President Clinton visited the Pentagon for briefings on Operation Uphold Democracy, the US-led, UN-authorized mission to remove the military regime installed by the 1991 Haitian coup d’état. We used JWICS for those sessions, and the president liked it so much that he arranged to import the capability to the White House Situation Room. Over the next two decades, every time I suffered a relapse and returned to government, I found JWICS continuing to grow, expanding to include secure internet and secure email. Later, when I was DNI and the time came to integrate the archipelago of agency IT systems and networks into a single Intelligence Community IT enterprise, JWICS served as its infrastructure backbone. It’s been a fortunate pattern in my career to have been appointed to places where people were already doing exceptional work. If you can spot such pockets of innovation and excellence and then champion and provide “top cover” for them, it will do wonders for your own career progression.
I also spent a great deal of time on the road while DIA director. Many of my trips were to bond with our close partners, particularly among the five English-speaking “Five Eyes” nations, but I dealt with many other countries as well. In 1994 our intelligence collection revealed that Saddam Hussein was again moving a massive number of troops and equipment to the south, toward Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, so I took John Moore, the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East and the senior subject-matter expert, to Kuwait City to brief the six ministers of foreign affairs of the Gulf Cooperation Council states. They took the news gravely and contemplated another invasion that, thankfully, didn’t come. From Kuwait, we flew to Saudi Arabia to brief the minister of defense and discuss preparations in the event we needed to rapidly deploy US forces again. The minister patiently listened to us and responded that he would have to reserve judgment, observing, “We can’t have your women in T-shirts driving trucks around here again.”
In the air, on our way home, we were told to divert to Egypt to brief President Hosni Mubarak, an imposing figure with a reputation for ruling with an iron fist. After we exchanged uncomfortable pleasantries, he inquired if I’d been to Egypt before. John piped up and said, “Hey, general, why don’t you tell the president about that time your dad took a swing at King Farouk?” Mubarak, who speaks fluent English, turned his gaze on me, and I nearly choked. I stuttered for a moment, sure an international incident was under way, but after I told the story, he roared with laughter and kept us way past schedule. In one of the more surreal moments of my life, as we were leaving, I caught sight outside Mubarak’s chamber of Yasser Arafat, looking extremely cranky, accompanied by two dour, heavily armed bodyguards who glared at me.
Many of my foreign visits were to coordinate and reaffirm existing alliances. Others were intended to forge new relationships behind the former Iron Curtain. It was such a strange reversal, given that the US Intelligence Community had battled the Soviets in the shadows for decades, and many times I’d felt like we were losing. The media had dubbed 1985 “the Year of the Spy,” for the eight high-profile arrests of Soviet agents in the United States, and that year wasn’t really an outlier for Soviet penetration of the US national security structure. Much controversy has swirled around the “failure” of the Intelligence Community—CIA and DIA specifically—to have predicted the precipitate collapse of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Warsaw Pact. We were well aware of the fundamental rot of the entire Communist system and confident in its ultimate demise, but it’s nearly impossible to predict spontaneous events that lead to momentous change—not with the Soviets, and not decades later with the Arab Spring.
When I first went to Russia in 1992, I was taken aback, even disappointed, at seeing the run-down infrastructure and the plight of Russian citizens. It was graphic evidence that behind the formidable Soviet military power was a third- or fourth-rate economy. On a subsequent trip, I visited GRU headquarters—the Russian military intelligence agency that was DIA’s nominal counterpart, much as the KGB was CIA’s. (I don’t know if I was the first DIA director to visit GRU, but I do know that Lieutenant General Mike Flynn was not the first DIA director to visit there in 2013, as he claimed.) There we found Soviet military equipment being sold at bargain-basement prices to raise funds to keep the agency functioning, so DIA bought jets, tanks, guns, antiaircraft systems, and whatever else we thought would be useful to study and exploit, as well as anything we wanted to keep off the black market.
In 1993 I visited Ukraine to establish a relationship with the former Soviet intelligence apparatus there. Ukraine was (and still is) a very poor country, but they rolled out the red carpet, taking me to some of their most sensitive intelligence sites and greeting me at each one with the traditional bread, salt, and vodka. We ate a lot of fish, and in the shadow of Chernobyl, wondered if it was safe. We stopped at a Ukrainian air defense training school, and I saw pictures of US aircraft on the classroom walls as training aids for learning how best to shoot them down. When touring a signals intelligence site, I walked up behind a Ukrainian intercept operator and saw from the notes he was transcribing in English that he was listening “live” to the communications of an airborne NATO AWACS aircraft—the Boeing 707 with the giant rotating radar dome used for all-weather surveillance, command, control, and communications. It was a surreal experience for a longtime Cold Warrior to watch our former adversary’s SIGINT operation actively surveilling us. We were given such unprecedented access because Chief of Ukrainian Military Intelligence Major General Skipalski was interested in having the US subsidize their SIGINT stations to respond to NATO tasking. We had to decline, mainly because their massive equipment was old and analog, and their intercept antenna complexes were all oriented west to collect on the US and NATO and wouldn’t have any real use for us without a substantial investment.
We drove to the Ukrainian base housing the Mach 2 Tu-160 Blackjack nuclear-payload jets we’d tried to collect intelligence on for years. The base commander initially seemed terrified that a three-star American military-intelligence “spy” had come to tour his base, but after several toasts of vodka, he relaxed—a lot—even inviting us to tour the flight line, where my senior expert on Russia pointed out birds’ nests inside the wheel well of a Tu-160. As we were getting ready to leave, I asked, as a point of professional curiosity, just how many Tu-160s were on the base. The commander immediately sobered, blanched, and said that was a state secret. General Skipalski motioned for me to join him, and as we drove up and down the flight line, I counted the planes. Back at the starting point, he asked how many I’d counted. I said nineteen. He asked if that was the number we’d counted with US intelligence systems. I told him it was. He smiled and nodded.
Of all the trips I made behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, by far the most sobering was to East Berlin, which actually took place before the Soviet Union dissolved and before I moved to DIA. The idea of revisiting the city after so many years was appealing; the reality was not. We toured two former Soviet kasernes—military encampments—and found that the Russians had stripped every building of anything of value (including window fixtures, doors, and plumbing) when they withdrew from the country, and left behind an environmental disaster. At the motor pool facilities, they had changed tank oil by just dumping the old oil onto the ground, which now covered and penetrated everything with its stench. And all the buildings were black from the residue of the coal they’d burned.
The most indelible impression left on me occurred when the German defense intelligence chief led us through the headquarters of the Stasi—the East German secret police—an eerily timed tour, given that it occurred simultaneously with the trials of former Stasi officers for their crimes against humanity. The Stasi was known for its massive spy networks throughout East Germany, for recruiting kids to inform on their parents, and for rooting out dissidents and destroying them, either physically or psychologically. We saw displays of medals, plaques, and monuments—rewards for those who’d spied and reported on their families. Even their files were pr
eserved, row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with personal information on the citizens of the German Democratic Republic. I touched some of the files, aware that each contained the private secrets of real people whose lives may have been ruined by this invasion of their privacy, or simply by knowing it was a parent or child or sibling who’d betrayed them. It was chilling to imagine living in such a state.
Seeing the stark reality of what the Stasi did stayed with me. This was what happened when a state surveillance apparatus ran amok with no limits and no checks. The people of East Germany never asked for such intrusiveness, and there was no oversight—no legislative review or judicial restraint over their pervasive, Orwellian surveillance. The experience also tempered my attitude about collecting intelligence on innocent citizens—in our country or anywhere else. That was a concept I didn’t need to confront before the collapse of the Soviet Union; anyone communicating on Soviet networks was aligned with the Soviets. Within just a few years, the internet and global telecommunications companies would erase the lines between East and West and between innocent civilian and government agent. Because of that visit to East Berlin, I was conscious of the Stasi legacy when those global shifts happened, particularly years later when, as DNI, I had an oversight responsibility for all US intelligence activities.
In 2013, after Edward Snowden released a massive collection of IC secrets into the wild, the word “Stasi” appeared more than once in the media to caricature our work. That reference may or may not have been hyperbole to those who uttered it, but the comparison—and the accusation inherent in it—hit home. The memory of Stasi headquarters in East Berlin was in my mind when I pushed for greater intelligence transparency, for declassifying documents that explained the legal basis for what we were doing, how the process of establishing collection targets worked, and how all three branches of government conducted oversight to ensure the protection of civil liberties and privacy. I wanted the American people to have a better understanding of what their Intelligence Community did and the limits of just how intrusive we should be in their lives—a dialogue East German citizens never had with the Stasi.
Despite all this transparency and communication, I don’t think Americans had resolved this issue in their own minds before I retired as DNI in 2017. The public continued to send mixed messages about its desires regarding the balance between safety and security on one hand, and civil liberties and privacy on the other. Most of the time, people leaned toward a less-intrusive intelligence enterprise that respects their civil liberties to the greatest extent possible, a position I appreciate and agree with. Yet every time an American citizen committed a mass shooting or set off an improvised bomb, particularly if that person invoked Allah before committing such an atrocity, people demanded to know why we weren’t reading that person’s email and social media posts, why we weren’t listening to his phone conversations, and why we weren’t infiltrating the personal space of others who might perpetrate such tragedies.
Every time this subject was raised, I’d think, Well, we could do that. It would take time and a significant investment to build the infrastructure necessary to get intimate with the private lives of American citizens, and it’s a measure I would oppose vigorously, but we could be much more intrusive than we have been. The question for me is, to what extent are we as a society willing to sacrifice personal liberties in the interests of common safety? We stop at red traffic lights. We submit to security screenings before boarding airline flights, which represent infringements on our civil liberties and privacy. Would we agree to having an inward-facing domestic intelligence apparatus? Should we? It’s a question that would assert itself with increasing frequency in the years after I took off the uniform, and I believe the US public has yet to reach a clear and consistent consensus.
I retired from active-duty service in September 1995. The Air Force had extended me for a fourth year as DIA director, to keep me in the running to potentially fill the position of deputy DCI, but when John Deutch was nominated to succeed Jim Woolsey as DCI, he preferred to have a deputy with White House experience—who turned out to be George Tenet—rather than someone with a military background. Deutch later informally offered me the job of NSA director, to replace Vice Admiral Mike McConnell. When I discussed this offer with Sue, she pointed out that we’d moved twenty-three times in thirty-two years. If I wanted to go to Fort Meade, she said, I should do so, but she wanted to put down roots in Virginia with her own house and her own garden. I decided it was her turn to decide where we’d live and submitted my retirement request. Secretary Perry said some generous things about me and my career at my retirement ceremony. After the reception, Sue and I stopped by the base’s Pass and ID office to pick up our retired-military identification cards, and I drove off a military installation for the last time in uniform. Just like that, it was over.
Retirement after thirty-four years of military service was, not surprisingly, something of a jolt. For some reason, I thought multiple employment possibilities would come rolling in. That didn’t happen. However, a friend from my University of Maryland ROTC days made a great offer for me to become a vice president of his small company, which provided systems acquisitions support to the Navy. It didn’t take me long to realize that my main value was to be a corporate hood ornament, and that it was not a good fit for me. I started looking for a graceful departure that wouldn’t embarrass me or the firm, which had been very generous. That elegant exit soon presented itself—unfortunately, by way of a national tragedy.
With Saddam Hussein still in power after the Gulf War concluded in 1991, the United Nations wanted to prevent his Sunni-led government from inflicting its wrath on the non-Sunni communities in Iraq. The most straightforward way to accomplish this was to establish no-fly zones above the Shia population in the south and the Kurdish population in the north. That left Baghdad open to airline traffic approaching from the east or west, and it kept Hussein’s military from bombing the disenfranchised people of his country. The US Air Force led the coalition forces enforcing the no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel—about half the land area of Iraq—flying missions out of the air base in the Saudi city of Dhahran, on the gulf coast near the island of Bahrain. Most of the contingent lived in an on-base apartment complex called Khobar Towers. On June 25, 1996, Iran and Hezbollah orchestrated the detonation of a massive truck bomb at the back of an eight-story apartment building, where each of the units had a sliding glass door. The blast caused the nonshatterproof glass to break into supersonic shards that killed nineteen airmen and wounded hundreds of people, both Americans and Saudis.
In early July I got a phone call from Wayne Downing, a four-star Army general who’d retired from his position as commander of US Special Operations Command just five months earlier. Defense Secretary Perry had appointed Wayne to lead a joint task force to investigate the incident, to identify who if anyone should be held accountable, and to determine how to prevent something like that from happening again. I knew Wayne from our time together on active duty and held him in high regard. He told me he didn’t want me to be a formal member of the task force, but asked if I would serve as a senior adviser on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. I accepted, leaving the job at my friend’s company and rejoining the government as a temporary senior executive employee. We flew almost immediately to Saudi Arabia. As we stood on the tarmac at Dhahran, I was hit by the memory of standing in Dhahran in 1948 as a seven-year-old boy in short pants on the way from Eritrea to the United States, the wind blowing sand so hard that it stung my legs. Forty-eight years later, I was back in Dhahran, again uncertain about what I was about to encounter.
We spent about two weeks in Saudi Arabia, half at Khobar and the remainder in Riyadh. Most of our investigation centered on the question of how, precisely, the conspirators could simply back a large truck up to the fence near the two apartment towers, detonate a powerful bomb, and escape. We interviewed many who were stationed at the base, and I spoke wit
h a young Air Force major who was, like most people, assigned there on ninety-day temporary orders, in his case as the wing intelligence officer. His entire focus was on threats to the aircraft patrolling the airspace over Iraq, not local threats in Saudi Arabia. In fact, he said he had no resources to monitor the local garrison, even if it had occurred to him to worry about it.
I also spent a good deal of time with the commander of the local Office of Special Investigations (OSI) detachment. The OSI is the rough analog of the FBI for the Air Force, charged with law enforcement investigations and counterintelligence. It was “stovepiped,” meaning that while its small units were deployed to virtually every major Air Force installation across the globe, they were centrally commanded from its headquarters in Washington. The young OSI captain, who had been at Khobar for about thirty days, was very open and cooperative and let me look through his office files. I found a copy of an assessment done by his temporary-duty predecessor the previous April, which had forecast the attack scenario as it occurred on June 25 in a chilling level of detail. Because of the stovepipe nature of OSI, the wing commander, Brigadier General Terry Schwalier—who had been scheduled to pass the baton of command the day after the attack—never saw this report.
As Wayne and his team were writing the assessment, I worried that the Air Force would come down unduly hard on Terry to avoid institutional accountability. I wanted to share my concern with Wayne, but given my advisory status, I was excluded from the “small group” meeting to finalize the task force’s recommendation on accountability. I wrote a memo to Wayne, stating my belief that the fault didn’t lie with the local commander but rather with Air Force institutional shortfalls relating to base-level security practices, many of which were corrected after the bombing. As it happened, the Air Force didn’t hammer Terry. It was Secretary of Defense William Cohen (Dr. Perry’s successor) who did the hammering. Over objections from the Air Force chief of staff, Cohen pulled Terry’s name off the promotion list to major general, prematurely ending the career of a good officer. Some in the Air Force were angry that I hadn’t resigned from the task force in protest, overlooking the fact that I was an adviser and not actually a member, and that I was specifically excluded from accountability deliberations by the task force senior leaders and unaware that there was anything to resign over until it was too late.
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