Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  By the time I’d moved into my Pentagon office, the IC had settled at seventeen distinct elements. Of those, only five were intelligence “agencies,” with the lion’s share of their resources focused on conducting intelligence as their primary mission, except for a portion of CIA’s budget allocated for covert action and NSA’s responsibilities for assuring the government’s ability to communicate. Those five agencies were responsible for conducting national intelligence to keep the warfighters, the national security structure, and the president informed, and each agency had its specialty: CIA—human intelligence and covert operations; NSA—signals intelligence and cyber; NGA—geospatial intelligence; DIA—military intelligence; and NRO—building, buying, launching, and flying reconnaissance systems in space.

  Eleven of the other Intelligence Community members were smaller offices, responsible for supporting their parent organizations. The four DOD service intelligence elements mostly served their respective military service: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Four other elements directly served Cabinet departments and secretaries: State, Treasury, Energy, and Homeland Security. And three other elements served large organizations within two other Cabinet departments: the Coast Guard within DHS, and the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI within the Justice Department. The intelligence component of the FBI, grown after 9/11, is a bit of an anomaly, as it is closer in scale to an actual agency, with a significant focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity. The FBI occupies a unique position, looking outward at threats beyond our borders, like the “Big Five” agencies, and inward at domestic threats, with one foot in each of the worlds of intelligence and law enforcement.

  The final IC element was the Office of the DNI. The ODNI was and is relatively small, particularly compared to the sprawling Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the ODNI wasn’t solely dedicated to coordinating budget and resources, as the USD(I) staff was. More than half of ODNI’s staff of fewer than two thousand people was and is focused on operational missions through their cross-community “centers”: the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC); the National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC), countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction; and the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX, later renamed the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, NCSC), monitoring other nations’ efforts to spy on us. In 2007, the ODNI added the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to conduct technology research for cross-community missions. In addition, the President’s Daily Brief Staff and the National Intelligence Council (which generates high-level community analytic products, including National Intelligence Estimates) work for the DNI. While ODNI operates as a default headquarters for the Intelligence Community, I came to consider it an active participant in the intelligence process and properly the seventeenth IC member. Years later, when I was DNI, our social media manager, Michael Thomas, succinctly summed up how the rest of the world views the ODNI: “If the CIA is the New York Yankees, we’re the Commissioner’s Office. We don’t have any fans, and no one buys our jerseys.”

  As USD(I), I was afforded access to the President’s Daily Brief for the first time in my career, and the best part of that access was my conversation each day with my assigned briefer. I still value the relationships I’ve had with those individuals over the years. My primary job, under the 2003 legislation that created USD(I), was making sure DOD intelligence components had the resources to operate, a task made easier by the fact that we were at war. As the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continued and we uncovered terrorist networks and plans to attack in the United States and Europe, every year we asked for an increase in funding for the Military Intelligence Program. And every year we got it.

  Much more difficult and controversial was granting authority. One of Bob Gates’s stated reasons for declining the DNI position had been the director’s lack of influence in hiring and firing IC component heads. Going completely against the Washington mantra of “Where you stand is where you sit,” Bob still felt the DNI should have at least some say over who led the IC agencies. We couldn’t give the DNI direct hiring authority without changing the IRTPA legislation, and Congress was having a hard enough time just passing a budget. So Bob, Mike, and I set out to remedy the situation as best we could, focusing on Executive Order 12333 (pronounced by everyone as “twelve triple-three”). President Reagan had signed this landmark executive order in 1981 as an underpinning for the organization, mission, authorities, and limits imposed on the IC. President Bush had last amended it in 2004, before IRTPA created the DNI. As a consequence, the executive order no longer comported with the spirit and intent of the law.

  Bob and Mike got White House approval to amend the executive order again, and I worked with David Shedd, one of Mike’s four deputy DNIs, to draft and coordinate new language with the White House. Our most significant proposed change was to stipulate that the secretary of defense coordinate with and receive the concurrence of the DNI to hire and fire directors of the four DOD agencies. For the military service intelligence chiefs, the respective secretaries were required to consult with the DNI. (Only in the government is the distinction between the words “consult” and “coordinate” so important.) The changes also gave the DNI authority to set IC collection and analysis priorities and to coordinate areas of responsibility.

  President Bush signed the revisions on July 30, 2008, and the next day Mike McConnell and I went to Capitol Hill to brief the House Intelligence Committee. In one of the most childish displays I ever saw on Capitol Hill—and that’s saying a lot—committee ranking member Pete Hoekstra stood up and led four Republicans out of the hearing room in protest over the fact that we’d changed an executive order—an executive order—without their concurrence. What made the display so absurd is that Mike and I were there representing a Republican administration, briefing them on an executive order being revised by a Republican president. I doubted the same thing had happened when President Reagan signed the original order in 1981.

  I found that my best work as USD(I) relied less on the authorities I had and more on the fact that I’d been around the intelligence business long enough to be acquainted with everyone involved. I’d met Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, when he was an up-and-coming Army major in the 1980s. Vice Admiral Bob Murrett had succeeded me at NGA, and we’d kept in contact. I’d known Lieutenant General Ron Burgess at DIA since he’d served as the senior intelligence officer for Southern Command, starting in 1999. And Scott Large and I got to know each other as we sorted through NRO’s major systems acquisitions.

  One of the other relationships that was invaluable was with Mike Vickers, who had a lengthy correspondence signature block as “Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities.” Basically, he conducted policy oversight for Special Operations Forces and for military activities that were more “spooky” than regular warfare—a large and growing field of work in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He also served as a networker among the special operations community, CIA, and the secretary of defense. Mike was uniquely qualified for this role, as he’d served behind the scenes in the CIA’s effort in the 1980s to arm and finance the mujahidin in Afghanistan to resist and eventually overthrow the Soviet occupation. Mike was a featured character in Charlie Wilson’s War, both the book and movie, and he was a legend among both intelligence officers and special operators.

  Mike and I spent many hours bonding in adjacent witness chairs in congressional hearings, and we traveled together a lot. One of the more interesting experiences of my career was going to Afghanistan with him in June 2009, visiting his old haunts as he narrated what had occurred in each place. I got a guided tour of the most successful covert action in history from a legendary figure who played a crucial role in making it all happen, who was also a great friend. I struggled to chronicle everything we saw, heard, and discussed
as we hit stops in multiple countries, and I took pages and pages of notes. When I got back to the office, I always found holes in my trip report, things I only vaguely remembered doing. Mike carried only a single three-by-five-inch card on which he took teeny-tiny notes, which he managed to turn into complete and readable novel-length reports that included every detail of our visits. I still don’t know how he did that.

  Years later, when I was DNI, Mike and his wife, Melana, invited Sue and me over to their house to watch Charlie Wilson’s War. Mike kept pausing the movie, sometimes to debunk what was happening onscreen and sometimes to elaborate and embellish. In the film, Mike’s character is introduced to the audience (and to Tom Hanks, playing Representative Charlie Wilson) as “the nerdy-looking kid in the white shirt,” who was playing chess against four guys simultaneously. One thing I learned while watching Charlie Wilson’s War at Mike’s house is that the real Mike Vickers doesn’t play chess.

  On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected to be our forty-fourth president. He had run on a campaign of “hope and change” and in large measure on not being George W. Bush. He was young and charismatic, and his father was black. I marveled on that day, and occasionally throughout his presidency, at just how far America had come in my lifetime. It was a tremendous milestone for our nation, and one I was very proud of us for. At the same time, I knew only a few months remained for me to cement the progress we’d made in defense intelligence before someone else took the job of USD(I).

  Of course, neither Bob nor his senior intelligence adviser—me—expected President-elect Obama to stage a covert meeting in a hangar at Reagan National Airport to ask Bob to stay on as Secretary of Defense. During the first week of December I was in Wellington, New Zealand, on yet another “farewell trip.” Having previously bid farewell to my Aussie and Kiwi counterparts as DIA director and as NGA director, I was getting pretty good at it. Then, on December 5, I got word via official communications channels that Bob was going to call me. I figured he wanted to thank me for my service, which would be the nice way of saying I was to be replaced. That shouldn’t have been an urgent matter, but Bob phoned at 9:30 A.M. on Friday in Washington—2:30 A.M. on Saturday in New Zealand. He informed me he was staying on as secretary and wanted me to continue as USD(I), but was checking to make sure I’d agree to do so before he approached the president-elect’s transition team. It took me a long few seconds to process his message, and I mumbled something about being honored that he’d ask me to stay, and that he didn’t need to check with Sue again. When I called Sue at a more reasonable hour, she was supportive, although she asked if the countdown clock she’d given me could be reset.

  In the following months, nearly all of the people I’d grown accustomed to working with turned their responsibilities over to successors. One choice of President Obama’s that I found baffling was Leon Panetta to lead CIA. Panetta was a politician—a former representative and President Clinton’s White House chief of staff—and his taking charge of the agency tasked with conducting human intelligence and covert actions made little sense to me. Politicians had a very mixed track record as CIA directors, and I recalled the short and controversial tenure of Porter Goss, who’d preceded Mike Hayden. Fortunately, I was very wrong about Leon. He has a great touch with people, and he became one of the most beloved and revered directors the agency has ever had.

  President Obama’s pick for DNI, retired four-star Navy Admiral Denny Blair, at least made sense to me, although I wondered if he was the right fit. The DNI job, like that of the USD(I), had very little line authority and required gentle powers of persuasion among close associates, but going in he didn’t have close relationships with any of the agency directors. Denny reminded me a lot of Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, whose military assistant I’d been at NSA, as he cut the same handsome, charismatic, articulate figure, and they had both finished their naval careers in the same demanding, high-profile job—commander of US Pacific Command. Remembering the surprise I’d felt in 1991 when the civilians at DIA didn’t necessarily move when I said “jump,” I wondered how someone who had distinguished himself in a career of military command would function in the culture of intelligence. Despite Gates, McConnell, Shedd, and my work revising EO 12333 the previous summer, the DNI still had very little real authority.

  My first interaction with Denny went a long way to alleviate my fears. He was amicable and interested in what I had to say, and as soon as he had grasped my dual-hat arrangement as Gates’s USD(I) and as his director of defense intelligence, he invited me to personally attend his senior staff meetings at ODNI headquarters, an offer on which I took him up. In the first few meetings the ODNI staff was reluctant to bring up “inside-baseball” issues in my presence, asking instead to discuss such matters privately. I, meanwhile, was very open about issues in DOD, asking for help where I could get it, and the staff soon decided I wasn’t there simply to spy on them and began to open up.

  A new wrinkle on the national intelligence stage under President Obama was John Brennan’s role as “Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and Assistant to the President,” another insufferably long title. John had been a career CIA officer and the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center, getting it up and running well before it was incorporated into ODNI in April 2005. People in Washington circles knew that President Obama had wanted John to be his CIA director, but being associated with the Bush CIA made confirmation difficult, and so John assumed a special advisory role in the White House. John and I weren’t intimate friends, but we’d held each other in mutual respect for some years. As USD(I), not involved with the substance of intelligence reporting, I didn’t see much of John until the final year of my tenure.

  Fortunately, none of the DOD agency directors were up for replacement because of the transition. Unfortunately, Blair, Gates, and I had to make a hard call with respect to the National Reconnaissance Office leadership. NRO was going through a difficult period, with a reorganization that didn’t “take” and still suffering the aftereffects of high-profile satellite system failures, notably the multibillion-dollar Future Imagery Architecture program, which was canceled in 2005 and, in 2008, lost control of a satellite that had to be destroyed in orbit. When the NRO director retired in April, we moved Betty Sapp, my USD(I) deputy for portfolio, programs, and resources, to NRO as the principal deputy director. She served as acting director until June, when we hired recently retired Air Force General Bruce Carlson. I didn’t like losing Betty from my staff, but having someone with her technical experience and disciplined nature at NRO was a big plus, in addition to having someone there with whom I worked well and whom I trusted. With Bruce and Betty in the front office, NRO began to dig itself out of a hole.

  Then, in the summer of 2009, Lieutenant General Ron Burgess took seriously an idea of mine that other generals might have considered half-baked. As DIA director, he had the same responsibilities to fill senior defense intelligence jobs as I’d had, way back when. While I’d once had to find a position for Brigadier General-select Mike Hayden, a problem easily resolved, Ron found that he had a gap in filling a critical post—specifically, the senior intelligence job for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. None of the qualified two-star generals or admirals could leave their current positions, and moving one of them early would mean moving everyone early, to backfill one another in the resulting daisy chain. I suggested to Ron that he appoint a civilian—Robert Cardillo—DIA’s director of analysis, to serve temporarily. Robert had spent most of his life as an analyst, but he’d been a great “utility infielder” for me at NGA, even running NGA’s public affairs and congressional affairs shops. I assured Ron that Robert could handle coordinating intelligence for the JCS and briefing Chairman Mike Mullen. Of course, it required a leap of faith, since no civilian had ever held that position before. Happily, Robert filled the yearlong gap successfully. Admiral Mullen had great regard for Robert and his work, Robert gained valuable experience
that would be very useful to him (and to me) later, and Ron was able to bring Robert back to DIA as his deputy director in 2010, filling another critical vacancy.

  For two and a half years, from April 2007 through November 2009, I managed to work in the trenches trying to strengthen both DOD and the IC and bringing both enterprises more closely together without drawing much public attention to my existence. But on November 5, 2009, Army major and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Nidal Hasan walked into a medical screening facility at Fort Hood, Texas, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!,” and began shooting, intentionally targeting soldiers in uniform over civilians and pursuing them as they fled the building. The rampage only ceased when Hasan stopped to change clips, and civilian police sergeant Mark Todd took him down with return fire. Thirteen people had been killed and another thirty-two injured. From the White House, John Brennan tasked the DOD, FBI, and NCTC with conducting a joint investigation into how an active-duty, commissioned Army officer could become radicalized without the Army’s knowing.

  The FBI’s superb deputy director, John Pistole, and I dug into the evidence and started conducting interviews. A number of Hasan’s coworkers testified that he was very upset about his impending deployment to Afghanistan, and others said he’d been torn about what he saw as a choice between the United States and Islam. We learned that Hasan had visited radical Islamist websites and expressed admiration for Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Islamist imam who’d counseled three of the 9/11 hijackers from his mosque in Virginia, and who—eight years later in Yemen—was radicalizing and recruiting Western Muslims to the cause of al-Qaida online. The FBI found sixteen emails ranging from December 2008 to June 2009 between the two, almost all from Hasan to Awlaki. The content of a few of those emails was concerning, particularly Hasan’s desire to see Awlaki again in the afterlife. Hasan had recently paid a visit to Guns Galore in nearby Killeen, and asked for whichever handgun had the “highest magazine capacity.” He’d purchased the weapon the next day, and then practiced firing it rapidly on a gun range until he was proficient.