Intelligence Community Brass Decries 'Cynicism' on 9/11 Anniversary

The 14th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Friday comes with “no specific threats” detected by the intelligence community, despite past attacks planned around that date, FBI Director James Comey said on Thursday.

Though the public “should be skeptical of all of us in the intelligence community and law enforcement, I’m concerned that [complaints about national security overreach] have spilled over to cynicism that is getting in the way of reasonable discussion of our authority and how we use it in the public square,” Comey said while on a panel of six intelligence community leaders at a summit put on by AFCEA International and the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance.

CIA Director John Brennan declined to speak on the degree of danger in Friday’s anniversary. But he spoke generally of ongoing threats from Middle East terrorist groups ISIS and AQAP, noting they operate “in a lot of areas that are ungoverned, where they can put down roots and conduct terrorism against the rest of the world. The indicators are that any plan could be moving down the timeline of execution.”

To Brennan the 9/11 anniversary means that the cooperation among partners in the intelligence community “compared with 14 years ago is light years ahead in a more difficult environment.” But more attention needs to be paid to cyberspace to meet the challenges of the new digital environment, Brennan added. The CIA’s modernization effort introduced earlier this year is “bringing the pieces together in a more integrated fashion,” he said.

Brennan challenged a questioner’s premise that the intelligence community needs to “repair trust” with the public since revelations about overseas torture and domestic surveillance. “The public gets a skewed characterization of what we do,” he said. “There are still old misunderstandings and misrepresentations by those determined to undermine U.S. intelligence, supported by our adversaries,” he said. “In the Washington goldfish bowl, everything gets magnified, and [intel agencies] need to do a better job articulating our mission.” The CIA now enjoys public favorability ratings in the 60s and 70s, Brennan said, “higher than a certain entity that goes up for reelection every so often,” a reference to Congress.

Comey added that his agency and others had contributed to public cynicism because “our day jobs are so all-consuming, the reflex is to keep it close and classified.” Ask an FBI employee to do a PR outreach, he said, and the reaction is, “Are you kidding?”

Adm. Michael Rogers, chief of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, also said he’d heard “nothing specific” about threats on Friday’s anniversary. “The chatter’s not as high as I’ve seen other times,” he said.  The biggest change he has seen in recent years in the role of the intel community is “everything has become so polarized that people are talking past each other,” he said. “In this very difficult work environment, it’s difficult to achieve consensus. We need to work together and engender greater dialogue and trust.”

Rogers praised NSA workers, calling their “value to this nation unchanged,” and said that he advises employees to stick to fundamental principles of obeying the law and protecting both the county and civil liberties. “Don’t lose sight of the reason we were created, and our allies count on us,” he said. Relationships with partner agencies “have never been better.”

Robert Cardillo, director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, said his agency is “at the cusp or in the midst of a revolution.” When he began his intel career in the early 1980s, “we operated behind closed doors,” and there was “purposeful stovepiping, or titanium pipes,” he joked. “Today some of that is still necessary, but more and more is being declassified, and we take it out in the open to reassure the taxpayers they’re getting a return on their investment.” Modern-day staff officers, he said, no longer take everything a senior analyst presents about a situation without questioning it.

Intelligence estimates of such complex situations as Syria and Iraq, Cardillo added, “are not black and white, and need more need more nuance in this noisy environment.”

Marine Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, after exclaiming how “cool” it felt to be onstage with “giants of the intel community,” said the biggest challenge today is building the “breadth and depth” of resources to confront the complexity of regions where there are no longer nation states, and older powers are resurgent. DIA is tasked “with being the premier intelligence agency,” he said, “and if there’s some competition, I’m okay with that.”

Asked about a current investigation about whether DIA officials slanted a recent analysis of ISIS, Stewart said he couldn’t discuss the case. “But intelligence is as much art as science, it’s not black and white and there is rough-and-tumble debate,” he said. “We will benefit from the result of that investigation.

Betty Sapp, director of the relatively small National Reconnaissance Office, said her agency’s work with satellites and ground-based surveillance systems has advantages for the intelligence community. “It’s because of our global reach—we don’t worry about geographic boundaries—and our flexibility for everything from treaty enforcement to humanitarian missions,” she said.  The biggest change, she added, is that her entire operation was a “black program” for its first 30 years, until 1992.

Panelists declined to comment on questions from Fox News intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge about classified documents on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, or the robustness of the government’s response to the Office of Personnel Management data breach.