Spy Chief Calls Iran Deal Workable, Commits to Transparency

The U.S. intelligence community has sufficient independent capabilities to verify Iran’s future compliance with the pending nuclear arms deal, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said Wednesday.

“Five days after the deal was struck, we were required to submit a report to Congress” on verification, and “I’m pretty confident—though we never say 100 percent—that we can in fact verify from our own sources what the international community does through the International Atomic Energy Agency,” Clapper told a summit on the state of intelligence put on by AFCEA International and the nonprofit Intelligence and National Security Alliance. “These will be very intrusive inspections, with unprecedented access.”

The nation’s spymaster repeatedly invoked the comic book hero Spiderman in speaking to a gathering of mostly contractors at the Washington Convention Center. He noted that the character debuted in 1962—the year Clapper entered intelligence work—and cited his motto “with great power comes great responsibility.”

Spiderman, with his alter ego Peter Parker, “is known for his genius, superhuman strengths and great cognitive sense,” Clapper said. “He has a lot in common with the intelligence community—our customers expect us to be clairvoyant.”

The more direct link, Clapper said, is that Spiderman, unlike the typical superhero who battled villains, displayed his “inner struggles” for survival while staying true to his girlfriend and dying uncle.

“Sometimes Peter couldn’t keep a promise to a friend,” Clapper said. “The intelligence community too faces tough choices,” he said, citing the needs to keep sources and methods secret, be transparent, and keep terrorists from harming the county while respecting privacy and civil liberties.

“The solutions to the conflicts are not easy,” he said. Of the 17 agencies under his purview, only the CIA and his own directorate are independent of larger departments, “where it’s not easy to follow the laws, rules and processes,” he said. “This gets lost in the public discussion. It’s not unusual at our meetings for us to pull out copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. It’s part of our daily business, which is what makes the intelligence community unique,” he added. “We make hard decisions in a difficult business in challenging times.”

Though the intel community must protect secrets and tradecraft, there is a proactive effort for greater transparency that would have shocked Clapper as young man, he said, mentioning his appointment in February of a transparency working group to establish principles. “Transparency helps us correct misunderstandings, show what we do and why we’re worthy of Americans’ trust, and show that what we do is a worthwhile contribution to allies around the world,” he added. “We follow the law, and when we make mistakes we own up.”

His office in recent years released 5,000 pages of declassified documents and pushed them out on Facebook and Twitter. Staffers spoke on global threats at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. And when the ODNI website published the “bookshelf” of items belonging to the late terrorist Osama bin Laden captured in the 2011 raid in Pakistan, “we got 2 million page views, more than those for all of 2013 and 2014 put together,” the former Air Force general said.

But the principles of transparency also include “how to properly blow the whistle, someone to reach out to other than the public,” Clapper said. “Whether you’re a blue badge (government) or a green badge (contractor), if you see something you think is wrong, there are legitimate avenues for whistleblowers.”

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who exposed domestic spying activities in 2013, “did untold damage to our collecting capabilities,” Clapper said. In Afghanistan, “terrorists went to school” on what he revealed. “On the other hand, he forced some needed transparency, particularly on programs affecting privacy. If that’s all he had done, I could have understood or even tolerated it. But he exposed things that have nothing to do with those domestic issues.”

Clapper boasted of the intelligence community’ successful use of videos and mapping imagery to demonstrate the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, and Russian misdirection on the Malaysian jetliner that crashed in the Ukraine in 2014. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, he noted, was an unsung hero of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, and in mapping out recovery procedures after the April 2015 earthquake in Nepal.

Asked by former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte about prospects for the intelligence budget, Clapper said the 2011 Budget Control Act spending caps and sequester mean “we’ll be in a mode of uncertainty for a while”—sequestration could continue until 2021. “Living year to year makes it hard to plan,” he added. “Uncertainty has a huge impact on our most valuable asset—our workforce.”

The intel community, after a sizable post-9/11 buildup, has “been put to the litmus test in the last few years of uncertainty and reductions,” he said. “ODNI earned its keep managing what to keep and where to make cuts.”

The workforce, Clapper has noticed during his global travels, has “undergone a profound socioeconomic change. Thousands of them have been deployed to war zones multiple times, which has a huge impact on identification of the mission to attract recruits.” When Clapper was in Vietnam in 1965, he hardly ever saw civilians, he said. The IC attrition rate is about 4 percent, he said, reporting that last fall the National Counterterrorism Center advertised for 31 vacancies and received 6,000 applications.

“The younger people desire mobility,” Clapper said. “They want to come to intelligence community, then go to industry to get refreshed on technology and then come back rather than stick with one institution.” He’d like to facilitate that, he said. Clapper advised applicants not to insist on one agency but to apply to them all since “your second choice may not be that bad.” He said he would like the IC to be more open to contractors “to lay out our technology needs” to the people who make the tools.

Asked about the state of integration of the community since passage of the 2004 reform law, Clapper said, “We operate better as a community than we did 10 years ago—but it doesn’t matter if the integration was necessary or needed, it’s the law. We have a unique arrangement, though other countries try to emulate it.”

Clapper ended by quoting an email message sent to FBI staff last week from FBI Director James Comey, which spoke of the need for “humility and the weakness of overconfidence. Fortunately, life’s experiences have beaten that out of me, and the older I get the less I know,” he quoted Comey as saying. That’s why, Clapper said, “it’s so important to have people around you who see the world differently, so you make better decisions.”

When that lesson gets forgotten, “we’re more likely to make mistakes,” Clapper said. “What gets lost in the public discussion is that we’re human.” Like Spiderman and Peter Parker, “With great power comes great responsibility. We’re striving to live up to the nation’s values.”