Pirozzolo Company Public Relations

Dick Pirozzolo Continues to Foster Positive US Relations, Economic Development and Freedom in Southeast Asia

Dick Pirozzolo: "Vietnam is growing steadily every day."

By

Nguyen Lan Anh

VietnamNet.Vn

Vietnam Net, Vietnam's largest online newspaper, published an interview with Michael Morris and Dick Pirozzolo, authors of  "Escape from Saigon - a Novel" chronicling the end of the Vietnam War or in Vietnam The American War.

Click here to read the original Vietnamese language version 

Saigon View from the Rex Bar in 1995

 Having returned to Vietnam many times since the war ended, communication consultant, journalist and US Air Force veteran Dick Pirozzolo chose trade, culture and tourism to establish a link between Vietnam and the United States. In so doing he has written articles and editorials on the reconciliation between two former foes.

Michael Morris was in Vietnam in 1967-1968 as a US Army infantry soldier and returned with Pirozzolo as part of a Boston Global Forum delegation of scholars, international marketing experts and journalists.

Vietnam Net: Congratulations, you have launched the book "Escape from Saigon -  a Novel” in 2017, what can you tell us about this book?

Mr. Dick Pirozzolo: Putting aside the past is a theme running throughout the book whose characters often come in conflict with their ideologies as they try to move forward. Even though "Escape from Saigon" is fiction it hews closely to historical events as it recounts the lives of both ordinary people as well as officials who are trapped in a city once called The Paris of the East.

The Continental Palace Hotel figures into "Escape from Saigon." While this classic hotel has been upgraded and retains its charm, it lacks the famous veranda where journalists and diplomats mingled during the war.

Some of these fictional characters include Lisette Vo, NBS-TV's first Vietnamese-American reporter who chronicled the fateful events of April 1975, Sam Esposito of The Washington Legend who writes about America's involvement and doing so angers US President Richard Nixon, an American businessman desperate to help his employees flee; Jean Paul Pelleran, a French pub owner, who wishes to remain in South Vietnam and continue running his piano bar, and US  Ambassador Graham Martin who becomes despondent and disillusioned over the April 1975 events.

Mr. Michael Morris: We concentrated on what happened during the last month when the Vietnam War ended on April 30. While the action occurs at that moment in time, reminiscences at Jean Paul’s bar and old newspaper stories are filled with historical events such as the partition of Vietnam that prompted Jean Paul to leave Hanoi for Saigon in the mid-1950s, or Sam Esposito who, before arriving in Vietnam in 1963, meets his old high school friend Billy Freda for beers at Mory’s in New Haven right after Billy returned from a year in Vietnam.

The Vietnam War was a major event in the lives of an entire generation of Americans who witnessed the war firsthand and had to deal with its aftermath. In our case, when we returned to the US we became professionals – I became a journalist in New York, and Dick became a journalist and media consultant in Boston. Even though the War ended 42 year ago, it is a permanent part of who we are.

Vietnam Net: As far as I know, a lot of American veterans have been writing about the war and the events of April 1975. What makes your book different, special?

The former US Embassy in Saigon remained vacant for over two decades before being razed to make room for new development in Ho Chi Minh City

Mr. Dick Pirozzolo: We have gotten a lot of praise for creating a unique work of fiction for example Winston Groom, author of "Forrest Gump," said, "Escape from Saigon offers a vivid unvarnished vision of the war-torn lives of people trapped in the capital.”

Casey Sherman, author of The New York Times Bestseller "The Finest Hours" and "Boston Strong" called, "Escape from Saigon … a sweeping saga in the tradition of Michener and Clavell.”

Llewellyn King, producer and co-host of PBS-TV's "White House Chronicle,” added, "Escape from Saigon is exceptional in its authenticity, with descriptions of Saigon that are in the tradition of American author Graham Greene's The Quiet American. "

Vietnam Net: You both recently returned to Vietnam with a Boston Global Forum Delegation of journalists and scholars. How did returning to Vietnam make you feel?

Mr. Michael Morris: For me personally, it was a meaningful trip. I did not know what to expect and did not know what my feelings would be. I could not even imagine seeing all that was new since I served in the country in the 1960s. And, finally I felt very satisfied. Like many American soldiers returning to Vietnam, I came here with an eye toward the future and was very happy to see the Vietnamese wholeheartedly welcome us. They are kind, treated me very well, invited me home for dinner. I was very much pleased with the experience.

Mr. Dick Pirozzolo: I have returned to Vietnam many times striving to cement relations between Vietnam and the United States. As part of my work, I became the media representative for Mr. Le Van Bang, Vietnam's first ambassador to the UN and later to the United States. Additionally, I’ve written articles and editorials on United States-Vietnam relationships and how they benefit both peoples.

Children peer into a US tank turret at a war museum in Saigon

During one of my trips to Vietnam I visited the Cu Chi tunnels outside of Saigon. One of the guides spoke in a very distinct American accent, that of New Jersey. When I asked him about it, he explained, “During the war, we took everything the Americans brought here including English which I got from listening to the US Armed Forces Radio and TV.”

 A fictionalized version of that tour guide appears in "Escape from Saigon,” arguing with one of the American characters over who in 1975 was the best pitcher in American baseball.

Vietnam Net: “Although we should not be not allowed to forget history we must live for the future.” What do you think of the message?

Mr. Dick Pirozzolo: The war ended 42 years ago, and I am confident that we are on track to further tighten relationships between the US and Vietnam. Those who are 30 years old or younger, know Vietnam only as a developing country, not a war and, overall, two-thirds of Americans were born after the war ended on April 30, 1975. This is similar to the Vietnam where 60 percent of the population was born after that historic milestone.

Since the 1990s, Americans have seen Vietnam as a market to promote brands and as a travel destination. According to government statistics, 400,000 people in the United States and 100,000 people in Canada are expected to travel to Vietnam this year.

Vietnam Net: Did you know that President Donald Trump has announced his visit

Ho Chi Minh City's iconic hotel

to Vietnam in November to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.

Mr. Dick Pirozzolo: That is a positive step. I had the opportunity to work with many Vietnamese leaders during the 1990s. At that stage, Vietnam was working to reconcile and begin trade relations with the United States as a Most Favored Nation.  I believe we will continue to develop in a positive direction. More and more Americans choose to buy Vietnamese products such as clothes, rice and coffee in large quantities. Moreover, the cultural and academic relations between the two countries are rich and multi-dimensional.

There is no debate, now is an important moment for Vietnam to become a closer partner with the US, playing a greater role in the maintenance of peace and stability in the region and the balance of power in the Pacific

Mr. Michael Morris: Economic relations are a very important bridge in international relations. I know American companies are increasingly looking to Vietnam to do business, and in so doing will help to boost your economy.

More people from our generation, veterans have brought their children and loved ones to witness Vietnam with their own eyes—a country that has a significant place in American history.

“Escape from Saigon – a Novel” is available on Amazon.com.

 

Trendy shops and cafés are emerging in Ho Chi Minh City

All images appearing in this article are protected by Copyright ©2017 Dick Pirozzolo. All rights reserved.

PR & Crisis Management Pros: Can you handle a SIMAD attack?

At the end of 2015, our financial services industry friends — foreign exchange (forex) brokers, traders, trading platform developers and financial technology companies — were hit by a tsunami of DDoS attacks.

Luckily the DDoS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks that recently shut down more than a few financial and forex trading sites are pretty crude. Says futurist Ted Gordon, “DDoS hackers have been around for a long time. They simply send so much data at one time that they are able to overwhelm the system and bring it, and customer access, to a screeching halt.”

The defense: build a bigger a pipe.

For example, FCM360 (www.fcm360.com), a secure ecommerce network provider and managed cloud hosting service, increased all of its upstream ISP bandwidth to repel attacks of up to 20 Gigabits per second internally.

“Additionally FCM360 contracted with security providers to increase its DDoS prevention capability to over 300 Gigabits per second in New York and London. This means we can withstand and mitigate nearly all current DDoS threats targeting the financial services and e-commerce industry,” says Jubin Pejman managing director

But Gordon, whose clients have included NATO and other international government entities, says that while DDoS attacks can be repelled “by building a bigger pipe, I worry about the future when a sophisticated lone-wolf SIMAD terrorist decides to penetrate the financial sector or the power grid for that matter."

SIMAD stands for Single Individual Massively Destructive.

Gordon, the lead author of “Lone Wolf Terrorism Prospects and Potential Strategies to Address that Threat,” sees us “in a race between the destructive capacity of an individual who can inflict harm on the level of, say, putting out all the lights on the Eastern seaboard, and the tools of detection and interdiction that might be available to thwart such efforts.”

To detect and stop such individuals Gordon believes an algorithm, using data from many different sources, will be developed to asses terrorism risk. The algorithm will produce a “risk number” similar to FICO scores that are based on debt collection and payment information and use a complex formula to determine an individual’s credit risk. “The terrorism database will be much larger, include more factors and, if proven statistically and used cautiously, could serve as a predictor of terrorism risk,” says Gordon.

“The data are likely to use facial recognition in new ways. For example, as someone enters the US, his or her passport photo might be matched to photos from a security camera near a restaurant in Brussels that is a known hangout for terrorists and shows the individual meeting with suspected terrorists.”

He added that law enforcement can also be expected to penetrate trading and ecommerce systems to test for reactions. This can include “fake trades” to learn whether our financial systems can withstand a large scale, sophisticated attack. Sources say TJX, for example, didn’t know its computer system had been breached until the FBI alerted the company. And, even after the company swept its system, hackers were able to leave behind a small bit of undetected code that continued to pirate credit card information.

Though sophistication and risk of devastation may increase, motivations will remain pretty much the same: “Greed, terror, or just proving one can break in to cause embarrassment,” says Gordon.

What does this mean for  the public relations advisor and crisis manager?

As PR pros we have to be astute observers of the shifting balance between organizational transparency, access, civil liberties, and public safety. In times of stress or fear the pendulum can swing toward putting safety above constitutional protections. PR pros need to caution clients against overreach. When the pendulum swings back the organization will face legal and public perception backlash.

One of the most fragile and perhaps outdated systems we have is the power grid. Could terrorists or foreign power take down our electric grid, as Ted Koppel speculates in a new book, Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath. Despite our best efforts to protect our own systems and data, an attack against the power grid will eventually bring down all our access to information and communication.

Think low tech too.

While you may have set up terrific communication systems that take full advantage of twitter and other social media outlets to instantly respond to customer concerns, community worries and employee needs, what do you do if the power grid is down or your data center is flooded? Make sure your disaster plan includes essential elements. Maintain a paper notebook with key political, senior management and media phone numbers and addresses. Establish a prearranged off-site meeting place for management and essential employees in the event of a major disaster. Make sure folks know how to initiate a pyramid alert plan. Have at least one hardwired phone that does not depend on an outside source of electricity as phone lines may be operative during an outage.

Pirozzolo Company Public Relations advises: one of the biggest mistakes corporate chiefs make during a disaster is to respond to media questions that are outside the scope of the organization's responsibility. If the building is ablaze, flooded, or a violent crime has been committed on premises or the FBI is investigating a cyber attack, let public safety and law enforcement officials respond to the immediate media questions. There will be ample time for a thoughtful response to the media on how the company will recover and what protections will be put in place to prevent a recurrence. Learn some simple deflections such as, "The FBI is involved, and we do not want to jeopardize their investigation," or "Let's focus on the fire department getting the blaze under control, I'm glad all out people got out without injury," or, "An arrest has just occurred and, in the interest of protecting the privacy of our employees, please direct your questions to  local law enforcement."

“Lone Wolf Terrorism Prospects,” by Ted Gordon, Elizabeth Florescu, and Yair Sharan, is available in paperback at Amazon.com or as a downloadable PDF file at www.lonewolfthreat.com.

60 Minutes, North Korea Bring Cyber Threats into Focus

The 60 Minutes' feature titled "Swiping Your Card" and the alleged North Korean attack against Sony have brought cyber risks into sharper focus than ever before.

 60 Minutes outlined the trail a credit card swipe can take to the dark side of the Web where an active market in stolen account information exists. In addition to theft, cyber attacks can be launched for political reasons. Most recently Sony claims its servers were hacked "in apparent retaliation for the Kim Jong-un baiting comedy The Interview," reports The Guardian.

For insight into the current state of cyber security we asked Anders Corr, Ph.D who is a global authority on the subject and founder of Corr Analytics, a risk advisor to government and industry. The interview with Dr. Corr first appeared in the current edition of FCM360 Forex Summit.

Q. Can you tell our readers about  Corr Analytics and how you got into the cyber security business?
 
A. As security moves from physical structures to algorithms in the cloud, we believe there will be tremendous growth in cyber-security technologies, budgets, and contracts. We are exploring teaming agreements with lawyers and technologists who specialize in cyber-security, cyber-insurance, and actuarial approaches to cyber-risk.
 
Q. We’ve heard the term Cyber-War. Is it a war?
 
A. Yes. The United States, China, and Russia are putting  resources into cyber-defense. An estimated 3% of the US defense budget is spent on cyber-defense, including public and black-budget expenditures. The US almost certainly has the most powerful cyber capabilities of any government. While the military possibilities of cyber strategies are barely known, military use of cyber strategies will grow exponentially in the coming decades.
 
The US and Israel developed the Stuxnet virus, which they used to take control of and overheat Iranian centrifuges sometime before 2010. Stuxnet was thought to have destroyed up to 20% of Iranian uranium enrichment capacity. Attacks like this could take control of nuclear arsenals or asset trading algorithms, with potentially disastrous results.
 
Q. What motivates cyber attacks and who are the players?
 
A. Cyber attacks are launched by governments, criminals, terrorists, and teenagers. Unfortunately, these categories overlap. The motivations for cyber-attacks range from stealing data to disruption of enemy processes. 
 
Q. What can the US do to protect us from cyber attacks?
 
A. The US and NATO needs to spend much more on cyber defense -- on the order of 5 to 10% of total defense spending -- to both defend against cyber attacks and to take the offensive if necessary. We need to get ahead of the Chinese and Russians, and determine whether cyber is an offense-dominant technology in warfare. If it is offense dominant, then the first mover has an advantage, and we need to consider going on the offensive rather than passively building cyber defenses as the French built the Maginot line prior to WWII.
 
At the very least the US needs to hit back against offending countries for not keeping their cyber-criminals and cyber-troops under control. If a cyber attack emanating from Russia results in a major loss to the United States economy, then cyber tactics can be used to recoup those costs, plus penalties, from Russia. No penalty invites further attacks.
 
Q. What about out and out theft?
 
A. On July 25, 2013, the worst cyber theft to date was announced -- a loss of $300 million. Ukrainian and Russian hackers stole 160 million credit card numbers from Visa, J.C. Penney, Jet Blue, and Carrefour, selling the data for $10 to $50 per card. The costs were never recouped from Russia or Ukraine.
 
Q. What is out government doing to thwart attacks?
 
A. The U.S. needs to do more against autocratic regimes that are targeting the United States and our allies. Russia has flown nuclear bombers near Europe recently, and China frequently harasses Japanese planes and ships in their own 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The U.S. should be using its cyber superiority to degrade the abilities of the Russian and Chinese militaries, and bring them to the negotiating table on issues that matter to us -- including nuclear proliferation, the China Seas, and Ukraine.
 
Q. Retailers, financial institutions, governments and the rich and famous have become cyber targets. Can an small companies—PR firms included—expect to fly under the radar?
 
A.Small businesses need to educate themselves on cyber-hygiene, and practice due diligence by asking their partners, suppliers, and contractors to disclose their cyber-security practices and preparedness. Small businesses, however, need to team with larger businesses to lobby government and provide greater cyber-security protections to the companies that compose the U.S. economy.