Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  Considering that struggle, not surprisingly, technology was a sharp point of focus for the threat hearings during the first few months of 2016—which I happily noted for each congressional committee would be the final time they would hear from me about the “most diverse set of threats I’ve seen in my more than fifty years in the intelligence profession.” I started each hearing by giving a countdown of days until I retired—by then under a year—and then launched into discussing how the same technology advances that were “central to our economic prosperity” would create new security vulnerabilities that we were just beginning to grasp. I talked about artificial intelligence making autonomous decisions and about the ways in which everyday machines were being connected to the internet. “The Internet of Things,” I explained, “will connect tens of billions of new physical devices that could be exploited.”

  I’d publicly illustrated how the internet is both a privacy and security concern with the example of connected refrigerators: “It’s not hard to imagine a fridge that knows whether you are stocking it full of fresh veggies and fruit and then reports that information back to your health insurance provider. But if the latest software patch can’t distinguish between an apple and an apple pie, your insurance rates could go up.” I also noted that, in theory, someone could hack the appliance and alter its temperature while you’re at work, producing “maliciously spoiled milk.” That typically drew laughs, and then I cited a case from 2015—as reported by the Register, a paper in the United Kingdom—in which a security firm had successfully hacked into a refrigerator digitally displaying its owner’s Google calendar. Having gained access to the calendar, they then surreptitiously collected the log-in and password for all his Google accounts. With a primary-email log-in, they could easily reset passwords for his bank and credit accounts.

  I also briefed Congress on Iran, which continued “to be the foremost state sponsor of terrorism” and to interfere in regional crises. Although the IAEA had announced in January that Iran had dismantled its nuclear-weapons program, as we’d said, that didn’t suddenly make the nation a beacon of justice and freedom. I discussed Russia, noting that the annexation of Crimea made Putin “the first leader since Stalin to expand Russia’s territory,” and that Moscow’s military venture into Syria marked its first deployment of significant combat power outside the Soviet space since its foray into Afghanistan in the 1980s. I noted that “Moscow faces the reality, however, of economic recession, driven in large part by falling oil prices, as well as sanctions. Russia’s nearly four percent GDP contraction last year will probably extend into 2016.”

  I updated my warnings about “unpredictable instability,” citing much more specific statistics than the year before:

  Violent extremists are operationally active in about 40 countries. Seven countries are experiencing a collapse of central government authority, and 14 others face regime-threatening, or violent, instability, or both. Another 59 countries face a significant risk of instability through 2016. The record level of migrants, more than one million arriving in Europe, is likely to grow further this year. Migration and displacement will strain countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. There are now some 60 million people who are considered displaced globally. Extreme weather, climate change, environmental degradation, rising demand for food and water, poor policy decisions and inadequate infrastructure will magnify this instability.

  My survey of cyber technology, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things made the most news, although it was the phrase I used to end my opening statement that made all the headlines: “Needless to say, there are many more threats to US interests—worldwide—that we can address, most of which are covered in our Statement for the Record. But I’ll stop this litany of doom and open to your questions.” Someone at ODNI thought that “James Clapper and the Litany of Doom” would be a great name for a heavy metal band, and by the end of the week, I was presented with a concert T-shirt that featured my likeness, front and center, absolutely shredding on lead guitar as pyrotechnics exploded all around.

  I turned seventy-five on March 14 and spent my birthday en route to Australia to meet with the Five Eyes intelligence chiefs to discuss the future of intelligence and security. In Canberra I found one presentation to be particularly compelling. Dr. Paul Taloni, the director of the Australian Signals Directorate—their equivalent of the NSA director—described sitting with his seven-year-old daughter and looking at the pictures of Pluto taken in 2015 when the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby.

  The first image he showed her, and later included in his presentation, was the now-iconic first color image NASA posted online: a rusty brown planet with the shape of a white heart covering its lower-right quadrant. He asked his daughter what it was, and she replied, “Just a photo of Pluto.” Each successive shot was taken at closer range, with more detailed views of the texture of the dwarf planet’s surface. The picture on his third slide showed sharp ridgelines and peaks on Pluto’s surface, casting shadows into a vast valley, with the nitrogen atmosphere hanging in layers, heaped above the curve of the horizon. His daughter told him it was “just the mountains on Pluto, with the air.” Then he showed her the best picture we’d had of Pluto at the time when he was seven—a faint white dot among many other dots. “Wow, Dad,” she observed, “you’re old.” I didn’t bother to say anything at the time, but when I was seven, we’d only just discovered Pluto a few years earlier. His point was that, in just one generation, technology had leapt from seeing Pluto as a faint dot to actually visiting the dwarf planet and sending back detailed color images.

  While I was in Canberra, a Google team was in Seoul, Korea, putting its DeepMind artificial intelligence to a unique test. Twenty years earlier, in 1996, IBM’s Deep Blue had shocked the world by defeating the reigning world chess champ, Garry Kasparov. In 2016, Google’s AlphaGo program took on the Chinese board game Go. Deep Blue had been able to process all possible chess moves to outmaneuver Kasparov. In Go, there are 1090 times as many possible positions as there are atoms in the universe. So a computer cannot win at Go by brute processing force. Instead, using neural network technology, AlphaGo taught itself to play, and in the process developed what Google’s engineers called “an intuition” for the game. That month, AlphaGo beat world champ Lee Sedol in four of five games. The biggest moment of the best-of-five match was move 37 of game 2. The commentator, also a Go grand master, thought AlphaGo had made a huge blunder, placing its piece far away from the action. Lee took several minutes to try to understand the move, hoping to capitalize on AlphaGo’s error. Eventually he recognized the brilliance—what he termed the “beauty”—of the move, one that likely had never been played before and not one a human would think of making. Lee had to leave the room for fifteen minutes to compose himself. So we have left behind the world of 1996, in which our smartest computers put their speed and brute force behind algorithms written by human programmers. We now live in a world in which machines can learn from their own mistakes and can develop a “beautiful” intuition.

  Later that spring, at the 2016 GEOINT Symposium, I recounted Paul Taloni’s presentation and Google’s victory, and I told the attendees that we could view that pace of technical innovation either as an alarming development that could take away any advantage we had, or as a force that would revolutionize our lives for the better, one that we in the IC could and, I was confident, would take advantage of. But, I said, we needed to stop fighting technology and instead put it to work for us.

  I illustrated what I meant with a problem our security folks had recently come across. During a standard sweep of a new facility of which the Intelligence Community was about to take possession, they’d discovered several wireless signals transmitting out into the world. When they located their sources, they were relieved to discover the signals were not from foreign intelligence bugs in the facility, but from vending machines trying to inform their distributor that they were empty. Apparently, “phoning h
ome” for refills is a fairly common feature in vending machines, and one we learned to check for and mitigate. But this led to more questions about how the Internet of Things affected us: Where were the weak points that we weren’t yet considering? And how would we adapt when even our clothes are connected, or when doctors regularly prescribe wireless monitors for health conditions? I mentioned that I had needed to obtain a security waiver for my hearing aids, which had Bluetooth connectivity. Technology had the potential to revolutionize our business and our lives, but we needed to move past just defending ourselves from drink machines and hearing aids.

  I felt that I ought to deliver a suitable valedictory address to close out my final GEOINT Symposium, having spoken as NGA Director, USD(I), and as DNI (although I did threaten to return in 2017 to represent “the GEOINT needs of the assisted living community”). So, I tried to sum up what my fifty-two years in the intelligence profession had taught me, particularly the subjects that had weighed on my mind as DNI while our nation was holding a very public conversation about the IC and how it does its work. What was lost in that public debate was the question of why we even do intelligence. Why does any nation-state? I told the GEOINT Symposium that “at its most basic level,” we conduct intelligence “to reduce uncertainty for decision makers. That can be anyone, from the president in an Oval Office to a private in an oval-shaped foxhole. We can’t eliminate uncertainty for any of them . . . but we can provide insight and analysis to help their understanding and to make uncertainty at least manageable.” Appreciating the risks involved, they can make educated decisions, and we and our friends and allies can operate with a shared assessment of the facts and the situation.

  I closed with this thought:

  I believe that in this time of change, when we don’t know who “Intell Customer Number One” will be a year from now when we hold GEOINT 2017, what our national priorities will be, and what challenges we’ll face next, if we keep the truth in front of us of why we do intelligence, our unique accesses and insight will continue to help our national leaders manage the inevitable uncertainty for a long time to come.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Election

  On December 4, 2011, Russians went to the polls in what would be the most closely contested parliamentary election since Vladimir Putin and his United Russia party came into power in 1999, when Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin as president and then never left. Putin had served two terms as Russia’s second president but was constitutionally prevented from running for a third consecutive term, and so he’d stepped down in 2008, nominating Dmitry Medvedev to stand for United Russia. He helped Medvedev get elected and then served as prime minister—first in succession to the presidency—during Medvedev’s term. Few doubted that Putin was still calling most of the shots. Then, in September 2011, Medvedev announced he would not run for a second term. Instead, he nominated Putin to stand as the party’s candidate for president in the March 4, 2012, election. Putin accepted the nomination and offered the prime ministership to Medvedev, should he win.

  This arrangement met the letter of the law—no more than two consecutive terms—but not everyone in Russia thought it was ethical or in the nation’s best interest, and for the first time in twelve years, voices of dissent were widely heard around the nation. People began to refer openly to United Russia as “the party of crooks and thieves,” and opposition parties dared to point out government corruption. Three months before the presidential contest, tensions came to a head during the December 4, 2011, Russian parliamentary election. It was a critical test for Putin’s party. Maintaining a hold on Russia’s parliament wasn’t just a matter of being able to run a legislative agenda without opposition; it answered the question of whether or not people with opposing political viewpoints would be able to get away with criticizing Putin.

  On parliamentary election day, the US IC and diplomats around the world watched the results with interest. As polls closed and votes were tallied, United Russia received a little less than 50 percent of the vote, but because of the way the elections were structured, it managed to keep a slim majority of seats in parliament—the rest split among the other six registered political parties, with the Communist Party finishing a distant second. As the tallies were rolling in, the opposing parties and independent organizations—Russian and international—began releasing reports of suspected voter fraud and voter intimidation, both at the polls and in workplaces, where employees likely to vote against United Russia were held at work and prevented from voting. Armed men appeared at polling stations and chased off election observers. Then reports came in of people being bused around to vote for United Russia at multiple stations throughout the day. That evening, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton joined other world leaders in expressing unease with the results. She called for an investigation with a statement that read, “We have serious concerns about the conduct of the election.”

  On the following day, Monday, citizens took to the streets to stage a genuine protest against the election—something else new in Putin’s Russia. There had been protests in previous years, but mostly from former Communist retirees whose marches were more nostalgic parades than legitimate threats. But now several thousand angry young people gathered in Moscow, showing their opposition not only to the election, but to the corruption they perceived as pervading Putin’s party and Medvedev’s government. They disrupted traffic and damaged property, and police couldn’t move them along. The demonstrations on Tuesday and Wednesday spread to other Russian cities. Putin seethed at this public embarrassment, coming on the heels of the closer-than-expected party win and just months before he would stand for president. On Thursday, he spoke to the Russian media, describing the protesters as mere “pieces on the chessboard” and claiming they were all being directed by an “unseen hand”—US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, through his old nemesis, the CIA.

  Whether he actually believed Clinton was behind the protests or whether the statement was a cynical move designed solely to stoke anti-American sentiments, his provocation worked. Those favoring United Russia galvanized around the American threat, and the state propaganda machine shifted into high gear. Over the next three months, the state media portrayed Putin as the only leader who could stand up to the United States, and Medvedev tweaked election rules to ensure no one who could compete with Putin was allowed to stand. In March, Putin won almost two thirds of the votes in the presidential election, and with new laws extending the presidential term to six years, he could theoretically remain in office until 2024. While it’s likely that Clinton’s public condemnation of the 2011 Russian parliamentary election actually helped Putin to a convincing win in 2012, Putin continued to blame her for Russian unrest, and he is not one to forgive or forget a grudge—ever. So when Clinton announced her candidacy for president in 2015, Putin remembered.

  After the 2016 US presidential election, the Intelligence Community investigated, documented, declassified, and published accounts of what Putin and Russia had done to influence the election—in remarkable detail. But that IC assessment didn’t capture the experience of actually being on the receiving end of the Russian influence operation in 2015 and 2016—the slowly dawning realization that our primary adversary for nearly all of my half century as a US intelligence professional was, without exaggeration, hacking away at the very roots of our democracy. Before then I’d never seriously considered writing a book about my experiences, even after transparency began to feel more natural. But after Election Day 2016, I felt compelled to share my experience of what had happened to us, to educate the electorate—not because I thought I could stop it from happening again, but because we needed to be able to recognize it when it did. In truth, “again” is the wrong word, because the Russian propaganda didn’t stop.

  Russian interference in the most recent US elections is not without precedent. The Soviet Union likely tried to influence every US election during the Cold War. The Soviet efforts for their favored candidate i
n 1960 are well documented. Adlai Stevenson had lost both the 1952 and 1956 elections to Dwight Eisenhower, at least partly because he’d made statements against the escalation of nuclear weapon testing and procurement, particularly of hydrogen bombs, and so was seen as “soft” on the Soviets. As documented at the time by New York Times Washington bureau chief James Reston and later by Stevenson’s biographer, John Bartlow Martin, after Stevenson announced he wouldn’t run in January 1960, he was invited by the Soviet ambassador to their embassy on a false diplomatic pretext. There the ambassador read him a letter from Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, offering support—including money and propaganda—if Stevenson would enter the race. He declined, went home, documented the conversation, and reported it to Eisenhower’s administration—putting the welfare of the nation above his own personal interests. With Stevenson out, Khrushchev favored anyone over Richard Nixon, and so, reportedly, the Soviets turned their efforts toward helping Kennedy get elected, without actually colluding with Kennedy’s campaign. (I can only wonder if during the Cuban Missile Crisis Khrushchev regretted having backed Kennedy.)

  We know the Soviets worked against Nixon again in 1968, and that Hubert Humphrey reportedly declined direct financial support. In the 1976 campaign, they successfully recruited a Democratic Party activist to report inside knowledge of candidate Jimmy Carter’s campaign that they could use to influence the new administration after Carter’s election. They worked against Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, using intelligence services to dig up and promulgate dirt on the sitting president. And those are just the few specific examples already in the public sphere that I can mention. In the IC’s report on Russian activities in the 2016 US presidential campaign, we noted that the Soviet Union used intelligence officers, influence agents, forgeries, and press placements to disparage candidates perceived as hostile to the Kremlin until the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed and ceased to exist.