On December 9, we held a press conference, and John told members of the media that Hasan had been in electronic communication with an FBI target. It didn’t take the media long to figure out that it meant that Hasan had emailed Awlaki. In the months that followed, John and I answered a lot of questions from a lot of people, including in closed congressional hearings. As people sought to assign blame, I was continually reminded of Terry Schwalier and the Khobar Towers attack, and how hindsight is always 20/20. But as I was asked again and again why FBI or intelligence elements hadn’t been reading Hasan’s emails and monitoring his internet usage before his rampage, a new, unsettling thought occurred to me: I wondered just how intrusive people wanted or expected us to be. Hasan was an American citizen, a commissioned officer in the Army, and a psychiatrist. Did he give up his privacy rights or right to practice his religion when he became an active-duty service member? When he visited radical sites online? The FBI determined they didn’t have enough evidence to get a warrant for a search. Did Americans want their Intelligence Community to start monitoring citizens without a warrant? How many steps away from a Stasi-type environment were we? As we concluded our investigation and briefed executive and legislative branch leaders, I didn’t find any satisfactory resolution to these unsettling questions. I still haven’t.
In the midst of struggling with the quandary of how to protect both public safety and individuals’ right to privacy, I witnessed one of the most morally courageous acts I’ve ever seen. On January 27, in his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama announced his intent to repeal the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in DOD, thus allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly. Secretary Gates and JCS Chairman Mullen were called to testify on the proposed repeal six days later. In their opening statements, both spoke in support of the president’s position, while cautioning that DOD needed time to study how the repeal would affect troops, particularly those deployed in war zones. This was the circumspect, reasoned, well-justified position of the department. At the conclusion of his opening statement, Mike said six words that always riveted my attention: “Speaking for myself and myself only.”
Generals and admirals are expected to answer congressional questions candidly, giving their personal views when asked. In my experience presenting both intelligence briefings and sworn testimony as a general officer and as a senior civilian, I had been very careful to differentiate between when I was speaking for the government and when I was breaking with the party line of the bureaucracy—the “company policy,” as I called it—knowing that expressing my personal views could influence decisions in ways for which my bosses and the institutions we represent may not have been prepared. For the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make any such remark, particularly planned and scripted in his opening statement, was of consequence. Pausing just a moment, Admiral Mullen addressed his personal views to Senator Carl Levin:
Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity—theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.
For the seventeen years since the imposition of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, no service chief had spoken publicly against the policy, and no service chief, much less a JCS chairman, had ever advocated for allowing gay service members to serve openly. On February 2, 2010, the JCS chairman spoke truth to power, in the process pointing out that an institution—his institution—that placed a premium on personal integrity was forcing its members to sacrifice theirs. To me, at least, Mike’s simple, direct statement made the moral obligation to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell self-evident. In the span of twenty-nine seconds, Mike Mullen forever became a personal hero of mine, after which I would always consider lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues from the perspective he expressed that day.
Simultaneous with the Fort Hood shooting investigation and the initial efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I watched from the sidelines as Denny Blair’s tenure as DNI began to unravel. For much of 2009, he and Leon Panetta had been in a bureaucratic spat over whether the CIA director or the DNI should designate the senior intelligence officer at a given foreign location. The whole idea of having a CIA station chief was to make a senior person cognizant of all US intelligence activity taking place in the country in question, who was in turn accountable to the diplomatic chief of mission there—typically the ambassador. This arrangement had been memorialized in an agreement between Secretary Rumsfeld and DCI Porter Goss. Denny could, and did, make an argument for the DNI to be able to pick someone outside CIA to be the senior officer, for instance, in a country where NSA has a larger US intelligence footprint than CIA. Either way, it seemed to me to be a less than critical issue on which to draw a line in the sand, but that’s where Denny chose to draw his line.
Leon, for his part, was right to push back, both on principle and because, in the charged atmosphere of 2009, the CIA workforce needed someone to have their back. Both public opinion and elected officials had turned against the agency over work it had carried out—work that it had been ordered by the president to do, that was deemed legal, and that was approved by those briefed in Congress. And many in the CIA believed it had been critical to preventing another tragedy in the years immediately after 9/11. Particularly frustrating was the fact that the programs in question—the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “extraordinary rendition” to black sites—had ended long before many in the agency were even aware of their existence.
Leon was not going to acquiesce, but even those circumstances could have been worked out if he and Denny had held the argument in private. Instead, Denny issued a cable—an official communication—notifying everyone overseas that he was in charge of picking the senior intelligence officer in each station. CIA officers took that as yet another attempt to marginalize the agency and its traditional authorities abroad. Leon immediately issued a cable countermanding Denny’s. Denny in turn appealed to the White House, essentially to determine if he was in fact in command of the Intelligence Community. In October Vice President Biden brought the two men into his office to mediate their differences. Leon wasn’t giving ground, and Denny wasn’t disposed to mediation with someone he felt reported to him, so it was left to Biden to make the final call. Weeks later he decided in favor of the CIA and Leon. Denny had picked his battle and lost.
The situation worsened on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian man aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, tried to set off plastic explosives hidden in his underwear. The explosives fizzled, setting his underwear on fire. Other passengers noticed what was happening and overwhelmed him with physical force. In the weeks that followed the attempted attack, the White House identified shortcomings at the National Counterterrorism Center, made worse by NCTC director Mike Leiter’s delay in returning from a ski vacation upon learning of the attack. NCTC postured itself as independent, but Leiter worked for Denny, and when John Brennan, the founding NCTC director, pointed out NCTC’s problems, it reflected poorly on Denny.
In the years since 2010, people have theorized that Denny Blair didn’t last as DNI because of his feud with Leon Panetta, or because of the “intelligence failure” regarding Abdulmutallab, or because of any of his public gaffes, gaffes that we’re all prone to. I simply think he was an intelligent, capable, patriotic man who was not the best fit for that particular job. He had thirty-four years of experience in uniform as a consumer of intelligence, leading to his command of all US forces for more than half the surface of the globe. I learned later that as DNI, he’d forcefully engaged White House and National Security Council meetings with his views on how, when,
and where to project force, which makes sense in the context of Denny Blair, presidential adviser. As a lifelong intelligence officer, I instinctively live by the first, fundamental, unwritten law of intelligence work: Speak straight, unbiased intelligence truth to power, and leave the business of policy making to the policy makers. I’ve described all this here not to criticize Denny, but because his experience had an impact on decisions I would make when I succeeded him, and it influenced how I dealt with the IC leadership, particularly the three CIA directors who served during my tenure as DNI.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Second Most Thankless Job in Washington
In early April 2010, with Denny Blair still on the job, Bob Gates called me to his office and said simply, “Jim, we need you to be the DNI.” My immediate response was a flat no. I’d watched three successive DNIs in less than five years struggle with the responsibility of occupying a Cabinet-level position without congruent legislative authorities. The DNI was tasked to be the president’s senior adviser and to lead, integrate, and manage the consolidated budgets of seventeen disparate intelligence organizations, transforming them into an actual Intelligence Community, but had zero line authority over any agency. I knew all too well from my time at the NIMA/NGA how hard it could be to integrate different cultures, and NIMA had involved only two groups of people, both within the agency I directed. Fifteen of the seventeen organizations for which the DNI was responsible reported to six Cabinet departments, led by six Cabinet secretaries, and the legislation that established the DNI included a clause granting deference to those secretaries. I wasn’t sure it was possible to actually do the job of DNI. Moreover, as I told Bob then, I was pushing seventy (today, of course, I’m dragging it closer to eighty), and I had absolutely no interest in enduring another confirmation process.
Most important, I’d already taken two postretirement jobs with Sue barely acquiescing. I’d retired after DIA at her behest, and it seemed to me that it was again time for us to follow her wishes. That night I told her about the job offer and how I’d declined it, expecting she’d be pleased and impressed. Instead, much to my surprise and chagrin, she replied, “How could you turn that down?” Once again I found myself in a late-night conversation in which Sue tried to straighten out my priorities over a glass or two of wine. She argued that this job was fundamentally different from NGA director or undersecretary. The DNI’s scope was wider, I would have a chance to make a difference for the entire community, and I’d be working directly with the president. The next morning I dropped off a note to Bob that read, “I talked to Sue and thought about it, and if you and the president think I’m the right person for the job, I’ll do it.”
I then went back to work as USD(I) and heard nothing for weeks. On Tuesday, May 4, I was on my way to Andrews Air Force Base for a flight to Ottawa to meet with my Canadian intelligence counterparts, when Robert Rangel, Bob’s chief of staff, called to say I had an appointment with the president the following morning. When I told him I was on my way to Andrews to fly to Ottowa, he replied, “You don’t understand. You have an appointment with the president tomorrow—alone.” He explained that it would be an interview for the DNI position. I believe my entire response was “Oh,” and I canceled my trip.
I arrived in the anteroom outside the Oval Office fifteen minutes early. Over the next seven years, I’d get to know that anteroom well. It wasn’t much bigger than a few office cubicles, but it was a central hub, with one door leading to the main entrance to the Oval, another to a hallway toward the Roosevelt Room, a third to the Cabinet room, and a fourth leading to the president’s outer office and a back entrance to the Oval. When I was finally led to the Oval Office entrance, I saw President Obama standing at a credenza in front of his scheduler’s desk, casually looking over the front pages of a pile of newspapers. He looked up, gave me his patented smile, stepped over, and shook my hand. I have no doubt that his greeting was choreographed to put me at ease. I don’t recall precisely what he said, but after some pleasantries, he gestured for me to follow him into the Oval—another room I would get to know very well.
This wasn’t my first time in the Oval Office, as earlier in my career I’d been part of a group of “straphangers” attending a personnel announcement there. But this was certainly my first time alone with a president, an experience even Cabinet secretaries seldom have. It would be repeated for me twice more in the next seven years—both times for discussions about replacements for the CIA director. I observed, as I entered, that the office is designed to impress and intimidate. My eyes took in the blue presidential seal, embedded directly in the center of the oval rug. Rays of gold and bronze radiated out from it across the rug and projected onto the vertically striped walls. Between my meeting in May and my first President’s Daily Brief in September, President Obama would swap out the radiant rug for a solid, cream colored one with a white presidential seal. His more muted color scheme projected a still confident but more relaxed commander in chief, one who embraced the power of the office but equally exhibited the humility inherent in his character.
At one end of the room under three tall windows stood the famous “Resolute desk,” constructed from the timbers of HMS Resolute, a British ship trapped in Arctic ice, abandoned in 1854, and then recovered and returned by Americans two years later. When Resolute was retired, Queen Victoria had the massive, ornate, and magnificent desk made and presented it to President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1880 as a sign of gratitude and friendship. It both symbolizes and embodies the power and grandeur of the office of the president. I rarely saw President Obama behind that desk, except during signing ceremonies and photo ops.
At the other end of the room, a portrait of George Washington hung over the fireplace mantle. The president walked over to the chair to Washington’s left, motioning for me to join him in the chair to Washington’s right, which Oval Office etiquette typically reserved for the vice president or foreign dignitaries. He asked how I felt about taking the DNI job, letting me present my prepared talking points up front. I told him I hadn’t campaigned for the job, that I was nearly seventy years old and “already had one foot in assisted living,” but acknowledged that I was a “duty guy at heart,” and if asked, I’d do my best. I felt that the DNI was an important position and a vast improvement from the DCI system, because the Intelligence Community leader is not a part-time job for an agency director. He chuckled at my “assisted living” line and said I looked as if I was in pretty good shape. He asked if I worked out, and I told him my schedule of alternating days between lifting weights and doing cardio. We talked about balancing the rigors of our jobs with taking care of ourselves and kept it light, but he was clearly taking stock of me. After about fifteen minutes, he smiled, rose, shook my hand, and walked me out.
The next day, I visited Bob in his office and discussed the interview. I enjoyed shooting the breeze with the president, but I had more thoughts on what it would take to make the DNI job actually work that I hadn’t had a chance to express. Bob suggested I write a letter to President Obama, which he would personally hand deliver.
On Thursday, May 20, Denny Blair announced his resignation. The media hyperventilated, speculating about what had happened to prompt his removal. Many associated it with a May 18 Senate report on Abdulmutallab’s Christmas Day attempt to set off explosives aboard Flight 253. Since the release of that report, I’d been rumored as Denny’s replacement, and after his resignation, my face was all over the cable news networks. I sat down to finish my letter to the president, writing that I hoped my thoughts would be “universally” useful to him, whether I ended up as the official nominee or not. I also cautioned, “I think the position of DNI has about one more chance to succeed before the Congress gets serious about trying something else (e.g., a ‘Department of Intelligence,’ which I think would pose major civil liberties challenges).” I didn’t share my experience of touring the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin, and I didn’t express how strongly the idea of an
all-powerful American intelligence czar went against my perception of who we were as a nation.
In the two and a half weeks since Bob had suggested I write a letter, I’d wondered about just how candid I should be. Finally, with the understanding that if I couldn’t write complete truth in that letter, I would never be able to do justice for the Intelligence Community and the country as DNI, I decided that President Obama deserved my full candor, so I offered seven key observations.
Regarding his expectations, I wrote:
If the expectation is that the DNI—and the Community which he/she is the nominal leader—is to be held to the standard of perfection, batting 1.000 all the time, then you may want to look for someone who is far more clairvoyant than I. Too often people confuse mysteries and secrets, and expect the Intelligence Community (IC) to be equally adept at divining both. We’re not. In the minds of many in the IC, Denny Blair’s departure seems to substantiate the old simplistic saw about there being only two conditions in public life: policy success or intelligence failure.
My second point concerned defining some “lanes in the road” for the relationships between CIA director Leon Panetta, Homeland Security Adviser John Brennan, and the next DNI, “first and foremost in your mind, and then, of course, to them, and importantly, for the Intelligence Community at large. Right now, there is confusion about who is really in charge of intelligence and what you expect of each.” Further:
Facts and Fears Page 17