NGA felt a special connection to New Orleans, since we had a small number of employees who lived in the affected area and because we’d held GEO-INTEL 2003 and GEOINT 2004 in the city. We deployed two Humvees adapted to establish communications and seventy-five people with GEOINT workstations. They created new maps and charts from aircraft and satellite imagery and produced analysis that was critical to helping Thad determine the quickest ways to restore phone systems and other critical infrastructure and to map passage in and out of damaged neighborhoods. We even helped with tracking derelict oil rigs that had broken loose and were adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard and NGA ended up working closely together, and I believe we saved lives and helped put the region on the path to recovery. We responded to an urgent request for help with the resources we had available, and that was my apparent undoing as NGA director.
In the immediate days after the storm struck, the White House convened daily interagency meetings to review the government’s response. I was told later that the Coast Guard and NGA were consistently singled out as exemplars for the federal response to Katrina. Secretary Rumsfeld wasn’t aware that NGA had deployed so many people and assets, and that was the final straw. In September I received a one-line memo from Rumsfeld that simply read, “You are relieved of duties as NGA director as of 13 June 2006.” That was still nine months away, but it was three months short of my planned and announced departure date of September 13, and everyone would know my five-year tour had been cut short. Having essentially been fired, I’d be a lame duck for the remainder of my tenure. I called Tish Long, who was by then a senior executive in Steve Cambone’s office, and asked if she knew anything about Rumsfeld’s decision. She didn’t, but gave me Cambone’s personal cell phone number. I called him and asked for an explanation I could share with the workforce and with my family. He replied, “I can’t tell you.” I said, “Thanks a lot,” and the conversation ended. The decision was never officially explained to me, although someone in Rumsfeld’s office, whom I trust, later told me it was because we’d supported Katrina operations without first asking for permission. I didn’t do so because we were complying with a long-standing written agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, already approved by DOD, to respond automatically to requests for support in the event of natural disasters.
In the intervening weeks I began to realize that, aside from the public humiliation, expelling me on June 13 instead of September 13 meant that I would be three months short of being vested in a very small government retirement annuity. Again, Sue was not amused. Joanne Isham came to my rescue, arranging to enroll me in a ninety-day CIA course designed to help career employees transition to the civilian world, which would extend my time in service to precisely five years. Cambone approved the training course, under the condition that I not show my face around NGA after June 13.
One postscript on the Katrina episode: In the process of working with the Coast Guard, I got to know Thad Allen pretty well professionally. After he learned about the circumstances of my premature departure, he brought me to his headquarters and presented me with the Coast Guard Distinguished Public Service Award. The Coast Guard had adopted me as something of an unofficial mascot, and it was a status that served me well for another decade and more. Some of the most personally gratifying experiences I had as DNI were at Coast Guard facilities and ships, where I always received a family welcome. In 2015 Sue and I had dinner with Thad and his wife, Pam. As old warhorses are wont to do, we reminisced as he showed us around his house. He recalled the superb work NGA did after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, as well as in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, and I found that he still displayed a three-dimensional topographical map of New Orleans that NGA gave him when he retired.
Katrina was a watershed moment for the Intelligence Community, and particularly for NGA. In the years that followed, NGA would put its tradecraft to work on natural disaster recovery efforts around the world, as well as in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Today, GEOINT is a tremendous force for good in the world, making positive impacts that extend beyond the dimensions of its intelligence mission. On my final day as director, the people of NGA made sure I felt their respect and affection as they wished me farewell. Lacking an auditorium, they set up a massive, air-conditioned tent to accommodate the ceremony and reception and invited foreign partners and dignitaries, and we celebrated what we’d become—not mappers and imagery analysts, but geospatial-intelligence professionals.
Leaving NGA in the summer of 2006, I had a much better idea of what the corporate world offered, and quickly found work at a company called Detica. My connection was Denny Reimer, the former Army chief of staff whom I’d served with in Korea twenty years earlier. I’d determined by this point that I both could and would find my psychic income somewhere outside the contracting world. I had absolutely no intent to ever go back to government service, but found another outlet when Georgetown University hired me as their Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Intelligence, a title that sounds far more impressive than I deserved. I taught just one course a semester, a lecture and discussion class for graduate students, an interesting mix of recent Georgetown graduates and older intelligence professionals who were going back to school for their master’s degree. I found that neither category of student took anything for granted, and so I struggled to stay one class ahead of these very bright students.
I was very fortunate to have a postgraduate assistant assigned to help me with designing the curriculum, selecting readings, and anticipating the academic discussions that would follow. Hannah Powell was a recent master’s program graduate who had studied in Spain and completed two internships with the State Department at embassies overseas. She was savvy in the ways of the academic world, Washington, and international diplomacy, and as it turned out, I needed her for all three.
Occasionally, after class I met a few students at the Tombs—a famous Georgetown watering hole—to discuss world events and issues with which they were dealing. I enjoyed mentoring my students at least as much as I enjoyed teaching, and it was a lot less stressful to consider world events through an academic lens. On October 9, North Korea conducted its first underground nuclear test. I’m sure I described to students how AFTAC would be scrambling to identify how large a detonation had occurred and how successful it was. Happily, I felt far removed from the action.
In early November, President Bush announced that he was replacing Don Rumsfeld with Bob Gates—of all people—as secretary of defense. I told my students that appointing Gates was a great move for the nation, as he had been a tremendous DCI and had a great understanding of how the national security apparatus worked. I also read between the lines of Bob’s public statements that he didn’t want to leave as president of Texas A&M, but was answering the call out of a sense of duty to the nation. In conversations in the Tombs, I said I didn’t envy Bob’s having to go through the confirmation process, with its onerous volumes of paperwork on personal finances, intrusive written questions from Congress, and preparation for a confirmation hearing. I said I’d never want to go through any of that again.
A few weeks later Bob called to ask if I’d consider finishing out the Bush administration’s term with him, as his undersecretary of defense for intelligence. I could feel the schadenfreude inherent in being asked to replace Steve Cambone as USD(I), but I also knew the job wasn’t easy—and I’d have to go through confirmation. Still, it was a chance to serve again, and I’d be working for someone whom I admired and respected greatly, and whom I considered a mentor. I told Bob I was interested, but that I’d have to talk to Sue, a conversation I correctly surmised would not go well. “How can you go back to work for this administration?” she asked that night. “They just fired you!” When I replied, “But it’s Bob Gates,” she only repeated, “They just fired you.”
A few nights later I met Bob for dinner at the Willard Hotel. There was no big wooing involved; he asked if I’d
take the job, and I said yes. When he asked if there was anything he could do to help me, I told him, “It would really help if you called my wife.” He laughed and said he would, and we then got to business. He explained that he wanted someone he knew and trusted to end the abject bureaucratic warfare between the Pentagon and the relatively new Office of the DNI. He felt with Mike Hayden as the new CIA director and me as USD(I), we would have a team that trusted each other and could work together. He also wanted me to rein in the Pentagon’s human intelligence apparatus, which had grown up under Rumsfeld and Cambone, and to cede proper authority back to the CIA. We ended up closing the restaurant down after a lengthy conversation about how to heal wounds and patch the divide between DOD and the Intelligence Community.
Bob was good to his word. He called Sue to ask her leave to “borrow” me for a while. According to Sue, the conversation ran something like this:
“Hi, Sue. This is Bob Gates.”
“I know who you are.”
“I was told I had to get your permission for Jim to come back to government.”
“That sounds right.”
“I promise, I only want him through the end of the administration, less than two years once he’s confirmed.”
“Okay. You can have him.”
Bob’s version of the conversation paints Sue in a more gracious light than her own version, but either way, the result was that I was cleared to proceed. Bob was confirmed by the Senate and took office in December 2006. I set to work, researching and completing financial disclosure questionnaires and eighty-three questions on topics ranging from my understanding of how detainees should be treated under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to my opinion of the organizational structure of both defense intelligence and the Office of the DNI. All except the final four were essay questions. Each of the last four asked for my agreement to testify and to provide documents to congressional committees if asked. If I provided any answer other than yes, I wouldn’t have had to worry about showing up for a confirmation hearing.
Again, because of politics beyond my control, my hearing was delayed until March 27, but things seemed to be going smoothly—until about two weeks before I was scheduled to testify, when I got a call from the White House personnel office. They wanted to know why I’d spent eighty thousand dollars on my NGA farewell reception the previous summer. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was certain there had been an error somewhere and called NGA. The error, as it happened, was mine in not asking the “perfect question.” While I had noticed the large tent—with its air-conditioning, hard flooring, and wood-paneled “Don’s Johns” porta-potties—going up during my last days as director, I’d failed to ask, “How much does that tent cost?” Nine months too late to do anything about it, I learned the answer was eighty thousand dollars. No one had run the cost estimate past me. The staff had just asked me whom to invite. But three weeks before my confirmation hearing, two disgruntled NGA employees had sent an anonymous letter detailing the tent rental charges to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which had, in turn, contacted the White House. We very quickly checked all the paperwork and accounting, and NGA had jumped through all the required legal hoops and received approval from the appropriate offices in the Pentagon before ordering the tent. They’d spent a lot of money to celebrate my four years and nine months at the helm of the agency, but they’d done it by the book.
After that drama, my hearing was relatively quick and painless. Senator John Warner, the ranking Republican on the committee, was my sponsor and graciously introduced me. Senator Carl Levin, as committee chair and senior Democrat, was enamored of everything Bob Gates was doing in the post-Rumsfeld era, and so, with my family in attendance, I received warm bipartisan support. After the hearing, the two senior senators invited me to a private anteroom, where they took me to the woodshed over the tent rental. I took responsibility and walked them through the approval procedures that NGA had gone through. They thought that level of spending was ridiculous and vowed to conduct an investigation into how much farewell ceremonies cost throughout DOD. I can only imagine what they would have found if they’d put that vow into action.
In any event, the committee approved my nomination and sent it to the full Senate for vote. We thought I might be confirmed on Thursday, March 29, before the Senate adjourned for their Easter recess on April 8, but by my Thursday evening class at Georgetown, I still had no word on the Senate vote. When I gave the class a break at the midway point, I had a voicemail from Jack Dempsey, USD(I)’s legislative liaison officer (and Joan’s husband, by the way). He said that some unknown senator had put my nomination on hold, and there was nothing anyone could do, as the Senate had gone on recess. A few days later Gates’s legislative affairs office called to say that Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, the former major-league baseball star, had placed the hold on me and asked what my connection to Bunning was. I had no idea, as I’d never worked with his office, never appeared before him for testimony, and never even met him. We were all mystified.
Hannah Powell ended up saving me from the pain of an extended hold. Online she discovered that Senator Bunning had put a similar hold on Art Money’s nomination for assistant secretary of defense in 1999 and didn’t lift it until DOD agreed to buy a large quantity of electromechanical safe locks from Mas-Hamilton Group, a company based in his home state of Kentucky. Sure enough, the lock contract was expiring, and Bunning wanted it renewed. Hannah quietly forwarded links to the news articles from 1999 to the Washington Post, which contacted Bunning’s office. Returning from Easter break, his office quickly removed the hold on my nomination and denied ever having issued it in the first place. The Senate went back into session Tuesday and voted to approve my appointment on Wednesday, April 11. Gates, who’d had enough, told me to bring Sue and any other family I could find, which ended up being just my two oldest grandkids, to his office, where he promptly swore me in that afternoon. This is how things work in Washington.
Sue made a point of presenting me with an electronic countdown clock that would tick off the days, hours, and minutes until January 20, 2009—the end of George Bush’s presidency, when I would rejoin her in the land of luxury cruises. She intended it to have a place on my desk, where I could keep an attentive eye on it. A few weeks later Andy gave me a less serious gift—Jim Bunning’s baseball card, which likely had been hard to come by. He suggested I get it autographed the next time I was on Capitol Hill. I never asked Bunning to sign it, but I kept the card, and the story lives on as a family joke.
As soon as I was sworn in, Gates confirmed my marching orders: get Pentagon intelligence back in line and fix the relationship with the DNI. He then pretty much left me on my own, as he focused on winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The equation for meeting his expectations had changed a bit during my confirmation process, and all for the better. In February John Negroponte had stepped down as DNI, returning to the State Department as deputy secretary, and was succeeded by Mike McConnell. Mike and I had first worked together in the late 1980s, when I’d been the senior intelligence officer for US Pacific Command and Mike for US Pacific Fleet, the Navy’s service component in Pacific Command’s area of operations. Later, of course, Mike had served as NSA director when I’d been DIA director and Bob Gates CIA director, and Mike had also been a partner at Booz Allen Hamilton when I’d been hired.
My first order of business as USD(I) was to address the combative relationship between the Office of the DNI and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and we immediately found a target of opportunity. The 2004 IRTPA legislation, in addition to creating the DNI, made it a requirement that, to become eligible for promotion to senior executive, all intelligence officers get broader IC experience by serving outside their “home” intelligence element. One of the bureaucratic fights between ODNI and OSD had been over who had the authority to “certify” someone from a DOD agency or military service as having met that “joint duty” requireme
nt. The whole matter was a little silly, putting bureaucratic infighting ahead of the welfare of employees, but it also gave me an idea. I proposed to Bob that I be assigned a “dual-hat” position on Mike McConnell’s staff as the DNI’s “director of defense intelligence,” putting me on both Mike’s and Bob’s staffs. Bob supported the idea, and Mike was also on board. We signed a memo to create the new position on May 28, just forty-seven days after Bob swore me in, which has to be some sort of DOD staffing record. Shortly after, Mike and I began an exchange of hostages, wherein he sent a representative to my staff meetings, and I sent Linda Petrone to his, one of the notable intelligence officers who’d worked with Joan Dempsey at DIA.
Simultaneous to making peace with ODNI, I began examining the infrastructure of questionable human intelligence capabilities that had developed on the secretary’s staff. Before he’d taken the job, Bob had said publicly that he intended to get DOD out of CIA’s business. Representative Duncan Hunter, who’d worked to make sure IRTPA didn’t “abrogate” any authority from the secretary of defense to the DNI, insinuated before, during, and after Gates’s hearing that Bob would change his mind about giving up that power and leverage once he took office. When Bob stood firm, congressional Republicans were at first dismayed, and eventually apoplectic, raging at both Bob and me for killing off what they considered to be critical DOD assets. Frankly, I didn’t think it was appropriate to be operating any intelligence collection or analysis capability on the bureaucratic OSD staff. My personal responsibilities meant I had to focus on policy issues and budget, not on whatever was happening that day in Syria or North Korea. Moreover, some of the new capabilities that had arisen in DOD were redundant with those handled elsewhere in the community—namely at CIA—and, following Bob’s lead, I was more interested in making the IC work than accumulating power.
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