If appearing publicly on Capitol Hill felt like walking into “a field of fire,” to borrow an Army expression I’d learned in South Korea, the situation in no way affected my obligation to speak intelligence truth to power, and I had no intention of being cautious or taking a diplomatic course with Congress. So, to the great distress of the National Intelligence Council, instead of having them write the first draft of my opening statement, I wrote it myself, broad-brushing the threats around the globe and focusing on how leaks and sequestration were causing us to lose our ability to collect intelligence on those threats. Long-tenured NIC chairman Chris Kojm urged me to take a more traditional approach, and I eventually gave in to his argument that Congress and the public deserved to hear more actual details of the threat picture, and I let the senior analysts on the National Intelligence Council edit and expand the opening statement.
Still, parts of my first draft survived, including referring, during the February 11 hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee, to the confluence of sequestration, leaks, and loss of partnerships as “the perfect storm.” I told them that we would, as always, meet the threat to the best of our abilities, but sequestration with its drastic cuts and arcane rules was a self-imposed handicap forcing the nation “to accept more risk.”
After speaking truth to power on how all of this was clouding the threat picture and making the world more dangerous, I highlighted the few specific crises we considered the most pressing, one being the civil war in Syria, which by then was creating a threat to the US homeland.
The strength of the insurgency is now estimated at somewhere between 75,000 to 80,000 on the low end and 110,000 to 115,000 on the high end, who are organized into more than 1,500 groups of widely varying political leanings. Three of the most effective are the al-Nusrah Front, Ahrar al Sham, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, as it’s known, whose numbers total more than 20,000. Complicating this further are the 7,500-plus foreign fighters from some 50 countries who have gravitated to Syria.
Unlike in Libya in 2012, there was no unified resistance in Syria, and despite what Senator McCain had said in 2013, we had a very difficult time identifying the “good guys.” Mixed in throughout the Syrian resistance were al-Qaida operatives and Iraq insurgency veterans, all of whom hated America. Our biggest concern was that, eventually, the fighters who had traveled from abroad—particularly those coming from Europe, but a growing number from the United States—would return home, having been radicalized by the terrorists they were fighting alongside and having learned new skills in war they could now apply against their fellow Europeans or Americans. Adding to this nightmare, refugees were pouring across Syria’s borders, and its border with Iraq was merely notional. There was very little stopping transit between the two countries, as we saw when the Islamic State of Iraq changed its name to include both Iraq and Syria (the Levant) as its territory.
The one piece of positive news in Syria was that after the US Intelligence Community had presented such a compelling case to show Assad’s use of chemical weapons the past fall, he had admitted to having about a thousand tons of mustard gas, sarin, and the nerve agent VX, and an international team had destroyed the equipment for producing the chemicals. By February, they were well into destroying or removing Syria’s existing stockpiles. It was, however, difficult to destroy chemical weapons in a war zone, and we had no illusions that Assad couldn’t reconstitute his chemical weapons program quickly if he decided to.
At the hearings, I continued my tradition of adding a year to the count of how we were “facing the most diverse set of threats I’d seen in my now more than five decades in the intelligence business.” In the televised SASC hearing, I cited:
The growth of foreign cyber-capabilities, both nation-states as well as non-nation-states; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; aggressive nation-state intelligence efforts against us; an assertive Russia; a competitive China; a dangerous, unpredictable North Korea; a challenging Iran, where the economic sanctions have had a profound impact on Iran’s economy and have contributed to the P5-plus-1 joint plan of action; lingering ethnic divisions in the Balkans; perpetual conflict and extremism in Africa: in Mali, Nigeria, Central African Republic, and South Sudan; violent political struggles in, among others, the Ukraine, Burma, Thailand, and Bangladesh; the specter of mass atrocities; the increasing stress of burgeoning populations; the urgent demands for energy, water, and food; the increasing sophistication of transnational crime; the tragedy and magnitude of human trafficking; the insidious rot of inventive, synthetic drugs; the potential for pandemic disease occasioned by the growth of drug-resistant bacteria.
“I could go on with this litany,” I said, looking up from the script, “but suffice it to say, we live in a complex, dangerous world.” The events of the past year had made the world so much harder to keep track of, and not just because some of our capabilities had been compromised. No matter how good they were, imagery and signals intelligence would only get us so far in understanding the reality on the ground in the far-flung areas of the world, and CIA only had so many operatives in a relatively limited number of places. To assess the situation in a remote nation in Africa or island in South Asia, we relied on the governments and intelligence services of the regional powers that were invested there. Over the past eight months, I’d spent a lot of time on secure, long-distance calls and traveled many thousands of miles trying to repair and restore those relationships. In November, I’d been to Europe and Asia, and was soon scheduled for a trip to Norway and Sweden, and then to meet with our close “Five Eyes” English-speaking partners: the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
Overseas travel was not glamorous. I flew with my executive assistant, one or two subject-matter experts, the three-star general who led ODNI’s “partner engagement” (successively Mike Flynn, Ted Nicholas, and then John Bansemer), and a travel coordinator, along with the aircrew, security, protective-detail, and communications teams, on a large Air Force transport plane, inside a secure box with no windows. In whatever country we’d landed, we’d ride to a hotel in a caravan of SUVs, typically eat dinner with our hosts, and prep for the next day, which would be filled with meetings—both with foreign government counterparts and with the US intelligence officers stationed there. We packed as much personal interface time into these trips as possible, typically across a conference table, never a putting green.
At meetings of the Five Eyes partners, which we held twice a year and rotated among each of the five nations, we dwelled on how we could collectively mitigate the damage we were all incurring from the publication of the leaks. Those were the serious discussions. During breaks, all four of the other national intelligence leaders took turns—and great joy—in asking pointed questions about our American political processes. “Sequestration and debt ceilings. We don’t have those; what are they like?” And, “So tell me again about how the greatest democracy on earth works.” More than once, the United Kingdom’s intelligence chief observed that it had been a grave mistake for the United States to declare independence, but that Queen Elizabeth was willing to welcome us back into her good graces, once we were willing to admit to our error. I never was able to come up with an appropriately witty retort. Our mutual challenge had drawn us closer than ever, and a year later, I would publicly make the—seemingly outlandish to the archconservatives in the US IC—suggestion that dual-citizenship privileges and obligation should be extended to all the Five Eyes partners whenever we found ourselves in one another’s intelligence footprint, with full access to each nation’s networks. This is an idea whose time hadn’t come before I retired, but I’m convinced it will happen someday.
For most of the other parties mentioned in the Snowden leaks, I’d developed a script for how to get past the awkward first few minutes of our meetings. The delegation leader would start with some version of “We’ve read all the shocking media reporting about your collection on our government through N
SA’s capabilities.” Without acknowledging the specific allegation, I’d respond, “The president has tasked us to study this with an intent to reform how we conduct intelligence.” We would all nod and then get on with business, leaving unspoken any understanding of how their intelligence services were spying on us. Everyone wanted insight on what US leaders were thinking—in general and in relation to their parochial issues and their government, and on the state of technology in America. Every national delegation I met with also needed US intelligence insights, particularly on terrorist threats, to keep stability in their sector of the world. Outside the Five Eyes circle, Norway and Japan understood our mutual dependencies best and did the most to minimize damage from public discussion of the leaks and what they revealed. Not surprisingly, those two nations have moved into the next concentric circle of partnership with US intelligence in the years since, to their credit and our mutual benefit.
I can say, however, that without a doubt, the 2014 bilateral meeting I had with a delegation from Brazil—the nation where Glenn Greenwald kept his residence—was one of the ugliest and nastiest of my career. Most nations sent their intelligence leaders to these gatherings; some, to make a point, sent their diplomats. Brazil sent its attorneys. President Dilma Rousseff was furious with the United States for purportedly spying on her, her government, and her citizens—at least according to Greenwald—and so dispatched her lead attack dog, Antonio Patriota, who had once been Brazil’s ambassador to the United Nations and was specifically named by Greenwald as someone we’d surveilled. He was backed up by a large contingent from Brazil’s Ministry of Justice. Without exchanging pleasantries, Patriota began reading aloud twenty-eight pejorative questions—charges, really—that he demanded the United States answer. Each was intentionally insulting, either to the United States or to the US Intelligence Community. I sat and listened, and when he was halfway through his list, I politely interrupted and asked if he would give me a copy of it, so we could provide him with formal, interagency-coordinated responses. That only seemed to infuriate him more, as my attempt to cooperate had broken his rhythm.
But even that enmity was short-lived. Two years later Brazil hosted the 2016 Summer Olympics, and the US Intelligence Community supported their efforts in a major way, deploying people and teams from several IC components. We provided them with intelligence that was not only timely enough for them to act, but was specific enough for them to make preemptive arrests. There were no attacks on any Olympic venue or event. Debriefing the success of the Olympics in 2016, after Rousseff’s exit, I recounted for the DNI representative in Brazil what had occurred with Antonio Patriota in 2014. He suggested it would be an opportune time to visit Brazil, and I did. That was one of the most pleasant and most productive foreign trips I ever took.
Another key strategic ally with whom our relationship was very publicly damaged was Germany. When Der Spiegel joined the Guardian and the Washington Post in publishing leaks, its citizens’ ire turned inward at the nation’s intelligence services, particularly the Federal Intelligence Service—the BND. Der Spiegel portrayed German intelligence as an American pawn, doing our bidding at the sacrifice of German sovereignty. Chancellor Angela Merkel publicly expressed her shock and dismay at reports that we’d surveilled her. I believe that, unlike probably all the other politicians who expressed their outrage in 2013 and 2014, Merkel’s anger was genuine, and she honestly didn’t know the extent to which Germany was spying on the United States, including surveillance of our national leaders.
I also had sympathy for her personal position. Angela Merkel had been a young girl in Brandenburg, in the East, when I’d attended Nuremberg American High School and the University of Maryland in Munich. She was still living in East Germany when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, and she remained there until it came down in 1989, an event that prompted the start of her political career. So, for her, the Stasi wasn’t a mythical boogeyman. She had grown up under its oppression, and for that reason, I believe she never trusted intelligence organizations—hers or anyone else’s. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know what her intelligence services were doing, and the reports from Der Spiegel that said the BND was helping NSA spy on her and on German citizens recalled the real-life experiences of her childhood and young adult life all too well. Even worse, her experiences and biases were not—and are not—outliers among German politicians. The truth was, many Der Spiegel stories had come from reporters, wittingly or unwittingly, misreading data Snowden had leaked from Boundless Informant statistics, believing the numbers represented one thing—such as collecting on German citizens—when they actually accounted for efforts such as German intelligence collecting on the Taliban and al-Qaida. Unfortunately, Merkel was, I think, predisposed to believe Der Spiegel, and the reports struck a painful, personal nerve.
As someone with very little diplomatic skill—to say the least—I came to appreciate Susan Rice’s considerable dexterity as a negotiator. After the political fallout from her recitation of the Benghazi talking points in 2012, she had moved to the senior-most White House national security position that did not require confirmation. In a twist of fate, she succeeded Tom Donilon as national security adviser just weeks after the first Snowden story appeared. As bad as the timing was for Susan, having her talents in that job at that very difficult time was a good thing for our nation. Within the National Security Council, she was known for being a bit rough around the edges and for suffering no fools. While abroad, however, she patiently listened and then, with a unique combination of good humor and sharp intellect, turned very difficult and sensitive discussions back to our need to work together and focus on the way ahead instead of dwelling on the past. In early 2014, the scandals and political skirmishes between Germany and the United States were far from over, but we were warily working together to take stock of the situations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, and without Susan, I’m not sure that would have been the case.
If we had not had that cooperation from Germany and other European nations, I honestly don’t know how we would have responded to what happened in March. The IC had been closely watching the ongoing political protests in Ukraine, which began in November 2013 when Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych suddenly backed out of a deal that would have brought Ukraine a desperately needed infusion of cash from the European Union in exchange for aligning itself more closely with EU policies. We were aware of the unrest but did not have the clairvoyance to predict a Russian invasion, which I remain convinced stemmed from Putin’s spur-of-the-moment opportunism, rather than being a long-planned operation.
Before the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine had been a crucial Soviet state to Moscow, hosting strategic air bases, the strategic intelligence sites I visited in 1993 as DIA director, and—more important—the Soviet Black Sea Fleet on the Crimean Peninsula. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine became the largest wholly European nation. Ukraine was—and is—extremely poor, which is why the government invited me behind the former Iron Curtain in 1993 to see the most sensitive of its intelligence sites. It desperately needed foreign investment if it was going to be independent of Russian influence and was eager to have the United States subsidize its operations. Unfortunately, its massive SIGINT sites—like so much else in Ukraine—held no practical value to the United States in 1993, so it fell back under nominal Russian control. For Russia, Ukraine remained strategically important, because it buffered Russia’s border from EU nations, and because Crimea was still home to its critically important Black Sea Fleet.
Ukraine is also starkly divided ethnically, with the population of its center, west, and north identifying as and speaking Ukrainian, and the population to the south and east identifying as and speaking Russian, particularly in Crimea and in the territories in the far east, bordering Russia. The capital city, Kiev, sits squarely within the Ukrainian-identifying population. So when President Yanukovych backed away from EU money and alliances in November 2013, Kiev and the surrounding areas
protested—not just the cancellation of the deal, but also the huge levels of corruption and cronyism in the national government. After student protesters were attacked by police and government forces at the end of November, the volume of demonstrators swelled into the hundreds of thousands—by some reports, a million. In many ways, it reminded me of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
When I briefed the worldwide threat assessment to Congress in February 2014, there were still massive numbers of protesters enduring brutal weather in Kiev, but the demonstrations had largely calmed, and interactions with police were less violent. That changed on February 18, when police came to take down barricades, and protesters held their ground. Five days of deadly clashes followed, during which the opposition gained control of Kiev, and Yanukovych fled to Russia. What remained of the parliament voted unanimously to remove him from office the same day.
This whole series of events was reported very differently to the citizens of Ukraine who spoke Ukrainian than to those who spoke Russian. Russian media described the uprising in Kiev as being orchestrated by the United States to put either Jewish or fascist elements—or absurdly, both—in control of the Ukrainian government. Backing up the fictitious media reporting was an army of Russian internet trolls pretending to be Ukrainians in the east who were afraid their country was falling to fascist elements in Kiev. They created internet memes that associated the capital with sympathy for Nazi Germany and wrote false eyewitness accounts of how the new government in Kiev was organizing to wipe out the ethnically Russian population.
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