On Sunday, May 14, I told Jake Tapper on CNN, “I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally—and that’s the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system—and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.” Jake asked, “Internally from the president?” And I responded, “Exactly.” I explained, “The Founding Fathers, in their genius, created a system of three coequal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances, and I feel as though that’s under assault and is eroding.”
Looking at the recording of that interview, I again appeared tired. This time, I wasn’t tired from working around the clock for months on end. I was tired because my journey of seventy-six years had led me to a place that should be home, and I’d found that the foundation of that home was beginning to crumble and the pillars that supported its roof were shaking. In the period of just a few months, our president had attacked Congress that wouldn’t pass legislation at his will, the judiciary that dared to rule against his travel ban, the “dishonest media,” the “Nazi” Intelligence Community, the FBI investigating his campaign, and anyone who said no to him. Beyond that, he had disparaged minority Americans and mocked those with disabilities. At the close of his first week in office, the Economist Intelligence Unit updated its Democracy Index to indicate that the United States no longer qualified as a full-fledged democracy. For the first time, because of an “erosion of public trust in political institutions,” our democratic status was listed as “flawed.”
Since then, President Trump’s motto, “America First,” has meant tearing up agreements that the United States had made with other nations and not meeting obligations we’d incurred before he took office. He marginalized NATO, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, said he wouldn’t honor the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and decertified the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I don’t see how North Korea or any other nation would trust the United States to live up to any new deal we tried to make. We have ceded leadership on global issues to China, Germany, and Russia.
I also looked tired in that interview because I knew who was behind all of this. In a 2005 Russian “state of the nation” speech, Vladimir Putin had said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and copatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” He blamed the United States for that disaster and wanted nothing more than for Russia to regain glory at our expense. By May 2017, when Jim Comey was fired and I began appearing on the talk shows, we’d learned that the Russian operation had been even more expansive than the IC had assessed in January. We knew now that the Russians had thousands of Twitter accounts and tens of thousands of bots that posted more than a million tweets. They posted more than a thousand videos on YouTube with days of streaming content. Facebook has said Russian content reached 126 million of its American users—an astonishing number, considering that only 139 million Americans voted.
As the leader of the Intelligence Community, I testified that the IC did not attempt to assess whether the Russian influence campaign impacted the results of the election. As a private citizen, I had no doubt they influenced at least some voters. Looking at the savvy ways the Russians targeted specific voter groups—for instance, buying advertisements on Facebook promoting Clinton’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement and ensuring those ads ran only on the pages of white conservative voters in swing states; at how they created lies that helped Trump and hurt Clinton and promoted these falsehoods through social media and state-sponsored channels to the point that the traditional US media were unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda; and at how they ran a multifaceted campaign and sustained it at a high level from early in 2015 until Election Day in 2016 . . . of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome. Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.
As the investigations have advanced, the specter of collusion has dominated the discussion. When I left office on January 20, I’d seen no smoking-gun evidence that the Russian government and the Trump campaign were in substantive coordination of their efforts. I didn’t learn about the June 9, 2016, meeting between candidate Trump’s closest advisers and representatives of the Russian government—purportedly to discuss “dirt on Hillary” and sanctions against wealthy Russians—until I was firmly retired. But what I did see as DNI—something brought home for me as I relived the election while preparing this book—is that the Russians and the campaign seemed to employ strikingly parallel messaging in social media posts and public statements, effectively complementing each other to great effect, with no attempt to hide it.
That combined effort appeared to go well beyond candidate Trump’s calling on a foreign power to find thirty thousand missing emails belonging to his political opponent and publish them, or his praise for WikiLeaks—which Trump’s CIA director later aptly characterized as a non–nation state hostile intelligence service—for publishing materials Russian intelligence had stolen. On a routine basis, whenever the campaign published an allegation that hurt Clinton, the Russians would repeat, amplify, and embellish that claim; and when the Russians promulgated a conspiracy theory about her, Trump would repeat it at campaign rallies and on Twitter. Whether secretly coordinated or not, whether there was actual collusion or not, this parallelism constituted a putative team effort by the Russian government and the Trump campaign to undermine truth and to cause much of the American public to question if facts were even knowable. And it didn’t end with the election.
The possibility that Trump’s campaign worked or coordinated any political tactics with the Russian government—directly or indirectly—is unquestionably of crucial importance. But in my mind, far more concerning than any specter of collusion is the aggressive indifference of President Trump’s administration to viewing Russia as a threat and its abject failure to do anything about this existential menace to our nation and our way of life. Repeatedly, the president has spoken about Iran’s violating the “spirit” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the agreement that prevents it from attaining a nuclear weapon—and he announced in October 2017 that he was decertifying the deal. Yet Russia has built, repeatedly tested, and deployed cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Those violations are a serious threat to global security, and Putin’s March 2018 speech in which he described “invincible” nuclear weapons—messaging aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences—further illustrates the profound animosity he has for the United States, the only adversary these weapons are intended for. Russia has continued to occupy large parts of Ukraine and to murder civilians in Syria. It has worked against American interests in Afghanistan and helped North Korea avoid sanctions. And it has continued to attack American institutions and to drive social divisions deeper, on social media and state-sponsored broadcasts. Whether that involves assailing the credibility of the press, the FBI, and the US Intelligence Community or promoting the violent rise of neo-Nazis, the Russians have been there, often finding their propaganda effectively supported by the US president. And they’ve done these things with impunity. In July 2017, Congress voted to impose sanctions against Russia in response to election interference. The sanctions bill passed the House 419–3 and the Senate 98–2. Knowing any veto would be easily overridden, Trump allowed it to become law, and then the administration simply chose not to enforce the sanctions.
And there’s something that bothers me even more
. On Sunday, January 22, 2017—just two days after the inauguration—NBC’s Chuck Todd confronted Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press, asking her about Sean Spicer’s blatant and obvious lie that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” She responded, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying that it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving, Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”
“Alternative facts.” I just can’t square “alternative facts” with my life experience. My parents taught me that one faced life’s truths head-on. Professionally, my dad approached his work without slant or politics, and I don’t recall his ever changing facts to make his bosses happy. I never heard the phrase “truth to power” from him, but I saw how he lived and worked. For fifty-three years, I tried hard to speak truth—sometimes very uncomfortable truth—to people making crucial decisions for our national security. Telling General Bill Livsey that I couldn’t provide him with “unambiguous” warning of a North Korean invasion was a difficult truth to deliver. Telling Wayne Downing that it was wrong to hold Terry Schwalier accountable for Air Force institutional failings was another. When I made mistakes—mistakenly finding WMD sites in Iraq or misunderstanding Senator Wyden’s question in testimony—they were honest mistakes.
I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as “fake news.” I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable. Just in the past few years, I’ve seen our country become so polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary. This was not something I could idly stand by and watch happen to the country I love.
I’ve often thought about General George Patton’s quote “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.” Applying Patton’s battlefield wisdom to the profession of intelligence, we provide facts to decision makers more broadly—whether they sit in the Oval Office or are hunkered down in an oval foxhole—to reduce uncertainty, risk, and, yes, fear. That’s why intelligence is vital; that’s what we do and why we do it.
As I left government service, I had my own decision to make. I thought hard about all my concerns—my “fears”—about the idea of writing a book. I had not planned to write anything, in spite of the urging of many friends and colleagues who thought I should, if for no other reason than to chronicle living through fifty years of the history of American intelligence. But after experiencing the election, the unprecedented Russian interference in our political process, and the behavior by and impact of the Trump administration, I changed my mind. I think the catalyst was the stark, visceral realization of seeing the fundamental pillars of our country being undermined both by the Russians and by the president. This shook me, since it was these very attributes—our form of government, our deference to the rule of law, our rich mix of ethnicities and nationalities, and our freedoms, including especially a free and independent press, and freedom of religious practice—that all seemed under siege, no longer universally respected and protected as assumed “givens.”
My parents instilled respect for these unique attributes of America throughout my formative years. My dad, who served faithfully for twenty-eight years in the Army during World War II, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam, was a living example to me of the importance of actively defending and protecting this country and what it stands for. And as I’ve described, I followed in his footsteps, serving thirty-four years in the military, sixteen years as a civilian in government, and six years in industry—virtually all in the profession of intelligence. I always considered this a noble calling, a sacred public trust, because, simply stated, I believe in this country. Part of this instilled ethos was profound respect for the president as commander in chief; I served in that spirit every president from John Kennedy through Barack Obama. So, speaking critically of our current president is counterinstinctive and difficult for me to do, but I feel it is my duty.
We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and, in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And, close to my heart, he has besmirched the Intelligence Community and the FBI—pillars of our country—and deliberately incited many Americans to lose faith and confidence in them. While he does this, he pointedly refuses to acknowledge the profound threat posed by Russia, inexplicably trusting the denials by Putin about their meddling in our political process over the considered judgments by his own Intelligence Community.
The Russians are astutely and persistently exploiting this divisiveness with every controversial issue they can identify, and regrettably, we are a very inviting target for them as they target both sides of every issue. They exploit Black Lives Matter by pretending to be hateful white people online, and they incite anger among targeted groups of whites by playing to negative black stereotypes; they engender fear of Muslims among Christians and vice versa; they stoke fear on both sides of the gun control debate; and so on. To be clear, the Russians are our primary existential threat. All those nuclear weapons they have or are developing are intended for only one adversary: the United States. They have been at war with us in the information realm for some time, and the apathy displayed by many Americans toward this profound menace is very disturbing. President Trump abets this apathy by his willful and skillful deflections. What we need him to do is to recognize this threat for what it is and to galvanize us in a coordinated national response. Only he can provide this leadership.
My hope is that this book will, in some measure, help people regain awareness. That’s also the reason I decided to appear regularly on CNN, so that I could continue to speak “truth to power”—in this case, to the American people. In the letter I wrote to President Obama in the spring of 2010 when he was considering whether to send my nomination as DNI to the Senate, I said: “I do not like publicity. I’ve spent the last week cringing every time I saw my name in the paper, or my face on the tube. I think it is part of the unwritten code of professional intelligence officers to stay out of the media.” That seems like a very long time ago, in a very different, more innocent environment.
I often encounter strangers in airliners, airports, and other public places who, upon recognizing me, convey gratitude for my speaking up and out, and giving them a voice. They do so in a way that doesn’t sound like the reflexive cliché “Thanks for your service.” I certainly don’t make the pretentious claim that I am carrying the torch of truth, but in some ways, that seems to be what many people implicitly expect of me and others—such as John Brennan and Jim Comey—who are staunch advocates for our values. That’s not to suggest that everyone I’ve encountered is uniformly supportive; some have angrily confronted me, questioning my loyalty and patriotism for speaking out.
It is, at this point, impossible to know whether we will restore our balance and national conscience. We have a reassuring history of recovery from similar national traumas, most prominently the Civil War and the Vietnam War. Our institutions were battered, and our national fabric severely stressed to the breaking point. But we recovered from both and, over time, emerged the better for it.
A favorite picture of my dad, taken in Germany when he was a major.
Fort Wayne, Indiana, probably 1943. I’m showing my early interest in communications intelligence.
Around the
time I was twelve years old, when I “hacked” my grandparents’ TV set to listen to the Philadelphia Police Department dispatcher.
Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, August 1961. I’m wearing the helmet liner with an X in this photo of my training platoon. At left and right in the front row are drill instructors Sergeant Stiborski and Gunnery Sergeant Fowler, and in the middle is our platoon commander, Second Lieutenant Badolato.
July 16, 1963. My first official portrait.
Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, August 1963. Standing in front of my spiffy 1963 Corvair convertible. I was on what was called “casual status” while awaiting my security clearance.
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