In the months following the war, General Schwarzkopf gave high praise to almost everyone involved in almost every aspect of the operation. The one exception was intelligence. We had counted the Iraqi order of battle down to a level of detail that was probably unnecessary. What we failed to do was to give any insight into the Iraqi soldier’s will to fight. In that respect, we’d vastly overrated the Iraqi Army, something we’d do again in 2014, when cities in Iraq were depending on it to defend them from the Islamic State.
Schwarzkopf had two chief complaints. First, as combatant commander, he had control of all the mainline, traditional military forces in the theater from each of the services, but he had no idea what Special Operations Forces or the CIA elements were doing. Bob Gates, who became director of central intelligence and of the CIA in November 1991, took that complaint seriously and set out to address the matter. Schwarzkopf’s second complaint centered on his disappointment with the imagery intelligence he’d received. He argued widely, loudly, and correctly that he’d had no wide-area imagery to see the total expanse of his battlespace. We’d provided him “postage-stamp” photos, tiny pictures without any context of how they fit into the overall theater of war, which was like looking at a patch of land through a soda straw. Worse, we’d provided these images far too slowly to be useful. And, to his frustration, there was no single agency he could contact to coordinate imagery collection and analysis and get results to him quickly.
Given General McPeak’s antipathy toward intelligence officers and my conflict with senior generals in the Pentagon over who should design and control the air war over Iraq, I figured my time in uniform would soon be over. So, once again, Sue and I started making retirement plans, but my military career had one more assignment in store.
CHAPTER THREE
The Peace Dividend
In 1991, the US Intelligence Community included four large, full-time intelligence agencies and the four intelligence components of the military services. The Department of Defense harbored three of the major intelligence agencies: the National Security Agency, NSA—the lead for intercepting signals and communications (established when I was in grade school in 1952 and that my dad, Sue’s dad, Sue, and I had served in); the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA—the central hub for intelligence on foreign military capabilities and intentions; and the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO—the organization that designed, launched, and flew intelligence satellites, including all the overhead missions to keep tabs on the Soviets. In 1991, NSA and DIA were led by three-star military officers and NRO by a senior civilian, all three of whom reported to the secretary of defense. The CIA operated independently as the fourth major agency with a civilian director who was “dual hatted” to lead the entire Intelligence Community as the director of central intelligence, as well as serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He reported to the president. Each intelligence component of the military services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—was run by a general or admiral, and each service had intelligence analysis centers tailored to the needs and interests of its service missions. In October 1991, the Air Force would consolidate all of its major strategic intelligence activities under the Air Force Electronic Security Command and rename it the Air Force Intelligence Command, a consolidation I’d helped to foster from the Pentagon.
In addition to the eight organizations nominally thought of as the Intelligence Community, the Coast Guard conducted intelligence missions, but did not really have a dedicated intelligence cadre, and the Departments of State, Treasury, and Energy also contained small intelligence offices, tightly focused, respectively, on intelligence to support diplomacy, financial intelligence, and on the security of DOE’s laboratories as well as tracking the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. I had some familiarity with DOE’s intelligence capabilities because of my tenure at AFTAC. But no one thought of the offices outside CIA and DOD as being part of an Intelligence Community and no one had any illusions about any of these organizations operating as an integrated enterprise.
By 1991, I’d spent most of my career as a staff intelligence officer—either on an operational staff or as a cog within the Air Force Intelligence Command or NSA. I’d had a lot of contact with the major agencies, but NSA was the only one in which I’d spent any significant time. So I was shocked when General McPeak called me to say, in a routine business tone, that Army Lieutenant General Ed Soyster was retiring as DIA director, and McPeak intended to nominate me for a third star to succeed him. It took me a moment to process what I had just heard, but once I grasped it, I was thrilled. In my brief interactions with the agency, I had been impressed with DIA’s mission and staff, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be another serendipitous turn for my career, leading in a direction I found appealing.
McPeak proposed my nomination to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March, and I was considered alongside generals and admirals from the other services. In June, the JCS reached consensus with the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications, and intelligence, Duane Andrews, and forwarded my name to the White House to officially nominate me to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would ultimately send my name to the floor to be confirmed by the entire Senate for my third star.
Filling the position of DIA director didn’t, in and of itself, require Senate confirmation, and typically, after consideration by the SASC, the nomination to promote someone to three-star general would quickly advance to the floor of the Senate for a pro forma vote. Not so for me. The Senate committee was at the time attempting to extort information from DOD on a completely unrelated program, information the Pentagon didn’t want to surrender. My nomination provided it with convenient leverage, and so the committee simply refused to consider it, leaving me to spend five months as an unemployed two-star general residing in bureaucratic limbo. Suffice it to say, I don’t do well when unoccupied and bored. I passed the days receiving briefings from the DIA staff on their work, reading intelligence reports as the Soviet Union imploded, going to the Pentagon gym a lot, and driving staff officers crazy with requests for information to read to fill my time. The one pleasant surprise was acquiring General Tony McPeak as a mentor and discovering that the super fighter-pilot was much more reasonable in person than his reputation suggested.
During those five idle months, one of General McPeak’s decisions put me into an awkward situation in public. Under his leadership, as part of a historic reorganization of the Air Force, the forty-year-old institutions of the Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command, and Military Airlift Command—SAC, TAC, and MAC—were all disbanded, almost overnight, and yet almost no one in the Air Force complained. The entire service was then too distracted by his decision to also change the Air Force uniforms for a redesign that was universally panned. Officers’ attire was particularly abhorrent, as it omitted the traditional brass rank and “US” insignia and put stripes on the coat sleeves, much like the Navy did. When McPeak unveiled the new uniforms at a press conference, a reporter instantly summed up everyone’s thoughts: “These look like airline pilot uniforms.” General McPeak’s succinct response was “Guilty.” I always wondered if he’d intentionally created this issue as a distraction from shutting down the three iconic commands.
I was “randomly” picked to be one of a few hundred service members to test-wear the two versions of the proposed new uniforms, both to model them for others and to assess their utility. One version failed me at the worst time. On Memorial Day 1991, Sue and I were to attend a concert on the National Mall and had been invited to a military reception before the event in the Capitol. Just as we stepped out of a car to walk the hundred yards or so to the Capitol building, a sudden, torrential rainstorm hit. As a traditionalist, I didn’t carry an umbrella, even in the face of a darkening sky, and by the time we reached the reception, we were drenched. As it dried, my uniform began shrinking around my arms and legs. I sensed an uncomfortable tension
from the tightening fabric, and when a button on my chest actually popped, I felt absurdly like the Incredible Hulk in the early 1980s TV show. I tried to melt into the crowd, but too late. General Colin Powell, of all people, resplendent in his dry dress Army service uniform, spotted me, smiled, and with obvious joy and great zeal, launched into a public razzing about Air Force uniforms and dress standards. It took my bruised ego several months to recover.
The five-month respite from the pressure of day-to-day duties did give me abundant time to ponder what I wanted to accomplish as DIA director. I’d spent a great deal of my career at operational commands in which my bosses had been intelligence customers, rather than practitioners, and I thought defense intelligence could serve its operational customers better than it had. I was frustrated that we could beam imagery into the Pentagon but still could not put timely intelligence into the hands of the combat forces at scale.
I was also struck that, while the director of central intelligence consolidated and presented the combined “national” intelligence picture to the National Security Council and the president, the “defense” intelligence picture was often conveyed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense erratically and in separate, often competitive streams from DIA and the intelligence components of each military service.
From my three combatant command senior intelligence officer jobs and as Air Force chief of intelligence, I appreciated alternative views. Constructive dissents can be helpful because they illustrate how the same source material can be viewed differently by different analysts or agencies. But the secretary of defense, or for that matter a warfighting commander like General Schwarzkopf, could receive five intelligence reports, one from DIA and one from each service, that all expressed opposing assessments, with little explanation as to why; or conversely, such reporting could effectively consist of five redundant echoes, none of which added any new information or insight. I was determined to try to fix those two problems as DIA director, and believed that the sudden demise of the Soviets would give me the space and time to do so.
The tedium ended when I became (I believe) the first DIA director nominee ever to appear for a formal confirmation hearing, which made me a bit apprehensive but passed without incident. After the hearing, I was quickly confirmed, appointed, and took my oath of office—all in November 1991. General McPeak presided at my pinning. I will never forget the grace he brought to that ceremony, in the presence of my mother and father, who were both beaming. I arrived at DIA just in time to see the Soviet Union finally collapse and officially dissolve on December 26.
One of the first decisions I had to make was what to do with the tenth issue of DIA’s annual Soviet Military Power. In the late 1970s the defense establishment believed that, while Americans felt a visceral animosity toward the Soviet Union, the public and the world at large didn’t truly understand the menace the Soviets posed to global peace and security—just as very few understand the threat Russia poses today. In 1981 DIA sought to show the magnitude and capability of Soviet forces and strategy by drawing on experts from across the Intelligence Community and amassing their consolidated knowledge in a profusely illustrated volume. They then performed the difficult work of declassifying the information, which meant going back to the systems and the people the intelligence originated with and working line by line to determine what facts and assessments could be published without revealing the sources and methods used to collect them. The initial one hundred-page publication was a compelling graphic example of what DIA could achieve when it worked to integrate the intelligence efforts of the military services.
Soviet Military Power was so successful that the agency decided to publish annual updates, starting in 1983. By the time I arrived at DIA, it was printing more than four hundred thousand copies each year in nine languages, including Russian. The 1991 issue was in its final edits when I took my oath of office, and with the Soviet collapse imminent, DIA was discussing just shelving the project. With no Soviets to make a public diplomacy case against, why bother? As the new director, I pointed out that none of the Soviet bombers, submarines, and ICBMs was about to magically disappear, and that our publication could explain what was happening during a crucial transformation. We published the 1991 issue as Military Forces in Transition, a title that set the tone for one of our biggest challenges over the next four years—keeping track of strategic Soviet military equipment.
I began to look for other ways to extend and institutionalize that cooperation among the services. Within DIA, a small but very capable group was tasked with aggregating the General Defense Intelligence Program. The GDIP (Gee-Dip we called it) encapsulated everything intelligence organizations did with the manpower and money Congress allocated for defense intelligence. The GDIP staff collects and summarizes that activity in a single report to help Congress decide what activities to continue appropriating. Other agencies prepared similar documents for cryptologic, human intelligence, counterintelligence, and other intelligence programs. Today, all of them are rolled up into just two consolidated program reports—one from the director of national intelligence and one from the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, positions that did not exist at that time.
In 1991, the GDIP staff had just welcomed its new deputy director—and later director—who was known and respected across the eight organizations of the Intelligence Community. Joan Dempsey was one of the most savvy intelligence officers with whom I’ve ever served—astute and pragmatic about both intelligence work itself and the ways of Washington. She compensated for my blind spots when it came to the art of dealing with Congress and the nuances of working with a civilian workforce, which constituted 75 percent of DIA. When I’d given direction as a commander, people in uniform typically responded, “Yes, sir.” Civilians at DIA sometimes reacted to me as their director with an attitude closer to “We’ll think about it.” Joan saved me from responding poorly—often and early.
Right out of the gate, Congress handed me a challenge disguised as a gift. They’d been pushing to consolidate GDIP resources under a single command and proposed taking five major intelligence centers from the military services and moving them all under DIA. In the end, it was decided that DIA would gain only the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) and the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC), under the rationale that they were both predominantly staffed by civilians, who could be more easily absorbed into DIA. I quickly learned that “empire building” is not all it’s cracked up to be, and that feathers get ruffled when Congress takes something from one organization and gives it to another. While AFMIC had been a joint command with each of the services represented, MSIC had belonged to the Army, and so it was the Army that felt most aggrieved and complained the loudest. Fortunately for me, the two moves went “final” on January 1, 1992, when I’d been on the job just a month and a half, and so the Army didn’t hold me personally responsible. Still, MSIC was the source of one of my first real headaches as DIA director.
The Missile and Space Intelligence Center essentially studied the capabilities of any foreign missile launched from the ground that wasn’t an ICBM. During the 1990–91 Gulf War, because DIA needed its expertise to understand the surface-to-air systems in Iraq, as well as the mobile Scud missiles that Iraq kept trying to launch into Israel and Saudi Arabia, MSIC sent analysts from its headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, to Washington on temporary duty orders. One of those civilian analysts had a girlfriend in Washington, and the temporary duty was a convenient arrangement he wanted to maintain. With the war over, I canceled the temporary duty arrangement and sent the MSIC people home. This analyst reached out to Alabama senator Richard Shelby’s office and found a sympathetic ear in his staff. Shortly after, I received a letter with Senator Shelby’s signature, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was an incompetent, unprofessional hack for having closed down the MSIC cell in the Pentagon. I hit the ceiling. I couldn’t believe that a senator could be so disrespectf
ul to a lieutenant general (oh, how naïve I was), and I directed my staff to prepare a barn-burner response.
Fortunately, Joan had a better idea. She pointed out that the letter had been signed by autopen, probably without Senator Shelby’s knowledge, and suggested that I view the letter as an opportunity. She knew that MSIC’s fifty-year-old facility in Huntsville was in disrepair: the roof leaked, the plumbing was unreliable, the electrical system was overstressed, and the air-conditioning and heating systems were obsolete. Using the letter as an excuse to engage with his staff, she set up a meeting with Senator Shelby to discuss building a new facility. On the way to Capitol Hill, she prevailed upon me not to bring up the letter, and I didn’t. Instead, we discussed how both DIA and the state of Alabama would be greatly served if we could find military construction funding to give the superb workforce of MSIC (all constituents of Senator Shelby) a state-of-the-art facility. We quickly struck a deal. After that, I sought Joan’s opinion before any major decision, in many ways viewing her as an unofficial second deputy director. Not for the first time, I came to regard someone who ostensibly worked for me as a mentor.
Joan was a trailblazing role model for an entire generation of women in the IC. She supervised a number of intelligence officers on the GDIP staff who would leave a substantial mark on the community, including Deborah Barger, Jennifer Carrano, and Linda Petrone. Joan’s protégée and successor as GDIP staff director, Tish Long, later became the first woman to direct a major intelligence agency. It’s a great injustice that Joan never had that opportunity. Over the years, Joan and Tish, and later Betty Sapp and Stephanie O’Sullivan, helped me be successful, not the other way around. From what I saw, these women proved themselves to be not merely as competent as their male contemporaries, but better. Borrowing an old expression, Joan used to say that women in the Intelligence Community had to follow the example of Ginger Rogers—Ginger performed the same dance steps as Fred Astaire, but backward, and in heels. Joan and many other powerful women in my life managed this with uncomplaining grace and good humor. I’ve just asked them to remember me kindly when they eventually take over the world.
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