As the cherry on top of this misery sundae, Congress failed to pass either an appropriations act or continuing resolution, and the government shut down from October 1 through October 16, 2013. Our “nonessential employees” were sent home, and our “essential employees” worked without pay.
Through all of those tribulations, I’m proud of how the IC responded with creative solutions to keep programs functioning and to quickly fill gaps by pivoting collection platforms whenever a publication exposed our capabilities. Agencies admitted their losses and looked to one another for help filling intelligence gaps. At the same time, our counterintelligence and security professionals put new procedures and online programs in place intended to thwart other potential leakers and to detect any attempts to repeat what Snowden had done. Finally, the people of the IC also opened their files and vaults to a review of their work, including by Congress and by a team appointed by the president.
My greatest personal disappointment through all this was that my exchange with Senator Wyden in the March testimony continued to be a distraction, one we apparently could not move beyond. On December 19, seven Republicans from the House Judiciary Committee—James Sensenbrenner, Darrell Issa, Trent Franks, Raúl Labrador, Ted Poe, Trey Gowdy, and Blake Farenthold—wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder, demanding that he investigate me for “knowingly and willfully” lying to Congress under oath. When I spoke to Eric about the letter, he dismissed it as frivolous and political, and I responded that I thought he should take them up on their request. Having been convicted in the court of public opinion, I would have preferred a formal investigation rather than dealing with the accusations and innuendos of reporters selling papers and politicians making political hay. Eric said he didn’t want to dignify their allegations. I always thought it telling that the Senate Intelligence Committee itself never saw fit to make a referral to the Justice Department.
On January 17, 2014, President Obama addressed the nation to discuss the results of the Intelligence Community review he’d ordered and some changes he was making. I was in the audience in the auditorium at the Justice Department—a location specifically chosen to emphasize the importance of oversight and the rule of law—when the president both delivered a rousing defense of the Intelligence Community and described specific steps for reforming how we did business, aimed at regaining the trust of the American public. He began by saying that he’d come into office skeptical of intelligence overreach, and as president he’d put additional protections and oversight procedures on programs that could feasibly be abused. But he clarified:
What I did not do is stop these programs wholesale, not only because I felt that they made us more secure, but also because nothing in that initial review and nothing that I have learned since indicated that our Intelligence Community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens.
To the contrary, in an extraordinarily difficult job, one in which actions are second-guessed, success is unreported, and failure can be catastrophic, the men and women of the Intelligence Community, including the NSA, consistently follow protocols designed to protect the privacy of ordinary people. They’re not abusing authorities in order to listen to your private phone calls or read your emails. When mistakes are made—which is inevitable in any large and complicated human enterprise—they correct those mistakes, laboring in obscurity, often unable to discuss their work even with family and friends.
I later said publicly that President Obama understood where his intelligence came from better than any of his recent predecessors—even George H. W. Bush, who had served as CIA director for almost a year. I just wished he’d gained that understanding for a better reason. The president continued:
If any individual who objects to government policy can take it into their own hands to publicly disclose classified information, then we will not be able to keep our people safe or conduct foreign policy. Moreover, the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light, while revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we might not fully understand for years to come.
He said that “regardless of how we got here, though,” we had serious work ahead of us “to protect ourselves and sustain our leadership in the world while upholding the civil liberties and privacy protections our ideals and our Constitution require.” He laid out a series of major reforms in quick succession. First was “a new presidential directive for our signals intelligence activities both at home and abroad,” which in many ways provided that we treat ordinary foreign citizens with the same protections we had for Americans—something no other nation on earth would consider. Second was putting concrete programs in place “to provide greater transparency to our surveillance activities and fortify the safeguards that protect the privacy of U.S. persons,” particularly regarding the Section 702 foreign intelligence program and the Section 215 metadata program. Third, he asked the attorney general and me to “place additional restrictions on the government’s ability to retain, search, and use in criminal cases communications between Americans and foreign citizens incidentally collected under Section 702.” Fourth, he placed time limits on the secrecy of court warrants known as “national security letters,” under which a suspected terrorist or foreign spy is investigated or surveilled without being notified. Fifth and last, he addressed the controversial Section 215, beginning with why it had come into existence, after “one of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, made a phone call from San Diego to a known al-Qaida safe house in Yemen. NSA saw that call, but it could not see that the call was coming from an individual already in the United States.”
He noted that his “review group turned up no indication that this database has been intentionally abused,” but that he believed “critics are right to point out that without proper safeguards, this type of program could be used to yield more information about our private lives,” and that while the courts and Congress did exert oversight, “it has never been subject to vigorous public debate.” He then made an announcement that shocked many people: “For all these reasons, I believe we need a new approach. I am therefore ordering a transition that will end the Section 215 bulk metadata program as it currently exists and establish a mechanism that preserves the capabilities we need without the government holding this bulk metadata.”
The new program, embodied in the USA Freedom Act, took another year and a half to pass in Congress, but it required telecommunications companies to hold their own data and the IC to obtain a warrant referencing a specific threat in order to be able to access the companies’ records. In practice, this wasn’t significantly different from what we’d been doing, but people seemed to trust the commercial providers holding and protecting their data more than they trusted the US government to do so. President Obama concluded his speech with this thought:
It may seem sometimes that America is being held to a different standard. And I’ll admit the readiness of some to assume the worst motives by our government can be frustrating. No one expects China to have an open debate about their surveillance programs or Russia to take privacy concerns of citizens in other places into account.
But let’s remember, we are held to a different standard precisely because we have been at the forefront of defending personal privacy and human dignity. As the nation that developed the internet, the world expects us to ensure that the digital revolution works as a tool for individual empowerment, not government control. Having faced down the dangers of totalitarianism and fascism and communism, the world expects us to stand up for the principle that every person has the right to think and write and form relationships freely, because individual freedom is the wellspring of human progress.
Six days later the German TV network ARD interviewed Snowden, who was, unsurprisingly, unimpressed with the president’s speech and the new initiatives. I didn’t watch the interview when it aired, but some colleagues clipped one specif
ic question and answer and sent it to me. The interviewer asked Snowden, “You were working until last summer for the NSA, and during this time you secretly collected thousands of confidential documents. What was the decisive moment, or was there a long period of time or something happening, why did you do this?” Snowden replied, “I would say sort of the breaking point is seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress.” I was, to say the least, incredulous at the level of cognitive dissonance it must have taken for him to give that answer. Snowden had been stealing US intelligence secrets—copying them and removing them from secured spaces—for a full year by the time I testified in March 2013. Four and a half months before my testimony, he had contacted Glenn Greenwald and offered these classified documents, and by the time I’d testified, he’d already leaked them to Greenwald and Laura Poitras through encrypted emails, as well as contacted Bart Gellman, offering to leak to the Washington Post.
When my friend Loch Johnson—whom I’d known since we attended high school together in Germany, and who had been a staff member on the Church Committee when they’d investigated intelligence abuses in the 1970s—invited me to the University of Georgia that April, to make up the Charter Lecture that I’d been forced to cancel because of the shutdown in October, I knew I would have to address Snowden to the student body. In my speech, I talked to them about politics in Washington, and how we don’t always follow “ancient tribal wisdom” about dismounting “dead horses.” I talked about the vast array of threats we faced as a nation, and about the damage done by the leaks. I then spoke about how what Snowden had done affected me personally, which I hadn’t done before publicly.
A few weeks ago, I saw an article in the Washington Post detailing college admissions. An admissions officer from George Washington University told the Post that for the admissions essay question, “Who’s your personal hero?,” this is a quote: “She’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations.”
The idea that young people see Edward Snowden as a hero really bothers me. So I felt that I needed to talk about Snowden here. First off, I get it. I understand that some people see Snowden as a courageous whistleblower, standing up to authority. I personally believe that whistleblowing takes an incredible amount of courage and integrity. But Snowden isn’t a whistleblower.
Of course, by April 2014 most government executives were comfortable with saying that Edward Snowden wasn’t a whistleblower. We’d pointed out how Snowden had failed to use the legitimate whistleblowing avenues open to him: senior officers at NSA, criminal investigation units, NSA’s or the IC’s inspector general, the civil liberties protection officer in my office, the Justice Department, or Congress. We had also laid out how irresponsible he’d been with releasing hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the full spectrum of lawful intelligence activities all over the world, but I understood that it was very easy to talk about what someone has done wrong, to tell people what they shouldn’t do, and whom they shouldn’t emulate. It’s more of a challenge to point out examples they should look up to and emulate. We couldn’t expect the next generation of selfless, patriotic young people to join the Intelligence Community if our pitch was going to be, “Come here, and don’t be like Edward Snowden.” I wanted to offer the students at UGA something different.
If you want a whistleblowing role model, look at Sergeant Joe Darby. He was an Army reservist stationed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003. One afternoon, one of the prison guards handed him a CD. Joe stuck the disk into his computer and was shocked when he saw graphic images of guards abusing prisoners.
Those guards were friends of his, some since high school. He agonized, thinking of his friends and his superiors, whom he’d be implicating. And he worried that those people could come after him for retribution. It took him three weeks of torment before he turned the disk over to a special agent with the Army Criminal Investigation Command. You know about the global uproar when the pictures went public.
For Joe, it was more personal. His fellow soldiers at Abu Ghraib shook his hand and thanked him. But back home, people called him a traitor and threatened his life. The Army needed to give his family an armed escort for six months. That act of whistleblowing took courage and integrity. In 2007, Joe Darby told the BBC, “I’ve never regretted for one second what I did when I was in Iraq, to turn those pictures in.”
I think he makes a great role model. I’d like to read an admissions essay on him. And I want people working for me who have the same sense of right and wrong, and the courage and integrity to speak up.
I then introduced Sean Curran, a University of Georgia graduate with a double major in mathematics and geology who was now working for DOD, helping develop the cryptanalytic capabilities the IC relies on for its foreign intelligence mission. Before turning the microphone over to Sean to talk about his experience, I gave the students a recruiting pitch:
We need people with the talent and dedication of Sean Curran in the IC, and we absolutely welcome people with the courage and integrity of Joe Darby. Being an intelligence officer means that sometimes you are the most junior person in the room, and you still have to voice an unpopular truth, to speak truth to power, because, at the end of the day, it’s our job to give useful intelligence to decision makers and policy makers, not just to tell them what they want to hear.
I think most of you really would like working in intelligence, but if that’s not your cup of tea, I hope you can serve our country in some other way, at least for a few years. We need bright young men and women like you everywhere in government. Serving is better than making a ton of money or skating through a life of leisure. It really is. And I do believe that so many of you already know that.
CHAPTER NINE
Not a Diplomat
When I went back to Capitol Hill in January and February to present the IC’s 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment, I felt like a man who had traversed mountains and rivers through hostile territory only to find himself back at the spot where he’d started, now surrounded by adversaries on all sides. In less than a year we’d lost some of our most important intelligence collection capabilities to a traitor from within our own ranks; we’d lost much of our capacity to replace those capabilities due to sequestration cuts, along with shedding thousands of contractors we could no longer afford to pay; we’d lost access to a lot of telecommunications information, as many companies resisted helping us, sometimes even with active terrorist investigations; we’d lost the trust of some foreign governments, which were truly surprised we were surveilling them, not to mention many more who feigned surprise, because, as we both knew, they were also surveilling us; we’d lost the trust of some foreign intelligence partners, who questioned our ability to keep their secrets as they lost their own capabilities to Snowden’s leaks; and most disturbing, we’d lost the trust of the American public, which questioned what we were doing globally on their behalf and what we were doing domestically to them. We were being far more transparent than I would have imagined possible just a few years earlier, but it felt as though we had barely made a dent in dampening the public anger.
Also, as I sat for the 2014 hearings, I felt a new, personal antagonism from some congressional members, which had nothing to do with performing for the red light over the camera. Attorney General Holder had not answered the House Judiciary Committee’s request to investigate me in December, and he had not replied to their follow-up letter in January asking why he hadn’t begun an investigation. I hadn’t done myself any favors, repeatedly trying to oversimplify an explanation for my mistake into something that could be expressed in a sound bite. That was particularly true of an interview with MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell just days after the Snowden leak, when I’d tried to explain what I’d been thinking when answering Senator Wyden’s yes or no question months earlier, which I’d misunderstood at the time he asked it. I still couldn’t clarify what my answer should have been for Mitchell, as the Section 215 progr
am was still classified even after being leaked. On camera, I’d told her something incomprehensible about “no” being the “least untruthful” of the two answers I could give.
My statement had been widely recognized as the best Washington “doublespeak” of that month and had earned me the Washington Post’s “Worst Week in Washington” award on June 14. Whatever else happened, there was no way to get that moment back. I’d sent an email to Denis McDonough, offering to resign. I will never forget Denis and his perceptive and compassionate leadership. He called me less than fifteen minutes later to say my resignation was not accepted and to tell me to focus on my duties. This, I came to learn when Denis became chief of staff, was typical of him. For the rest of the administration, I witnessed countless examples of Denis reaching out to people at just the right time with just the right dose of encouragement. Six months after receiving Denis’s timely support, continuing my duties meant going to the Hill again.
Complicating the 2014 hearings, just before I briefed our threat assessment to the House Intelligence Committee on February 4, President Obama gave an interview with CNN in which Jake Tapper asked him about my exchange with Senator Wyden and my “least untruthful” answer to Andrea Mitchell. The president responded:
I think that Jim Clapper himself would acknowledge, and has acknowledged, that he should have been more careful about how he responded. His concern was that he had a classified program that he couldn’t talk about and he was in an open hearing in which he was asked, he was prompted to disclose a program, and so he felt that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. Subsequently, I think he’s acknowledged that he could have handled it better. He’s spoken to Mr. Wyden personally.
His answer was an attempt to paint what had happened in a constructive light and move on, and I might have been okay with it had the president or I ever spoken directly about my exchange with Wyden. We had discussed and moved past other questionable comments I’d made in hearings, as well as my “London?” gaffe with Diane Sawyer, but we never talked about this one. After the Tapper interview, I remarked privately to a group that included USD(I) Mike Vickers that since I was “so far under the bus, I might as well change the oil while I’m down here.” Later, I learned that Mike never forgets anything.
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