Facts and Fears
Page 12
For me, the investigation of the Khobar bombing was an epiphany. I will never forget climbing the stairwell of the apartment building adjacent to the one that had absorbed the brunt of the bomb blast. Its stairs, handrails, and walls were smeared in blood. I instantly “got religion” about terrorism. And I learned that it is simply impossible, after the fact, to re-create events as they actually happened. That is, it is not possible to reconstruct the contemporaneous conditions and environments in which people make judgments and decisions. It was not the last time I’d reach this conclusion.
Another key lesson I took from the experience is that differences in service cultures have an impact on how we view the actions of others. As a ground-combat-arms Army officer, Wayne Downing viewed garrison security much differently than I did or Terry Schwalier had as Air Force officers. Taking into account factors like perimeter defense, surveillance and countersurveillance, and potential field of fire is instinctive with experienced Army and Marine Corps officers, but not necessarily for Air Force or Navy. The accountability determination was therefore conducted on an Air Force officer from an Army perspective. This small but important fact influenced future accountability investigations, which would be led by officers of the same service as the officer being investigated.
I returned to life in Northern Virginia and was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, where Mike McConnell was a partner. I stayed with BAH for about a year and a half and found that I wasn’t particularly good at helping to win contracts and expand the firm’s footprint. I also discovered just how frustrating it could be to engage with the government and just how much companies were willing to invest in preparing proposals to compete for work—proposals that in themselves didn’t provide any intrinsic value to the government. I also realized I didn’t want to be responsible for company profit or loss or for employee payroll, and the firm really didn’t want a partner who didn’t have a driving interest in generating profit.
So I continued to float around, consulting for the government and for the nonprofit Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. I was asked to join the NSA Advisory Board and spent a lot of time driving to and from Fort Meade, doing what I could to help NSA transition into the internet age. I was elected president of the Security Affairs Support Association, which would later become the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, one of the three major organizations that interface between the Intelligence Community and industry partners. In 1998, I moved to SRA International as a vice president for intelligence. SRA was a better fit than BAH, mostly because its leaders tolerated my pro bono work for the IC, but in truth, helping make the owners of the companies I worked for richer just never moved me.
In 1998 I was invited to become a member of the congressionally mandated Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Virginia governor Jim Gilmore. Initially, Don Rumsfeld was on the commission, but it quickly became clear that Rumsfeld’s and Gilmore’s personalities could not coexist in the same room. In 1999, 2000, and 2001, I helped write three iterations of the annual Gilmore Commission Report, and each year, I testified to Congress on behalf of Governor Gilmore, presenting our findings, which were not very reassuring. Gilmore publicly expressed—in no uncertain terms—that it was not a question of if, but when the homeland would be attacked by terrorists possessing a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. In 2001, after the Bush administration came to power, we briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, and Gilmore’s concerns resonated with him.
I didn’t share the certitude that Gilmore and Cheney felt about an impending nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, but from my other pro bono work, I knew that neither resources nor morale was healthy in the Intelligence Community. The “peace dividend” cuts had continued, and every year, each agency cut a “salami slice” across programs and capabilities, whittling everything down until its capabilities suffered, and many no longer functioned as intended. Across the community, global presence and analytic coverage were reduced, CIA stations overseas were closed, and capabilities for processing, exploiting, and dissemination were shrunk. The community lost one third of its all-source analysts and a quarter of its HUMINT collectors. Of twenty-three SIGINT satellites in orbit, twenty-two were beyond the end of their design life, as were two of our three imagery satellites. The community was forced to neglect the basics of power, space, and cooling within its far-flung facilities, and the agencies retreated defensively into their respective discipline cocoons, a condition not conducive to collaboration and coordination. So, while I wasn’t certain an attack was imminent, I also wasn’t confident that our Intelligence Community was prepared to detect one coming, and if one occurred, to respond resiliently.
For me personally, life was pretty good. Since I had retired from active military service, my responsibilities had decreased while my income had increased. I was home at night. I was getting to know the terrific young adults that Sue had raised. Two or three times a year, Sue and I went on luxury cruises. However pleasant it was, I just wasn’t getting the “psychic income” that public service offered. Then, in late summer 2001, I got a call from retired Vice Admiral Staser Holcomb, who had been Secretary Rumsfeld’s military assistant the first time he’d served as secretary of defense and who was now serving informally as Rumsfeld’s “executive headhunter,” recruiting people for senior positions in DOD. Staser simply asked, “Would you consider coming back to government service?”
CHAPTER FOUR
9/11 and Return to Service
Staser explained that the Pentagon was looking for a new director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and wanted to consider candidates other than military officers. To this day, I really don’t know why I was approached to interview for a job directing an agency whose creation I’d opposed as one of my last acts leaving the military. But with the benefit of six years of hindsight, I could see how the challenge of directing NIMA would be worthwhile. In theory, it made sense to fuse the nation’s mapping and geographic analysis capabilities to create a new intelligence discipline. The raw collection for both endeavors emanated from the same sources—our overhead-reconnaissance satellite systems. In practice—and as the result of a shotgun marriage arranged by Congress and a very small group of executive branch leaders—the mappers and imagery analysts worked as two wary partners forced to live under one roof. NIMA needed someone to forge these two communities together and focus them on a united mission.
I called Sue right away to tell her about this “bolt-from-the-blue” phone call and that I was interested in the job. “You’re kidding me,” she replied, and the conversation later that evening lasted through more than one glass of wine. I think she understood from the outset that I really missed public service, but she did not miss playing the role of military wife. With Andy and Jennifer leading their own lives as independent adults, she enjoyed the quiet work she’d found and the satisfaction it brought to her. I’d known that social duties had never been her favorite part of military life, but I was surprised by the vehemence of her opposition. She’d also become used to having me around, taking cruises, and traveling together. I reassured her that NIMA wasn’t a military command and she wouldn’t have to be a military wife again. There would be foreign visitors and social receptions, but she would only have to be involved to the extent she wanted to be. I told her I wouldn’t take the job without her support, but I really wanted to do it. Though skeptical, she ultimately relented.
NIMA’s challenges were an open secret. In the five years since the agency had been formed, ten separate studies had been commissioned to prescribe a cure for its alleged maladies. Studies, of course, are one of Washington’s time-honored pastimes for simultaneously responding to criticism and conveying the image of taking action while kicking any big decisions down the road, and NIMA had become the study piñata of the Intelligence Community. The most recent, a joint secretary of defense and DCI study directed by Congress, had
begun in late 1999 and had just published its report in December 2000. The commissioners wrote that the proximal event leading to their appointment was the failure of the Future Imagery Architecture systems, which the New York Times called “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.” FIA was largely an NRO disaster, but NIMA owned a lot of the problems with integrating ground systems to task and deliver imagery analysis. The commissioners’ list of grievances echoed General Schwarzkopf’s complaints after the Gulf War, which were precisely what the agency had been founded to address five years earlier.
I didn’t read this critique as an indictment of the first two directors, but rather as recognition of how hard it is to change institutional and cultural mind-sets. Culture, custom, and resistance to change are formidable obstacles that take time to overcome. As the commissioners wrote, “Although some progress has been made, the promise of converging mapping with imagery exploitation into a unified geospatial information service is yet to be realized, and NIMA continues to experience ‘legacy’ problems, both in systems and in staff.”
The report praised NIMA’s forays into using satellite imagery produced by the commercial companies for the energy exploration, natural resource management, urban development, disaster relief, and environmental research industries, among others; but then the report rebuked the agency’s failure to think beyond what the current technology was capable of doing. It laid out specific actions that needed to be taken by the director, such as appointing a chief technology officer, but also steps that might require congressional action—for instance, allowing US commercial satellite companies to collect and produce images at much higher resolution so that NIMA could stop expending so much time and resources on getting its legacy systems to do that job.
The commissioners observed that NIMA had failed to integrate the work of the technical experts filling not just two, but “two and a half roles”—imagery analysis, cartography, and acquisition. The joint report laid out a road map for integrating the work of those specialists, eventually employing analysts who were trained in each field from the beginning of their careers. The commissioners described a future vision of integrating signals intelligence with geospatial intelligence to intercept the content of an adversary’s communications and then identify where on the globe the transmission emanated from—what I’d done manually on my EC-47 missions over Laos and Cambodia thirty years earlier, at scale and with the value of imagery analysts. If we could make that happen, we’d be onto something revolutionary for national security.
The commissioners made one other recommendation that was more personal for me, writing that this kind of change would never happen during a two- to three-year tour of a military director, and urged “that the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency serve a term of not less than five years.” I decided I wouldn’t take the job unless I had support from the secretary of defense to serve that term. I noted that a full five-year tour would also qualify me for a (very modest) civil service pension (which was not, by the way, a persuasive argument for Sue).
Because the NIMA director was appointed directly by the secretary of defense, I assumed I would just have to pass muster in an interview with Secretary Rumsfeld. I’d studied the diagnosis in the commission report, I’d talked to people in the agency and to many of its stakeholders, and I’d decided how I’d administer the prescription. I was ready, or so I thought.
My formal interview for the job was unusual, to say the least. Staser accompanied me into the secretary’s cavernous office, and we sat around a small table once used by Jefferson Davis when he was the secretary of war, five years before he became president of the Confederate States. Almost as soon as I sat down, Rumsfeld was off on a rant about Congress, complaining about partisan politics and how too many members catered to their constituents over the best interests of the nation. He seemed genuinely frustrated with congressional demands for reports, which had increased exponentially from the first time he had served as secretary. I mentally, if not verbally, agreed with him. He paused to ask what I thought about a few of our mutual acquaintances. I diplomatically hedged my answers regarding people with whom I might soon be working, but my impression was that he wasn’t paying attention, and my responses didn’t matter. He went back to his congressional rant, saying that Congress hadn’t tried to micromanage him the first time he’d been secretary of defense. I nodded along, interjecting an occasional “Yes, Mr. Secretary,” or “I certainly understand,” and listening for any openings to bring up the points I wanted to make about NIMA. As my thirty-minute appointment extended to forty-five minutes, I thought that if I was a wagering man, I’d bet he’d be out of the job before Christmas. The interview came to a merciful end. He stood, shook my hand, and wished me luck. Outside, Staser saw my quizzical look and told me I had the job.
I had only a few weeks to finish preparing. I met with NIMA’s outgoing director, Army Lieutenant General Jim King, who was to retire on Thursday, September 13, 2001, and then I started on-site visits to each of NIMA’s seventeen legacy facilities spread around the Washington metro area. On September 10, I flew out to visit the NIMA facilities in St. Louis, a legacy of the Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information Center that had been absorbed into the Defense Mapping Agency in 1972. About a third of NIMA’s workforce was posted there.
On the morning of September 11, I was sitting in a conference room at yet another NIMA facility in Arnold, Missouri, near St. Louis, receiving a series of briefings on their mission and capabilities. A secretary soon interrupted the meeting, saying she thought we’d want to know that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. It sounded like a tragic accident, and we wondered aloud for a few minutes about civil aviation in and around New York City and how someone could have gotten that lost, particularly since it was a beautiful, clear day across the country. The briefer had barely hit his rhythm again when just after 8:00 the secretary returned, going straight to the TV and turning it on. The South Tower was ablaze, and the North Tower spewed smoke behind it. In just a few seconds of viewing these terrible images, I realized that directing NIMA was going to be a lot more challenging and a lot more critical than I’d realized.
At about 8:40, a reporter announced that the Pentagon had been hit, and a few minutes later, the station went to a live stream of the building in flames. I’d spent almost ten years working there, and I oriented immediately. The camera was streaming from somewhere near the gas station to the southwest of the building. Just out of the picture to the right was the parking lot where Rich O’Lear and I had fought off the huge rats every morning. Just out of the picture to the left was Arlington Cemetery, the lines of white headstones on the hills of green grass. Black smoke poured out of the massive, crumbling structure. I wondered how many casualties there were, and if anyone I knew was among them. The camera cut back to New York, where people were jumping from the World Trade Center’s top floors. It was painful to watch but impossible to turn away from. Just before 9:00 central time, the South Tower fell, followed thirty minutes later by the North Tower. Twenty minutes after that, the west face of the Pentagon collapsed. That image is still seared into my memory—the Pentagon, where I’d spent so much of my life and so much of my energy, in smoldering ruins.
I called Sue to check in, and then tried to reach Jim King so that I could offer my support and to ask if his instinct to postpone a leadership change was the same as mine, to provide some sense of continuity to the workforce, which would be pressed hard by events to come, particularly if we were in for more attacks. The aeronautical navigation specialists in St. Louis were concerned about where all the planes in US airspace were being diverted, where our military assets were grounded, and where we might be vulnerable for a potential next round of attacks. Soon they would turn to helping track down the perpetrators. When we finally reached Jim that afternoon, he said he’d already canceled his retirement ceremony.
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After we spoke, I felt an overwhelming urge to get back to Washington, to Sue, and to NIMA headquarters—to do something. Of course, all flights were grounded, every rental car not already occupied had been snatched up by grounded air passengers, and there were no train tickets to be had. Finally, two other senior executives who were visiting from NIMA headquarters and I commandeered a car from the Arnold facility motor pool and hit the road. The drive was more than eight hundred miles, almost entirely on monotonous Interstate 70. I struggled to stay awake when driving, and then I struggled to stay awake while trying to help my two companions stay awake. It was stupid and dangerous, and we were lucky to arrive in the Washington area alive twelve hours later, on the morning of Wednesday, September 12.
I let Jim King know I was back, realized there wasn’t much I could do, and headed home to sleep. On Thursday and Friday I drove to the Bethesda facility, continuing to get up to speed and trying to help where I could. On late Friday afternoon Jim and I were formally notified that the Pentagon—likely Secretary Rumsfeld—had overruled our informal agreement to postpone our turnover. So I’d officially been director for two days without knowing it. A personnel officer administered the oath of office to me in his modest office, and that was it—no passing of the NIMA flag and no ceremonial rituals normally observed in such a transition.