U.S. official urges WMD vigilance

Ambassador Kenneth Brill, director of the National Counterproliferation Center, said the government must expand the resources it devotes to countering the spread of deadly weapons.

"The biggest challenge to both policy and intelligence is the effort by states to acquire WMDs, like North Korea and Iran," Brill said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian yesterday. "Policy and intelligence need to both work harder together and be more innovative in developing partnerships."

Brill was on campus to speak with students in WWS 488: Terrorism and the Role of Intelligence, who are studying reforms in U.S. national intelligence strategy after Sept. 11, 2001.

Though Brill declined to comment specifically on what action the intelligence community is taking in response to North Korea's recent nuclear weapons test, he said that "Intelligence has been working flat-out" on the issue. Brill said that he was not surprised by North Korea's action and that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence "hasn't finished assessing what happened with the nuclear test."

WWS 488 is taught by Edmund Hull, former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Yemen and the Wilson School's first "Ambassador-in-Residence."

"It was important for the class to engage with a senior official from Washington engaged day-today in national intelligence," Hull said. "We wanted them to see the real thing and to hear how it works when you try to do national intelligence."

At the behest of the 9/11 Commission, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — headed by Ambassador John Negroponte — with the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act. As part of the national intelligence office, the National Counterproliferation Center "develop[s] with colleagues in the community plans for counter proliferation," Brill said.

He explained that the United States must work with other governments to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. "Counterproliferation is a team sport," he said.

Brill graduated from Ohio University and received an M.B.A. from Berkeley in 1973. Joining the State Department in 1975, Brill has served as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Deputy Chief of Mission and Charge' d'Affaires in India and U.S. Representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Vienna Office of the United Nations.

Because of this breadth of experience, Hull said, Brill is the "ideal and authoritative source" for discussing the future of national intelligence.