Former US intel chief Clapper: From the shadows to the spotlight

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Former US intel chief Clapper: From the shadows to the spotlight

By Chris Zappone

James Clapper never expected at the age of 77 to embark on a second career in the full public gaze as a commentator on intelligence and security issues.

More accustomed to operating in the shadows of the security establishment as the US director of national intelligence, Clapper says of the decision to write a book, go on national TV and feud with the United States President: "This is counter-intuitive for me."

James Clapper, former US director of national intelligence.

James Clapper, former US director of national intelligence.Credit: Jason South

Yet who in the US intelligence community, or elsewhere, would have expected to find themselves confronting a government led by a President who traffics in conspiracy theories and lies, in a culture awash with fake news, trolls and influence operations?

And that's what motivates him – what Clapper calls the "assault on truth".

As he puts it, any domain relying on empirical facts or data - science, academia, journalism - is increasingly under attack by people embracing untruths and “whacko conspiracy theory”. Intelligence is a target for this assault too.

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From the alternative theories of the Skripal poisonings, to claims about the "deep state" at work in the Trump-Russia probe, today's technology allows the public to socialise and embrace disinformation in a way unthinkable in years past.

In person, Clapper's steady gaze and firm gestures suggest a man shaped by a life of government service – first the Marines, then the Air Force (he retired as a lieutenant-general) and finally as a civilian leader.

Until last year, he advised president Barack Obama on intelligence issues, while overseeing  major US intelligence agencies. His experience spans conflict in South-east Asia, the September 11 attacks, the Edward Snowden revelations and the death of Osama bin Laden.

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Clapper briefed Trump on the conclusions about Russian interference once he took office in early 2017. Trump, irked by the continuing scrutiny about his alleged links with Russia, later lashed out at Clapper and threatened to revoke the ex-director’s security clearance.

Clapper isn’t the only member of the US intelligence community attacked by Trump. Others include colleagues such as ex-CIA chief John Brennan and ex-National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden.

US President Barack Obama and senior White House aides and officials watch the operation that ended in the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. James Clapper can be seen standing on the far right.

US President Barack Obama and senior White House aides and officials watch the operation that ended in the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. James Clapper can be seen standing on the far right.Credit: Bloomberg

As Trump showed in his meeting in Helsinki in June with Russia's leader Vladimir Putin, he prefers to cast doubt on his own country’s intelligence assessments and the institutions that make them.

“I felt that the institutions I spent over 50 years of my life defending are under assault right now and I need to speak up about it,” Clapper says over lunch in Melbourne.

What Trump is doing contravenes “our traditional values, standards and norms”, he says.

Clapper is one of the men who reckoned with Russia’s unprecedented interference campaign in the 2016 election, and he has been vocal: speaking, appearing regularly on CNN and publishing a book, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence.

How to protect institutions (as well as politicians and parties) from reputational attacks easily amplified and sustained online remains a concern of open democracies everywhere. They rely on institutions, both formal and informal, to uphold the state and defend citizens' rights.

But today’s chaotic information environment bypasses many traditional defences. Violence, spectacle, hate speech (often masquerading as “free speech”) and conspiracy theories can crowd out the real news democracy needs to function.

“There has always been an ambient level of interference [and] of collection [of intelligence] against us by the Russians," Clapper says. "The issue is when we decide there is a spike, and this is not normal and it’s not like what they’ve done in the past.”

2016 was one such time. Russia made history by using a combination of hacking, propaganda and sympathetic fringe groups to attack the American system, aiming to discredit it, hurt the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and help Trump. In doing so, Russia showed that the battle over national narratives, once thought relegated to the Cold War, was alive and well. A post-9/11 focus on terrorism had to accommodate the challenge posed by technology that allows foreign powers to radicalise not just individuals but masses.

A depiction of Lenin arriving at St Petersburg's Finland Station in April 1917 (with Stalin, who was not present, standing behind him in the carriage). He was sent to Russia by the German government.

A depiction of Lenin arriving at St Petersburg's Finland Station in April 1917 (with Stalin, who was not present, standing behind him in the carriage). He was sent to Russia by the German government.Credit: Alamy

In the sweep of history, foreign interference in another nation’s affairs is not new. During World War I, the Germans transported Vladimir Lenin to Russia from Switzerland in the hopes that his cause of communist revolution would divide Russia, distracting it from battle. It did – changing the course of history. The US and Soviet Union were active in election meddling during the Cold War. Evidence from the 1960s shows the Russians tried to influence US political leaders.

Back then, strong borders, including electronic borders, made such efforts more difficult, Clapper says. During the Cold War, “technologically, the world was dominated by two mutually exclusive telecommunication systems, one dominated by the Soviet Union, and one dominated by the West, meaning us [the US]”.

The internet has scrambled all that. With information now plentiful and malleable, people are vulnerable to ideas that lead them to harm their own nation.

Foreign influence is not just a Russian affair. China has made headlines in this area for years in Australia. The death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi revealed a coordinated Saudi effort to shift perceptions on social media. Turkey is suspected of using well-timed leaks over Khashoggi’s death to further damage Saudi Arabia’s reputation. Iran is using coordinated online tactics too.

The ongoing effect of Russian influence campaigns, marked by hacking, trolls, promotion of conspiracy theory, disinformation and a sophisticated understanding of psychology, have had a particular effect on the West.

In Clapper’s book, he discusses key moments of his career, including the controversy surrounding his famous March 2013 exchange with Senator Ron Wyden over NSA collection programs, and the leaks of classified intelligence programs by Edward Snowden three months later.

January 2017: James Comey, 
 then director of the FBI (left), James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (centre) and then CIA director John Brennan prepare to testify during a Senate hearing on Russian intelligence activities.

January 2017: James Comey, then director of the FBI (left), James Clapper, then director of national intelligence (centre) and then CIA director John Brennan prepare to testify during a Senate hearing on Russian intelligence activities. Credit: New York Times

After the Snowden revelations, Clapper said the public’s understanding of the capability and intent of the government to surveil its citizenry “was way, way exaggerated and overblown".

“People don’t understand the physical and resource limits to doing that, let alone the intent or authority,” he adds.

“That’s a narrative we could actually never tamp down because of the aura of mystery around intelligence activities,” Clapper says. The suspicion is shared in Australia, because the nation’s intelligence services “can’t be public” about all the details of their business.

In the current climate, it takes little to exploit the normal and existing distrust between the democratic state and its citizens. This has proven a valuable opening for conspiracy theorists - foreign and domestic - who play on fears of a "deep state" or conflate past intelligence failures, such as those before the US invasion of Iraq and the current Department of Justice probe into Russian interference in US politics.

(Clapper sat on the board that approved the National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction in 2002 - an event also discussed in his book.)

While Russia “is bent on undermining [the United States'] society and system and destroying it if they could”, Clapper said, China is more focused on controlling populations.

“That’s what compels a lot of Chinese behaviour, both foreign and domestic.”

Rory Medcalf, the head of the ANU's National Security College, where Clapper is a visiting professor, says: "If dissenting Chinese voices can be silenced in Australia, they can be silenced anywhere."

Then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, April 2016.

Then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, April 2016.Credit: Andrew Meares

Influence or interference operations “represent a profound challenge [for democracies] because essentially these activities are an effort to exploit virtues of open societies to undermine the foundations of trust within those societies”, Medcalf says.

“The threat is the subversion and distortion of legitimate policymaking in a democracy to serve the ends of a foreign power."

It’s with those concerns in mind that Australia passed its foreign influence laws earlier this year. Democracies remain exposed to coordinated efforts to damage them, but they are responding - slowly.

In Britain, MI5 has recently taken over the tracking of right-wing extremists from police, in part because of the international dimension of the extremists’ coordination. Security agencies, which in earlier times sought a low public profile, are being forced to wade into the public sphere.

Last month, the Australian Signals Directorate joined Twitter. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance –Australia, the US, Britain, New Zealand and Canada – also pledged to “coordinate on appropriate responses and attribution” in response to cases of “severe foreign interference”.

However, Clapper warned that advocacy by intelligence agencies in the West will likely be greeted with scepticism by the public because of their necessary secrecy.

Even if there wasn't suspicion, Clapper says that “how to sustain” accurate counter-messages to the public will remain a hard question, as his experience shows.

On October 7, 2016, a month before the US presidential election, the intelligence community took the unusual step of going public with information about the Russian interference campaign. The same day, The Washington Post published the infamous Access Hollywood audio revealing Trump’s crude comments about women. Within an hour, WikiLeaks began publishing hacked emails, which were then pumped up by Russian bots and trolls, in an apparent attempt to deflect attention from a story that embarrassed Trump.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy, May 2017.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy, May 2017.Credit: AP

The warning for the public on Russia was drowned out by a tidal wave of spectacle.

Such unpredictability makes analysts wary of seeking a fixed defence against information war.

Intelligence professor Jonathan Herrmann, for instance, has written that the US shouldn’t build “an informational Maginot Line, because there are a nearly infinite number of ways around it”.

Does this new realm of competition mean we’re drifting toward a future dominated by Russia and China?

Despite what Clapper calls the “lovefest” between the two nations - combined military exercises, joint participation in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation - Russia still harbours deep fears of China’s economic power.

As for China and the US, “the fact that the US and China’s economies are inextricably bound serves to moderate Chinese behaviour, and - up until the tariff wars - has moderated the US' behaviour as well”.

Asked if a rift between the US and Chinese economies raised the risks of war, Clapper answers “yes, theoretically”.

“I don’t think the US seriously contemplates a major war with either Russia or China,” he says – then adds a caveat. “I should say a major kinetic war.

“I think we’re already at the war in the information sphere or cyber sphere.”

Chris Zappone is an Age senior writer and a fellow at the Futures Hub of the ANU's National Security College.

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