Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  While the struggle those women endured for recognition of their efforts and accomplishments was very visible to me as director, the fact that we had racial tensions and discriminatory practices was sprung on me one afternoon. Sandy Wilson, an African American Air Force captain who had come with me from the Air Force, invited me to a brown-bag lunch meeting. Instead of the half dozen employees I’d expected, well over fifty had shown up, and I noticed that I was the only white guy in the room. I sat down and went into “receive only” mode for the next hour-plus. Many of those employees shared personal stories about the culture and atmosphere at DIA, starting with the fact that the mailroom was commonly referred to as “the plantation.” It challenged my entire belief system to hear that some people would treat others with that kind of disrespect. I realized with a growing sense of horror that this wasn’t an isolated problem but one that infected many parts of the agency.

  After that meeting, I established an equal opportunity and diversity officer at the senior executive level, whose full-time job was to root out and deal with issues of inclusion. I told him that the point wasn’t just to increase the percentages of underrepresented minorities employed at DIA, but more importantly, to make all employees feel valued as part of the agency community. I told the employees at the brown-bag lunch that my office was open to them whenever they felt they were being treated with anything less than the respect they deserved. Many of them took me up on that offer, and we painstakingly resolved each case. Beyond doing what’s “right,” if racial issues are allowed to fester, they will negatively affect the mission—a lesson that stuck with me for the rest of my career. I’m proud of the positive impact we had on the culture at DIA over just a few years. I’m not one to cite awards I’ve received, and I certainly didn’t undertake this work for recognition, but I’m still very proud that the NAACP presented me with a meritorious service award in July 1994 for my “contributions in promoting equal opportunity policies and programs.”

  I tried to fix such institutional problems as publicly—within the agency—as possible, whereas I felt it best to help out individual officers as quietly as possible. One morning JCS chairman General Colin Powell called me to his office. He never summoned me to tell me how happy he was with the job I was doing, so I fully expected I was walking into an “enhanced counseling session.” Instead, Powell asked me, “Do you know this Mike Hayden guy?” I said I’d heard of him as a fast-rising colonel assigned to the National Security Council staff who was on the brigadier-general promotion list, but I didn’t know him personally. Powell said he’d been told that someone on the NSC had slated Mike to become the next US defense attaché to Moscow, apparently based on his earlier assignment as the Air Force assistant attaché to Bulgaria from 1984 to 1986. Powell informed me that wasn’t going to happen. As JCS chairman, he was deeply involved in trying to forge a new relationship with a post-Soviet Russia and wanted his own trusted agent to represent him in Moscow. Since DIA managed all the military attachés worldwide, Powell told me, “You’d better find him another job.” I eventually helped swing a deal to get Mike appointed as director of intelligence at European Command, a high-profile job at which he excelled. I don’t think Mike ever realized I was involved, but I’ve enjoyed the thought that I helped set him on the path to ultimately serving as director of both NSA and CIA and achieving the very rare distinction of four-star general.

  Just a few weeks before I took my oath of office as DIA director, Bob Gates took his as director of central intelligence and of the CIA. Bob was, at that point, the only DCI to have risen through the CIA analytic ranks to be appointed director, and because of his extensive agency background was better able to balance his time and see past agency concerns. For me, that was great, as he encouraged me to lead the intelligence components of the military services as the unofficial “director of military intelligence.”

  With his support, the military intelligence leaders agreed to have me represent them when National Intelligence Estimates came up for approval. NIEs represent the apex of the Intelligence Community’s long-term, strategic analysis product line, in direct support of senior policy makers across the government, to include the president. When I was DIA director, NIEs particularly focused on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the trajectories of its former satellite nations, and the disposition of its military capabilities. As ex officio director of military intelligence, I spoke from a stronger position at meetings to discuss community approval of draft NIEs, since the views I expressed carried the weight of all the military components. They also agreed to my ideas about how to organize analysts deployed to the combatant commanders and the Pentagon. I quickly found that the military services supported almost any proposal I put forward, as long as I was transparent with them and they didn’t lose resources.

  That lasted about a year. Then, with the legislation that appropriated funds and authorized activities for Fiscal Year 1993, Congress directed us to start “reaping the peace dividend”—meaning the US government, and presumably taxpayers, would collect the reward of the end of the Cold War by no longer investing so heavily in the forces we’d built to confront the Soviets, and channel the funds elsewhere or use them to pay down the national debt. Every military service and every intelligence agency had its budget slashed, and I was informed that DIA’s resources would need to be cut 20 percent over the following five years. Because such a large percentage of the agency’s budget went into salaries, that meant I had to get rid of one fifth of our workforce.

  We addressed that mainly by offering early retirements and freezing hiring, which we recognized would also affect our talent pool, but we didn’t have much choice. From planning sessions, I soon realized that because of the staff cuts we would have to reorganize the agency to match our manpower levels. We took the decisive step of combining our two major analytic organizations. Before, one directorate had focused on strategic estimates, and the other generated the daily production of analysis on a tactical deadline. After the reorganization, the consolidated analytic organization would not distinguish strategic analysts from tactical, nor analysts who studied the technical capabilities of foreign military weapons systems from those who studied the overall military capabilities of adversary nations. We knew this was going to hurt, but the advice of General George Patton came to mind: “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

  When I set aside my fears and announced the decision, however, the workforce revolted. My mistake was in not considering its civilian nature. While military service members frequently move between duty stations, many DIA civilian employees had sat at the same desk for eight straight years since the building opened, and now many employees were forced to play musical cubicles. We literally experienced scuffles between employees over whom a particular desk belonged to and who was going to occupy it. I realized very quickly that, whatever merits our reorganization plan had, we hadn’t sufficiently talked with the employees and worked out the details. We ultimately ended up executing a second reorganization to undo the ill effects of the first. I learned that gaining employees’ buy-in before making big changes is essential, and that there are cultural differences between military and civilian employees.

  Of course, this same downsizing was going on everywhere, including with each of the service intelligence components, as well as with combat and combat-support structures throughout DOD. Then, in the midst of everyone’s reorganizing to “reap the peace dividend,” the US military was ordered into combat.

  By late 1992, Somalia had no central government and had achieved “failed state” status. Warlords ruled the lawless streets, and human suffering was widespread. In December, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing force to restore order, and President George H. W. Bush—who had just lost his reelection
bid to Bill Clinton—ordered the US military to prepare. At DIA, we realized we had very little foundational intelligence on Somalia. We needed maps of the infrastructure, roads, ports, and terrain. We needed information on the warring clans. We needed profiles on the warlord leaders. The Intelligence Community had essentially closed shop in much of the Horn of Africa, and there were no reliable assets on the ground.

  We did what we could to collect overhead imagery from satellites and overflights. We deployed DIA officers with the combat forces and painstakingly built the intelligence picture from the ground up. I wish I could say our work led to stabilizing the situation and allowing aid to reach the Somali people in need, but that didn’t happen. On October 3, 1993, US special operators conducted a disastrous raid that left eighteen Americans dead and seventy-three wounded. Rescue operations continued the following day, and one American was held hostage for eleven days. We don’t really know how many Somalis died in the battle of Mogadishu, but estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands.

  After the clash, televised images of American casualties being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu reached the States, and two days later, President Clinton announced that he was recalling all US forces from Somalia. The Joint Special Operations Command commander took responsibility for the disaster, saying in part that he blamed himself for sending the special operators in Task Force Ranger on the mission without adequate intelligence. This series of events was heartbreaking for DIA, as the special operators were close partners of ours, and many of us took their loss very personally.

  In the spring of 1993, as President Clinton’s defense team came into shape, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Perry saw another opportunity for consolidation of resources under the nominal auspices of my new, self-proclaimed role as director of military intelligence. Dr. Perry asked me to research the human-intelligence programs in each of the military services and return to brief him on the potential for creating a single, unified, strategic, military HUMINT service. The idea was to generate efficiencies by consolidating the costly management and support structures of each military service within DIA—theoretically to gain more operational “tooth” by reducing management “tail.” It would also mean moving three thousand people and their attendant funding out of the service intelligence components. They howled, and I didn’t blame them. Unfortunately, it was the Army that again had the most resources to lose, and the service turned from complaining to me, to waging a political-guerrilla campaign against DIA with Congress.

  This effectively left me in the position of adding thousands of people to a workforce I was simultaneously cutting by 20 percent. In planning for the consolidation, we severely underestimated the support structure that such a large HUMINT service would need (comptroller, personnel, logistics, contracting, etc.), and I failed to secure the necessary resources and billets for administrative and support people.

  I was successful in divesting just one of my own responsibilities as DIA director, and it was by far the most politically charged, controversial, and depressing issue of my tenure. In 1973, as the Paris Peace Accords were signed—temporarily stopping the North and South Vietnamese armies from fighting and permanently ending US participation in the conflict—3,237 US service members were listed as either “missing in action” or “killed in action/body not recovered,” but only 591 POWs returned in Operation Homecoming. The Department of Defense, working with intelligence agencies and the South Vietnamese government, searched South Vietnam for two years, recovering and identifying the remains of just 63 servicemen. In 1975, Saigon fell to the Communists, and searches stopped. That’s when things got complicated.

  The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia had formed during the war to bring the abuse of POWs to the forefront of the national discussion, and after hostilities ended, the league switched its mission to advocating for the prisoners’ return. Many people affiliated with the league believed they were alive and that the US government wasn’t doing enough to bring them home. DIA had established a dedicated office to gather, analyze, and investigate any intelligence leads, particularly reported or alleged sightings of people believed to be American POWs. Although none was ever found alive, by the 1980s, conspiracy theories abounded, fueled in part by the success of Rambo: First Blood Part II, a fictional account in which Sylvester Stallone’s character finds and dramatically rescues POWs being held in bamboo cages, to the astonishment of government officials in positions similar to mine who’d insisted there were no more prisoners of war.

  I got involved with the League of Families, supported their efforts, and attended and spoke at their annual conventions. Those gatherings were heartbreaking, and all I could say to grieving families was some variation of “I understand how you feel. The odds are against your loved one being alive, but DIA will persevere and will keep looking. We take every lead seriously and will do all we can to resolve all of them.” Because of the nature of DIA work, I couldn’t go into nearly as much detail about what we were doing as I wanted, much less to their satisfaction. It eventually became clear to me that it was simply inappropriate for an intelligence agency to be in charge of resolving casualty issues, which should have been handled more openly and transparently than we had the ability to do. The media excoriated what they perceived as our “mind-set to debunk” the false live-sighting reports and portrayed us as cruel and heartless. Because we were a “spy” agency, the conspiracy theorists also alleged that we were covering up crimes in which the US government was complicit. I received several anonymous death threats, which we then wasted more resources tracking down.

  Vietnam veteran and Republican senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire constantly criticized DIA and told families that he was holding our feet to the fire. In August 1991, Smith had persuaded the Senate leadership to establish a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The committee investigated for a year and a half, calling witnesses ranging from former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Vietnam Army colonel Bui Tin to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and even me. In January 1993, just weeks before the end of President Bush’s administration, the committee released its report, which was highly critical of Intelligence Community practices but also found no compelling evidence that any American POWs were still alive in Southeast Asia. After President Clinton’s administration took office, I gave DIA’s POW/MIA resolution office to DOD, lock, stock, and barrel. As of this writing, more than sixteen hundred service members are still unaccounted for. No nation expends more effort to recover prisoners of war and those missing in action than we do, but it’s unlikely more than a few more from the Southeast Asia war will ever be identified.

  I gave up the POW/MIA mission quite voluntarily, but I also discovered what it felt like to have a valued mission taken away from my agency. It took four years of study and debate after the Gulf War before national leaders were willing to do something about General Schwarzkopf’s imagery intelligence complaint. They eventually reached the conclusion that the problem would never be solved until there was a single agency responsible for imagery in all its forms at the same depth that NSA was responsible for cryptology in all its forms. The direction from above was therefore to move all the imagery analysts from CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, with all its attendant resources, along with people and resources from other elements, including those at DIA, and combine them with the mapping, charting, and geodesy mission performed by the Defense Mapping Agency. We were told the resulting National Imagery and Mapping Agency—NIMA—would join CIA, NSA, DIA, and the NRO as the fifth major intelligence agency.

  As DIA director, I stood to lose some five hundred imagery analysts and an entire mission area to NIMA. Within DIA, the imagery analysts were sometimes treated as second-class citizens by all-source analysts, but their work was integral and crucial to our analysis process. To protect DIA, I fought NIMA’s establishment right up to the day of my retirement, a battle that in ret
rospect was both misguided and hopeless. In the end, when NIMA was officially established on October 1, 1996, I was glad to see such a concrete step taken toward accountability for making useful imagery available on a timely and high-volume basis.

  In our shrinking fiscal environment, we didn’t have the resources to invest in any large, new-technology project, but one small team at DIA was in charge of creating a Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, and I tried to give them as much support as I could. Their charter was signed in 1990, the same year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Because the idea of going online to search for information was completely new and largely untested outside the research offices of DARPA (DOD’s technology research arm, which created ARPANet, the forerunner of the internet) and CERN (the European nuclear research organization where Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and email didn’t become prevalent until later, this team was tasked with something much more modest—creating a secure video teleconference capability with which we could conduct virtual meetings to discuss classified information, led by Air Force Captain Mike Waschull. In those early days the system was fraught with problems: The bandwidth was limited, images constantly froze on the screen, and the audio was bad. But we all saw the tremendous possibilities for what JWICS could do to make intelligence sharing faster and more operationally relevant.