If tough assignments are a measure for the character of an individual, there are few people that can stand either next to or in the shadow of Michael Chertoff.

Known to much of America and the world for his nearly four years of service (2005-2009) as the second secretary for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Chertoff has been no stranger to tough jobs.

Whether it be serving as a federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals, the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division at the U.S. Justice Department, a U.S. Senate counsel, or a federal prosecutor taking on Mafia kingpins or other criminals, Chertoff has never shied away from tough battles against formidable forces.

To those who have worked with him, he is known for his ability to get to the point and to get to it quickly. Drawing upon information before him and his own research, personal network, and instincts, Chertoff’s innate ability to focus onto the crux of an issue or problem has been described by many as “laser-like.”

Having turned the DHS secretary’s office over to his friend and former Justice Department colleague, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, in late January 2009, he has set up his own firm, The Chertoff Group, in downtown Washington. Advising U.S. and international clients on a range of issues, the former secretary continues his busy pace of work, having just completed his first book, Homeland Security: Assessing the First Five Years. Chertoff sat down for an interview to reflect on his time as the leader of DHS and what the challenges ahead will be.

Rich Cooper: Mr. Secretary, looking back at your nearly four years of service at DHS, what are the accomplishments that you are most proud of and what were some of your greatest frustrations?

Michael Chertoff: Well, the bottom line, the accomplishment that was most significant is the fact that we did not have another successful attack against the United States. I think in many ways that’s the ultimate measure. At a somewhat less high altitude, I would say we dramatically changed and increased the security for people coming into the country. We transformed the way we deal with people at the ports of entry, not only bringing 10-print biometrics into effect, but also biographic collection and analysis based on commercial airline data.

We have more robust requirements for crossing our land border in terms of documentation, and even between the borders. You know we built 630 miles of fence, more than doubled the Border Patrol, and according to the reports I got from the Border Patrol just about a month ago, there’s been essentially a two-thirds reduction in the flow [of illegal immigrants] across the border. In some areas where we used to have thousands a day, there are now five or six a day.

Your job has been described by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and others as the toughest job in Washington. What do you know now after having been through that job that you wish you had known when you took the job back in March 2005?

I think I knew the breadth of the department. What you don’t appreciate until you get the job is the sheer variety of issues you’re going to deal with on a daily basis and, of course, every day you’re dealing with weather-related matters, terrorism-related matters, immigration matters, issues having to do with regulating the chemical industry, and all that can come up in a single day.

That makes it a fascinating job, but I think in terms of understanding what your day’s going to be like, it gives you some sense of the sheer breadth of the subject matter you’re going to be covering.

I always go into a job by saying to myself: “Inevitably, your plans are going to be distracted and frustrated by events that occur, so what are the most important things you have to accomplish? Focus on those, and make sure you drive those to conclusion.”

Only one other person has had the job of DHS secretary before, but it’s one of those positions, as you alluded to, that you never know what’s going to happen day-in, day-out. What’s the best piece of advice someone gave you as you took the reins of DHS?

I think it was someone who said, “Make sure you keep getting plenty of exercise,” which sounds silly, but in a way, what they’re saying is, “You could spend all your time working. You need to be able to re-charge your batteries a little bit.” In my case I exercise. I go out running. And what it enables you to do is to keep some balance. You could be completely absorbed with work-related things 24/7.

What was your biggest surprise in the job?

I think, I wouldn’t describe it as a surprise, but the most unexpected benefit was the relationship I developed as the [military] service secretary of the Coast Guard. I don’t think I focused on the fact that other than the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Homeland Security is the only other [Cabinet] secretary who has a military service in his domain. Since I had not served in the military, it introduced me to the culture of the military, which is a unique and very admirable culture, in a way that I did not anticipate when I came in. It turned out to be one of the great pleasures of the job that I discovered pretty quickly.

What’s the most serious threat to the homeland today, and how do we address it?

In terms of consequence, I would say biological terrorism is the most serious threat. It’s not a threat that I think is imminent, although we’ve had an attack in 2001 with anthrax. It is also one which would not be impossible to fabricate in a short period of time because the raw material for a biological attack occurs in nature or you can just have the know-how. So I would say if it was of high consequence, that worries me the most and I do become concerned.

What’s the best investment in homeland security today?

Right now I would say the best investment for the government would be cyber security. It’s the area where I think we have still the greatest vulnerability relative to the amount of security we’ve put in place. One of the reasons for that is it’s the set of assets that are most widely distributed in the private sector. There are real challenges in terms of what role the government plays in cyber security because you’re getting into very sensitive areas that touch on the First Amendment.

That being said, the fact that it’s a hard problem does not mean it’s a problem we should ignore. We need to invest not only the knowhow, but in setting up the basic architecture and the authorities that we’re going to need in order to enable the private sector to protect assets on which we will depend.

What about private sector investment? What’s the best investment for them to be making?

I would have to say cyber security as well. Most businesses and critical infrastructure have the basic set of tools that they need to continue to refine, but at least they’ve got something going.

Depending on what your particular business or facility is, you’re going to have some protection from the physical surroundings, vetting of your employees, some kind of protection for travel. You should, if you’ve been paying attention, have a contingency plan for a pandemic flu or some similar kind of biological incident, but the area where again I think we see uneven behavior is in the cyber area.

You alluded in one of your earlier responses about working with the Coast Guard and the talent you had the opportunity to work with. Over the course of your career you’ve had the opportunity to work with a wide cadre of people, from public sector, private sector, from the legal world, from the military world. What are some of the leadership skills that you think we really need to be developing for homeland security leaders today so that we can be more resilient and more successful?

I think you put your finger on it when describing the breadth of interactions that I had, which really reflect the breadth of interactions anybody in homeland security is going to have. It is a domain that’s going to take you – in a single day – from dealing with the military, to the private sector, to lawyers, to engineers, to people in schools and community centers.

In terms of a civilian domain, where there is no such thing as command and control, where it’s about achieving unity of effort through coordination across a wide series or a wide spectrum of actors, the key is to learn how to lead by coordination. What that means is how to set and explain what your goals are; how to help the various elements that have to come together understand how their particular talents and capabilities fit within those goals, but also to make sure everybody has ownership of the goal. That requires a different set of skills than just the traditional top-down management. It really involves being able to work with colleagues in a networked way across a wide spectrum of business and government cultures.

Terrorism experts and homeland security leaders including you have said it’s not a matter of “if,” but rather “when” another act of terror will occur in the United States. Are you surprised we’ve not been attacked?

Well, we’ve been attacked. It hasn’t been successful.

I mean, going back to the shoe-bomber we had a series of efforts to attack us, and they’ve all been frustrated. They’ve all been frustrated because we often acted early. I recognize we have been attacked, I am confident there will be future efforts to attack us, and the variable is are we going to be able to frustrate those efforts.

We’ve done a lot by doing what we’ve done in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

We’ve done a lot with what we’ve done at the borders; what we’ve done internally; and what we’ve done for intelligence collection and analysis. But this is a dynamic process, so with each refinement that the enemy puts in place, there’s going to be a countermeasure we’re going to have to be prepared to put in place at the same time or before. I think that is the thing which I worry about when I look down the road.

Now that you’re in the private sector, how have your views about the private sector and what it can do for homeland security changed?

The upside is, it’s given me the opportunity to become much more personally acquainted with some of the entrepreneurial and technological skills that the private sector brings to the problem. You know when you’re a Cabinet secretary, particularly because of the procurement rules and complicated rules about acquisition; you tend to view technology at the end of a long funnel. You don’t see it from the perspective of people who are working on it.

It’s been fascinating for me to see all the ingenuity that’s out there. What I sometimes see is that the people who work on these solutions are frustrated because they think they have something good, but they don’t know what it’s good for. They have a solution but they don’t know what the problem is. In fact, a lot of what I find that I do now is really help people understand what it is that they can solve, because if you know what you’re solving then you can adapt your technology, your ingenuity to actually produce a positive result.

Who should bear the burden – the public or private sector – when it comes to research and development (R&D) for the technologies and products that we need to have deployed to protect the country from a range of hazards?

Well, I think that the government certainly can do things to promote R&D, the way we do with DARPA, the way we started to do with [the] Science and Technology [Directorate], which is to seed research into areas that we know operationally would be beneficial to us, as well as devoting a certain percent of the budget – I think we used to put about 10 percent – into the kind of long-ball, Hail Mary pass type of effort that, while unlikely to succeed, would, if it did succeed, be a game-changer.

I think you’ve got to have a spectrum. But at the same time, the government is not the only consumer of homeland security. The private sector itself consumes homeland security.

Some of the key to the research is understanding what the need is. If you can identify a felt need in a market, it’s like any other business. You can then work to take the tools you have and make them adaptable to meet that market need.

One of the resounding criticisms on DHS in its early days was that it was too focused on terrorism at the expense of preparing for other hazards. Shortly after you took office, along comes the 2005 hurricane season with Katrina, Rita, and Wilma that literally shocked us all. Based upon that experience do you think there’s a better balance now at the department and how the nation views and prepares for threats?

I don’t think there’s any question that Katrina, in particular, was a traumatic experience and caused us to invest a tremendous amount of effort into understanding how we had to reconfigure the department, including FEMA, to deal with the admittedly exceptional but nevertheless real occurrence where local and state government is overwhelmed and can’t perform the traditional function that the doctrine says is: “They’re the first responders.”

The federal government had not really prepared for first response in the civilian domain. The military had the capabilities, but we’d never really closed the circle in merging those with the civilian authorities.

That’s a lot of what we did, as I spent a lot of personal time of mine in the two years right after Katrina, and of course the test came when we did Gustav. That actually was a great example of how all the lessons learned were put into effect, because we had created that relationship between the military and the civilian authorities. We had done the planning, the preparation, the capacity building that had not been before, and I think that’s resulted in a department that’s better balanced. Although I have to say as we speak now, toward the end of October, I don’t think we’ve not had a hurricane make landfall in the United States [this year].

We’ve had a remarkably calm season, contrary to all the predictions, but as you point out with Gustav, that really was the emergence of the true homeland defense mission that was still trying to form in those early days.

How did the Katrina experience change you and how you led the department?

Certainly it consumed a huge amount of personal time because it was very frustrating to see things in the department that did not work well. As I’ve said a lot of times publicly, a lot of that had to do with lack of planning in advance, so it really gave me a very strong impetus to build a planning capability in the department.

The irony is that I gave a speech about a month before Katrina where I said I thought that one of the problems we had in the department is we didn’t have preparedness down right, we weren’t planning right. So I can’t say Katrina opened my eyes to it. What I can say is Katrina created a very strong emotional incentive to get it done right, to drive it to conclusion and we did drive it to conclusion.

We spent a huge amount of time pushing this issue, and I might also say the president spent a huge amount of personal time pushing to make sure that we prepared and took on board the lessons learned. It was the absolute obsessive focus on getting the planning job done that was the real legacy of Katrina.

It’s interesting that you talk about the planning legacy, because it just seems as we move further from 9/11 that you hear more and more persons echoing concerns about complacency. I’m curious as to your thoughts: Are we a Pearl Harbor nation? Does it take a major event or a major disaster to cause us to take dramatic actions that need to be done?

You know, that’s a very good question – “Are we a Pearl Harbor nation?” I really hope not. You know when I go out among members of the public, I’m constantly gratified and pleased by the fact that people come up and say, “Thank you for what you did,” and “You’ve kept the country safe,” not because it’s a personal compliment to me but because it shows people do think about this and do care about it. So I think the public is very well aware of what we went through. On the other hand, there are times I read things in the media, in which it’s hard to believe the author was in any way aware of the fact that we had an attack on September 11th. They act as if the threat is conjured-up and that worries me because you’re competing with a lot of other agenda items for investment.

I’m not saying we should put all our money in homeland security and nothing in anything else, but what I am saying is, whether it’s biological threats or issues involving Afghanistan, I do hear from some people the attitude: “Let’s move beyond 9/11.” The problem is the terrorists are not moving beyond 9/11. And let me say this: Even if Al Qaeda were completely eliminated tomorrow, it’s not going to end the problem.

There are other ideological groups and there’ll be ideologies in the future, maybe different than what we face now, that will model themselves on what we saw eight years ago, and will meet or exceed the kind of levels of violence that we’ve seen.

We’re in a world now where technology and global communications allow a smaller and smaller number of people to wage a kind of warfare that used to be the prerogative of a nation-state. Those days are never going to go away and we’ve got to not be panicked or hyper-anxious, but we have to have a disciplined program dealing with security in much the same way as we should have a disciplined program about maintaining our health or making sure that our fiscal house is in order.

What lessons do we still have to learn from 9/11 and Katrina?

I think the hardest lesson to learn is that the responsibility for security is not purely a government responsibility. It flows down even to the individual. When we saw in the hurricane seasons after Katrina people still not evacuating because they didn’t take on board the significance of voluntary evacuation when you have the capability of doing that; when you see people who fought against having secure identification because they don’t understand that knowing who gets on an airplane means we can keep dangerous people off; then what you worry about is people have the attitude that’s going to be taken care of by the government. The government’s not going to take care of all of it.

The government will take care of some of it, and there are some things only the government can do, but in modern life, whether it’s a natural disaster or an act of terror, an act of war, everybody’s on the front lines now. There is no rear area. There is no civilian domain. When we have terrorist attacks they go right in to the buildings, the airplanes, the civilian domains, and likewise the natural disasters put everybody on the front line.

You’ve known DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano from your previous work together at the Justice Department, and it was obvious from the moment that she was named there was a great deal of comfort and confidence that you had in her taking on the reins of the department following you. What was it about her that gave you the comfort level in her taking your job, and what were some of the things that you offered as far as guideposts for her in taking it on?

First of all, I’ve known her for 15 years or more. We were prosecutors together and U.S. attorneys together. I know her to be smart, I know her to be committed to security as a law enforcement person. I knew she was a governor. I knew that she knew the issues and cared about the issues and most important, was tough-minded enough that she could prepare to do what had to be done. The one thing about the job of secretary of Homeland Security is you’re going to have to make decisions and a lot of them, and you have to be tough-minded about making them. So that made me feel she was a very good choice for the job. We also put into a place a very detailed transition plan, which I think worked very well.

My personal advice, which I will keep personal to her, had to do more with the kind of unique perspective of the secretary. What does it mean to be responsible under HSPD 5 [Homeland Security Policy Directive 5 deals with management of domestic incidents] for coordinating response across the entire government? What does that mean in practical terms? What does it mean to deal with your Cabinet colleagues? What does it mean to deal with Congress? Those are things which only the personal perspective of the secretary can lend. So it was that kind of personal advice that I gave.

If you could, what policy or program would you like to see changed to better advance the homeland mission?

There’s been a lot of continuity, so in one way I have to say there’s not one particular thing I can single out. I know Real ID is still in the balance, and I think we’re going to need to drive the ability to have a secure form of identification that’s used to get into airplanes or do whatever else we require knowing something about the people coming into or being in a particular location. So I’d like to make sure we’re committed to getting that done, I’d like to see we’re committed to getting the work under way on the issue of bioterrorism and I’d like to see us continue to implement a cyber security strategy.

Last question. What were the greatest lessons you learned from being secretary?

I guess I have to say in some ways, I probably dealt with more crises as secretary than in any other job. But I also have to say I was on duty as head of Criminal Division on 9/11, and that was certainly a crisis too, and I was there during Enron, and that was a crisis. I guess the lessons I learned were probably most in the area of crisis management.

First, as I said, planning.

Second, investing in building capacity so that when you do need to deploy something and you flip the switch, the light comes on. You can have a great plan but if you don’t have the capacity you’re not going to execute.

Then I have to say, I find people consistently underestimate the gravity of a crisis. I don’t know whether it’s a psychological defense mechanism or a desire not to look like you’re unduly panicked or overreacting, but I find that people have a tendency – and I don’t care whether it’s a legal crisis, a natural disaster, or an act of terror – the first response I see almost uniformly is to downplay it. It’s almost like you’re in disbelief, and in my experience, over and over, I don’t know how many crises I’ve dealt with of every kind it is you actually have to fight against that impulse, because more often than not, you’re going to start off by doing too little rather than too much. At the close call, you’re always better off doing a little more than you need rather than doing a little less.

Is that something that really came to light for you based upon the Katrina experience?

Yeah, but not just Katrina. I’ve seen it with all the natural disasters, I’ve seen it with various kinds of terrorist plots and things of that sort we had to deal with, and then going back to dealing with some of the issues I had when I was at the Department of Justice, looking at 9/11. There I think everybody understood it was a big deal, but even look at some of the ways people reacted to the financial crisis, the Enron case, other cases.

Once you’ve got the plan and the capabilities, you need to act forcefully and dramatically to make sure that you change momentum in the situation. I’ve been in too many meetings where people are almost paralyzed, and they say, “Well maybe we really don’t need to do this. Maybe that’s too much.” I’ve even seen it in exercises too.

Now what I’ve learned having gone through a lot of these, your first impulse – “Maybe we don’t need to do it” – is not always, but more often than not, not correct, and that you’re better off doing a little more than you think you need, rather than doing less than you think you need.

This interview first appeared in Faircount Media Group’s The Year in Homeland Security, 2009 Edition.

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