Staser explained that the Pentagon was looking for a new director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency and wanted to consider candidates other than military officers. To this day, I really don’t know why I was approached to interview for a job directing an agency whose creation I’d opposed as one of my last acts leaving the military. But with the benefit of six years of hindsight, I could see how the challenge of directing NIMA would be worthwhile. In theory, it made sense to fuse the nation’s mapping and geographic analysis capabilities to create a new intelligence discipline. The raw collection for both endeavors emanated from the same sources—our overhead-reconnaissance satellite systems. In practice—and as the result of a shotgun marriage arranged by Congress and a very small group of executive branch leaders—the mappers and imagery analysts worked as two wary partners forced to live under one roof. NIMA needed someone to forge these two communities together and focus them on a united mission.
I called Sue right away to tell her about this “bolt-from-the-blue” phone call and that I was interested in the job. “You’re kidding me,” she replied, and the conversation later that evening lasted through more than one glass of wine. I think she understood from the outset that I really missed public service, but she did not miss playing the role of military wife. With Andy and Jennifer leading their own lives as independent adults, she enjoyed the quiet work she’d found and the satisfaction it brought to her. I’d known that social duties had never been her favorite part of military life, but I was surprised by the vehemence of her opposition. She’d also become used to having me around, taking cruises, and traveling together. I reassured her that NIMA wasn’t a military command and she wouldn’t have to be a military wife again. There would be foreign visitors and social receptions, but she would only have to be involved to the extent she wanted to be. I told her I wouldn’t take the job without her support, but I really wanted to do it. Though skeptical, she ultimately relented.
NIMA’s challenges were an open secret. In the five years since the agency had been formed, ten separate studies had been commissioned to prescribe a cure for its alleged maladies. Studies, of course, are one of Washington’s time-honored pastimes for simultaneously responding to criticism and conveying the image of taking action while kicking any big decisions down the road, and NIMA had become the study piñata of the Intelligence Community. The most recent, a joint secretary of defense and DCI study directed by Congress, had begun in late 1999 and had just published its report in December 2000. The commissioners wrote that the proximal event leading to their appointment was the failure of the Future Imagery Architecture systems, which the New York Times called “perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects.” FIA was largely an NRO disaster, but NIMA owned a lot of the problems with integrating ground systems to task and deliver imagery analysis. The commissioners’ list of grievances echoed General Schwarzkopf’s complaints after the Gulf War, which were precisely what the agency had been founded to address five years earlier.
I didn’t read this critique as an indictment of the first two directors, but rather as recognition of how hard it is to change institutional and cultural mind-sets. Culture, custom, and resistance to change are formidable obstacles that take time to overcome. As the commissioners wrote, “Although some progress has been made, the promise of converging mapping with imagery exploitation into a unified geospatial information service is yet to be realized, and NIMA continues to experience ‘legacy’ problems, both in systems and in staff.”
The report praised NIMA’s forays into using satellite imagery produced by the commercial companies for the energy exploration, natural resource management, urban development, disaster relief, and environmental research industries, among others; but then the report rebuked the agency’s failure to think beyond what the current technology was capable of doing. It laid out specific actions that needed to be taken by the director, such as appointing a chief technology officer, but also steps that might require congressional action—for instance, allowing US commercial satellite companies to collect and produce images at much higher resolution so that NIMA could stop expending so much time and resources on getting its legacy systems to do that job.
The commissioners observed that NIMA had failed to integrate the work of the technical experts filling not just two, but “two and a half roles”—imagery analysis, cartography, and acquisition. The joint report laid out a road map for integrating the work of those specialists, eventually employing analysts who were trained in each field from the beginning of their careers. The commissioners described a future vision of integrating signals intelligence with geospatial intelligence to intercept the content of an adversary’s communications and then identify where on the globe the transmission emanated from—what I’d done manually on my EC-47 missions over Laos and Cambodia thirty years earlier, at scale and with the value of imagery analysts. If we could make that happen, we’d be onto something revolutionary for national security.
The commissioners made one other recommendation that was more personal for me, writing that this kind of change would never happen during a two- to three-year tour of a military director, and urged “that the Director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency serve a term of not less than five years.” I decided I wouldn’t take the job unless I had support from the secretary of defense to serve that term. I noted that a full five-year tour would also qualify me for a (very modest) civil service pension (which was not, by the way, a persuasive argument for Sue).
Because the NIMA director was appointed directly by the secretary of defense, I assumed I would just have to pass muster in an interview with Secretary Rumsfeld. I’d studied the diagnosis in the commission report, I’d talked to people in the agency and to many of its stakeholders, and I’d decided how I’d administer the prescription. I was ready, or so I thought.
My formal interview for the job was unusual, to say the least. Staser accompanied me into the secretary’s cavernous office, and we sat around a small table once used by Jefferson Davis when he was the secretary of war, five years before he became president of the Confederate States. Almost as soon as I sat down, Rumsfeld was off on a rant about Congress, complaining about partisan politics and how too many members catered to their constituents over the best interests of the nation. He seemed genuinely frustrated with congressional demands for reports, which had increased exponentially from the first time he had served as secretary. I mentally, if not verbally, agreed with him. He paused to ask what I thought about a few of our mutual acquaintances. I diplomatically hedged my answers regarding people with whom I might soon be working, but my impression was that he wasn’t paying attention, and my responses didn’t matter. He went back to his congressional rant, saying that Congress hadn’t tried to micromanage him the first time he’d been secretary of defense. I nodded along, interjecting an occasional “Yes, Mr. Secretary,” or “I certainly understand,” and listening for any openings to bring up the points I wanted to make about NIMA. As my thirty-minute appointment extended to forty-five minutes, I thought that if I was a wagering man, I’d bet he’d be out of the job before Christmas. The interview came to a merciful end. He stood, shook my hand, and wished me luck. Outside, Staser saw my quizzical look and told me I had the job.
I had only a few weeks to finish preparing. I met with NIMA’s outgoing director, Army Lieutenant General Jim King, who was to retire on Thursday, September 13, 2001, and then I started on-site visits to each of NIMA’s seventeen legacy facilities spread around the Washington metro area. On September 10, I flew out to visit the NIMA facilities in St. Louis, a legacy of the Air Force Aeronautical Chart and Information Center that had been absorbed into the Defense Mapping Agency in 1972. About a third of NIMA’s workforce was posted there.
On the morning of September 11, I was sitting in a conference room at yet another NIMA facility in Arnold, Missouri, near St. Louis, receiving a series of briefings on their mission and capabilities. A secretary soon interrupted the meeting, saying she thought we’d want to know that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. It sounded like a tragic accident, and we wondered aloud for a few minutes about civil aviation in and around New York City and how someone could have gotten that lost, particularly since it was a beautiful, clear day across the country. The briefer had barely hit his rhythm again when just after 8:00 the secretary returned, going straight to the TV and turning it on. The South Tower was ablaze, and the North Tower spewed smoke behind it. In just a few seconds of viewing these terrible images, I realized that directing NIMA was going to be a lot more challenging and a lot more critical than I’d realized.
At about 8:40, a reporter announced that the Pentagon had been hit, and a few minutes later, the station went to a live stream of the building in flames. I’d spent almost ten years working there, and I oriented immediately. The camera was streaming from somewhere near the gas station to the southwest of the building. Just out of the picture to the right was the parking lot where Rich O’Lear and I had fought off the huge rats every morning. Just out of the picture to the left was Arlington Cemetery, the lines of white headstones on the hills of green grass. Black smoke poured out of the massive, crumbling structure. I wondered how many casualties there were, and if anyone I knew was among them. The camera cut back to New York, where people were jumping from the World Trade Center’s top floors. It was painful to watch but impossible to turn away from. Just before 9:00 central time, the South Tower fell, followed thirty minutes later by the North Tower. Twenty minutes after that, the west face of the Pentagon collapsed. That image is still seared into my memory—the Pentagon, where I’d spent so much of my life and so much of my energy, in smoldering ruins.
I called Sue to check in, and then tried to reach Jim King so that I could offer my support and to ask if his instinct to postpone a leadership change was the same as mine, to provide some sense of continuity to the workforce, which would be pressed hard by events to come, particularly if we were in for more attacks. The aeronautical navigation specialists in St. Louis were concerned about where all the planes in US airspace were being diverted, where our military assets were grounded, and where we might be vulnerable for a potential next round of attacks. Soon they would turn to helping track down the perpetrators. When we finally reached Jim that afternoon, he said he’d already canceled his retirement ceremony.
After we spoke, I felt an overwhelming urge to get back to Washington, to Sue, and to NIMA headquarters—to do something. Of course, all flights were grounded, every rental car not already occupied had been snatched up by grounded air passengers, and there were no train tickets to be had. Finally, two other senior executives who were visiting from NIMA headquarters and I commandeered a car from the Arnold facility motor pool and hit the road. The drive was more than eight hundred miles, almost entirely on monotonous Interstate 70. I struggled to stay awake when driving, and then I struggled to stay awake while trying to help my two companions stay awake. It was stupid and dangerous, and we were lucky to arrive in the Washington area alive twelve hours later, on the morning of Wednesday, September 12.
I let Jim King know I was back, realized there wasn’t much I could do, and headed home to sleep. On Thursday and Friday I drove to the Bethesda facility, continuing to get up to speed and trying to help where I could. On late Friday afternoon Jim and I were formally notified that the Pentagon—likely Secretary Rumsfeld—had overruled our informal agreement to postpone our turnover. So I’d officially been director for two days without knowing it. A personnel officer administered the oath of office to me in his modest office, and that was it—no passing of the NIMA flag and no ceremonial rituals normally observed in such a transition.
That day the State Department demanded in writing that the Taliban government provide all information it had about Osama bin Laden and his whereabouts, and that it expel anyone affiliated with al-Qaida. Similarly, Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing “the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States.” That same afternoon, President Bush stood on a pile of rubble at Ground Zero, holding a bullhorn and trying to address the emergency responders who had crowded around. When one of them yelled, “I can’t hear you,” Bush responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” I thought that was an inspired, and inspiring, statement to those responders and to the nation, and I wanted to get to work. On Saturday the fifteenth, when I drove my mighty Mustang onto the NIMA compound and parked in the space marked “Reserved for Director,” a very polite security guard informed me I wasn’t authorized to park in the director’s parking spot. I extended my hand and said, “Hi.”
On Monday I addressed the senior staff at NIMA for the first time as their director. I told them that I was gratified to return to government, but circumstances were not what any of us had expected or wanted. I said we would all remember what we were doing when we were attacked, much like what many of us had experienced on November 22, 1963, except that in many ways September 11, 2001, would be more profound, because people we personally were acquainted with had been affected. I knew seven DIA employees who had been lost, and a husband-and-wife tandem of flight attendants who were on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon were related to my son-in-law, Jay. I told the NIMA staff that the real shock would set in as our nation endured three thousand funerals and many more memorial services in the coming weeks.
Finally, I said that we were in the privileged position of being able to do something about the tragedy, to make a direct contribution to whatever was coming next. My impression was that people in NIMA were thinking of their responsibilities as a sacred public trust, and they were reacting accordingly. I acknowledged that in 1995, as DIA director, I’d been against the formation of NIMA, and that I’d been wrong: NIMA could play a leading role in integrating and unifying the Intelligence Community. I stressed that NIMA drew its institutional strength and relevance from the fact that, fundamentally, “Everything and everyone must be someplace,” including the people who had attacked us on September 11. If NIMA met its potential, managing the functional synthesis of imagery and mapping into a new intelligence field, every other agency and every other discipline would build upon the geospatial foundation we would provide. We would need to make major changes, working simultaneously on three time frames: now, next, and after next.
Soon after that first meeting, we established a task force for integrating our imagery analysts with the mapping and charting experts, and we set it loose. I authorized my newly arrived deputy director, Joanne Isham, an experienced senior CIA officer, to take whatever steps were necessary to facilitate the transformation. She would work on changes inside the agency, and I would work on support we needed from outside. And then, we went to work, and NIMA went to war.
One of our big goals was to get people with different skill sets to physically and functionally work together. Under Jim King, NIMA had experimented with assigning mappers and imagery analysts to a single workspace to see what they could accomplish, but NIMA needed to scale Jim’s experiment up so that the entire agency worked that way. In the meantime, we were fixated on filling the blank space that was Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was hiding and training. We started almost from square zero, since the little data we had was not current, and without basic information on the country’s geography, demographics, and infrastructure it would be virtually impossible to conduct military operations there. We began obtaining raw data and buying all the commercial imagery of Afghanistan as it became available. I was accused in some trade media of exercising a “checkbook monopoly,” trying to corner the market on commercial imagery, but I was fine with that criticism, as we needed all the data we could gather, from whatever source—to locate the terrorists, and then produce maps and charts to target them.
On September 21, in an address to a joint session of Congress, President Bush spoke to the world, saying, “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Even more directly, he addressed the government in Afghanistan: “The Taliban must act and act immediately. They will hand over the terrorists, or they will share in their fate.” Before the month was out, CIA operatives were in the country, laying the groundwork to support an invasion. On October 7, less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the United States began air strikes in Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad. On October 19, Special Operations Forces initiated the ground war. Very quickly, Taliban and al-Qaida fighters were on the run. As someone who had witnessed the gradual buildup to the Gulf War and Operation Desert Storm from the Pentagon, the rapidity of Operation Enduring Freedom was impressive. Everyone at NIMA was working hard to support the war effort. With advances in digital technology, we were pushing imagery not only to the Pentagon, but also to General Tommy Franks and Central Command, and to commanders on the ground in Afghanistan. However, we were still effectively functioning as practitioners of two separate disciplines.
I’ve never been a big fan of off-site meetings with team-building exercises and other touchy-feely whatnot, but I thought it would be beneficial if the agency leadership and I collectively paused, caught our breath, and took stock of the course we’d charted for the agency. After the Christmas holidays, I asked the top forty leaders to join me at a secluded spot away from Washington to assess the agency’s collective performance. Once I had them captive, I asked, somewhat rhetorically, whether we’d all been “singing ‘Amazing Grace’ at the wake of DMA and NPIC long enough,” and if the time had come to fully unite, integrate our work, embrace “geospatial intelligence” as a new discipline, and ultimately change the name of the agency. They unanimously agreed. It took almost two years for legislation to officially rename NIMA to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in November 2003, but I believe geospatial intelligence was officially born at that off-site meeting in January 2002.
The prospect of changing the agency’s name turned out to be an emotional, controversial issue with the workforce. I received many cards and letters expressing support, angst, or outright resistance to rebranding after only five years. People also succumbed to the temptation to try to pronounce “NGIA” as a word, and I heard from several black employees that they were uncomfortable with the result. I didn’t disagree, so we added the infamous hyphen to make it the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. When people said “NGA,” they sounded out each letter: N-G-A; and NGA has three letters, like the other big agencies. I still get my chain pulled about the decision to hyphenate the name, even by friends like Mike Hayden and Bob Gates, who consider it “awkward” and “unfortunate.” I don’t regret it. NGA is the only agency I ever got to (re)name, and I still think the name fits.
On January 29, President Bush delivered his first State of the Union address since the attacks, explaining that the administration’s goals went well beyond taking out the group of al-Qaida terrorists who’d planned and perpetrated the attacks on New York and Washington: “What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that, far from ending there, our war against terror is only beginning.” We would root out terrorism wherever it could be found, and any nation that supported terrorism or allowed terrorists to exist within its borders was complicit. His message for those nations was clear: “Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.”
What followed became the standard answer among intelligence and national security leaders to the question, What keeps you up at night? “Our second goal,” Bush announced, “is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction.” He cited North Korea, Iran, and Iraq, saying that they “and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil.” He saved his most damning rhetoric for Iraq: “This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.” He concluded with the warning, “The price of indifference would be catastrophic.”
Shortly after that speech, we heard that Vice President Cheney was pushing the Pentagon for intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and then the order came down to NIMA to find the WMD sites. We set to work, analyzing imagery to eventually identify, with varying degrees of confidence, more than 950 sites where we assessed there might be WMDs or a WMD connection. We drew on all of NIMA’s skill sets to determine whether and how the suspect WMD sites might be interconnected and mutually supportive. This served as a compelling, persuasive example of what the integration of our two major legacy professions could achieve . . . and it was all wrong.
With the same “slam-dunk” certitude expressed by CIA director George Tenet, we fed our findings into the classified work being prepared at that agency, and in September, I represented NIMA as a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board, participating in the review process that would certify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction as a consensus view of the IC. The White House aimed to justify why an invasion of and regime change in Iraq were necessary, with a public narrative that condemned its continued development of weapons of mass destruction, its support to al-Qaida (for which the Intelligence Community had no evidence), and the atrocities Hussein had inflicted on the Kurdish people within his borders (which were terrible, but atrocities were not unique to Hussein’s Iraq). After the Intelligence Community presented its consensus, the White House homed in on Iraq’s WMD programs and on Hussein’s flouting of weapons inspections.
On February 5, 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an impassioned, persuasive, and seemingly well-documented briefing to the United Nations in which he presented evidence of Iraq’s reconstituted chemical, biological, and nuclear programs. To support his speech, NIMA had gone through the difficult process of declassifying satellite images of trucks arriving at WMD sites just ahead of weapons inspectors to move materials before they could be found, and my team also produced computer-generated images of trucks fitted out as “mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.” Those images, possibly more than any other substantiation he presented, carried the day with the international community and Americans alike.
Having made its case, the United States led a multinational force, joined by contingents from the UK, Australia, Spain, and Poland, in an invasion of Iraq on March 20, six weeks after Powell’s speech. NIMA provided unprecedented support to the effort, both for the military planning against Iraq’s defenses and for the teams that would seize any weapons of mass destruction they found and secure the sites we’d helped identify. We prepared a prioritized list of our suspect sites with specific locations, the best approach routes, and any noted defenses, transmitting this data directly to the theater, using capabilities that weren’t available during the 1991 war. We maintained secure communications with deployed forces, including the fourteen-hundred-member international Iraq Survey Group. Using this information, they went from site to site but found almost nothing. We were shocked. In September the survey group admitted in its public report that they’d found only trace amounts of chemical weapons, not enough to use in combat. The trucks we had identified as “mobile production facilities for biological agents” were in fact used to pasteurize and transport milk.
In late October, I spoke at an off-the-record breakfast event with Washington media to discuss the state of the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I talked about the imagery situation in Iraq and explained that we’d made some assumptions we shouldn’t have, though the circumstantial prewar evidence seemed compelling, and admitted that I was still baffled that no WMD sites had been discovered. I mentioned that in the days before the invasion started, we saw a lot of cars and trucks fleeing the country into Syria, and Bill Gertz from the Washington Times asked if it was possible that the vehicles were removing WMD caches ahead of the invasion. I replied that it was impossible to determine who or what was in them. I probably should have clarified what a great stretch it would have been to assert that Syria’s Alawite-led government, aligned with Shia Iran against Iraq’s Sunni-led government, would conspire with Hussein to harbor Iraqi weapons. The following morning, I was amazed to read the Washington Times headline: SPY CHIEF SAYS IRAQ MOVED WEAPONS: SATELLITE IMAGES BEFORE WAR SHOW HEAVY VEHICLE TRAFFIC INTO SYRIA.
In the years that followed, I’ve heard many, including some in the Intelligence Community, theorize that Saddam Hussein had bluffed his way into a US invasion, that he feared Iran more than the United States, and that he wanted Iran and other neighbors to think he had chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs, to intimidate them and to prove to his own government and people that he was firmly in control, defiant to the world, and a force in the region. This theory holds that he purposely built facilities to look like WMD sites, and that he deliberately moved trucks on and off those sites prior to UN weapons inspections to create the illusion that he was hiding a covert weapons program. This was not, however, the case. The theory accords far too much credit to Hussein and doesn’t attribute the failure where it belongs—squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.
It wasn’t until a few months later, at a closed hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee, that I first heard the code name “Curveball.” I was seated almost directly behind George Tenet as he and a few of his senior analysts told the committee about a man who had escaped Iraq and fled to Germany. He’d asked for asylum, claiming that he’d worked on a team that built mobile production facilities for biological agents. Listening to Tenet’s account, I felt a sinking feeling. He said that before the war, the CIA had never had direct access to Curveball, only to the intelligence from him the Germans had passed to us, which CIA and DIA sources confirmed through another source in the Middle East—who, it turned out, had gotten his information secondhand from Curveball. Our original and corroborating sources were therefore the same person. Worse, Curveball turned out to have been an alcoholic who’d worked for a TV station owned by Saddam’s son Uday, and he’d fled Iraq because he’d stolen money from his employer, who wasn’t known for lenience with those who’d shown disloyalty. Sitting in that classified hearing and listening to George and his officers brief the committee, I felt a lot more naïve than someone with forty years of experience in the intelligence business should have felt.
George, to his credit, took all of the heat for the atrocious intelligence work. As DCI, he was ultimately accountable, but we were all responsible. I’d sat as a member of the National Foreign Intelligence Board that had approved the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, and I’d never thought to question CIA’s “spooky source” that had given us all that amazing—too amazing—intelligence. Years later, when I attended National Intelligence Boards to review National Intelligence Estimates (“foreign” was dropped when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were added), the procedure had changed so that the very first topic discussed was the sources used to reach any conclusions about the intelligence in question—one of a number of reforms the community instituted after Iraq.
While the larger IC sorted through these big questions, NIMA pressed on. The idea of geospatial intelligence was taking root within the agency, and we needed the industrial base that we relied on for technical solutions and to supplement our government workforce to get in sync too, so in October 2003, through Joanne’s aegis, we worked with a small number of corporate leaders to hold an unclassified symposium we called “GEO-INTEL 2003” at the New Orleans Marriott Hotel. Notably, Steve Jacques, who had recently left Raytheon to start his own company, and Stu Shea with Northrop Grumman led the corporate effort. We billed the event as an opportunity to hear the government “highlight the role of geospatial technologies in national security,” and discuss geospatial intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as to see the technology that we were using at nonmilitary events, such as the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
NIMA hoped to entice enough industry partners to be worth the effort, but even we were surprised when more than a thousand people showed up. Energized by the showing, Steve and Stu joined with other industry members to form a nonprofit alliance, the US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, to work across corporate lines on the tradecraft and technology behind geospatial intelligence. They took responsibility for continuing the forum, rebranding it from “GEO-INTEL 2003” to “GEOINT 2004.” The following October, I appeared onstage with Lieutenant General Mike Hayden, who’d become NSA director in 1999, to talk about how signals intelligence and geospatial-intelligence professionals were working together in unprecedented ways. A decade later, more than four thousand GEOINT practitioners in government and industry attend each year, making the GEOINT Symposium the largest such gathering of government and contractor intelligence professionals in the United States.
I was grateful for the energy our workforce and USGIF put into developing tradecraft and growing the GEOINT community, particularly in the year between GEO-INTEL 2003 and GEOINT 2004, which was a dark period of reckoning for the Intelligence Community. In February 2004, President Bush established the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, known in shorthand as the Iraq WMD Commission. The feeling around the community was that, unlike the 9/11 Commission, which had ostensibly started with a blank slate and set out to discover what happened, the Iraq WMD Commission had already judged the ways in which we’d fallen short, and was looking to document any and all mistakes—even honest ones—and hold everyone involved accountable.
Then, in April 2004, an event completely unconnected to the IC put us under even more intense scrutiny. On April 28, 60 Minutes aired a report on prisoner abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and included leaked photos of uniformed US Army guards taunting naked Iraqi prisoners on leashes. Army Reserve Sergeant Joe Darby at Abu Ghraib turned a disk with the pictures over to the Army Criminal Investigative Command, and after its investigation was under way, other people with copies of the pictures leaked them to the press. More photos seemed to leak out every day, and attention to the prisons in Iraq eventually turned to questions about the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison in which the CIA was operating. Human Rights Watch and other rights groups began to talk about the “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects to CIA “black sites” or to nations that had fewer qualms about what methods they employed during interrogations. At NGA, processing geospatial imagery, we were about as far from the scandal as an IC agency could get, but the revelations about prisoner abuse still bothered us, because we were an integral part of the Intelligence Community. I remembered back to the promise made by the instructors at Air Force survival school in 1970, before I deployed to fly missions over Laos—that the United States would never treat prisoners the way the Vietcong treated our service members they captured.
Meanwhile, in July 2004 the 9/11 Commission published its report, which included a narrative of what happened that day, an investigation of the events that led up to the attacks, and an examination of what could be done in the future to prevent anything like it from happening again. The 9/11 commissioners graphically described the intelligence picture for the summer before the attacks with the phrase “the system was blinking red.” One passage in particular succinctly crystallizes the problems we had as an Intelligence Community: “The agencies cooperated, some of the time. But even such cooperation as there was is not the same thing as joint action. When agencies cooperate, one defines the problem and seeks help with it. When they act jointly, the problem and options for action are defined differently from the start. Individuals from different backgrounds come together in analyzing a case and planning how to manage it.”
The joint action they described meant getting all the agencies and smaller elements to realize they were all engaged on the same mission and would mutually benefit from working on it together. NGA was in the process of developing tradecraft for geospatial intelligence, for which we were the nascent functional manager. The other agencies had developed tradecraft for their own specialties over the course of decades, particularly CIA (the functional manager for human intelligence) and NSA (the functional manager for signals intelligence). I’d been in the SIGINT world and around the rest of the community long enough to realize that each agency needed to embrace its own culture, traditions, and capabilities. After honoring that, we could inspire them to cooperate to take advantage of one another’s complementary strengths. It was the same reasoning for why we needed a diverse workforce: bringing together different perspectives and experiences enabled us to formulate a range of different options for action. In the Intelligence Community, the old saying “the sum is greater than the parts” has profound meaning.
From NGA, I’d seen the major agencies take important steps to realizing this integrated approach. NGA embedded its own experts within the NSA, CIA, and DIA workforces to provide a common GEOINT foundation. I also realized it was easier for them to collaborate with us than with one another. When I’d started in the intelligence profession in 1963, CIA and NSA just didn’t come in contact in the field, but as both agencies grew in capability and expanded their global reach—and as the world effectively shrank—they increasingly found themselves operating in the same space. Competition, however friendly, often begets turf battles, and leading up to 9/11, each agency sometimes viewed the others with distrust. NSA, for example, often institutionally felt more comfortable sharing SIGINT with their Commonwealth partners from the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than with CIA. NGA, in contrast, was too new an entity to represent a threat, and we were developing tradecraft that was by its very nature collaborative. So we looked at the other agencies as partners, not competitors, and they reciprocated.
The release of the 9/11 Commission Report in the summer of 2004 was an epiphany moment for our nation and a catalyst for the Intelligence Community, although at the time, reading that document felt like scraping a wound that had just begun to heal. The immediate response from Congress and the White House was to do something, but there were wide disagreements about what that something should be. Some in the Senate proposed choosing a strong, empowered Intelligence Community leader to serve as a Cabinet secretary. Some in the House wanted to create a position for a coordinator of intelligence sharing, but supported Secretary Rumsfeld’s view that a national intelligence director shouldn’t have any authority to direct agencies. Rumsfeld found an ally in House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter, who foresaw that a “Secretary of Intelligence” would risk compromising his Armed Services Committee’s influence over the National Intelligence Program budget.
The Senate effort, at least, was driven by two people who were genuinely committed to reform of the IC. Majority Leader Bill Frist logically could have assigned writing and negotiating the Senate bill to either the Armed Services Committee or the Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which had turf to protect. Instead, he gave the pen and the power to negotiate with the House to Senators Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the chair and ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was a deft move by Frist, as neither Collins nor Lieberman was fighting for control of the agencies, so they could at least notionally focus on what was best for the nation—not just for their committee.
In March 2015, at an event where we were both speaking, Senator Collins said something about the struggle to forge that legislation in 2004 that really struck me. She said that her inspiration had been something she’d been told by Mary Fetchet, a mother who had lost her son on 9/11: “When American lives are at stake, inaction because of inertia is unacceptable.” Collins said that every time she thought about throwing in the towel, she remembered Mary Fetchet’s words. Collins was serious enough about introducing legislation that she asked the CIA to detail someone from the Community Management Staff to her office to help with coordination and provide a sanity check on proposals. CIA sent Deb Barger, one of the intelligence officers who had worked with Joan Dempsey when I was DIA director.
In his book Playing to the Edge, Mike Hayden recounts that in a closed session of the House Intelligence Committee, he as NSA director and I as NGA director warned that creating a powerless intelligence director would make things worse, as the agencies affected wouldn’t know who was in charge and whether to follow the new director, or the director of CIA, or the secretary of defense. We recommended, if they were going to go, to go big. Mike describes how soon after, in August, we met with a group of Intelligence Community seniors in an off-site leadership course for an off-the-record discussion about the state of play in the community.
At that session, Mike and I were quite candid. I pointed out that in my forty years in the business, every DCI had started out with great intentions of making the community more collaborative, but sooner or later (mostly sooner), they had all become consumed with agency-centric issues, and managing the community became a second-tier priority. To me, the most prominent exception was Bob Gates, who’d served as a career CIA officer and because of his familiarity with the agency was better able to balance his time and energy between both of his “hats.” I went so far as to argue that if we were going to create a director of national intelligence, we should consider moving the three agencies whose names started with “N” (for “national”)—NSA, NGA, and NRO—out of DOD. Each of those agencies had a role in supporting combat troops, but the vast majority of their funding and effort was focused on strategic intelligence to support the president, the National Security Council, and the whole of government efforts to benefit national priorities—priorities that didn’t necessarily align with those of the secretary of defense. The fact that Mike and I were the directors of two of those “national” agencies did not escape the senior executives present, and our assertions weren’t mitigated much by the fact that we said DIA, whose “D” stood for “defense” and whose focus was more squarely on supporting troops, should probably stay with DOD when the others left.
A few days later, Mike and I found ourselves at an uncomfortable lunch in Secretary Rumsfeld’s private dining room. We were seated across from Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, JCS chairman General Dick Myers, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steve Cambone. Of that group Cambone had by far the most to lose if the “national” agencies left DOD. His position had been created in March 2003, with Rumsfeld’s support and the strong backing of Duncan Hunter in the House, ostensibly to coordinate DOD’s intelligence budget and to oversee the four DOD agencies and the intelligence components of the military services, and implicitly to be a counterweight to the yet-to-be-legislated DNI. If three of the four agencies were pulled out from under Cambone, his authority would be greatly diminished.
Mike has compared this infamous lunch to sitting at the DMZ, negotiating across the table with North Koreans, which was an apt analogy. When I’d served as DIA director, I’d found many occasions to speak truth to power. I’d testified honestly about how reaping the peace dividend was undermining our workforce. I’d briefed Congress and the secretary about our lack of confidence in what would happen to the Soviet nuclear capability with the breakup of the USSR. I’d delivered a lot of bad news, a lot of assessments, and a lot of my own personal judgments that those listening probably would have preferred not to have heard. But since taking the helm at NGA, I’d found that I was even less inhibited than I’d been as a three-star general. To our credit—particularly Mike’s—we didn’t back down from the positions we’d expressed at the off-the-record session, but as a civilian agency director on what I knew (or thought) was my last hurrah in the government, I was not as circumspect with my words.
At that lunch, Mike and I both advocated establishing a strong DNI, rather than creating a weak figurehead that would diffuse or confuse authority, and we told the secretary that he should back legislation that would align the three “national” agencies under a DNI. The agencies could still fulfill their combat support responsibilities, but they would produce better intelligence under an authority whose full-time focus would be on integrating their work. We appealed to him to support improving how intelligence functioned, rather than protecting the existing bureaucracy. Secretary Rumsfeld cut short the lunch and left, missing a good dessert. Mike would later say that my discourse that day was the reason my NGA directorship was ultimately terminated early. Not completely, but I certainly believe it put me on Rumsfeld’s and Cambone’s watch list. I stuck around for almost another two years and later learned the final impetus for my dismissal was much more petty.
On September 23, 2004, Senator Collins introduced her committee’s legislation to create a strong director of national intelligence with clear authorities. The Senate bill passed on October 6, and the far weaker House bill on October 16. When the two chambers couldn’t reconcile differences before adjourning for the November 2 election, most observers assumed the bill was dead. Postelection lame-duck sessions rarely pass any meaningful legislation, and the House and Senate were still far apart, with the House in a much stronger position, because the Senate really wanted to pass the bill, and the House would’ve been happy to let it die. That enabled Duncan Hunter and his committee to extort whatever concessions Rumsfeld wanted under the rubric of “compromise.” If they didn’t get what they demanded, the new Congress would have to start over with new legislation in January, and for opponents of a strong DNI, that was all to the good. That seemed the likely course—until someone creatively inserted the word “abrogate.” The House agreed to pass the bill if the Senate would consent to add Section 1018, which read:
The President shall issue guidelines to ensure the effective implementation and execution within the executive branch of the authorities granted to the Director of National Intelligence by this title and the amendments made by this title, in a manner that respects and does not abrogate the statutory responsibilities of the heads of the departments of the United States Government.
This essentially neutered the entire legislation, by stipulating that anything the DNI asked an intelligence component to do could be overruled by the Cabinet secretary who controlled that component, but this was the final offer. Collins and Lieberman realized that their choice was either to accept it or start over. The Senate acquiesced, and Congress passed the bill to the president, who signed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 into law on December 17. IRTPA, like all major legislation, was flawed. Actually, with the addition of Section 1018, it overachieved at being flawed, but it did manage to codify intelligence reforms and establish in statute the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
Unsurprisingly, considering the act’s weak legislative charter, President Bush encountered difficulty in finding someone willing to serve as the first DNI. Bob Gates has written about how he turned the job down, as he believed that the position involved huge responsibility but granted little authority to make anything happen. I remember thinking it was a job I certainly wouldn’t want.
In April 2005 John Negroponte, a distinguished State Department diplomat who’d been an intelligence customer his entire career but never an intelligence officer, took the oath of office as the first DNI. I like and respect John and appreciated his taking on this challenge, but I thought the position should have been filled by a career intelligence officer, someone steeped in intelligence culture, particularly as the first incumbent. In fairness, I would never advocate that a career intelligence officer lead the State Department. I was heartened by one of the first decisions John made, bringing Mike Hayden from NSA to be the principal deputy DNI. Mike pinned on his fourth star—the only four-star intelligence officer at the time—and became John’s close partner in leading the IC.
John and Mike set to work, bureaucratically outgunned by Rumsfeld and the large Office of the Secretary of Defense. The DNI had a tiny staff scattered among a few offices in the New Executive Office Building near the White House and in CIA headquarters. I heard about meetings where the four deputy DNIs crowded into the chief of staff’s office. Two sat in chairs that got hit whenever the door opened, a third sat on a safe, and the fourth leaned on the doorframe. That was how the senior brain trust for the US Intelligence Community was initially accommodated. John, to his credit, persevered through a very difficult launch.
My immediate concerns for NGA were more parochial and more practical. Congress and the president had authorized DOD to close military bases around the world to reduce operating costs, and the Pentagon’s recommendations to the Base Realignment and Closure Commission were due May 13, 2005, to include how it would allocate funding for new facilities. In January 2004 Secretary Rumsfeld had asked all installation commanders to begin to gather information and data. We were far ahead of the curve, having already studied how to consolidate NIMA’s miscellaneous facilities in my first year on the job. By the time the commission activated, the decrepit NPIC building in the Washington Navy Yard in Southeast Washington was nearly closed, and we had identified a site in Springfield, Virginia, to build NGA’s future headquarters that, sometime after 2010, would bring together the two thirds of the agency workforce in the Washington area. We just needed the commission and armed services committees to authorize us to spend $2.4 billion to build the new headquarters, as well as a smaller new facility near St Louis. We’d calculated how, over time, the cost of this construction would be amortized, and we’d convinced DOD we’d save money from the initial investment.
On Thursday, May 12—with a day to go before deadline—the secretary of defense still had not finalized the list of bases selected for closure or realignment, and there was a scramble across DOD for each service and agency to protect its equities. That morning, Cambone told NGA he’d decided unilaterally that we couldn’t put the money Congress had previously allocated for us to relocate NPIC toward construction of a new facility, so we didn’t have enough to build a new headquarters. I spent most of the day on a series of tense phone calls with Cambone, Mike Hayden, and Pentagon logistics chief Mike Wynne, who was responsible for finalizing recommendations for the secretary. In the space of two hours, the funding pendulum for NGA swung from zero to $2.4 billion for both new facilities before settling on $2.1 billion for just the headquarters building in the East. At the end of the day, I felt I had another strike against me on Cambone’s ledger, but I also felt it was well worth it.
Then, on August 29, 2005, NGA and the nation suddenly faced a new kind of challenge. At 6:10 A.M. local time, Hurricane Katrina leveled miles of Mississippi and Louisiana coastline and left large sections of New Orleans underwater. In the aftermath, the Coast Guard commandant and chief of hurricane relief operations, Admiral Thad Allen, reached out to NGA for help in assessing the magnitude of damage to the city—how it had affected the waterways, blocked the ports, and disrupted the infrastructure, including knocking out all communications into or out of much of Louisiana and Mississippi. Plainly stated, he asked us to help him acquire the situational awareness he needed to manage disaster response and prioritize relief efforts.
NGA felt a special connection to New Orleans, since we had a small number of employees who lived in the affected area and because we’d held GEO-INTEL 2003 and GEOINT 2004 in the city. We deployed two Humvees adapted to establish communications and seventy-five people with GEOINT workstations. They created new maps and charts from aircraft and satellite imagery and produced analysis that was critical to helping Thad determine the quickest ways to restore phone systems and other critical infrastructure and to map passage in and out of damaged neighborhoods. We even helped with tracking derelict oil rigs that had broken loose and were adrift in the Gulf of Mexico. The Coast Guard and NGA ended up working closely together, and I believe we saved lives and helped put the region on the path to recovery. We responded to an urgent request for help with the resources we had available, and that was my apparent undoing as NGA director.
In the immediate days after the storm struck, the White House convened daily interagency meetings to review the government’s response. I was told later that the Coast Guard and NGA were consistently singled out as exemplars for the federal response to Katrina. Secretary Rumsfeld wasn’t aware that NGA had deployed so many people and assets, and that was the final straw. In September I received a one-line memo from Rumsfeld that simply read, “You are relieved of duties as NGA director as of 13 June 2006.” That was still nine months away, but it was three months short of my planned and announced departure date of September 13, and everyone would know my five-year tour had been cut short. Having essentially been fired, I’d be a lame duck for the remainder of my tenure. I called Tish Long, who was by then a senior executive in Steve Cambone’s office, and asked if she knew anything about Rumsfeld’s decision. She didn’t, but gave me Cambone’s personal cell phone number. I called him and asked for an explanation I could share with the workforce and with my family. He replied, “I can’t tell you.” I said, “Thanks a lot,” and the conversation ended. The decision was never officially explained to me, although someone in Rumsfeld’s office, whom I trust, later told me it was because we’d supported Katrina operations without first asking for permission. I didn’t do so because we were complying with a long-standing written agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, already approved by DOD, to respond automatically to requests for support in the event of natural disasters.
In the intervening weeks I began to realize that, aside from the public humiliation, expelling me on June 13 instead of September 13 meant that I would be three months short of being vested in a very small government retirement annuity. Again, Sue was not amused. Joanne Isham came to my rescue, arranging to enroll me in a ninety-day CIA course designed to help career employees transition to the civilian world, which would extend my time in service to precisely five years. Cambone approved the training course, under the condition that I not show my face around NGA after June 13.
One postscript on the Katrina episode: In the process of working with the Coast Guard, I got to know Thad Allen pretty well professionally. After he learned about the circumstances of my premature departure, he brought me to his headquarters and presented me with the Coast Guard Distinguished Public Service Award. The Coast Guard had adopted me as something of an unofficial mascot, and it was a status that served me well for another decade and more. Some of the most personally gratifying experiences I had as DNI were at Coast Guard facilities and ships, where I always received a family welcome. In 2015 Sue and I had dinner with Thad and his wife, Pam. As old warhorses are wont to do, we reminisced as he showed us around his house. He recalled the superb work NGA did after Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, as well as in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, and I found that he still displayed a three-dimensional topographical map of New Orleans that NGA gave him when he retired.
Katrina was a watershed moment for the Intelligence Community, and particularly for NGA. In the years that followed, NGA would put its tradecraft to work on natural disaster recovery efforts around the world, as well as in response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Today, GEOINT is a tremendous force for good in the world, making positive impacts that extend beyond the dimensions of its intelligence mission. On my final day as director, the people of NGA made sure I felt their respect and affection as they wished me farewell. Lacking an auditorium, they set up a massive, air-conditioned tent to accommodate the ceremony and reception and invited foreign partners and dignitaries, and we celebrated what we’d become—not mappers and imagery analysts, but geospatial-intelligence professionals.
Leaving NGA in the summer of 2006, I had a much better idea of what the corporate world offered, and quickly found work at a company called Detica. My connection was Denny Reimer, the former Army chief of staff whom I’d served with in Korea twenty years earlier. I’d determined by this point that I both could and would find my psychic income somewhere outside the contracting world. I had absolutely no intent to ever go back to government service, but found another outlet when Georgetown University hired me as their Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Intelligence, a title that sounds far more impressive than I deserved. I taught just one course a semester, a lecture and discussion class for graduate students, an interesting mix of recent Georgetown graduates and older intelligence professionals who were going back to school for their master’s degree. I found that neither category of student took anything for granted, and so I struggled to stay one class ahead of these very bright students.
I was very fortunate to have a postgraduate assistant assigned to help me with designing the curriculum, selecting readings, and anticipating the academic discussions that would follow. Hannah Powell was a recent master’s program graduate who had studied in Spain and completed two internships with the State Department at embassies overseas. She was savvy in the ways of the academic world, Washington, and international diplomacy, and as it turned out, I needed her for all three.
Occasionally, after class I met a few students at the Tombs—a famous Georgetown watering hole—to discuss world events and issues with which they were dealing. I enjoyed mentoring my students at least as much as I enjoyed teaching, and it was a lot less stressful to consider world events through an academic lens. On October 9, North Korea conducted its first underground nuclear test. I’m sure I described to students how AFTAC would be scrambling to identify how large a detonation had occurred and how successful it was. Happily, I felt far removed from the action.
In early November, President Bush announced that he was replacing Don Rumsfeld with Bob Gates—of all people—as secretary of defense. I told my students that appointing Gates was a great move for the nation, as he had been a tremendous DCI and had a great understanding of how the national security apparatus worked. I also read between the lines of Bob’s public statements that he didn’t want to leave as president of Texas A&M, but was answering the call out of a sense of duty to the nation. In conversations in the Tombs, I said I didn’t envy Bob’s having to go through the confirmation process, with its onerous volumes of paperwork on personal finances, intrusive written questions from Congress, and preparation for a confirmation hearing. I said I’d never want to go through any of that again.
A few weeks later Bob called to ask if I’d consider finishing out the Bush administration’s term with him, as his undersecretary of defense for intelligence. I could feel the schadenfreude inherent in being asked to replace Steve Cambone as USD(I), but I also knew the job wasn’t easy—and I’d have to go through confirmation. Still, it was a chance to serve again, and I’d be working for someone whom I admired and respected greatly, and whom I considered a mentor. I told Bob I was interested, but that I’d have to talk to Sue, a conversation I correctly surmised would not go well. “How can you go back to work for this administration?” she asked that night. “They just fired you!” When I replied, “But it’s Bob Gates,” she only repeated, “They just fired you.”
A few nights later I met Bob for dinner at the Willard Hotel. There was no big wooing involved; he asked if I’d take the job, and I said yes. When he asked if there was anything he could do to help me, I told him, “It would really help if you called my wife.” He laughed and said he would, and we then got to business. He explained that he wanted someone he knew and trusted to end the abject bureaucratic warfare between the Pentagon and the relatively new Office of the DNI. He felt with Mike Hayden as the new CIA director and me as USD(I), we would have a team that trusted each other and could work together. He also wanted me to rein in the Pentagon’s human intelligence apparatus, which had grown up under Rumsfeld and Cambone, and to cede proper authority back to the CIA. We ended up closing the restaurant down after a lengthy conversation about how to heal wounds and patch the divide between DOD and the Intelligence Community.
Bob was good to his word. He called Sue to ask her leave to “borrow” me for a while. According to Sue, the conversation ran something like this:
“Hi, Sue. This is Bob Gates.”
“I know who you are.”
“I was told I had to get your permission for Jim to come back to government.”
“That sounds right.”
“I promise, I only want him through the end of the administration, less than two years once he’s confirmed.”
“Okay. You can have him.”
Bob’s version of the conversation paints Sue in a more gracious light than her own version, but either way, the result was that I was cleared to proceed. Bob was confirmed by the Senate and took office in December 2006. I set to work, researching and completing financial disclosure questionnaires and eighty-three questions on topics ranging from my understanding of how detainees should be treated under Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to my opinion of the organizational structure of both defense intelligence and the Office of the DNI. All except the final four were essay questions. Each of the last four asked for my agreement to testify and to provide documents to congressional committees if asked. If I provided any answer other than yes, I wouldn’t have had to worry about showing up for a confirmation hearing.
Again, because of politics beyond my control, my hearing was delayed until March 27, but things seemed to be going smoothly—until about two weeks before I was scheduled to testify, when I got a call from the White House personnel office. They wanted to know why I’d spent eighty thousand dollars on my NGA farewell reception the previous summer. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was certain there had been an error somewhere and called NGA. The error, as it happened, was mine in not asking the “perfect question.” While I had noticed the large tent—with its air-conditioning, hard flooring, and wood-paneled “Don’s Johns” porta-potties—going up during my last days as director, I’d failed to ask, “How much does that tent cost?” Nine months too late to do anything about it, I learned the answer was eighty thousand dollars. No one had run the cost estimate past me. The staff had just asked me whom to invite. But three weeks before my confirmation hearing, two disgruntled NGA employees had sent an anonymous letter detailing the tent rental charges to the Senate Armed Services Committee, which had, in turn, contacted the White House. We very quickly checked all the paperwork and accounting, and NGA had jumped through all the required legal hoops and received approval from the appropriate offices in the Pentagon before ordering the tent. They’d spent a lot of money to celebrate my four years and nine months at the helm of the agency, but they’d done it by the book.
After that drama, my hearing was relatively quick and painless. Senator John Warner, the ranking Republican on the committee, was my sponsor and graciously introduced me. Senator Carl Levin, as committee chair and senior Democrat, was enamored of everything Bob Gates was doing in the post-Rumsfeld era, and so, with my family in attendance, I received warm bipartisan support. After the hearing, the two senior senators invited me to a private anteroom, where they took me to the woodshed over the tent rental. I took responsibility and walked them through the approval procedures that NGA had gone through. They thought that level of spending was ridiculous and vowed to conduct an investigation into how much farewell ceremonies cost throughout DOD. I can only imagine what they would have found if they’d put that vow into action.
In any event, the committee approved my nomination and sent it to the full Senate for vote. We thought I might be confirmed on Thursday, March 29, before the Senate adjourned for their Easter recess on April 8, but by my Thursday evening class at Georgetown, I still had no word on the Senate vote. When I gave the class a break at the midway point, I had a voicemail from Jack Dempsey, USD(I)’s legislative liaison officer (and Joan’s husband, by the way). He said that some unknown senator had put my nomination on hold, and there was nothing anyone could do, as the Senate had gone on recess. A few days later Gates’s legislative affairs office called to say that Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky, the former major-league baseball star, had placed the hold on me and asked what my connection to Bunning was. I had no idea, as I’d never worked with his office, never appeared before him for testimony, and never even met him. We were all mystified.
Hannah Powell ended up saving me from the pain of an extended hold. Online she discovered that Senator Bunning had put a similar hold on Art Money’s nomination for assistant secretary of defense in 1999 and didn’t lift it until DOD agreed to buy a large quantity of electromechanical safe locks from Mas-Hamilton Group, a company based in his home state of Kentucky. Sure enough, the lock contract was expiring, and Bunning wanted it renewed. Hannah quietly forwarded links to the news articles from 1999 to the Washington Post, which contacted Bunning’s office. Returning from Easter break, his office quickly removed the hold on my nomination and denied ever having issued it in the first place. The Senate went back into session Tuesday and voted to approve my appointment on Wednesday, April 11. Gates, who’d had enough, told me to bring Sue and any other family I could find, which ended up being just my two oldest grandkids, to his office, where he promptly swore me in that afternoon. This is how things work in Washington.
Sue made a point of presenting me with an electronic countdown clock that would tick off the days, hours, and minutes until January 20, 2009—the end of George Bush’s presidency, when I would rejoin her in the land of luxury cruises. She intended it to have a place on my desk, where I could keep an attentive eye on it. A few weeks later Andy gave me a less serious gift—Jim Bunning’s baseball card, which likely had been hard to come by. He suggested I get it autographed the next time I was on Capitol Hill. I never asked Bunning to sign it, but I kept the card, and the story lives on as a family joke.
As soon as I was sworn in, Gates confirmed my marching orders: get Pentagon intelligence back in line and fix the relationship with the DNI. He then pretty much left me on my own, as he focused on winning the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The equation for meeting his expectations had changed a bit during my confirmation process, and all for the better. In February John Negroponte had stepped down as DNI, returning to the State Department as deputy secretary, and was succeeded by Mike McConnell. Mike and I had first worked together in the late 1980s, when I’d been the senior intelligence officer for US Pacific Command and Mike for US Pacific Fleet, the Navy’s service component in Pacific Command’s area of operations. Later, of course, Mike had served as NSA director when I’d been DIA director and Bob Gates CIA director, and Mike had also been a partner at Booz Allen Hamilton when I’d been hired.
My first order of business as USD(I) was to address the combative relationship between the Office of the DNI and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and we immediately found a target of opportunity. The 2004 IRTPA legislation, in addition to creating the DNI, made it a requirement that, to become eligible for promotion to senior executive, all intelligence officers get broader IC experience by serving outside their “home” intelligence element. One of the bureaucratic fights between ODNI and OSD had been over who had the authority to “certify” someone from a DOD agency or military service as having met that “joint duty” requirement. The whole matter was a little silly, putting bureaucratic infighting ahead of the welfare of employees, but it also gave me an idea. I proposed to Bob that I be assigned a “dual-hat” position on Mike McConnell’s staff as the DNI’s “director of defense intelligence,” putting me on both Mike’s and Bob’s staffs. Bob supported the idea, and Mike was also on board. We signed a memo to create the new position on May 28, just forty-seven days after Bob swore me in, which has to be some sort of DOD staffing record. Shortly after, Mike and I began an exchange of hostages, wherein he sent a representative to my staff meetings, and I sent Linda Petrone to his, one of the notable intelligence officers who’d worked with Joan Dempsey at DIA.
Simultaneous to making peace with ODNI, I began examining the infrastructure of questionable human intelligence capabilities that had developed on the secretary’s staff. Before he’d taken the job, Bob had said publicly that he intended to get DOD out of CIA’s business. Representative Duncan Hunter, who’d worked to make sure IRTPA didn’t “abrogate” any authority from the secretary of defense to the DNI, insinuated before, during, and after Gates’s hearing that Bob would change his mind about giving up that power and leverage once he took office. When Bob stood firm, congressional Republicans were at first dismayed, and eventually apoplectic, raging at both Bob and me for killing off what they considered to be critical DOD assets. Frankly, I didn’t think it was appropriate to be operating any intelligence collection or analysis capability on the bureaucratic OSD staff. My personal responsibilities meant I had to focus on policy issues and budget, not on whatever was happening that day in Syria or North Korea. Moreover, some of the new capabilities that had arisen in DOD were redundant with those handled elsewhere in the community—namely at CIA—and, following Bob’s lead, I was more interested in making the IC work than accumulating power.
By the time I’d moved into my Pentagon office, the IC had settled at seventeen distinct elements. Of those, only five were intelligence “agencies,” with the lion’s share of their resources focused on conducting intelligence as their primary mission, except for a portion of CIA’s budget allocated for covert action and NSA’s responsibilities for assuring the government’s ability to communicate. Those five agencies were responsible for conducting national intelligence to keep the warfighters, the national security structure, and the president informed, and each agency had its specialty: CIA—human intelligence and covert operations; NSA—signals intelligence and cyber; NGA—geospatial intelligence; DIA—military intelligence; and NRO—building, buying, launching, and flying reconnaissance systems in space.
Eleven of the other Intelligence Community members were smaller offices, responsible for supporting their parent organizations. The four DOD service intelligence elements mostly served their respective military service: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Four other elements directly served Cabinet departments and secretaries: State, Treasury, Energy, and Homeland Security. And three other elements served large organizations within two other Cabinet departments: the Coast Guard within DHS, and the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI within the Justice Department. The intelligence component of the FBI, grown after 9/11, is a bit of an anomaly, as it is closer in scale to an actual agency, with a significant focus on counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity. The FBI occupies a unique position, looking outward at threats beyond our borders, like the “Big Five” agencies, and inward at domestic threats, with one foot in each of the worlds of intelligence and law enforcement.
The final IC element was the Office of the DNI. The ODNI was and is relatively small, particularly compared to the sprawling Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but the ODNI wasn’t solely dedicated to coordinating budget and resources, as the USD(I) staff was. More than half of ODNI’s staff of fewer than two thousand people was and is focused on operational missions through their cross-community “centers”: the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC); the National Counterproliferation Center (NCPC), countering the spread of weapons of mass destruction; and the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX, later renamed the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, NCSC), monitoring other nations’ efforts to spy on us. In 2007, the ODNI added the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to conduct technology research for cross-community missions. In addition, the President’s Daily Brief Staff and the National Intelligence Council (which generates high-level community analytic products, including National Intelligence Estimates) work for the DNI. While ODNI operates as a default headquarters for the Intelligence Community, I came to consider it an active participant in the intelligence process and properly the seventeenth IC member. Years later, when I was DNI, our social media manager, Michael Thomas, succinctly summed up how the rest of the world views the ODNI: “If the CIA is the New York Yankees, we’re the Commissioner’s Office. We don’t have any fans, and no one buys our jerseys.”
As USD(I), I was afforded access to the President’s Daily Brief for the first time in my career, and the best part of that access was my conversation each day with my assigned briefer. I still value the relationships I’ve had with those individuals over the years. My primary job, under the 2003 legislation that created USD(I), was making sure DOD intelligence components had the resources to operate, a task made easier by the fact that we were at war. As the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan continued and we uncovered terrorist networks and plans to attack in the United States and Europe, every year we asked for an increase in funding for the Military Intelligence Program. And every year we got it.
Much more difficult and controversial was granting authority. One of Bob Gates’s stated reasons for declining the DNI position had been the director’s lack of influence in hiring and firing IC component heads. Going completely against the Washington mantra of “Where you stand is where you sit,” Bob still felt the DNI should have at least some say over who led the IC agencies. We couldn’t give the DNI direct hiring authority without changing the IRTPA legislation, and Congress was having a hard enough time just passing a budget. So Bob, Mike, and I set out to remedy the situation as best we could, focusing on Executive Order 12333 (pronounced by everyone as “twelve triple-three”). President Reagan had signed this landmark executive order in 1981 as an underpinning for the organization, mission, authorities, and limits imposed on the IC. President Bush had last amended it in 2004, before IRTPA created the DNI. As a consequence, the executive order no longer comported with the spirit and intent of the law.
Bob and Mike got White House approval to amend the executive order again, and I worked with David Shedd, one of Mike’s four deputy DNIs, to draft and coordinate new language with the White House. Our most significant proposed change was to stipulate that the secretary of defense coordinate with and receive the concurrence of the DNI to hire and fire directors of the four DOD agencies. For the military service intelligence chiefs, the respective secretaries were required to consult with the DNI. (Only in the government is the distinction between the words “consult” and “coordinate” so important.) The changes also gave the DNI authority to set IC collection and analysis priorities and to coordinate areas of responsibility.
President Bush signed the revisions on July 30, 2008, and the next day Mike McConnell and I went to Capitol Hill to brief the House Intelligence Committee. In one of the most childish displays I ever saw on Capitol Hill—and that’s saying a lot—committee ranking member Pete Hoekstra stood up and led four Republicans out of the hearing room in protest over the fact that we’d changed an executive order—an executive order—without their concurrence. What made the display so absurd is that Mike and I were there representing a Republican administration, briefing them on an executive order being revised by a Republican president. I doubted the same thing had happened when President Reagan signed the original order in 1981.
I found that my best work as USD(I) relied less on the authorities I had and more on the fact that I’d been around the intelligence business long enough to be acquainted with everyone involved. I’d met Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, when he was an up-and-coming Army major in the 1980s. Vice Admiral Bob Murrett had succeeded me at NGA, and we’d kept in contact. I’d known Lieutenant General Ron Burgess at DIA since he’d served as the senior intelligence officer for Southern Command, starting in 1999. And Scott Large and I got to know each other as we sorted through NRO’s major systems acquisitions.
One of the other relationships that was invaluable was with Mike Vickers, who had a lengthy correspondence signature block as “Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict & Interdependent Capabilities.” Basically, he conducted policy oversight for Special Operations Forces and for military activities that were more “spooky” than regular warfare—a large and growing field of work in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He also served as a networker among the special operations community, CIA, and the secretary of defense. Mike was uniquely qualified for this role, as he’d served behind the scenes in the CIA’s effort in the 1980s to arm and finance the mujahidin in Afghanistan to resist and eventually overthrow the Soviet occupation. Mike was a featured character in Charlie Wilson’s War, both the book and movie, and he was a legend among both intelligence officers and special operators.
Mike and I spent many hours bonding in adjacent witness chairs in congressional hearings, and we traveled together a lot. One of the more interesting experiences of my career was going to Afghanistan with him in June 2009, visiting his old haunts as he narrated what had occurred in each place. I got a guided tour of the most successful covert action in history from a legendary figure who played a crucial role in making it all happen, who was also a great friend. I struggled to chronicle everything we saw, heard, and discussed as we hit stops in multiple countries, and I took pages and pages of notes. When I got back to the office, I always found holes in my trip report, things I only vaguely remembered doing. Mike carried only a single three-by-five-inch card on which he took teeny-tiny notes, which he managed to turn into complete and readable novel-length reports that included every detail of our visits. I still don’t know how he did that.
Years later, when I was DNI, Mike and his wife, Melana, invited Sue and me over to their house to watch Charlie Wilson’s War. Mike kept pausing the movie, sometimes to debunk what was happening onscreen and sometimes to elaborate and embellish. In the film, Mike’s character is introduced to the audience (and to Tom Hanks, playing Representative Charlie Wilson) as “the nerdy-looking kid in the white shirt,” who was playing chess against four guys simultaneously. One thing I learned while watching Charlie Wilson’s War at Mike’s house is that the real Mike Vickers doesn’t play chess.
On November 4, 2008, Barack Obama was elected to be our forty-fourth president. He had run on a campaign of “hope and change” and in large measure on not being George W. Bush. He was young and charismatic, and his father was black. I marveled on that day, and occasionally throughout his presidency, at just how far America had come in my lifetime. It was a tremendous milestone for our nation, and one I was very proud of us for. At the same time, I knew only a few months remained for me to cement the progress we’d made in defense intelligence before someone else took the job of USD(I).
Of course, neither Bob nor his senior intelligence adviser—me—expected President-elect Obama to stage a covert meeting in a hangar at Reagan National Airport to ask Bob to stay on as Secretary of Defense. During the first week of December I was in Wellington, New Zealand, on yet another “farewell trip.” Having previously bid farewell to my Aussie and Kiwi counterparts as DIA director and as NGA director, I was getting pretty good at it. Then, on December 5, I got word via official communications channels that Bob was going to call me. I figured he wanted to thank me for my service, which would be the nice way of saying I was to be replaced. That shouldn’t have been an urgent matter, but Bob phoned at 9:30 A.M. on Friday in Washington—2:30 A.M. on Saturday in New Zealand. He informed me he was staying on as secretary and wanted me to continue as USD(I), but was checking to make sure I’d agree to do so before he approached the president-elect’s transition team. It took me a long few seconds to process his message, and I mumbled something about being honored that he’d ask me to stay, and that he didn’t need to check with Sue again. When I called Sue at a more reasonable hour, she was supportive, although she asked if the countdown clock she’d given me could be reset.
In the following months, nearly all of the people I’d grown accustomed to working with turned their responsibilities over to successors. One choice of President Obama’s that I found baffling was Leon Panetta to lead CIA. Panetta was a politician—a former representative and President Clinton’s White House chief of staff—and his taking charge of the agency tasked with conducting human intelligence and covert actions made little sense to me. Politicians had a very mixed track record as CIA directors, and I recalled the short and controversial tenure of Porter Goss, who’d preceded Mike Hayden. Fortunately, I was very wrong about Leon. He has a great touch with people, and he became one of the most beloved and revered directors the agency has ever had.
President Obama’s pick for DNI, retired four-star Navy Admiral Denny Blair, at least made sense to me, although I wondered if he was the right fit. The DNI job, like that of the USD(I), had very little line authority and required gentle powers of persuasion among close associates, but going in he didn’t have close relationships with any of the agency directors. Denny reminded me a lot of Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, whose military assistant I’d been at NSA, as he cut the same handsome, charismatic, articulate figure, and they had both finished their naval careers in the same demanding, high-profile job—commander of US Pacific Command. Remembering the surprise I’d felt in 1991 when the civilians at DIA didn’t necessarily move when I said “jump,” I wondered how someone who had distinguished himself in a career of military command would function in the culture of intelligence. Despite Gates, McConnell, Shedd, and my work revising EO 12333 the previous summer, the DNI still had very little real authority.
My first interaction with Denny went a long way to alleviate my fears. He was amicable and interested in what I had to say, and as soon as he had grasped my dual-hat arrangement as Gates’s USD(I) and as his director of defense intelligence, he invited me to personally attend his senior staff meetings at ODNI headquarters, an offer on which I took him up. In the first few meetings the ODNI staff was reluctant to bring up “inside-baseball” issues in my presence, asking instead to discuss such matters privately. I, meanwhile, was very open about issues in DOD, asking for help where I could get it, and the staff soon decided I wasn’t there simply to spy on them and began to open up.
A new wrinkle on the national intelligence stage under President Obama was John Brennan’s role as “Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism and Assistant to the President,” another insufferably long title. John had been a career CIA officer and the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center, getting it up and running well before it was incorporated into ODNI in April 2005. People in Washington circles knew that President Obama had wanted John to be his CIA director, but being associated with the Bush CIA made confirmation difficult, and so John assumed a special advisory role in the White House. John and I weren’t intimate friends, but we’d held each other in mutual respect for some years. As USD(I), not involved with the substance of intelligence reporting, I didn’t see much of John until the final year of my tenure.
Fortunately, none of the DOD agency directors were up for replacement because of the transition. Unfortunately, Blair, Gates, and I had to make a hard call with respect to the National Reconnaissance Office leadership. NRO was going through a difficult period, with a reorganization that didn’t “take” and still suffering the aftereffects of high-profile satellite system failures, notably the multibillion-dollar Future Imagery Architecture program, which was canceled in 2005 and, in 2008, lost control of a satellite that had to be destroyed in orbit. When the NRO director retired in April, we moved Betty Sapp, my USD(I) deputy for portfolio, programs, and resources, to NRO as the principal deputy director. She served as acting director until June, when we hired recently retired Air Force General Bruce Carlson. I didn’t like losing Betty from my staff, but having someone with her technical experience and disciplined nature at NRO was a big plus, in addition to having someone there with whom I worked well and whom I trusted. With Bruce and Betty in the front office, NRO began to dig itself out of a hole.
Then, in the summer of 2009, Lieutenant General Ron Burgess took seriously an idea of mine that other generals might have considered half-baked. As DIA director, he had the same responsibilities to fill senior defense intelligence jobs as I’d had, way back when. While I’d once had to find a position for Brigadier General-select Mike Hayden, a problem easily resolved, Ron found that he had a gap in filling a critical post—specifically, the senior intelligence job for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. None of the qualified two-star generals or admirals could leave their current positions, and moving one of them early would mean moving everyone early, to backfill one another in the resulting daisy chain. I suggested to Ron that he appoint a civilian—Robert Cardillo—DIA’s director of analysis, to serve temporarily. Robert had spent most of his life as an analyst, but he’d been a great “utility infielder” for me at NGA, even running NGA’s public affairs and congressional affairs shops. I assured Ron that Robert could handle coordinating intelligence for the JCS and briefing Chairman Mike Mullen. Of course, it required a leap of faith, since no civilian had ever held that position before. Happily, Robert filled the yearlong gap successfully. Admiral Mullen had great regard for Robert and his work, Robert gained valuable experience that would be very useful to him (and to me) later, and Ron was able to bring Robert back to DIA as his deputy director in 2010, filling another critical vacancy.
For two and a half years, from April 2007 through November 2009, I managed to work in the trenches trying to strengthen both DOD and the IC and bringing both enterprises more closely together without drawing much public attention to my existence. But on November 5, 2009, Army major and practicing psychiatrist Dr. Nidal Hasan walked into a medical screening facility at Fort Hood, Texas, shouted, “Allahu Akbar!,” and began shooting, intentionally targeting soldiers in uniform over civilians and pursuing them as they fled the building. The rampage only ceased when Hasan stopped to change clips, and civilian police sergeant Mark Todd took him down with return fire. Thirteen people had been killed and another thirty-two injured. From the White House, John Brennan tasked the DOD, FBI, and NCTC with conducting a joint investigation into how an active-duty, commissioned Army officer could become radicalized without the Army’s knowing.
The FBI’s superb deputy director, John Pistole, and I dug into the evidence and started conducting interviews. A number of Hasan’s coworkers testified that he was very upset about his impending deployment to Afghanistan, and others said he’d been torn about what he saw as a choice between the United States and Islam. We learned that Hasan had visited radical Islamist websites and expressed admiration for Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Islamist imam who’d counseled three of the 9/11 hijackers from his mosque in Virginia, and who—eight years later in Yemen—was radicalizing and recruiting Western Muslims to the cause of al-Qaida online. The FBI found sixteen emails ranging from December 2008 to June 2009 between the two, almost all from Hasan to Awlaki. The content of a few of those emails was concerning, particularly Hasan’s desire to see Awlaki again in the afterlife. Hasan had recently paid a visit to Guns Galore in nearby Killeen, and asked for whichever handgun had the “highest magazine capacity.” He’d purchased the weapon the next day, and then practiced firing it rapidly on a gun range until he was proficient.
On December 9, we held a press conference, and John told members of the media that Hasan had been in electronic communication with an FBI target. It didn’t take the media long to figure out that it meant that Hasan had emailed Awlaki. In the months that followed, John and I answered a lot of questions from a lot of people, including in closed congressional hearings. As people sought to assign blame, I was continually reminded of Terry Schwalier and the Khobar Towers attack, and how hindsight is always 20/20. But as I was asked again and again why FBI or intelligence elements hadn’t been reading Hasan’s emails and monitoring his internet usage before his rampage, a new, unsettling thought occurred to me: I wondered just how intrusive people wanted or expected us to be. Hasan was an American citizen, a commissioned officer in the Army, and a psychiatrist. Did he give up his privacy rights or right to practice his religion when he became an active-duty service member? When he visited radical sites online? The FBI determined they didn’t have enough evidence to get a warrant for a search. Did Americans want their Intelligence Community to start monitoring citizens without a warrant? How many steps away from a Stasi-type environment were we? As we concluded our investigation and briefed executive and legislative branch leaders, I didn’t find any satisfactory resolution to these unsettling questions. I still haven’t.
In the midst of struggling with the quandary of how to protect both public safety and individuals’ right to privacy, I witnessed one of the most morally courageous acts I’ve ever seen. On January 27, in his 2010 State of the Union Address, President Obama announced his intent to repeal the Clinton-era “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in DOD, thus allowing gay and lesbian service members to serve openly. Secretary Gates and JCS Chairman Mullen were called to testify on the proposed repeal six days later. In their opening statements, both spoke in support of the president’s position, while cautioning that DOD needed time to study how the repeal would affect troops, particularly those deployed in war zones. This was the circumspect, reasoned, well-justified position of the department. At the conclusion of his opening statement, Mike said six words that always riveted my attention: “Speaking for myself and myself only.”
Generals and admirals are expected to answer congressional questions candidly, giving their personal views when asked. In my experience presenting both intelligence briefings and sworn testimony as a general officer and as a senior civilian, I had been very careful to differentiate between when I was speaking for the government and when I was breaking with the party line of the bureaucracy—the “company policy,” as I called it—knowing that expressing my personal views could influence decisions in ways for which my bosses and the institutions we represent may not have been prepared. For the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to make any such remark, particularly planned and scripted in his opening statement, was of consequence. Pausing just a moment, Admiral Mullen addressed his personal views to Senator Carl Levin:
Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do. No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me personally, it comes down to integrity—theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.
For the seventeen years since the imposition of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, no service chief had spoken publicly against the policy, and no service chief, much less a JCS chairman, had ever advocated for allowing gay service members to serve openly. On February 2, 2010, the JCS chairman spoke truth to power, in the process pointing out that an institution—his institution—that placed a premium on personal integrity was forcing its members to sacrifice theirs. To me, at least, Mike’s simple, direct statement made the moral obligation to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell self-evident. In the span of twenty-nine seconds, Mike Mullen forever became a personal hero of mine, after which I would always consider lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues from the perspective he expressed that day.
Simultaneous with the Fort Hood shooting investigation and the initial efforts to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I watched from the sidelines as Denny Blair’s tenure as DNI began to unravel. For much of 2009, he and Leon Panetta had been in a bureaucratic spat over whether the CIA director or the DNI should designate the senior intelligence officer at a given foreign location. The whole idea of having a CIA station chief was to make a senior person cognizant of all US intelligence activity taking place in the country in question, who was in turn accountable to the diplomatic chief of mission there—typically the ambassador. This arrangement had been memorialized in an agreement between Secretary Rumsfeld and DCI Porter Goss. Denny could, and did, make an argument for the DNI to be able to pick someone outside CIA to be the senior officer, for instance, in a country where NSA has a larger US intelligence footprint than CIA. Either way, it seemed to me to be a less than critical issue on which to draw a line in the sand, but that’s where Denny chose to draw his line.
Leon, for his part, was right to push back, both on principle and because, in the charged atmosphere of 2009, the CIA workforce needed someone to have their back. Both public opinion and elected officials had turned against the agency over work it had carried out—work that it had been ordered by the president to do, that was deemed legal, and that was approved by those briefed in Congress. And many in the CIA believed it had been critical to preventing another tragedy in the years immediately after 9/11. Particularly frustrating was the fact that the programs in question—the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “extraordinary rendition” to black sites—had ended long before many in the agency were even aware of their existence.
Leon was not going to acquiesce, but even those circumstances could have been worked out if he and Denny had held the argument in private. Instead, Denny issued a cable—an official communication—notifying everyone overseas that he was in charge of picking the senior intelligence officer in each station. CIA officers took that as yet another attempt to marginalize the agency and its traditional authorities abroad. Leon immediately issued a cable countermanding Denny’s. Denny in turn appealed to the White House, essentially to determine if he was in fact in command of the Intelligence Community. In October Vice President Biden brought the two men into his office to mediate their differences. Leon wasn’t giving ground, and Denny wasn’t disposed to mediation with someone he felt reported to him, so it was left to Biden to make the final call. Weeks later he decided in favor of the CIA and Leon. Denny had picked his battle and lost.
The situation worsened on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a young Nigerian man aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit, tried to set off plastic explosives hidden in his underwear. The explosives fizzled, setting his underwear on fire. Other passengers noticed what was happening and overwhelmed him with physical force. In the weeks that followed the attempted attack, the White House identified shortcomings at the National Counterterrorism Center, made worse by NCTC director Mike Leiter’s delay in returning from a ski vacation upon learning of the attack. NCTC postured itself as independent, but Leiter worked for Denny, and when John Brennan, the founding NCTC director, pointed out NCTC’s problems, it reflected poorly on Denny.
In the years since 2010, people have theorized that Denny Blair didn’t last as DNI because of his feud with Leon Panetta, or because of the “intelligence failure” regarding Abdulmutallab, or because of any of his public gaffes, gaffes that we’re all prone to. I simply think he was an intelligent, capable, patriotic man who was not the best fit for that particular job. He had thirty-four years of experience in uniform as a consumer of intelligence, leading to his command of all US forces for more than half the surface of the globe. I learned later that as DNI, he’d forcefully engaged White House and National Security Council meetings with his views on how, when, and where to project force, which makes sense in the context of Denny Blair, presidential adviser. As a lifelong intelligence officer, I instinctively live by the first, fundamental, unwritten law of intelligence work: Speak straight, unbiased intelligence truth to power, and leave the business of policy making to the policy makers. I’ve described all this here not to criticize Denny, but because his experience had an impact on decisions I would make when I succeeded him, and it influenced how I dealt with the IC leadership, particularly the three CIA directors who served during my tenure as DNI.