Juliette Kayyem

Assistant Secretary for Intergovernmental Programs, Homeland Security Department

(Harvard Belfer Ctr)

Why She Matters

A terrorism expert, Kayyem started studying the subject well before Sept. 11, 2001. She was Massachusetts' first under secretary of homeland security, and at the federal department, she heads the office dedicated to coordinating with state and local level equivalents.

Hailing from state government, Kayyem has a unique perspective on the challenges of state-federal law enforcement coordination. In 2009, Napolitano elevated Kayyem's office from within the Federal Emergency Management Agency to the Secretary's Office.

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Background

At a Glance

Career History: Massachusetts Executive Office of Public Safety, Undersecretary of Homeland Security (2007-2009); Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Lecturer in Public Policy, (2000-2007); National Commission on Terrorism (1999-2000)
Hometown: Los Angeles, Calif.
Alma Mater: Harvard University, B.A., 1991; Harvard School of Law, J.D., 1995

Spouse: David Barron
Religion: Christian
Web site

Path to Power

Kayyem grew up in Los Angeles. She was raised Christian, attended a Jewish school and came East to attend college at Harvard University.

As an undergraduate, she contributed op-eds to the Harvard Crimson, covering Jesse Jackson, South African politics and the succor that students should offer their thesis-writing friends.

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She spent a summer house-sitting in Cambridge and one in Washington, D.C., at the Brookings Institution, doing "internwork," which she defined in a piece for the Washington Post as "the ratio of hours spent doing secretarial work to researching writing, or some other substantive task."

After college, however, she did not scramble back to the capital, but traveled to South Africa, where she worked as a journalist before returning to Cambridge. As a law student at Harvard, she worked on the appeals cases of death row inmates in Alabama and was hired straight out of school by the Justice Department.

Department of Justice

Kayyem's first boss at DOJ, where she worked in the Civil Rights Division, was Deval Patrick, who would become governor of Massachusetts. She worked on issues like harassment, until, at a White House meeting, the president of the Arab-American Institute noticed her and pushed to have her work on problems like secret evidence and airport profiling, according to the Boston Globe.

"I admit I became interested in the issues because the groups had me become interested," Kayyem told the Globe in 2001. "They knew having someone who was Arab-American in the civil rights division of the Justice Department was very helpful to them."

She had to fight for a high-level security clearance to work on national security cases. "Having to verify that indeed my aunts and uncles were born in Lebanon was difficult," she later wrote. "That two of the nine were born in Cuba en route once made matters worse."

At DOJ, with her new focus, Kayyem quickly rose and became an adviser to Attorney General Janet Reno. One of the main battles she fought was to convince the department, even before 9/11, to reduce its use of secret evidence, which she argued allowed the department to indulge in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim biases.

Terrorism Expert

After just four years at Justice, Kayyem resigned her position to join the National Commission on Terrorism. She was appointed to the commission by then-House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), after his first choice, Salam Al-Marayati, raised the hackles of Jewish organizations. Janet Reno recommended her for the post, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Kayyem was the only Arab-American on the commission, and the position troubled her. "It was the equivalent of calling Jesse Jackson an African, and it gave the impression some scary Arab was on the commission," she told the Globe. Her grandmother told her to explain that she was not an Arab but to "tell them you are Lebanese," Kayyem said.

The terrorism commission's work was prompted by the bombing of the USS Cole, and its final report came out in 2000. The report cautioned that international terrorism posed a growing threat to the U.S. and suggested increased funding for FBI and CIA counterterrorism efforts and better planning for terrorist attacks.

After finishing her work with the commission, Kayyem returned to Harvard as a public-policy lecturer and terrorism expert at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

From that perch, she was called upon to explain issues ranging from Osama bin Laden's involvement in the 9/11 attacks, to terrorist watch lists and the Guantanamo investigations. She became a national-security analyst for NBC and wrote op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor. At the Kennedy School, she also published books on state and local homeland security and on civil liberties.

Under Secretary of Homeland Security

In 2007, Kayyem's old boss, Deval Patrick, took office as Massachusetts governor, and asked her to join his team. She told Governing Magazine that "a significant part of her decision to become Patrick's top homeland security adviser was simply that he issued a personal invitation."

Massachusetts' homeland security bureaucracy is unusual: the homeland security department is not independent but falls under the larger umbrella of public safety. That integration allowed her to work towards improving coordination among public safety and emergency management operations, she told a congressional committee in 2008.

As under secretary, Kayyem dealt with issues like applying to DHS for grant money and interoperability among Massachusetts' first-responders. In her first year in office, DHS slashed the state's homeland-security funding by 40 percent, and Kayyem, along with the state's senators, had to appeal to department for an explanation. She told the Globe that she and other state officials needed more transparency fromthe sprawling federal bureaucracy.

"We as a group find Homeland Security as a department very difficult," she said. "The federal-state relations can be very difficult to manage."

She also handled the Lite Brite incident, where Boston police responded to boxes set up as guerilla advertisements as a bomb threat, and an incident where an art student wandered into the airport with a fake bomb strapped to her body. After the 2008 election, she served on President Obama's transition team.

The Issues

In her current job, Kayyem's focus is on state and local homeland security programs' relationship with DHS, a subject that she has both written about as an academic and dealt with as a state official. DHS Secretary Napolitano has also promised to improve the state-level fusion centers that collate the work of local law enforcement with federal intelligence.

State and Local Preparedness

As a Harvard terrorism scholar, one of Kayyem's first projects examined the role of state and local law enforcement on terrorism. "In the fury of activity regard the DHS, it became clear that state and local responses to domestic preparedness planning were either ignored, or a mere afterthought," she and a colleague would write. "But, by and large, domestic preparedness is a "ground up" response, since it is local responders who will be the first to arrive."

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In 2001, Kayyem released a report emphasizing the need for standardized communication among state and local law enforcement and for information sharing. "The problem with domestic preparedness is you have to cut across jurisdictions and across professions," she explained to USA Today. "Most governors and mayors have never dealt with anything like this before."

A year after 9/11, Kayyem was advocating for robust funding for first responders and recommending that homeland security leaders improve local preparedness by building critical infrastructure and modernizing public-health infrastructure.

Intelligence Sharing

One of the new initiatives that 9/11 spawned on a state and local level was fusion centers, hubs where information from local law enforcement and federal intelligence gathering united. Before joining DHS, Kayyem envisioned a circumscribed role for the centers.

In 2004, she wrote, "The local and state role is likely to remain most relevant in limited circumstances regarding intelligence: when the federal government has a credible threat against a locale and local authorities are put to work to stop it....There is simply no reason to believe that the terrorist threat we face today is so pervasive that our entire local and state police apparatus must be complicit in the federal government's overarching efforts."

As Massachusetts under secretary, Kayyem oversaw a fusion center, whose mission was not just to direct local intelligence to federal ends but to look for patterns that would aid traditional crime-fighting. In 2008, she told a congressional committee that, "While in the past newspaper articles and commentators have decried the fact that many fusion centers are joint tasked - intelligence and law enforcement based - I think those concerns are ill-founded."

Instead, she said fusion centers that would thrive must focus on traditional crime analysis.

"A fusion center that was solely terrorism focused could not sustain itself.... The true power that resides at the state and local level of law enforcement vis-a-vis terrorism prevention is not some grand new intelligence mission, but rather a culture of sharing the product of the good work that has been going on for years," she said. She also told the committee that fusion centers' work should be as transparent as possible.

The Network

Kayyem's has worked for former Attorney General Janet Reno and Gov. Deval Patrick (D-Mass.), a mentor at an early Justice Department job who then personally invited her to become his first homeland security under secretary in Massachusetts.

In Boston, she worked in the same department as Richard Serino, FEMA's deputy administrator. Former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.), who appointed her to the National Commission on Terrorism, is now president of the Gephardt Group, a DC lobbying group.

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Campaign Contributions

Kayyem raised $11,000 for Gov. Deval Patrick's 2007 campaign, the Boston Phoenix reported. In the 2004 cycle, she gave $700 to Jon Paul Jennings, a former DOJ colleague who was running for Congress in Indiana. She has also contributed money to the DNC and the DCCC; in 2008, she wrote checks to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

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