Facts and Fears Read online

  My memories of the trip back to the United States are as vivid as those of the trip to Eritrea. We flew out on Ethiopian Airlines, which consisted of a few olive drab B-17s with “EAL” printed on their tails. Our pilot, “Bail Out” Wicker, told us he got his name because he’d parachuted out of more than one B-17 during the war. That did not inspire confidence in seven-year-old Jimmy Clapper, but thankfully we encountered no emergencies on our flight. I will never forget sitting in the nose bubble, which still had its machine-gun mount, and flying into Payne Field, where planes abandoned after the war were parked in the desert as far as the eye could see: fighters, bombers, transport planes, all baking in the sun. From Cairo, we flew to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and stayed five days, waiting for a plane to Germany. I remember standing outside our motel in short pants as the blowing sand stung my legs. We flew on a big, slow C-54 (a redesignated DC-4) from Dhahran to Frankfurt, which was still in rubble, with people everywhere begging for handouts. We stayed overnight in Bad Soden, outside the city, with no potable water, and I recall being very thirsty. From Frankfurt, we spent a day and a half on a train to Bremerhaven, single-tracking the whole way and passing mile after mile of abandoned or destroyed rolling stock: locomotives, tankers, passenger cars, and freight cars. In retrospect, Germany’s recovery from the war is a remarkable achievement. Finally, we sailed back to the United States on another converted troopship.

  My dad was assigned to Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia, which was at the time an Army signals intelligence post outside Washington. I was a huge fan of Superman and Batman, and I had a large collection of their comics, which I kept in strict chronological order and took very good care of. They’d be worth a fortune today. But when we had to relocate again, there were strict weight limits for transporting household goods and my parents didn’t want to use up their allowance with a lot of comic books. I was told we had to leave them behind, and so, with much regret, I handed over my entire pristine-condition collection to a bratty four-year-old girl named Sue. Seventeen years later, after many more moves for both of us, I married Sue, despite the fact that she no longer had my comics.

  I wasn’t aware of it, but that was a tough move for my parents, too, as we were forced to separate for a while. In 1950, after the North Koreans invaded South Korea, my dad was sent to Chitose, Japan, as the second-in-command of a small Army signals intelligence unit supporting the war effort. Chitose is on Hokkaido, the second largest and northernmost of Japan’s four main islands. It’s just across the Sea of Japan and on about the same latitude as Vladivostok, Russia. Because we couldn’t join him until suitable facilities for dependents were built, my mother, sister, and I returned to Fort Wayne, living with my grandparents on their 160 acres while I was in fourth grade and part of fifth, before we joined my dad near the end of 1951.

  Regular Army soldiers viewed the signals intelligence guys in the Army Security Agency as having more brains than brawn and more of an affinity for electronics than shooting, fighting, and sleeping on the ground. But in Chitose, every now and then the commanding officer and my dad wanted to remind the troops that they were part of the Army, and so they’d take the signals intelligence unit to the field and practice putting up tents, operating a field mess, and doing weapons proficiency training. My dad took me along on one of these summer encampments, equipped with cut-down fatigues, a web belt, a canteen, the smallest helmet liner my dad could find, and even a small backpack. The first sergeant, the senior enlisted man in the unit, took a shine to me and let me carry his (unloaded) M1 rifle, or maybe he saw me as a convenient way to get out of having to carry it himself. Either way, it was a cool experience for an eleven-year-old, and undoubtedly something that can’t be done in today’s Army, even on Bring Your Child to Work Day.

  I was enamored with the little I knew of my dad’s work, and I was learning a lot about soldiering from watching him, but it was something my mother did in Chitose in 1952 that had a lifelong impact on how I viewed the world. This was before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling that desegregated schools in the States, but it was four years after President Truman signed Executive Order 9981, banning racial discrimination in the military. The executive order may have desegregated the armed forces institutionally, but not socially.

  Much of the social life on military bases, particularly overseas, and certainly on the remote base in Chitose, was centered on the Officers’ Club. On Sundays the club always served a fancy brunch, putting out its best linen and china and hiring a Japanese band to play and sing its amusing interpretations of popular American songs. The officers, including my dad, who was then a captain, wore dress uniforms, while their wives were in their Sunday best, complete with hats and white gloves. Even the kids dressed up, which for me was torture.

  At my age, I didn’t know and didn’t care about who the senior officers in the club were; I didn’t know the colonels and lieutenant colonels. But one Sunday, I recognized my dentist, who was a first lieutenant, a junior Army officer like my dad, and one of the very few black Army officers on the base. On that day my family had a prime table near the band, but when my dentist came in, he took a seat by himself on the perimeter of the room. I noticed him there but didn’t think much of it. When the music stopped, my mother—and I’m sure she picked this timing on purpose—stood up and rather ostentatiously walked over to my dentist’s table. Many of the officers and their wives in the room noticed and pointedly watched her. She talked with him for a minute or two, invited him to sit with us, took him by the hand, and led him through the center of the room to our table. As she did, all the senior officers began staring at my dad, their faces projecting their unspoken questions—What is your wife doing? Can’t you get her under control? I’ll never forget my dad’s expression—a mixture of amusement, admiration, and fear. But to his great credit, he made my sister and me shift our chairs to make room at the table for our guest.

  There may have been consequences for my parents, although if there were, they never mentioned them. In fact, my mother never said a word about what she’d done, even though she spoke to me about a lot of other things, sometimes incessantly. That may be why I remember that Sunday brunch so vividly, even though it was more than sixty-five years ago. When I was at a very impressionable age, my mother showed me that the color of someone’s skin doesn’t determine the human dignity they deserve. That lesson stayed with me and influenced decisions I’ve made in both my personal and professional lives.

  When my family left Japan in 1953, en route to Littleton, Massachusetts, my sister and I were parked with my mother’s parents in Philadelphia. This was a good deal for me, because my grandparents let me stay up as late as I wanted to watch TV. Television was a great novelty, since we didn’t have one in Japan. On Friday nights, the old movies would end about 12:30, and one night I did the 1950s equivalent of channel surfing, which required actually walking up to the set and manually turning the selector dial. There were only four channels, and one night I stopped between channels four and five—I’ll never forget this—because I heard voices speaking in a clipped cadence. There was no picture, just voices. I listened for maybe fifteen minutes as they batted words and numbers back and forth in speech patterns bordering on the nonsensical. Finally I figured out that I’d stumbled onto the broadcast frequency of the Philadelphia Police Department dispatcher. I wanted to hear more, but my arm was getting tired, so I went to the kitchen, found some toothpicks, and stuck them in the dial to secure it. That’s right, I “hacked” the Philadelphia Police Department, using my grandparents’ black-and-white TV set and some toothpicks.

  The next night I was prepared with a map of the city of Philadelphia and began plotting the addresses where the police cruisers were dispatched. After a few nighttime surveillance sessions, I figured out where the police district boundaries were, based on which cruisers responded to specific locations. I wrote down anything they said that I didn’t understand, and kept listenin
g until I had figured out what all the “10” codes (10-4, 10-5, etc.) were, the system for call signs, and the personal identifiers for lieutenants and above. I got a pack of index cards to keep track of all the facts I was collecting. Soon I was staying up every night to build my “database.” About a month later, when my parents came to Philadelphia to retrieve my sister and me, my dad asked, “So what’ve you been up to this summer?” I showed him my map and my card files, and I gave him a thorough briefing on how police operations worked in the city. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as he exclaimed, “My God, I’ve raised my own replacement!”

  One evening in the fall of 2015, when I was the director of national intelligence, I was shooting the breeze with my staff and recounted this story. A few weeks later, my speechwriter put it into the script for a speech I was scheduled to give for a CIA-sponsored event at George Washington University on “The Ethos and the Profession of Intelligence.” I hadn’t seriously considered it before, but this vignette from my childhood illustrates what we do in the intelligence profession in simple terms. Intelligence involves research, determination, persistence, patience, continuity, drawing inferences in the absence of complete information, and taking advantage of vulnerabilities and what you overhear in others’ conversations, no matter how cryptic and jargon-filled they are. Obviously, the Philadelphia Police Department hadn’t foreseen that a twelve-year-old kid would listen in on its radio transmissions, let alone map out its operations. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that little avocation, more than sixty years ago, started me down the path to service in the intelligence business.

  My family spent most of my seventh-grade year in Littleton while my dad completed the Army Security Agency Officers Career Course at Fort Devens. We lived in an old farmhouse on eighty-five acres with lots of berries to pick. By 1953, when my sister was old enough to start elementary school and I was getting close to starting high school, my parents made plans to settle down in Virginia, near the Army Security Agency headquarters in Arlington. It was going to be a struggle on an Army captain’s salary, but they decided to buy a small house in the expensive Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, which would enable me to attend the new Annandale High School. I finished the seventh grade being bused to a dilapidated wreck of an elementary school near Bailey’s Crossroads, called the Woodburn Annex. My only distinct memory of that spring was our seventh-grade field trip to New York, when we got to fly on a Lockheed Super Constellation. For me, that plane was the pinnacle of speed and luxury, and the only thing it was missing was a nose bubble with a machine-gun mount.

  As planned, I enrolled at Annandale High School as an eighth grader when its doors first opened to students in the fall of 1954—the year of the US Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools, an unpopular ruling in Virginia. When our neighboring Arlington County attempted to observe the ruling, the state government fired its school board and took direct control of enrollments statewide. I don’t know what would have happened if Fairfax County, where we lived, had been left to its own devices, but with the state in control, Annandale High remained segregated throughout my four years there. I wasn’t involved in segregation protests or anything radical, but I often thought about what my mother had done for my dentist in Chitose.

  Meanwhile, things weren’t going quite as planned for my dad. After a series of reorganizations involving the three service cryptologic commands—the Army Security Agency, the Air Force Security Service, and the Naval Security Group—he found himself attached to the headquarters unit of a new intelligence organization—the National Security Agency—and when in 1955 NSA began its move from Arlington Hall to Fort Meade, south of Baltimore, Maryland, he was among the first reassigned. My parents decided to stay in Falls Church, and my dad had to spend several hours on the road every day, all so I could remain in my high school. This had to be particularly frustrating, because my brother, Mike, had just joined our family. Mike was born at Fort Belvoir seven years after my sister, Ruth Anne, was born at Walter Reed, seven years after I came into the world.

  When I was old enough to drive, my dad bought me a 1947 Cadillac convertible. I think he intentionally picked a car that weighed over two tons and got nine miles to the gallon so I couldn’t go very far with it. It was broken most of the time anyway, and we spent many weekends together working on it and “bonding.” I still keep a model of that car, and it always reminds me of dad and our grease-monkey Saturday afternoons together.

  By my junior year, I was working as a janitor at our church, and over the summer as a lifeguard at our neighborhood pool. And I was terribly in love, as only a seventeen-year-old can be. Then, in early 1958, my dad was unexpectedly reassigned to Germany. I’m sure this was stressful for my parents, but for me it was a Shakespearean tragedy. I announced that I wasn’t going and that I had made arrangements to live in a friend’s basement for the summer and my senior year. My mother then did a brave thing—she sold our house and traveled to Germany with my sister and brother to join my dad without me. I lasted about six weeks before I wrote a letter asking them to “send my orders” so that I could rejoin the family in Germany. That was a hugely disappointing moment for me, to admit I couldn’t manage life by myself and to leave Virginia.

  Life can sometimes loop back on itself, and in 2013, when I was the DNI, Annandale High asked me to be its graduation speaker, fifty-nine years after I first enrolled there. The ceremony fell on June 13, and when I accepted the invitation, I had no idea how difficult that week would be for me. It was two and a half months after damaging mandatory budget cuts went into effect for the Intelligence Community, and I was fighting the Defense Department to keep intelligence professionals from being furloughed. It was three weeks after Edward Snowden had fled to Hong Kong, and stolen documents were leaking out through press outlets, cutting into intelligence capabilities on a daily basis. I thought about canceling, but was glad I didn’t. The students were in high spirits, and they also made me laugh when I arrived. Rather than my donning the gown commensurate with my master’s degree, the students asked me to wear the same one they were wearing, to indicate that, like them, I had yet to graduate from Annandale High. I was game, and I did.

  I took about two minutes of my commencement speech to vent, before talking about the graduating class, their accomplishments, and what lay ahead for them. I closed my speech that night by telling them:

  If you take care of yourself, if you have a vision of what you want for the future, if you’re kind, and attentive, and responsible, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ll live an interesting and successful life. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll reach every goal you set out to achieve. Fifty-nine years ago, I set out to graduate from Annandale High, and I didn’t reach that goal. I never got the chance to wear a red Annandale robe and mortarboard until tonight.

  And it’s okay to fall short of some of your goals. Even if it feels like a disaster at the time, you’ll most likely do some pretty cool other things, as long as you do your best to stay on the right path. I’m proud of how things have turned out in my life. And I’ve never, ever, been bored. Although these days, I’d like a little boredom. Sometimes, by some circuitous route, you eventually reach those goals you thought had long passed you by. So tonight, I get to wear Annandale red. And you know, it feels pretty sweet.

  Back in the summer of 1958, leaving Virginia for Germany with my tail tucked between my legs, the feeling was not pretty sweet. I took a ship to Bremerhaven and a train to Nuremberg, where my parents met me and drove me the last few miles to Herzo Base—less than fifty miles from the East German border—where my dad was the operations officer of an Army signals intelligence battalion. His group was part of an enormous effort to intercept communications among the newly formed Warsaw Pact nations: the Soviet Union and seven satellite countries in Eastern Europe. My dad had a knack for being posted in places just in time for a flash point, and I had just barely arrived when Nikita Khrushchev deli
vered his November speech, with an ultimatum to remove all Western forces from West Berlin in six months or risk war. President Eisenhower maintained American troops in West Berlin, and he kept the number of service members stationed in West Germany at a quarter million, plus their dependents.

  I fell into an easy routine with all the other Army brats at Nuremberg American High School. We were a tiny school and had just enough male bodies to form a football team to play against other dependent-American high schools. I played guard on both offense and defense, not a natural position for me at 160 pounds, and I soon got over leaving my love interest behind in Virginia. The recent history of Nuremberg was intensely omnipresent, and I remember touring the courtroom where the International Military Tribunal had been held just thirteen years before. Here, the Holocaust was not something you just read about in a textbook, and discussions of the atrocities humans are capable of committing were not academic. I think that for all of us, it put the work our parents were doing to counter the Soviets in a sobering light.

  That year I befriended two soldiers stationed at Herzo Base—ostensibly working for my dad—who were licensed amateur ham radio operators. Because high-frequency radio carried over great distances, the military in those days sanctioned hams as an alternative way of communicating with family and friends back in the States. Cooperating hams in America could connect the overseas radio operators via phone and save them a ton of money in overseas phone charges. It was all fascinating to me, so I hung out with these two soldiers, both of whom had college degrees and were really good guys. They taught me about communications theory and practice and about the propagation effects of weather, time of day, and seasons of the year, especially in the high-frequency band of the radio frequency spectrum. That primer was a good foundation years later, since HF was the communications mainstay for the Soviets and Chinese during the Cold War. More important to me at the time was the fact that I had a chance to encounter the caliber of people who were in the same profession as my dad. They were not at all interested in the Army as a career, but they were conscientious and professional about their duties, and they stressed that if I was going to join the military, I should do so as a commissioned officer. I was impressed, and the idea of service was growing on me.