BY MELISSA REICHLEY

For the past year Frances Fragos Townsend ’82 has begun her workday by stepping into a White House staff car. On arriving at the West Wing, the well-dressed, upbeat, 42-year-old mother of two boys, ages nine and three, receives intelligence briefings with the national security advisor—prior to briefing President Bush—on issues of homeland security and ongoing terrorism threats around the world. When Bush appointed Townsend as his homeland security advisor in May 2004, it was a career move the SPA alumna never imagined. “You don’t plan it. I’ve been in the counterterrorism community, law enforcement, the intelligence community, civilian organizations, and a military organization. I’ve had a very varied career.”

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Yet there, smiling across the conference room table in her warmly decorated West Wing office, Townsend sits and admits to being “focused.” An understatement from a woman who earned two bachelor’s degrees at AU, in political science and psychology, cum laude, in three years. After graduation Townsend accelerated through law school at the University of San Diego in two and a half years.

An only child from Long Island, Townsend shares openly that she’s the first in her family to graduate from high school, let alone college, and credits her parents for instilling in her their unwavering desire for her to do better than they did. “The most important thing to them was my education. Their attitude was no matter what decisions I made no one could ever take my education away from me,” she says.

So in 1979 Townsend headed to AU because she wanted to work in public service. Still, she never saw herself in a position prominent in the public eye, one in which she has represented President Bush in Saudi Arabia and met with Crown Prince Abdullah and other intelligence counterterrorism commissioners. “Truthfully, it’s been an extraordinary experience,” she notes.

Townsend’s remarkable success in public service began rather simply when, in 1988, the young attorney from the Brooklyn district attorney’s office went on a job interview.

“I can remember going into the interview thinking, the Southern District of New York is probably the finest U.S. Attorney’s Office in the country, the oldest, most steeped in its own history, and has people who are law review and from Ivy League schools, and I didn’t have any of that. I knew my interview was going to be an uphill battle. I was not the typical person they hired into that office.” However, that is just what then–New York U.S. attorney Rudy Giuliani did.

“Rudy, who was kind of a street fighter from Brooklyn, realized I had been in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, and he took a shine to me and gave me a chance. But it was just that: I was atypical. Somebody saw something in me and gave me the opportunity.”

Giuliani is not the only stellar mentor who “saw something” in Townsend. She counts among her mentors former FBI director Louis Freeh, who was her supervisor at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York; former attorney general Janet Reno, with whom she worked during the Clinton administration; and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who, Townsend says, “has become not just an extraordinary mentor but an extraordinary friend.”

After her stint as a New York prosecutor, where some of her focus was on Italian organized crime and the infamous Gambino family, Townsend returned to Washington in 1993 to work for the Justice Department on international legal issues, law enforcement, and intelligence legal issues. “I was not at all excited to be working in a bureaucracy . . . convinced I’d only do it for a year.”

Indeed, in 2001, seeking something more than legal work, Townsend landed a position with the U.S. Coast Guard. There, she helped shift the focus from countering drug activities to expanding intelligence capabilities. “I believed they could bring a lot more to the government in terms of their ability to collect information in U.S. ports and ships all around the world,” she says.

She was right. As founding assistant commandant for intelligence, she helped establish “fusion centers” that funneled information from the Coast Guard’s commands around the country into two central locations. “You heard a lot in the wake of 9/11 about putting all the dots together. The fusion centers are meant to pull all the dots together to see if you develop patterns and what you can learn. We were able to leverage our relationship with the Navy and really contribute to the larger picture of the U.S. intelligence community.”

Today Townsend chairs the Homeland Security Council and is responsible for coordinating with the leaders of 22 government agencies, including the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and State; FBI; CIA; HHS; and EPA. Her goal: to close the gaps in what’s done by each agency.

“I don’t think anybody truly understood the enormity of the president’s undertaking in establishing the Department of Homeland Security. It is really amazing what they’ve been able to do, the leverage of bringing the border agencies together to build a more complete picture of who enters and leaves the country, and the importance of that for investigators like the FBI, who are trying to resolve threats in this country. Their ability to real-time share information and continue to strengthen that relationship has been an enormous benefit to this country.”

At the end of each 14-hour day, Townsend hopes to simply make a difference. “It’s funny, you work so many hours that what you take away from it is the hope that you’ve left the country safer. The greatest threat to our homeland security is that some terrorist will try to commit an atrocity like 9/11, and so you work really hard, every day, all day, in the hope that what you’re doing is defeating that. I’ve got two small children, and I tell people, I fight today in the hope that they won’t need to be called on to fight later in their lifetimes.”

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