Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  Both the optics and substance of your interactions with the DNI are crucial. If you consistently treat the DNI as your senior intelligence adviser, that in itself will empower the position. . . . If, on the other hand, you engage directly with the Director of CIA, without at least the knowledge—or preferably the participation—of the DNI, the stature and imputed authority of the DNI are marginalized accordingly.

  Thirdly, I agreed with Bob Gates’s idea that the DNI should function as something like an “avuncular, sage, strong Senate committee chairman, in the tradition of, say, John Warner or Sam Nunn,” bringing other leaders together on the merits of an idea, rather than issuing line orders. Further, I endorsed the idea that only a career intelligence officer could follow the model that Bob had set as DCI, explaining that because of his vast experience, “He was a ‘DNI’ way before anyone thought of it,” and concluding, “That, by the way, is a strength of the DNI arrangement—someone who can preside over the entire community, without the distraction of running a large, complex agency.”

  My fourth observation was that I would need to make some changes to the ODNI organizational structure and staff. My fifth was “I am a ‘truth to power’ guy.” I described the trouble that that conviction had gotten me into when I spoke my mind to the previous secretary of defense, and noted that I wasn’t going to change: “I would always insist on giving you privately the facts, to include what we don’t know.” Within that sentence, I’d deliberatively chosen the adverb “privately.”

  I thought those were five reasonable, defensible observations. My sixth, not so much:

  I have always sought to be “below the radar”; I do not like publicity. I’ve spent the last week cringing every time I saw my name in the paper, or my face on the tube. I think it is part of the unwritten code of professional intelligence officers to stay out of the media. I don’t believe the DNI should be out making speeches, appearing on talking-head shows, or giving interviews.

  I certainly didn’t believe the DNI should ever write a memoir.

  Finally, I noted that, if I was chosen as DNI, and “if the first inklings of discomfiture with me arise,” I would not be offended if asked to leave, and “There should be no agonizing over such a decision.” I signed it, “With great respect, Jim Clapper.” I never received a direct reply to the letter, although my later interactions with the president led me to believe he’d absorbed both its substance and intent.

  On Saturday, June 5, I returned to the Oval Office, this time so that the president could announce my nomination. Sue and Jennifer and her family accompanied me, and President Obama laughed and kidded with them, radiating his irresistible charm and good humor, putting all of us at ease. My two oldest grandkids, Ryan and Erin, were wide-eyed, both at meeting the president and just being in the White House. As we were walking out to the Rose Garden to face the phalanx of media cameras, the president paused and commented to Erin, “I appreciate your grandfather’s willingness to take on the second most thankless job in Washington.” I thought he was joking. Nope.

  On Monday I received a call from Kathleen Turner. I knew her from my time as DIA director as a sharp Soviet subject-matter expert who’d risen through the ranks to become at thirty-two the youngest DIA officer ever to reach senior executive. I’d appointed her as DIA’s human resources director, and after I moved on, she’d continued to impress in roles of increasing responsibility until, in 2005, she left DIA to serve as the first ODNI legislative affairs director. I was very happy to hear her say she’d be my Sherpa, my experienced and knowledgeable guide through the confirmation process. I was filling out volumes of paperwork from the White House, all the typical security clearance and conflict-of-interest forms, but also much more intrusive questions, such as what I might have ever written or said that could embarrass the president, and how I was getting along with my wife. They served as a fair warning of the public profile of the job I was about to take.

  I also got a call from Leon Panetta, congratulating me and inviting me to lunch with him and Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, whom I didn’t know personally and with whom I hadn’t always had the most positive and satisfying exchanges during hearings. Leon wanted both to help me with my confirmation and to begin repairing the breach between the CIA and ODNI. The lunch succeeded on both counts. I didn’t say much, but Leon slipped in some good words for me, reassuring Feinstein, who was skeptical of military retirees, that I’d taken off the active-duty uniform fifteen years earlier and left that mind-set behind me. I told her that as DNI I’d focus on integration of community efforts—the reason I felt Congress and the president had created the position. One of the few things she said directly to me over lunch confirmed the concern I’d expressed to the president: There would probably not be another chance to make the DNI concept work if it didn’t work this time.

  Leon helped me with one other issue that summer, something that probably contributed to my success more than any other. I told him I needed the principal deputy DNI to be a CIA person, someone who had insight into and credibility and influence with the agency, someone who could cover my blind spots when CIA issues came up. Leon offered his number three—Stephanie O’Sullivan, CIA’s associate deputy director. I knew her by reputation as a brilliant technical engineer who’d spent most of her career building systems to which I often didn’t have access. When we spoke, I told her my principal motivation in taking the DNI job was to make the enterprise better. I proposed that, generally, I’d work the outside—the White House, Congress, foreign partners, agency directors—if she’d work the inside—ODNI staff and Intelligence Community issues. This resonated with her, and we bonded right from the start.

  Of course, before I could put any of that into action, I had to be confirmed. Kathleen Turner guided me through meetings with each of the senators on the Intelligence Committee, who would all ask questions at my confirmation hearing and would ultimately vote on sending my name to the Senate floor. I laid out my case to each, and they all seemed to hear me out before turning to their own pet issues. Many expressed concerns about installing yet another retired military officer in a senior civilian intelligence position. I reminded them that I was one of only a few who had served as a military service intelligence chief, twice as an agency director—once in uniform and once in a suit—and as a political appointee at the undersecretary level, experience that gave me a fair understanding of what it took to make all of those jobs work, and that I would bring to bear as DNI. Many expressed serious doubts and warned again that I represented the last chance to get this right, but Kathleen always put a positive spin on events and, on more than one occasion, talked me down from backing out of the nomination.

  By far, the most comfortable meeting I had was with Senator Barbara Mikulski from Maryland. We already had a rapport from working through Base Realignment and Closure issues when I’d been NGA director. Senator Mikulski and I would both retire in January 2017, and in the seven years I worked with her, my impression never changed. She was the rare Capitol Hill politician who always advocated for her positions—which consistently included the IC and our workforce—but never let the culture of politics compromise her fundamental sense of right.

  Meanwhile, the defense intelligence world didn’t stop turning, and two important events occurred on my watch as USD(I) that summer. For several years, the Pentagon had faced the growing realization that it needed to organize for military activity in the cyber realm—both on defense and offense. In time-honored government tradition, we conducted a study while knowing the outcome we desired. Once the report was in hand, Secretary Gates ordered the establishment of US Cyber Command under US Strategic Command. CYBERCOM was to be formed at Fort Meade with NSA and led by the NSA director, since NSA was the center of expertise and had all the resources and capabilities for operating in cyberspace. Making CYBERCOM subordinate to STRATCOM and giving the NSA director another hat were intended to be temporary provisions until CYBERCOM
could take its training wheels off and operate independently. On May 21, Keith Alexander pinned on his fourth star and added another hat as the first CYBERCOM commander. Keith already had served for five years as NSA director, and I observed that his primary institutional instincts remained with NSA. His successor, Admiral Mike Rogers, put on both hats simultaneously, and his focus seemed to be more evenly balanced.

  The second notable event of that summer was the appointment of Tish Long as the third director of NGA (fifth, counting my NIMA predecessors). I had always assumed that I’d been named the third director of NIMA in 2001 because DOD wasn’t ready to name a woman—namely Joan Dempsey—as director of one of the five intelligence agencies. By 2010, we were ready, and more important, Tish was the most qualified and talented individual available to lead NGA. She’d served as the first chief information officer at DIA when I’d been director, and then had replaced Joan as the director of the GDIP staff; she’d also served as deputy director of naval intelligence and in a key leadership position with the USD(I) before moving to DIA as deputy director in 2006. I considered Tish a protégée, and in one of life’s happy coincidences, she took her oath of office as NGA director the same day I did as DNI—August 9. That’s getting a little ahead of the story.

  My confirmation hearing was finally scheduled for July 20. I’m still not sure whether to consider it fortunate or unfortunate that July 20 was day two of the Washington Post series “Top Secret America.” The articles were a collaboration between Dana Priest and William M. Arkin. Priest had won the Pulitzer Prize for Beat Reporting in 2006 with her work about CIA “black sites,” and had received acclaim again in 2007 for exposing the conditions veterans were enduring at Walter Reed. She and Arkin had spent two years doing research, and the Post was billing this series as her next big blockbuster. It was not. Its primary premise was that the combined US counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence enterprise was massively bloated. It reported that 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies worked in 10,000 locations across the United States, with an estimated 854,000 people holding security clearances. This revelation was met with a collective yawn.

  The original plan for “Top Secret America” was for the Post to put an interactive website online, on which anyone could see Google Street Views of places that Arkin and the Post believed were intelligence sites, alleging that an undisclosed, covert spy facility could be in any reader’s backyard! Without confirming to the Post whether any of their assessments were correct, intelligence officials, including Denny Blair, convinced the editors that publishing those addresses would invite attacks at those locations, and that the paper could be held criminally liable. The Post wisely decided not to publish actual addresses, and what they were left with was breathless reporting from Dana Priest, who recounted sitting at a table with an actual intelligence contractor (one of hundreds of thousands, according to her own reporting) and trying to access the DNI’s headquarters building unannounced, prompting “men in black” to “jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.” By the afternoon of July 19, the first “Top Secret America” article had fallen to second place on the Post’s website of the most-read stories, behind a commentary on people not giving up their seats on the Metro to people with disabilities.

  Day two of the series focused on how, in this huge enterprise, there were so many gosh darn contractors—people who worked for private companies hired by the government to perform jobs that it couldn’t fill with federal employees. After 9/11, when national security leaders assessed what the peace dividend had wrought, they realized they would have to pay private companies to quickly reconstitute the capabilities they’d lost through downsizing. By 2010, the pendulum had not swung back far enough toward hiring government employees with the necessary skill sets, but we were well aware of that fact. In a very narrow sense, the appearance of the Post series was fortunate for me, because it made the line of questions at my confirmation hearing predictable and generally within my knowledge wheelhouse, thanks to my time as USD(I).

  On the morning of the hearing, President Obama called to wish me luck—the first of only two direct phone calls I got from him. I told him I didn’t have a feeling for how the hearing would go, and he assured me it would be fine.

  Sue, Jennifer, Jay, my brother, Mike, and my sister, Chris, sat directly behind me, sending positive energy my way for the hearing and, I hoped, making the senators more reticent to publicly flog me in front of them. When it was my turn to speak, I acknowledged their support on the official Senate record, noting I’d had Sue’s for forty-five years at that point, and I observed that their seats were “more comfortable” than my small chair behind a small table with a thin microphone jutting toward my face. The senators were on a raised dais that extended in a U shape around me. Throughout the confirmation hearing, Senators Feinstein and Kit Bond, the senior Republican and committee vice chair, remained at the center of the dais, directing the action, while the other senators customarily took their seats only when it was their turn to ask questions, at which point the camera would cut to them.

  I think the morning’s theme was best captured by an off-microphone comment from Bond to Feinstein that did not make it into the official record or media reporting: “Welcome to our annual DNI confirmation,” which was indicative of a good bit of the cynicism held toward the very concept of the DNI, whether it could work, and whether I was up to the job, particularly as they seemed to view me as too beholden to DOD. Senator Bond noted that the Armed Services Committee had endorsed me, and that the Intelligence Committee didn’t regard that as necessarily to my benefit.

  After Senator Bond’s remarks, I greatly appreciated Senator Mikulski’s speaking up. In an exception to protocol, she took the microphone for several minutes before my opening statement, taking Feinstein and Bond to task: “I know we’ve been through four DNI confirmations, four DNIs,” she acknowledged, “and if there is a failure in or questions about the authority and the functionality of the DNI, then it’s incumbent on Congress to look at the legislation, but not necessarily fault the DNI nominee for the failures of the legislative framework.” She then preempted much of the criticism I’d receive that morning with a rousing defense, which I truly appreciated:

  One of the things in working with Mr. Clapper as head of the NGA was, again, his candor, his straightforwardness, his willingness to tell it like it is—not the way the top brass wanted to hear it—I thought it was refreshing and enabled us to work very well.

  I think that in this job he will be able to speak truth to power—which God knows we need it—and he will speak truth about power, which we also need. I would hope that as we say, oh, gee, we don’t know if we want a military guy chairing or heading the DNI, Mr. Clapper left the military service in 1995. He’s been a civilian. He doesn’t come with the whole extensive, often military staff that people bring with them when they take a civilian job. And I think in my mind he’s probably the best qualified to do this job, because he’s not only been a nighthawk standing sentry over the United States of America, but he’s actually run an intelligence agency and he’s actually had to run a big bureaucracy. And he’s had to run with sometimes very inadequate leadership at the top.

  So, we ought to give him a chance and I think we ought to hear what he has to say today.

  None of Senator Mikulski’s statement made it into the press reporting on the hearing, but a quote from Kit Bond, taken completely out of context, made it into every piece of media coverage. After a wonky exchange about comments I’d made a decade earlier that the Senate Intelligence Committee—instead of the Senate Armed Services Committee—should have authority over the Military Intelligence Program (MIP), Senator Bond talked about the problems inherent in having the two Senate committees divide oversight duties. I wanted to respond that the 9/11 Commission had judged congressional oversight of intelligence to be dysfunctional for precisely this reason, and that while the Intelligence Community had worked har
d to reform itself in that regard, Congress had taken no such steps. I also felt that the single best thing Congress could do to strengthen the DNI and to make post-9/11 intelligence reform successful would be to separate the National Intelligence Program from Cabinet budgets and make it a self-standing appropriation. I didn’t say any of that; I couldn’t, and he knew it. Still, Bond pressed me to agree that his committee should take oversight of the MIP. Out of a sense of self-preservation, I declined to advocate for either of the two committees, both of which I’d be reporting to if confirmed. Bond understood and laughed. Of the fight for budget control between the two committees, he said, “You have, as anyone around here knows, entered into the most deadly minefield in Washington, DC.” All of the headlines instead referred to the DNI post itself as “the most deadly minefield in Washington.”

  I survived the hearing, and the committee advanced my name to the full Senate. Before a vote could happen, though, two committee Republicans—Bond and Tom Coburn—each put a hold on my nomination, saying they wanted the administration to give them classified reports on the dangers posed by releasing Guantanamo Bay detainees. When they released their holds the first week of August, Senator McCain put another hold on me, asking for something else with no relation to me. The Senate was scheduled to adjourn for recess on Friday, August 6, for the rest of the month, and it looked as though they would leave without voting on my appointment.

  National Security Adviser Jim Jones told me that if they didn’t hold a vote, President Obama would make a recess appointment. I warned Jim that because the DNI’s authorities were already ambiguous, an appointment without Senate confirmation would only further weaken the position. I told him that if the Senate adjourned without voting on me, I would withdraw. On Thursday night, August 5, I attended a social event at which C-SPAN was on in the background—it was that kind of party. Well into the evening, Senator Harry Reid was presiding over votes on the floor. We watched as he called for a vote on measure 1019, my nomination. None of the senators present (if there were any, since C-SPAN is not allowed to pan the gallery) opposed my nomination. As they moved onto the next measure. I simply shook my head and stared at the screen. Just like that, after all that drama, I’d been confirmed.