Bernadette Alway
Security Director, Americas West Region, International SOS. Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent.
National Security and Crisis Management.
Senior Advisor, ASPP™ Community of Experts
Bernadette Alway serves as a Senior Advisor to the ASPP™ Community of Experts.
She is Security Director for the Americas West Region at International SOS, where she advises global organizations, corporate enterprise leaders, government agencies and non-governmental organizations on navigating complex security threats and safeguarding personnel across high-risk environments. She brings more than three decades across law enforcement, national security and enterprise risk to the prevention work. Chris Grollnek, ASPP™’s Chairman of the Board and Founding Principal, is an active shooter expert whose P.R.O. Model™ the Department of Justice selected as “A” national standard for the Assistant United States Attorneys and across the department, and which is in use at some installations and commands across the Department of Defense.
The record behind the title
Bernadette served twenty-one years with the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a Special Agent in the Chicago, Jackson, Los Angeles and New York field offices, building expertise in crisis management, security operations, strategic partnerships, and complex national security and criminal enterprise investigations. As a Supervisory Special Agent in New York she directed security operations for high-profile special events, among them the United Nations General Assembly and the U.S. Open, and supervised the New York Joint Operations Center. Through her leadership of the Domestic Security Alliance Council and the InfraGard programs she became a recognized connector between law enforcement and industry, building the public and private information sharing that protects critical infrastructure and the people inside it.
Two assignments in that record speak directly to the work ASPP™ does. While assigned to the New York office she supervised Victim Services Specialists and was selected to serve on the FBI’s national Victim Services Response Team, the multi-specialty team that deploys anywhere in the world after a mass casualty shooting involving United States citizens to make death notifications and establish a family reunification center for victims and their families. In the FBI’s Inspection Division she was hand-selected by the Assistant Director for the small team that created the Bureau’s official shooting guide for all FBI agent-involved shooting incidents.
Her other assignments took her to FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to the Terrorist Screening Center, and overseas as Assistant Legal Attaché in Kazakhstan. Before the Bureau she spent more than a decade as a Police Officer with the Penn State University Police Department, where she worked campus security, immediate threat response and special event security operations. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and an MBA from Penn State University.
Why her seat matters here
Prevention is a chain, and most organizations only ever see one or two links of it. Bernadette has worked nearly all of them. She has policed a campus, run security for events where the whole world was watching, carried the badge into the worst day a family will ever have, and she now advises global enterprises on keeping their people safe where the risk is constant. That span is rare, and it is why her counsel belongs on an advisory board whose whole purpose is making sure the attack never happens.
Her service on the Victim Services Response Team is the part that should not be glossed over. She has stood in the room after the event, with the families, doing the hardest job in federal law enforcement. People who have done that work understand, in a way that reading about it never teaches, what a missed warning actually costs. That is the perspective we wanted at the table.
We are grateful she said yes.
