Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  As we approached Election Day, the attack had morphed into “the Benghazi scandal.” By then the conspiratorial narrative on cable networks and internet-driven news sites held that President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton had knowingly left the State Department vulnerable to a plot by al-Qaida and had then called off the rescue teams. Further, it claimed that the IC was complicit in a cover-up. I ascribed all of this to desperate political maneuvers and hoped it would go away after the election. On Tuesday, November 6, President Obama won reelection handily. On December 18 the Accountability Review Board released its report, finding flaws in State Department security decisions and assigning fault without demonizing anyone. It also lent no credence to any of the conspiracy theories that had been circulating. In February 2013, Clinton, as long planned, resigned as secretary of state and was succeeded by Senator John Kerry. Susan Rice, who had unjustly become a favorite political punching bag after her television appearances the past September, anticipating that a confirmation hearing would become a circus, had pulled her name from contention for the post, and President Obama named her to replace Tom Donilon as national security adviser.

  In a sane world, the House and Senate might have each quietly conducted an investigation to review the State Department Accountability Review Board’s conclusions. But Washington post-Benghazi was no longer a sane political world. Over the next four years, investigations were undertaken by the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, the House Committee on the Judiciary, and the House Committee on Armed Services. Finally, in May 2014, twenty months after the attack, Speaker of the House John Boehner commissioned the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Each of these Republican-led committees attacked Hillary Clinton, who everyone assumed would be the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. The House Benghazi Committee released its report on June 28, 2016, less than two weeks after Clinton secured the nomination.

  Matt Olsen and I spent a great deal of time briefing these various committees, describing what happened that night based on the garbled and contradictory accounts of eyewitnesses, and evidence from the security camera, Predator, and cell-phone videos. NGA produced three-dimensional depictions of the State Department facility and the CIA annex, including the routes between the facilities along which the State Department and CIA people had fled. Our presentation, particularly the security-camera video of the looters and vandals, was compelling. When we shared it with the president, he felt it both debunked the myths surrounding the attack and helped him visualize what had actually happened. I urged that we declassify the presentation, publish it, and publicly answer any questions it raised, but the White House and Justice Department pushed back, fearing it might jeopardize future prosecutions. In 2014, US Special Operations Forces captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, the leader of Ansar al-Sharia. In November 2017, he was found guilty of providing material support to terrorists and of three other charges and acquitted on fourteen others, including counts of murder. I hope that people who are interested in the truth will one day have a chance to see our presentation, including the security and Predator videos, NGA graphic projections, and our reconstruction of events.

  None of the congressional committees ever rose above political narratives to objectively and dispassionately investigate what had happened at Benghazi. Matt and I were always asked if the attack was terrorism, and we always answered yes, it fit the definition, but that that was a very low bar to clear. Terrorism is an ideologically motivated attack on civilians, intended to intimidate or coerce them into a certain course of action. The attacks on the State Department facility and the CIA annex fit those parameters, which is why President Obama referred to them as an “act of terror” when he spoke about them publicly on September 12. But defining them as terrorism is not the same as saying that al-Qaida was behind the attack. I don’t believe there was any real connection between Ansar al-Sharia and al-Qaida before September 11, 2012, although al-Qaida was all too eager to claim them after they struck a blow against the infidel Americans. Beyond that, the mere fact that it was an act of terrorism does not justify the need for eight separate congressional investigations. During President George W. Bush’s administration, twelve separate incidents met the same definition of terrorist attacks on US diplomatic facilities. More than sixty people died in those instances, and none of them generated much congressional interest. So I have a hard time believing the investigations were ever really about getting to the truth of what happened in Benghazi.

  And there’s another reason I don’t think the investigations were about discovering the truth or, just as important, about determining what should be done to keep anything like Benghazi from ever happening again. At no point in any of these congressional briefings were decisions made by Chris Stevens questioned. Given the circumstances of his death, Chris effectively became beyond reproach. While I admired Chris, I still have some serious questions about the decisions he made at that time: Why did he remain in Benghazi hours after the US embassy in Cairo had been overrun? Why did he go there on 9/11 in the first place, and why didn’t he realize his security was completely inadequate? Confidence in oneself and one’s team is admirable, but had he become too complacent? If Stevens had survived, those questions would certainly have been raised if the committees were serious about arriving at the truth—and if the committees were really interested in the truth, they’d have asked those questions anyway.

  The events of that night were absolutely tragic. There is only one reason the intelligence account of the events remains controversial, and I still feel angry as I write this, five years after the attack. The singular reason we, as a nation, haven’t been able to learn from the tragic events of September 11, 2012, and move forward, wiser and safer, is that a skewed version of the events perfectly suits a particular political narrative that arose at the end of a contentious presidential election, because one political party realized they could continue to benefit from manipulating the facts, and because certain people valued politics over objective truth. All of that became possible because, on a Sunday morning, five days after the attack, the sitting president’s campaign opened the door to politicizing intelligence, and because those who should have known better—senior intelligence officials like me—didn’t recognize what was happening in time to stop it.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Consumed by Money

  The 2004 law that established the DNI outlined three primary tasks for the position. The DNI was to be the senior intelligence adviser to the president and the default leader of the Intelligence Community. My work in those two roles garnered the most public attention, but I and the ODNI staff put a great deal of time and energy into the DNI’s third job—determining the budget and resources that went to the intelligence agencies through the National Intelligence Program.

  Federal spending on national security tends to grow or shrink based on how threatened we feel at any moment. The same year I became DIA director, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the defense and intelligence enterprises began to reap the peace dividend. I’ve written about how I was asked to cut DIA’s budget and workforce by 20 percent over a period of five years, how the trend of percentage cuts extended beyond my time as director, and how those reductions were affecting every agency and military service, as well as the secretary of defense and director of central intelligence. After September 11, 2001, the cash-flow valves reversed, budgets surged, and what defense services and intelligence agencies and elements didn’t receive in their base budgets, they got from “overseas contingency operation” funding. OCO is “above the line” war funding and not subject to the normal budgetary processes.

  Every type of funding was expanded each year, which we can now discuss because Denny Blair and then I declassified the IC’s top-line annual budget number. By fiscal year 2007—the government’s fiscal year runs from Octo
ber 1 until September 30—the (strategic) National Intelligence Program, determined by the DNI, had reached $43.5 billion, and the (operationally focused) Military Intelligence Program, determined by the USD(I), had reached $20 billion, for a total of $63.5 billion spent on intelligence. By fiscal year 2011, the first full budget year of my tenure as DNI, the NIP and MIP had jumped to $54.6 billion and $24 billion respectively—$78.6 billion in total—which was more than was allocated to all but two or three Cabinet departments. (By way of comparison, the overall defense budget jumped from $335 billion in Fiscal Year 2001 to $625 billion in Fiscal Year 2007 and $717 billion in Fiscal Year 2011, more than doubling in a decade.)

  Considering those two decades of intelligence budgets—or at least, what I can say about them in an unclassified context—I would point to a fiscal reality that makes some people in Washington uncomfortable. According to the federal Office of Management and Budget, in 1992, the fiscal year of the Soviet collapse, the US government spent $290 billion more than it received in taxes—a deficit the government had to address by borrowing through issuing bonds. With the peace dividend we spent less on defense, and as the national economy came out of recession, the deficit fell each year of the 1990s. By 1998, the federal government was actually collecting more from taxes than it was spending, and in 2000, it had a budget surplus of $236 billion—meaning it could afford to pay off some debt principal without borrowing more.

  After September 11, 2001, as defense spending rose and markets fell, the federal surpluses became deficits again—reaching $464 billion by 2008. Then, as illustrated brilliantly by Tim Geithner in his memoir, Stress Test, driven by the subprime mortgage crisis and financial institutions’ lack of liquidity to use for recovery, the US financial sector and US economy collapsed into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2009, President Obama inherited President Bush’s commitment of $700 billion to bail out the financial sector and rescue the economy through the Troubled Asset Relief Program—TARP. The deficit for 2008 more than tripled in 2009, to $1.41 trillion, as the federal government brought in far less money and spent far more on defense, bailouts, and protecting people who were losing their jobs and their homes. No other government on earth spent as much as $1.41 trillion total in 2009. The magnitude of what the federal government was borrowing had become so large that by 2010, when I became DNI, Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, characterized our national debt as the most prominent threat to our national security.

  During President Obama’s first year in office he faced a situation in which he desperately needed to inject money into the US financial system to prevent a second Great Depression; at the same time, almost as desperately, he had to scale back federal borrowing. It was a time in which we needed to address the fiscal realities we faced removed from the mire of partisan politics.

  Unfortunately, in 2009 Congress was still populated by many of the kind of people who had, six months earlier, staged a juvenile walkout in protest of the briefing DNI Mike McConnell and I had given on President Bush’s changes to Executive Order 12333, which redefined intelligence authorities after the establishment of the DNI. Also unfortunately, when approaching cuts, many members of Congress felt strongly and uncompromisingly that while the budget did need to be slashed, the programs they supported should be protected, whether those were allocated to defense (largely supported by Republicans) or to domestic programs (largely supported by Democrats).

  Despite the fact that the federal budget makes headline news constantly, few people know how the process actually works, so it’s worth taking a few pages here to present what I hope will clarify some of the intricacies of how the budget cycle is supposed to work. During the first week of February, the president presents his budget request to Congress. In a functional world, after receiving this request, House and Senate budget committees draft a budget resolution that offers broad guidelines for the rest of Congress to use in constructing the actual budget. Then, congressional oversight committees spend the next few months critiquing the president’s requests, checking items of particular interest to their committees or to their individual members, making backdoor deals, and marking up the request to become House and Senate “authorization” bills—literally authorizing federal departments to run their programs. Committees also use these authorization bills to conduct oversight. In the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, Congress made the passage of intelligence authorization bills contingent on the CIA’s informing the chairs and vice-chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees of any covert actions it was conducting. In my time as DNI, Congress extended this oversight to micromanagement levels, which included informing me of the precise size and makeup they wanted for the Office of the DNI staff, caps on staff pay and promotions, skill sets, and how many desks in Liberty Crossing could be occupied by contractors.

  Between April and June, committees hold budget hearings, at which executive branch secretaries and directors—like the DNI—defend the budget requests they submitted in February. Intelligence budget briefings are conducted behind closed doors to allow discussion of the details of classified programs. In June or July, the committees release their draft authorization bills to the executive departments for comment. Typically, when Congress sends over the authorization bills, executive departments only have a few weeks to respond, so budget and programmatic experts typically read the draft bills in late-night sessions over delivery pizza on the day they’re released. Department headquarters’ offices send the draft bills, with specific questions, around to staff experts to get feedback on what provisions and budget lines they can and can’t live with. Their responses are then submitted to Congress. Sometimes, departments feel strongly enough about their objections that they recommend the president veto the bill unless changes are made to it. A vetoed authorization bill can have serious consequences for a department, including not being able to start any new programs if a bill never gets passed. So in the organizations I directed, we always took recommending a veto very seriously.

  Again, in a functional world, committees consider the feedback and objections they’ve received from executive departments, and the House and Senate counterpart committees come together to meld their bills into mutually agreed-upon legislation, which they send to the president’s desk for signature. When the president signs the authorization bill, it becomes law—the “authorization act” for that fiscal year. That’s not quite the end of the process. Once oversight committees authorize federal departments to run their programs under a specific budget, the appropriations committees—one each in the House and Senate—appropriate money to be spent. That appropriation is the actual federal budget. There are twelve appropriations subcommittees, so the budget can be doled out as twelve separate appropriations acts, or several can be rolled up into an “omnibus” act.

  That budget cycle process is the basis for all federal spending, and for the Intelligence Community, it’s even more complicated. IC equities get spread out into two authorization bills—intelligence (for NIP equities) and defense (for MIP equities)—but its appropriation comes through just the defense appropriations subcommittee. There’s a reason for this odd arrangement. After congressional investigations determined that the CIA had spied on Americans and engaged in other illegal actions during the Watergate era, Congress decided it required better oversight of intelligence activities. It therefore created select intelligence oversight committees in both the Senate (1976) and the House (1977) to oversee the national-level intelligence program. At the same time, in the Senate, it left oversight of intelligence work that supported military operations in the Armed Services Committee. That’s how we ended up with a National Intelligence Program (NIP), determined by the DNI and authorized by the Intelligence Authorization Act each year; and a Military Intelligence Program, overseen by the USD(I) and rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act for all military activities. To further complicate matters, the Senate committee oversees only the Na
tional Intelligence Program, while the House committee also has jurisdiction over DOD’s Military Intelligence Program.

  So every year that all three bills passed, we received three sets of instructions/guidance from Congress, and every year, the priorities of the appropriators differed from those of the authorizers. The IC can’t spend money unless it’s both appropriated and authorized, which caused annual headaches. If we didn’t get an appropriation act, we’d shut down. If we didn’t get an authorization act, they’d send us the draft bill from each committee and tell us to consider what they would have passed if they’d agreed to pass it. This is how I learned that Excedrin pairs well with martinis.

  Intelligence budgeting is also more complex because of the types of things we have to budget for. If we want to develop, build, and launch a satellite system with new capabilities in ten years, we have to plan in which years the development will require more or less funding to stay on track. If we’re growing an online capability, we have to plan for when additional staff will be needed to make it work. We need to know whether that funding will come from the NIP or the MIP, and have to trust that congressional appropriations will be stable and support our careful plans. Much of our effort at USD(I) and DNI was accordingly focused on study and planning for years in the future, rather than what we were currently executing.

  With all of that as background, I took my oath of office as DNI on August 9, 2010, and as a general indicator of just how well Democrats and Republicans were working together on Capitol Hill, when October 1, 2010, rolled around, it marked the start of the sixth consecutive year that the Intelligence Community would operate without an authorization act. It also marked the fifth consecutive year that Congress failed to appropriate a government budget by the beginning of the fiscal year. Starting in 2007, Congress had started each fiscal year by passing a “continuing resolution,” which essentially was the legislative branch telling the executive branch departments to continue operating, temporarily, at the same funding level as the previous year until Congress could see its way clear to actually fund the government. For each of those previous four years, Congress passed either a series of continuing resolutions or, eventually, an appropriations act. As much as congressional members complain any time the Intelligence Community comes up short on anything, Congress consistently failed to do its one primary job—fund the government.