Transcripts For CSPAN3 Former DNI Director Clapper Delivers

CSPAN3 Former DNI Director Clapper Delivers Remarks On Intelligence Gathering... September 26, 2017

Its hard to imagine anyone more suited to the topic of a career in intelligence than mr. James clapper. Its a great treat to have him here this evening. As you can see from his background, hes had over five years of experience in the Intelligence Community, in the military side, on the civilian side, inside and outside government and overseas as well and maybe its not listed in his bio but maybe someone can ask him a question to tell you about his 2014 visit to north korea to rescue a couple of americans who got caught up there. I first met mr. Clapper in the 1990s when i was a baby bureaucrat in the pentagon and he was head of Defense Intelligence agency. I was, i confess, a little bit scared of him when i first encountered him but my boss, ash carter, and the rest of the pentagon civilian leadership held him in such high regard and respect that we were all grateful to have him part of the team. Most recently, i logged many hours with mr. Clapper in the white house situation room discussing north korea, ebola outbreaks, syria chemical weapons and the whole gamut of National Security issues. These were in the format of the Principles Committee meeting chaired by ambassador susan rice and i was on the back bench. She was of course at the table. As some of you know because i know you do some role playing here, every principals Committee Meeting begins with an intelligence update so it was almost like a ritual prayer. Mr. Clapper would entone the latest update on whatever hard problem that was on the sit room table that day. It has been my pleasure over my entire career to work with incredibly talented members of the Intelligence Community and in particular in my last tour at the white house to work with people who work directly with mr. Clapper. I know i speak for not only myself but for legions of intelligence professionals in noting the integrity and humanity with which he has led the Intelligence Community from his various roles. He truly personifies the term servant leader. Its a special honor to be able to introduce you tonight. The other thing that shows the humility of that is i did a little bit of surveying some of his former teammates and they said a favorite saying of his is their job was to be down there in the engine room shoveling intel coal. So i am sure that we will have more than coal from the conversation that he offers us today. So it is my distincti honor to invite mr. James clapper to the podium. Thank you very much. [ applause ] thanks very much. Its great to be here. I first think i should pay tribute both to dr. Holegate and as well the gentleman sitting to her right who im sure is known to many, chris koejen. Chris and i worked together when chris served with great distinction as the chairman of whats called the National Intelligence council. If any of you are looking for role models for public service, you only need look right here at laura and chris. What i thought id do tonight is and i think im going to try not to talk too long because what im really interested in is dialogue and questions and discussion. Ill talk about 20 minutes about some ruminations on the profession of intelligence. I do that by way of a commercial. Im writing a book. Reflecting on the 50plus years or so i spent in the profession of intelligence. So for the first time in a long time i had some time for contemplation. I thought id share some of those ruminations with you and hopefully if youre not already interested, at least consider public service, National Security and i think more specifically im here to recruit for intelligence. In doing so, just a couple of lessons i learned along the way. Again, ill just touch on some of these things and we can talk more about them in the q a period. My father was an Army Intelligence officer. He served in world war ii, specifically signal intelligence, collecting Enemy Communications and breaking codes and that sort of thing. He served during world war ii and during the korean war and then coincidentally, quite by accident, he and i served together in vietnam in 1965 and 66. So, in some ways i probably inherited the intelligence gene from him. In fact, first time in my life i knew i was going to be an Intelligence Officer i was about 12 years old. It was 1953, and typically military families when youre moving from duty station to duty station you move a lot in the military, parents would drop the kids at the grandparents and go on to the next place, find a place to live, get the house set up and come back and retrieve the kids from the grandparents. You just stayed out of the way. So in the summer of 1953, we had just returned from japan oh k cado, and were on here way to fort devins, massachusetts. So my parents dropped my sister and me off at my grandparents in philadelphia. Grandkids love i have four grandkids now and you spoil them. The big thing was i could stay up as late as i wanted to watch television. Back in the day, back in 1953, television was still a novelty. Not like it is now. So anyway, one of my favorite shows on friday night was the sha mitts beer mystery hour. They used to show old charlie chan movies. I loved them, from the 30s. One friday, the first friday i was there as a matter of fact, i decided about 12 30 in the morning i was going to surf. For all of you in this room, in those days when you surfed, you had to actually go up to the tv and turn the dial. I know thats a completely foreign concept but thats the way it worked. And you only had like 13 channels. Thats all. Black and white. Big huge television with vacuum tubes. Nothing like you have, flat screens and all that. Anyway, so im turning the dial between channel 4 and 5 and about halfway between those two ch channels i heard talking. Thats odd. I held the tv selector right there halfway between channel 4 and 5 and i held it for about 15 minutes and i figured out it was the Philadelphia Police department dispatcher. And it was really interesting to me because there was all kinds mayhem going on in the city of philadelphia. It was really interesting. So after a while it got tiresome, tiring holding that tv knob so i switched it to make sure i could get it back and then i ran out to the kitchen and got some toothpicks and stuck them in the selector dial so it would stay in that one position. So i guess i hacked my grandparents black and white tv set. Anyway, i started listening. It was just interesting. I stayed up until 2 30 or 3 00 in the morning. The next night i wanted to do the same thing and i got a map from the city of philadelphia and i started plotting police calls, where they would dispatch cruisers and all this sort of thing. And it didnt take too long. Im doing this night after night, bear in mind. I could figure out where the high crime areas were in philadelphia and all this sort of thing. Then, the police use these 10 codes like 104 and 106 and they have certain meanings. So i got a bunch of threebyfive cards and started writing these down and when i started figuring them out because you could figure out the context and they would compromise them and say what they really were, then i figured out that they had a call sign allocation system where Police Cruisers in each district would have a unique set of call signs that they would call the crui r cruiser, whoever was riding in it. Then i also found out that the police officers, the lieutenant and above, had their own personal call signs. So i had these files set up and pretty soon just by the way they dispatched Police Cruisers, i figured out what the Police District boundaries were in the city of philadelphia. After about three weeks of this, i had a pretty good idea how the Philadelphia Police department worked. I didnt really know what i was doing. It just seemed a cool thing to do. So my dad who spent his life in the signal intelligence business, he and my mom come back to pick up my sister and me and my dad said, hey, what have you been doing . So i whip out my map with the Police Districts on it and the high crime areas. I whip out my i guess you call it metadata today but my threebyfive cards. 65 years ago, i still remember the expression on my dads base, my god, ive raised my own replacement. I told that story unfortunately for humor but also to make a serious point because it does illustrate, even though i didnt know what i was doing, it does illustrate the nature of the work in intelligence. Youre figuring out a problem where you dont know all the facts. You have to draw inferences. You have to corroborate your hypothesis, test your theory, and then at some point in time youll come up with, you know, thats a fact, thats a fact i can go with. Thats kind of what i did, even though i didnt know. But anyway, thats when i knew i was going to be in intelligence. Anyway, fast forward, i enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve in 1961. Moved to the air force, was commissioned i went to the university of maryland, finished up there in 1963 and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in the air force. I did 32 years in the air force, moved we moved 23 times in that 32 years. My last job in active duty, as laura indicated, 00 i wi was di of dia. I was still working for the government. I did the cobar towers investigation in 1996 which is when i got religion about terrorism. We can talk about that if you want. The gilmore commission, the commission headed by former governor jim gilmore of virginia on weapons of mass destruction. Served on the nsa, National Security Advisory Board for four years, and i taught intelligence at the graduate level. I came back in 2001, specifically two days after 9 11, as director of what was then called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency which is now the national gio spatial intelligence agency. Did that almost five years, was out for a couple months and bob gates who was then secretary of defense who had been the dci, the director of Central Intelligence when i was dia director asked me to come back and be the undersecretary of defense for intelligence which oversees all intelligence and dod. The deal was only 19 months and then he got held over and asked me to stay on so 19 months turned into three and a half years. I thought i was done and i was dra goned one more time and i stopped that on january 20th and i can tell you it is a great time to be a former. I went to vietnam in that was my war, Southeast Asia, did two tours there, 65 and 66. I dont know how many of you may have seen at least some of the series, i think its on pbs, by ken burns on vietnam. And it is very well done, and having lived through that era, both the war itself and the aftermath of it which was a very traumatic time for this country. I really resonate with that series because i think it captured not only the facts but the atmosphere of it as well. For me personally, that was absolutely the worst year of my life, both personally and professionally. I hated the war. I became very disillusioned about it. I briefed for a time, general westmoreland who was the commander there, and then i really got disillusioned. So i was all ready to get out of the air force as soon as i could after my tour was up, came about this close, and for some reason somebody sort of plucked me out of anonymity and mentored me. It was a couple general officers that picked me out of the crowd for some reason. And that had a huge, huge impact on my life and my career. I just mention that because to emphasize the importance of mentoring. Say well, i dont have anybody to mentor. Well, i would commend to you and what id always tell people, young people in our agencies that if you see somebody that you think would be who is a role model for you, ask them to mentor you. Dont wait to be asked. There are no thinking senior, i dont care what the capacity, will turn you down because theyre going to be so flattered and honored that you asked. Thats a way to help yourself advance your career wherever you go. I just mention that very briefly because of the huge impact it had on me. Then i was back in actually texas for a while, went back volunteered to go back for a second tour which in contrast to the first one was very, very rewarding. I was flying Reconnaissance Missions on the back end of some old rickety c47s from world war ii and commanded a detachlt and flew about 73 combat support missions. My second tour was a great tour. So, after my second tour in Southeast Asia which ended in june of 1971, another mentor who planted me in the heady environment of the front office of the National Security agency at fort meade, maryland. I was at this point a young captain. I had about 8 years service, and i was working directly f for turned out to be two threestar officers, two threestar directors. Theyre both dead now so i can talk about them. I bring this up because of the contrasting styles in their leadership. I served for the last year working for admiral then vice admir admiral noll guiler. He was followed by air force threestar general, director of nsa who was only there a year, then he got his fourstar and went onto another assignment in the air force. I bring this up just to mention the two contrasting leadership styles and i recount this in the book. Admiral guiler was a very demanding boss, very smart but he was extremely hard on people. What i watched happen, from my advantage as military assistant which meant i kept his calendar and tracked his papers and all that sort of thing, so i had a lot of opportunities to observe. And what i noticed is that that style of leadership is effective if youre very dictatorial, demanding and very harsh with people. It is effective. People will do exactly the minimum and nothing else, and dont ever depend on i watched this too. People were afraid to convey bad news to the director because they didnt want to incur they were afraid of incurring his wrath. He would fire people on the spot. So then the next director came in. Admiral guiler left and general phillips came in and he was the exact opposite. The antithesis. 180 degrees out. Very quiet, very introverted, very courteous with everyone, very gracious. The impact was amazing to see the difference in the way people reacted to that. People would bring ideas to him. People were not afraid to tell him, hey, this is screwed up, you need to do something about it. They werent reluctant to do that. Now, both styles of leadership are effective, they both work. So fast forward 20 years and now im a threestar general and im now a director of an intelligence agency, in this case, dia, Defense Intelligence agency. So what i tried to do is remember that experience, both positive and negative, and yeah, there are times when you do have to be tough with people, but by and large what i found in my 50plus years in the intel business is people want to do the right thing. They want to do the mission. They want to do it well and they want to excel in it. You just have to create an environment where that can happ happen. Leadership and intelligence ultimately, penultimately i guess is about motivating others to use their intellects. Thats one of the great things from a diversity standpoint about the Intelligence Community. Its all about your brain. It doesnt matter what your ethnic group is, your gender, your sexual preference, none of that matters. Its your mind is what counts in the Intelligence Community and the interesting work that you have the opportunity to engage in. I sort of consider that kind of a leadership laboratory. It will be in the book but i thought id mention it because in the context of leadership. Looking back i think the one factor that has changed the Intelligence Community, the thing that has changed the Intelligence Community more than anything else looking back historically is technology. Its not i mean, when we had traumas like 9 11, yes, that had an impact. Reorganizations which i think are highly overrated, yeah, but what has really historically changed the business of intelligence is technology. I say that in the context of adversary technology, what are the adversaries doing and our own to cope with it. So fast forward on the six and a half years i spent as director of National Intelligence, my focus was on integration of the community and that was the central message from the 9 11 commission which was convened which chris served on, was convened to examine what happened and what went wrong in the 9 11 attacks. So one of the major recommendations that came out of the commission was their view that the nation needed a director of National Intelligence. First they called it the nid. The National Intelligence director, acronyms arent very appealing, the nid . Anyway, it came out dni. The notion was to have someone as a fulltime responsibility to champion integration across the community. U. S. Intelligence community is the premiere capability on the planet. Its huge in total, 70 billion plus if you count the dod and the National Intelligence program. That is larger than all but maybe three of the cabinet departments, three or four of them, as a program. Its huge. Its a major enterprise to run. 16 components. 6 agencies including now the fbi which is very much a part of the u. S. Intelligence community. So how to integrate that, draw on the complimentary strengths of each of the agencies. Thats what i worked on during the six and a half years i was there. Its a neverending journey. Youre not all done with integrating by close of business friday. I think the high, the low and the most interesting and we can talk about it during the q a, i think the high for me was being present in the white house situation room during

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