Conceptually, changing the President’s Daily Briefs was pretty simple, but merging two of ODNI’s larger offices into a single force for leading the integration of the intelligence production cycle across seventeen agencies and elements was more complex, to say the least. Fortunately, this was yet another area in which I was very fortunate to have exemplary work on which to build. In ODNI’s first year, John Negroponte had established “mission managers” to focus on leading community approaches to difficult intelligence problems—initially North Korea and Iran. In 2010, the Iran mission manager was Norm Roule, who had turned his office into a coordination center, pulling together intelligence from around the community, piecing together the overall picture on everything from the nuclear reactor at Bushehr to political opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. His group was lining up the human and signals intelligence with overhead reconnaissance and defining gaps in collection—things our sources couldn’t tell us. Social media became an important component of understanding Iran after the 2009 elections and the “Green Movement” protests, which were the largest demonstrations in the thirty years since the Iranian revolution. Norm’s office wasn’t running an operation or doing any collection on Iran. It was simply helping the agencies understand each other’s work and coordinating so they could work together more effectively.
Robert and I wanted to use that model to create seventeen national intelligence managers, some whose geographic areas of responsibility would be roughly analogous to the DOD combatant commands—like NIM-Europe and NIM-Africa—and others functional—like NIM-Cyber and NIM-Counterterrorism. Using what Norm’s office was doing as a template, each NIM would create a strategy to make the most of the IC’s collection and analysis capabilities and to identify where we should invest in new ones. We envisioned, given a year or more for all seventeen NIM offices to establish themselves and the unifying intelligence strategies for their areas of responsibility, that they would be able to work together to put rigor behind the compilation of all the government’s intelligence needs, the top tier of which was made up of the president’s priorities.
Increasingly my own time was consumed with requests from the White House and Congress. On Monday, December 20, I visited Capitol Hill to answer questions from senators who were about to vote on New START—the updated Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty between Russia and the United States, which was up for ratification. I sat in a small room from 1:00 P.M. to 3:30, and Pat Roberts was the only senator to stop by. When the designated time was up, I went straight to my SUV, and my protective detail drove me to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to participate in an interview with Diane Sawyer of ABC News, along with John Brennan and Janet Napolitano. I’d been out of communications for almost four hours, and I didn’t bother to check my BlackBerry during the short ride, a mistake I came to regret and tried never to repeat.
On camera, Ms. Sawyer opened with “First of all, London—how serious is it? Any implication that it was coming here? Director Clapper?” I didn’t have a clue what her cryptic question referred to. She looked at me until I finally asked, “London?” John jumped in and explained that the UK had just made a series of arrests of suspected terrorists. I’d been following the surveillance in and around the London area but hadn’t known about the arrests. Sawyer smelled blood, and came back to the subject a little later, commenting, “I was a little surprised you didn’t know about London.” I was a little irritated at that point and realized I was in trouble, but responded, “I’m sorry, I didn’t.” John, to his great credit, complained to Sawyer about her stunt after the interview.
ABC waited twenty-four hours to air the interview and recut it to make me look completely out of touch. As was the reflexive response in Washington, some members of Congress called for me to be fired. After an NSC meeting, the president asked me to walk with him back to the Oval Office. He assured me that I had his confidence and enjoined me to learn a lesson from the experience, which I did: Always know what’s in the headlines going into any interview. I got a very nice note from Secretary Clinton, which closed with the sentiment, “Finally, as a longtime observer—and sometimes victim—of the press ‘gotcha game,’ don’t let the First Amendment get you down! All the best, Hillary.”
In contrast to that bad day, February 18, 2011, was an extremely happy one for me, when Stephanie O’Sullivan was confirmed and became the principal deputy DNI—the PDDNI—which she pronounced as “P-Diddy.” Before Stephanie’s arrival, I could assign big tasks to tremendously talented staff members and know they’d get done, but I still felt obligated to keep track of all the things I’d delegated. Stephanie stood beside me and helped shoulder the entire load. We approached problems from very different viewpoints: me as a political science major and former Air Force officer who’d spent a career in the defense intelligence ecosystem, she as an engineer who’d started her career designing and building marvelous technology projects and then gone on to build teams of engineers and eventually—as CIA’s director of science and technology—lead an organization of some of the most brilliant scientists and technologists in the world. Although we approached intelligence challenges from widely contrasting perspectives, I can’t recall a time when we ever disagreed about priorities or how to respond to them. More than once, I publicly adapted a line I’d first heard from Bob Gates: “Stephanie speaks for me, even when we haven’t spoken.”
While Stephanie could speak for me, I was still less than comfortable speaking publicly for the community. A few weeks after she arrived, I managed to cause yet another distraction, this one during our annual series of worldwide threat assessment hearings. Every year between February and April, the DNI, accompanied by selected IC agency directors, appears in open hearings before the intelligence and armed services committees to discuss the threats to the United States and our allies around the world. These open hearings are fraught with potential pitfalls. One, of course, is the risk of compromising sources, methods, and tradecraft. Another is unintentionally offending another country—on at least three occasions, one of our ambassadors got summoned by a head of state to answer for something I said during testimony as DNI. A third pitfall is that the televised hearings could turn into a game of “stump the chump,” in which congressional members asked about parochial interests or obscure happenings in the far corners of the world, or about classified programs they knew I couldn’t discuss in open sessions. This led me to lament, years later, that talking to Congress publicly about classified intelligence matters while trying to protect vital intelligence sources and methods is one of my favorite things to do—ranking right up there with undergoing oral surgery and folding fitted sheets. I was often struck by the contrast in how congressional members would often seem to play to the camera in open session, but when we’d adjourn to a closed, secure room to talk about the classified details, discussions were more businesslike and less frequently polemical. I can validate what Bob Gates wrote: When “the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf.”
In March, I got into trouble on camera—again—when Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia asked me, in an awkwardly worded question, which nation-state posed the greatest threat to the United States—not a threat to US interests, but to the United States. I tried to clarify the question, and then responded that only Russia and China, with their nuclear arsenals, posed a “mortal threat.” I added the caveat that I was talking about “capability,” and that “intent” was an entirely different matter. I also said that my biggest immediate concern was still non-nation-state terrorism. I wound up offending Russia and China, and once again the “fire the DNI” refrain arose.
While all this was taking place, I was brought in on an extremely closely held intelligence project. Since September 11, 2001, the United States Intelligence Community had one mission that surpassed all others, at least emotionally: to find, and capture or kill, Osama bin Laden. In early 2011 we finally had a promising lead on his
whereabouts. Truly stellar intelligence work by some dedicated analysts from CIA, NSA, and NGA had tracked him to a small compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, near the Pakistan Military Academy. Collecting intelligence on the compound was a particularly difficult problem, because the site was a hundred miles from the Afghanistan border. Pakistan was a key ally in the Afghan war, and the bulk of our supply lines traversed it, yet we didn’t trust the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency—at all. In fact, they had a history of tipping off targets (targets for us, proxies for them) ahead of raids. At the same time, the Pakistanis were very suspicious about US intelligence, which made it difficult to conduct human intelligence work. It was hard not to wonder if some of the Pakistanis knew bin Laden was in Abbottabad and were protecting him.
Bin Laden himself went to extreme lengths to minimize his exposure to prying eyes and cameras that might see into the compound’s garden. While we had glimpses of a “tall man in white” strolling there, intelligence analysts were unable to identify any communications that would verify his presence, given his meticulous communications-security discipline. In the end, while CIA experts led the effort to confirm that the man was in fact bin Laden, it was really superb teamwork and intelligence integration that built the case. The CIA has rightly received a great deal of credit for their incredible work, but the ensuing raid would not have happened without the efforts of NSA and NGA as well.
As spring approached, the briefings to National Security Adviser Tom Donilon became more intense, urgent, and frequent. Two questions consumed those meetings: How certain were we that bin Laden was there? And what would be the best way to capture or kill him? Each senior member of the national security team, including me, had different perspectives and levels of confidence in the intelligence we had. By March and April, we were meeting regularly with the president and vice president and discussing four options: obliterate the compound with an air strike (in a suburban setting, in a nation we weren’t at war with), use a remotely piloted drone to perform a more surgical strike, conduct a special operations raid, or continue to gather more intelligence. Other accounts I’ve read discount option four, but without confirmation that bin Laden was in the compound, doing nothing and continuing to watch was a perfectly valid response. It risked losing bin Laden again, but didn’t risk jeopardizing Pakistani support. The analysts who had been tracking him, some for years, felt sure it was bin Laden, and though the CIA tried several innovative approaches to obtain confirmation, by April we hit the point at which we feared doing more would tip either bin Laden or the Pakistanis that we were wise to his whereabouts. The longer we waited, the more concerned we became about an inevitable leak. Sometimes, speaking difficult truths means admitting what we don’t know for certain and leaving the decision maker with a tough call to make.
The final interagency briefing occurred on Thursday, April 28. The analysts presented their best case and concluded that, short of bin Laden’s slipping up by taking a stroll outside the compound, the intelligence we had was as good as it was going to get. The president went around the table and asked each of us for our opinion on what course of action to take. Most felt the intelligence was sufficient enough to act upon, and most favored the raid. Bob Gates, who was personally responsible for any troops who would be put at risk, preferred the drone strike option. Vice President Biden had low confidence that the intelligence warranted the risk, and he preferred maintaining vigilance and taking no direct action. When it came around to me, I told the president that, because this was a policy decision, I was speaking as Jim Clapper and not as the DNI. I said that I preferred the idea of the raid, because special operators on the ground were rational actors, who could change the plan if they discovered that bin Laden wasn’t there or that the compound was something other than what we thought it was. I told him I felt confident in the intelligence, because the experts most intimately involved had a high degree of confidence. As was the president’s practice, he did not make a decision at this meeting, preferring to contemplate it further outside the Situation Room. Again, I thought of the quote from General George Patton: “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”
The following day I was told the president had made the courageous—and what proved to be correct—decision for elite Special Operations Forces to conduct a raid on April 30. As has been well documented, he and several others of the group planned to be at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Saturday night, which would have meant our all quietly slipping out to monitor the progress of the raid, but because the weather in Pakistan turned bad the raid was postponed until Sunday.
The president was in rare form at the Correspondents’ Dinner, which took place just a few days after the state of Hawaii had released his long-form birth certificate, putting an end to the conspiracy theory that he was born in Kenya. Halfway through his eighteen-minute comic monologue that night, the president turned to Donald Trump, sitting three tables away from me, who had been leading the “birther” conspiracy charges. The president said, “Now, I know that he’s taken some flak lately, but no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than ‘The Donald,’ and that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter, like: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?”
President Obama spent two and a half minutes poking fun at Trump, drawing laughter and applause throughout. He closed the bit with, “Say what you will about Mr. Trump, he certainly would bring some change to the White House,” and the screens around the room showed a Photoshopped image of the White House turned into a tacky hotel with “Trump” emblazoned across the front in neon lights. Trump smiled and waved, but after the cameras turned away, I could tell he was seething. The president remained calm, cool, and collected throughout the evening; he must have realized that anything he said at the dinner would likely be overshadowed within twenty-four hours.
On Sunday morning, we gathered again in the Situation Room. Admiral Bill McRaven was in Afghanistan controlling the mission, although given its nature, the operation was conducted as a covert action under CIA authorities, and so Leon Panetta was nominally in charge at CIA headquarters. Much to Leon’s credit, he made no effort to foster the optic that he was in command or to interfere with Bill’s leadership.
Remembering stories of President Nixon ordering air strikes in Vietnam, Tom Donilon was concerned that we not convey the image that the White House was micromanaging the raid, and so we started out in the Situation Room, all staring at a blank screen. As Bob Gates notes in his memoir, Duty, Air Force Brigadier General Marshall Webb was in a small adjoining “breakout” room, monitoring a video feed of the compound, and we eventually all drifted in and crowded around him. President Obama refused to take the seat at the head of the table. After losing my seat to Denis McDonough when I took a bathroom break, I wound up standing behind Hillary Clinton to watch. That’s where we were when White House photographer Pete Souza snapped the famous photograph, not in the Situation Room, but in a breakout room, just across the hall.
Given the historical importance of that photo, I would make two observations. One: Robert Cardillo, who was sitting to Vice President Biden’s right, was literally cropped out of history. Two: I want to take a rare opportunity to correct Bob Gates. In his memoir, he notes that the photo was later famously Photoshopped to portray everyone as superheroes. Bob writes, “Obama was Superman; Biden, Spiderman; Hillary, Wonder Woman; and I, for some reason, was the Green Lantern.” No, Bob. Biden was the Flash, and you were the Martian Manhunter. My comic-book collection may have been lost to antiquity, but I remember. Denis McDonough was Photoshopped as Green Lantern, and that would have been me if he hadn’t taken my seat.
To answer the othe
r question often raised about the photo—yes, it was that tense in the room. As Bob notes, we watched as the first helicopter crashed. Bill McRaven came over our link to reassure us that the raiders would go to a backup plan, which they did, but we still worried about the mission and egressing the compound. When the team went into the house there was nothing but silence for what seemed like an eternity. Finally we heard “Geronimo—EKIA.” “Geronimo” was the code word for Osama bin Laden, and “EKIA” meant “enemy killed in action.”
I think everyone in that room appreciated what a courageous decision the president had made in ordering the raid. We’d all played out the scenarios for what might happen if the attack went wrong, either by the Pakistanis being alerted to the plan, by American forces encountering resistance on the ground, or by their inability to get access to the compound—or if the intelligence had been wrong.
The public history of US intelligence traditionally reads as a narrative of failures and shortcomings, certainly dating back to the US misadventure in Southeast Asia. These include our virtual nonparticipation in Grenada, our failure to foresee precisely the collapse of the Soviet Union, not serving General Schwarzkopf well with imagery during the Gulf War, and our having very little foundational intelligence for Somalia and later Afghanistan. Errors were made that led to massive tragedies, such as allegedly not “connecting the dots” to prevent 9/11, and then connecting dots that weren’t really there, which helped to lead us into Iraq. And there were mistakes that could have ended in tragedy and didn’t, like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarding a flight on Christmas Day 2009 with explosives in his underwear.
When we get it right, though—when we stop someone from boarding a plane bound for the United States or when we prevent dangerous materials from being shipped across borders—we almost never discuss it publicly, mostly because we don’t want to lose our ability to repeat our success. And here’s the interesting point about intelligence officers and special operators working together on that particular raid: On almost any given night, similar raids built on similar partnerships were almost certainly occurring somewhere in Afghanistan. We were having success after success, devastating al-Qaida and the Taliban leadership, and not revealing our achievements or the operations that led to them—unless the operation went wrong, which meant a tragedy that required a public accounting. In planning the Abbottabad raid together, our communities had certainly discussed our hope that within Osama bin Laden’s house, we’d find the intelligence that would enable operations to put the final nail in the coffin of al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
Facts and Fears Page 20