Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  On February 27, Russian special forces—without insignia—took control of the building occupied by the Supreme Council of Crimea. Then, on March 1, as Russian-stoked protests against the new Ukrainian government raged across its Russian-speaking areas, Yanukovych sent a letter to Vladimir Putin, asking for Russian troops to stabilize Ukraine for the safety of its citizens. Putin asked Russia’s parliament to sanction the use of Russian troops, and immediately put this authority into action, marching Russian troops—also without insignia—up from the naval base and across from mainland Russia into Crimea. Any pro-Ukrainian forces were immediately overwhelmed without shots ever being fired. By the end of the following day, Russia had complete control of Crimea, although Putin denied having any forces anywhere in Ukraine, apart from what was allowed on its naval base. He spoke approvingly of “little green men”—troops wearing Russia’s newest military uniforms and outfitted with Russia’s newest military equipment—who he claimed were ad hoc Ukrainian militias. Russian-language social media, driven by Russian intelligence, began a lovefest with these “little green men,” whom it portrayed as loving guardians of the Ukrainian people.

  On March 4, still denying the presence of Russian forces in Crimea, Putin declared that Russia had no intention of annexing the peninsula, and at the same time, floated the idea that secret polls in Crimea indicated the people there supported annexation by Russia. On March 16 the Crimean Supreme Council issued a referendum, nominally asking if the people of Crimea wanted to be part of the new Ukrainian government or secede to the Russian Federation. On March 17 they announced that 95 percent of voters had opted to join Russia. On March 18 Putin made a show of reluctantly bowing to the will of the Crimean people and graciously accepted the strategically vital peninsula on the Black Sea as the newest Russian state. What surprised leaders in the West the most wasn’t that he would lie about his intentions or actions, or even that he would move to annex a former Soviet territory, but rather the relative ease and speed with which he achieved it.

  I believe this whole episode illustrates how Western observers, particularly diplomats, completely misread Putin. He’s not an idealist, and he doesn’t care about communism or want to follow in Lenin’s or Stalin’s footsteps. While he’s a former KGB officer, he’s not a callback to the Soviets. He’s more of a throwback to the tsars, and wants to restore the greatness of the Russian empire. In his mind, with this particular episode, he was simply correcting the injustice done to the Soviet republic of Russia in 1954, when Khrushchev handed Crimea to the republic of Ukraine.

  In March 2014, I was excoriated—again—by national leaders and the media for not seeing all of this coming. In fact, we’d been warning for several days in February about Russian soldiers without insignia positioning themselves around Crimea and Russian troops massing near the border, but we never expected Russia to actually seize control, much less formally annex the peninsula. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to assess Putin’s intentions. As a former KGB officer, he understands US intelligence capabilities well enough not to send an unsecured email saying he plans to take control of Crimea on March 2. And even if we had some insight into his plans and intentions, it would still have been impossible for us to predict all of the external issues and random occurrences that would have factored into what would actually happen.

  Back under the metaphorical bus for my lack of clairvoyance, I took some solace in an article that Will Inboden, who was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin, published in Foreign Policy magazine on February 18, before events in Ukraine began to unfold. Titled “The Seven Impossible Demands Policymakers Place on Intelligence,” it cited as one of them, “Give me accurate and precise forecasts about the future, but don’t make any mistakes,” with the apt example: “Consider an intelligence forecast that ‘In Moscow on April 1, 2015, Vladimir Putin will rise at 6:47 am, eat a poached egg for breakfast, and order yet another missile test in violation of the INF treaty.’ Pity the poor analyst if it turns out that Putin does all of the above—except eats oatmeal that day instead.”

  The morning after Putin annexed Crimea, my security detail drove me from Liberty Crossing to NSA headquarters to give a speech that had nothing to do with Ukraine, or Congress, or Snowden’s leaks. Nevertheless, I flipped through the pages of my script, underlining certain phrases to stress and making edits to more precisely capture what I was thinking. With all the professional challenges and world events going on, this event suddenly felt unusually personal, a reminder that leading the community wasn’t just about responding to the daily churn of overseas threats and Washington politics. General Keith Alexander greeted me at the door. Keith had been NSA director since 2005 and had met the Snowden leaks head-on, sometimes to the dismay of the White House, as when he’d spoken the previous fall at the annual Black Hat convention of hackers in Las Vegas. I had first known Keith as a bright, up-and-coming Army major in the late 1980s, but we had more recently bonded behind the witness table at congressional hearings, particularly at the worldwide threat assessments, and I was glad to see him. I stepped to the lectern with my speech to address the “IC Pride” group at its Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Allies Summit. Here I was, a seventy-three-year-old white, straight, cisgender man, and I hoped I might have something worthwhile to say to them. Their warm applause helped calm my nerves. I opened my text, adjusted the microphone, and began.

  I thought I should start by explaining to you why I’m here speaking to you, and why I wanted to be here to speak to you. It has to do with my own personal history, my own “journey,” I guess you might call it. This began for me about fifty years ago, when I was a very young lieutenant in the Air Force, on my first assignment after technical training as a SIGINT officer, at what was then Kelly Air Force Base in Texas.

  Over the next twenty minutes, I told them the story of the two Russian linguists, the airmen I’d processed out of the Air Force on less-than-honorable discharges for being homosexual. I told them about Admiral Inman restoring a security clearance on the condition that an NSA crypto-mathematician out himself, and how I’d similarly restored an Air Force civilian’s clearance in 1989. I didn’t name him then, but Mark Roth was there, sitting in the front row, and when I glanced at him while telling his story, I saw that he was quietly weeping. I almost lost it right then, but looked away and pressed ahead, describing Admiral Mike Mullen’s testimony in 2009, when he’d explained why Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was so wrong.

  So, let me come back to why I wanted to speak to you here, at this summit. I always try not to take myself, or the position I occupy, too seriously. But I do realize that I can, should, and must use the position as a “bully pulpit” when the occasion calls for it. And this occasion calls for it. I need to set the example in the Intelligence Community, and be part of the change that we all want to see take place. There’s no way that I can ever really know what members of the LGBT community have gone through. But I can absolutely proclaim myself as an Ally. And I’m proud to be one.

  They applauded and then stood and applauded more. I looked down at the next line of my speech, but they wouldn’t let me go on, so I just stopped and drank the moment in. These were people who had each, for years or even decades, kept their secrets about who they were, who had suffered through repeatedly being told that people like them didn’t belong or that their personal identity was a clinical personality disorder. While giving that speech was a great personal catharsis, divesting myself of a burden of fifty years, the event meant more to me than even that. The whole auditorium, the whole event, was an outpouring of unconditional love and acceptance, an expression of joy from the audience in finding a community in which they didn’t have to hide who they were. And just like that, they made it very clear that they’d accepted me into that community. I’m sure they had no idea just how much that meant to me at that moment.

  Eleven months later, during a social event in Paris, an IC employee took me aside and said she had been in th
e NSA auditorium when I gave that speech. She told me it had come at a critical time for her, and that hearing me talk about my experience had made an impact on her choice to stay in the IC and in her chosen profession. It struck me later that the roles were reversed from my encounter with President Kennedy, as I had become the public figure, but the impact on me was the same. I don’t know if that woman ever thought about our conversation again, but I will never forget it.

  Back in the outside world, the IC was in for another surprise just a few weeks later. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant had, through a series of uprisings, taken control of several cities in western Iraq, including Fallujah and Ramadi. They had also made gains in Syria and were funneling captured weapons across the border. It appeared they were massing forces to try to capture Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which was an entirely different and more ambitious undertaking. We estimated that somewhere in the range of a thousand ISIL fighters were preparing to drive into Mosul in their 4x4 trucks, armed with machine guns and some artillery. We fed that intelligence to the Iraqi government, which positioned itself to meet the challenge with about thirty thousand army troops, backed by tens of thousands of members of the police forces, all armed with modern US-provided equipment in up-armored Humvees. The Iraqi troops outnumbered the ISIL fighters by at least thirty to one and were better equipped, fed, and positioned.

  If I were to say that on June 4, thirty thousand Iraqi troops caught sight of a truck bearing a black flag, threw down their weapons, and ran, that would be an exaggeration, but not by much. Over the next six days, the ISIL fighters killed approximately sixty-five hundred Iraqi troops, four thousand of whom were prisoners they summarily executed; captured almost all of the US equipment the Iraqi troops abandoned, including hundreds of Humvees; and gained control of large caches of paper money in Mosul’s banks as well as a steady source of funding from the oil refinery in the town of Baiji. Shortly after, ISIL declared a caliphate, and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, named himself as the religious successor to the Islamic prophet Muhammad and descendant leader of the world’s Muslim community. This declaration was a call to all Muslims to join the Islamic State and defend Muhammad’s nation.

  Once again, the US Intelligence Community’s lack of clairvoyance left us looking inept. I told the president and Congress, and even said publicly, that intelligence analysis is very good at evaluating capabilities—orders of battle, armament, positioning—but assessing “will to fight” was frustratingly difficult. We had underestimated the North Vietnamese and Vietcong and overestimated the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. We’d been surprised in 1991 when the US-led coalition quickly took back Kuwait from the Iraqis with very little bloodshed. To many policy makers, that explanation simply wasn’t good enough, and once again, the IC was dragged through the gauntlet of the cable-news networks and political talk shows.

  Of all the people I worked with who were affected by the Islamic State’s victories and its declaration of a caliphate, and by subsequent video postings of war atrocities on the internet, the group I felt the most sympathy for was the American Islamic community. After 9/11, they’d been targeted for violence by angry fellow US citizens, who found them a convenient target. Muslim groups around the nation had largely responded with equanimity and attempts at dialogue. Some were willing to work with the US Intelligence Community, developing relationships with the FBI and DHS. Things had, for the most part, reasonably settled down for American Muslims in the years since 9/11, but with the rise of the Islamic State, anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States was again on the rise.

  As the summer wore on, we continued to deal with another negative public narrative—this one comparing US intelligence officers with the East German Stasi. This image had become so entrenched that we surprised people when we expressed support of the USA Freedom Act, the draft legislation proposed to end NSA’s bulk storage of phone call metadata as governed by Section 215 of the Patriot Act. With that legislation, NSA would destroy its database and be required to obtain a court order for a specific phone number to run a search against the records held by the telecommunications companies, which were already storing the data for business purposes. NSA could request that companies provide data on what other numbers the target was in contact with. We needed to work out the details for how this would actually function, particularly how we would gain physical accesses to quickly search phone number databases across multiple providers in an emergency, but in broad terms, the act met our foreign intelligence needs. We wouldn’t be burdened by either the physical requirements or the social and political stigma of holding the data, and when we did need it, we would have a much more complete and useful record to search, since the USA Freedom Act included cell-phone data as well as landlines.

  A year after Glenn Greenwald began publishing stories from Snowden’s documents, the internet was full of stories about how we were spying on ordinary citizens, trying to ascertain if they were cheating on their spouses, growing weed in their basement, or pirating Hollywood movies. None was true. We were—and are—looking outward at the threats that could harm or threaten our nation or our friends and allies.

  In the summer of 2014, that meant trying to contain the Islamic State to the no-man’s-land between Iraq and Syria, as the Iraqi Army continued to fold at the least resistance. It meant monitoring the sudden influx of foreign fighters who answered the call of the caliphate, particularly from Northern Africa and Europe and even from the United States, as well as trying to keep what remained of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles out of the hands of this terrorist group. It meant more closely following what China was doing in the South China Sea, where they were dredging sand over coral reefs to create new “Chinese” islands—eight hundred miles from the mainland—so that they could claim what had been international waters as their territory. It meant turning the geospatial-intelligence enterprise, led by NGA, on to West Africa to monitor the Ebola outbreak, which had spread to major cities in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, and posed a danger to the entire world. It meant ongoing tracking of Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear weapons programs. And it meant watching “little green men” from Russia slowly invade eastern Ukraine, bringing heavy weaponry across the border in what Vladimir Putin claimed were humanitarian aid convoys.

  The Russian military truly broke new ground in social media use that summer, both helping and harming their case. While their brigade of internet trolls churned out false stories about the humanitarian successes in eastern Ukraine, bolstered by tricks like causing a town’s electric power to go out and then entering the town and restoring it, the regular Russian Army soldiers were posting pictures of themselves by recognizable Ukrainian landmarks with their armored personnel carriers and antiaircraft weapons. Heavy Russian military equipment was positioned all around eastern Ukraine, and on July 17 the tense situation led to tragedy.

  Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, and despite myriad warnings about combat operations taking place on the ground, the flight was routed over eastern Ukraine. Russian soldiers, operating a Buk surface-to-air missile system well inside Ukraine’s border, mistook the civilian airliner for a military target, engaged it, launched a missile, and brought it down, killing 298 civilian passengers and crew. Those are the facts, as determined by the Dutch Safety Board, except that they did not specify that Russian soldiers were operating the SA-11, only that the surface-to-air system had been brought across the border from Russia and was returned there shortly after the airliner was destroyed. Of course, this wasn’t a weapons system available to the Russian-speaking Ukrainian rebels. More to the point for US intelligence, while it took the Dutch Safety Board more than a year to reach its conclusions, we had the Russians dead to rights in just a few hours, fusing data from our so-called “national technical means satellites,” intercepts, and open-source reporting—particularly social media.

  For me, our ability to pinpoint attribution for this
tragedy to an overly aggressive and trigger-happy Russian military was particularly gratifying, because I’d lived through the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983. This time we had systems in place that were designed to collect the relevant information, systems that would allow us to show precisely what happened. Not only did those systems work as advertised, but we also had the means in place to integrate data from several different sources to reconstruct the event in great detail. Our ability to speak intelligence truth to the world contrasted starkly with my experience with KAL 007.

  The Russian response, however, was remarkably consistent. Despite overwhelming evidence, they simply denied responsibility. They first claimed that ethnically Russian Ukrainian separatists had shot down a Ukrainian Air Force plane, which the Russian SA-11 team initially genuinely believed they’d done. Then, when it became impossible to deny it was a civilian airliner, they claimed that it had been the Ukrainian military that had shot it down from central Ukraine, not the separatists. The Russian government–sponsored television network in the United States, RT America, even said the United States IC had cleared them of wrongdoing, running the headline US INTELLIGENCE: NO DIRECT LINK TO RUSSIA IN MALAYSIA PLANE DOWNING. RT then reported that Ukraine had shot down the plane in an attempt to assassinate Vladimir Putin, and even went so far as to falsify imagery, publishing a composite photograph of a Ukrainian fighter firing on a Malaysian airliner, an image so obviously fake that I pointed out that there really was no system owned by anyone that could have taken such a photo. When that story fell apart, they claimed Ukrainian air traffic control had directed the plane to execute maneuvers similar to what a military flight would do—precisely the same excuse they’d used with KAL 007 in 1983.