On December 23, 2011, Congress actually passed an omnibus appropriations act, funding the government for the next nine months. The fiscal year 2012 National Intelligence Program was cut $700 million to $53.9 billion, and the Military Intelligence Program was cut another $2.5 billion to $21.5 billion, after having $3 billion cut the previous year. On January 31, 2012, the ill-fated supercommittee dissolved, leaving us in limbo for figuring out future intelligence budgets, all while dealing with operational challenges like the Arab Spring and the tragic attack in Benghazi in September.
That October I addressed the 2012 GEOINT Symposium in Orlando, updating the audience on IC ITE and explaining exactly what was at stake if sequestration came into effect on January 1—less than three months away. I explained that with no latitude on how to take cuts, the sequester “could mean significant reductions in our most valuable asset, our people. And every major systems acquisition program in the NIP is in jeopardy of being wounded. So we can only hope that the lame-duck Congress, which returns after the election, will do something to avert this train wreck.” I concluded my remarks with a thought that felt ominous even as I said it: “And the worst part is that if it happens, it would occur during the time of the most diverse and demanding array of threats I’ve seen in almost fifty years in this business. And I can assure you that to the extent that I have any influence, for as long as I have any influence, I’ll do my damnedest to minimize the damage.”
The next crisis didn’t wait for Congress to return after the election. On the evening of Tuesday, November 6, as I watched the election returns, it looked as though President Obama would be reelected. If he asked me to stay on as DNI, and I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t, I planned to tell him I would only stay if Stephanie also agreed to stay as PDDNI. The final item on my calendar for the day was a meeting with Sean Joyce, the FBI’s deputy director under Bob Mueller. Sean had been promoted to that position after serving as the director of the FBI’s intelligence component, so I already had a close working relationship with him. I was told he wanted to brief me on a sensitive cybersecurity issue, so I asked Stephanie to join us.
Sean began laying out a case of cyberstalking between two women in Florida, one of whom had published a biography of CIA director David Petraeus earlier that year. He explained that the FBI had gotten involved after one of the women had filed a report with the Tampa FBI Field Office, and I began to wonder precisely how this seemingly petty civil issue had risen to a level that the FBI’s deputy director became involved. Then Sean’s tone shifted as he revealed that, while investigating the biographer, they discovered that she was having an extramarital affair with Petraeus, and Dave had been improperly sharing classified material with her. I was stunned, and perhaps for the only time I can recall, Stephanie looked genuinely surprised. Sean said that not only did agency people know about the affair, but at least two congressional offices were aware of it as well, which meant it wouldn’t stay a secret for long.
The next morning, I called Dave privately and shared what Sean had told us. He didn’t immediately seem to grasp how dire the situation was. I pointed out that if a midgrade government employee had provided classified material to a girlfriend, he would have his clearance suspended, and I asked Dave to consider that in determining his course of action. At one point in our conversation, I reminded him that unlike me he was an international icon, and as one retired general officer to another, I suggested he take control of the situation while he still had some control to exercise by informing his family and explaining the situation to the president before the story went public. By the end of the conversation, he understood the urgency of the matter. I spoke with him twice more on Wednesday and tried to offer support. Appropriately, if belatedly, he took responsibility and did the difficult and right thing by telling his family and the president, and by resigning.
On Thursday, I met with Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, bringing my superb general counsel Bob Litt with me. The Justice Department chief of staff shared the same information Sean had given to Stephanie and me. Since Dave was presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed, the White House was dismayed that Sean had briefed me before he had them, and Kathy reminded me I didn’t have authority to ask Dave to resign, as only the White House could do that—a reminder I didn’t need.
On Friday afternoon, Sue and I flew to North Carolina to spend the weekend with my sister, Chris, and her husband, Jim, a retired Army intelligence officer. President Obama accepted Dave’s resignation, the story broke, and I spent the entire weekend on the phone with congressional members, explaining what had happened.
This sequence of events led to my third meeting alone with the president. The first had been my interview for the DNI position. The second had been shortly after April 28, 2011, when I was surprised by the president’s announcement that Dave would become the CIA director, succeeding Leon Panetta, who was in turn following Bob Gates as secretary of defense. The 2004 IRTPA legislation explicitly states that the president would nominate the CIA director based on the recommendation of the DNI. Shortly after the appointment was announced, Bob Litt politely reminded the White House counsel about the specifics of the law. That second private meeting with the president appeared to be a hastily scheduled “whoops” acknowledgment, during which he assured me he would seek my recommendation if he ever needed to appoint another CIA director.
Not to be outdone, I used the occasion of Leon’s departure from CIA to have my own “whoops” moment—publicly and spectacularly. I was the fifth person to present Leon with an award onstage, and I recycled a joke I’d been using for years, that speaking fifth reminded me of the apocryphal line ascribed to Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband when he supposedly said, “I know what I’m supposed to do, but how do I make it different?” The line got a laugh, as it always did. After the ceremony, as I was walking off the stage, NGA director Tish Long walked up, smiled, and rhetorically asked, “Guess who’s here?” I knew immediately she meant former senator John Warner, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s ex-husbands; heart sinking, I scanned the rapidly dispersing crowd for the senator. No luck. I resolved to call him as soon as I could, and I went with my detail to my preplanned exit. There, I encounter none other than Senator Warner, standing on the curb, waiting for his ride. I figuratively fell on my knees, babbling an apology for my insensitive gaffe. He laughed and said, “No, no. It was a great line. I laughed too.” Getting in his car, he added, “By the way, I was number six.”
Eighteen months later, President Obama met with me alone for what turned out to be the final time to ask for my recommendation on whom to nominate as the next CIA director. I knew he favored John Brennan for the job, and I felt that John would be a terrific agency director and that we could work well together. I told the president that I could endorse two people: either John or Deputy Director Michael Morell, who had served as acting director before Dave, and who assumed that position again after Dave resigned. He ultimately chose John.
Between Benghazi, Dave’s resignation, and wondering if Congress would do something before its latest self-imposed deadline of New Year’s Day, I spent a good deal of time during the fall of 2012 on the phone with congressional members and shuttling back and forth to Capitol Hill. I was deeply concerned that sequestration would take effect, and I felt compelled to let our committee members know—again—that while we accepted that we were not exempt from cuts, sequestration would damage intelligence capabilities indiscriminately. In fact, all of Washington was already up in arms about sequestration. At midnight on December 31, it would kick in at the precise moment the tax cuts passed during President Bush’s tenure would expire, and six other economically bad pieces of legislation would all be triggered, along with the debt ceiling being reached again. The government would inexplicably raise taxes and cut spending simultaneously, a move the Congressional Budget Office warned would throw the nation into immediate recession. With all the drama Washington cou
ld muster, this impending event had been dubbed the “fiscal cliff.”
I was also concerned about another potential legislative disaster—the renewal of what’s awkwardly called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008. FISA grants the Intelligence Community much of its authority to conduct intelligence against threats overseas, and this provision of FISA was slated to expire at the end of the year and required reauthorization. Particularly of concern for the Intelligence Community was Section 702, which gave the IC authority, under court supervision, to intercept communications of non-US persons, such as suspected terrorists overseas. When people think of the Intelligence Community “listening to calls” and “reading emails”—actually gathering the content of communications needed to interrupt terrorist plots and target terrorists overseas—Section 702 is a critical tool we rely upon heavily to do so. Understandably, some members of the legislative branch were concerned that we never use this authority for foreign surveillance against the American people, so Congress required under Section 702 that we could only “target the communications of non-U.S. persons located outside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes,” a restriction with which I strongly agreed.
That fall I led teams, which at various times included FBI director Bob Mueller, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, and ODNI general counsel Bob Litt, among others, to meet with key congressional members to explain the importance of Section 702, the procedural safeguards that had been installed to prevent its abuse, and the roles that all three branches of government played in oversight. As the deadline for its renewal approached, these meetings became more frequent—and more intense. In November and December, I briefed our oversight committees, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the House Speaker and minority leader. I explained how Section 702 works and how the foreign intelligence we collected under its authority contributed to thousands of reports and dozens of articles in the President’s Daily Brief, and I described the accesses we would lose, particularly against foreign terrorist networks, without its reauthorization.
I also described what happened when we were monitoring phone or internet communications of a non-American overseas but then realized the person speaking with the target was an American or was located within the United States—the so-called “incidental collection” of a “US person.” In those cases, analysts first determined if there was foreign intelligence value to the intercepted communication. If there wasn’t, our policy was to delete the communication forever. If there was intelligence value—for example, a terrorist’s talking to someone in the United States about a terrorist plot—we would “minimize” the protected American’s name with the designation “US person #1,” or “US person #2,” etc., in any signals intelligence reporting.
On November 27, I, along with Bob Litt and Chris Inglis, participated in a particularly contentious discussion with Senators Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall, and Ron Wyden on the details of minimization procedures and the measures we took not to target Americans with this authority. Senator Wyden pressed us for the number of Americans whose communications we had “incidentally” collected since 2008, when Section 702 was enacted. We did our best to alleviate his concerns, but we had a particularly hard time getting him to understand why we couldn’t provide the precise number.
Essentially, the IC doesn’t have the time and resources to fully process every communication we intercept, and we wouldn’t even know if we’d incidentally intercepted a US person unless we went to great lengths to identify every participant on a call or every address on an email. We didn’t—and couldn’t—use minimization procedures for names if we never identified the names. It’s possible that we’d unwittingly intercepted a significant number of communications in which our targets were talking to Americans, but the only way to get a precise count of how many times this had happened would be to listen to, read, and analyze every communication we’d ever intercepted and then try to determine the nationalities of all its participants, which might require a lot of research regarding their identities. Paradoxically, such an effort would mean we’d need to be more comprehensively intrusive in the lives of innocent US citizens, because we would have to approach the problem by intentionally attempting to find and identify Americans. It would even mean looking for Americans in intercepted communications we’d never examined, which, beyond its intrusiveness, would require vast analytic resources we simply didn’t possess. We did our best to explain all this, but Senator Wyden, in particular, wasn’t interested in our explanations.
After many more discussions and much more hand-wringing, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act renewal on Friday, December 28—again at nearly the last minute, but with comfortable voting margins—and President Obama signed it into law on Sunday, December 30.
The focus then returned to the drama around the fiscal cliff. On Monday, December 31, House Democrats rejected a deal brokered by the White House and Senate to enact new, smaller tax cuts, which would have effectively allowed taxes to increase by only a small amount, and would have kicked the sequestration can down the road to March 1. Speaker Boehner threatened to derail the whole plan by adding billions in spending cuts, in addition to delaying the sequester. The House threw a tantrum, until 10:45 that night, when he finally allowed a vote, and the compromise bill passed. The Senate didn’t approve the compromise and send it to the president’s desk until after the midnight deadline.
Before the New Year’s Eve showdown, it seemed as if the entire government had been energized to prevent leaping off the fiscal cliff into a self-imposed recession. With a compromise bill passed and signed, Washington shifted its attention to the next crisis—the debt ceiling—again. In January 2013 the government exceeded the Treasury Department’s borrowing limit, but somehow Treasury took “extraordinary measures” and kept the government open, still needing to reconcile the ceiling with Congress. Regardless, no energy was left to stop or even mitigate the damage from sequestration, which would go into effect March 1. We pleaded with Congress to at least give us some flexibility to manage the budget cuts, but we were consistently told any measures that touched sequestration were “poison pills,” meaning, if they were slipped into any bill, they would kill the entire bill. In this case, mitigating sequestration would compromise any chance for getting past the current debt-ceiling crisis and—after that—the expiration of the continuing budget resolution in March. Congress had tied its own hands—quite the magic trick—but was subsequently unable to extricate itself.
On January 29, I took a call from Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. As a way to absorb sequestration costs, DOD proposed furloughing each of its government civilians once a week, thereby cutting their salaries by 20 percent. This would both lower DOD’s budget and attract Congress’s attention, since DOD civilians were employed in just about every congressional district in the nation. He was informing me of this proposal because it would include all the civilians in the DOD intelligence agencies—NSA, NRO, NGA, and DIA. I shared my concern that putting people with access to top secret, compartmented intelligence in potentially dire financial straits could result in a huge counterintelligence vulnerability, but Ash was determined that DOD would press ahead.
I asked my senior staff to start assessing my authorities under law and executive orders to see if I could stop DOD from furloughing intelligence employees. We determined that Section 1018 of the 2004 IRTPA—the last-minute addition to the act that created the DNI, which stated that the DNI was to exercise his authority in a manner that “respects and does not abrogate the statutory responsibilities of the heads of the departments”—effectively blocked me from stopping a DOD furlough. However, ODNI’s new chief financial officer—Rich Fravel, who’d succeeded Marilyn Vacca—pointed out that the whole exercise was about absorbing cuts to the budget, and while the secretary of defense determined the Military Intelligence Program through the USD(I), the DNI alone determined the National Intelligence Program. I could simpl
y state that NIP-funded jobs would be fully funded, and people who worked in those jobs would not be furloughed. I told Rich to draft a diplomatically worded letter I could send to Ash.
The world continued its crazy spiral; on February 12, North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test under the regime of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. And Washington continued its astounding dysfunction; on February 14, Republicans in the Senate made former Republican senator and two-time Purple Heart recipient Chuck Hagel the first defense secretary nominee in our nation’s history to have his confirmation filibustered, mostly for political reasons or, more absurdly, to demand more information about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
During a visit by a delegation representing the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, I took the opportunity to complain about our typical government approach of making the same mistakes again and again. I said, “It reminds me of the ancient tribal wisdom that goes, ‘When you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ Well—in Washington—we sometimes do things differently.” I explained:
When we find ourselves riding a dead horse, we often try strategies that are less successful, such as: buying a stronger whip, changing riders, saying things like: “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse,” appointing a committee to study the horse, lowering the standards so that more dead horses can be included, appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse, hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse, harnessing several dead horses together—to increase speed—attempting to mount multiple dead horses in hopes that one of them will spring to life, providing additional funding and training to increase the dead horse’s performance, declaring that, since a dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it’s less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore, contributes more to the mission than live horses, and my favorite—promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
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