In 1991, the US Intelligence Community included four large, full-time intelligence agencies and the four intelligence components of the military services. The Department of Defense harbored three of the major intelligence agencies: the National Security Agency, NSA—the lead for intercepting signals and communications (established when I was in grade school in 1952 and that my dad, Sue’s dad, Sue, and I had served in); the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA—the central hub for intelligence on foreign military capabilities and intentions; and the National Reconnaissance Office, NRO—the organization that designed, launched, and flew intelligence satellites, including all the overhead missions to keep tabs on the Soviets. In 1991, NSA and DIA were led by three-star military officers and NRO by a senior civilian, all three of whom reported to the secretary of defense. The CIA operated independently as the fourth major agency with a civilian director who was “dual hatted” to lead the entire Intelligence Community as the director of central intelligence, as well as serving as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He reported to the president. Each intelligence component of the military services—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—was run by a general or admiral, and each service had intelligence analysis centers tailored to the needs and interests of its service missions. In October 1991, the Air Force would consolidate all of its major strategic intelligence activities under the Air Force Electronic Security Command and rename it the Air Force Intelligence Command, a consolidation I’d helped to foster from the Pentagon.
In addition to the eight organizations nominally thought of as the Intelligence Community, the Coast Guard conducted intelligence missions, but did not really have a dedicated intelligence cadre, and the Departments of State, Treasury, and Energy also contained small intelligence offices, tightly focused, respectively, on intelligence to support diplomacy, financial intelligence, and on the security of DOE’s laboratories as well as tracking the proliferation of nuclear weapons around the world. I had some familiarity with DOE’s intelligence capabilities because of my tenure at AFTAC. But no one thought of the offices outside CIA and DOD as being part of an Intelligence Community and no one had any illusions about any of these organizations operating as an integrated enterprise.
By 1991, I’d spent most of my career as a staff intelligence officer—either on an operational staff or as a cog within the Air Force Intelligence Command or NSA. I’d had a lot of contact with the major agencies, but NSA was the only one in which I’d spent any significant time. So I was shocked when General McPeak called me to say, in a routine business tone, that Army Lieutenant General Ed Soyster was retiring as DIA director, and McPeak intended to nominate me for a third star to succeed him. It took me a moment to process what I had just heard, but once I grasped it, I was thrilled. In my brief interactions with the agency, I had been impressed with DIA’s mission and staff, and the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be another serendipitous turn for my career, leading in a direction I found appealing.
McPeak proposed my nomination to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in March, and I was considered alongside generals and admirals from the other services. In June, the JCS reached consensus with the assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications, and intelligence, Duane Andrews, and forwarded my name to the White House to officially nominate me to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which would ultimately send my name to the floor to be confirmed by the entire Senate for my third star.
Filling the position of DIA director didn’t, in and of itself, require Senate confirmation, and typically, after consideration by the SASC, the nomination to promote someone to three-star general would quickly advance to the floor of the Senate for a pro forma vote. Not so for me. The Senate committee was at the time attempting to extort information from DOD on a completely unrelated program, information the Pentagon didn’t want to surrender. My nomination provided it with convenient leverage, and so the committee simply refused to consider it, leaving me to spend five months as an unemployed two-star general residing in bureaucratic limbo. Suffice it to say, I don’t do well when unoccupied and bored. I passed the days receiving briefings from the DIA staff on their work, reading intelligence reports as the Soviet Union imploded, going to the Pentagon gym a lot, and driving staff officers crazy with requests for information to read to fill my time. The one pleasant surprise was acquiring General Tony McPeak as a mentor and discovering that the super fighter-pilot was much more reasonable in person than his reputation suggested.
During those five idle months, one of General McPeak’s decisions put me into an awkward situation in public. Under his leadership, as part of a historic reorganization of the Air Force, the forty-year-old institutions of the Strategic Air Command, Tactical Air Command, and Military Airlift Command—SAC, TAC, and MAC—were all disbanded, almost overnight, and yet almost no one in the Air Force complained. The entire service was then too distracted by his decision to also change the Air Force uniforms for a redesign that was universally panned. Officers’ attire was particularly abhorrent, as it omitted the traditional brass rank and “US” insignia and put stripes on the coat sleeves, much like the Navy did. When McPeak unveiled the new uniforms at a press conference, a reporter instantly summed up everyone’s thoughts: “These look like airline pilot uniforms.” General McPeak’s succinct response was “Guilty.” I always wondered if he’d intentionally created this issue as a distraction from shutting down the three iconic commands.
I was “randomly” picked to be one of a few hundred service members to test-wear the two versions of the proposed new uniforms, both to model them for others and to assess their utility. One version failed me at the worst time. On Memorial Day 1991, Sue and I were to attend a concert on the National Mall and had been invited to a military reception before the event in the Capitol. Just as we stepped out of a car to walk the hundred yards or so to the Capitol building, a sudden, torrential rainstorm hit. As a traditionalist, I didn’t carry an umbrella, even in the face of a darkening sky, and by the time we reached the reception, we were drenched. As it dried, my uniform began shrinking around my arms and legs. I sensed an uncomfortable tension from the tightening fabric, and when a button on my chest actually popped, I felt absurdly like the Incredible Hulk in the early 1980s TV show. I tried to melt into the crowd, but too late. General Colin Powell, of all people, resplendent in his dry dress Army service uniform, spotted me, smiled, and with obvious joy and great zeal, launched into a public razzing about Air Force uniforms and dress standards. It took my bruised ego several months to recover.
The five-month respite from the pressure of day-to-day duties did give me abundant time to ponder what I wanted to accomplish as DIA director. I’d spent a great deal of my career at operational commands in which my bosses had been intelligence customers, rather than practitioners, and I thought defense intelligence could serve its operational customers better than it had. I was frustrated that we could beam imagery into the Pentagon but still could not put timely intelligence into the hands of the combat forces at scale.
I was also struck that, while the director of central intelligence consolidated and presented the combined “national” intelligence picture to the National Security Council and the president, the “defense” intelligence picture was often conveyed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense erratically and in separate, often competitive streams from DIA and the intelligence components of each military service.
From my three combatant command senior intelligence officer jobs and as Air Force chief of intelligence, I appreciated alternative views. Constructive dissents can be helpful because they illustrate how the same source material can be viewed differently by different analysts or agencies. But the secretary of defense, or for that matter a warfighting commander like General Schwarzkopf, could receive five intelligence reports, one from DIA and one from each service, that all expressed opposing assessments, with little explanation as to why; or conversely, such reporting could effectively consist of five redundant echoes, none of which added any new information or insight. I was determined to try to fix those two problems as DIA director, and believed that the sudden demise of the Soviets would give me the space and time to do so.
The tedium ended when I became (I believe) the first DIA director nominee ever to appear for a formal confirmation hearing, which made me a bit apprehensive but passed without incident. After the hearing, I was quickly confirmed, appointed, and took my oath of office—all in November 1991. General McPeak presided at my pinning. I will never forget the grace he brought to that ceremony, in the presence of my mother and father, who were both beaming. I arrived at DIA just in time to see the Soviet Union finally collapse and officially dissolve on December 26.
One of the first decisions I had to make was what to do with the tenth issue of DIA’s annual Soviet Military Power. In the late 1970s the defense establishment believed that, while Americans felt a visceral animosity toward the Soviet Union, the public and the world at large didn’t truly understand the menace the Soviets posed to global peace and security—just as very few understand the threat Russia poses today. In 1981 DIA sought to show the magnitude and capability of Soviet forces and strategy by drawing on experts from across the Intelligence Community and amassing their consolidated knowledge in a profusely illustrated volume. They then performed the difficult work of declassifying the information, which meant going back to the systems and the people the intelligence originated with and working line by line to determine what facts and assessments could be published without revealing the sources and methods used to collect them. The initial one hundred-page publication was a compelling graphic example of what DIA could achieve when it worked to integrate the intelligence efforts of the military services.
Soviet Military Power was so successful that the agency decided to publish annual updates, starting in 1983. By the time I arrived at DIA, it was printing more than four hundred thousand copies each year in nine languages, including Russian. The 1991 issue was in its final edits when I took my oath of office, and with the Soviet collapse imminent, DIA was discussing just shelving the project. With no Soviets to make a public diplomacy case against, why bother? As the new director, I pointed out that none of the Soviet bombers, submarines, and ICBMs was about to magically disappear, and that our publication could explain what was happening during a crucial transformation. We published the 1991 issue as Military Forces in Transition, a title that set the tone for one of our biggest challenges over the next four years—keeping track of strategic Soviet military equipment.
I began to look for other ways to extend and institutionalize that cooperation among the services. Within DIA, a small but very capable group was tasked with aggregating the General Defense Intelligence Program. The GDIP (Gee-Dip we called it) encapsulated everything intelligence organizations did with the manpower and money Congress allocated for defense intelligence. The GDIP staff collects and summarizes that activity in a single report to help Congress decide what activities to continue appropriating. Other agencies prepared similar documents for cryptologic, human intelligence, counterintelligence, and other intelligence programs. Today, all of them are rolled up into just two consolidated program reports—one from the director of national intelligence and one from the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, positions that did not exist at that time.
In 1991, the GDIP staff had just welcomed its new deputy director—and later director—who was known and respected across the eight organizations of the Intelligence Community. Joan Dempsey was one of the most savvy intelligence officers with whom I’ve ever served—astute and pragmatic about both intelligence work itself and the ways of Washington. She compensated for my blind spots when it came to the art of dealing with Congress and the nuances of working with a civilian workforce, which constituted 75 percent of DIA. When I’d given direction as a commander, people in uniform typically responded, “Yes, sir.” Civilians at DIA sometimes reacted to me as their director with an attitude closer to “We’ll think about it.” Joan saved me from responding poorly—often and early.
Right out of the gate, Congress handed me a challenge disguised as a gift. They’d been pushing to consolidate GDIP resources under a single command and proposed taking five major intelligence centers from the military services and moving them all under DIA. In the end, it was decided that DIA would gain only the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) and the Armed Forces Medical Intelligence Center (AFMIC), under the rationale that they were both predominantly staffed by civilians, who could be more easily absorbed into DIA. I quickly learned that “empire building” is not all it’s cracked up to be, and that feathers get ruffled when Congress takes something from one organization and gives it to another. While AFMIC had been a joint command with each of the services represented, MSIC had belonged to the Army, and so it was the Army that felt most aggrieved and complained the loudest. Fortunately for me, the two moves went “final” on January 1, 1992, when I’d been on the job just a month and a half, and so the Army didn’t hold me personally responsible. Still, MSIC was the source of one of my first real headaches as DIA director.
The Missile and Space Intelligence Center essentially studied the capabilities of any foreign missile launched from the ground that wasn’t an ICBM. During the 1990–91 Gulf War, because DIA needed its expertise to understand the surface-to-air systems in Iraq, as well as the mobile Scud missiles that Iraq kept trying to launch into Israel and Saudi Arabia, MSIC sent analysts from its headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, to Washington on temporary duty orders. One of those civilian analysts had a girlfriend in Washington, and the temporary duty was a convenient arrangement he wanted to maintain. With the war over, I canceled the temporary duty arrangement and sent the MSIC people home. This analyst reached out to Alabama senator Richard Shelby’s office and found a sympathetic ear in his staff. Shortly after, I received a letter with Senator Shelby’s signature, informing me in no uncertain terms that I was an incompetent, unprofessional hack for having closed down the MSIC cell in the Pentagon. I hit the ceiling. I couldn’t believe that a senator could be so disrespectful to a lieutenant general (oh, how naïve I was), and I directed my staff to prepare a barn-burner response.
Fortunately, Joan had a better idea. She pointed out that the letter had been signed by autopen, probably without Senator Shelby’s knowledge, and suggested that I view the letter as an opportunity. She knew that MSIC’s fifty-year-old facility in Huntsville was in disrepair: the roof leaked, the plumbing was unreliable, the electrical system was overstressed, and the air-conditioning and heating systems were obsolete. Using the letter as an excuse to engage with his staff, she set up a meeting with Senator Shelby to discuss building a new facility. On the way to Capitol Hill, she prevailed upon me not to bring up the letter, and I didn’t. Instead, we discussed how both DIA and the state of Alabama would be greatly served if we could find military construction funding to give the superb workforce of MSIC (all constituents of Senator Shelby) a state-of-the-art facility. We quickly struck a deal. After that, I sought Joan’s opinion before any major decision, in many ways viewing her as an unofficial second deputy director. Not for the first time, I came to regard someone who ostensibly worked for me as a mentor.
Joan was a trailblazing role model for an entire generation of women in the IC. She supervised a number of intelligence officers on the GDIP staff who would leave a substantial mark on the community, including Deborah Barger, Jennifer Carrano, and Linda Petrone. Joan’s protégée and successor as GDIP staff director, Tish Long, later became the first woman to direct a major intelligence agency. It’s a great injustice that Joan never had that opportunity. Over the years, Joan and Tish, and later Betty Sapp and Stephanie O’Sullivan, helped me be successful, not the other way around. From what I saw, these women proved themselves to be not merely as competent as their male contemporaries, but better. Borrowing an old expression, Joan used to say that women in the Intelligence Community had to follow the example of Ginger Rogers—Ginger performed the same dance steps as Fred Astaire, but backward, and in heels. Joan and many other powerful women in my life managed this with uncomplaining grace and good humor. I’ve just asked them to remember me kindly when they eventually take over the world.
While the struggle those women endured for recognition of their efforts and accomplishments was very visible to me as director, the fact that we had racial tensions and discriminatory practices was sprung on me one afternoon. Sandy Wilson, an African American Air Force captain who had come with me from the Air Force, invited me to a brown-bag lunch meeting. Instead of the half dozen employees I’d expected, well over fifty had shown up, and I noticed that I was the only white guy in the room. I sat down and went into “receive only” mode for the next hour-plus. Many of those employees shared personal stories about the culture and atmosphere at DIA, starting with the fact that the mailroom was commonly referred to as “the plantation.” It challenged my entire belief system to hear that some people would treat others with that kind of disrespect. I realized with a growing sense of horror that this wasn’t an isolated problem but one that infected many parts of the agency.
After that meeting, I established an equal opportunity and diversity officer at the senior executive level, whose full-time job was to root out and deal with issues of inclusion. I told him that the point wasn’t just to increase the percentages of underrepresented minorities employed at DIA, but more importantly, to make all employees feel valued as part of the agency community. I told the employees at the brown-bag lunch that my office was open to them whenever they felt they were being treated with anything less than the respect they deserved. Many of them took me up on that offer, and we painstakingly resolved each case. Beyond doing what’s “right,” if racial issues are allowed to fester, they will negatively affect the mission—a lesson that stuck with me for the rest of my career. I’m proud of the positive impact we had on the culture at DIA over just a few years. I’m not one to cite awards I’ve received, and I certainly didn’t undertake this work for recognition, but I’m still very proud that the NAACP presented me with a meritorious service award in July 1994 for my “contributions in promoting equal opportunity policies and programs.”
I tried to fix such institutional problems as publicly—within the agency—as possible, whereas I felt it best to help out individual officers as quietly as possible. One morning JCS chairman General Colin Powell called me to his office. He never summoned me to tell me how happy he was with the job I was doing, so I fully expected I was walking into an “enhanced counseling session.” Instead, Powell asked me, “Do you know this Mike Hayden guy?” I said I’d heard of him as a fast-rising colonel assigned to the National Security Council staff who was on the brigadier-general promotion list, but I didn’t know him personally. Powell said he’d been told that someone on the NSC had slated Mike to become the next US defense attaché to Moscow, apparently based on his earlier assignment as the Air Force assistant attaché to Bulgaria from 1984 to 1986. Powell informed me that wasn’t going to happen. As JCS chairman, he was deeply involved in trying to forge a new relationship with a post-Soviet Russia and wanted his own trusted agent to represent him in Moscow. Since DIA managed all the military attachés worldwide, Powell told me, “You’d better find him another job.” I eventually helped swing a deal to get Mike appointed as director of intelligence at European Command, a high-profile job at which he excelled. I don’t think Mike ever realized I was involved, but I’ve enjoyed the thought that I helped set him on the path to ultimately serving as director of both NSA and CIA and achieving the very rare distinction of four-star general.
Just a few weeks before I took my oath of office as DIA director, Bob Gates took his as director of central intelligence and of the CIA. Bob was, at that point, the only DCI to have risen through the CIA analytic ranks to be appointed director, and because of his extensive agency background was better able to balance his time and see past agency concerns. For me, that was great, as he encouraged me to lead the intelligence components of the military services as the unofficial “director of military intelligence.”
With his support, the military intelligence leaders agreed to have me represent them when National Intelligence Estimates came up for approval. NIEs represent the apex of the Intelligence Community’s long-term, strategic analysis product line, in direct support of senior policy makers across the government, to include the president. When I was DIA director, NIEs particularly focused on the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the trajectories of its former satellite nations, and the disposition of its military capabilities. As ex officio director of military intelligence, I spoke from a stronger position at meetings to discuss community approval of draft NIEs, since the views I expressed carried the weight of all the military components. They also agreed to my ideas about how to organize analysts deployed to the combatant commanders and the Pentagon. I quickly found that the military services supported almost any proposal I put forward, as long as I was transparent with them and they didn’t lose resources.
That lasted about a year. Then, with the legislation that appropriated funds and authorized activities for Fiscal Year 1993, Congress directed us to start “reaping the peace dividend”—meaning the US government, and presumably taxpayers, would collect the reward of the end of the Cold War by no longer investing so heavily in the forces we’d built to confront the Soviets, and channel the funds elsewhere or use them to pay down the national debt. Every military service and every intelligence agency had its budget slashed, and I was informed that DIA’s resources would need to be cut 20 percent over the following five years. Because such a large percentage of the agency’s budget went into salaries, that meant I had to get rid of one fifth of our workforce.
We addressed that mainly by offering early retirements and freezing hiring, which we recognized would also affect our talent pool, but we didn’t have much choice. From planning sessions, I soon realized that because of the staff cuts we would have to reorganize the agency to match our manpower levels. We took the decisive step of combining our two major analytic organizations. Before, one directorate had focused on strategic estimates, and the other generated the daily production of analysis on a tactical deadline. After the reorganization, the consolidated analytic organization would not distinguish strategic analysts from tactical, nor analysts who studied the technical capabilities of foreign military weapons systems from those who studied the overall military capabilities of adversary nations. We knew this was going to hurt, but the advice of General George Patton came to mind: “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.”
When I set aside my fears and announced the decision, however, the workforce revolted. My mistake was in not considering its civilian nature. While military service members frequently move between duty stations, many DIA civilian employees had sat at the same desk for eight straight years since the building opened, and now many employees were forced to play musical cubicles. We literally experienced scuffles between employees over whom a particular desk belonged to and who was going to occupy it. I realized very quickly that, whatever merits our reorganization plan had, we hadn’t sufficiently talked with the employees and worked out the details. We ultimately ended up executing a second reorganization to undo the ill effects of the first. I learned that gaining employees’ buy-in before making big changes is essential, and that there are cultural differences between military and civilian employees.
Of course, this same downsizing was going on everywhere, including with each of the service intelligence components, as well as with combat and combat-support structures throughout DOD. Then, in the midst of everyone’s reorganizing to “reap the peace dividend,” the US military was ordered into combat.
By late 1992, Somalia had no central government and had achieved “failed state” status. Warlords ruled the lawless streets, and human suffering was widespread. In December, the UN Security Council passed a resolution authorizing force to restore order, and President George H. W. Bush—who had just lost his reelection bid to Bill Clinton—ordered the US military to prepare. At DIA, we realized we had very little foundational intelligence on Somalia. We needed maps of the infrastructure, roads, ports, and terrain. We needed information on the warring clans. We needed profiles on the warlord leaders. The Intelligence Community had essentially closed shop in much of the Horn of Africa, and there were no reliable assets on the ground.
We did what we could to collect overhead imagery from satellites and overflights. We deployed DIA officers with the combat forces and painstakingly built the intelligence picture from the ground up. I wish I could say our work led to stabilizing the situation and allowing aid to reach the Somali people in need, but that didn’t happen. On October 3, 1993, US special operators conducted a disastrous raid that left eighteen Americans dead and seventy-three wounded. Rescue operations continued the following day, and one American was held hostage for eleven days. We don’t really know how many Somalis died in the battle of Mogadishu, but estimates range from the hundreds to the thousands.
After the clash, televised images of American casualties being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu reached the States, and two days later, President Clinton announced that he was recalling all US forces from Somalia. The Joint Special Operations Command commander took responsibility for the disaster, saying in part that he blamed himself for sending the special operators in Task Force Ranger on the mission without adequate intelligence. This series of events was heartbreaking for DIA, as the special operators were close partners of ours, and many of us took their loss very personally.
In the spring of 1993, as President Clinton’s defense team came into shape, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Bill Perry saw another opportunity for consolidation of resources under the nominal auspices of my new, self-proclaimed role as director of military intelligence. Dr. Perry asked me to research the human-intelligence programs in each of the military services and return to brief him on the potential for creating a single, unified, strategic, military HUMINT service. The idea was to generate efficiencies by consolidating the costly management and support structures of each military service within DIA—theoretically to gain more operational “tooth” by reducing management “tail.” It would also mean moving three thousand people and their attendant funding out of the service intelligence components. They howled, and I didn’t blame them. Unfortunately, it was the Army that again had the most resources to lose, and the service turned from complaining to me, to waging a political-guerrilla campaign against DIA with Congress.
This effectively left me in the position of adding thousands of people to a workforce I was simultaneously cutting by 20 percent. In planning for the consolidation, we severely underestimated the support structure that such a large HUMINT service would need (comptroller, personnel, logistics, contracting, etc.), and I failed to secure the necessary resources and billets for administrative and support people.
I was successful in divesting just one of my own responsibilities as DIA director, and it was by far the most politically charged, controversial, and depressing issue of my tenure. In 1973, as the Paris Peace Accords were signed—temporarily stopping the North and South Vietnamese armies from fighting and permanently ending US participation in the conflict—3,237 US service members were listed as either “missing in action” or “killed in action/body not recovered,” but only 591 POWs returned in Operation Homecoming. The Department of Defense, working with intelligence agencies and the South Vietnamese government, searched South Vietnam for two years, recovering and identifying the remains of just 63 servicemen. In 1975, Saigon fell to the Communists, and searches stopped. That’s when things got complicated.
The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia had formed during the war to bring the abuse of POWs to the forefront of the national discussion, and after hostilities ended, the league switched its mission to advocating for the prisoners’ return. Many people affiliated with the league believed they were alive and that the US government wasn’t doing enough to bring them home. DIA had established a dedicated office to gather, analyze, and investigate any intelligence leads, particularly reported or alleged sightings of people believed to be American POWs. Although none was ever found alive, by the 1980s, conspiracy theories abounded, fueled in part by the success of Rambo: First Blood Part II, a fictional account in which Sylvester Stallone’s character finds and dramatically rescues POWs being held in bamboo cages, to the astonishment of government officials in positions similar to mine who’d insisted there were no more prisoners of war.
I got involved with the League of Families, supported their efforts, and attended and spoke at their annual conventions. Those gatherings were heartbreaking, and all I could say to grieving families was some variation of “I understand how you feel. The odds are against your loved one being alive, but DIA will persevere and will keep looking. We take every lead seriously and will do all we can to resolve all of them.” Because of the nature of DIA work, I couldn’t go into nearly as much detail about what we were doing as I wanted, much less to their satisfaction. It eventually became clear to me that it was simply inappropriate for an intelligence agency to be in charge of resolving casualty issues, which should have been handled more openly and transparently than we had the ability to do. The media excoriated what they perceived as our “mind-set to debunk” the false live-sighting reports and portrayed us as cruel and heartless. Because we were a “spy” agency, the conspiracy theorists also alleged that we were covering up crimes in which the US government was complicit. I received several anonymous death threats, which we then wasted more resources tracking down.
Vietnam veteran and Republican senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire constantly criticized DIA and told families that he was holding our feet to the fire. In August 1991, Smith had persuaded the Senate leadership to establish a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The committee investigated for a year and a half, calling witnesses ranging from former secretary of state Henry Kissinger and former Vietnam Army colonel Bui Tin to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and even me. In January 1993, just weeks before the end of President Bush’s administration, the committee released its report, which was highly critical of Intelligence Community practices but also found no compelling evidence that any American POWs were still alive in Southeast Asia. After President Clinton’s administration took office, I gave DIA’s POW/MIA resolution office to DOD, lock, stock, and barrel. As of this writing, more than sixteen hundred service members are still unaccounted for. No nation expends more effort to recover prisoners of war and those missing in action than we do, but it’s unlikely more than a few more from the Southeast Asia war will ever be identified.
I gave up the POW/MIA mission quite voluntarily, but I also discovered what it felt like to have a valued mission taken away from my agency. It took four years of study and debate after the Gulf War before national leaders were willing to do something about General Schwarzkopf’s imagery intelligence complaint. They eventually reached the conclusion that the problem would never be solved until there was a single agency responsible for imagery in all its forms at the same depth that NSA was responsible for cryptology in all its forms. The direction from above was therefore to move all the imagery analysts from CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center, with all its attendant resources, along with people and resources from other elements, including those at DIA, and combine them with the mapping, charting, and geodesy mission performed by the Defense Mapping Agency. We were told the resulting National Imagery and Mapping Agency—NIMA—would join CIA, NSA, DIA, and the NRO as the fifth major intelligence agency.
As DIA director, I stood to lose some five hundred imagery analysts and an entire mission area to NIMA. Within DIA, the imagery analysts were sometimes treated as second-class citizens by all-source analysts, but their work was integral and crucial to our analysis process. To protect DIA, I fought NIMA’s establishment right up to the day of my retirement, a battle that in retrospect was both misguided and hopeless. In the end, when NIMA was officially established on October 1, 1996, I was glad to see such a concrete step taken toward accountability for making useful imagery available on a timely and high-volume basis.
In our shrinking fiscal environment, we didn’t have the resources to invest in any large, new-technology project, but one small team at DIA was in charge of creating a Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, and I tried to give them as much support as I could. Their charter was signed in 1990, the same year Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Because the idea of going online to search for information was completely new and largely untested outside the research offices of DARPA (DOD’s technology research arm, which created ARPANet, the forerunner of the internet) and CERN (the European nuclear research organization where Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and email didn’t become prevalent until later, this team was tasked with something much more modest—creating a secure video teleconference capability with which we could conduct virtual meetings to discuss classified information, led by Air Force Captain Mike Waschull. In those early days the system was fraught with problems: The bandwidth was limited, images constantly froze on the screen, and the audio was bad. But we all saw the tremendous possibilities for what JWICS could do to make intelligence sharing faster and more operationally relevant.
President Clinton visited the Pentagon for briefings on Operation Uphold Democracy, the US-led, UN-authorized mission to remove the military regime installed by the 1991 Haitian coup d’état. We used JWICS for those sessions, and the president liked it so much that he arranged to import the capability to the White House Situation Room. Over the next two decades, every time I suffered a relapse and returned to government, I found JWICS continuing to grow, expanding to include secure internet and secure email. Later, when I was DNI and the time came to integrate the archipelago of agency IT systems and networks into a single Intelligence Community IT enterprise, JWICS served as its infrastructure backbone. It’s been a fortunate pattern in my career to have been appointed to places where people were already doing exceptional work. If you can spot such pockets of innovation and excellence and then champion and provide “top cover” for them, it will do wonders for your own career progression.
I also spent a great deal of time on the road while DIA director. Many of my trips were to bond with our close partners, particularly among the five English-speaking “Five Eyes” nations, but I dealt with many other countries as well. In 1994 our intelligence collection revealed that Saddam Hussein was again moving a massive number of troops and equipment to the south, toward Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, so I took John Moore, the defense intelligence officer for the Middle East and the senior subject-matter expert, to Kuwait City to brief the six ministers of foreign affairs of the Gulf Cooperation Council states. They took the news gravely and contemplated another invasion that, thankfully, didn’t come. From Kuwait, we flew to Saudi Arabia to brief the minister of defense and discuss preparations in the event we needed to rapidly deploy US forces again. The minister patiently listened to us and responded that he would have to reserve judgment, observing, “We can’t have your women in T-shirts driving trucks around here again.”
In the air, on our way home, we were told to divert to Egypt to brief President Hosni Mubarak, an imposing figure with a reputation for ruling with an iron fist. After we exchanged uncomfortable pleasantries, he inquired if I’d been to Egypt before. John piped up and said, “Hey, general, why don’t you tell the president about that time your dad took a swing at King Farouk?” Mubarak, who speaks fluent English, turned his gaze on me, and I nearly choked. I stuttered for a moment, sure an international incident was under way, but after I told the story, he roared with laughter and kept us way past schedule. In one of the more surreal moments of my life, as we were leaving, I caught sight outside Mubarak’s chamber of Yasser Arafat, looking extremely cranky, accompanied by two dour, heavily armed bodyguards who glared at me.
Many of my foreign visits were to coordinate and reaffirm existing alliances. Others were intended to forge new relationships behind the former Iron Curtain. It was such a strange reversal, given that the US Intelligence Community had battled the Soviets in the shadows for decades, and many times I’d felt like we were losing. The media had dubbed 1985 “the Year of the Spy,” for the eight high-profile arrests of Soviet agents in the United States, and that year wasn’t really an outlier for Soviet penetration of the US national security structure. Much controversy has swirled around the “failure” of the Intelligence Community—CIA and DIA specifically—to have predicted the precipitate collapse of the Soviet Union and the unraveling of the Warsaw Pact. We were well aware of the fundamental rot of the entire Communist system and confident in its ultimate demise, but it’s nearly impossible to predict spontaneous events that lead to momentous change—not with the Soviets, and not decades later with the Arab Spring.
When I first went to Russia in 1992, I was taken aback, even disappointed, at seeing the run-down infrastructure and the plight of Russian citizens. It was graphic evidence that behind the formidable Soviet military power was a third- or fourth-rate economy. On a subsequent trip, I visited GRU headquarters—the Russian military intelligence agency that was DIA’s nominal counterpart, much as the KGB was CIA’s. (I don’t know if I was the first DIA director to visit GRU, but I do know that Lieutenant General Mike Flynn was not the first DIA director to visit there in 2013, as he claimed.) There we found Soviet military equipment being sold at bargain-basement prices to raise funds to keep the agency functioning, so DIA bought jets, tanks, guns, antiaircraft systems, and whatever else we thought would be useful to study and exploit, as well as anything we wanted to keep off the black market.
In 1993 I visited Ukraine to establish a relationship with the former Soviet intelligence apparatus there. Ukraine was (and still is) a very poor country, but they rolled out the red carpet, taking me to some of their most sensitive intelligence sites and greeting me at each one with the traditional bread, salt, and vodka. We ate a lot of fish, and in the shadow of Chernobyl, wondered if it was safe. We stopped at a Ukrainian air defense training school, and I saw pictures of US aircraft on the classroom walls as training aids for learning how best to shoot them down. When touring a signals intelligence site, I walked up behind a Ukrainian intercept operator and saw from the notes he was transcribing in English that he was listening “live” to the communications of an airborne NATO AWACS aircraft—the Boeing 707 with the giant rotating radar dome used for all-weather surveillance, command, control, and communications. It was a surreal experience for a longtime Cold Warrior to watch our former adversary’s SIGINT operation actively surveilling us. We were given such unprecedented access because Chief of Ukrainian Military Intelligence Major General Skipalski was interested in having the US subsidize their SIGINT stations to respond to NATO tasking. We had to decline, mainly because their massive equipment was old and analog, and their intercept antenna complexes were all oriented west to collect on the US and NATO and wouldn’t have any real use for us without a substantial investment.
We drove to the Ukrainian base housing the Mach 2 Tu-160 Blackjack nuclear-payload jets we’d tried to collect intelligence on for years. The base commander initially seemed terrified that a three-star American military-intelligence “spy” had come to tour his base, but after several toasts of vodka, he relaxed—a lot—even inviting us to tour the flight line, where my senior expert on Russia pointed out birds’ nests inside the wheel well of a Tu-160. As we were getting ready to leave, I asked, as a point of professional curiosity, just how many Tu-160s were on the base. The commander immediately sobered, blanched, and said that was a state secret. General Skipalski motioned for me to join him, and as we drove up and down the flight line, I counted the planes. Back at the starting point, he asked how many I’d counted. I said nineteen. He asked if that was the number we’d counted with US intelligence systems. I told him it was. He smiled and nodded.
Of all the trips I made behind the Iron Curtain in the early 1990s, by far the most sobering was to East Berlin, which actually took place before the Soviet Union dissolved and before I moved to DIA. The idea of revisiting the city after so many years was appealing; the reality was not. We toured two former Soviet kasernes—military encampments—and found that the Russians had stripped every building of anything of value (including window fixtures, doors, and plumbing) when they withdrew from the country, and left behind an environmental disaster. At the motor pool facilities, they had changed tank oil by just dumping the old oil onto the ground, which now covered and penetrated everything with its stench. And all the buildings were black from the residue of the coal they’d burned.
The most indelible impression left on me occurred when the German defense intelligence chief led us through the headquarters of the Stasi—the East German secret police—an eerily timed tour, given that it occurred simultaneously with the trials of former Stasi officers for their crimes against humanity. The Stasi was known for its massive spy networks throughout East Germany, for recruiting kids to inform on their parents, and for rooting out dissidents and destroying them, either physically or psychologically. We saw displays of medals, plaques, and monuments—rewards for those who’d spied and reported on their families. Even their files were preserved, row after row of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with personal information on the citizens of the German Democratic Republic. I touched some of the files, aware that each contained the private secrets of real people whose lives may have been ruined by this invasion of their privacy, or simply by knowing it was a parent or child or sibling who’d betrayed them. It was chilling to imagine living in such a state.
Seeing the stark reality of what the Stasi did stayed with me. This was what happened when a state surveillance apparatus ran amok with no limits and no checks. The people of East Germany never asked for such intrusiveness, and there was no oversight—no legislative review or judicial restraint over their pervasive, Orwellian surveillance. The experience also tempered my attitude about collecting intelligence on innocent citizens—in our country or anywhere else. That was a concept I didn’t need to confront before the collapse of the Soviet Union; anyone communicating on Soviet networks was aligned with the Soviets. Within just a few years, the internet and global telecommunications companies would erase the lines between East and West and between innocent civilian and government agent. Because of that visit to East Berlin, I was conscious of the Stasi legacy when those global shifts happened, particularly years later when, as DNI, I had an oversight responsibility for all US intelligence activities.
In 2013, after Edward Snowden released a massive collection of IC secrets into the wild, the word “Stasi” appeared more than once in the media to caricature our work. That reference may or may not have been hyperbole to those who uttered it, but the comparison—and the accusation inherent in it—hit home. The memory of Stasi headquarters in East Berlin was in my mind when I pushed for greater intelligence transparency, for declassifying documents that explained the legal basis for what we were doing, how the process of establishing collection targets worked, and how all three branches of government conducted oversight to ensure the protection of civil liberties and privacy. I wanted the American people to have a better understanding of what their Intelligence Community did and the limits of just how intrusive we should be in their lives—a dialogue East German citizens never had with the Stasi.
Despite all this transparency and communication, I don’t think Americans had resolved this issue in their own minds before I retired as DNI in 2017. The public continued to send mixed messages about its desires regarding the balance between safety and security on one hand, and civil liberties and privacy on the other. Most of the time, people leaned toward a less-intrusive intelligence enterprise that respects their civil liberties to the greatest extent possible, a position I appreciate and agree with. Yet every time an American citizen committed a mass shooting or set off an improvised bomb, particularly if that person invoked Allah before committing such an atrocity, people demanded to know why we weren’t reading that person’s email and social media posts, why we weren’t listening to his phone conversations, and why we weren’t infiltrating the personal space of others who might perpetrate such tragedies.
Every time this subject was raised, I’d think, Well, we could do that. It would take time and a significant investment to build the infrastructure necessary to get intimate with the private lives of American citizens, and it’s a measure I would oppose vigorously, but we could be much more intrusive than we have been. The question for me is, to what extent are we as a society willing to sacrifice personal liberties in the interests of common safety? We stop at red traffic lights. We submit to security screenings before boarding airline flights, which represent infringements on our civil liberties and privacy. Would we agree to having an inward-facing domestic intelligence apparatus? Should we? It’s a question that would assert itself with increasing frequency in the years after I took off the uniform, and I believe the US public has yet to reach a clear and consistent consensus.
I retired from active-duty service in September 1995. The Air Force had extended me for a fourth year as DIA director, to keep me in the running to potentially fill the position of deputy DCI, but when John Deutch was nominated to succeed Jim Woolsey as DCI, he preferred to have a deputy with White House experience—who turned out to be George Tenet—rather than someone with a military background. Deutch later informally offered me the job of NSA director, to replace Vice Admiral Mike McConnell. When I discussed this offer with Sue, she pointed out that we’d moved twenty-three times in thirty-two years. If I wanted to go to Fort Meade, she said, I should do so, but she wanted to put down roots in Virginia with her own house and her own garden. I decided it was her turn to decide where we’d live and submitted my retirement request. Secretary Perry said some generous things about me and my career at my retirement ceremony. After the reception, Sue and I stopped by the base’s Pass and ID office to pick up our retired-military identification cards, and I drove off a military installation for the last time in uniform. Just like that, it was over.
Retirement after thirty-four years of military service was, not surprisingly, something of a jolt. For some reason, I thought multiple employment possibilities would come rolling in. That didn’t happen. However, a friend from my University of Maryland ROTC days made a great offer for me to become a vice president of his small company, which provided systems acquisitions support to the Navy. It didn’t take me long to realize that my main value was to be a corporate hood ornament, and that it was not a good fit for me. I started looking for a graceful departure that wouldn’t embarrass me or the firm, which had been very generous. That elegant exit soon presented itself—unfortunately, by way of a national tragedy.
With Saddam Hussein still in power after the Gulf War concluded in 1991, the United Nations wanted to prevent his Sunni-led government from inflicting its wrath on the non-Sunni communities in Iraq. The most straightforward way to accomplish this was to establish no-fly zones above the Shia population in the south and the Kurdish population in the north. That left Baghdad open to airline traffic approaching from the east or west, and it kept Hussein’s military from bombing the disenfranchised people of his country. The US Air Force led the coalition forces enforcing the no-fly zone south of the 32nd parallel—about half the land area of Iraq—flying missions out of the air base in the Saudi city of Dhahran, on the gulf coast near the island of Bahrain. Most of the contingent lived in an on-base apartment complex called Khobar Towers. On June 25, 1996, Iran and Hezbollah orchestrated the detonation of a massive truck bomb at the back of an eight-story apartment building, where each of the units had a sliding glass door. The blast caused the nonshatterproof glass to break into supersonic shards that killed nineteen airmen and wounded hundreds of people, both Americans and Saudis.
In early July I got a phone call from Wayne Downing, a four-star Army general who’d retired from his position as commander of US Special Operations Command just five months earlier. Defense Secretary Perry had appointed Wayne to lead a joint task force to investigate the incident, to identify who if anyone should be held accountable, and to determine how to prevent something like that from happening again. I knew Wayne from our time together on active duty and held him in high regard. He told me he didn’t want me to be a formal member of the task force, but asked if I would serve as a senior adviser on intelligence and counterintelligence matters. I accepted, leaving the job at my friend’s company and rejoining the government as a temporary senior executive employee. We flew almost immediately to Saudi Arabia. As we stood on the tarmac at Dhahran, I was hit by the memory of standing in Dhahran in 1948 as a seven-year-old boy in short pants on the way from Eritrea to the United States, the wind blowing sand so hard that it stung my legs. Forty-eight years later, I was back in Dhahran, again uncertain about what I was about to encounter.
We spent about two weeks in Saudi Arabia, half at Khobar and the remainder in Riyadh. Most of our investigation centered on the question of how, precisely, the conspirators could simply back a large truck up to the fence near the two apartment towers, detonate a powerful bomb, and escape. We interviewed many who were stationed at the base, and I spoke with a young Air Force major who was, like most people, assigned there on ninety-day temporary orders, in his case as the wing intelligence officer. His entire focus was on threats to the aircraft patrolling the airspace over Iraq, not local threats in Saudi Arabia. In fact, he said he had no resources to monitor the local garrison, even if it had occurred to him to worry about it.
I also spent a good deal of time with the commander of the local Office of Special Investigations (OSI) detachment. The OSI is the rough analog of the FBI for the Air Force, charged with law enforcement investigations and counterintelligence. It was “stovepiped,” meaning that while its small units were deployed to virtually every major Air Force installation across the globe, they were centrally commanded from its headquarters in Washington. The young OSI captain, who had been at Khobar for about thirty days, was very open and cooperative and let me look through his office files. I found a copy of an assessment done by his temporary-duty predecessor the previous April, which had forecast the attack scenario as it occurred on June 25 in a chilling level of detail. Because of the stovepipe nature of OSI, the wing commander, Brigadier General Terry Schwalier—who had been scheduled to pass the baton of command the day after the attack—never saw this report.
As Wayne and his team were writing the assessment, I worried that the Air Force would come down unduly hard on Terry to avoid institutional accountability. I wanted to share my concern with Wayne, but given my advisory status, I was excluded from the “small group” meeting to finalize the task force’s recommendation on accountability. I wrote a memo to Wayne, stating my belief that the fault didn’t lie with the local commander but rather with Air Force institutional shortfalls relating to base-level security practices, many of which were corrected after the bombing. As it happened, the Air Force didn’t hammer Terry. It was Secretary of Defense William Cohen (Dr. Perry’s successor) who did the hammering. Over objections from the Air Force chief of staff, Cohen pulled Terry’s name off the promotion list to major general, prematurely ending the career of a good officer. Some in the Air Force were angry that I hadn’t resigned from the task force in protest, overlooking the fact that I was an adviser and not actually a member, and that I was specifically excluded from accountability deliberations by the task force senior leaders and unaware that there was anything to resign over until it was too late.
For me, the investigation of the Khobar bombing was an epiphany. I will never forget climbing the stairwell of the apartment building adjacent to the one that had absorbed the brunt of the bomb blast. Its stairs, handrails, and walls were smeared in blood. I instantly “got religion” about terrorism. And I learned that it is simply impossible, after the fact, to re-create events as they actually happened. That is, it is not possible to reconstruct the contemporaneous conditions and environments in which people make judgments and decisions. It was not the last time I’d reach this conclusion.
Another key lesson I took from the experience is that differences in service cultures have an impact on how we view the actions of others. As a ground-combat-arms Army officer, Wayne Downing viewed garrison security much differently than I did or Terry Schwalier had as Air Force officers. Taking into account factors like perimeter defense, surveillance and countersurveillance, and potential field of fire is instinctive with experienced Army and Marine Corps officers, but not necessarily for Air Force or Navy. The accountability determination was therefore conducted on an Air Force officer from an Army perspective. This small but important fact influenced future accountability investigations, which would be led by officers of the same service as the officer being investigated.
I returned to life in Northern Virginia and was hired by Booz Allen Hamilton, where Mike McConnell was a partner. I stayed with BAH for about a year and a half and found that I wasn’t particularly good at helping to win contracts and expand the firm’s footprint. I also discovered just how frustrating it could be to engage with the government and just how much companies were willing to invest in preparing proposals to compete for work—proposals that in themselves didn’t provide any intrinsic value to the government. I also realized I didn’t want to be responsible for company profit or loss or for employee payroll, and the firm really didn’t want a partner who didn’t have a driving interest in generating profit.
So I continued to float around, consulting for the government and for the nonprofit Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. I was asked to join the NSA Advisory Board and spent a lot of time driving to and from Fort Meade, doing what I could to help NSA transition into the internet age. I was elected president of the Security Affairs Support Association, which would later become the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, one of the three major organizations that interface between the Intelligence Community and industry partners. In 1998, I moved to SRA International as a vice president for intelligence. SRA was a better fit than BAH, mostly because its leaders tolerated my pro bono work for the IC, but in truth, helping make the owners of the companies I worked for richer just never moved me.
In 1998 I was invited to become a member of the congressionally mandated Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Virginia governor Jim Gilmore. Initially, Don Rumsfeld was on the commission, but it quickly became clear that Rumsfeld’s and Gilmore’s personalities could not coexist in the same room. In 1999, 2000, and 2001, I helped write three iterations of the annual Gilmore Commission Report, and each year, I testified to Congress on behalf of Governor Gilmore, presenting our findings, which were not very reassuring. Gilmore publicly expressed—in no uncertain terms—that it was not a question of if, but when the homeland would be attacked by terrorists possessing a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon. In 2001, after the Bush administration came to power, we briefed Vice President Dick Cheney, and Gilmore’s concerns resonated with him.
I didn’t share the certitude that Gilmore and Cheney felt about an impending nuclear, chemical, or biological attack, but from my other pro bono work, I knew that neither resources nor morale was healthy in the Intelligence Community. The “peace dividend” cuts had continued, and every year, each agency cut a “salami slice” across programs and capabilities, whittling everything down until its capabilities suffered, and many no longer functioned as intended. Across the community, global presence and analytic coverage were reduced, CIA stations overseas were closed, and capabilities for processing, exploiting, and dissemination were shrunk. The community lost one third of its all-source analysts and a quarter of its HUMINT collectors. Of twenty-three SIGINT satellites in orbit, twenty-two were beyond the end of their design life, as were two of our three imagery satellites. The community was forced to neglect the basics of power, space, and cooling within its far-flung facilities, and the agencies retreated defensively into their respective discipline cocoons, a condition not conducive to collaboration and coordination. So, while I wasn’t certain an attack was imminent, I also wasn’t confident that our Intelligence Community was prepared to detect one coming, and if one occurred, to respond resiliently.
For me personally, life was pretty good. Since I had retired from active military service, my responsibilities had decreased while my income had increased. I was home at night. I was getting to know the terrific young adults that Sue had raised. Two or three times a year, Sue and I went on luxury cruises. However pleasant it was, I just wasn’t getting the “psychic income” that public service offered. Then, in late summer 2001, I got a call from retired Vice Admiral Staser Holcomb, who had been Secretary Rumsfeld’s military assistant the first time he’d served as secretary of defense and who was now serving informally as Rumsfeld’s “executive headhunter,” recruiting people for senior positions in DOD. Staser simply asked, “Would you consider coming back to government service?”