Following the money
A hard-charging banker left Goldman Sachs to join the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designation unit, tracking the financial trail and battling a bureaucracy
By Marja Mills Tribune staff reporter Published February 10, 2003
WASHINGTON -- The day was just beginning, but already Celina Realuyo was hurrying down the long corridors of the State Department.
Perpetually in a rush, the counterterrorism adviser was doing her trademark speed walk in the 2-inch heels that lift her to a full 5 feet tall. She was on a mission, the ritual that marks the one predictable slice of her day.
Realuyo ducks into a little store in the basement and plunks down the usual $1.87 for a bottle of mango juice and a copy of The Washington Post.
The morning sip of sweet mango juice she can count on.
After that, all bets are off.
"The nature of this job is that you're at the mercy of events but at the same time, there is so much planning to do for later," said Realuyo, 36. "There just isn't enough time."
A former banker with a Harvard MBA, Realuyo was at her desk in Goldman Sachs' London office when the terrorism of Sept. 11 struck back home.
Now she is part of the complicated -- some might say insurmountable -- effort to track how terrorists get and move their money and to try to stem the flow.
Realuyo is a policy adviser with the State Department's Counterterrorism Finance and Designation Unit, one of six people assigned there full time. She offers training to foreign government officials and bankers -- those who want it -- on preventing and prosecuting money laundering, and on screening out potential clients on terrorist watch lists.
"It takes money for [terrorists] to train, to travel, to carry out their plots," Realuyo said, citing the Al Qaeda operatives who pulled off the Sept. 11 plot.
"It's just a piece of the puzzle," she said, "but it's a big piece."
Despite a resume in overdrive and a high-security clearance, Realuyo is the first to say she is merely a cog in the wheel in the country's mounting effort to thwart terrorism.
Her hectic, often frustrating routine offers a glimpse at life in the trenches for one woman drafted into this amorphous thing called the War on Terrorism.
Declared by President Bush after Sept. 11, the War on Terrorism has its more visible components, of course: the troops amassed in Kuwait for the threatened invasion of Iraq; the stepped-up security at American airports; the congressional vote to create the massive new Department of Homeland Security.
And then there is the kind of largely low-profile, long-range counterterrorism work Realuyo does. It is heavy on meetings and endless coordination among other federal agencies.
Between trips to assess banking practices in different countries, and offer training in tightening them, Realuyo often is at her State Department cubicle well into the evening, writing reports.
Computers and spreadsheets
As she wryly puts it: "It's not like we're doing covert ops with night-vision goggles."
Instead, Realuyo's tools are computer software and spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and the blue Mead spiral notebook she fills with notes and contact information at terrorist finance meetings around Washington and the world.
She is one of many private sector executives who, since the terrorist attacks, have enlisted in one way or another in the government's response.
The new Transportation Security Administration, for example, has been the beneficiary of a group of executives from companies such as Disney, Intel and Marriott, who went to Washington to direct the "go-teams" that helped launch one of the largest new agencies in the history of the federal government.
Realuyo, born and raised in Manhattan, was leading a far different life only a year and a half ago. A gregarious, hard-charging former U.S. Foreign Service officer, Realuyo had left the government in 1998 to earn an MBA.
She was an international banker with Goldman Sachs in London, talking by phone with a client, when she glanced up at the office television sets on Sept. 11.
Live footage of the smoking south tower at the World Trade Center flashed across the screens. She watched the second jet hit the north tower, saw the Pentagon in flames.
It didn't take long, Realuyo said, for her sense of fear to give way to fury.
The next week, she spoke by phone with Maura Harty, her mentor and former boss at the State Department. Harty made her pitch.
"We need people like you," she said, " . . . who can follow the money."
And not just that. Realuyo already "knew the building," in the lingo of the State Department.
She is fluent Spanish and French, and speaks some German, Italian and Tagalog, the language of her parents' native Philippines.
An international relations junkie since high school, Realuyo was raised in New York but had traveled the world with her mother, a cardiologist, and her father, a prominent New York attorney who once served as a Filipino diplomat.
Realuyo earned international affairs degrees at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins. In the Foreign Service, she was assigned to the American embassies in Spain and Panama and the U.S. mission to NATO. She also helped monitor international crises in the Situation Room, the nerve center of the White House.
When she spoke with Harty, Realuyo said, she was intrigued by the anti-terrorism prospect, but unsure about going back to Washington.
She would have to take a steep salary cut, uproot herself, and once again contend with the bureaucracy of the federal government.
She debated the possibility with a close friend, Pam Schneider, who also had left the State Department to earn an MBA. Schneider understood why her friend was torn.
"It's just a matter of does your heart or your head win out at any given time," said Schneider, a Chicago marketing consultant. "Your heart wanting to go back and do what you are passionate about and [wanting to] make . . . a difference in the world versus your head, which says you're dealing with so much bureaucracy and b.s. and being a cog in the wheel and they pay me nothing and I could be making lots of money in the private sector. That's kind of the dilemma constantly."
Finally, Realuyo decided to go with her heart.
"I was just so angry [about the terrorism]," Realuyo said, "and I was in a position to do something about it."
A series of job interviews followed, then an extensive security check. She was in. By June of last year, she was working at the State Department.
Tired of bureaucracy
Six months later, Realuyo still has that passionate sense of purpose, she said, but is weary of her grinding schedule and the frustrations of trying to coordinate among the many agencies involved in anti-terrorism efforts.
"The admin stuff,'" she said, "is a killer." In Washington, anti-terrorism programs sprawl across countless federal agencies, from the CIA to the FBI, from the National Security Agency to the Pentagon, from Customs to the Coast Guard. The new Department of Homeland Security is being assembled in the largest reorganization of the federal government in half a century. By March, the department, led by Secretary Tom Ridge, is expected to draw an estimated 175,000 employees from 22 federal departments and agencies. Realuyo and her State Department colleagues will remain separate from the Homeland Security Department. But many of those with whom they must coordinate -- from law enforcement officials to Treasury Department employees -- will be folded into the Homeland Security behemoth. "The problem we have," Realuyo said, "is a lot of the people we work with at Treasury don't know if they have a job at Treasury or at Homeland -- what they will do, and that will be a big blow to how we do things. . . . " That sense of limbo was palpable in Realuyo's office in makeshift quarters on the State Department's 8th floor. Other than the blue fighting fish darting around a small fishbowl -- an apropos gift from her young goddaughter -- Realuyo has not bothered to put out many personal effects. Larger quarters This spring, she is scheduled to move to the second floor and the expanded quarters of the State Department's counterterrorism office. The Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, as it officially is called, has tripled in size since Sept. 11 to about 100 people. The new counterterrorism coordinator is Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's anti-terrorism center. U.S. efforts aimed at hampering terrorist financing abroad include pressing for tighter money laundering laws and banking practices in different countries, encouraging institutions overseas to freeze or seize assets of groups designated as terrorists, and seeking more regulation of charities, another source of terrorist funding in some cases. Privacy and sovereignty issues shadow many of the efforts to crack down on international terrorist financing. So does the question of how effective such initiatives can be. They take place against the daunting backdrop of global money markets that send $1.5 trillion spinning around the globe every day, in everything from legitimate investments to currency speculation to tax dodging to mafia money-laundering to terrorist financing. With computer and satellite technologies and uneven banking practices internationally, it is relatively easy to deposit and move money many places with few questions asked, or paper trails left. International finance experts predict that is unlikely to change anytime soon. Spreading the banking gospel But Realuyo is passionate about the need to spread the gospel about banking practices, many of them what she calls "the basic stuff" that could make it harder to move money for terrorist purposes, or, in other cases, easier to prosecute after the fact. Her colleague Mike Gayle gave this example. An overseas terrorist group on a watch list is denied access to banks to wire funds to the U.S. for a planned attack. The snag doesn't stop the plan necessarily, but it makes it harder to execute. "It increases the chances they'll get caught . . .," Gayle said, "maybe smuggling money into the country. . . . We're trying to narrow their options and make everything harder." Asked for examples of what the anti-terrorism financing work has yielded so far, Realuyo declined to say. Those are classified, she said. "We have made a dent in disrupting the terrorist financing network but we can't say because these groups don't know how much we know." According to Realuyo, success in the broadest terms for counterterrorism finance specialists has included helping uncover terrorist plots before they unfolded, and gleaning valuable information from money trails left by terrorist groups. "People ask Why are we spending money on other countries?'" Realuyo said. "We want to detect, disrupt and dismantle terrorist networks before they reach U.S. shores."
The U.S. maintains lists of groups and individuals designated as terrorists, as does the United Nations.
Realuyo's job aims, in large part, to assess what the banking practices are in different countries and to recommend ways to tighten them.
Endless paperwork
When she is not overseas, about half of each month, she is writing reports on the last trip, coordinating the endless logistics of planning the next ones and dealing with day-to-day classified matters she will not discuss.
The assessment trips are a hit-and-miss proposition: The small U.S. delegations she organizes go only to countries that want them, according to Realuyo, and those countries are under no legal obligation to follow the groups' recommendations.
On a trip to Caracas last fall, for example -- one complicated by the political and economic instability there -- she and a small U.S. delegation gathered with bankers and government officials in informal meetings. The sessions are designed to be educational, not confrontational, she said.
"What we do is preach to them the best practices in the U.S. and what has worked in terms of knowing who your clients are, knowing what their activities are," Realuyo said. "If you see a transfer to a country you've never seen them transfer to before, it should be a red flag."
She ran through her other usual questions with bankers, including: Do you require two forms of identification before opening an account for a new client? Do you ask to see a pay slip? Do you report to a federal agency wire transfers above a certain amount? In the U.S., that amount is $10,000.
Do you have name-checking software designed to catch individuals or groups on lists of designated terrorists? Do you have a compliance officer keeping up with the lists as names are added? Do you create electronic records of transactions, a money trail investigators can use to trace criminal activity?
In Asuncion, Paraguay, Realuyo and a similar team conducted seminars on the topic for bankers from several South American countries. The plan is to do this in dozens of countries, region by region.
Other State Department trainers have made similar trips to some Middle Eastern countries, Realuyo said, though she declined to name which ones.
When she meets with bankers, Realuyo emphasizes her own banking credentials.
"It's hard to talk to bankers with credibility unless you've been one of them," she said. "They tend to look at the regulators and pooh-pooh them as people who have not been practioners."
Realuyo usually travels with a State Department colleague experienced in investigating money laundering issues, plus a few people from other agencies.
"It's always like Noah's Ark: two from Treasury, two from Justice, two from State," she said.
Hence the constant meetings and e-mails in Washington to coordinate among those entities, and others, such as the National Security Council, that have a piece of the counterterrorism finance initiatives.
"I probably spend half the day running up and down the stairs to try to coordinate things," Realuyo said. "Coordinating trips, finding money for training programs . . . finding trainers."
So she can only roll her eyes at the image her counterterrorist title conjures up among her old banking buddies.
"I'm always telling my friends, No, I'm not Sydney on Alias,'" Realuyo said.
In the popular ABC television show, a glamorous young spy travels the world to go hand-to-hand with shady operatives, foiling dastardly plots before disaster strikes.
As Gary Novis, a colleague who often travels with Realuyo, puts it: "The popular image is James Bond, but the reality is it's a lot of hard groundwork. It's analyzing data, doing assessments, collating it with other reports, dealing with bureaucracies."
Dealing with bureaucracies has gotten harder with so many federal agencies involved in anti-terrorism initiatives.
"You have all these agencies competing for the mandate and the money," Realuyo said. "The policy is run out of the White House: It's like a bunch of people vying for Dad's attention type-of-thing."
Struggling with the beast
Stephen Flynn, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, oversaw a recent report on U.S. efforts to combat terrorism.
"There is still very much a struggle with what this beast is and how we approach it," Flynn said.
"We don't have the equivalent of the containment strategy we had during the Cold War that starts to provide an organizing construct for everyone. It makes it very, very difficult to bring people with disparate interests together and say, That's where we're going; that's what we're doing.'" At the State Department, Realuyo said, senior staff members gather every morning at nine in the blue-carpeted office of Black, the new counterterrorism chief. "It's a lot about the crisis du jour," Realuyo said of the meeting, often whatever terrorism-related news is in the headlines. Realuyo does not attend that meeting. By 9:30 a.m., she is getting assignments from those who did on any immediate tasks. A recent CNN report about a suspected terrorist group having targeted an American school in Singapore, for example, sent Realuyo scrambling for background for her higher-ups. The planned attack was foiled in 2001 after Singapore authorities arrested a group of suspected Islamic militants, she said, and was only recently announced by the Singapore government. It was not the immediate crisis she first thought from the news report. "It's almost like CNN runs your day," she said. If Black or Secretary of State Colin Powell need background reports for overseas trips as they arise, Realuyo and her colleagues sometimes are called upon to prepare briefings. That means reviewing intelligence, doing research, writing reports. The press of events competes with the planning of the assessment trips overseas. Her first morning back from two weeks in Panama and Venezuela, for example, Realuyo drank her usual bottle of mango juice at her desk while clicking through some of the 400 e-mails awaiting her. She scanned recent intelligence reports about the so-called Triple-Frontier area where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay converge. The region had just been in the news as a possible Al Qaeda breeding ground. Realuyo knew she might have to give a briefing on the matter any day to the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. At a meeting with representatives of the Treasury Department and several others involved in the overseas training, Realuyo updated them on the South American trip. "Panama, thumbs up," Realuyo said. The Panamanians were amenable to a training seminar; the U.S. group had found wired classrooms in which to conduct the classes later. "We played up the You can serve as the model for your region,'" Realuyo said. "And they ate that up."
Then it was on to discussions of Venezuela; a conference in response to the October Bali nightclub bombings that killed 192; questions of which agency would pay for what.
It was 9:30 p.m. that first day back before Realuyo had finished her rounds of meetings and calls and reports.
Afterward, a colleague joined her for shop talk over a dinner of sushi and smoothies at Wholesome Foods in Georgetown.
Realuyo keeps up with old friends, but most of her time these days is spent with people from work.
"There aren't that many people who can really relate to this job," she said. "And because of security, there are only so many people you can talk about your day with."
By 11 that night, Realuyo was home, a one-bedroom apartment in an upscale complex not far from her office.
Realuyo, who is close to her parents and brother, said she had set herself a "drop dead date" of age 35 to be married and having children. Her schedule isn't helping in that regard. "I guess," she said, "I'll have to move it to 40."
That night, Realuyo e-mailed some friends, caught an 11:30 rebroadcast of Lou Dobb's "Moneyline" on CNN and drifted off to sleep.
In six hours, it would be time to get up and start again.