I was eating a quick lunch at 11:31 A.M. in Muscat, Oman—2:31 A.M. on the US East Coast—when the Associated Press declared Donald Trump to be the president-elect. I had only a few minutes to absorb my shock before I’d be closeted in further meetings with the host government. I wondered what President Obama was thinking and if he now regretted his reticence to speak out about the Russian interference. I considered just how little impact Jeh Johnson and I had apparently had with the warning we’d issued a month before the election, and while I didn’t know what effect the Russian interference had—and really couldn’t know, because the IC was only assessing the world outside the US borders—I was disturbed and a little sickened to think the Russian efforts could have changed the outcome of the election. But the thought I kept coming back to was just how out of touch I was with the people who lived in Middle America. For the past several years, I’d watched as “unpredictable instability” around the world had prompted angry populations to rise up against their governments and societies. It led to al-Qaida, ISIS, and their ilk proliferating from Afghanistan to Southwest Asia and into North Africa and Europe. It led to civil wars in Libya and Syria and a global refugee crisis unlike anything the world had seen since the end of the Second World War, which my dad had helped end. Unpredictable instability brought pain, war, and suffering to the world. In the United States, it gave us Donald Trump.
I was far from being the only person who was shocked by the outcome, and as the Russians scrambled to stop their #DemocracyRIP social media campaign, President-elect Trump’s circle seemed to have no strategy for shifting from campaign mode to administration-transition mode. Rather than working with the State Department, or even contacting it, Trump was taking calls from world leaders, apparently from whoever could get his personal cell phone number. Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull famously obtained it from professional golfer Greg Norman and was one of eight world leaders to call Trump with congratulations on the day his victory was announced. With no State Department involvement, no one briefed the president-elect on bilateral issues or existing agreements, and the United States has no official record of what was said during those conversations.
I wondered if our intelligence team was faring better than State. On election night, we’d deployed a team with each of the campaigns, ready to give whoever was president-elect his or her first President’s Daily Brief—essentially the PDB prepared for President Obama. At the suggestion of the lead officer for candidate briefings, I’d handwritten nearly identical letters to both candidates. I assumed Secretary Clinton’s was being shredded, as planned. The one that was delivered read:
Dear President-elect Trump:
First, I want to offer congratulations to you on your election.
Second, on behalf of the Intelligence Community, I want to pledge to you our unswerving commitment to provide the best intelligence we can muster. We will rarely be able to completely eliminate uncertainty for you and the Vice President, but we can at least reduce it, and thus help you manage risk, in the face of many difficult decisions you will undoubtedly face.
Finally, I hope you will support the basic writ of “truth to power” in which the Intelligence Community is expected to always “tell it like it is”—straight, objective, unpoliticized.
Again, my congratulations.
With great respect.
Sincerely,
Jim Clapper
I traveled from Oman to Kuwait and then to Jordan, where I had lunch with King Abdullah on Friday. The king tried to hide his pique that there had been no communication between Trump’s team and his government. He ended the lunch early, and I watched wistfully as someone carried off my plate after I’d had only a couple of bites of a superb steak. The next day, I flew from Jordan to Israel, ending another trip to the Middle East with a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. He seemed a different person, jubilant with the results of the election. He couldn’t stop smiling and noted that he’d had a terrific conversation with the president-elect within hours of Trump’s delivering his victory speech. I congratulated him, and he gave me another of his cigars.
When I returned to Washington, I focused primarily on what I needed to do before retiring—this time for good. Along with every other Senate-confirmed Obama appointee, I submitted a formal resignation letter, which was standard procedure for the transition between administrations. If a president-elect wished someone from a previous administration to remain in office, he’d reject the resignation and ask the official to stay on, as President-elect Obama had done with Secretary Gates. Still, despite the pro forma nature of the process, it did feel as if I’d taken a concrete step toward finally retiring, fifty-five years after I’d enlisted in the Marine Corps. I’d expected, if my former colleague Hillary Clinton had won the election, that she might ask me to stick around until she could get a new DNI confirmed. I didn’t expect President-elect Trump to ask, and I don’t think I’d have agreed to remain if he had.
The following morning I testified in what I believed—naïvely—was my final congressional hearing, with USD(I) Marcel Lettre, who’d replaced Mike Vickers, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work before the House Intelligence Committee. The topic of the hearing was officially “IC Support for DOD,” but it became an opportunity for Chairman Devin Nunes and a few other committee members to take their parting shots. They all had their pet issues, but after six years and more of often politicized agendas at hearings, I was no longer concerned I’d slip into the trap of making a statement the press would spin into meaning something I hadn’t intended. Besides, I couldn’t see any member of Congress calling for my head after I’d resigned, a thought that pleased me privately. So, after Nunes and ranking member Adam Schiff made their opening statements and gave me the floor, I smiled—a rare occurrence for me on Capitol Hill—leaned into the microphone, thanked them, and then said, “I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good. I’ve got sixty-four days left, and I think I’d have a hard time with my wife for anything past that.”
The hearing was unfocused and ranged widely from topics like analytic integrity to cybersecurity to threat assessments to deciding which overseas bases should house which DOD intelligence activities. Fifty minutes in, Schiff asked me about the Russian interference in the election and Russia’s continued presence in eastern Ukraine and Syria, and what I thought would change under a Trump administration. I replied that the Russians were continuing their activity on all fronts, and that I couldn’t speculate on what—if anything—would change. His follow-up questions all concerned Russian military activities, and he didn’t bring up the election interference again. His final question was about how Putin would react if—given his cordial relationship with the new US president—he could no longer blame all his woes on the “American bogeyman.” I thought that was a salient question, and I reaffirmed that Putin had indeed stayed in power in part by calling for Russian nationalism while painting the United States as bent on Russia’s destruction. The discussion moved on.
About an hour and a half into the hearing, my legislative affairs officer slipped me a note. Apparently, it wasn’t common knowledge that every political appointee had submitted pro forma resignations, and all the cable news channels and print media services that follow Washington politics were reporting “Clapper resigns!,” saying I’d quit in protest over Donald Trump’s winning the election. The story was trending on Twitter and was the top result on Google’s aggregated news site. For once, I hadn’t been tricked into making headlines. In the business, this is what we call an “unforced error.” At the next opportunity, I interjected into the live feed and House record, “I do need to clarify about my statement about resignation; it’s not effective until noon on 20 January 2017—not immediately—as is being reported in the media.”
The media expected conflict between Obama administration officials and Trump’s transition team, and so they saw it even when it wasn’t there. I’d meant it in September when I’d told the IC and intelligence industry associations “It’ll be okay,” and continued to use that phrase after the election, both in internal IC and in public speeches, and my office was working hard to help Trump’s national security transition team get up to speed. The president-elect had set up shop in Trump Tower in New York, and we arranged security to allow him to continue getting intelligence briefings there. He had designated Mike Flynn as his national security adviser, and without speaking about it directly, Mike and I put aside any animosity from his early exit from DIA to work toward a smooth transition of government. We had two phone conversations during the transition, both courteous and professional.
The media continued to see divisions that didn’t exist, and when Admiral Mike Rogers was seen at Trump Tower, reportedly interviewing to replace me as DNI, the Washington Post published a story purporting that I had cosigned a letter to President Obama recommending that Mike be fired. That simply wasn’t true, and ODNI public affairs director Brian Hale asked the Post to explain where the story had come from. The reporter, Ellen Nakashima, wouldn’t name any sources, but cited a recommendation I’d sent to the White House that CYBERCOM be split off from NSA. We explained to the Post that my suggestion to split the organizations was intended to optimize IC and national security capabilities, was based on six and a half years of watching CYBERCOM grow its capabilities, and said nothing about firing Mike. The Post wasn’t interested in this story without the conflict and wouldn’t change their article. Despite the public narrative, we continued to work with the transition team, giving them access to IC leaders and facilities.
Regardless of our cooperation with the Trump transition team, we hadn’t forgotten what Russia had done. The FBI and CIA were coming across new evidence of Russian activities relating to the election every day, and I was starting to see that the scope and scale of their effort was much bigger than Jeh or I had understood when we’d released our statement in October. In late November, Susan Rice asked the NSC staff to draft a menu of possible punitive measures the president could impose on Russia before leaving office. The resulting list spanned a spectrum that included increased sanctions, but I was particularly in favor of the suggestion to expel Russian spies and to close facilities in the United States that we knew were bases for espionage. Many FBI resources went into countering those efforts, and we could put those resources to better use if we shipped some of the counterintelligence threat back to Russia.
As we discussed those possibilities in the White House Situation Room, the public dialogue about Russian interference was heating up. Seeming to fear it called the legitimacy of his election into question, the president-elect responded defensively whenever the subject was raised. In an interview with Time magazine on November 28, he countered a question on Russian activities with, “I don’t believe they interfered. That became a laughing point, not a talking point, a laughing point.” Asked who he thought had hacked the Democrats’ email accounts and IT systems, he responded, “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.”
We knew it was not someone in New Jersey, and I was fairly certain that President-elect Trump knew that as well. At an NSC meeting on Monday, December 5, President Obama told us he wanted CIA, FBI, and NSA to integrate all their relevant intelligence into a single report to pass on to the next administration and Congress. He also asked us to derive from it an unclassified document for public consumption with as much information from the classified version as possible. And critically, he wanted all of this done before January 20—the end of his administration.
After that meeting, John Brennan, Mike Rogers, Jim Comey, and I caucused privately. John had already volunteered to host a small group of analysts so they could share their findings, and we decided to expand the team to include almost thirty of the most seasoned people from the three agencies and from ODNI, working long hours through the ensuing holiday to produce as thorough a community assessment as possible.
On Friday, December 9, unnamed “officials briefed on the matter” leaked the effort to the press, saying the CIA and FBI had reached the conclusion that Russia had helped Trump win. The leak wasn’t quite accurate, and certainly wasn’t helpful, but the immediate response from President-elect Trump’s transition team was even worse. Under the seal of “President Elect Donald J. Trump,” the team published a press release that—with no preamble—began, “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’” It was stunning. Based on rumors from anonymous sources, the president-elect had lashed out reflexively to delegitimize the Intelligence Community—the same IC that would be serving him in forty-two days, that was already giving him President Obama’s PDBs. The attack was disturbing, as was its demonstrably false assertion that his victory was one of the “biggest” ever.
On Monday, as I continued my personal farewell tour with the intelligence workforce, a young woman asked me, somewhat urgently, “What are we supposed to do now?” It took me a moment to get my head around the doubt and uncertainty underlying the question before I could respond, and then I told her and her colleagues the only thing I could say: “Keep doing the business of intelligence. Keep shoveling intelligence coal down in the engine room and let the people on the bridge worry about what direction we’re headed, how fast we’re going, and how to arrange the deck chairs. Keep our mission in front of us and stay true to the key tenets of intelligence work: support intelligence integration, speak straight, unbiased truth to power, and leave the business of policy making to the policy makers.” I have no idea if those platitudes were helpful to her or anyone in the room, but it was about all I could muster that Monday morning.
Back in my office, I picked up the speech I had planned to deliver Wednesday night at a dinner in my honor, when I was scheduled to address INSA, the large intelligence industry association whose predecessor I’d been president of in the 1990s. My talk was—once again—built around the reassuring phrase, “It’ll be okay.” I called my speechwriter into the office, handed him the speech, and told him, “I don’t think I can say this anymore.”
On Wednesday night, I still opened with humor, borrowing a very old line to describe “the crucial partnership between the IC and industry” as being “kind of like the partnership between the taxidermist and the veterinarian—either way, you get your dog back.” I added, “Bear with me. This is my last chance to use my well-worn one-liners.” Then, instead of blowing smoke and assuring the crowd that everything would be okay, I told them about my conversation with that young intelligence officer Monday morning, and her question, “What are we supposed to do now?” I shared the answer I’d given her and added what I’d been thinking about since that conversation.
When I started out in the intelligence business—back when “intelligence automation” was acetate, grease pencil, and two corporals—I don’t think the words “intelligence” and “integration” were ever used in the same sentence. But those other two principles I told her: “speak truth to power” and “let the policy makers make policy,” have served me well for almost fifty-four years. And I believe we have to continue speaking truth to power, even—or especially—if the person in power doesn’t want to hear the truth we have to tell him.
The applause cut me off so abruptly that I stepped back from the microphone; a few people even stood. It felt like a long time before they let me get back to my speech. Then I told them:
I believe everyone here knows, my connection to the business goes back even further, to when I was a kid, following my dad around to duty stations all over the world. So it’s with mixed emotions that I’m stepping down as DNI—again, in thirty-seven days. There are things I won’t miss about playing an active role in intelligence. That starts with the dysfunctional Congress, and it goes on to include the hyperventilation in the media. If they can’t find something to hyperventilate about, they’ll make up something like, “Clapper resigns in protest.” And I won’t miss the daily drudge of the job, of not having a whole day off in six and a half years, and never having a moment to myself.
I’ll stop that list there, because at this point, I already feel like I’m attending my own wake—with a speaking role—which is not recommended when people are holding a wake for you.
I also have a list of things I will most certainly miss, in particular the remarkable people of the IC. We have the brightest, most inquisitive, most dedicated and patriotic workforce in government. After half a century, our people still have the ability to surprise me with their ingenuity, their brilliance, and their commitment to mission. And I will miss our mission. Those are the things I’ll most miss: the people and the mission.
Finally, I said that “before I shuffle off the stage, since I’ve got one foot in assisted living already,” I wanted to answer one frequently asked question: Are we better? As in, are we better than we were before I started as DNI or before 9/11 changed the way we do business?
Well, one upshot to achieving “intelligence geezerdom” is that I tend to look back even farther. I’ve got a lot more data points, and so, the question I ask myself is: Are we better now than we were when I was a young intelligence officer in 1963? The answer to that is a resounding yes. We’re more efficient. We collect more, with more accesses and more tools at our disposal. Our technology is astounding, and we can put intelligence into the hands of deployed warfighters in real time, whereas we used to be days or weeks time-late.
We are organized completely differently. We are a community; while fifty years ago, CIA and NSA might as well have been on two different planets. We, of course, haven’t reached integration nirvana, but we’ve come a long way on that journey. And we’ve also, over the past few years, learned to embrace transparency. Well, “embrace” may be a strong word, but just a few years ago, transparency felt genetically antithetical to me, and it doesn’t feel that way now.
And the result of all that progress is that we’re more effective at reducing risk for our national decision makers. Of course, policy makers have the option of accepting or rejecting the insight that intelligence gives them. If they reject it, they do so at their own peril, and unfortunately, at the peril of the nation, too. So, what do we do? We “keep on keeping on,” doing the work of the intelligence business.
The president-elect seemed increasingly desperate to make the story of Russian interference go away, constantly denying there had been any impact on the election or any interference at all. On December 28, he said that it was “time for the country to move on to bigger and better things.” President Obama didn’t want to focus on the Russian issue during his final weeks in office, either, but he wasn’t simply going to “move on.” On December 29, he ordered new sanctions against Russia and declared thirty-five known Russian spies in the United States to be persona non grata and sent them home. He also closed the two Russian-owned facilities in Maryland and New York. I didn’t think that response was commensurate with what they’d done to us, but I also knew we weren’t prepared to take more drastic steps. We waited to see how Putin would respond, fully expecting a reciprocal retaliation.
The same day, as was confirmed when he later pled guilty to lying to the FBI about it, National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn called Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, assuring him not to worry about the sanctions and asking that Russia not retaliate. On the following day, Putin announced he would not expel anyone from Russia and would not respond in kind to the new US sanctions, saying he would wait to work with the next US presidential administration. Trump tweeted, “Great move on delay (by V. Putin)—I always knew he was very smart!”
New Year’s Day fell on Sunday, and so Monday, January 2, was a scheduled government holiday. The IC assessment team did not take the day off, and neither did I, as the most highly classified version of the assessment was due to the president on Thursday. John, Mike, Jim, and I, along with our closest trusted senior staff members, gave the draft assessment a critical read. We agreed that after we briefed President Obama on Thursday, we would brief President-elect Trump on Friday and provide a still-classified but less sensitive version to Congress. Then, the team would have the weekend to redact the sensitive aspects of the classified version so that we could publish an unclassified assessment on Monday, January 9. We also agreed that the three versions of the assessment—including the version we published—would contain the same conclusions, word for word.
Our team of subject-matter experts cross-referenced independent sources across disciplines, each corroborating the others and each adding to the big picture, enriching what we knew about the scope and scale of Russia’s efforts. I remember just how staggering the assessment felt the first time I read it through from start to finish, and just how specific our conclusions and evidence were. We showed unambiguously that Putin had ordered the campaign to influence the election, that the campaign was multifaceted, and that Russia had used cyber espionage against US political organizations and publicly disclosed the data they collected through WikiLeaks, DCLeaks, and the Guccifer 2.0 persona. We documented Russian cyber intrusions into state and local voter rolls. We described Russia’s pervasive propaganda efforts through RT, Sputnik, and the social media trolls, and how the entire operation had begun with attempts to undermine US democracy and demean Secretary Clinton, then shifted to promoting Mr. Trump when Russia assessed he was a viable candidate who would serve their strategic goals. We added historical context to show just how much of an unprecedented escalation in directness, level of activity, and scope of effort all of this represented, and we assessed that the election operation signaled a “new normal in Russian influence efforts.” The Russian government had done all of this at minimal cost and without significant damage to their own interests, and they had no real incentive to stop.
On Tuesday President-elect Trump attempted to undercut our assessment before its release, tweeting, “The ‘intelligence’ briefing on so-called ‘Russian hacking’ was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!” Of course, it had never been the plan to give him the assessment before it went to President Obama, but we chose not to respond to his tweet. On Wednesday, he tweeted, “Julian Assange said ‘a 14 year old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!” We again ignored the provocation, and I hoped the intelligence briefer who continued to present President’s Daily Briefs to the president-elect wasn’t being shot as the messenger.
I continued my Oval Office sessions with President Obama through all of this. On Tuesday, two days before the assessment was due to him, he was calm, patient, and supportive, never pressing me for details before the report was ready. That stood in stark contrast to Congress. Almost as soon as the president assigned us the task of studying the Russian interference on December 5, our oversight committees began demanding we give them updates on our progress. It’s the only time I can recall ever giving Congress a flat no without making any attempt to compromise or deflect the contrived ire of their demands. We certainly didn’t want the partisan congressional “guidance” that would have come as a result of briefing them, nor did we want anything to interfere with the team preparing the assessment, which leaks of their work certainly would have done. Even within the White House Situation Room, during the month it took to put the assessment together, we took extraordinary measures when discussing Russian interference, procedures comparable to those invoked during the endgame of the hunt for bin Laden.
One senator did find a way around our efforts to keep Congress out of our work until we’d briefed the president. John McCain informed my office in December that he wanted to hold a final hearing on “foreign cyber threats” before I retired. He said that the session would not be about the Russian interference, but instead would cover a broad look at cybersecurity. My office knew that even if that was genuinely his intent, the other senators on the committee would undoubtedly inquire about the assessment. McCain assured me he wouldn’t let that happen but when, still dubious, my office continued to try to deflect the invitation, Senator McCain defaulted to his favorite persuasive technique and said that if I didn’t agree to appear voluntarily, he’d subpoena me. For reasons that escape me now, we not only agreed to do the hearing, but scheduled it for Thursday morning—a morning I would normally brief the president in the Oval, and the very day that we would be delivering our assessment on Russian interference to him.
Preparing for that hearing was just about the last thing on my mind that week. Not only were the three directors and I poring over the IC assessment for any flaw, any reason why the president-elect, his team, Congress, or anyone else could call its conclusions into question, we were also settling on how we would actually present it. We’d decided in the interests of consistency that—no matter whom we were briefing—we’d use the same set of talking points. I would serve as the moderator, and we’d mark out specific cues for Mike, Jim, and John to amplify our talking points by briefing the NSA, FBI, and CIA equities in the assessment, in that specific order. Our mantra was “That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.” Of course, we couldn’t have believed in that mantra if we weren’t confident in the superb work the IC assessment team had done and the meticulous reviews we were continuing to put their work through.
We conducted a walkthrough of our presentation, and by Wednesday night, January 4, we were ready. We sent a copy of the assessment to the White House so that the president could read it before we met with him. Then—having seen on Twitter a preview of how the president-elect would characterize and attempt to dismiss the assessment and anticipating what would happen if he had a full weekend to tweet and talk about it before we released the public version—we made a difficult request of the overworked IC assessment team. We asked them to start working on the unclassified version immediately and to have it ready by Friday morning, instead of Monday, so that we could release the public assessment as soon as we finished briefing the president-elect that afternoon.
On Thursday morning, despite all my best efforts to avoid it, I found myself once again behind the witness table in the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing room. Before the hearing started, my staff had warned the committee staff that I would be traveling directly from the hearing room to the White House to brief the IC assessment to the president. Chairman McCain therefore knew that I was leaving the hearing at noon and that trying to extend the hearing past then risked an awkward scene. Also, while the assessment was complete and we no longer were concerned about congressional interference, we strongly wished to avoid discussing what was in it before we’d briefed the president and his successor.
After welcoming the senators who were new to the committee in the recently elected Congress and welcoming us as witnesses, McCain explained why we were gathered. In two sentences, he succinctly stated the difficulty our nation faced:
This hearing is about the broad range of cybersecurity challenges confronting our nation—threats from countries like Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—as well as non-state actors from terrorist groups to transnational criminal organizations. In recent years, we have seen a growing series of cyberattacks by multiple actors—attacks that have targeted our citizens, businesses, military, and government.
Having kept his promise that the hearing would broadly address “foreign cyber threats,” McCain moved to the topic on everyone’s mind, as I kept a poker face:
But there is no escaping the fact that this committee meets today, for the first time in this new Congress, in the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on our democracy. At the president’s direction, Director Clapper is leading a comprehensive review of Russian interference in our recent election with the goal of informing the American people as much as possible about what happened.
Continuing his opening remarks, Chairman McCain both relieved the most distinct point of anxiety among Republican legislators (and the president-elect’s transition team), and at the same time deftly let us off the hook for the most controversial line of questioning we’d expected to face. “The goal of this review, as I understand it,” he stated, “is not to question the outcome of the presidential election. Nor should it be.” Then he explained what we would release the following day, saying we needed to move forward, “with full knowledge of the facts,” and that, without previewing the assessment, “we know a lot already.” He concluded, “Every American should be alarmed by Russia’s attacks on our Nation. There is no national security interest more vital to the United States of America than the ability to hold free and fair elections without foreign interference. That is why Congress must set partisanship aside, follow the facts, and work together.”
In fairness to Chairman McCain, over the next two and a half hours, we did occasionally discuss cyber-related topics other than Russian interference, and despite my having been strongly opposed to testifying that morning, his insistence on holding this hearing ended up doing us a huge favor. It served to introduce the scope of the assessment to the public, media, and Congress in a thoughtful manner that ran counter to the president-elect’s tweets, and more important, the hearing gave us an opportunity to demonstrate that the IC assessment wasn’t a politically motivated witch hunt, and that we hadn’t conducted the assessment simply because President Obama didn’t like the results of the election.
The discussion that followed was at times circumspect and often tense, but it afforded us an opportunity to discuss aspects of what had happened during the run-up to the election that our assessment did not cover. Chairman McCain returned several times to lambasting Julian Assange. At one point, he asked me directly, “Director Clapper, how would you describe Mr. Assange?” “Well,” I replied, “he is holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London because he is under indictment, I believe by the Swedish government, for a sexual crime. He has—in the interests of ostensibly openness and transparency exposed [and] put people at risk by his doing that. So I do not think those of us in the intelligence community have a whole lot of respect for him.” Mike simply said, “I would echo those comments.”
In another exchange, Republican senator Dan Sullivan challenged me on the seemingly unforceful US response to the Chinese hacks of OPM’s systems, asking, “But is that answer not part of the problem; that we are showing that we are not going to make it costly for them to come in and steal the files of twenty-two million Americans, including many intelligence officers?” I responded with a “truth to power” answer I suspect he didn’t want to hear: “Well, as I say, people who live in glass houses need to think about throwing rocks because this was an act of espionage. And we and other nations conduct similar acts of espionage. So if we are going to punish each other for acts of espionage, that is a different policy issue.”
A few minutes later Republican senator Lindsey Graham returned to the point, noting how similar the sanctions in response to Russia’s actions were to those issued in response to China’s. “Is there a difference between espionage and interfering in an election?” he asked me. “Yes,” I responded. “Espionage implies, to me at least, a passive collection, and this was much more activist.” He led me down a road that, for a change, I was comfortable walking. “So when it comes to espionage, we better be careful about throwing rocks. When it comes to interfering in our election, we better be ready to throw rocks. Do you agree with that?” “That is a good metaphor,” I agreed. He concluded with a line he knew would be replayed on all the cable news networks: “I think what Obama did was throw a pebble. I am ready to throw a rock.”
The hearing also gave me an opportunity to address a topic that had been on my mind since December 9, when the president-elect had first attacked the IC. Democratic senator Claire McCaskill broached it by asking if it was important “that we maintain the intelligence community as a foundational, apolitical bloc of our country.” “I could not feel stronger about exactly that,” I responded. “I think it is hugely important that the intelligence community conduct itself and be seen as independent, providing unvarnished, untainted, objective, accurate, and timely and relevant intelligence support to all policy makers, commanders, diplomats, et cetera.”
She continued, “Do, in fact, members of the intelligence community engage in life-threatening and very dangerous missions every day, particularly as it relates to the war on terror?” “You only need to walk into the lobby of CIA and look at the stars on the wall or the front lobby of NSA [to see] the number of intelligence people that have paid the ultimate price in the service of their country,” I replied. Then she got to the heart of what had been bothering me so much, expressing what I as DNI could not say:
So let us talk about who benefits from a president-elect trashing the intelligence community. Who benefits from that, Director Clapper? The American people? Them losing confidence in the intelligence community and the work of the intelligence community? Who actually is the benefactor of someone who is about to become commander in chief trashing the intelligence community?
I tried to be circumspect with my response: “I think there is an important distinction here between healthy skepticism, which policy makers, to include policy maker number one, should always have for intelligence, but I think there is a difference between skepticism and disparagement.”
The hearing adjourned at 12:09, after Chairman McCain and I sparred—playfully, I think—each of us in “cranky old man” mode. Before gaveling the hearing to a close, he said, “Director Clapper, we will be calling you again.” Breaching etiquette, I keyed my microphone back on to retort, “Really?”
My detail hustled me out of the hearing room and into the SUV. Just ahead of Mike Rogers’s team, we raced down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House. Mike and I ran in, meeting John Brennan and Jim Comey, and together the four of us discussed the IC assessment with the president, who was somber and appreciative. I’ve often wondered what would have happened—or more to the point, what wouldn’t have happened—if President Obama hadn’t tasked us specifically to gather all the intelligence reporting on the Russian interference into one report, or if we’d still been working in a culture in which the CIA, NSA, and FBI refused to share information with one another, as they’d been accused of doing in the summer of 2001.
Without that IC assessment, I don’t know that all the subsequent congressional investigations would have been launched. The Senate Intelligence Committee started its investigation the day after we briefed them, followed shortly by the Senate judiciary, House intelligence, and House oversight and government reform committees. Likewise, I don’t know if the FBI’s investigation would have been so threatening as to provoke President Trump to fire Jim Comey in May, or to prompt Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from Russia-related matters and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller as special counsel.
On Thursday night the team worked through the details of the still highly classified version for Congress, and the unclassified version we intended to publish Friday afternoon.
At 8:30 on Friday morning we were back on Capitol Hill, presenting our briefing to the “Gang of Eight”: the party leaders in the House and Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Our presentation was fast-paced and terse, as we had to leave by 9:30 to stay on schedule. I departed the Capitol with the impression that the leaders of both parties were taken aback, both by the extent of the Russian operation and by the thoroughness with which we’d documented the facts and evidence.
Jim, John, Mike, and I departed the Capitol on time, all of us and our personal security details in four separate, specially configured, up-armored SUVs, and sped across the Anacostia River to Andrews Air Force Base. John, Mike, and I boarded one plane, and Jim—who’d planned to remain in New York and meet with employees in FBI offices there after briefing the president-elect—boarded another. We landed at Newark International Airport around 11:30, where another four SUVs equipped with flashing lights were waiting on the tarmac to whisk us across the Hudson River to Manhattan and Trump Tower. With the media camped out in the lobby on the business side of the building, we took the residential entrance, which was fairly quiet, with only a few doormen and porters in the hallway, who all ducked aside as we passed. I briefly wondered if twenty or so government men in dark suits walking briskly through the residential hallway was an odd sight, or something to which they had already grown accustomed. Security officers held each elevator as we ascended to the fourteenth floor, crossed over to the business side, and ascended again. We transited a busy hallway, bustling with people I assumed were working on the transition, and finally reached the conference room where we were to brief the president-elect, a small and windowless space, which we were told had been secured as a SCIF—a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility—by the Secret Service. Eight chairs were arranged around a table, with another row along a wall.
As the de facto leader of our four-man delegation, I posted myself by the door, and we waited for the president-elect. After about ten minutes, he walked in, smiling. When I extended my hand and introduced myself, he laughed and said, “I know who you are.” He told me I had done “a great job” testifying the previous day, which seemed a diplomatic gesture, considering I hadn’t been all that complimentary toward him during the hearing, and he concluded, “You looked good on TV.” That final bit of flattery was a compliment I’m sure I’ve never heard before. I thanked him, while asserting that I actually have a face made for radio. He thanked me for the letter I’d sent along with his initial President’s Daily Brief—the first of three times he brought up the letter during the meeting.
His pleasant, courteous attitude was a relief and set the tone for an affable briefing. President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect Pence sat at opposite ends of the table. I sat to Trump’s immediate left with John Brennan beside me. Mike Rogers and Jim Comey sat across from us. National Security Adviser-designate Mike Flynn and White House chief of staff-designate Reince Priebus took the remaining two seats at the table to either side of Pence. This arrangement was much friendlier than if the four of us had been seated at one side of the table and Trump’s team at the other, and as such felt more like a standard intelligence briefing than one of the tense negotiations for which Trump was famous. As we got settled, CIA director-nominee Mike Pompeo, Deputy National Security Adviser-designate K. T. McFarland, and Homeland Security Adviser-designate Tom Bossert took seats against the wall, along with Trump’s PDB briefer, for whom the president-elect had high praise. After we started briefing, White House press secretary-designate Sean Spicer joined in, taking one of the wall seats.
We briefed virtually the same content we’d given the Gang of Eight that morning, with me as the lead presenter and Mike, Jim, and John delivering their amplifying parts on cue. While the material was the same, the whole session was more relaxed, and we took our time to explain terms and intelligence procedures with which we knew the group might not be familiar. The briefing remained professional, but conversational, too, and the president-elect and vice president-elect both interjected politely. Trump appropriately questioned some evidence and conclusions, and we answered his questions to his apparent satisfaction. Pence very astutely prompted us to clarify points on several occasions; I was impressed by the way he actively consumed the intelligence we were providing.
We were scheduled to spend an hour in Trump Tower, but the meeting lasted an hour and a half. By the end, I believe everyone in the room realized that the evidence—particularly from signals intelligence and cyber forensics—to attribute the influence operation to Vladimir Putin and the Russian government was overwhelming. The entire Trump team was happy to hear our assessment that the Russians had not successfully tampered with actual vote tallies. The only question they posed that we couldn’t answer was whether the Russian influence operation had any effect on the outcome of the election. I told the president-elect that we had neither the authority nor capabilities to assess what impact—if any—the Russian operation had.
As we closed the briefing, Jim Comey took advantage of a pause in conversation to address the president-elect. We’d agreed that one of the two of us would bring up “one additional matter,” a subject “best discussed on a one-on-one basis” with the president-elect. The additional matter was a dossier—a collection of seventeen “pseudo-intelligence” reports created by a private company—which I first learned about from John Brennan a week or so after we’d been tasked to conduct the IC assessment. I didn’t know until after my tenure as DNI that the dossier had begun as opposition research against Mr. Trump during the Republican primary race and then, sponsored by the Democrats, had continued to expand during the general election campaign. The memos covered a wide range of topics all related to long-standing interactions between Trump, his associates, and the Russians. It further alleged that the Russian government had compromising material on the president-elect and his team, which it had not disclosed during the course of the election or since.
Some details in the report were salacious, but in our professional opinions, the more ominous accounts alleged ties between members of the Trump team and the Russian government. Because we had not corroborated any of the sources used to generate the dossier, we had not included it as part of our IC assessment. We knew that at least two congressional members and some of the media had copies of the dossier, and that it could be published—in whole or in part—at any moment. While we could neither confirm nor refute anything in the document, we felt what I expressed as a “duty to warn” the president-elect that it existed and that it potentially could be made public. I wondered at the time—and have often done so since—what the reaction would have been had we not warned the president-elect about the existence of the dossier, and he later learned we had known about it and chosen not to tell him.
We decided that it should be Jim to brief him about the matter, for two reasons: First, the FBI had initially uncovered the dossier in its earlier investigation into the Russian hacking of Clinton-campaign emails, and second, John and I were both retiring at noon on January 20, while Jim would continue on as FBI director for President Trump.
We all rose, and President-elect Trump thanked us. Reince Priebus asked him if he wanted anyone on his team to stay for the “additional matter,” and the president-elect said no. So, leaving the two of them to talk, the rest of the party adjourned. Before we cleared the conference room, the Trump team had already begun drafting their press release about our meeting. I overheard their first point, that the US IC had assessed that the Russian interference did not change the outcome of the election—which was very different from our acknowledgment that we hadn’t, and couldn’t, assess its impact. We had to let it pass. In the hallway I took the opportunity to engage Tom Bossert, who in turn introduced me to the vice president-elect. I spoke with them briefly, suggesting that the new administration consider asking Nick Rasmussen to stay on as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, which it did.
In the car on the way back to Newark Airport, I called Brian Hale (who only requested to be described as “tanned and rested” if we mentioned him in this book) and told him to publish the unclassified IC assessment immediately. He replied that, just minutes before, he’d received the certified-as-unclassified version of the report as it was moved onto the ODNI system connected to the internet, and it was ready to go. Cutting the phone connection and sitting back, I felt just about as far from “tanned and rested” as one can get. My personal vision of dancing quietly off the stage while no one was paying attention had dissolved. I had less than fourteen days left on the job, and we still had hearings to get through with our oversight committees and each of the full houses of Congress within the next week. So far, I imagined—or hoped—that we appeared publicly to be like the proverbial duck gliding smoothly across the pond, but I could feel just how frantically we were kicking our legs beneath the surface. After we landed at Andrews, I called White House chief of staff Denis McDonough to let him know that not only had we survived the briefing, but it had gone surprisingly well.
I got little rest over the weekend, both because I was preparing for the hearings and because I was running out of time to close on several issues that were important to the IC before the clock ran out on January 20. Early Monday morning I was on camera once again, this time under very different circumstances. Every four years, just ahead of Inauguration Day, our National Intelligence Council publishes its Global Trends report, an “unclassified strategic assessment of how key trends and uncertainties might shape the world over the next 20 years, to help senior US leaders think about and plan for the longer term.” Global Trends represents years of work from our most strategically minded analysts, and I took a lot of pride in introducing the program of presentations planned for that day.
After advising the media and the spray of cameras, to chuckles, “If you’re here to get the latest on the Russia hacks you’re in the wrong place,” I explained that “the Global Trends report does not represent the official, coordinated view of the US Intelligence Community; it does not represent the official view or policy of the US government, and it’s not a prediction of the future.” Instead it was, I told them, a framework for thinking about the world, designed to help each new administration. The report we published on January 9, 2017, was titled “Paradox of Progress,” and it depicted a world at a crossroads, with “rising tensions within and between countries.” It forecast:
An ever-widening range of states, organizations, and empowered individuals will shape geopolitics. For better and worse, the emerging global landscape is drawing to a close an era of American dominance following the Cold War. So, too, perhaps is the rules-based international order that emerged after World War II. It will be much harder to cooperate internationally and govern in ways publics expect. Veto players will threaten to block collaboration at every turn, while information “echo chambers” will reinforce countless competing realities, undermining shared understandings of world events.
Underlying this crisis in cooperation will be local, national, and international differences about the proper role of government across an array of issues ranging from the economy to the environment, religion, security, and the rights of individuals. Debates over moral boundaries—to whom is owed what—will become more pronounced, while divergence in values and interests among states will threaten international security.
It will be tempting to impose order on this apparent chaos, but that ultimately would be too costly in the short run and would fail in the long. Dominating empowered, proliferating actors in multiple domains would require unacceptable resources in an era of slow growth, fiscal limits, and debt burdens. Doing so domestically would be the end of democracy, resulting in authoritarianism or instability or both.
The “paradox” was that, within this dark vision, there were unprecedented opportunities to reshape our world for the better, all dependent on how individuals, governments, and international groups renegotiated their expectations of and obligations to one another. The report raised profound questions, based on years of diligent research and engagement with novel thinkers around the globe. In any sane world, I would have spent weeks preparing for the speech that morning and would have framed many of my final public engagements as DNI around the milestone report. Given the events of the past year and my continuing responsibility to report on the Russian operation against our election, I almost felt caught in a microcosm of the dark world the report described. So, that Monday, I gave my introductory speech, thanked the team who’d created the report, and departed for a farewell town hall at DHS and then to prepare for additional Russia-interference briefings with Mike, Jim, and John.
On Tuesday morning we were back on Capitol Hill. At 10:00, we briefed the House Intelligence Committee in a classified, closed hearing, a gathering that turned partisan, personal, and nasty. In particular, three of the Republican lawmakers challenged our conclusion that the Russians actively supported Trump and seemed to resent that we had not involved them in the creation of the IC assessment or informed them as soon as we had any new information. Our explanations only served to stoke their anger. The briefing ran past schedule, and we hurried from the House briefing room south of the Capitol to a hearing room in an office building north of the Capitol for an open, televised hearing with the Senate Intelligence Committee. We had about a twenty-minute break before the red lights went on above the cameras.
For the next two hours, as the American public, the Russian government, and the rest of the world watched, we answered questions about the Russian cyber and influence operation. The senators, and simultaneously the media, sought to parse our every word, Democrats looking for collusion between Trump’s team and the Russians, Republicans for evidence of a conspiracy that the IC was attempting to undermine the president-elect. Senators on both sides pressed Jim Comey to reveal whether there were open FBI investigations looking into either of the presidential campaigns. The Democrats certainly remembered the letter Jim had sent to the Hill eleven days before the election about reopening its investigation into Clinton’s emails. When Jim told Senator Angus King, “Especially in a public forum, we never confirm or deny a pending investigation,” King voiced quiet exasperation, and the left-leaning media outlets were apoplectic.
When the red lights went off, we immediately moved with the Senate committee to their secure facility. Strangely, after answering questions about it for two hours in public, we then presented the IC assessment to the committee for the first time. By the time this session ended, we’d been testifying for seven straight hours. When I finally had the free time to check on world events, I found that all the contentiousness of the hearings and briefings had been completely overshadowed by other breaking news: BuzzFeed had published the now-infamous dossier on Trump, the one that Jim had warned the president-elect about five days earlier. In a classic case of “shoot the messenger,” Trump publicly blamed us for the publication of the dossier—yet another indication to me that his administration would not appreciate anyone’s speaking truth to power, particularly if the truth was politically inconvenient.
I woke Wednesday to find that Trump had tweeted another early-morning attack on us: “Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” I was floored by the analogy, and Jewish communities in the United States and abroad called for him to apologize and retract the statement.
That afternoon in my office, I watched the president-elect in a televised news conference, doubling down on his Nazi tweet, again alleging that US intelligence agencies had “allowed” the dossier to leak—as though we had any control over a document we’d discovered already “out in the wild.” He continued, “I think it’s a disgrace. And I say that, and I say that, and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.” Not helping the situation, the New York Times quickly published a story apparently intended to clarify that he meant to refer to US intelligence as the Stasi, not the Gestapo.
As I was leaving the office for the drive to the NRO for a farewell town hall, I asked Stephanie Sherline to see if she could track down a phone number for Trump. Much to my surprise, several minutes later she told me the president-elect had agreed to speak with me later that afternoon. Connecting from the NRO, I thanked him for taking the call and said he’d gotten my attention when he’d referred to the IC as “Nazis.” I explained to him that I wanted to defend the men and women of the Intelligence Community. I tried to appeal to his higher instincts and reiterated the points from my Election Day letter—that he was inheriting a national treasure and that the men and women of the IC wanted only to serve the nation and to make him successful as president. He thanked me and said that he valued the IC and the intelligence he’d been receiving. He then asked if I would put out a statement refuting what was in the dossier. The request felt very transactional—that he would play nice if I would do him a favor. I declined, saying that I couldn’t refute or affirm what was in the dossier. He sounded disappointed.
On Thursday, Mike, Jim, John, and I briefed the entire Senate, and on Friday morning, the entire House. To accommodate the many of its 435 members who showed up, we gave the House presentation in an auditorium in the Capitol Visitor Center. After the briefing, the chair and ranking member of the Intelligence Committee—Devin Nunes and Adam Schiff—facilitated questions, with Republicans lined up at a microphone in the aisle on one side of the auditorium, and Democrats on the other. The questions were mostly partisan—from both sides—and we did our best to answer them within the scope of our IC assessment. When Adam Schiff recognized Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, what followed was one of the more uncomfortable, dramatic, emotional displays I’ve witnessed on Capitol Hill. She ripped into Jim Comey over the hacking, the investigations, and the letter to the committees, channeling all of the frustration she’d felt since stepping down as DNC chair into a litany of allegations aimed at him. In the midst of so much chaos, partisanship, and controversy, her anguish was palpable. I truly admired Jim for responding calmly. I tried to think of something I could say to defuse the exchange, but I couldn’t.
I traveled from the Capitol to NSA headquarters, where I held my final town hall with the workforce there, thanking them for their quiet service through all the controversies of the past few years and trying to reassure them about the future. That evening, when I arrived back at the office, Stephanie Sherline took a long look at me, and for the first time in six and a half years said, “You look tired.”
On Monday morning, the final week of the Obama presidency, I attended an NSC meeting that was neither celebratory nor valedictory. We discussed a difficult national security matter the president needed input on and conveyed our thoughts and departmental positions to him. I spent the next few days focusing on writing performance evaluations and lining up awards and other forms of recognition for the people who’d worked with me the past few years, and who all so richly deserved them.
On Tuesday, I had lunch at the CIA. John then hosted a wonderful send-off with the staff in “the Bubble,” CIA’s auditorium, featuring a video with clips of me delivering all my well-worn one-liners and geezer jokes. That evening, I thanked the airlift operations team that had arranged my transportation all over the world for six years, including to North Korea. I pinned a medal on the uniform of the enlisted Air Force noncommissioned officer who’d coordinated much of that travel, although what he really deserved was retroactive hazardous-duty pay for his endless patience with me.
On Wednesday, I visited DIA for a farewell town hall there and then met with former senator Dan Coats, who had been named in the media as my likely successor as DNI. I’d first encountered Dan when he’d served as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He understood intelligence oversight but wanted to know more about the day-to-day details of the job, and I didn’t hold back. Dan is a very decent man whose belief in “truth to power” made him a solid choice to be DNI, and after our discussion, he took the job with his eyes wide open. Later I presented an award to Mike Dempsey, who had succeeded Robert Cardillo as deputy DNI for intelligence integration and who would serve as acting DNI after Stephanie and I departed on Friday. That evening, I attended a final National Security Council meeting, at which we continued conducting business. The president thanked us all for our service and said he was proud of what we’d accomplished and that he’d miss us.
On Thursday, with Attorney General Lynch, after some seven years of staff work, I cosigned a directive that allowed for greater sharing of raw signals intelligence—the actual intercepts before they’d been processed—outside of NSA. It required quite a bit of compromise from the SIGINT professionals at NSA to accomplish, but it was another big step for intelligence integration. I met with the cross-agency team that had produced the IC assessment on Russian interference and thanked them for what they’d done for our nation, and at the request of the ODNI workforce, Stephanie and I set aside an hour before lunch to pose for pictures with the staff, the people who were so instrumental to any success we’d achieved in integrating intelligence. ODNI’s public affairs team set up a red-carpet backdrop, and we ended up staying for two and a half hours. That evening, the leaders of the other sixteen IC components came to Liberty Crossing for one last meeting—a reception that included martini service. I thanked all of them for all that they had done, and for the work that was still ahead under the new administration.
Stephanie and I also hosted a mini reception for many of our protective-detail officers who had served us for the past six years. We both agreed that this was our most emotional farewell. These great men and women became part of our extended families, protecting us 24/7. They are wonderful people—professional, self-effacing, and dedicated—and always as respectful as possible of what little privacy we had.
On Friday morning, the twentieth of January, Sue and I had been invited to brunch at CIA deputy director David Cohen’s home, with John Brennan and his wife. We spent the morning and early afternoon eating, drinking, and laughing, and at noon, noted that John, David, and I had all become private citizens. Early that afternoon, Deputy National Security Adviser Avril Haines and Homeland Security Adviser Lisa Monaco joined us. They’d been working at the White House on the morning of the inauguration, almost right up until noon. We never turned on the Cohens’ TV.
For the first time since I started out as a scared second lieutenant in 1963, I left a job not thinking about what I would do next. I would turn seventy-six on March 14—eleven years past when most people retire—never really having asked myself how long I wanted to work or when I’d stop, not until 2015 when Sue had become ill. In the years I was DNI, I’d never felt relieved of duty, not even knowing Stephanie O’Sullivan was at the helm, fully capable of handling everything. My personal security detail had been omnipresent, and I was always able to communicate with the national security structure. I had comms in the office. I had comms in the car. I had comms at home. If I traveled, a special comms team accompanied me. I was never out of touch and never able to completely relax. We have six years of vacation pictures in which I’m obviously not chilling out, because I was always aware of the emails and cables piling up. At noon on January 20, 2017, those obligations and all of that anxiety evaporated, much to my great relief.
On Saturday, with a good bit of help, I packed up the office, making sure I kept track of the jar of paperclips I’d received from President Obama, and all the other meaningful mementoes I’d accumulated on the job. Now that the DNI’s office was no longer mine, with no one pushing to keep me on schedule, no calls from the White House and Congress to push me off schedule, no briefings, no papers to sign, no emails to catch up on and answer over the weekend, the place finally felt calm and quiet. By Sunday afternoon, as I stood and looked at the bare walls and empty shelves, it finally felt real that my fifty-five years of service was over. I didn’t regret its ending.
Life as a retiree took some adjustment. My first trip through self-checkout at the grocery store had all the makings of vaudeville comedy, and the short-term protective-detail officer assigned to me seemed quite amused. I also had my grandson on speed dial for whenever I encountered IT difficulties. It’s more than a little disconcerting to pivot from being a sought-after expert on national cybersecurity priorities to not being able to figure out where I’d saved a Word document before I closed the file. Some adjustments were pleasant, and cataract surgery was a life-changing event. Driving me home from Walter Reed, Sue asked why I was reading all the road signs aloud. “Because I can see them now!” I replied. She glanced at me sideways without saying anything else. Vacationing in Antigua, or just having morning coffee with Sue, I wondered what was so important that I hadn’t found time to relax for so long.
I did relax, but after a break I continued making the rounds at colleges and universities, appealing to the next generation of US voters and potential intelligence officers about the virtues of public service. I felt such engagements were an “intelligence-geezer obligation.” And I watched from the outside as the new administration struggled to govern while contending with the new president’s aversion to inconvenient facts. On his first full day in office, he sent his new press secretary out to address the media coverage of the inauguration. All the papers and cable news networks had run side-by-side pictures shot from the top of the Washington Monument. One showed President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, with crowds packed into the National Mall and spilling out into the streets and sidewalks, and the other showed President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, which was visibly more sparsely attended. Contrary to all the images and data, Sean Spicer berated the media for their coverage, announcing, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” Telling them the White House would hold them responsible for misrepresentations, he took no questions.
An hour and a half later, President Trump was on camera at CIA headquarters. When I’d heard the first place he would visit as president was the CIA, I naïvely wondered if my appeal to his higher instincts had somehow had impact. No. He took to the microphone and began rambling about the “dishonest media,” the size of his inauguration crowd, and his belief that military and law enforcement people had voted for him en masse, lumping the CIA into those categories and saying, “Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me, but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did. But I would guarantee a big portion, because we’re all on the same wavelength, folks.” He expressed his support of the IC with “I want to say that there is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump. There’s nobody.” He briefly interrupted himself to say, “The wall behind me is very, very special,” and then resumed his self-aggrandizing diatribe. The problem was that the sacred wall he was standing before—with its 125 stars representing fallen CIA officers—is the CIA’s equivalent of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, not a place for politics or boasting. I considered putting out a statement, but John Brennan expressed that he was “deeply saddened and angered” and that “Trump should be ashamed of himself,” and I felt that covered it.
On Friday, January 27, a week after stepping down, I went to FBI headquarters for a wonderful farewell from the Bureau. Just before the ceremony, I met briefly with Jim Comey in his office, and he mentioned that earlier that day, he’d been invited to dinner at the White House with the president. My impression then was that he was uneasy about the invitation, and I hadn’t seen much that had made Jim uneasy in the past. He said that he hoped to impress upon the president the importance of an independent FBI and an independent FBI director—that they couldn’t and shouldn’t be “buddies.” I agreed, and I empathized with his difficult position. A few moments later, we were both onstage, and I told the FBI workforce that through all of the recent controversy, the Bureau—with their commitment to “fidelity, bravery, integrity”—remained a pillar of our democracy.
Throughout President Trump’s first week in office, people on both sides of the aisle appeared shocked as he actually began fulfilling his campaign promises through a series of executive orders. The most questionable—legally and morally—appeared to be the travel ban he signed on Friday. The order indefinitely blocked Syrian refugees from entering the United States and suspended entry of anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen for ninety days. The president stated that the executive order was being issued to prevent terrorism, but to many people, it echoed his call as a candidate for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” More than sixty thousand visas were temporarily revoked, and hundreds of people were detained Friday after arriving at American airports, including US green card holders and permanent residents returning from travel overseas—people who lived in the United States who were prevented from returning home. With the same signature, President Trump also ceded leadership on the Syrian refugee crisis to Europe. We suddenly stopped helping those who were the true victims of the Islamic State, and of Assad’s regime supported by Russia.
A national outcry followed over the weekend, with thousands of people protesting at airports where travelers were being detained without warrant or charges. People took to social media to protest, followed closely by a counterprotest in favor of detaining Muslims. I’d been a private citizen for a week and no longer had access to intelligence on what was happening, but I was well aware that Russian social media accounts had not been shut down and felt certain their activities on Facebook and Twitter were leading the charge in stoking anger between Americans with differing political viewpoints.
Meanwhile, President Trump—just like President-elect Trump—showed an aggressive indifference to getting to the bottom of the Russian interference in the election. He continued to deny that he or his campaign had any contacts with Russia, even as he fired Mike Flynn as national security adviser on February 13, officially for “misleading the vice president” about conversations he’d had with the Russian ambassador. Three days later Trump tweeted, “The Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly (306), so they made up a story—RUSSIA. Fake news!” On February 26 he tweeted, “Russia talk is FAKE NEWS put out by the Dems, and played up by the media, in order to mask the big election defeat and the illegal leaks!”
Watching all of this, I knew it would be very difficult for anyone still in government to contradict the president, and I recalled how helpful it had been when Mike Hayden had appeared on television to say the things I could not say as DNI. I decided that speaking out was another obligation I had, and so I agreed to appear on Meet the Press on Sunday, March 5.
Early on Saturday, March 4—the day before my appearance—President Trump tweeted twice with a new conspiracy theory: “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” and “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” So, of course, the first question Chuck Todd asked me the next day on the show was if I knew of a wiretap on Trump’s offices. “For the part of the national security apparatus that I oversaw as DNI,” I replied, “there was no such wiretap activity mounted against the president-elect at the time, or as a candidate, or against his campaign.” I said I wouldn’t necessarily know about law enforcement wiretaps, although I would know if a foreign-intelligence-related FISA warrant had been issued. I don’t think Chuck Todd was expecting so straight an answer, so he pursued the line of questioning.
“And at this point, you can’t confirm or deny whether that exists?”
“I can deny it.”
“There is no FISA court order?”
“No, not to my knowledge.”
“Of anything at Trump Tower?”
“No.”
Chuck looked genuinely surprised and thought for a moment before replying, “Well, that’s an important revelation at this point. Let me ask you this. Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials?” This question couldn’t be answered as easily, and I clarified that just because something had not been included as evidence in the IC assessment didn’t mean it hadn’t come to light since then. “There’s a lot of smoke,” Chuck observed, “but there hasn’t been that smoking gun yet. At what point should the public start to wonder if this is all just smoke?” I answered, “Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know. I do think, though, it is in everyone’s interest, in the current president’s interests, in the Democrats’ interests, in the Republicans’ interest, in the country’s interest, to get to the bottom of all this. Because it’s such a distraction. And certainly, the Russians have to be chortling about the success of their efforts to sow dissension in this country.”
That was the crucial point I most wanted to make—we needed to know the facts of what happened—because the Russians were going to attack us again, and the next time, either party or any United States institution could find itself their target. Allegations of collusion and the results of the election were secondary to the profound threat Russia posed—and poses—to our system.
On March 20—two weeks after my TV appearance—Jim Comey and Mike Rogers testified before the House Intelligence Committee. During the hearing, Jim confirmed that the FBI was investigating contacts between Trump associates and Russia during the election. He also said there was “no information” to support the president’s claim that Trump Tower had been wiretapped. His testimony generated a lot of discomfiture in the White House, and six weeks later, on the eve of the next hearing at which Jim was scheduled to make an appearance, the president tried to preempt it with a series of tweets reading: “FBI Director Comey was the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton in that he gave her a free pass for many bad deeds! The phony Trump/Russia story was an excuse used by the Democrats as justification for losing the election. Perhaps Trump just ran a great campaign?”
In the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing the next morning, Jim confirmed again that the FBI was investigating Russian interference and possible contacts with the Trump campaign, but went further, stating that Russia was continuing its interference in US politics. He referred to it as “the greatest threat of any nation on earth, given their intention and their ability.” Democrats pushed him for an explanation about the letter concerning newly discovered Clinton emails that he’d sent to Congress on October 28, to which he somewhat famously replied, “It makes me mildly nauseous to think that we might have had some impact on the election, but honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision.” He explained that, because of everything that had led up to the discovery of new emails, he couldn’t conceal the new information from Congress. “Everybody who disagrees with me has to come back to October 28 with me and stare at this and tell me what you would do.”
I watched the hearing closely, for several reasons: because I admired Jim, considered him a friend, and wished him well, because I hadn’t received an intelligence briefing in three and a half months and was interested in what was new, and because I was scheduled to testify five days later before a Senate judiciary subcommittee and wanted a preview of what I was in for. That hearing was originally scheduled for me, Susan Rice, and Sally Yates—the former acting attorney general whom President Trump had fired in January when she’d courageously announced her determination that the president’s travel ban was unlawful and that the Justice Department would not defend it in court. The May 8 hearing would have been the first for each of us as private citizens, and we all had become controversial figures, although Susan and I had a head start on Sally.
Although Susan had the least to do with the Russian interference investigation, I expected that she would take most of the heat at the hearing—she always had, dating back to Benghazi. Her appearance at this hearing was highly anticipated because she’d acknowledged that as national security adviser, she’d requested “unmasking” of US persons who’d participated or been mentioned in valid foreign intelligence intercepts. When their real names were revealed, she learned that some of those individuals had been associated with the Trump campaign. The media—particularly RT and right-wing online “news” sites—implied that our government secrecy signaled an impropriety related to unmasking, and they conflated the implied impropriety with conspiracy theories about Susan and the Obama administration. Although I no longer had access to the intelligence, I felt certain that the Russian social media troll farm was helping to slander Susan—a favorite target of theirs. I knew for a fact that Susan had done nothing wrong, and that requesting an unmasking was sometimes critical to understanding the context of an intercepted conversation. During my tenure as DNI, I’d also requested unmaskings, to learn whom a foreign intelligence target was talking to or talking about. Susan wouldn’t be able to discuss details of the classified intercepts during the hearing, but I knew she was looking forward to testifying to clear the air on the subject, and to clear her name.
Then, just four days before our scheduled testimony, the subcommittee’s Democratic ranking member, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, notified Susan that the Republicans had not coordinated with the Democrats on the committee when they’d invited her to testify, and he did not consent to her appearance, asking her to withdraw. Susan felt she had no choice and withdrew her name as a witness. Immediately the Republicans seized on another false narrative, asserting she’d withdrawn because she had something to hide. President Trump tweeted, “Susan Rice, the former National Security Advisor to President Obama, is refusing to testify before a Senate Subcommittee next week on allegations of unmasking Trump transition officials. Not good!” I was displeased with how Susan was being treated and felt I’d lost my only close ally at the witness table. I didn’t know Sally as well. She had a reputation for being tough, but I worried the hearing was going to be ugly.
With my opening statement, I recapped the multifaceted Russian campaign and how we’d made our IC assessment. I reviewed the briefings we’d conducted and said that, four months later, “the conclusions and confidence levels reached at the time still stand.” I talked about how the idea of unmasking was being misrepresented and misunderstood in the media, and I cited an ODNI transparency report that indicated that 1,934 unmaskings had occurred in 2016 from collections under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. I explained that officials had to follow precise procedures for unmasking, and that unmasked names remained classified and very sensitive. By contrast, leaking those names—or any other classified material—was illegal and endangered national security. Next, I talked about counterintelligence investigations by the FBI, noting how acutely sensitive they are, and added that “during my tenure as DNI, it was my practice to defer to the FBI director—both Director Mueller and then subsequently Director Comey—on whether, when, and to what extent they would inform me about such investigations.” I encouraged Congress to renew Section 702 before it expired at the end of 2017. Noting the sharp divisions and lingering anger in the country, I concluded by saying the Russians “must be congratulating themselves.”
Over the next three hours, we covered familiar ground on the Russian interference and the IC assessment, the dossier, and the briefings, but we also heard Sally’s riveting account of briefing the Trump White House counsel on Mike Flynn’s actions that led to his firing as national security adviser. She said she’d met White House counsel Don McGahn on January 26, during the first week of the new administration, and warned him “that there were a number of press accounts of statements that had been made by the vice president and other high-ranking White House officials about General Flynn’s conduct that we knew to be untrue.” The Justice Department knew—and “the Russians knew—that General Flynn had misled the Vice President,” and that created, “a situation where the national security advisor could be blackmailed by the Russians.” She said that the FBI had interviewed Flynn on January 24, the Justice Department “got a readout from the FBI on the 25th,” and she’d gone to McGahn on the twenty-sixth so that the White House could take appropriate action, noting, “You don’t want your national security advisor compromised by the Russians.” McGahn considered overnight and asked her to return for further discussion on Friday the twenty-seventh. She worked with the FBI over the weekend to document everything that had taken place and called McGahn on Monday, January 30, to inform him that the material “was available if he wanted to see it.” In the hearing, Senator Whitehouse asked her if anyone from the White House ever reviewed what they’d prepared. “I don’t know what happened after that,” Sally responded, “because that was my last day.” President Trump fired her that afternoon.
At one point as she recounted this story, Senator Graham stopped her, asking, “Okay and I don’t mean to interrupt you, but this is important to me. How did the conversation between the Russian ambassador and Mr. Flynn make it to the Washington Post?” I answered for us, “That’s a great question. All of us would like to know that.”
For eighteen days after Sally Yates’s conversation with Don McGahn, Mike Flynn stayed on as national security adviser, though both he and the White House knew that he’d been compromised by the Russians and that the FBI was investigating the compromise. President Trump finally—and reluctantly—fired Flynn on February 13. Jim Comey would later testify that the president met with him alone on February 14, telling him, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” Jim did not agree to drop the investigation. In December, after Flynn had pleaded guilty to misleading the FBI, President Trump tweeted, “I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”
As I listened to Sally testify, I thought about what a shame it was that the Justice Department had lost someone so willing and capable of speaking truth to power. That impression was only strengthened as members of the committee grilled her on her decision not to defend the president’s travel ban. Senator John Cornyn told her he found it enormously disappointing “that you would countermand the executive order of the president of the United States because you happen to disagree with it as a policy matter.” “I appreciate that, senator,” Sally shot back, “and let me make one thing clear. It is not purely as a policy matter. In fact, I’ll remember my confirmation hearing, in an exchange that I had with you and others of your colleagues where you specifically asked me in that hearing that if the president asked me to do something that was unlawful or unconstitutional—and one of your colleagues said, or even just that would reflect poorly on the Department of Justice—would I say no? And I looked at this, I made a determination that I believed that it was unlawful. I also thought that it was inconsistent with principles of the Department of Justice and I said no. And that’s what I promised you I would do and that’s what I did.” While I didn’t know Sally well at the start of the hearing, I admired and respected the strength of character, convictions, and impeccable integrity she demonstrated, and I felt as if we bonded under fire as the hearing went on.
All of those conversations were interesting, but to me, there was one overriding reason we’d been called to testify. Midway through the hearing, I said, “I understand how critical leaks are and unmasking and all these ancillary issues. But to me, the transcendent issue here is the Russian interference in our election process, and what that means to the erosion of the fundamental fabric of our democracy, and that to me is a huge deal. And they’re going to continue to do it. And why not? It proved successful.” Then, near the end of the hearing—employing not very subtle sarcasm to introduce what I really wanted to say—I expressed why I was willing to testify publicly as a private citizen about what had happened: “Well, as much as I love congressional hearings, I think there is a useful purpose served, because I think the most important thing that needs to be done here, is to educate the electorate as to what the Russians’ objective is, and the tactics and techniques, and procedures that they’ve employed and will continue to employ.”
After the hearing, President Trump sat down with reporters from Time magazine to watch clips and critique Sally and me. He was quoted by Time as saying, “Watch them start to choke like dogs,” and then, referring specifically to me, “Ah, he’s choking. Ah, look.” When a friend forwarded the story and I read Trump’s comments, it occurred to me that if President Obama had said that I had “choked” at a congressional hearing, I’d have been devastated. President Trump’s remarks just didn’t bother me.
The thought I expressed at the end of the hearing—that we had to talk about what the Russians had done to us—was what led me to appear on Meet the Press in March and even—perhaps against my better judgment—to start writing a book around the same time. However, it took one more event to convince me that an occasional public appearance wasn’t going to cut it, and that event happened the very next day after the hearing.
On Tuesday, May 9, my friend Jim Comey was talking to FBI employees in the Los Angeles field office when a nearby TV screen posted “breaking news”—he’d been fired as FBI director. No one had informed him. The same day, the White House put out a statement that the firing was on the recommendation of Sessions and Rosenstein, ostensibly because Jim had overreached with the investigation of Clinton’s emails. Shortly after the announcement, according to a report in the New York Times, President Trump bragged to Russian officials in the Oval Office, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.”
On Wednesday, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders changed the story, saying the president had lost confidence in Comey because of his poor leadership at the FBI, “and frankly he’d been considering letting Director Comey go since the day he was elected.” On Thursday, the president changed the story yet again, stating in an interview, “He’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander, the FBI has been in turmoil,” and that the workforce had lost faith in Jim as a leader. Trump further said that he was going to fire Comey regardless of Sessions’s and Rosenstein’s recommendations. He went on: “And, in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should’ve won.’” Then, on Friday, Trump tweeted, “When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?” This was after tweeting on Tuesday, “Director Clapper reiterated what everybody, including the fake media already knows—there is ‘no evidence’ of collusion w/ Russia and Trump.”
For me, this was the final straw. Jim Comey was a distinguished public servant, and his firing and the way it was handled were truly reprehensible. I think people could reasonably disagree with some of his decisions, but he’d always made them with the best interests of the nation in mind, and to say that FBI had lost faith in his leadership was a flat lie. I was angry at both the way President Trump and his White House had treated my friend and colleague and at the thought that our nation had lost yet another leader with the courage to speak truth to power. And then the president asserted that I had exonerated him of collusion when, in fact, I’d made it very clear that the Intelligence Community simply could not corroborate allegations of collusion by the time we’d completed our report in January.
On Friday, the same day the president posted that second tweet naming me, I went on MSNBC to refute the words that he had attributed to me. “My practice during the six and a half years that I was at the DNI,” I told Andrea Mitchell, “was always to defer to the director of the FBI—be it Director Bob Mueller or Director James Comey—on whether, when, and what to tell me about a counterintelligence investigation. So it is not surprising or abnormal that I would not have known about the investigation, or even more importantly, the content of that investigation. So, I don’t know if there was collusion or not, I don’t know if there is evidence of collusion or not, nor should I have in this particular context.” Andrea started to ask a question, but I wasn’t finished. “And if I may make one more point, what we were focused on and certainly what I was focused on in the madcap environment of the end of my time as DNI was the Intelligence Community assessment that we put together on Russian interference in our election, which by the way is the issue we really ought to be focusing on as a nation.” On the issue of collusion, I told her, “There was no evidence that rose to that level at that time that found its way into the Intelligence Community assessment, which we had pretty high confidence in. That’s not to say there wasn’t evidence, but not that met that threshold.”
On Sunday, May 14, I told Jake Tapper on CNN, “I think in many ways our institutions are under assault both externally—and that’s the big news here is the Russian interference in our election system—and I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.” Jake asked, “Internally from the president?” And I responded, “Exactly.” I explained, “The Founding Fathers, in their genius, created a system of three coequal branches of government and a built-in system of checks and balances, and I feel as though that’s under assault and is eroding.”
Looking at the recording of that interview, I again appeared tired. This time, I wasn’t tired from working around the clock for months on end. I was tired because my journey of seventy-six years had led me to a place that should be home, and I’d found that the foundation of that home was beginning to crumble and the pillars that supported its roof were shaking. In the period of just a few months, our president had attacked Congress that wouldn’t pass legislation at his will, the judiciary that dared to rule against his travel ban, the “dishonest media,” the “Nazi” Intelligence Community, the FBI investigating his campaign, and anyone who said no to him. Beyond that, he had disparaged minority Americans and mocked those with disabilities. At the close of his first week in office, the Economist Intelligence Unit updated its Democracy Index to indicate that the United States no longer qualified as a full-fledged democracy. For the first time, because of an “erosion of public trust in political institutions,” our democratic status was listed as “flawed.”
Since then, President Trump’s motto, “America First,” has meant tearing up agreements that the United States had made with other nations and not meeting obligations we’d incurred before he took office. He marginalized NATO, pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord, said he wouldn’t honor the North American Free Trade Agreement, abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and decertified the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. I don’t see how North Korea or any other nation would trust the United States to live up to any new deal we tried to make. We have ceded leadership on global issues to China, Germany, and Russia.
I also looked tired in that interview because I knew who was behind all of this. In a 2005 Russian “state of the nation” speech, Vladimir Putin had said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and copatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” He blamed the United States for that disaster and wanted nothing more than for Russia to regain glory at our expense. By May 2017, when Jim Comey was fired and I began appearing on the talk shows, we’d learned that the Russian operation had been even more expansive than the IC had assessed in January. We knew now that the Russians had thousands of Twitter accounts and tens of thousands of bots that posted more than a million tweets. They posted more than a thousand videos on YouTube with days of streaming content. Facebook has said Russian content reached 126 million of its American users—an astonishing number, considering that only 139 million Americans voted.
As the leader of the Intelligence Community, I testified that the IC did not attempt to assess whether the Russian influence campaign impacted the results of the election. As a private citizen, I had no doubt they influenced at least some voters. Looking at the savvy ways the Russians targeted specific voter groups—for instance, buying advertisements on Facebook promoting Clinton’s support of the Black Lives Matter movement and ensuring those ads ran only on the pages of white conservative voters in swing states; at how they created lies that helped Trump and hurt Clinton and promoted these falsehoods through social media and state-sponsored channels to the point that the traditional US media were unwittingly spreading Russian propaganda; and at how they ran a multifaceted campaign and sustained it at a high level from early in 2015 until Election Day in 2016 . . . of course the Russian efforts affected the outcome. Surprising even themselves, they swung the election to a Trump win. To conclude otherwise stretches logic, common sense, and credulity to the breaking point. Less than eighty thousand votes in three key states swung the election. I have no doubt that more votes than that were influenced by this massive effort by the Russians.
As the investigations have advanced, the specter of collusion has dominated the discussion. When I left office on January 20, I’d seen no smoking-gun evidence that the Russian government and the Trump campaign were in substantive coordination of their efforts. I didn’t learn about the June 9, 2016, meeting between candidate Trump’s closest advisers and representatives of the Russian government—purportedly to discuss “dirt on Hillary” and sanctions against wealthy Russians—until I was firmly retired. But what I did see as DNI—something brought home for me as I relived the election while preparing this book—is that the Russians and the campaign seemed to employ strikingly parallel messaging in social media posts and public statements, effectively complementing each other to great effect, with no attempt to hide it.
That combined effort appeared to go well beyond candidate Trump’s calling on a foreign power to find thirty thousand missing emails belonging to his political opponent and publish them, or his praise for WikiLeaks—which Trump’s CIA director later aptly characterized as a non–nation state hostile intelligence service—for publishing materials Russian intelligence had stolen. On a routine basis, whenever the campaign published an allegation that hurt Clinton, the Russians would repeat, amplify, and embellish that claim; and when the Russians promulgated a conspiracy theory about her, Trump would repeat it at campaign rallies and on Twitter. Whether secretly coordinated or not, whether there was actual collusion or not, this parallelism constituted a putative team effort by the Russian government and the Trump campaign to undermine truth and to cause much of the American public to question if facts were even knowable. And it didn’t end with the election.
The possibility that Trump’s campaign worked or coordinated any political tactics with the Russian government—directly or indirectly—is unquestionably of crucial importance. But in my mind, far more concerning than any specter of collusion is the aggressive indifference of President Trump’s administration to viewing Russia as a threat and its abject failure to do anything about this existential menace to our nation and our way of life. Repeatedly, the president has spoken about Iran’s violating the “spirit” of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the agreement that prevents it from attaining a nuclear weapon—and he announced in October 2017 that he was decertifying the deal. Yet Russia has built, repeatedly tested, and deployed cruise missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. Those violations are a serious threat to global security, and Putin’s March 2018 speech in which he described “invincible” nuclear weapons—messaging aimed at both domestic and foreign audiences—further illustrates the profound animosity he has for the United States, the only adversary these weapons are intended for. Russia has continued to occupy large parts of Ukraine and to murder civilians in Syria. It has worked against American interests in Afghanistan and helped North Korea avoid sanctions. And it has continued to attack American institutions and to drive social divisions deeper, on social media and state-sponsored broadcasts. Whether that involves assailing the credibility of the press, the FBI, and the US Intelligence Community or promoting the violent rise of neo-Nazis, the Russians have been there, often finding their propaganda effectively supported by the US president. And they’ve done these things with impunity. In July 2017, Congress voted to impose sanctions against Russia in response to election interference. The sanctions bill passed the House 419–3 and the Senate 98–2. Knowing any veto would be easily overridden, Trump allowed it to become law, and then the administration simply chose not to enforce the sanctions.
And there’s something that bothers me even more. On Sunday, January 22, 2017—just two days after the inauguration—NBC’s Chuck Todd confronted Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press, asking her about Sean Spicer’s blatant and obvious lie that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period.” She responded, “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. You’re saying that it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving, Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”
“Alternative facts.” I just can’t square “alternative facts” with my life experience. My parents taught me that one faced life’s truths head-on. Professionally, my dad approached his work without slant or politics, and I don’t recall his ever changing facts to make his bosses happy. I never heard the phrase “truth to power” from him, but I saw how he lived and worked. For fifty-three years, I tried hard to speak truth—sometimes very uncomfortable truth—to people making crucial decisions for our national security. Telling General Bill Livsey that I couldn’t provide him with “unambiguous” warning of a North Korean invasion was a difficult truth to deliver. Telling Wayne Downing that it was wrong to hold Terry Schwalier accountable for Air Force institutional failings was another. When I made mistakes—mistakenly finding WMD sites in Iraq or misunderstanding Senator Wyden’s question in testimony—they were honest mistakes.
I don’t believe our democracy can function for long on lies, particularly when inconvenient and difficult facts spoken by the practitioners of truth are dismissed as “fake news.” I know that the Intelligence Community cannot serve our nation if facts are negotiable. Just in the past few years, I’ve seen our country become so polarized because people live in separate realities in which everyone has his or her own set of facts—some of which are lies knowingly distributed by a foreign adversary. This was not something I could idly stand by and watch happen to the country I love.
I’ve often thought about General George Patton’s quote “The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.” Applying Patton’s battlefield wisdom to the profession of intelligence, we provide facts to decision makers more broadly—whether they sit in the Oval Office or are hunkered down in an oval foxhole—to reduce uncertainty, risk, and, yes, fear. That’s why intelligence is vital; that’s what we do and why we do it.
As I left government service, I had my own decision to make. I thought hard about all my concerns—my “fears”—about the idea of writing a book. I had not planned to write anything, in spite of the urging of many friends and colleagues who thought I should, if for no other reason than to chronicle living through fifty years of the history of American intelligence. But after experiencing the election, the unprecedented Russian interference in our political process, and the behavior by and impact of the Trump administration, I changed my mind. I think the catalyst was the stark, visceral realization of seeing the fundamental pillars of our country being undermined both by the Russians and by the president. This shook me, since it was these very attributes—our form of government, our deference to the rule of law, our rich mix of ethnicities and nationalities, and our freedoms, including especially a free and independent press, and freedom of religious practice—that all seemed under siege, no longer universally respected and protected as assumed “givens.”
My parents instilled respect for these unique attributes of America throughout my formative years. My dad, who served faithfully for twenty-eight years in the Army during World War II, the Korean conflict, and Vietnam, was a living example to me of the importance of actively defending and protecting this country and what it stands for. And as I’ve described, I followed in his footsteps, serving thirty-four years in the military, sixteen years as a civilian in government, and six years in industry—virtually all in the profession of intelligence. I always considered this a noble calling, a sacred public trust, because, simply stated, I believe in this country. Part of this instilled ethos was profound respect for the president as commander in chief; I served in that spirit every president from John Kennedy through Barack Obama. So, speaking critically of our current president is counterinstinctive and difficult for me to do, but I feel it is my duty.
We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and, in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And, close to my heart, he has besmirched the Intelligence Community and the FBI—pillars of our country—and deliberately incited many Americans to lose faith and confidence in them. While he does this, he pointedly refuses to acknowledge the profound threat posed by Russia, inexplicably trusting the denials by Putin about their meddling in our political process over the considered judgments by his own Intelligence Community.
The Russians are astutely and persistently exploiting this divisiveness with every controversial issue they can identify, and regrettably, we are a very inviting target for them as they target both sides of every issue. They exploit Black Lives Matter by pretending to be hateful white people online, and they incite anger among targeted groups of whites by playing to negative black stereotypes; they engender fear of Muslims among Christians and vice versa; they stoke fear on both sides of the gun control debate; and so on. To be clear, the Russians are our primary existential threat. All those nuclear weapons they have or are developing are intended for only one adversary: the United States. They have been at war with us in the information realm for some time, and the apathy displayed by many Americans toward this profound menace is very disturbing. President Trump abets this apathy by his willful and skillful deflections. What we need him to do is to recognize this threat for what it is and to galvanize us in a coordinated national response. Only he can provide this leadership.
My hope is that this book will, in some measure, help people regain awareness. That’s also the reason I decided to appear regularly on CNN, so that I could continue to speak “truth to power”—in this case, to the American people. In the letter I wrote to President Obama in the spring of 2010 when he was considering whether to send my nomination as DNI to the Senate, I said: “I do not like publicity. I’ve spent the last week cringing every time I saw my name in the paper, or my face on the tube. I think it is part of the unwritten code of professional intelligence officers to stay out of the media.” That seems like a very long time ago, in a very different, more innocent environment.
I often encounter strangers in airliners, airports, and other public places who, upon recognizing me, convey gratitude for my speaking up and out, and giving them a voice. They do so in a way that doesn’t sound like the reflexive cliché “Thanks for your service.” I certainly don’t make the pretentious claim that I am carrying the torch of truth, but in some ways, that seems to be what many people implicitly expect of me and others—such as John Brennan and Jim Comey—who are staunch advocates for our values. That’s not to suggest that everyone I’ve encountered is uniformly supportive; some have angrily confronted me, questioning my loyalty and patriotism for speaking out.
It is, at this point, impossible to know whether we will restore our balance and national conscience. We have a reassuring history of recovery from similar national traumas, most prominently the Civil War and the Vietnam War. Our institutions were battered, and our national fabric severely stressed to the breaking point. But we recovered from both and, over time, emerged the better for it.