Facts and Fears

by James R. Clapper

  On Tuesday morning we were back on Capitol Hill. At 10:00, we briefed the House Intelligence Committee in a classified, closed hearing, a gathering that turned partisan, personal, and nasty. In particular, three of the Republican lawmakers challenged our conclusion that the Russians actively supported Trump and seemed to resent that we had not involved them in the creation of the IC assessment or informed them as soon as we had any new information. Our explanations only served to stoke their anger. The briefing ran past schedule, and we hurried from the House briefing room south of the Capitol to a hearing room in an office building north of the Capitol for an open, televised hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee. We had about a twenty-minute break before the red lights went on above the cameras.

  For the next two hours, as the American public, the Russian government, and the rest of the world watched, we answered questions about the Russian cyber and influence operation. The senators, and simultaneously the media, sought to parse our every word, Democrats looking for collusion between Trump’s team and the Russians, Republicans for evidence of a conspiracy that the IC was attempting to undermine the president-elect. Senators on both sides pressed Jim Comey to reveal whether there were open FBI investigations looking into either of the presidential campaigns. The Democrats certainly remembered the letter Jim had sent to the Hill eleven days before the election about reopening its investigation into Clinton’s emails. When Jim told Senator Angus King, “Especially in a public forum, we never confirm or deny a pending investigation,” King voiced quiet exasperation, and the left-leaning media outlets were apoplectic.

  When the red lights went off, we immediately moved with the Senate committee to their secure facility. Strangely, after answering questions about it for two hours in public, we then presented the IC assessment to the committee for the first time. By the time this session ended, we’d been testifying for seven straight hours. When I finally had the free time to check on world events, I found that all the contentiousness of the hearings and briefings had been completely overshadowed by other breaking news: BuzzFeed had published the now-infamous dossier on Trump, the one that Jim had warned the president-elect about five days earlier. In a classic case of “shoot the messenger,” Trump publicly blamed us for the publication of the dossier—yet another indication to me that his administration would not appreciate anyone’s speaking truth to power, particularly if the truth was politically inconvenient.

  I woke Wednesday to find that Trump had tweeted another early-morning attack on us: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” I was floored by the analogy, and Jewish communities in the United States and abroad called for him to apologize and retract the statement.

  That afternoon in my office, I watched the president-elect in a televised news conference, doubling down on his Nazi tweet, again alleging that US intelligence agencies had “allowed” the dossier to leak—as though we had any control over a document we’d discovered already “out in the wild.” He continued, “I think it’s a disgrace. And I say that, and I say that, and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.” Not helping the situation, the New York Times quickly published a story apparently intended to clarify that he meant to refer to US intelligence as the Stasi, not the Gestapo.

  As I was leaving the office for the drive to the NRO for a farewell town hall, I asked Stephanie Sherline to see if she could track down a phone number for Trump. Much to my surprise, several minutes later she told me the president-elect had agreed to speak with me later that afternoon. Connecting from the NRO, I thanked him for taking the call and said he’d gotten my attention when he’d referred to the IC as “Nazis.” I explained to him that I wanted to defend the men and women of the Intelligence Community. I tried to appeal to his higher instincts and reiterated the points from my Election Day letter—that he was inheriting a national treasure and that the men and women of the IC wanted only to serve the nation and to make him successful as president. He thanked me and said that he valued the IC and the intelligence he’d been receiving. He then asked if I would put out a statement refuting what was in the dossier. The request felt very transactional—that he would play nice if I would do him a favor. I declined, saying that I couldn’t refute or affirm what was in the dossier. He sounded disappointed.

  On Thursday, Mike, Jim, John, and I briefed the entire Senate, and on Friday morning, the entire House. To accommodate the many of its 435 members who showed up, we gave the House presentation in an auditorium in the Capitol Visitor Center. After the briefing, the chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee—Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff—facilitated questions, with Republicans lined up at a microphone in the aisle on one side of the auditorium, and Democrats on the other. The questions were mostly partisan—from both sides—and we did our best to answer them within the scope of our IC assessment. When Adam Schiff recognized Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, what followed was one of the more uncomfortable, dramatic, emotional displays I’ve witnessed on Capitol Hill. She ripped into Jim Comey over the hacking, the investigations, and the letter to the committees, channeling all of the frustration she’d felt since stepping down as DNC chair into a litany of allegations aimed at him. In the midst of so much chaos, partisanship, and controversy, her anguish was palpable. I truly admired Jim for responding calmly. I tried to think of something I could say to defuse the exchange, but I couldn’t.

  I traveled from the Capitol to NSA headquarters, where I held my final town hall with the workforce there, thanking them for their quiet service through all the controversies of the past few years and trying to reassure them about the future. That evening, when I arrived back at the office, Stephanie Sherline took a long look at me, and for the first time in six and a half years said, “You look tired.”

  On Monday morning, the final week of the Obama presidency, I attended an NSC meeting that was neither celebratory nor valedictory. We discussed a difficult national security matter the president needed input on and conveyed our thoughts and departmental positions to him. I spent the next few days focusing on writing performance evaluations and lining up awards and other forms of recognition for the people who’d worked with me the past few years, and who all so richly deserved them.

  On Tuesday, I had lunch at the CIA. John then hosted a wonderful send-off with the staff in “the Bubble,” CIA’s auditorium, featuring a video with clips of me delivering all my well-worn one-liners and geezer jokes. That evening, I thanked the airlift operations team that had arranged my transportation all over the world for six years, including to North Korea. I pinned a medal on the uniform of the enlisted Air Force noncommissioned officer who’d coordinated much of that travel, although what he really deserved was retroactive hazardous-duty pay for his endless patience with me.

  On Wednesday, I visited DIA for a farewell town hall there and then met with former senator Dan Coats, who had been named in the media as my likely successor as DNI. I’d first encountered Dan when he’d served as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He understood intelligence oversight but wanted to know more about the day-to-day details of the job, and I didn’t hold back. Dan is a very decent man whose belief in “truth to power” made him a solid choice to be DNI, and after our discussion, he took the job with his eyes wide open. Later I presented an award to Mike Dempsey, who had succeeded Robert Cardillo as deputy DNI for intelligence integration and who would serve as acting DNI after Stephanie and I departed on Friday. That evening, I attended a final National Security Council meeting, at which we continued conducting business. The president thanked us all for our service and said he was proud of what we’d accomplished and that he’d miss us.

  On Thursday, with Attorney General Lynch, after some seven years of staff work, I cosigned a directive that allowed for greater sharing of raw signals intelligence—the actual intercepts before they’d been pro
cessed—outside of NSA. It required quite a bit of compromise from the SIGINT professionals at NSA to accomplish, but it was another big step for intelligence integration. I met with the cross-agency team that had produced the IC assessment on Russian interference and thanked them for what they’d done for our nation, and at the request of the ODNI workforce, Stephanie and I set aside an hour before lunch to pose for pictures with the staff, the people who were so instrumental to any success we’d achieved in integrating intelligence. ODNI’s public affairs team set up a red-carpet backdrop, and we ended up staying for two and a half hours. That evening, the leaders of the other sixteen IC components came to Liberty Crossing for one last meeting—a reception that included martini service. I thanked all of them for all that they had done, and for the work that was still ahead under the new administration.

  Stephanie and I also hosted a mini reception for many of our protective-detail officers who had served us for the past six years. We both agreed that this was our most emotional farewell. These great men and women became part of our extended families, protecting us 24/7. They are wonderful people—professional, self-effacing, and dedicated—and always as respectful as possible of what little privacy we had.

  On Friday morning, the twentieth of January, Sue and I had been invited to brunch at CIA deputy director David Cohen’s home, with John Brennan and his wife. We spent the morning and early afternoon eating, drinking, and laughing, and at noon, noted that John, David, and I had all become private citizens. Early that afternoon, Deputy National Security Adviser Avril Haines and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco joined us. They’d been working at the White House on the morning of the inauguration, almost right up until noon. We never turned on the Cohens’ TV.

  For the first time since I started out as a scared second lieutenant in 1963, I left a job not thinking about what I would do next. I would turn seventy-six on March 14—eleven years past when most people retire—never really having asked myself how long I wanted to work or when I’d stop, not until 2015 when Sue had become ill. In the years I was DNI, I’d never felt relieved of duty, not even knowing Stephanie O’Sullivan was at the helm, fully capable of handling everything. My personal security detail had been omnipresent, and I was always able to communicate with the national security structure. I had comms in the office. I had comms in the car. I had comms at home. If I traveled, a special comms team accompanied me. I was never out of touch and never able to completely relax. We have six years of vacation pictures in which I’m obviously not chilling out, because I was always aware of the emails and cables piling up. At noon on January 20, 2017, those obligations and all of that anxiety evaporated, much to my great relief.

  On Saturday, with a good bit of help, I packed up the office, making sure I kept track of the jar of paperclips I’d received from President Obama, and all the other meaningful mementoes I’d accumulated on the job. Now that the DNI’s office was no longer mine, with no one pushing to keep me on schedule, no calls from the White House and Congress to push me off schedule, no briefings, no papers to sign, no emails to catch up on and answer over the weekend, the place finally felt calm and quiet. By Sunday afternoon, as I stood and looked at the bare walls and empty shelves, it finally felt real that my fifty-five years of service was over. I didn’t regret its ending.

  Life as a retiree took some adjustment. My first trip through self-checkout at the grocery store had all the makings of vaudeville comedy, and the short-term protective-detail officer assigned to me seemed quite amused. I also had my grandson on speed dial for whenever I encountered IT difficulties. It’s more than a little disconcerting to pivot from being a sought-after expert on national cybersecurity priorities to not being able to figure out where I’d saved a Word document before I closed the file. Some adjustments were pleasant, and cataract surgery was a life-changing event. Driving me home from Walter Reed, Sue asked why I was reading all the road signs aloud. “Because I can see them now!” I replied. She glanced at me sideways without saying anything else. Vacationing in Antigua, or just having morning coffee with Sue, I wondered what was so important that I hadn’t found time to relax for so long.

  I did relax, but after a break I continued making the rounds at colleges and universities, appealing to the next generation of US voters and potential intelligence officers about the virtues of public service. I felt such engagements were an “intelligence-geezer obligation.” And I watched from the outside as the new administration struggled to govern while contending with the new president’s aversion to inconvenient facts. On his first full day in office, he sent his new press secretary out to address the media coverage of the inauguration. All the papers and cable news networks had run side-by-side pictures shot from the top of the Washington Monument. One showed President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, with crowds packed into the National Mall and spilling out into the streets and sidewalks, and the other showed President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, which was visibly more sparsely attended. Contrary to all the images and data, Sean Spicer berated the media for their coverage, announcing, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Telling them the White House would hold them responsible for misrepresentations, he took no questions.

  An hour and a half later, President Trump was on camera at CIA headquarters. When I’d heard the first place he would visit as president was the CIA, I naïvely wondered if my appeal to his higher instincts had somehow had impact. No. He took to the microphone and began rambling about the “dishonest media,” the size of his inauguration crowd, and his belief that military and law enforcement people had voted for him en masse, lumping the CIA into those categories and saying, “Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did. But I would guarantee a big portion, because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks.” He expressed his support of the IC with “I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody.” He briefly interrupted himself to say, “The wall behind me is very, very special,” and then resumed his self-aggrandizing diatribe. The problem was that the sacred wall he was standing before—with its 125 stars representing fallen CIA officers—is the CIA’s equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, not a place for politics or boasting. I considered putting out a statement, but John Brennan expressed that he was “deeply saddened and angered” and that “Trump should be ashamed of himself,” and I felt that covered it.

  On Friday, January 27, a week after stepping down, I went to FBI headquarters for a wonderful farewell from the Bureau. Just before the ceremony, I met briefly with Jim Comey in his office, and he mentioned that earlier that day, he’d been invited to dinner at the White House with the president. My impression then was that he was uneasy about the invitation, and I hadn’t seen much that had made Jim uneasy in the past. He said that he hoped to impress upon the president the importance of an independent FBI and an independent FBI director—that they couldn’t and shouldn’t be “buddies.” I agreed, and I empathized with his difficult position. A few moments later, we were both onstage, and I told the FBI workforce that through all of the recent controversy, the Bureau—with their commitment to “fidelity, bravery, integrity”—remained a pillar of our democracy.

  Throughout President Trump’s first week in office, people on both sides of the aisle appeared shocked as he actually began fulfilling his campaign promises through a series of executive orders. The most questionable—legally and morally—appeared to be the travel ban he signed on Friday. The order indefinitely blocked Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspended entry of anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for ninety days. The president stated that the executive order was being issued to prevent terrorism, but to many people, it echoed his call as a candidate for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” More than sixty thousand visas were temporarily
revoked, and hundreds of people were detained Friday after arriving at American airports, including US green card holders and permanent residents returning from travel overseas—people who lived in the United States who were prevented from returning home. With the same signature, President Trump also ceded leadership on the Syrian refugee crisis to Europe. We suddenly stopped helping those who were the true victims of the Islamic State, and of Assad’s regime supported by Russia.

  A national outcry followed over the weekend, with thousands of people protesting at airports where travelers were being detained without warrant or charges. People took to social media to protest, followed closely by a counterprotest in favor of detaining Muslims. I’d been a private citizen for a week and no longer had access to intelligence on what was happening, but I was well aware that Russian social media accounts had not been shut down and felt certain their activities on Facebook and Twitter were leading the charge in stoking anger between Americans with differing political viewpoints.

  Meanwhile, President Trump—just like President-elect Trump—showed an aggressive indifference to getting to the bottom of the Russian interference in the election. He continued to deny that he or his campaign had any contacts with Russia, even as he fired Mike Flynn as national security adviser on February 13, officially for “misleading the vice president” about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador. Three days later Trump tweeted, “The Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly (306), so they made up a story—RUSSIA. Fake news!” On February 26 he tweeted, “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”