Chairman, Lawrenson Smith LLC
Former Officer, UK Intelligence Community and British Army
Faculty Member, Center for Homeland Defense and Security, Naval Postgraduate School
Email: pauljsmith8@comcast.net
Phone: (202) 338-3580
Areas of Interest
Counterterrorism
The development of a domestic US counterterrorism doctrine
Homeland Security and Counter Espionage Education
Biography
Paul Smith, a British citizen, was born in 1953 and served as a commissioned infantry officer in the British Army for 20 years in both front line and senior defence policy positions in the UK Ministry of Defence. He completed 5 operational tours in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s.
Upon retiring from the British Army in 1992, Paul joined the British Security Service (MI5) where for the next 16 years he served in a series of operational, investigative and liaison postings in UK, Northern Ireland and abroad. His final posting was to the British Embassy in Washington, DC as the MI5 counter terrorist liaison officer to the US intelligence community. This period coincided with a number of famous terrorist attacks and investigations such as 7/7 in 2005 and the transatlantic airline liquid bomb plot of 2006.
In 2008 Paul left MI5 and took a year - long appointment as an Intelligence Specialist with the FBI Intelligence Reform program. In this post Paul provided the FBI with a series of policy papers which included the exploitation of operational intelligence, the training of FBI agents and analysts in the most effective means of intelligence collection, the "lone wolf" threat and the use of table top exercises "Left of Boom".
Since 2009 Paul has provided counter terrorist intelligence and operational training to US Federal, State and Local law enforcement agencies, first with a US company called AT Solutions and more recently, as a private security consultant with Lawrenson Smith LLC. Paul is also a member of the Advisory Board to i2, the software company specializing in data exploitation software, such as Analyst Notebook, which is widely used throughout the US intelligence and law enforcement communities.
Since 2008 Paul has been an adjunct professor teaching the Federal, State and local first responders who attend the Homeland Security Masters Course held at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. To mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Paul recently published a critique of US National Counterterrorism Strategy which was published by Real Instituto Elcano, a European think tank based in Madrid. Paul was also recently invited to contribute classes on various aspects of counterterrorism to the "Business and Terrorism" course taught at the Postgraduate Business School of Georgetown University.
His real passion is the American Civil War!
