Top radio ham 'going ashore'

Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, K0DQ (USN Ret), Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), announced his retirement from that agency last week.

Redd submitted his resignation to President Bush with an effective date of November 10, 2007. Over his four-decade career, Scott Redd has created a new Navy fleet, helped administer Iraq's first occupational government and served as the first director of the NCTC.

An active contester for more than 40 years, Redd, a native of Sydney, Iowa, enjoys both CW and phone. In 1971, Redd, then K0DQI, won the CQ World Wide DX Contest (phone) from Mexico as 6D1AA 1971. He also won the ARRL International DX Contest, both phone and CW, in 1972 from Mexico as XE1IIJ; this was the first time a single operator surpassed 10,000 contacts in a contest.

In 1973, Redd won the ARRL Phone DX Contest from the DX side (Mexico) as 6J9AA, and in 1986, he won the ARRL CW from the US as W3GRF. All of these wins were as Single Operator, High Power. Redd went on to place third in his first CQ Worked All Prefix (WPX) (CW) contest in 1995 as A92Q from Bahrain.

Throughout his ham radio career, Redd has held many DX call signs: P40Q, 3V8DQ, A92Q, XE1IIJ, 4A4AA/1, 6J9AA, 6D1AA, 6G1AA, 6J9AA, 4C5AA and 4C9AA, to name a few.

A 1966 graduate of the Naval Academy and a Fulbright Scholar, in 1995 Redd founded and was named commander of the Navy's Fifth Fleet - which operates in waters surrounding the Middle East and is the only new fleet since World War II.

He served as director of strategic plans and policy on the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1996 until he retired from the Navy
two years later. Redd was also named chief operating officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority in March 2004, but the White House recalled him a month later to lead the commission that examined the intelligence failures that led up to the Iraq war.

He earlier served as Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, for which he received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service. Redd pledged to carry out the mission of the NCTC "with determination, with integrity, and to the very best of my abilities." Congress confirmed Redd as NCTC director in August 2005.

The NCTC is the nation's repository for counterterrorism intelligence and sets the nation's war plan for fighting terrorists. The center has few employees of its own and, instead, brings together about 400 analysts and other employees from agencies such as the CIA, the Homeland
Security Department and the FBI to pore over data collected by other agencies.

The NCTC houses the nation's terrorist watch list and
distributes it throughout the government nightly. It holds video teleconferences three times a day to keep the White House and the intelligence community informed about terrorist activity and counterterror operations. "We say, 'Mr. President, here's what the intelligence community believes, and here's where agencies disagree,'" Redd said. "So now he can see what the disagreement is and why. Because
intelligence is not an arithmetic thing, there's a lot of judgment that goes into it."