Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  Then, in April 2004, an event completely unconnected to the IC put us under even more intense scrutiny. On April 28, 60 Minutes aired a report on prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and included leaked photos of uniformed US Army guards taunting naked Iraqi prisoners on leashes. Army Reserve Sergeant Joe Darby at Abu Ghraib turned a disk with the pictures over to the Army Criminal Investigative Command, and after its investigation was under way, other people with copies of the pictures leaked them to the press. More photos seemed to leak out every day, and attention to the prisons in Iraq eventually turned to questions about the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison in which the CIA was operating. Human Rights Watch and other rights groups began to talk about the “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects to CIA “black sites” or to nations that had fewer qualms about what methods they employed during interrogations. At NGA, processing geospatial imagery, we were about as far from the scandal as an IC agency could get, but the revelations about prisoner abuse still bothered us, because we were an integral part of the Intelligence Community. I remembered back to the promise made by the instructors at Air Force survival school in 1970, before I deployed to fly missions over Laos—that the United States would never treat prisoners the way the Vietcong treated our service members they captured.

  Meanwhile, in July 2004 the 9/11 Commission published its report, which included a narrative of what happened that day, an investigation of the events that led up to the attacks, and an examination of what could be done in the future to prevent anything like it from happening again. The 9/11 commissioners graphically described the intelligence picture for the summer before the attacks with the phrase “the system was blinking red.” One passage in particular succinctly crystallizes the problems we had as an Intelligence Community: “The agencies cooperated, some of the time. But even such cooperation as there was is not the same thing as joint action. When agencies cooperate, one defines the problem and seeks help with it. When they act jointly, the problem and options for action are defined differently from the start. Individuals from different backgrounds come together in analyzing a case and planning how to manage it.”

  The joint action they described meant getting all the agencies and smaller elements to realize they were all engaged on the same mission and would mutually benefit from working on it together. NGA was in the process of developing tradecraft for geospatial intelligence, for which we were the nascent functional manager. The other agencies had developed tradecraft for their own specialties over the course of decades, particularly CIA (the functional manager for human intelligence) and NSA (the functional manager for signals intelligence). I’d been in the SIGINT world and around the rest of the community long enough to realize that each agency needed to embrace its own culture, traditions, and capabilities. After honoring that, we could inspire them to cooperate to take advantage of one another’s complementary strengths. It was the same reasoning for why we needed a diverse workforce: bringing together different perspectives and experiences enabled us to formulate a range of different options for action. In the Intelligence Community, the old saying “the sum is greater than the parts” has profound meaning.

  From NGA, I’d seen the major agencies take important steps to realizing this integrated approach. NGA embedded its own experts within the NSA, CIA, and DIA workforces to provide a common GEOINT foundation. I also realized it was easier for them to collaborate with us than with one another. When I’d started in the intelligence profession in 1963, CIA and NSA just didn’t come in contact in the field, but as both agencies grew in capability and expanded their global reach—and as the world effectively shrank—they increasingly found themselves operating in the same space. Competition, however friendly, often begets turf battles, and leading up to 9/11, each agency sometimes viewed the others with distrust. NSA, for example, often institutionally felt more comfortable sharing SIGINT with their Commonwealth partners from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than with CIA. NGA, in contrast, was too new an entity to represent a threat, and we were developing tradecraft that was by its very nature collaborative. So we looked at the other agencies as partners, not competitors, and they reciprocated.

  The release of the 9/11 Commission Report in the summer of 2004 was an epiphany moment for our nation and a catalyst for the Intelligence Community, although at the time, reading that document felt like scraping a wound that had just begun to heal. The immediate response from Congress and the White House was to do something, but there were wide disagreements about what that something should be. Some in the Senate proposed choosing a strong, empowered Intelligence Community leader to serve as a Cabinet secretary. Some in the House wanted to create a position for a coordinator of intelligence sharing, but supported Secretary Rumsfeld’s view that a national intelligence director shouldn’t have any authority to direct agencies. Rumsfeld found an ally in House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, who foresaw that a “Secretary of Intelligence” would risk compromising his Armed Services Committee’s influence over the National Intelligence Program budget.

  The Senate effort, at least, was driven by two people who were genuinely committed to reform of the IC. Majority Leader Bill Frist logically could have assigned writing and negotiating the Senate bill to either the Armed Services Committee or the Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which had turf to protect. Instead, he gave the pen and the power to negotiate with the House to Senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was a deft move by Frist, as neither Collins nor Lieberman was fighting for control of the agencies, so they could at least notionally focus on what was best for the nation—not just for their committee.

  In March 2015, at an event where we were both speaking, Senator Collins said something about the struggle to forge that legislation in 2004 that really struck me. She said that her inspiration had been something she’d been told by Mary Fetchet, a mother who had lost her son on 9/11: “When American lives are at stake, inaction because of inertia is unacceptable.” Collins said that every time she thought about throwing in the towel, she remembered Mary Fetchet’s words. Collins was serious enough about introducing legislation that she asked the CIA to detail someone from the Community Management Staff to her office to help with coordination and provide a sanity check on proposals. CIA sent Deb Barger, one of the intelligence officers who had worked with Joan Dempsey when I was DIA director.

  In his book Playing to the Edge, Mike Hayden recounts that in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee, he as NSA director and I as NGA director warned that creating a powerless intelligence director would make things worse, as the agencies affected wouldn’t know who was in charge and whether to follow the new director, or the director of CIA, or the secretary of defense. We recommended, if they were going to go, to go big. Mike describes how soon after, in August, we met with a group of Intelligence Community seniors in an off-site leadership course for an off-the-record discussion about the state of play in the community.

  At that session, Mike and I were quite candid. I pointed out that in my forty years in the business, every DCI had started out with great intentions of making the community more collaborative, but sooner or later (mostly sooner), they had all become consumed with agency-centric issues, and managing the community became a second-tier priority. To me, the most prominent exception was Bob Gates, who’d served as a career CIA officer and because of his familiarity with the agency was better able to balance his time and energy between both of his “hats.” I went so far as to argue that if we were going to create a director of national intelligence, we should consider moving the three agencies whose names started with “N” (for “national”)—NSA, NGA, and NRO—out of DOD. Each of those agencies had a role in supporting combat troops, but the vast majority of their funding and effort was focused on strategic intelligence to support the president, the National Security Council, and the whole o
f government efforts to benefit national priorities—priorities that didn’t necessarily align with those of the secretary of defense. The fact that Mike and I were the directors of two of those “national” agencies did not escape the senior executives present, and our assertions weren’t mitigated much by the fact that we said DIA, whose “D” stood for “defense” and whose focus was more squarely on supporting troops, should probably stay with DOD when the others left.

  A few days later, Mike and I found ourselves at an uncomfortable lunch in Secretary Rumsfeld’s private dining room. We were seated across from Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, JCS chairman General Dick Myers, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. Of that group Cambone had by far the most to lose if the “national” agencies left DOD. His position had been created in March 2003, with Rumsfeld’s support and the strong backing of Duncan Hunter in the House, ostensibly to coordinate DOD’s intelligence budget and to oversee the four DOD agencies and the intelligence components of the military services, and implicitly to be a counterweight to the yet-to-be-legislated DNI. If three of the four agencies were pulled out from under Cambone, his authority would be greatly diminished.

  Mike has compared this infamous lunch to sitting at the DMZ, negotiating across the table with North Koreans, which was an apt analogy. When I’d served as DIA director, I’d found many occasions to speak truth to power. I’d testified honestly about how reaping the peace dividend was undermining our workforce. I’d briefed Congress and the secretary about our lack of confidence in what would happen to the Soviet nuclear capability with the breakup of the USSR. I’d delivered a lot of bad news, a lot of assessments, and a lot of my own personal judgments that those listening probably would have preferred not to have heard. But since taking the helm at NGA, I’d found that I was even less inhibited than I’d been as a three-star general. To our credit—particularly Mike’s—we didn’t back down from the positions we’d expressed at the off-the-record session, but as a civilian agency director on what I knew (or thought) was my last hurrah in the government, I was not as circumspect with my words.

  At that lunch, Mike and I both advocated establishing a strong DNI, rather than creating a weak figurehead that would diffuse or confuse authority, and we told the secretary that he should back legislation that would align the three “national” agencies under a DNI. The agencies could still fulfill their combat support responsibilities, but they would produce better intelligence under an authority whose full-time focus would be on integrating their work. We appealed to him to support improving how intelligence functioned, rather than protecting the existing bureaucracy. Secretary Rumsfeld cut short the lunch and left, missing a good dessert. Mike would later say that my discourse that day was the reason my NGA directorship was ultimately terminated early. Not completely, but I certainly believe it put me on Rumsfeld’s and Cambone’s watch list. I stuck around for almost another two years and later learned the final impetus for my dismissal was much more petty.

  On September 23, 2004, Senator Collins introduced her committee’s legislation to create a strong director of national intelligence with clear authorities. The Senate bill passed on October 6, and the far weaker House bill on October 16. When the two chambers couldn’t reconcile differences before adjourning for the November 2 election, most observers assumed the bill was dead. Postelection lame-duck sessions rarely pass any meaningful legislation, and the House and Senate were still far apart, with the House in a much stronger position, because the Senate really wanted to pass the bill, and the House would’ve been happy to let it die. That enabled Duncan Hunter and his committee to extort whatever concessions Rumsfeld wanted under the rubric of “compromise.” If they didn’t get what they demanded, the new Congress would have to start over with new legislation in January, and for opponents of a strong DNI, that was all to the good. That seemed the likely course—until someone creatively inserted the word “abrogate.” The House agreed to pass the bill if the Senate would consent to add Section 1018, which read:

  The President shall issue guidelines to ensure the effective implementation and execution within the executive branch of the authorities granted to the Director of National Intelligence by this title and the amendments made by this title, in a manner that respects and does not abrogate the statutory responsibilities of the heads of the departments of the United States Government.

  This essentially neutered the entire legislation, by stipulating that anything the DNI asked an intelligence component to do could be overruled by the Cabinet secretary who controlled that component, but this was the final offer. Collins and Lieberman realized that their choice was either to accept it or start over. The Senate acquiesced, and Congress passed the bill to the president, who signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 into law on December 17. IRTPA, like all major legislation, was flawed. Actually, with the addition of Section 1018, it overachieved at being flawed, but it did manage to codify intelligence reforms and establish in statute the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

  Unsurprisingly, considering the act’s weak legislative charter, President Bush encountered difficulty in finding someone willing to serve as the first DNI. Bob Gates has written about how he turned the job down, as he believed that the position involved huge responsibility but granted little authority to make anything happen. I remember thinking it was a job I certainly wouldn’t want.

  In April 2005 John Negroponte, a distinguished State Department diplomat who’d been an intelligence customer his entire career but never an intelligence officer, took the oath of office as the first DNI. I like and respect John and appreciated his taking on this challenge, but I thought the position should have been filled by a career intelligence officer, someone steeped in intelligence culture, particularly as the first incumbent. In fairness, I would never advocate that a career intelligence officer lead the State Department. I was heartened by one of the first decisions John made, bringing Mike Hayden from NSA to be the principal deputy DNI. Mike pinned on his fourth star—the only four-star intelligence officer at the time—and became John’s close partner in leading the IC.

  John and Mike set to work, bureaucratically outgunned by Rumsfeld and the large Office of the Secretary of Defense. The DNI had a tiny staff scattered among a few offices in the New Executive Office Building near the White House and in CIA headquarters. I heard about meetings where the four deputy DNIs crowded into the chief of staff’s office. Two sat in chairs that got hit whenever the door opened, a third sat on a safe, and the fourth leaned on the doorframe. That was how the senior brain trust for the US Intelligence Community was initially accommodated. John, to his credit, persevered through a very difficult launch.

  My immediate concerns for NGA were more parochial and more practical. Congress and the president had authorized DOD to close military bases around the world to reduce operating costs, and the Pentagon’s recommendations to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission were due May 13, 2005, to include how it would allocate funding for new facilities. In January 2004 Secretary Rumsfeld had asked all installation commanders to begin to gather information and data. We were far ahead of the curve, having already studied how to consolidate NIMA’s miscellaneous facilities in my first year on the job. By the time the commission activated, the decrepit NPIC building in the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington was nearly closed, and we had identified a site in Springfield, Virginia, to build NGA’s future headquarters that, sometime after 2010, would bring together the two thirds of the agency workforce in the Washington area. We just needed the commission and armed services committees to authorize us to spend $2.4 billion to build the new headquarters, as well as a smaller new facility near St Louis. We’d calculated how, over time, the cost of this construction would be amortized, and we’d convinced DOD we’d save money from the initial investment.

  On Thursday, May 12—with a day to go before deadline—the secretary of defense sti
ll had not finalized the list of bases selected for closure or realignment, and there was a scramble across DOD for each service and agency to protect its equities. That morning, Cambone told NGA he’d decided unilaterally that we couldn’t put the money Congress had previously allocated for us to relocate NPIC toward construction of a new facility, so we didn’t have enough to build a new headquarters. I spent most of the day on a series of tense phone calls with Cambone, Mike Hayden, and Pentagon logistics chief Mike Wynne, who was responsible for finalizing recommendations for the secretary. In the space of two hours, the funding pendulum for NGA swung from zero to $2.4 billion for both new facilities before settling on $2.1 billion for just the headquarters building in the East. At the end of the day, I felt I had another strike against me on Cambone’s ledger, but I also felt it was well worth it.

  Then, on August 29, 2005, NGA and the nation suddenly faced a new kind of challenge. At 6:10 A.M. local time, Hurricane Katrina leveled miles of Mississippi and Louisiana coastline and left large sections of New Orleans underwater. In the aftermath, the Coast Guard commandant and chief of hurricane relief operations, Admiral Thad Allen, reached out to NGA for help in assessing the magnitude of damage to the city—how it had affected the waterways, blocked the ports, and disrupted the infrastructure, including knocking out all communications into or out of much of Louisiana and Mississippi. Plainly stated, he asked us to help him acquire the situational awareness he needed to manage disaster response and prioritize relief efforts.