On Friday, December 9, unnamed “officials briefed on the matter” leaked the effort to the press, saying the CIA and FBI had reached the conclusion that Russia had helped Trump win. The leak wasn’t quite accurate, and certainly wasn’t helpful, but the immediate response from President-elect Trump’s transition team was even worse. Under the seal of “President Elect Donald J. Trump,” the team published a press release that—with no preamble—began, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’” It was stunning. Based on rumors from anonymous sources, the president-elect had lashed out reflexively to delegitimize the Intelligence Community—the same IC that would be serving him in forty-two days, that was already giving him President Obama’s PDBs. The attack was disturbing, as was its demonstrably false assertion that his victory was one of the “biggest” ever.
On Monday, as I continued my personal farewell tour with the intelligence workforce, a young woman asked me, somewhat urgently, “What are we supposed to do now?” It took me a moment to get my head around the doubt and uncertainty underlying the question before I could respond, and then I told her and her colleagues the only thing I could say: “Keep doing the business of intelligence. Keep shoveling intelligence coal down in the engine room and let the people on the bridge worry about what direction we’re headed, how fast we’re going, and how to arrange the deck chairs. Keep our mission in front of us and stay true to the key tenets of intelligence work: support intelligence integration, speak straight, unbiased truth to power, and leave the business of policy making to the policy makers.” I have no idea if those platitudes were helpful to her or anyone in the room, but it was about all I could muster that Monday morning.
Back in my office, I picked up the speech I had planned to deliver Wednesday night at a dinner in my honor, when I was scheduled to address INSA, the large intelligence industry association whose predecessor I’d been president of in the 1990s. My talk was—once again—built around the reassuring phrase, “It’ll be okay.” I called my speechwriter into the office, handed him the speech, and told him, “I don’t think I can say this anymore.”
On Wednesday night, I still opened with humor, borrowing a very old line to describe “the crucial partnership between the IC and industry” as being “kind of like the partnership between the taxidermist and the veterinarian—either way, you get your dog back.” I added, “Bear with me. This is my last chance to use my well-worn one-liners.” Then, instead of blowing smoke and assuring the crowd that everything would be okay, I told them about my conversation with that young intelligence officer Monday morning, and her question, “What are we supposed to do now?” I shared the answer I’d given her and added what I’d been thinking about since that conversation.
When I started out in the intelligence business—back when “intelligence automation” was acetate, grease pencil, and two corporals—I don’t think the words “intelligence” and “integration” were ever used in the same sentence. But those other two principles I told her: “speak truth to power” and “let the policy makers make policy,” have served me well for almost fifty-four years. And I believe we have to continue speaking truth to power, even—or especially—if the person in power doesn’t want to hear the truth we have to tell him.
The applause cut me off so abruptly that I stepped back from the microphone; a few people even stood. It felt like a long time before they let me get back to my speech. Then I told them:
I believe everyone here knows, my connection to the business goes back even further, to when I was a kid, following my dad around to duty stations all over the world. So it’s with mixed emotions that I’m stepping down as DNI—again, in thirty-seven days. There are things I won’t miss about playing an active role in intelligence. That starts with the dysfunctional Congress, and it goes on to include the hyperventilation in the media. If they can’t find something to hyperventilate about, they’ll make up something like, “Clapper resigns in protest.” And I won’t miss the daily drudge of the job, of not having a whole day off in six and a half years, and never having a moment to myself.
I’ll stop that list there, because at this point, I already feel like I’m attending my own wake—with a speaking role—which is not recommended when people are holding a wake for you.
I also have a list of things I will most certainly miss, in particular the remarkable people of the IC. We have the brightest, most inquisitive, most dedicated and patriotic workforce in government. After half a century, our people still have the ability to surprise me with their ingenuity, their brilliance, and their commitment to mission. And I will miss our mission. Those are the things I’ll most miss: the people and the mission.
Finally, I said that “before I shuffle off the stage, since I’ve got one foot in assisted living already,” I wanted to answer one frequently asked question: Are we better? As in, are we better than we were before I started as DNI or before 9/11 changed the way we do business?
Well, one upshot to achieving “intelligence geezerdom” is that I tend to look back even farther. I’ve got a lot more data points, and so, the question I ask myself is: Are we better now than we were when I was a young intelligence officer in 1963? The answer to that is a resounding yes. We’re more efficient. We collect more, with more accesses and more tools at our disposal. Our technology is astounding, and we can put intelligence into the hands of deployed warfighters in real time, whereas we used to be days or weeks time-late.
We are organized completely differently. We are a community; while fifty years ago, CIA and NSA might as well have been on two different planets. We, of course, haven’t reached integration nirvana, but we’ve come a long way on that journey. And we’ve also, over the past few years, learned to embrace transparency. Well, “embrace” may be a strong word, but just a few years ago, transparency felt genetically antithetical to me, and it doesn’t feel that way now.
And the result of all that progress is that we’re more effective at reducing risk for our national decision makers. Of course, policy makers have the option of accepting or rejecting the insight that intelligence gives them. If they reject it, they do so at their own peril, and unfortunately, at the peril of the nation, too. So, what do we do? We “keep on keeping on,” doing the work of the intelligence business.
The president-elect seemed increasingly desperate to make the story of Russian interference go away, constantly denying there had been any impact on the election or any interference at all. On December 28, he said that it was “time for the country to move on to bigger and better things.” President Obama didn’t want to focus on the Russian issue during his final weeks in office, either, but he wasn’t simply going to “move on.” On December 29, he ordered new sanctions against Russia and declared thirty-five known Russian spies in the United States to be persona non grata and sent them home. He also closed the two Russian-owned facilities in Maryland and New York. I didn’t think that response was commensurate with what they’d done to us, but I also knew we weren’t prepared to take more drastic steps. We waited to see how Putin would respond, fully expecting a reciprocal retaliation.
The same day, as was confirmed when he later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about it, National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn called Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, assuring him not to worry about the sanctions and asking that Russia not retaliate. On the following day, Putin announced he would not expel anyone from Russia and would not respond in kind to the new US sanctions, saying he would wait to work with the next US presidential administration. Trump tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”
New Year’s Day fell on Sunday, and so Monday, January 2, was a scheduled government holiday. The IC assessment team did not take the day off, and neither did I, as the most highly cla
ssified version of the assessment was due to the president on Thursday. John, Mike, Jim, and I, along with our closest trusted senior staff members, gave the draft assessment a critical read. We agreed that after we briefed President Obama on Thursday, we would brief President-elect Trump on Friday and provide a still-classified but less sensitive version to Congress. Then, the team would have the weekend to redact the sensitive aspects of the classified version so that we could publish an unclassified assessment on Monday, January 9. We also agreed that the three versions of the assessment—including the version we published—would contain the same conclusions, word for word.
Our team of subject-matter experts cross-referenced independent sources across disciplines, each corroborating the others and each adding to the big picture, enriching what we knew about the scope and scale of Russia’s efforts. I remember just how staggering the assessment felt the first time I read it through from start to finish, and just how specific our conclusions and evidence were. We showed unambiguously that Putin had ordered the campaign to influence the election, that the campaign was multifaceted, and that Russia had used cyber espionage against US political organizations and publicly disclosed the data they collected through WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and the Guccifer 2.0 persona. We documented Russian cyber intrusions into state and local voter rolls. We described Russia’s pervasive propaganda efforts through RT, Sputnik, and the social media trolls, and how the entire operation had begun with attempts to undermine US democracy and demean Secretary Clinton, then shifted to promoting Mr. Trump when Russia assessed he was a viable candidate who would serve their strategic goals. We added historical context to show just how much of an unprecedented escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort all of this represented, and we assessed that the election operation signaled a “new normal in Russian influence efforts.” The Russian government had done all of this at minimal cost and without significant damage to their own interests, and they had no real incentive to stop.
On Tuesday President-elect Trump attempted to undercut our assessment before its release, tweeting, “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” Of course, it had never been the plan to give him the assessment before it went to President Obama, but we chose not to respond to his tweet. On Wednesday, he tweeted, “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!” We again ignored the provocation, and I hoped the intelligence briefer who continued to present President’s Daily Briefs to the president-elect wasn’t being shot as the messenger.
I continued my Oval Office sessions with President Obama through all of this. On Tuesday, two days before the assessment was due to him, he was calm, patient, and supportive, never pressing me for details before the report was ready. That stood in stark contrast to Congress. Almost as soon as the president assigned us the task of studying the Russian interference on December 5, our oversight committees began demanding we give them updates on our progress. It’s the only time I can recall ever giving Congress a flat no without making any attempt to compromise or deflect the contrived ire of their demands. We certainly didn’t want the partisan congressional “guidance” that would have come as a result of briefing them, nor did we want anything to interfere with the team preparing the assessment, which leaks of their work certainly would have done. Even within the White House Situation Room, during the month it took to put the assessment together, we took extraordinary measures when discussing Russian interference, procedures comparable to those invoked during the endgame of the hunt for bin Laden.
One senator did find a way around our efforts to keep Congress out of our work until we’d briefed the president. John McCain informed my office in December that he wanted to hold a final hearing on “foreign cyber threats” before I retired. He said that the session would not be about the Russian interference, but instead would cover a broad look at cybersecurity. My office knew that even if that was genuinely his intent, the other senators on the committee would undoubtedly inquire about the assessment. McCain assured me he wouldn’t let that happen but when, still dubious, my office continued to try to deflect the invitation, Senator McCain defaulted to his favorite persuasive technique and said that if I didn’t agree to appear voluntarily, he’d subpoena me. For reasons that escape me now, we not only agreed to do the hearing, but scheduled it for Thursday morning—a morning I would normally brief the president in the Oval, and the very day that we would be delivering our assessment on Russian interference to him.
Preparing for that hearing was just about the last thing on my mind that week. Not only were the three directors and I poring over the IC assessment for any flaw, any reason why the president-elect, his team, Congress, or anyone else could call its conclusions into question, we were also settling on how we would actually present it. We’d decided in the interests of consistency that—no matter whom we were briefing—we’d use the same set of talking points. I would serve as the moderator, and we’d mark out specific cues for Mike, Jim, and John to amplify our talking points by briefing the NSA, FBI, and CIA equities in the assessment, in that specific order. Our mantra was “That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.” Of course, we couldn’t have believed in that mantra if we weren’t confident in the superb work the IC assessment team had done and the meticulous reviews we were continuing to put their work through.
We conducted a walkthrough of our presentation, and by Wednesday night, January 4, we were ready. We sent a copy of the assessment to the White House so that the president could read it before we met with him. Then—having seen on Twitter a preview of how the president-elect would characterize and attempt to dismiss the assessment and anticipating what would happen if he had a full weekend to tweet and talk about it before we released the public version—we made a difficult request of the overworked IC assessment team. We asked them to start working on the unclassified version immediately and to have it ready by Friday morning, instead of Monday, so that we could release the public assessment as soon as we finished briefing the president-elect that afternoon.
On Thursday morning, despite all my best efforts to avoid it, I found myself once again behind the witness table in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room. Before the hearing started, my staff had warned the committee staff that I would be traveling directly from the hearing room to the White House to brief the IC assessment to the president. Chairman McCain therefore knew that I was leaving the hearing at noon and that trying to extend the hearing past then risked an awkward scene. Also, while the assessment was complete and we no longer were concerned about congressional interference, we strongly wished to avoid discussing what was in it before we’d briefed the president and his successor.
After welcoming the senators who were new to the committee in the recently elected Congress and welcoming us as witnesses, McCain explained why we were gathered. In two sentences, he succinctly stated the difficulty our nation faced:
This hearing is about the broad range of cybersecurity challenges confronting our nation—threats from countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—as well as non-state actors from terrorist groups to transnational criminal organizations. In recent years, we have seen a growing series of cyberattacks by multiple actors—attacks that have targeted our citizens, businesses, military, and government.
Having kept his promise that the hearing would broadly address “foreign cyber threats,” McCain moved to the topic on everyone’s mind, as I kept a poker face:
But there is no escaping the fact that this committee meets today, for the first time in this new Congress, in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on our democracy. At the president’s direction, Director Clapper is leading a comprehensive review of Russian interference in our recent election with the goal of informing the American people as much as possible about what happened.
In fairness to Chairman McCain, over the next two and a half hours, we did occasionally discuss cyber-related topics other than Russian interference, and despite my having been strongly opposed to testifying that morning, his insistence on holding this hearing ended up doing us a huge favor. It served to introduce the scope of the assessment to the public, media, and Congress in a thoughtful manner that ran counter to the president-elect’s tweets, and more important, the hearing gave us an opportunity to demonstrate that the IC assessment wasn’t a politically motivated witch hunt, and that we hadn’t conducted the assessment simply because President Obama didn’t like the results of the election.
The discussion that followed was at times circumspect and often tense, but it afforded us an opportunity to discuss aspects of what had happened during the run-up to the election that our assessment did not cover. Chairman McCain returned several times to lambasting Julian Assange. At one point, he asked me directly, “Director Clapper, how would you describe Mr. Assange?” “Well,” I replied, “he is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he is under indictment, I believe by the Swedish government, for a sexual crime. He has—in the interests of ostensibly openness and transparency exposed [and] put people at risk by his doing that. So I do not think those of us in the intelligence community have a whole lot of respect for him.” Mike simply said, “I would echo those comments.”
Facts and Fears Page 47