As one of more than 40 million Americans who’d already cast an absentee ballot for the 2016 presidential election, I was in Muscat, Oman—on almost certainly my last whirlwind trip to meet with Middle East leaders as US director of national intelligence—when the electorate went to the polls on November 8. Oman is nine hours ahead of Washington, and before I went to bed that night, about 2:00 A.M. in Oman and 5:00 P.M. on the US East Coast, election analysts and pundits were discussing how the Republican candidate for president, Donald Trump, “had a narrow path” to win the election, but only if a long list of specific states improbably broke his way. They predicted that as soon as Florida or Ohio was called for former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the election would effectively be over. I slept four or five hours, rose, and turned on the TV, discovering that the narrative had flipped: The media analysts had called Ohio for Trump and said Clinton needed massive turnouts in all the left-leaning cities in Florida that hadn’t reported yet for her to have a chance of taking the state’s twenty-nine Electoral College votes. I was surprised, but didn’t really have time to think about it.
I read the overnight intelligence reports and continued getting ready for the day. An hour later, the media called Florida for Trump and laid out a very specific list of states that would now all have to swing to Clinton for her to win. As the morning progressed, I worked through the back-to-back meetings that were typical of foreign trips. In the short breaks between, my staff updated me on how things stood with the election. As we broke for lunch, at 2:31 A.M. on the US East Coast, the Associated Press declared Trump to be the US president-elect.
I was shocked. Everyone was shocked, including Mr. Trump, who’d continued on Election Day to cast doubt on whether he would accept the election results as legitimate. Having a few minutes alone, I kept thinking of just how out of touch I was with the people who lived in Middle America. I’d been stationed in heartland states repeatedly during my military career, particularly Texas, and I had traveled extensively as an agency director in the early 2000s and again during the past six and a half years as DNI, meeting with Intelligence Community employees outside of St. Louis, speaking at the University of Texas at Austin and with the Chamber of Commerce in San Antonio, and visiting many other places. I’d joked to audiences about just how out of touch people in Washington were, and I’d never failed to draw a laugh, sometimes applause. Working down in the “engine room” of our national security enterprise—“shoveling intelligence coal,” as I liked to say—I never recognized just how much frustration with and resentment toward Washington those communities had, and just how deep the roots of their anger went. But Donald Trump had, and he’d appealed to them more than I’d realized or liked.
I also thought about the warning on Russian interference in the election that Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and I had issued to the American public a month earlier. We’d agonized over the precise wording of the press release and whether naming Russian president Vladimir Putin as the mastermind and puppeteer of the Russian influence operation would cause an international incident, drawing Jeh’s department and the Intelligence Community into the political fray. Reading responses to exit polls, I realized that our release and public statements simply hadn’t mattered. I wasn’t sure if people were oblivious to the seriousness of the threat we’d described or if they just didn’t care what the Russians were doing. Either way, I saw that our efforts ended up having all the impact of another raindrop in a storm at sea.
I wondered what President Obama was thinking and if he regretted his reticence to “put his thumb on the scale” of the election—as he put it—by not publicly calling out the Russian interference while Putin was effectively standing on the other end of that scale. At the same time, I was no longer sure it would have mattered to the people in Middle America if the president had presented everything we knew about Russia’s massive cyber and propaganda efforts to undermine American democracy, disparage former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and promote Donald Trump. Despite the public narrative that Edward Snowden had disingenuously started in 2013, alleging we were spying on everyday US citizens, the IC had no authority and no capability to evaluate how Americans were receiving the Russian propaganda or what they were thinking and doing when they entered polling booths. In a lot of ways, our capabilities were like the physical infrastructure at the signals intelligence facilities in Ukraine I’d visited in 1991 after the Iron Curtain fell. Just like the former Soviet antenna arrays had been, our capabilities were oriented outward toward the threat and largely incapable of looking inward, even if we wanted to. It simply wasn’t our job. We’d been watching how the Russians were trying to influence US voters, not what impact they may have been having. We had no empirical evidence to assess whether the Russian influence campaign was working, and on Election Day, I was disturbed to recognize it probably had.
I didn’t realize it then, but the Russians were just as shocked as we were. They’d succeeded beyond their wildest imagination and were completely unprepared for their own success. The Russian propaganda network in the United States, formerly known as Russia Today and since rebranded as just “RT,” was jubilant in calling the election for Mr. Trump: “That’s what this is, a defining moment in global history, that America is willing to turn the page and possibly isolate itself from the rest of the world.” They declared, “The next speech that Donald Trump gives to the world will be one of the most important speeches in the history of the world.” As the anchors reveled in Trump’s victory, the crawl at the bottom of the screen continued running lines intended to delegitimize Clinton’s win, such as SEVERAL STATES REPORT BROKEN VOTING MACHINES. The Russian internet troll factory scrambled to stop its #DemocracyRIP social media campaign, set to run from its fake accounts on Twitter and Facebook. In the middle of all this, Putin lost the chance to return the favor of challenging Clinton’s victory, as she’d challenged the results of the 2011 Russian election when she’d been US secretary of state. I don’t believe he minded—at all.
After the election, the CIA and the FBI continued to uncover evidence of preelection Russian propaganda, all intended to undermine Clinton and promote Trump, and the Intelligence Community continued to find indications of Russian cyber operations to interfere with the election. At a National Security Council meeting on Monday, December 5, President Obama gave us more explicit instructions. He wanted the CIA, NSA, and FBI—each agency with the mission-specific tradecraft and capabilities to determine what the Russians had done—to assemble all their findings, encompassing the most sensitive sourcing, into a single report that he could pass on to the next administration and to Congress. He also asked us to produce a paper for public consumption with as much information from the classified version as possible. And critically, he wanted all of this done before he left office.
The highly classified IC assessment that resulted was, I believe, a landmark product—among the most important ever produced by US intelligence. I was proud of our work, but the unclassified version we published ran just a few pages and was written with the clinical sterility of a standard intelligence briefing. I still wanted to more fully capture what it felt like to be on the receiving end of the Russian influence operation in 2015 and 2016. For me, there was no specific moment in that time, no flash of insight when I understood 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. That realization slowly washed over me in 2016 in a tide that continued to rise after the election, and even after I’d left government and the new administration had transitioned into power. My concern about what I saw taking place in America—and my apprehension that we were losing focus on what the Russians had done to us—is ultimately what persuaded me to write this book, to use what we had learned in our IC assessment to frame my experience and our collective experience as Americans.
My hope is to capture and share the experience of more than fifty years in the intelligence profession, to impart the pride that intelligence officers take in their work, the care with which they consider the ethical implications of surveillance and espionage, and the patriotism and willingness to sacrifice that they bring to the job. And finally, I intend to show that what Russia did to the United States during the 2016 election was far worse than just another post–Cold War jab at an old adversary. What happened to us was a sustained assault on our traditional values and institutions of governance, from external as well as internal pressures. In the wake of that experience, my fear is that many Americans are questioning if facts are even knowable, as foreign adversaries and our national leaders continue to deny objective reality while advancing their own “alternative facts.” America possesses great strength and resilience, but how we rise to this challenge—with clear-eyed recognition of the unbiased facts and by setting aside our doubts—is entirely up to us. I believe the destiny of the American ideal is at stake.