America's Top Spy Talks Snowden Leaks and Our Ominous Future (2024)

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.

Clapper’s life is a whirl of video teleconferences and non­descript spaces—subterranean briefing rooms, flatscreen-lined command centers, and eavesdropping-proof chambers called sensitive compartmented informa­tion facilities, or SCIFs (pronounced “skiffs” in spookspeak). His armored, antenna-topped black SUV—more tank than car—even has a satellite dish to keep Clapper in secure contact wherever he’s driving around DC. When he travels, a special team converts a hotel room into a secure communi­cations suite. His digital hearing aids are regularly checked by security to ensure that no foreign adversary is listening, and his counterintelligence team dumbs down the iPads he uses to brief the president in the Oval Office so that they can’t transmit or eavesdrop.

Clapper holds one of the broadest portfolios in government. The entire world is his domain: every election, economic upheaval, technological advance, terrorist plot, or foreign leader’s bad hair day. “I never get a pass in meetings,” he says.

Thanks to the documents leaked by Snowden, the American public now knows that Clapper’s empire encompasses more than 107,000 employees, roughly equivalent to the population of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Their combined budget exceeds $52 billion, including $10 billion for the NSA and $14 billion for the CIA, $2.6 billion of which goes for covert action programs like drone strikes and sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program.

It’s inside that workforce where Clapper has had his biggest successes, making headway in areas like procurement reform and IT upgrades or building partnerships with foreign governments and domestic agencies. Clapper has also tried hard to improve diversity, which he says still has a long way to go, and he became an unlikely champion for integrating LGBT employees into the intelligence commu­nity. “If I’d been able to work all the time on improving the institution and the community, that’d have been much more satisfying,” he says. But he knows that few outsiders will recall any of that.

Instead he will most likely be remembered for something else that originated inside his workforce: one of the most significant intelligence breaches in US history.

On Saturday, June 8, 2013, Clapper was at the office, giving a rare TV interview to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell in an attempt to quell the growing controversy over a series of leaks in The Guardian and The Washington Post about the nation’s post-9/11 surveillance programs. “It is literally—not figuratively, literally—gut-wrenching to see this happen, because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intel­ligence capabilities,” Clapper told Mitchell. Minutes later, a member of his security detail—plainclothes, Glock-carrying CIA guards who each wear generic badges iden­tifying them as a US special agent—interrupted to say Clapper had to take an urgent telephone call. That’s when he first heard the name that would, more than any other person, define his tenure: Edward Snowden.

In addition to the general shock waves that Snowden’s leaks sent, they caused a particular problem for Clapper person­ally. Upon discovering that the NSA had been vacuuming up global internet communications under a program code­named Prism, the media quickly directed a spotlight on a seemingly innocuous Capitol Hill exchange that had occurred three months earlier between Clapper and US senator Ron Wyden. In a hearing on March 12, 2013, Wyden had asked Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?”