Palm Beach Atlantic’s LeMieux Center for Public Policy will host FBI agent George L. Piro and former CIA director and 70th Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Piro will speak 6 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 19 in the Lassiter Rotunda of the University’s Warren Library, 300 Pembroke Place. Pompeo will speak 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 1 in the DeSantis Family Chapel.
George L. Piro
George L. Piro is special agent in charge of the Miami Division. Most recently, he was assistant director of the International Operation Division. Piro also served as the deputy assistant director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.
Previously, he was director of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, leading the intelligence community and FBI participation in the interagency unit overseen by the Counterterrorism Security Group in the White House. Piro was the leader of the FBI team responsible for the interrogation of Saddam Hussein and spent seven months leading the interrogation of Hussein and other key figures.
Piro has also served as supervisor of the Washington Field Office’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and as the assistant special agent in charge of the office’s International Terrorism Branch. He was deployed throughout the Middle East for multiple counterterrorism assignments.
He entered the FBI as a special agent in 1999. He was initially assigned to work at FBI Phoenix on matters of international terrorism. He was promoted to the agency’s counterterrorism division in 2003.
Piro was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, and is a fluent Arabic and Assyrian speaker. He served as a police officer in California for nearly 10 years before his FBI service. He has received numerous awards, including the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement, the FBI Director’s Award for Excellence and the FBI Medal for Meritorious Achievement.
He received his bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Chapman University and master’s degree in security studies from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He holds a master’s certificate in Arab studies.
Mike Pompeo
Seventieth Secretary of State and former CIA Director Mike Pompeo is the first American to have served in both of those Presidential Cabinet posts. His service was the culmination of four decades of experiences that reflect quintessentially American values: hard work, risk taking, free market competition, individual liberty, opportunity, national sovereignty and a strong faith in God.
Pompeo served as the nation’s most senior diplomat in his role as 70th Secretary of State. Under his watch, the world witnessed the emergence of America as a massive energy exporter, a force for good in Middle East and an American foreign policy based on the nation’s founding ideals that put America first. COVID-19 required Pompeo to lead a team that executed America’s largest global repatriation effort. Pompeo’s time as secretary of state pulled back the curtain shielding the egregious acts of the Chinese Communist Party that threaten American jobs and freedoms. Pompeo also called out and punished attacks on basic human dignity in places like Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Nigeria, China and elsewhere. He came into his role as secretary after leading the CIA.
Four times, Kansans elected Mike to represent their 4th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. In Congress, he served on the Energy and Commerce Committee, the House Intelligence Committee and the Special Committee that investigated the death of four Americans in Benghazi, Libya.
Prior to his service in Congress, Pompeo founded Thayer Aerospace, where he served as CEO for more than a decade. He later became president of Sentry International, an oilfield equipment manufacturing, distribution and service company.
Pompeo enrolled at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated first in his class. He then served as a cavalry officer patrolling the Iron Curtain before the fall of the Berlin Wall and with the 2nd Squadron, 7th Cavalry in the Fourth Infantry Division. After leaving active duty, Pompeo graduated from Harvard Law School, having been an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Pompeo was born in Orange, California. Pompeo and his wife Susan have one son, Nick.
