I didn’t have time to focus on our exchange in the hearing, as I was immediately consumed again by world events and sequestration. On Thursday, two days after the hearing, I met with Ash Carter and several other DOD officials in White House chief of staff Denis McDonough’s office to finally settle the issue of furloughs, with Denis as the arbiter. Denis wasn’t ready to make a call after hearing our arguments, and I think each of us walked out thinking he had presented the stronger case and would prevail.
By this point, DOD had determined that its furloughs wouldn’t start until July, and both Ash and new Secretary Chuck Hagel had announced they would voluntarily lower their own salaries to match the losses by furloughed employees. It was a gracious gesture, and I followed suit, although I also recognized that by voluntarily cutting my salary, I only demonstrated that I made enough money that I could afford to lose 10 percent of it and still be able to pay my mortgage, something a GS-10 or GS-12 living in Washington might not be able to manage. I had no illusions that voluntarily lowering my salary made anyone feel better.
On Tuesday, March 26, Denis called to say that, based on the recommendation of the Office of Management and Budget, he agreed that the DNI could determine whether employees in NIP-funded jobs would be furloughed. Ash accepted Denis’s decision, and we moved on. With that settled, the agency directors and I started April with a clearer idea of how to deal with the sequestration cuts, which were quickly getting steeper as we slid down that hill.
On the afternoon of April 15, as crowds cheered the runners finishing the Boston Marathon, two homemade bombs exploded at the finish line, killing three people and injuring almost three hundred, including sixteen survivors who lost arms or legs. Amid all the confusion, the perpetrators of the attack walked away unscathed.
By 2011, the ODNI had established “domestic DNI representatives” within the United States, similar to the intelligence leads abroad who maintain cognizance of all intelligence activities occurring in their country or field of influence. The twelve regional domestic DNI reps were senior FBI assistant directors or special agents in charge of field offices, and the representative with purview over the New England area was based in Boston. He immediately tapped resources in the National Counterterrorism Center, the DOD agencies, and CIA, as well as all the Justice Department resources available to the FBI. Within twenty-four hours the IC had determined that no international terrorist network was involved, and no groundwork had been laid for successive attacks.
On April 18 the FBI released pictures of two brothers who had been seen by witnesses and caught on security cameras carrying and setting down the bags that had contained the homemade bombs. In the massive manhunt over the next two days, the brothers shot and killed a police officer, stole a car, and took a hostage. The hostage escaped, and large sections of Boston were placed on lockdown. The brothers, cornered, engaged in a violent gun battle with Boston police. Making his escape, the younger of the two, nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ran over his wounded older brother, twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, with a stolen car. Tamerlan died, and Dzhokhar was later found hiding in a boat in a local backyard. He was wounded in the resulting confrontation, and was finally taken into custody, ending the crisis.
In many ways, this incident was a nightmare scenario for US intelligence. Two brothers who had immigrated to the United States as minors in 2002—one a citizen, the other’s citizenship application pending—had found instructions for making homemade bombs out of common kitchen pressure cookers in the online magazine Inspire, published by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. They weren’t in contact with AQAP or other international terrorist organizations and had come up with their plot for indiscriminate slaughter on their own. They had made no phone or email communication that we could have intercepted, and there was no human source whom we could have exploited to learn of and thwart their plan. In fact, this was one of the few prominent times I can remember NSA’s using the Patriot Act Section 215 authorities that Senator Wyden had intended to ask me about and was later so critical of. We plugged the brothers’ phone numbers into the database to see if they had placed or received international phone calls, or if there was a pattern in their calls that would indicate a broader conspiracy to commit further acts of terror. If there had been, we would have had to quickly obtain warrants to find out whom they were talking to and what was said. Fortunately, we determined there was no coordinated plan for further bombings, so in this case, Section 215 didn’t enable us to prevent an attack but did reassure us there was no broader conspiracy involved, which allowed us to focus on finding and apprehending the brothers.
We learned that the FBI had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011—two years before the bombing—but had concluded he wasn’t a threat at the time. When that fact was made public, the FBI and IC were excoriated in the press for not more aggressively surveilling the brothers. After Jim Comey became FBI director five months later, he would lament that this unfair criticism meant that the FBI was no longer merely being held to the standard of “finding a needle in a haystack,” but instead to being able to identify “a strand of hay that might one day become a needle.”
In the weeks after the attack, I felt the practical frustration that Jim would later give eloquent voice to. Even more strongly than frustration, I felt the philosophical conflict in which we were embroiled, as the public, media, and Congress chastised us for not having monitored Tamerlan’s internet usage after he had been cleared by the FBI. It was the same feeling I’d had after the Fort Hood shooting, when Congress had asked why we weren’t reading Nidal Hasan’s emails. Technically, we could do so. It would have required a significant investment in technology and massive changes to US law to allow the Intelligence Community to get intrusive with the personal business of Americans, but it was feasible. However, I didn’t think that’s what the US electorate wanted, and moreover, using the US intelligence apparatus to look inward at Americans would require us to override what I believed was an inherent right to privacy, implied if not explicitly stated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Some ODNI senior staff members recall us breaking out pocket editions of the Constitution after the Boston Marathon—going right to the source. I don’t specifically remember doing that, but it does comport with the kinds of discussions I remember having.
But in the spring and summer of 2013, not even questions as fundamental as balancing national security with inherent civil liberties could be my dominant focus for long. On Tuesday, May 14, DOD announced its final sequestration plan. It would furlough its civilian employees, without pay, for eleven days over the following twenty-two weeks. Certain employees would be exempted from this mandatory furlough—for instance, those deployed to war zones and intelligence employees whose jobs were funded by the National Intelligence Program, as determined by the DNI. I think it’s a measure of just how personally employees took this announcement that within weeks, job listings in the IC clearly indicated whether the position was NIP funded or MIP funded. I even saw one advertisement describing how to “Make a career in the NIP.” I laughed, but I also understood the sentiment that inspired it.
Suddenly, and somewhat embarrassingly, I was unofficially declared a hero for the IC workforce. Coincidentally, that same day, legendary Marine Corps General Jim Mattis visited Liberty Crossing. He had just retired from active duty on March 22, ending his career as commander, US Central Command, a position in which he’d overseen operations throughout the combat theater and all the nations affected by the Arab Spring for the previous two and a half years. After Jim and I had lunch, he addressed the ODNI and IC workforce for an hour of remarks and spirited conversation. He opened by observing that he was delivering his first-ever speech in a suit instead of in a uniform. He said that he’d chosen to speak to the Intelligence Community as his first audience after his retirement because he owed a great debt to its practitioners, and “a Marine never forgets his debts.”
I felt a lot of pride in our community that
day, and in my connection to both the Intelligence Community and the Marine Corps. It felt as if we had more positive energy flowing than we’d had in quite a while. I knew that budgets would continue to be cut, but we now had a clearer vision and a plan for how to compensate. I hoped that the month of May would mark a turning point for IC fortunes, and that we could refocus on our mission without all the distractions that had plagued us for the past few years.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Snowden
The same week that DOD announced it would not furlough NIP-funded employees, an IT administrator on contract at the large, and very important, NSA facility in Hawaii told his supervisor he was taking medical leave to fly to the US mainland for treatment. Edward Snowden gave a completely different story to his girlfriend, with whom he shared a home, explaining that he would be away for a few weeks and couldn’t say where he was going, conveying the implication that he was off on a secret mission for NSA. On Monday, May 20, 2013, he flew to Hong Kong carrying a bag of laptops holding hundreds of thousands—maybe millions, as we had no idea of the actual number at the time and still aren’t certain—of intelligence documents and communications, many not just classified but compartmented to protect sensitive sources; cleared employees are read into compartmented programs only when they have a need to know about them. Tapping into what he thought he knew about maintaining cover, he checked into a plush hotel and began subsisting on room service.
Over the next two weeks, as Snowden divulged gravely damaging secrets about how the US Intelligence Community operated, he wrapped his every action in mystery, using signals and secret code phrases to rendezvous with reporters and give them his stolen information. If we had been looking for him, I believe we would have found him. But we weren’t. Snowden’s lies to his supervisor and girlfriend were credible enough that neither questioned them, and so the US Intelligence Community was blissfully unaware that, in an exotic port city of mainland China, we were hemorrhaging intelligence capabilities through a trusted insider turned traitor.
Looking back, there’s a coincidental timing to all of this that makes our naïvete in not preparing for the possibility of insider treachery and actively monitoring for it inexcusable. On June 3, in Washington, DC—literally as Edward Snowden was meeting with two reporters and a documentary filmmaker in Hong Kong—the military trial of Private First Class Bradley Manning was getting under way. (We knew Manning was a transgender woman in June 2013, but she didn’t become Private Chelsea Manning until after her sentencing in August.)
Manning had been a low-level intelligence analyst in Iraq from late 2009 into 2010, when she became disenchanted with intelligence reports she was reading, which she felt showed a moral ambiguity not apparent in the public narrative of the war. She felt obligated to reveal that prisoner abuses were still taking place, nearly six years after the Abu Ghraib scandal, and she was disturbed by combat reports and video that indicated that US soldiers—some of whom had deployed on repeated combat tours—had a casual attitude toward killing. For Manning, the line defining which side was “in the right” had blurred until it ceased to exist. Envisioning it a form of citizen activism, she swept up all the classified and sensitive materials she could acquire—half a million military documents and a quarter million diplomatic cables—and gave them to the online organization WikiLeaks in January 2010. This single massive theft and release made everything else WikiLeaks had published, combined, pale by comparison.
On April 5, 2010, at the National Press Club in Washington, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange released the most incendiary material he’d received from Manning—a gunsight video from an Apache helicopter, complete with the audio from its radio transmissions and cockpit internal-communications circuit. The video showed the gunship firing on a gathering of men on a town square in New Baghdad, Iraq, on July 12, 2007. Later in the video, the Apache fires again, this time on a van that pulls up to the scene, after its occupants get out and begin to move casualties. What differentiated this footage from other combat videos is that, during the series of firefights, two Iraqi correspondents who were covering the war for Reuters were killed, and two children who were in the van were injured and later evacuated by US troops. DOD had shown the video to Reuters soon after the incident occurred but hadn’t released it publicly, despite Reuters having filed a Freedom of Information Act request. With that information as the backdrop, Assange staged the April 5 event as a way of announcing that his organization could and would publish leaked materials that governments did not want released. He pitched WikiLeaks as an organization with no agenda, other than shining a bright light into the dark places that powerful governments and international organizations didn’t want the world to see.
In fact, WikiLeaks did have an agenda, which was apparent in its editorial choices, even at that early point. The video opens with a quote from George Orwell, white letters on a black screen: “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Over ominous garbled voices and clicks and buzzes of military radio microphones being keyed, the screen cuts to a title card reading “Collateral Murder,” with a website address, www.collateralmurder.com. The video then provides this context:
On the morning of July 12th, 2007, two Apache helicopters using 30mm cannon fire killed about a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad.
Two children were also wounded.
Although some of the men appear to have been armed, the behavior of nearly everyone was relaxed.
The U.S. military initially claimed that all the dead were “anti-Iraqi forces” or “insurgents”.
The stories of most of those who were killed are unknown. But among the dead were two Reuters news employees, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen.
The footage cuts to photographs of the deceased Reuters correspondents and of their families in anguish, interspersed with quotes from friends and coworkers. It then cuts to a black screen with the words:
The U.S. military claimed the victims died in a battle that took place between U.S. forces and insurgents.
“There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force.”
—Lieutenant-Colonel Scott Bleichwehl, spokesman for U.S. forces in Baghdad. (New York Times)
The implication of the introduction, running two minutes and forty-six seconds in a video with a total runtime of seventeen minutes and forty-six seconds, was unmistakable: WikiLeaks and Assange intended to demonstrate that the US military was covering up its extreme wrongdoing with lies.
After the introduction, the video cuts to the black-and-white gunsight video. As the helicopter crew attempts to discern what’s happening in the town square, an arrow inserted by WikiLeaks points to “Saaed w/ camera,” and as one of the pilots says on the internal circuit, “That’s a weapon,” another arrow identifies “Namir w/ camera.” A moment later, the pilot says, “He’s got a weapon, too.” No arrow appears to identify another man holding an AK-47, nor the man holding an RPG—a rocket-propelled grenade. The helicopter crew requests and receives permission to engage, and the ensuing fire kills or disables everyone on screen. Arrows identify “Namir’s body” and “Saaed trying to escape.” The video fades out and back in. On the internal cockpit circuit, the pilot handling the flight controls congratulates the pilot who had done the shooting, and they discuss the incident in a manner indicating they are comfortable with what had just occurred. The pilots acknowledge one person as being still alive, which a WikiLeaks-inserted arrow indicates is Saaed. Once the pilots identify him as being disabled and unarmed, they report on the radio that they will hold fire, but they keep the helicopter’s gun trained on the wounded man. On the internal circuit, one is heard saying, “Come on, buddy. All you gotta do is pick up a weapon.” The helicopter continues to circle as a van pulls up near the wounded man, and one pilot transmits, “We have individuals going t
o the scene, looks like possibly picking up bodies and weapons.” As the van drivers carry Saaed, the pilots repeatedly request permission to engage. Finally, given the go-ahead, they fire on the van. When they cease firing, an arrow identifies Saaed’s body, and the video cuts to a black screen, reading:
Eight minutes after the attack, ground troops arrive on the scene.
“We pulled up and stopped and I could hear them over the intercom say they couldn’t drive the Bradleys [tanks] in because there were too many bodies and didn’t want to drive over them.”
—Captain James Hall, Army chaplain. (Washington Post)
The remainder of the video shows a Humvee driving over a body as it arrives on scene, to the apparent amusement of the pilots, fades out and then cuts to soldiers pulling the two wounded children from the van and running with them in their arms. After several moments, one pilot is heard on the internal circuit saying, “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other replies, “That’s right.”
I believe the early parts of this video could prompt Americans to contemplate and discuss how years of war have produced a generation of soldiers who were callous about inflicting death. However, the selective editing and editorializing done by WikiLeaks encouraged a different narrative, one that seemed to recall the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. In 1968, an angry US Army platoon entered a Vietnamese village and wiped it out, killing 347 men, women, and children indiscriminately. The massacre was a monumental turning point for American public tolerance for the Southeast Asia war. But New Baghdad was not My Lai. The Apache pilots may have been more comfortable with taking life than we’d like, but they were not indiscriminate killers.
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