“America’s Top Spy Talks Snowden Leaks and Our Ominous Future”
WIRED, November 17, 2016
Security
By Garrett M. Graff
“America’s top spy and the future of surveillance.”
[On Thursday morning*, November 17**,** James Clapper announced** that** he** had** submitted** his** letter** of** resignation**. He** will** serve** out** the** remaining** 64** days** of** his** term**.*]
Public appearances don’t come easily to James Clapper, the United States director of national intelligence. America’s top spy is a 75-year-old self-described geezer who speaks in a low, guttural growl; his physical appearance—muscular and bald—recalls an aging biker who has reluctantly accepted life in a suit. Clapper especially hates appearing on Capitol Hill, where members of Congress wait to ambush him and play what he calls “stump the chump.” As he says, “I rank testimony—particularly in the open—right up there with root canals and folding fitted sheets.”
One of the things Clapper does profess to enjoy about his job is meeting with the men and women who make up his covert empire of 17 agencies, which range from brand names like the CIA, NSA, DEA, and FBI to lesser-known units like the Treasury Department’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis. As he has traveled the country and the world over his six years in office, he has hosted scores of town hall meetings with intelligence officers, analysts, and operatives. The events are typically low-key, focusing less on what’s in the news than on the byzantine and, to Clapper, almost soothing minutiae of the military-intelligence bureaucracy.
And so it was that he found himself in late August in an auditorium at US Strategic Command near Omaha, Nebraska, headquarters of the nation’s nuclear forces, taking questions from a group of 180 civilian and military personnel. There were fairly routine queries about China, recruiting, and coordination between the intel services. Then an older man in a suit, a lifer like Clapper, reached for the microphone and asked him something no one ever had in his tenure as director of national intelligence.
For a moment the question stopped Clapper in his tracks.
“Is spying moral?”
Back in the early 1970s, James Clapper was a young military assistant to the director of the NSA when the entire US intelligence establishment was thrown into upheaval. A team of antiwar activists had broken into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and made off with thousands of files. In them was evidence of multiple illegal domestic spying programs, conducted by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, aimed largely at neutralizing left-wing dissent in America. Public faith in US intelligence, already poisoned by the CIA’s cold war regime of dirty tricks, plummeted further. And Congress moved to rein in America’s spies, hardening laws and norms against domestic surveillance.
Some 40 years later, Clapper now presides over a broader intelligence purview than any one of his bosses did back in the ’70s. And hanging over his tenure is a sense that our spies have once again overstepped the bounds of acceptable behavior. Many in the public today regard former NSA contractor Edward Snowden as a whistle-blower and a hero for exposing another era of domestic surveillance. Clapper has found himself defending his agencies from the charge that they’re leading the nation into a dystopian future in which an all-seeing government kills from the sky with no accountability, hoovers up vast troves of data from law-abiding people the world over, and undermines personal computer security through back doors, malware, and industry side deals. He argues, though, that today’s scandals pale by comparison to those of an earlier era. The programs exposed by Snowden, he says, “had all kinds of oversight by all three branches of government, very limited sets of data, and a very small cadre of people who had access to it. We had none of that in the ’70s.”
Clapper says he has never doubted the morality of his profession. The job of the intelligence community is, in his view, honorably straightforward: to provide policymakers with objective analysis derived from intelligence gathered through legally authorized methods. It’s the battlefield that’s confusing and dystopian. From Clapper’s standpoint, the country is locked in a seemingly constant state of war against a protean and often faceless set of enemies, at a time when a single employee can walk out with a thumb drive containing decades’ worth of secrets. It’s enough to make him nostalgic for the comparatively uncomplicated era of nuclear détente. “Sometimes I long for the halcyon days of the cold war,” he tells me. “We had a single adversary and we understood it.”
Rather than worry whether his spies have gone too far, Clapper worries that leaders in Washington are ill-equipped to tackle the multiplying, metastasizing set of threats that face America. His annual appearances on Capitol Hill—filled with discussions about ISIS, cyberwar, North Korea’s nuclear program, and new Russian and Chinese aggression—have been so routinely pessimistic that he refers to his yearly global threat assessment as the Litany of Doom. Unpredictable instability has been a constant for this administration and will be, he says, for the next one too.
But in mere weeks, when a new presidential administration takes office, all those issues will be someone else’s problem. For Clapper, the transition can’t come soon enough. He has spent much of this year literally counting down the days he has left. Some mornings, when he briefs the commander in chief, known as Intelligence Customer Number One, President Barack Obama will ask him what the current tally is and then offer Clapper a fist bump. In his final months in the role, Clapper and more than a dozen of his top aides and advisers provided WIRED with an unprecedented series of interviews discussing the state of America’s intelligence apparatus and the threats they’ll be handing off to a new administration come January 20. Even six years in, such exchanges don’t come naturally. “In this job,” Clapper says, “I’ve found the less I talk, the better.”
The nation’s first director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, opened shop in 2005 with a staff of 11 crammed into a small office close to the White House—filling a new post created in the aftermath of 9/11 in recognition that the country needed a single figure to oversee its intelligence efforts. By the time Clapper arrived in the job five years later, the staff occupied a 51-acre complex in McLean, Virginia.
Though discreetly identified only by a roadside sign, 1550 Tysons McLean Drive is actually easily visible to passengers landing at Reagan National Airport. From the air, its two buildings form an L and an X, a nod to its gratuitously patriotic post-9/11 moniker, Liberty Crossing, or “LX” in government-speak. The compound houses the 1,700 employees of the office of the director of national intelligence as well as the National Counterterrorism Center, another post-9/11 creation, whose multistory command post was built to mimic the fictional one in Kiefer Sutherland’s drama 24. It’s a city unto itself, with a police force, a Dunkin’ Donuts, and a Starbucks.
Clapper’s office, on the sixth floor of the L building, is large but mostly barren except for standard-issue government-executive dark wood furniture. One notable exception: a poster by the door of a stern bald eagle, with the caption “I am smiling.”
Clapper is about as steeped in the intelligence business as any American ever has been. His father worked in signals intelligence during World War II. And when the young James met President John F. Kennedy in 1962 as a 21-year-old Air Force ROTC cadet, he told the commander in chief that he too intended to become an intelligence officer. It’s the only profession he ever really aspired to. Clapper met his wife at the NSA (her father also was an intelligence officer), and in Vietnam he shared a trailer with his father, who was the NSA’s deputy chief of operations there. By now Clapper has devoted more than a half century to the field. In 2007, then–secretary of defense Robert Gates installed him as the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence, overseeing all four of its defense-related intel offices.
Then in 2010, angry over the intelligence community’s intransigence and failure to connect the dots to prevent the Christmas Day bombing attempt aboard a Northwest Airlines flight, Obama turned to Clapper and made him the nation’s fourth director of national intelligence in just five years. Clapper figured he’d spend his tenure working behind the scenes, coordinating the nation’s many-tentacled intelligence apparatus.
About the Author:
Garrett M. Graff is a contributing editor at WIRED and a director at The Aspen Institute. He is the author of the No. 1 national bestseller “The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11”
