Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  In another exchange, Republican senator Dan Sullivan challenged me on the seemingly unforceful US response to the Chinese hacks of OPM’s systems, asking, “But is that answer not part of the problem; that we are showing that we are not going to make it costly for them to come in and steal the files of twenty-two million Americans, including many intelligence officers?” I responded with a “truth to power” answer I suspect he didn’t want to hear: “Well, as I say, people who live in glass houses need to think about throwing rocks because this was an act of espionage. And we and other nations conduct similar acts of espionage. So if we are going to punish each other for acts of espionage, that is a different policy issue.”

  A few minutes later Republican senator Lindsey Graham returned to the point, noting how similar the sanctions in response to Russia’s actions were to those issued in response to China’s. “Is there a difference between espionage and interfering in an election?” he asked me. “Yes,” I responded. “Espionage implies, to me at least, a passive collection, and this was much more activist.” He led me down a road that, for a change, I was comfortable walking. “So when it comes to espionage, we better be careful about throwing rocks. When it comes to interfering in our election, we better be ready to throw rocks. Do you agree with that?” “That is a good metaphor,” I agreed. He concluded with a line he knew would be replayed on all the cable news networks: “I think what Obama did was throw a pebble. I am ready to throw a rock.”

  The hearing also gave me an opportunity to address a topic that had been on my mind since December 9, when the president-elect had first attacked the IC. Democratic senator Claire McCaskill broached it by asking if it was important “that we maintain the intelligence community as a foundational, apolitical bloc of our country.” “I could not feel stronger about exactly that,” I responded. “I think it is hugely important that the intelligence community conduct itself and be seen as independent, providing unvarnished, untainted, objective, accurate, and timely and relevant intelligence support to all policy makers, commanders, diplomats, et cetera.”

  She continued, “Do, in fact, members of the intelligence community engage in life-threatening and very dangerous missions every day, particularly as it relates to the war on terror?” “You only need to walk into the lobby of CIA and look at the stars on the wall or the front lobby of NSA [to see] the number of intelligence people that have paid the ultimate price in the service of their country,” I replied. Then she got to the heart of what had been bothering me so much, expressing what I as DNI could not say:

  So let us talk about who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community. Who benefits from that, Director Clapper? The American people? Them losing confidence in the intelligence community and the work of the intelligence community? Who actually is the benefactor of someone who is about to become commander in chief trashing the intelligence community?

  I tried to be circumspect with my response: “I think there is an important distinction here between healthy skepticism, which policy makers, to include policy maker number one, should always have for intelligence, but I think there is a difference between skepticism and disparagement.”

  The hearing adjourned at 12:09, after Chairman McCain and I sparred—playfully, I think—each of us in “cranky old man” mode. Before gaveling the hearing to a close, he said, “Director Clapper, we will be calling you again.” Breaching etiquette, I keyed my microphone back on to retort, “Really?”

  My detail hustled me out of the hearing room and into the SUV. Just ahead of Mike Rogers’s team, we raced down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Mike and I ran in, meeting John Brennan and Jim Comey, and together the four of us discussed the IC assessment with the president, who was somber and appreciative. I’ve often wondered what would have happened—or more to the point, what wouldn’t have happened—if President Obama hadn’t tasked us specifically to gather all the intelligence reporting on the Russian interference into one report, or if we’d still been working in a culture in which the CIA, NSA, and FBI refused to share information with one another, as they’d been accused of doing in the summer of 2001.

  Without that IC assessment, I don’t know that all the subsequent congressional investigations would have been launched. The Senate Intelligence Committee started its investigation the day after we briefed them, followed shortly by the Senate judiciary, House intelligence, and House oversight and government reform committees. Likewise, I don’t know if the FBI’s investigation would have been so threatening as to provoke President Trump to fire Jim Comey in May, or to prompt Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from Russia-related matters and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel.

  On Thursday night the team worked through the details of the still highly classified version for Congress, and the unclassified version we intended to publish Friday afternoon.

  At 8:30 on Friday morning we were back on Capitol Hill, presenting our briefing to the “Gang of Eight”: the party leaders in the House and Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Our presentation was fast-paced and terse, as we had to leave by 9:30 to stay on schedule. I departed the Capitol with the impression that the leaders of both parties were taken aback, both by the extent of the Russian operation and by the thoroughness with which we’d documented the facts and evidence.

  Jim, John, Mike, and I departed the Capitol on time, all of us and our personal security details in four separate, specially configured, up-armored SUVs, and sped across the Anacostia River to Andrews Air Force Base. John, Mike, and I boarded one plane, and Jim—who’d planned to remain in New York and meet with employees in FBI offices there after briefing the president-elect—boarded another. We landed at Newark International Airport around 11:30, where another four SUVs equipped with flashing lights were waiting on the tarmac to whisk us across the Hudson River to Manhattan and Trump Tower. With the media camped out in the lobby on the business side of the building, we took the residential entrance, which was fairly quiet, with only a few doormen and porters in the hallway, who all ducked aside as we passed. I briefly wondered if twenty or so government men in dark suits walking briskly through the residential hallway was an odd sight, or something to which they had already grown accustomed. Security officers held each elevator as we ascended to the fourteenth floor, crossed over to the business side, and ascended again. We transited a busy hallway, bustling with people I assumed were working on the transition, and finally reached the conference room where we were to brief the president-elect, a small and windowless space, which we were told had been secured as a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—by the Secret Service. Eight chairs were arranged around a table, with another row along a wall.

  As the de facto leader of our four-man delegation, I posted myself by the door, and we waited for the president-elect. After about ten minutes, he walked in, smiling. When I extended my hand and introduced myself, he laughed and said, “I know who you are.” He told me I had done “a great job” testifying the previous day, which seemed a diplomatic gesture, considering I hadn’t been all that complimentary toward him during the hearing, and he concluded, “You looked good on TV.” That final bit of flattery was a compliment I’m sure I’ve never heard before. I thanked him, while asserting that I actually have a face made for radio. He thanked me for the letter I’d sent along with his initial President’s Daily Brief—the first of three times he brought up the letter during the meeting.

  His pleasant, courteous attitude was a relief and set the tone for an affable briefing. President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Pence sat at opposite ends of the table. I sat to Trump’s immediate left with John Brennan beside me. Mike Rogers and Jim Comey sat across from us. National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn and White House chief of staff-designate Reince Priebus took the remaining two seats at the table to either side of Pence. This arra
ngement was much friendlier than if the four of us had been seated at one side of the table and Trump’s team at the other, and as such felt more like a standard intelligence briefing than one of the tense negotiations for which Trump was famous. As we got settled, CIA director-nominee Mike Pompeo, Deputy National Security Adviser-designate K. T. McFarland, and Homeland Security Adviser-designate Tom Bossert took seats against the wall, along with Trump’s PDB briefer, for whom the president-elect had high praise. After we started briefing, White House press secretary-designate Sean Spicer joined in, taking one of the wall seats.

  We briefed virtually the same content we’d given the Gang of Eight that morning, with me as the lead presenter and Mike, Jim, and John delivering their amplifying parts on cue. While the material was the same, the whole session was more relaxed, and we took our time to explain terms and intelligence procedures with which we knew the group might not be familiar. The briefing remained professional, but conversational, too, and the president-elect and vice president-elect both interjected politely. Trump appropriately questioned some evidence and conclusions, and we answered his questions to his apparent satisfaction. Pence very astutely prompted us to clarify points on several occasions; I was impressed by the way he actively consumed the intelligence we were providing.

  We were scheduled to spend an hour in Trump Tower, but the meeting lasted an hour and a half. By the end, I believe everyone in the room realized that the evidence—particularly from signals intelligence and cyber forensics—to attribute the influence operation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government was overwhelming. The entire Trump team was happy to hear our assessment that the Russians had not successfully tampered with actual vote tallies. The only question they posed that we couldn’t answer was whether the Russian influence operation had any effect on the outcome of the election. I told the president-elect that we had neither the authority nor capabilities to assess what impact—if any—the Russian operation had.

  As we closed the briefing, Jim Comey took advantage of a pause in conversation to address the president-elect. We’d agreed that one of the two of us would bring up “one additional matter,” a subject “best discussed on a one-on-one basis” with the president-elect. The additional matter was a dossier—a collection of seventeen “pseudo-intelligence” reports created by a private company—which I first learned about from John Brennan a week or so after we’d been tasked to conduct the IC assessment. I didn’t know until after my tenure as DNI that the dossier had begun as opposition research against Mr. Trump during the Republican primary race and then, sponsored by the Democrats, had continued to expand during the general election campaign. The memos covered a wide range of topics all related to long-standing interactions between Trump, his associates, and the Russians. It further alleged that the Russian government had compromising material on the president-elect and his team, which it had not disclosed during the course of the election or since.

  Some details in the report were salacious, but in our professional opinions, the more ominous accounts alleged ties between members of the Trump team and the Russian government. Because we had not corroborated any of the sources used to generate the dossier, we had not included it as part of our IC assessment. We knew that at least two congressional members and some of the media had copies of the dossier, and that it could be published—in whole or in part—at any moment. While we could neither confirm nor refute anything in the document, we felt what I expressed as a “duty to warn” the president-elect that it existed and that it potentially could be made public. I wondered at the time—and have often done so since—what the reaction would have been had we not warned the president-elect about the existence of the dossier, and he later learned we had known about it and chosen not to tell him.

  We decided that it should be Jim to brief him about the matter, for two reasons: First, the FBI had initially uncovered the dossier in its earlier investigation into the Russian hacking of Clinton-campaign emails, and second, John and I were both retiring at noon on January 20, while Jim would continue on as FBI director for President Trump.

  We all rose, and President-elect Trump thanked us. Reince Priebus asked him if he wanted anyone on his team to stay for the “additional matter,” and the president-elect said no. So, leaving the two of them to talk, the rest of the party adjourned. Before we cleared the conference room, the Trump team had already begun drafting their press release about our meeting. I overheard their first point, that the US IC had assessed that the Russian interference did not change the outcome of the election—which was very different from our acknowledgment that we hadn’t, and couldn’t, assess its impact. We had to let it pass. In the hallway I took the opportunity to engage Tom Bossert, who in turn introduced me to the vice president-elect. I spoke with them briefly, suggesting that the new administration consider asking Nick Rasmussen to stay on as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which it did.

  In the car on the way back to Newark Airport, I called Brian Hale (who only requested to be described as “tanned and rested” if we mentioned him in this book) and told him to publish the unclassified IC assessment immediately. He replied that, just minutes before, he’d received the certified-as-unclassified version of the report as it was moved onto the ODNI system connected to the internet, and it was ready to go. Cutting the phone connection and sitting back, I felt just about as far from “tanned and rested” as one can get. My personal vision of dancing quietly off the stage while no one was paying attention had dissolved. I had less than fourteen days left on the job, and we still had hearings to get through with our oversight committees and each of the full houses of Congress within the next week. So far, I imagined—or hoped—that we appeared publicly to be like the proverbial duck gliding smoothly across the pond, but I could feel just how frantically we were kicking our legs beneath the surface. After we landed at Andrews, I called White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to let him know that not only had we survived the briefing, but it had gone surprisingly well.

  I got little rest over the weekend, both because I was preparing for the hearings and because I was running out of time to close on several issues that were important to the IC before the clock ran out on January 20. Early Monday morning I was on camera once again, this time under very different circumstances. Every four years, just ahead of Inauguration Day, our National Intelligence Council publishes its Global Trends report, an “unclassified strategic assessment of how key trends and uncertainties might shape the world over the next 20 years, to help senior US leaders think about and plan for the longer term.” Global Trends represents years of work from our most strategically minded analysts, and I took a lot of pride in introducing the program of presentations planned for that day.

  After advising the media and the spray of cameras, to chuckles, “If you’re here to get the latest on the Russia hacks you’re in the wrong place,” I explained that “the Global Trends report does not represent the official, coordinated view of the US Intelligence Community; it does not represent the official view or policy of the US government, and it’s not a prediction of the future.” Instead it was, I told them, a framework for thinking about the world, designed to help each new administration. The report we published on January 9, 2017, was titled “Paradox of Progress,” and it depicted a world at a crossroads, with “rising tensions within and between countries.” It forecast:

  An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events.

  Underlying this crisis in
cooperation will be local, national, and international differences about the proper role of government across an array of issues ranging from the economy to the environment, religion, security, and the rights of individuals. Debates over moral boundaries—to whom is owed what—will become more pronounced, while divergence in values and interests among states will threaten international security.

  It will be tempting to impose order on this apparent chaos, but that ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long. Dominating empowered, proliferating actors in multiple domains would require unacceptable resources in an era of slow growth, fiscal limits, and debt burdens. Doing so domestically would be the end of democracy, resulting in authoritarianism or instability or both.

  The “paradox” was that, within this dark vision, there were unprecedented opportunities to reshape our world for the better, all dependent on how individuals, governments, and international groups renegotiated their expectations of and obligations to one another. The report raised profound questions, based on years of diligent research and engagement with novel thinkers around the globe. In any sane world, I would have spent weeks preparing for the speech that morning and would have framed many of my final public engagements as DNI around the milestone report. Given the events of the past year and my continuing responsibility to report on the Russian operation against our election, I almost felt caught in a microcosm of the dark world the report described. So, that Monday, I gave my introductory speech, thanked the team who’d created the report, and departed for a farewell town hall at DHS and then to prepare for additional Russia-interference briefings with Mike, Jim, and John.