Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  I flew my final mission on June 2, 1971, and just a few weeks before I left, the same old, crusty inspector-general colonel reinspected my unit, and this time we passed with flying colors. (I’m keeping this pun in defiance of all my editors.) I left Thailand on June 3 with a sense of professional satisfaction and personal accomplishment that I seldom experienced during the rest of my military career. I felt I had really done something significant, that I had molded that unit into a true capability for the Air Force and US intelligence. I was extremely proud of my troops and the unit I left behind when I flew home to my family.

  After Thailand, General Stapleton decided I should see the bigger picture of the world of signals intelligence beyond what the Air Force was doing, and so he planted me at NSA as the military assistant to the director, replacing a senior Air Force lieutenant colonel as a rather junior captain. In my final performance review, Stapleton wrote, “I’m more confident in Captain Clapper’s ability to be a general than I am in any of my colonels.” That felt a bit over the top—even at the time—and I doubt that he mentioned that assessment to any of those colonels.

  When Sue and I arrived at our old stomping grounds of Fort Meade, the NSA director was Vice Admiral Noel Gayler. He was a handsome, swashbuckling Navy fighter pilot, a certified ace for having downed five enemy planes during World War II. He was the first naval aviator to be awarded three Navy Crosses, the combat valor award second only to the Medal of Honor. Gayler was smart, capable, arrogant, and overbearing. He ruled by fear and intimidation, suffered no fools, and fired people on the spot if they didn’t measure up. That said, his leadership approach was effective. People worked feverishly for long hours to get the job done on schedule, and NSA headquarters led the global signals intelligence effort for the nation. I practically lived at my desk, just outside Gayler’s office, returning home only to sleep. When our son, Andy, was born, Sue remarked that the only real difference in the circumstances of his birth from Jennifer’s was that I’d found out about it more quickly.

  In August 1972, Gayler was promoted to full admiral and left for Hawaii to serve as the four-star commander in chief, US Pacific Command, and was replaced by Lieutenant General Sam Phillips. While Gayler was famous for his combat prowess and leadership, Phillips was known for managing large, complex, technical projects. He’d been the Apollo program director from 1963 to 1969, the driving force behind putting a man on the moon. Shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took humankind’s first stroll on a celestial body, Phillips announced he was returning to his Air Force career. After command of the Space and Missile Systems Organization in Los Angeles, he came to NSA. General Phillips was quiet, courteous, serious, and brilliant. An introvert and a gentleman, he seemed the antithesis of Admiral Gayler. From observing him, I learned that, while fear and intimidation can drive people to do their jobs well, they’ll only do what they are told. Under Phillips’s leadership, people gave their best, as it pained them to let him down, knowing he had their backs. His staff brought him bad news without fear and let him know when things were going wrong soon enough for him to act.

  There was plenty of bad news in those first few years of the 1970s. Antiwar fever had taken hold, and demonstrations were taking place all around the country. Race relations in America were at a low point, marked by riots and burning cities. The military, reflecting society at large, had its own race-relations issues, as well as problems with discipline, particularly among the draftees.

  In January 1973, the United States signed the Paris Peace Accords, in which we agreed to recognize the “independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Vietnam.” By March we’d pulled all our forces out of the country. Despite the endgame of the war, and despite the reported thaw in US-Soviet relations in the 1970s—détente, as it was called—our all-consuming target at NSA continued to be the Soviets. NSA was deeply involved with enhancing collection, particularly on their nuclear weapons programs, and we made a strong push to develop the technologies necessary to put signals intelligence systems into space.

  While military aide to General Phillips in 1973, I was promoted to major, a year “below the zone”—before the time when I was supposed to be considered for promotion. I would go on to be promoted three years below the zone to lieutenant colonel, after just fourteen months as a major, and an additional year early to colonel—five years before I should have made colonel in the normal progression.

  That’s not to say I didn’t make mistakes; I made a big career error in 1973 by following General Phillips as he picked up his fourth star and took command of the Air Force Systems Command, the organization tasked with research, development, and acquisition of new weapons systems. I admired his leadership to the point that I wanted to go with him, regardless of what work I’d be doing. At Systems Command I faced a frustrating situation, since a full colonel was already installed to do what I’d done for General Phillips at NSA. The position I now occupied had been held by the pilot tasked with flying the general around. I wasn’t a pilot, and effectively having nothing to do was not “career enhancing.” I realized my mistake and asked General Phillips to help. He set up several interviews, and I ended up in the intelligence office of Systems Command, in the foreign material acquisition program. This was a positive turn of events that got me involved in acquiring adversary military equipment—purchasing whole systems or collecting pieces left on battlefields to assemble into complete systems. This was a major Cold War enterprise and profoundly interesting, but it was far removed from the operational duties I most enjoyed.

  After five months at the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia, I was assigned to US Pacific Command—back on Admiral Gayler’s staff, but sufficiently down the food chain that I wasn’t in his direct line of sight again. When I arrived at Camp Smith, Hawaii, I was appointed to work shifts as a watch officer, giving me flashbacks to my time at Tan Son Nhut Air Base a decade earlier. I appealed to Brigadier General Doyle Larson, who was the senior intelligence officer—the “J-2” in military parlance—and whom I knew from the Air Force Security Service, and told him I’d already served as a watch officer in a war zone. He agreed that the assignment wasn’t career progressive and moved me into the intelligence collection branch as an “action officer.” Then, when I was promoted early to lieutenant colonel, Larson made me the signals intelligence branch chief. As a mentor, he influenced my next three assignments.

  At Pacific Command we focused on the Soviet Far East and China, and, of course, North Korea. Open combat between the United States and North Korea had stopped with the 1953 armistice, but the war technically never ended, and soldiers from North Korea still stare across a four-kilometer-wide Demilitarized Zone—a no-man’s-land between North and South Korea—at South Korean and US soldiers, who to this day warily stare back. On August 18, 1976, a South Korean working party went out to trim a massive poplar tree that blocked the view across the DMZ. North Korean troops soon appeared and ordered them to stop. In the ensuing confrontation the two US Army officers in charge of the working party were beaten to death with axes. The Pacific Command turned its attention to the tense situation and any intercepts of North Korean communications on the incident. Three days later a muscular contingent of US Army and South Korean Special Forces returned to the scene, backed up by attack helicopters, fighter aircraft, and even B-52 bombers—which the North Koreans knew could carry nuclear weapons. A North Korean convoy arrived and set up machine-gun positions, but didn’t open fire. During an hour-long standoff, US Army engineers cut the tree down. The mission was aptly named: Operation Paul Bunyan.

  Tensions between North and South escalated, and US Air Force B-52s continued to fly patrols parallel to the DMZ. The North Koreans, in turn, put their air-defense systems on high alert, flew MiG fighters on frequent patrols, and dispatched their submarines out to sea. We intercepted communications indicating that Kim Il-sung might order an invasion into South Korea. I stayed in the office for about three
days without going home, communicating via Teletype with an Army major who was my counterpart in South Korea. The sense of an imminent war was palpable through the crisis, and it took several weeks for the situation to stabilize enough for us to fall back into a regular rhythm.

  That was precisely the kind of intelligence work I’d joined the military to do, but in the summer of 1978, the Air Force decided it was once again time to invest in my education. Sue, Jenny, Andy, and I returned to the mainland so I could attend the prestigious National War College in Washington. The Air Force personnel office told me to plan on a follow-on assignment to the Pentagon, so we bought a town house in the Lake Braddock community of Burke, not far from where I’d lived with my parents when my dad was assigned to Arlington Hall. Unfortunately, I hadn’t learned from my dad’s experience, because after I completed my studies, the Air Force (thanks to the intervention of Doyle Larson) instead assigned me to NSA. I began making the long commute around DC to Fort Meade, in Maryland, just like Dad had. The only real difference was—for good or ill—I got to use the Capital Beltway (the proposed “circumferential highway” of the 1950s) for my commute.

  In 1979 the Army, Navy, and Air Force all had cryptologic commands to conduct both signals intelligence and communications security missions—breaking and making code. The Army and Navy maintained their headquarters in Washington, whereas the Air Force Security Service was deliberately located elsewhere, at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, where I’d spent so much of my early career. The Air Force needed a senior resident officer at NSA to represent its positions, and in June 1979 I took on that role. Then, in February 1980, when NSA director Vice Admiral Bobby Inman officiated at my promotion to colonel, I took charge of all the Air Force personnel stationed at NSA—several thousand people—as the first Air Force wing commander at Fort Meade.

  My most demanding work mostly consisted of being the intermediary between Admiral Inman and Major General Larson, who, subsequent to being PACOM’s senior intelligence officer, had become commander of the Air Force Security Service and received his second star. Larson incorporated other parts of Air Force intelligence into the agency and transformed it into the Electronic Security Command to make it more operationally relevant. It was no secret that Larson saw his natural career progression as becoming the next NSA director—a point of sensitivity with Admiral Inman, who was in Larson’s way. I had to spend a good bit of my time and energy during the next year and a half as a diplomat, smoothing flag and general officer feathers whenever either was ruffled.

  I consider Bobby Inman an icon and a legend—with the Navy, at NSA, and at CIA, where he became deputy director in 1981. As of this writing, he still has a full-time teaching position at the University of Texas. People everywhere have stories about his uncanny mastering of the details of signals intelligence operations or astutely handling demanding members of Congress. Many accounts involve the joint-operations policies he promoted in 1981 when, for just a few months, he was simultaneously NSA director and CIA deputy director. To me, none of the bold actions Inman is famous for hold a candle to something I saw him very quietly do to protect one NSA employee.

  In 1979, shortly after I started making the daily commute to Fort Meade, Inman learned that a gifted senior civilian crypto-mathematician was gay. He wasn’t living openly, but enough people knew so that Inman would have to confront the situation. For uniformed service members, like the two airmen I’d had to deal with in 1964, being outed meant immediate general or dishonorable discharge, but because civilians weren’t bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, an extra step was required to dismiss them. Guidance for processing security clearances said that anyone who was homosexual was vulnerable to blackmail by foreign intelligence services and therefore was not suitable for holding a clearance. If anyone at a command was discovered to be gay, commanders were required to revoke their clearance, effectively ending their employment and their career.

  By the time this case reached Inman, the NSA security office had already administratively removed the employee’s clearance and was in the throes of firing him. Inman halted the process and asked the employee to come to his office. Inman told the man that he could not retain his clearance as long as he was vulnerable to blackmail. However, Inman reasoned that if he acknowledged his sexual orientation to his coworkers, family, and friends, he could no longer be blackmailed, and Inman could restore his clearance. The employee agreed and returned to his job. That decision was still tragic on a personal level, since it compelled someone to come out publicly on the government’s terms and timetable. Still, it was a compassionate and courageous gesture, and an absolute revelation to me.

  Ten years later, when I was a major general serving as the chief of Air Force intelligence in the Pentagon in 1989, I was confronted with a similar situation regarding a civilian employee who’d been outed. As the senior intelligence officer for the entire United States Air Force, I had significant authority that I certainly didn’t possess in 1964, and so I followed Admiral Inman’s example and restored the clearance of my employee, Mark Roth. Mark went on to serve our nation with great distinction, achieving the grade of senior executive. He is retired now, but still serving his country. My decision set a precedent in the Air Force, and I took some flak from a few of my general officer colleagues, but it was the right thing to do—for Mark, for the Air Force, and for our country. And, although I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, perhaps I was also trying to atone for my part in what had happened to those two Russian linguist airmen twenty-five years earlier.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Command and Controversy

  While mentoring from senior officers meant so much to my early career, when I arrived at the Pentagon in 1981, I met a peer who would have a major impact on me—and become a lifelong friend in the process. Rich O’Lear had been commissioned from the Air Force Academy the same year I was commissioned from ROTC, and he was also a “fast burner,” having been promoted to colonel four years ahead of the typical schedule. When we were both assigned to work for the Air Force assistant chief of staff for intelligence—the senior intelligence officer at Air Force headquarters, Major General Jim Pfautz—Rich was initially slotted as my deputy. We were both type A competitive people, and I suspect those who knew us thought the competitive chemistry would put us in conflict. That didn’t happen.

  Rich had a very different background from mine; while I’d been focused on signals intelligence, he’d spent more time in the realm of Strategic Air Command in all-source analysis—fitting signal intercepts, imagery, and human intelligence together to discover and present the big picture of our adversaries’ capabilities and intentions. But we shared a passion for getting the mission done, and we gelled from the start. General Pfautz was an exacting and demanding boss with high expectations and a sharp temper when those expectations weren’t met. Rich taught me a lot about the tricks of the staff-work trade he’d learned at SAC, how to prepare and deliver briefings, and particularly, how to treat people. In many ways, his professionalism reminded me of my dad’s.

  I was, additionally, thankful that work was closer to home. Not having to move for another three years allowed Jennifer to spend her entire high school career at the same school, and Sue and I both appreciated giving her an opportunity neither of us had had. Establishing roots in our neighborhood somehow led to my becoming elected president of our homeowners’ association, something I would never want to do again. It was akin to being unpaid mayor for thirteen hundred families, managing a seventeen-acre lake, tennis courts, a pool, and full-time office and maintenance staffs. I discovered that the only people who attended association meetings were those with fervent complaints, and I found it striking just how emotionally attached town house owners could become to specific parking places and how much hate and discontent renters could cause owners.

  While I was president, our community became one of the first in Fairfax County to establish a neighborhood watch program. To
get better acquainted with how the county police force worked, I asked to go on ride-alongs. By accompanying officers on patrol, I saw how they operated and how they had absolutely no idea what they would confront when they made a traffic stop or responded to a domestic dispute. My experience with the Fairfax County Police Department would prove helpful years later when I was DNI. After 9/11, the Intelligence Community worked to share information from classified sources with state and local law-enforcement officers who did not hold security clearances—the people who might actually encounter terrorists or deal with the immediate aftermath of an attack. When as DNI I met with the International Association of Chiefs of Police, those ride-alongs served as a shared frame of reference from which we could talk about much bigger issues involving the entire country.

  Since Rich and I didn’t live far apart, we carpooled to the Pentagon, planning our strategy for the day, and after parking, worked as a fire team to watch for the huge rats that then lurked in the Pentagon south parking lot. There were two major subordinate staff offices under General Pfautz, one focused on programs and budgets, and the other on substantive intelligence matters—actual analysis of adversary capabilities and activities. We were assigned to the first, which made me glad for the “mistake” I’d made in following General Phillips to Air Force Systems Command. That experience constituted my only familiarity with how the Air Force builds and acquires intelligence systems, providing me with just enough understanding to be absolutely blown away when I first learned about the F-117 Nighthawk and its unconventional design and stealth technology.