Surprise! - Sharpening Intelligence for National Security

In the first hour, Sonni will discuss past surprises in national security and some ideas about how to avoid them in the future. In the second hour, she will give students pointers about how to communicate in the age of distraction. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Sonni Efron has more than 25 years of experience in international affairs, in journalism, government, and the NGO sector. She has been a foreign correspondent, an op-ed editor speechwriter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the managing editor of a six-volume series on grand strategy for the RAND Corporation.

Born in London and educated at UC Berkeley, Efron spent nearly 20- years at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked as an investigative and political reporter, foreign correspondent, State Department correspondent, assistant op-ed editor, and editorial writer for global affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Overseas assignments included Kuwait (1991), correspondent in the Moscow Bureau (1993-1995), and Tokyo correspondent and then Bureau Chief (1996-1999). She has covered coups and conflicts on three continents, including the first Chechnya War, the coups in Cambodia. In 2000-2001, she was a Knight Fellow at Stanford University, focusing on Chinese foreign policy. She won numerous awards, including Scripps Howard Walker Stone prize for editorial writing (2007), and was twice nominated for Pulitzer Prize, for investigating reporting and for editorial writing.

At RAND, Efron focuses on foreign policy and national security issues, editing reports, and writing op-eds and speeches. She edited the first five volumes of the Strategic Rethink series and is a coauthor, with Andrew Hoehn, the late Richard Solomon et. al., of the sixth and final volume, “Strategic Choices for a Turbulent World: In Pursuit of Security and Opportunity” (Jan. 2017). She has helped write and edit reports in the Strategy 2040 series, and worked with RAND experts on subjects ranging from Fake News to Truth Decay, artificial intelligence, Iran and North Korea, bioterrorism, and U.S. infrastructure reform.

This event is cosponsored by the Career Center.