The 2004 law that established the DNI outlined three primary tasks for the position. The DNI was to be the senior intelligence adviser to the president and the default leader of the Intelligence Community. My work in those two roles garnered the most public attention, but I and the ODNI staff put a great deal of time and energy into the DNI’s third job—determining the budget and resources that went to the intelligence agencies through the National Intelligence Program.
Federal spending on national security tends to grow or shrink based on how threatened we feel at any moment. The same year I became DIA director, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, and the defense and intelligence enterprises began to reap the peace dividend. I’ve written about how I was asked to cut DIA’s budget and workforce by 20 percent over a period of five years, how the trend of percentage cuts extended beyond my time as director, and how those reductions were affecting every agency and military service, as well as the secretary of defense and director of central intelligence. After September 11, 2001, the cash-flow valves reversed, budgets surged, and what defense services and intelligence agencies and elements didn’t receive in their base budgets, they got from “overseas contingency operation” funding. OCO is “above the line” war funding and not subject to the normal budgetary processes.
Every type of funding was expanded each year, which we can now discuss because Denny Blair and then I declassified the IC’s top-line annual budget number. By fiscal year 2007—the government’s fiscal year runs from October 1 until September 30—the (strategic) National Intelligence Program, determined by the DNI, had reached $43.5 billion, and the (operationally focused) Military Intelligence Program, determined by the USD(I), had reached $20 billion, for a total of $63.5 billion spent on intelligence. By fiscal year 2011, the first full budget year of my tenure as DNI, the NIP and MIP had jumped to $54.6 billion and $24 billion respectively—$78.6 billion in total—which was more than was allocated to all but two or three Cabinet departments. (By way of comparison, the overall defense budget jumped from $335 billion in Fiscal Year 2001 to $625 billion in Fiscal Year 2007 and $717 billion in Fiscal Year 2011, more than doubling in a decade.)
Considering those two decades of intelligence budgets—or at least, what I can say about them in an unclassified context—I would point to a fiscal reality that makes some people in Washington uncomfortable. According to the federal Office of Management and Budget, in 1992, the fiscal year of the Soviet collapse, the US government spent $290 billion more than it received in taxes—a deficit the government had to address by borrowing through issuing bonds. With the peace dividend we spent less on defense, and as the national economy came out of recession, the deficit fell each year of the 1990s. By 1998, the federal government was actually collecting more from taxes than it was spending, and in 2000, it had a budget surplus of $236 billion—meaning it could afford to pay off some debt principal without borrowing more.
After September 11, 2001, as defense spending rose and markets fell, the federal surpluses became deficits again—reaching $464 billion by 2008. Then, as illustrated brilliantly by Tim Geithner in his memoir, Stress Test, driven by the subprime mortgage crisis and financial institutions’ lack of liquidity to use for recovery, the US financial sector and US economy collapsed into the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 2009, President Obama inherited President Bush’s commitment of $700 billion to bail out the financial sector and rescue the economy through the Troubled Asset Relief Program—TARP. The deficit for 2008 more than tripled in 2009, to $1.41 trillion, as the federal government brought in far less money and spent far more on defense, bailouts, and protecting people who were losing their jobs and their homes. No other government on earth spent as much as $1.41 trillion total in 2009. The magnitude of what the federal government was borrowing had become so large that by 2010, when I became DNI, Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, characterized our national debt as the most prominent threat to our national security.
During President Obama’s first year in office he faced a situation in which he desperately needed to inject money into the US financial system to prevent a second Great Depression; at the same time, almost as desperately, he had to scale back federal borrowing. It was a time in which we needed to address the fiscal realities we faced removed from the mire of partisan politics.
Unfortunately, in 2009 Congress was still populated by many of the kind of people who had, six months earlier, staged a juvenile walkout in protest of the briefing DNI Mike McConnell and I had given on President Bush’s changes to Executive Order 12333, which redefined intelligence authorities after the establishment of the DNI. Also unfortunately, when approaching cuts, many members of Congress felt strongly and uncompromisingly that while the budget did need to be slashed, the programs they supported should be protected, whether those were allocated to defense (largely supported by Republicans) or to domestic programs (largely supported by Democrats).
Despite the fact that the federal budget makes headline news constantly, few people know how the process actually works, so it’s worth taking a few pages here to present what I hope will clarify some of the intricacies of how the budget cycle is supposed to work. During the first week of February, the president presents his budget request to Congress. In a functional world, after receiving this request, House and Senate budget committees draft a budget resolution that offers broad guidelines for the rest of Congress to use in constructing the actual budget. Then, congressional oversight committees spend the next few months critiquing the president’s requests, checking items of particular interest to their committees or to their individual members, making backdoor deals, and marking up the request to become House and Senate “authorization” bills—literally authorizing federal departments to run their programs. Committees also use these authorization bills to conduct oversight. In the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, Congress made the passage of intelligence authorization bills contingent on the CIA’s informing the chairs and vice-chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees of any covert actions it was conducting. In my time as DNI, Congress extended this oversight to micromanagement levels, which included informing me of the precise size and makeup they wanted for the Office of the DNI staff, caps on staff pay and promotions, skill sets, and how many desks in Liberty Crossing could be occupied by contractors.
Between April and June, committees hold budget hearings, at which executive branch secretaries and directors—like the DNI—defend the budget requests they submitted in February. Intelligence budget briefings are conducted behind closed doors to allow discussion of the details of classified programs. In June or July, the committees release their draft authorization bills to the executive departments for comment. Typically, when Congress sends over the authorization bills, executive departments only have a few weeks to respond, so budget and programmatic experts typically read the draft bills in late-night sessions over delivery pizza on the day they’re released. Department headquarters’ offices send the draft bills, with specific questions, around to staff experts to get feedback on what provisions and budget lines they can and can’t live with. Their responses are then submitted to Congress. Sometimes, departments feel strongly enough about their objections that they recommend the president veto the bill unless changes are made to it. A vetoed authorization bill can have serious consequences for a department, including not being able to start any new programs if a bill never gets passed. So in the organizations I directed, we always took recommending a veto very seriously.
Again, in a functional world, committees consider the feedback and objections they’ve received from executive departments, and the House and Senate counterpart committees come together to meld their bills into mutually agreed-upon legislation, which they send to the president’s desk for signature. When the president signs the authorization bill, it becomes law—the “authorization act” for that fiscal year. That’s not quite the end of the process. Once oversight committees authorize federal departments to run their programs under a specific budget, the appropriations committees—one each in the House and Senate—appropriate money to be spent. That appropriation is the actual federal budget. There are twelve appropriations subcommittees, so the budget can be doled out as twelve separate appropriations acts, or several can be rolled up into an “omnibus” act.
That budget cycle process is the basis for all federal spending, and for the Intelligence Community, it’s even more complicated. IC equities get spread out into two authorization bills—intelligence (for NIP equities) and defense (for MIP equities)—but its appropriation comes through just the defense appropriations subcommittee. There’s a reason for this odd arrangement. After congressional investigations determined that the CIA had spied on Americans and engaged in other illegal actions during the Watergate era, Congress decided it required better oversight of intelligence activities. It therefore created select intelligence oversight committees in both the Senate (1976) and the House (1977) to oversee the national-level intelligence program. At the same time, in the Senate, it left oversight of intelligence work that supported military operations in the Armed Services Committee. That’s how we ended up with a National Intelligence Program (NIP), determined by the DNI and authorized by the Intelligence Authorization Act each year; and a Military Intelligence Program, overseen by the USD(I) and rolled into the National Defense Authorization Act for all military activities. To further complicate matters, the Senate committee oversees only the National Intelligence Program, while the House committee also has jurisdiction over DOD’s Military Intelligence Program.
So every year that all three bills passed, we received three sets of instructions/guidance from Congress, and every year, the priorities of the appropriators differed from those of the authorizers. The IC can’t spend money unless it’s both appropriated and authorized, which caused annual headaches. If we didn’t get an appropriation act, we’d shut down. If we didn’t get an authorization act, they’d send us the draft bill from each committee and tell us to consider what they would have passed if they’d agreed to pass it. This is how I learned that Excedrin pairs well with martinis.
Intelligence budgeting is also more complex because of the types of things we have to budget for. If we want to develop, build, and launch a satellite system with new capabilities in ten years, we have to plan in which years the development will require more or less funding to stay on track. If we’re growing an online capability, we have to plan for when additional staff will be needed to make it work. We need to know whether that funding will come from the NIP or the MIP, and have to trust that congressional appropriations will be stable and support our careful plans. Much of our effort at USD(I) and DNI was accordingly focused on study and planning for years in the future, rather than what we were currently executing.
With all of that as background, I took my oath of office as DNI on August 9, 2010, and as a general indicator of just how well Democrats and Republicans were working together on Capitol Hill, when October 1, 2010, rolled around, it marked the start of the sixth consecutive year that the Intelligence Community would operate without an authorization act. It also marked the fifth consecutive year that Congress failed to appropriate a government budget by the beginning of the fiscal year. Starting in 2007, Congress had started each fiscal year by passing a “continuing resolution,” which essentially was the legislative branch telling the executive branch departments to continue operating, temporarily, at the same funding level as the previous year until Congress could see its way clear to actually fund the government. For each of those previous four years, Congress passed either a series of continuing resolutions or, eventually, an appropriations act. As much as congressional members complain any time the Intelligence Community comes up short on anything, Congress consistently failed to do its one primary job—fund the government.
The 2010 elections were marked by the rise of the Tea Party faction within the Republican Party, which was a backlash to Obama’s presidency. Driven by their victories, the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, and the newly elected Tea Party members made it a point of pride to be even more purposefully disruptive than the previous Congress.
The bright spot for the Intelligence Community, amid so much dysfunction on the Hill, was the January 2011 appointment of representatives Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger as, respectively, the chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee in the House. They were determined to set aside partisan politics and do what they believed best for the IC and for the nation, even if their actions drew the ire of their respective parties. When in 2015 I presented an award to them on behalf of an intelligence industry association, I said I’d been told that sometimes on a single issue, Ruppersberger, the Democrat, would be taking heat from the Obama White House at the same time that Rogers, the Republican, was under attack for supporting the White House.
Rogers and Ruppersberger introduced an authorization bill for 2011 in February—nearly halfway through the fiscal year—and worked with Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chair Saxby Chambliss to get it to the president’s desk. President Obama signed it on June 8. Subsequently, Rogers and Ruppersberger worked with the Senate Intelligence Committee to pass authorization bills for each of the next four years, which they served together. Thanking them on behalf of the IC in 2015, I joked, “In their four years as HPSCI leaders, they passed five intelligence authorization bills—five annual authorization bills—in four years. That really only works with congressional math.”
On the appropriations side, however, the math was not working. Democrats and Republicans seemed to concur that federal spending was unsustainable, but couldn’t agree on much else. So in 2010, for the fifth straight year, they failed to pass an appropriations bill by October 1. On September 29, two days before a potential shutdown, Congress passed a continuing resolution, funding the government through December 3. The next CR went through December 18, with successive ones coming on December 21, March 4, March 18, April 8, and then April 15. None of those continuing resolutions was passed with more than two days to spare before the previous resolution expired, and some were passed only a few hours before the government would have to shut down. Because agencies in the executive branch required days of preparation for a shutdown, across the government we had to prepare, again and again, to close up shop.
Seven times between December 2010 and April 2011, we canceled training and called people back from travel. Seven times, we started procedures for closing down infrastructure systems. More than once, we got so close to shutdown that NSA prepared to phase down some nonurgent systems related to signals intelligence. Seven times, we notified employees they were hours from being furloughed, sent home without pay for as long as the government remained unfunded. Instructions from the Office of Personnel Management complicated the situation, as we were required to divide employees into two groups: those whose work was “essential” to keep the government from actually collapsing (which included such positions as security guards protecting our facilities, analysts monitoring terrorists trying to board airliners, officers deployed to combat zones in support of warfighters, and, of course, people who could answer whatever questions Congress had as they debated passing a budget), and those whose work was allegedly “nonessential” (including, for example, acquisition professionals who made sure satellites were delivered on time and within budget, officers who coordinated with foreign intelligence services, recruiters who hired new intelligence officers, and the human resources folks who made sure we all got paid). The actual policy document uses the words “excepted” and “nonexcepted,” but it was all communicated to employees as “essential” and “nonessential.”
It was demoralizing for intelligence professionals to be characterized as nonessential and then threatened with the possibility of not being paid. Media headlines repeatedly asked: If those people were nonessential, why did we employ them in the first place? The news for essential employees was actually worse, as they would have to work without pay. After previous government shutdowns, Congress had passed a bill retroactively remunerating people for time they missed, but the Tea Party Republicans indicated publicly they would now block any retroactive payments.
At the end of the workday on Friday, April 15, 2011, Congress hadn’t reached a deal to pass a budget or a new continuing resolution, and we expected to shut down at midnight. We informed people definitively whether they were “essential” or “nonessential.” We told the nonessential employees to take home any medication they had at work, or anything else critical to their personal lives. By some miracle, though, Congress managed to pass an actual appropriation for the remainder of the fiscal year, and we remained open. In fact, we needed our chief financial officer and her staff to come in to work on the weekend to figure out how the enacted appropriations affected the Intelligence Community. It was actually good news for the NIP, which was given a $1.5 billion increase—our last up-year in the post-9/11 streak—but the MIP saw a $3 billion reduction for its Fiscal Year 2011 funding. Because April 15 was more than halfway through the year, and we’d been told to operate under the assumption of the previous year’s funding levels, programs funded under the MIP had the remainder of the year to absorb the $3 billion cut, rather than a full year. So instead of an 11 percent cut over a full year, it was a 24 percent cut over five and a half months. As my dad would’ve said, “This is no way to run a railroad.”
This was just the start of the 2011 drama. The United States is one of only a handful of nations that sets a limit on how much money its government can borrow, and other nations that do either fix their debt ceiling as a percentage of their GDP, so that it naturally rises over time, or set a hard limit so high that they don’t worry about ever reaching it. In contrast, the US Congress regularly has to raise the ceiling for the amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to owe in bonds. After 9/11, Congress quietly raised the debt ceiling in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2007, twice in 2008, twice in 2009, and again in 2010, to $14.294 trillion. Shortly after Congress passed a budget on April 15, 2011, all eyes turned to August 2, which the US Treasury had identified as the date when it would reach the debt ceiling limit and be unable to issue more bonds.
The Tea Party Republicans in the House, in particular, saw this as another opportunity to “play chicken” with the federal government in pursuit of their agenda. Republicans wanted cuts to domestic entitlements, particularly social safety-net programs like welfare, food stamps, and Medicaid. Democrats wanted to raise taxes on wealthy Americans. Republicans were set against any increases in taxes and wanted to protect national security equities. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner pointed out the real absurdity of the debate: If the government didn’t raise the ceiling to borrow more money, it would default on government bonds. Then, almost certainly, the international credit indexes would downgrade the United States’ credit rating, and the interest rates the government paid on bonds would go up. If neither side swerved before Tuesday, August 2, not only could we see a government shutdown, but annual federal spending would increase hundreds of billions of dollars just to cover interest payments, with no tangible benefit for taxpayers.
On Monday, August 1, with this national theater of the absurd playing out in Washington, the Intelligence Community leadership left town for the day. Stephanie and I met the directors of the “Big Six”—CIA, NSA, NRO, NGA, DIA, and FBI—along with USD(I) Mike Vickers and key members of each agency staff at an “undisclosed location” to discuss what we were going to do. Regardless of what happened with the debt ceiling that week, our days of ever-increasing intelligence budgets were probably over.
Heading into that meeting, I believed that, to most IC agency heads and to most of our workforce, my oft-repeated phrase “intelligence integration” meant coordinating across agency lines to bring tradecraft from all the intelligence disciplines together. Three months earlier, to the day, outstanding intelligence work by CIA, NSA, and NGA had led to the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, and the death of Osama bin Laden. That was intelligence integration built on work that had been under way long before I became DNI.
In the summer of 2011, facing decreasing budgets across the board, IC leaders realized we needed to extend the same spirit of integration to our business processes because we were staring once again into the abyss of a potential shutdown and the certainty of losing resources across the community, which would potentially impact the safety and security of the nation, its citizens, and our allies.
In a somber room, we discussed the realities we faced. Our budgets had increased at a somewhat similar rate to the defense budget since 2001, but our mission imperatives had expanded at the same rate. We’d not only discovered and disrupted terrorist plots around the world; we were supporting active wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, protecting troops from insurgent attacks and IEDs, and giving them intelligence to go on the offensive. At the same time, China and Russia still challenged us, and North Korea and Iran both were pushing to become internationally recognized nuclear states. That spring, I’d told our congressional oversight committees that we must “sustain a robust, balanced array of intelligence capabilities to cope with the wide variety and scope of potential threats.” Despite these expanding requirements, the direction from Congress and the public was for us to “trim the fat.”
At our off-site, the agency directors and their chief finance officers opened their books to each other to an unprecedented degree. They revealed—in real numbers—how much they were spending on specific missions and programs. It quickly became apparent that each agency had already spent the past year or more identifying efficiencies within their own systems, and that there was very little overlap between two agencies performing similar enough functions that we could feel safe eliminating one and allowing it to be covered by another. I know that skeptics won’t buy this, but while many IC programs were very expensive, almost all served a unique purpose within our expanded mission, and there was almost no fat to trim.
I finally spoke out loud what I believed everyone was thinking: We weren’t going to be able to, as the cliché goes, “do more with less.” Saying we could accept these cuts without significant impact would be intellectually dishonest, misrepresenting the facts to our stakeholders and policy makers. So, I told the group, we would “do less with less.” That did not mean salami slicing—taking a percentage cut from every program, so that we continued doing the same things but with impaired capabilities—so we agreed to plan as a community to prioritize resources according to the strategies the national intelligence managers in ODNI had been coordinating. We would make hard choices and kill off entire programs and capabilities, and we’d keep funding critical programs at the levels they needed to function properly. As Stephanie deftly put it, “Flat is the new up.” We also agreed that “sunk costs” are lost costs—we’d only keep a program because it met mission needs, not just because we’d already invested a large sum of money in it.
As I write this, I can imagine readers thinking that making necessary adjustments in response to cost-cutting measures sounds remarkably obvious. At the time, however, seriously considering intentionally killing a government program to save money felt pretty radical. One of my favorite quotes, which I used again and again over the next few years, was from a New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford, who once remarked, “We’re running out of money, so we must begin to think.” Later, Stephanie revised Rutherford’s quote to say, “So we must begin to think together.”
We decided first and foremost to protect our future. That meant, as we froze—and perhaps later even cut—the overall size of the IC workforce, we’d keep a hiring pipeline open to bring in new people with fresh ideas and experiences. It also meant we’d protect our investment in science and technology. Under Dawn Meyerriecks’s leadership from ODNI, the chief scientists and research directors of the IC had already formulated how to manage research investment. In some areas, like cryptanalysis, we would continue to lead the world, while in others we would support industry research to ensure we could use their resulting products. In many, many other areas, we would have to leverage what industry was already producing, using “adapt” or “adopt” as our primary principles.
We also agreed to coordinate any cuts we made to the NIP with cuts made to the MIP, so that we could avoid inadvertently creating a serious vulnerability, what could be called “programming fratricide.” For that reason, it was crucial that USD(I) Mike Vickers was at the table, and I was grateful when, a month later, Mike invited us to a similar MIP-focused off-site. We’d come a long way from the turf battles of a few years before.
The final—again rather obvious—principle we agreed to was favoring capabilities for conducting intelligence over support functions. Marilyn Vacca, the person most responsible for executing the DNI’s authority to determine the NIP, told the group that 20 to 25 percent of our budget request was coded for information technology. IT was so expensive because each of the agencies had developed its own separate and secure infrastructure, network, email system, support services, and user experience. Their respective IT leaders and chief information officers had built interagency bridges to connect the archipelago, but each maintained its own island. I asked Al Tarasiuk, a deeply experienced CIA senior officer on rotation as the ODNI chief information officer, to develop an approach on how we could first bring all the agencies, and eventually the smaller intelligence components, into a single, united “IC IT Enterprise.” Al’s first contribution was to pronounce “IC ITE” as “eyesight.” No program has any cachet in Washington until it has a catchy acronym.
On Tuesday, August 2, the day after our off-site and—once again—the last possible day to avert disaster, Congress passed the Budget Control Act of 2011, and the president signed it into law. The act raised the debt ceiling by $900 billion and cut spending by $917 billion total over ten years, almost all of it back-loaded to the final few years—again kicking the can down the road. It also established a “supercommittee” of six Republicans and six Democrats tasked with cutting another $1.5 trillion. To show how serious Congress was about this supercommittee, the act carried a provision that if the supercommittee didn’t agree on a way to cut at least another $1.2 trillion, it would trigger a “sequestration” cut, indiscriminately slashing the domestic programs the Democrats cared about and the national security programs the Republicans cared equally about—$600 billion from each side. The law was deliberately cast to make these cuts as painful as possible. Triggering sequestration would not only result in these mindless, draconian, automatic cuts, but would specify that departments and agencies would have to take the cuts to all their programs, leaving directors and secretaries no discretion to move around money to save vital systems and capabilities. Essentially, Congress wrote the Budget Control Act of 2011 to force the supercommittee to negotiate, because in their minds, literally anything the supercommittee might come up with would be better than triggering sequestration, which they described as “unthinkable.” As we read about this deal, Stephanie correctly observed that much of what we’d accomplished with our off-site meeting would be completely undone if sequestration took place.
After August 2, 2011, the noise of Washington political chaos quieted enough for us to focus on the chaos of the rest of the world for a while. The Libyan civil war was reaching its endgame. The battle of Tripoli began on August 19, Gaddafi was captured and killed on October 20, and NATO ended its mission on October 31. The Iraq War officially ended (or so we thought) with the final withdrawal of US troops on December 18. Almost immediately, the insurgency forces in Iraq regenerated.
Before that, on October 17, I rolled out IC ITE at the 2011 GEOINT Symposium in San Antonio, and in December, Al Tarasiuk presented us with the plan he and the agency CIOs had come up with. The agencies had competitively agreed to lead individual efforts for IC ITE. CIA and NSA won separate bids to provide cloud computing power. DIA and NGA had bid together to provide desktop hardware and a virtual desktop and interface. In addition to hosting a cloud, NSA would make computing accessible and powerful by making available thousands of mission applications through an “app mall.” Later, agencies would bid again to lead the longer-term challenge of consolidating IT network infrastructures with all of the associated issues of fiber, routers, and switches. To implement this plan, the agencies agreed not to cut their IT budgets through fiscal years 2012 and 2013. Over the following months, Al Tarasiuk would lead the technical effort, and Stephanie would lead the agency deputies committee to address systemic challenges and overcome the inevitable passive-aggressive resistance that such change inevitably engenders among agencies.
Unfortunately, as IC agencies were integrating in new ways, Congress was reaching new levels of disintegration. On November 21 the cochairs of the bipartisan congressional supercommittee published a statement that began, “After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline” of December 31. Still, no one panicked, for while sequestration had technically been triggered, it wouldn’t start until January 1, 2013, not 2012. Congress had another year to find a way out of the trap it had set for itself.
On December 23, 2011, Congress actually passed an omnibus appropriations act, funding the government for the next nine months. The fiscal year 2012 National Intelligence Program was cut $700 million to $53.9 billion, and the Military Intelligence Program was cut another $2.5 billion to $21.5 billion, after having $3 billion cut the previous year. On January 31, 2012, the ill-fated supercommittee dissolved, leaving us in limbo for figuring out future intelligence budgets, all while dealing with operational challenges like the Arab Spring and the tragic attack in Benghazi in September.
That October I addressed the 2012 GEOINT Symposium in Orlando, updating the audience on IC ITE and explaining exactly what was at stake if sequestration came into effect on January 1—less than three months away. I explained that with no latitude on how to take cuts, the sequester “could mean significant reductions in our most valuable asset, our people. And every major systems acquisition program in the NIP is in jeopardy of being wounded. So we can only hope that the lame-duck Congress, which returns after the election, will do something to avert this train wreck.” I concluded my remarks with a thought that felt ominous even as I said it: “And the worst part is that if it happens, it would occur during the time of the most diverse and demanding array of threats I’ve seen in almost fifty years in this business. And I can assure you that to the extent that I have any influence, for as long as I have any influence, I’ll do my damnedest to minimize the damage.”
The next crisis didn’t wait for Congress to return after the election. On the evening of Tuesday, November 6, as I watched the election returns, it looked as though President Obama would be reelected. If he asked me to stay on as DNI, and I had no reason to believe he wouldn’t, I planned to tell him I would only stay if Stephanie also agreed to stay as PDDNI. The final item on my calendar for the day was a meeting with Sean Joyce, the FBI’s deputy director under Bob Mueller. Sean had been promoted to that position after serving as the director of the FBI’s intelligence component, so I already had a close working relationship with him. I was told he wanted to brief me on a sensitive cybersecurity issue, so I asked Stephanie to join us.
Sean began laying out a case of cyberstalking between two women in Florida, one of whom had published a biography of CIA director David Petraeus earlier that year. He explained that the FBI had gotten involved after one of the women had filed a report with the Tampa FBI Field Office, and I began to wonder precisely how this seemingly petty civil issue had risen to a level that the FBI’s deputy director became involved. Then Sean’s tone shifted as he revealed that, while investigating the biographer, they discovered that she was having an extramarital affair with Petraeus, and Dave had been improperly sharing classified material with her. I was stunned, and perhaps for the only time I can recall, Stephanie looked genuinely surprised. Sean said that not only did agency people know about the affair, but at least two congressional offices were aware of it as well, which meant it wouldn’t stay a secret for long.
The next morning, I called Dave privately and shared what Sean had told us. He didn’t immediately seem to grasp how dire the situation was. I pointed out that if a midgrade government employee had provided classified material to a girlfriend, he would have his clearance suspended, and I asked Dave to consider that in determining his course of action. At one point in our conversation, I reminded him that unlike me he was an international icon, and as one retired general officer to another, I suggested he take control of the situation while he still had some control to exercise by informing his family and explaining the situation to the president before the story went public. By the end of the conversation, he understood the urgency of the matter. I spoke with him twice more on Wednesday and tried to offer support. Appropriately, if belatedly, he took responsibility and did the difficult and right thing by telling his family and the president, and by resigning.
On Thursday, I met with Attorney General Eric Holder and White House counsel Kathy Ruemmler, bringing my superb general counsel Bob Litt with me. The Justice Department chief of staff shared the same information Sean had given to Stephanie and me. Since Dave was presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed, the White House was dismayed that Sean had briefed me before he had them, and Kathy reminded me I didn’t have authority to ask Dave to resign, as only the White House could do that—a reminder I didn’t need.
On Friday afternoon, Sue and I flew to North Carolina to spend the weekend with my sister, Chris, and her husband, Jim, a retired Army intelligence officer. President Obama accepted Dave’s resignation, the story broke, and I spent the entire weekend on the phone with congressional members, explaining what had happened.
This sequence of events led to my third meeting alone with the president. The first had been my interview for the DNI position. The second had been shortly after April 28, 2011, when I was surprised by the president’s announcement that Dave would become the CIA director, succeeding Leon Panetta, who was in turn following Bob Gates as secretary of defense. The 2004 IRTPA legislation explicitly states that the president would nominate the CIA director based on the recommendation of the DNI. Shortly after the appointment was announced, Bob Litt politely reminded the White House counsel about the specifics of the law. That second private meeting with the president appeared to be a hastily scheduled “whoops” acknowledgment, during which he assured me he would seek my recommendation if he ever needed to appoint another CIA director.
Not to be outdone, I used the occasion of Leon’s departure from CIA to have my own “whoops” moment—publicly and spectacularly. I was the fifth person to present Leon with an award onstage, and I recycled a joke I’d been using for years, that speaking fifth reminded me of the apocryphal line ascribed to Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband when he supposedly said, “I know what I’m supposed to do, but how do I make it different?” The line got a laugh, as it always did. After the ceremony, as I was walking off the stage, NGA director Tish Long walked up, smiled, and rhetorically asked, “Guess who’s here?” I knew immediately she meant former senator John Warner, one of Elizabeth Taylor’s ex-husbands; heart sinking, I scanned the rapidly dispersing crowd for the senator. No luck. I resolved to call him as soon as I could, and I went with my detail to my preplanned exit. There, I encounter none other than Senator Warner, standing on the curb, waiting for his ride. I figuratively fell on my knees, babbling an apology for my insensitive gaffe. He laughed and said, “No, no. It was a great line. I laughed too.” Getting in his car, he added, “By the way, I was number six.”
Eighteen months later, President Obama met with me alone for what turned out to be the final time to ask for my recommendation on whom to nominate as the next CIA director. I knew he favored John Brennan for the job, and I felt that John would be a terrific agency director and that we could work well together. I told the president that I could endorse two people: either John or Deputy Director Michael Morell, who had served as acting director before Dave, and who assumed that position again after Dave resigned. He ultimately chose John.
Between Benghazi, Dave’s resignation, and wondering if Congress would do something before its latest self-imposed deadline of New Year’s Day, I spent a good deal of time during the fall of 2012 on the phone with congressional members and shuttling back and forth to Capitol Hill. I was deeply concerned that sequestration would take effect, and I felt compelled to let our committee members know—again—that while we accepted that we were not exempt from cuts, sequestration would damage intelligence capabilities indiscriminately. In fact, all of Washington was already up in arms about sequestration. At midnight on December 31, it would kick in at the precise moment the tax cuts passed during President Bush’s tenure would expire, and six other economically bad pieces of legislation would all be triggered, along with the debt ceiling being reached again. The government would inexplicably raise taxes and cut spending simultaneously, a move the Congressional Budget Office warned would throw the nation into immediate recession. With all the drama Washington could muster, this impending event had been dubbed the “fiscal cliff.”
I was also concerned about another potential legislative disaster—the renewal of what’s awkwardly called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008. FISA grants the Intelligence Community much of its authority to conduct intelligence against threats overseas, and this provision of FISA was slated to expire at the end of the year and required reauthorization. Particularly of concern for the Intelligence Community was Section 702, which gave the IC authority, under court supervision, to intercept communications of non-US persons, such as suspected terrorists overseas. When people think of the Intelligence Community “listening to calls” and “reading emails”—actually gathering the content of communications needed to interrupt terrorist plots and target terrorists overseas—Section 702 is a critical tool we rely upon heavily to do so. Understandably, some members of the legislative branch were concerned that we never use this authority for foreign surveillance against the American people, so Congress required under Section 702 that we could only “target the communications of non-U.S. persons located outside the United States for foreign intelligence purposes,” a restriction with which I strongly agreed.
That fall I led teams, which at various times included FBI director Bob Mueller, NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, and ODNI general counsel Bob Litt, among others, to meet with key congressional members to explain the importance of Section 702, the procedural safeguards that had been installed to prevent its abuse, and the roles that all three branches of government played in oversight. As the deadline for its renewal approached, these meetings became more frequent—and more intense. In November and December, I briefed our oversight committees, the Senate majority and minority leaders, and the House Speaker and minority leader. I explained how Section 702 works and how the foreign intelligence we collected under its authority contributed to thousands of reports and dozens of articles in the President’s Daily Brief, and I described the accesses we would lose, particularly against foreign terrorist networks, without its reauthorization.
I also described what happened when we were monitoring phone or internet communications of a non-American overseas but then realized the person speaking with the target was an American or was located within the United States—the so-called “incidental collection” of a “US person.” In those cases, analysts first determined if there was foreign intelligence value to the intercepted communication. If there wasn’t, our policy was to delete the communication forever. If there was intelligence value—for example, a terrorist’s talking to someone in the United States about a terrorist plot—we would “minimize” the protected American’s name with the designation “US person #1,” or “US person #2,” etc., in any signals intelligence reporting.
On November 27, I, along with Bob Litt and Chris Inglis, participated in a particularly contentious discussion with Senators Jeff Merkley, Tom Udall, and Ron Wyden on the details of minimization procedures and the measures we took not to target Americans with this authority. Senator Wyden pressed us for the number of Americans whose communications we had “incidentally” collected since 2008, when Section 702 was enacted. We did our best to alleviate his concerns, but we had a particularly hard time getting him to understand why we couldn’t provide the precise number.
Essentially, the IC doesn’t have the time and resources to fully process every communication we intercept, and we wouldn’t even know if we’d incidentally intercepted a US person unless we went to great lengths to identify every participant on a call or every address on an email. We didn’t—and couldn’t—use minimization procedures for names if we never identified the names. It’s possible that we’d unwittingly intercepted a significant number of communications in which our targets were talking to Americans, but the only way to get a precise count of how many times this had happened would be to listen to, read, and analyze every communication we’d ever intercepted and then try to determine the nationalities of all its participants, which might require a lot of research regarding their identities. Paradoxically, such an effort would mean we’d need to be more comprehensively intrusive in the lives of innocent US citizens, because we would have to approach the problem by intentionally attempting to find and identify Americans. It would even mean looking for Americans in intercepted communications we’d never examined, which, beyond its intrusiveness, would require vast analytic resources we simply didn’t possess. We did our best to explain all this, but Senator Wyden, in particular, wasn’t interested in our explanations.
After many more discussions and much more hand-wringing, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act renewal on Friday, December 28—again at nearly the last minute, but with comfortable voting margins—and President Obama signed it into law on Sunday, December 30.
The focus then returned to the drama around the fiscal cliff. On Monday, December 31, House Democrats rejected a deal brokered by the White House and Senate to enact new, smaller tax cuts, which would have effectively allowed taxes to increase by only a small amount, and would have kicked the sequestration can down the road to March 1. Speaker Boehner threatened to derail the whole plan by adding billions in spending cuts, in addition to delaying the sequester. The House threw a tantrum, until 10:45 that night, when he finally allowed a vote, and the compromise bill passed. The Senate didn’t approve the compromise and send it to the president’s desk until after the midnight deadline.
Before the New Year’s Eve showdown, it seemed as if the entire government had been energized to prevent leaping off the fiscal cliff into a self-imposed recession. With a compromise bill passed and signed, Washington shifted its attention to the next crisis—the debt ceiling—again. In January 2013 the government exceeded the Treasury Department’s borrowing limit, but somehow Treasury took “extraordinary measures” and kept the government open, still needing to reconcile the ceiling with Congress. Regardless, no energy was left to stop or even mitigate the damage from sequestration, which would go into effect March 1. We pleaded with Congress to at least give us some flexibility to manage the budget cuts, but we were consistently told any measures that touched sequestration were “poison pills,” meaning, if they were slipped into any bill, they would kill the entire bill. In this case, mitigating sequestration would compromise any chance for getting past the current debt-ceiling crisis and—after that—the expiration of the continuing budget resolution in March. Congress had tied its own hands—quite the magic trick—but was subsequently unable to extricate itself.
On January 29, I took a call from Deputy Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. As a way to absorb sequestration costs, DOD proposed furloughing each of its government civilians once a week, thereby cutting their salaries by 20 percent. This would both lower DOD’s budget and attract Congress’s attention, since DOD civilians were employed in just about every congressional district in the nation. He was informing me of this proposal because it would include all the civilians in the DOD intelligence agencies—NSA, NRO, NGA, and DIA. I shared my concern that putting people with access to top secret, compartmented intelligence in potentially dire financial straits could result in a huge counterintelligence vulnerability, but Ash was determined that DOD would press ahead.
I asked my senior staff to start assessing my authorities under law and executive orders to see if I could stop DOD from furloughing intelligence employees. We determined that Section 1018 of the 2004 IRTPA—the last-minute addition to the act that created the DNI, which stated that the DNI was to exercise his authority in a manner that “respects and does not abrogate the statutory responsibilities of the heads of the departments”—effectively blocked me from stopping a DOD furlough. However, ODNI’s new chief financial officer—Rich Fravel, who’d succeeded Marilyn Vacca—pointed out that the whole exercise was about absorbing cuts to the budget, and while the secretary of defense determined the Military Intelligence Program through the USD(I), the DNI alone determined the National Intelligence Program. I could simply state that NIP-funded jobs would be fully funded, and people who worked in those jobs would not be furloughed. I told Rich to draft a diplomatically worded letter I could send to Ash.
The world continued its crazy spiral; on February 12, North Korea conducted its first nuclear weapons test under the regime of Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. And Washington continued its astounding dysfunction; on February 14, Republicans in the Senate made former Republican senator and two-time Purple Heart recipient Chuck Hagel the first defense secretary nominee in our nation’s history to have his confirmation filibustered, mostly for political reasons or, more absurdly, to demand more information about the 2012 attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi.
During a visit by a delegation representing the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, I took the opportunity to complain about our typical government approach of making the same mistakes again and again. I said, “It reminds me of the ancient tribal wisdom that goes, ‘When you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ Well—in Washington—we sometimes do things differently.” I explained:
When we find ourselves riding a dead horse, we often try strategies that are less successful, such as: buying a stronger whip, changing riders, saying things like: “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse,” appointing a committee to study the horse, lowering the standards so that more dead horses can be included, appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse, hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse, harnessing several dead horses together—to increase speed—attempting to mount multiple dead horses in hopes that one of them will spring to life, providing additional funding and training to increase the dead horse’s performance, declaring that, since a dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it’s less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore, contributes more to the mission than live horses, and my favorite—promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
The Chamber of Commerce loved the comedy bit. So did I. It was cathartic, and I believe I repeated it every time I traveled away from Washington for the rest of my tenure. It never failed to draw a laugh or to confirm what people have always suspected about Washington.
The situation in February 2013 was not funny. On February 20, DOD informed Congress of its revised proposal that, unless we avoided sequestration, it would furlough DOD civilian employees for one day of each two-week pay period, starting in April through the remainder of the calendar year, effectively cutting everyone’s salary by 10 percent. On the same day, I met with the agency directors to affirm our plans to manage sequestration, now that it was upon us. Among the topics we discussed was that I would exclude employees in NIP-funded billets from the furlough. The challenge we had been working through was figuring out which billets and which individuals were covered by which program. In many offices, an employee paid with NIP funds might be sitting next to someone paid with MIP funds. No one in a given office knew or cared about this distinction, including the two employees—although if I got my way, they would, very soon. We agreed it would be hard to sort out, and that the people funded by the MIP—who would be furloughed—would likely resent the situation, but it was the best I could do under the law, and so I signed and sent Rich Fravel’s masterful letter to DOD, which made what I felt was a compelling case that we could cover NIP-funded salaries, still absorb our share of the mandated (and mindless) cuts imposed by Congress, and not have to furlough those employees.
I had a series of phone calls with DOD officials over the next few days, including with Ash Carter on February 26—the same day that Chuck Hagel was finally confirmed as secretary. On February 27, between White House meetings, Ash and I met in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—neutral turf. Not surprisingly, DOD had a different interpretation of my authorities than I did, and Ash challenged my decision to protect as many employees as I could. Ash and I had served together in the Pentagon in the early 1990s, and had great respect for each other, but the IC had made a commitment to protect our people at the off-site in August 2011, and I said we would honor it. I’d decided this was an issue on which I couldn’t and wouldn’t compromise, even if our differences would have to be settled by the White House.
On March 1, 2013, two days after this meeting, sequestration became the law of the land. And on that day—not much happened. Instead of plunging off a fiscal cliff, we slowly started slipping down a hill that just kept getting steeper. Congress didn’t grant us an exception to allow us to decide how to take cuts, so our resources would definitely be affected. I didn’t know yet if I’d managed to protect NIP-funded employees, but MIP-funded staff would take a cut in salary from mandatory furloughs, and they would still have the same workload with 10 percent fewer days to complete it. Our hiring pipeline would slow, as the perpetual backlog of security clearance investigations would balloon. Our ability to replace technology-based collection sources that became compromised or were overcome by the technological progress of the world would be severely undercut.
On Tuesday, March 12, I participated in the first worldwide threat assessment hearing of 2013, this one with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Senator Feinstein. Feinstein truly was a trailblazer for women in government. She was the first woman to be elected mayor of San Francisco, the first to serve as senator from California, and the first to preside over a presidential inauguration. She was also the first woman to preside as chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and she was proud of her legacy. In the summer of 2011, NGA director Tish Long, NRO deputy director Betty Sapp, and PDDNI Stephanie O’Sullivan were present to testify at a hearing, when Feinstein called a halt to it. She couldn’t let the moment go unnoted, and said on the official record, “I have never seen a panel sitting in front of me that was all women, all senior women in the IC.” Senator Feinstein and I had had some tense exchanges over the years, but I always felt I could work with her. In fact, I had grown to have great respect and affection for her.
She opened the hearing by cautioning, “As members know, we will immediately follow this session with a closed one, and I’ll ask that members refrain from asking questions here that have classified answers. This hearing is really a unique opportunity to inform the American public, to the extent we can, about the threats we face as a nation and worldwide.” She welcomed new CIA director John Brennan to his first threat assessment hearing and thanked Bob Mueller for appearing in what was likely his last after twelve years on the job.
She then yielded the floor to Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss, who had been very angry about Benghazi and felt we were hiding something when Matt Olsen and I had briefed him, but we had all moved on since then. In his statement he focused on terrorism, advocating that we stop giving Miranda warnings to captured terrorists and start sending them to Guantanamo Bay for interrogations. I’m sure he realized that was a policy decision and not mine to make, because he didn’t bring it up later as a question.
Chairman Feinstein then turned the floor over to me to speak on behalf of John, Bob, and the other witnesses. First, I shared my personal feelings on doing televised hearings at all. I’d tried earlier that year to get us out of answering questions on camera and failed because John McCain, ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (which held its own threat hearing), had responded that if I didn’t appear voluntarily, he’d subpoena me. Senator McCain and I had a lot of notable televised exchanges during which he was typically irascible, but we developed a mutually respectful, if sometimes testy, relationship when the red light above the camera wasn’t on, mostly because we were both old and crotchety Southeast Asia veterans.
In my opening statement on March 12, I noted that our foreign partners and adversaries watched these hearings, too, and warned, “While our statements for the record and your opening statements can be reviewed in advance for classification issues, our answers to your questions cannot. And our attempts to avoid revealing classified information sometimes lead to misinterpretation, or accusations that we’re being circumspect for improper reasons.” In fact, we had submitted a highly detailed written statement that laid out the extent of global threats in as many specifics as we could possibly publish in unclassified form. The 2013 statement was somewhat historic, as “cyber” had displaced “terrorism” as the first threat topic addressed.
Having expressed my reservations, I turned to the impact sequestration would have on national security, noting that the associated budget cut was “well over $4 billion, or about 7 percent of the NIP,” and that the way the cut was structured compounded its damage because it restricted our ability to allocate deductions in a balanced and rational way. Explaining that I would discuss the subject in greater detail in the classified session, I laid out examples in a carefully constructed script, explaining how sequestration would force the nation to accept unnecessary risk to our security as the IC scaled back global coverage, and because it would force us to restructure contracts, it absurdly would end up costing us more money in the long run. I talked about protecting the IC workforce, and that we recognized we were not immune to cuts, but that we needed the ability to manage cuts, rather than being forced to absorb them on a pro rata basis. I drew on my experience:
Unfortunately, I’ve seen this movie before. Twenty years ago, I served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the job that Lieutenant General Mike Flynn has now. We were then enjoined to “reap the peace dividend” occasioned by the end of the Cold War. We reduced the Intelligence Community by 23 percent. During the mid- and late ’90s, we closed many CIA stations, we reduced HUMINT collectors, cut analysts, allowed our overhead architecture to atrophy, and we neglected basic infrastructure needs, such as power, space, and cooling, and let our facilities decay. And most damaging, most devastatingly, we badly distorted the workforce.
I concluded with the ominous note that people wouldn’t appreciate the extent of intelligence losses from sequestration until they resulted in disaster: “Unlike more directly observable sequestration impacts, like shorter hours at public parks or longer security lines at airports, the degradation to intelligence will be insidious. It will be gradual and almost invisible—unless and until, of course, we have an intelligence failure.”
I then turned to the threats we’d cited in our statement for the record. I explained why “cyber” had been moved up to lead the report. I talked about how we’d added global shortages of food and water, along with disease and pandemics—all influenced by climate change—as drivers of instability in our list of threats. I spoke on how the terrorist threat had evolved, no longer driven by al-Qaida in Afghanistan, but was now more diversified, decentralized, global, and persistent. I discussed the fragile new governments in the Arab world, whose intentions we were still trying to understand. I talked about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, including the ambitions of North Korea and Iran to achieve nuclear state status and the huge volumes of chemical and biological agents in Syria, and how the civil war there had already turned into a humanitarian disaster unlike anything we’d seen since World War II. After describing the global picture, I turned to specific threats by region.
Over the next two hours, I answered questions on North Korean provocations, on the Benghazi attack and the talking points used by Ambassador Susan Rice, about cyber, about sanctions on Iran, about Iran and North Korea purportedly sharing ballistic missile technology, about Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian unrest, the state of the opposition forces in Syria, the role of Iran in Syria, several more takes on the effect of Iranian sanctions, and more about politicization of the Benghazi talking points. I answered Senator Chambliss’s question on sequestration with “I am not, and none of us are suggesting that we won’t take our fair share of the cuts. All we’re asking for is the latitude on how to take them, to minimize the damage.”
Senator Mikulski asked to speak out of turn, as she was hurrying to the Senate floor, in her role on the Appropriations Committee, to introduce a continuing resolution to keep the government running. She said to me, “In terms of the flexibility that you’ve just asked for, that the Chair has spoken pretty firmly with me about, along with other members, we will not have that in our bill. We were told that was a poison pill,” meaning that any attempts to protect the IC would cause the government to shut down. I always appreciated Senator Mikulski’s candor about congressional dynamics, and that she always had both the IC’s interests and the big picture in mind.
When all committee members had used their allotted five minutes, Chairman Feinstein opened for a second round of questions on camera before we’d adjourn to the closed hearing. Only Senators Feinstein, Angus King, and Ron Wyden had “round two” questions, hers on Hezbollah and Senator King’s on extremism in North Africa. Senator Wyden’s seemed to come out of left field:
And this is for you, Director Clapper—again, on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer, because I know Senator Feinstein wants to move on. Last summer, the NSA director was at a conference and he was asked a question about the NSA surveillance of Americans. He replied, and I quote here, ‘‘The story that we have millions, or hundreds of millions, of dossiers on people is completely false.’’ The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question, does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?
After nearly two hours in the “hot seat,” I was tired, and annoyed that, months after we’d settled the FISA Section 702 reauthorization, Wyden was bringing it up again at this particular hearing, and on television. I’d explained to him in November that I couldn’t give him a number of incidental collections, but he and I both knew it wasn’t “hundreds of millions.” Also, his question specifically mentioned “dossiers”—collections of multiple reports on an identified person or topic—not single inadvertent intercepts on someone whom we hadn’t identified.
I flipped the microphone on. “No, sir,” I replied and then flipped it off.
“It does not?” he asked incredulously.
We did have “dossiers”—although that’s not the word I would have chosen—on spies and suspected terrorists in the United States. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court issued us approximately two thousand warrants for domestic surveillance every year, amounting to twenty thousand or so since 9/11, a number that was classified at the time. The number of foreign persons overseas we collected on was much, much larger—and definitely classified. As I’d explained in November, I didn’t—couldn’t—know the number of inadvertent, “incidental” intercepts without the IC intentionally trying to identify Americans in intercepted communications, and every other number I knew relating to surveillance I couldn’t reveal publicly. In ten minutes, we’d be in a secure hearing room, and then, without having to tap dance around classification while our adversaries were watching me on TV—something we knew they did—I could once again explain 702 procedures. On camera, I put my fingertips to my forehead, a gesture my staff says is a “tell” that I’m getting aggravated.
I flipped the mic back on and, controlling my voice, replied, “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
Wyden again looked incredulous and responded, “All right. Thank you. I’ll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer.”
An hour or so later, after the classified follow-on hearing, as our car was crossing the Potomac on our way back to Liberty Crossing, Bob Litt brought up Senator Wyden’s question. Bob said that he knew what I had been thinking in my response, but explained that Senator Wyden’s question wasn’t about FISA Section 702 authorities. What he had actually been asking about was Section 215 of the Patriot Act, and in that context, Bob said I’d answered incorrectly.
After taking a moment to recall what, precisely, the Patriot Act Section 215 was, I pushed back. I replied that Wyden’s question made zero sense to me in the context of Section 215. NSA used the authorities under Section 215 to keep a database of phone call records that consisted only of metadata—phone numbers and times, not even the names associated with the numbers, much less the content of the calls. The rationale for the NSA database was that, if we discovered a terrorist was calling into the United States and knew the phone number he was calling from, we could look at the phone records to see what numbers he was calling to, and how long the connection had lasted. If the call records indicated something worth investigating, obtaining caller identities and actually listening to the content of the calls would require requesting a warrant from a court under a different authority than Section 215. In short, you can’t create a dossier on someone if you don’t know who the phone number belongs to or what was said on the call. In any case, because the NSA program under Section 215 was highly classified, Senator Wyden wouldn’t—or shouldn’t—have been asking questions that required classified answers on camera. He hadn’t even attended the closed briefing where we could have discussed the Patriot Act Section 215 in detail.
When I asked Bob if he was certain that Senator Wyden had been talking about Section 215, he apologized and said that he knew that Wyden’s question concerned Section 215, because the senator’s office had sent over a note just the day before that said he was going to ask about that subject. It was one of hundreds of questions the ODNI staff had planned to prep me for, but—between sequestration and the North Korea nuclear test—we hadn’t gotten to this particular obscure one in our limited time and on such short notice. I replayed Senator Wyden’s question in my head. He’d used the word “dossiers” several times, but his last sentence—the sound bite, the critical question at the end—was, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?” When I walked into the office, my administrative assistant, Stephanie Sherline, asked how the hearing had gone. “I screwed up,” I told her and followed that up with stronger language.
Months later, after my mistake had become a scandal, Bob would write letters to the New York Times and the New Yorker, reporting that I looked “surprised and distressed” when he’d told me my answer was incorrect. I was. Over the years I’d given plenty of answers that committees didn’t like, but I had never intentionally misrepresented the facts—which is precisely what this looked like.
A few days after the hearing, Bob spoke with John Dickas, a member of Senator Wyden’s staff, on a secure phone call and explained my mistake. Dickas asked Bob to have me correct the mistake on the public record, but Bob pointed out that I could not, because making a public correction would mean revealing a classified program. He said that my error had been forgetting about Section 215, but even if I had remembered it, there still would have been no acceptable, unclassified way for me to answer the question in an open hearing. Even my saying, “We’ll have to wait for the closed, classified session to discuss this” would have given something away. Looking back, I think Senator Wyden phrased his question in the obscure way he did because he was trying to avoid revealing the classified program himself. For the time, our offices let the matter drop. I ought to have sent a classified letter to Senator Wyden explaining my thoughts when I’d answered and that I misunderstood what he was actually asking me about. Yes, I made a mistake—a big one—when I responded, but I did not lie. I answered with truth in what I understood the context of the question to be.
I didn’t have time to focus on our exchange in the hearing, as I was immediately consumed again by world events and sequestration. On Thursday, two days after the hearing, I met with Ash Carter and several other DOD officials in White House chief of staff Denis McDonough’s office to finally settle the issue of furloughs, with Denis as the arbiter. Denis wasn’t ready to make a call after hearing our arguments, and I think each of us walked out thinking he had presented the stronger case and would prevail.
By this point, DOD had determined that its furloughs wouldn’t start until July, and both Ash and new Secretary Chuck Hagel had announced they would voluntarily lower their own salaries to match the losses by furloughed employees. It was a gracious gesture, and I followed suit, although I also recognized that by voluntarily cutting my salary, I only demonstrated that I made enough money that I could afford to lose 10 percent of it and still be able to pay my mortgage, something a GS-10 or GS-12 living in Washington might not be able to manage. I had no illusions that voluntarily lowering my salary made anyone feel better.
On Tuesday, March 26, Denis called to say that, based on the recommendation of the Office of Management and Budget, he agreed that the DNI could determine whether employees in NIP-funded jobs would be furloughed. Ash accepted Denis’s decision, and we moved on. With that settled, the agency directors and I started April with a clearer idea of how to deal with the sequestration cuts, which were quickly getting steeper as we slid down that hill.
On the afternoon of April 15, as crowds cheered the runners finishing the Boston Marathon, two homemade bombs exploded at the finish line, killing three people and injuring almost three hundred, including sixteen survivors who lost arms or legs. Amid all the confusion, the perpetrators of the attack walked away unscathed.
By 2011, the ODNI had established “domestic DNI representatives” within the United States, similar to the intelligence leads abroad who maintain cognizance of all intelligence activities occurring in their country or field of influence. The twelve regional domestic DNI reps were senior FBI assistant directors or special agents in charge of field offices, and the representative with purview over the New England area was based in Boston. He immediately tapped resources in the National Counterterrorism Center, the DOD agencies, and CIA, as well as all the Justice Department resources available to the FBI. Within twenty-four hours the IC had determined that no international terrorist network was involved, and no groundwork had been laid for successive attacks.
On April 18 the FBI released pictures of two brothers who had been seen by witnesses and caught on security cameras carrying and setting down the bags that had contained the homemade bombs. In the massive manhunt over the next two days, the brothers shot and killed a police officer, stole a car, and took a hostage. The hostage escaped, and large sections of Boston were placed on lockdown. The brothers, cornered, engaged in a violent gun battle with Boston police. Making his escape, the younger of the two, nineteen-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, ran over his wounded older brother, twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, with a stolen car. Tamerlan died, and Dzhokhar was later found hiding in a boat in a local backyard. He was wounded in the resulting confrontation, and was finally taken into custody, ending the crisis.
In many ways, this incident was a nightmare scenario for US intelligence. Two brothers who had immigrated to the United States as minors in 2002—one a citizen, the other’s citizenship application pending—had found instructions for making homemade bombs out of common kitchen pressure cookers in the online magazine Inspire, published by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. They weren’t in contact with AQAP or other international terrorist organizations and had come up with their plot for indiscriminate slaughter on their own. They had made no phone or email communication that we could have intercepted, and there was no human source whom we could have exploited to learn of and thwart their plan. In fact, this was one of the few prominent times I can remember NSA’s using the Patriot Act Section 215 authorities that Senator Wyden had intended to ask me about and was later so critical of. We plugged the brothers’ phone numbers into the database to see if they had placed or received international phone calls, or if there was a pattern in their calls that would indicate a broader conspiracy to commit further acts of terror. If there had been, we would have had to quickly obtain warrants to find out whom they were talking to and what was said. Fortunately, we determined there was no coordinated plan for further bombings, so in this case, Section 215 didn’t enable us to prevent an attack but did reassure us there was no broader conspiracy involved, which allowed us to focus on finding and apprehending the brothers.
We learned that the FBI had interviewed Tamerlan in 2011—two years before the bombing—but had concluded he wasn’t a threat at the time. When that fact was made public, the FBI and IC were excoriated in the press for not more aggressively surveilling the brothers. After Jim Comey became FBI director five months later, he would lament that this unfair criticism meant that the FBI was no longer merely being held to the standard of “finding a needle in a haystack,” but instead to being able to identify “a strand of hay that might one day become a needle.”
In the weeks after the attack, I felt the practical frustration that Jim would later give eloquent voice to. Even more strongly than frustration, I felt the philosophical conflict in which we were embroiled, as the public, media, and Congress chastised us for not having monitored Tamerlan’s internet usage after he had been cleared by the FBI. It was the same feeling I’d had after the Fort Hood shooting, when Congress had asked why we weren’t reading Nidal Hasan’s emails. Technically, we could do so. It would have required a significant investment in technology and massive changes to US law to allow the Intelligence Community to get intrusive with the personal business of Americans, but it was feasible. However, I didn’t think that’s what the US electorate wanted, and moreover, using the US intelligence apparatus to look inward at Americans would require us to override what I believed was an inherent right to privacy, implied if not explicitly stated in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Some ODNI senior staff members recall us breaking out pocket editions of the Constitution after the Boston Marathon—going right to the source. I don’t specifically remember doing that, but it does comport with the kinds of discussions I remember having.
But in the spring and summer of 2013, not even questions as fundamental as balancing national security with inherent civil liberties could be my dominant focus for long. On Tuesday, May 14, DOD announced its final sequestration plan. It would furlough its civilian employees, without pay, for eleven days over the following twenty-two weeks. Certain employees would be exempted from this mandatory furlough—for instance, those deployed to war zones and intelligence employees whose jobs were funded by the National Intelligence Program, as determined by the DNI. I think it’s a measure of just how personally employees took this announcement that within weeks, job listings in the IC clearly indicated whether the position was NIP funded or MIP funded. I even saw one advertisement describing how to “Make a career in the NIP.” I laughed, but I also understood the sentiment that inspired it.
Suddenly, and somewhat embarrassingly, I was unofficially declared a hero for the IC workforce. Coincidentally, that same day, legendary Marine Corps General Jim Mattis visited Liberty Crossing. He had just retired from active duty on March 22, ending his career as commander, US Central Command, a position in which he’d overseen operations throughout the combat theater and all the nations affected by the Arab Spring for the previous two and a half years. After Jim and I had lunch, he addressed the ODNI and IC workforce for an hour of remarks and spirited conversation. He opened by observing that he was delivering his first-ever speech in a suit instead of in a uniform. He said that he’d chosen to speak to the Intelligence Community as his first audience after his retirement because he owed a great debt to its practitioners, and “a Marine never forgets his debts.”
I felt a lot of pride in our community that day, and in my connection to both the Intelligence Community and the Marine Corps. It felt as if we had more positive energy flowing than we’d had in quite a while. I knew that budgets would continue to be cut, but we now had a clearer vision and a plan for how to compensate. I hoped that the month of May would mark a turning point for IC fortunes, and that we could refocus on our mission without all the distractions that had plagued us for the past few years.