, who was head of SOCOM at the time, was incredibly supportive, and a number of others were as well.

**Vivian Walker:**Great, thank you.

**James Glassman:**I just want to second that. Our relations with DoD and the military were great. Unlike a lot of people at State, I was not allergic to them. I thought it was important for us to maintain good relations, and they were smart enough to understand that in many areas, it certainly wasn’t good for them to be out front. But they saw the value.

My very first trip was not to Saudi Arabia, but it was to Tampa to visit SOCOM. And when I got there, I found that they knew everything about me, everything I wanted to do, and they wanted to help. And I think we had a very good relationship.

**Vivian Walker:**Thank you so much. And really quick, Peter.

**Peter Kovach**:  I have a question in that vein, how is the difference between info ops and the other information communities being dealt with in today’s environment?

**Vivian Walker:**So to repeat for our online audience, it’s a question about the relationship between info ops, between different audiences, did I get it right?

**Peter Kovach**:  Info ops and what used to be psyops in public affairs.

**Graham Brookie:**I’m not totally sure that’s a functional relationship right now, because there needs to be an updated doctrine across the space given that the information environment is changing so rapidly.

I think everybody, including Chris Maier, who leads SOLIC, is talking about how to adapt that type of strategy for impact, including the basic clearance process or concept of operations for an information operation, making sure that those operations don’t happen in a vacuum and supporting a strategic goal of a free, open, interoperable, global information environment.

**Vivian Walker:**Thank you. Before we turn it over to Vice Chairman Hybl to close out the meeting, I just want to thank all of you again for your commitment, your experience, your insights, your candor. We have been very lucky to have you as public servants advocating on behalf of our country. Thank you so much.

I also want to acknowledge the presence of my co-writer on this project, Adele Ruppe. She certainly made an enormous contribution to the success of this report.

Bill, over to you.

**Bill Hybl:**Thank you. On behalf of the Commission, I want to thank all of you for being here, those of you that are online and following us. Thank you. We’re going to have another report in September. We hope you will be here and have an opportunity to join us.

I want to extend a special thanks to Vivian. You know, this five-year period has been marked by a series, not one, not two, but many special reports which have certainly influenced public diplomacy and have made a difference as we reach out in a more domestic, educational way as to what we do. The fact is that you’re going to be missed greatly, and we wish you well in your other pursuits. Maybe a round of applause for Vivian.

Thank you for being here. That concludes the event. Thank you all.

**END OF TRANSCRIPT**

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Advisory CommitteePublic DiplomacyU.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy

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