'I helped protect US president - Trump's team must watch out for two words'

Theresa Payton made history as the first female Chief Information Officer during and later found herself appearing on Hunted. But while she was used to working in a "fishbowl" during her time at The White House between 2006 and 2008, she admits wasn't as different as people would assume.

During her time working for the Executive Office of President Bush, Theresa was responsible for implementing the first ever 24/7 Security Operation Centre (SOC) for White House operations. Prior to joining, the Presidential office had no team dedicated to the operations for the President.

After leaving her role serving under President Bush, Theresa landed herself a role on show Hunted, leading the Deputy Commander of Intelligence back in 2017. Speaking about the show, in a rare interview, she exclusively told the : "What a fascinating opportunity."

Theresa added: "It's interesting, when you work at the , you are in somewhat of a fishbowl, if things go wrong, everybody knows. It was the same thing with Hunted, just a different type of fishbowl. As the Deputy Commander of Intelligence on Hunted, my role was to lead the command centre's intel operations and orchestrate the tracking of the Fugitives.

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"I believe we had to cover about 100,000 square miles and let's just say, our team captured the targets within 28 days." The reality show allows people taking part to attempt to evade some of the most skilled intelligence officers in the in an attempt to find out how tricky it is to go under the radar.

Theresa added: "It was interesting because it really demanded the same strategic foresight as thinking about how to build the White House SOC, chasing people who are trying to run away for sport and competition money. It was really interesting because my ability to analyse patterns and predict moves really helped us with hunting the fugitives and I always tell people, if you haven't watched the show, please watch it."

Since Theresa's time on the show, her season from the United States is used to inform and educate participants when a new series launches in the UK. She said: "What I always like to tell people, if you haven't seen the show, think The Bourne Identity meets CSI. And my role was to just lead a great brain trust to outsmart the runners."

Working mum Theresa, who now runs a female-driven tech and cybersecurity company called Fortalice Solutions, emphasised that the show is far from scripted. "I'm not used to having a camera on me all day long at work and a microphone," she explained, before adding: "I was literally hot mic'd the entire day, even when we were on break I had a hot mic on.

"I always say to people, you're seeing a career of experiences in banking and the White House. When it comes to high stakes challenges, you don't know what's being captured. So everything that you see, whether it be going over strategy, focus, faith, humour – all of those things get captured by the camera." Theresa joked that running the command centre was similar to "herding cyber-cats in a storm" as she and her team played "mental mind games" on the contestants.

Before joining the White House, Theresa worked in banking and joked she went from "the server room to the boardroom," and rarely spoke to the media. When she eventually joined President Bush's staffing list, she again rarely disclosed information about herself and kept her LinkedIn page to a minimum and only stated that she worked for the federal government.

"That was just as much for my own protection as for the privacy and policy of the White House," she said. "There's no media, there's not public speaking and so to leave there and then suddenly be on a reality TV show was really something different," Theresa explained.

After leaving the White House, Theresa admits she noticed the "phantom vibrating of the device," having work a clip on her belt in her financial career and Informations Officer role, meaning she was constantly available to take on work. "For weeks after leaving, I kept reaching for my waist and there's no White House device, no banking device attached to my waist, that was kind of strange," she said.

But this wasn't all, Theresa would wake up throughout the night believing her phone was going off only to realise it wasn't. However, now she looks back with gratitude after people took a chance on her. When she was hired into banking, Theresa was actually working on technologies that were not being used. "Being the first female to have that role with small children and my husband has his own career, a dual career family, the White House took a chance on me," she explained before stating that she was "incredibly grateful" for the "incredible opportunities" that were given to her.

Now, she uses these opportunities to help others, mentoring college and university students and even gives back time to her two universities, Immaculata University and the University of Virginia. "I always remember, somebody saw something in me, took a chance, all the things that I've had the opportunity to do were my first time, people believed in me and so I aim to just pay that forward for the people that I meet," she said.

Theresa visits her universities at least twice a year and also engages with virtual seminars in order to encourage people to take up a career in the STEM industry. Through this, she tells people to embrace the "F word"; failure. Admitting that while failure isn't always an option, it's a learning curve for people.

Reflecting on her White House role, Theresa said: "We did not have a 24/7 full dedicated SOC for White House operations and I had the opportunity to create the SOC for the Executive Office of the President. at the time, this was considered to be a groundbreaking move to protect the critical systems of White House operations.

"You had the secret service, military, the White House military and White House communications agency but no group was dedicated to the technology operations. What was great about this was during the time period, cyber attacks on government systems rose to about 300 per cent, so putting this SOC in place was a true game changer.

"We really laid the foundation for what people refer to as zero trust frameworks." This terminology, though, is not something Theresa uses and instead focuses on no trust networks. "We're moving from that trust but verified to truly a verified and then trust but only trust one instance for this type of design," she said. Theresa says that it was in "incredible opportunity to serve" as not only did they build a SOC but a cyber fortress which she says was to keep the nation states and criminals at bay to allow President Bush to "sleep soundly."

During her tenure, she also protected the digital footprints of individuals as they were being targeted via digital and physical espionage from Cold War spy techniques to digital war spying techniques. During her time, she also ensured that President George W. Bush's iPod Shuffle playlist was never published to the public when it was synced to the cloud.

Social media was also a discussion, with Theresa explaining that President Bush decided to let the "professionals do the communicating." But while Donald Trump's use of social media often comes under fire, Theresa believes that the President uses his platform in order to speak directly to the public he serves.

Offering her advice to the President's team, she said: "I would advise them that based on this human user story as Commander In Chief and President of the United States, they should be doing an ongoing thorough review of the digital footprint, not only of him, but the digital footprints of his chief of staff and everybody around him." She explained she was "aghast" when Venmo accounts of senior execs in the White House were available for public viewing.

Although she was still working in financial services when the atrocious September 11 attacks took place, Theresa admits that President Bush was serious about one thing – ensuring such attacks never took place again. The attacks, known as 9.11, were coordinated terrorist attacks carried out by terrorists.

Terrorists hijacked commercial airliners, flying two into the Twin Towers, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth which crashed in Pennsylvania after passengers revolted and tackled the terrorists. Tragically, 2,977 people were killed. President Bush wanted to make sure that nothing like this ever happened again under his watch, or the watch of another President.

"I knew where his heart was and his heart was 'not on our watch'," she explained. Theresa later added that on a daily occurrence, often multiple times a day, the President would say: "We must leave this place better than we found it for the next administration to come." Most recently, Theresa admits she has been "dismayed" by the negativity surrounding the recent Blue Origin space mission which saw an all female team made up of Katy Perry, Gayle King, film producer Kerianne Flynn, former NASA scientist Aisha Bowe, US journalist Lauren Sanchez, US research scientist Amanda Nguyen, head into space for the first time since 1963.

She said: "It was fearless. It showed women, young women, girls that they belong among the stars. It definitely reminds us that we should dream bigger. Katy Perry's words on the matter, I see she's being panned but I have to say, as a working mum, her words hit home for me and every other working mother who's juggling their career and family.

"So it was really great to see. I get it, some people feel like it was more of a billionaire's joy ride, is what I think somebody wrote but I love this opportunity to talk about this. This wasn't just a flight, it was really a launch pad for ambition. We have no idea how many young women and girls will walk away inspired. Maybe they'll card the next Mars Rover or maybe they will create the next design, eco-friendly rocket. Maybe they'll be inspired to be an astronaut but that's the ripple effect that I think we could have from something like this."

While she acknowledges that people may criticise for heading into space, she admits its "long overdue" to see an all female crew. She said: "They showed that with bravery and being bold, trusting in somebody else's engineering. I think that's very interesting because I reflected on when William Shatner went up and when he came back and how emotional he was. I don't remember all this negativity around that. I just ask everybody to look at the statistics, we need more people in STEM and we especially need to encourage and inspire more women to choose STEM as a profession."

She believes that the female crew showed "raw courage" and modelled "fearlessness" during their mission. Space was a topic of conversation in the White House during Theresa's tenure, she explained: "They definitely were having those conversations. I would not say I had an active role in those conversations, other than from time to time being allowed to listen in.

"But yes, absolutely, kind of space as the fifth domain – you think about land, water, sea and air but beyond air is space or the universe, so that was often discussed. From a policy perspective, critical infrastructure, what does this mean for commerce and certainly, protection and defence of truly outer space."

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