Facts and Fears Quotes

“my mother showed me that the color of someone’s skin doesn’t determine the human dignity they deserve.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“it was actually the Republican-controlled House that voted to cut funding to foreign embassies, leading up to the September 11, 2012 attack”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“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.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“what Russia did to the United States during the 2016 election was far worse than just another post–Cold War jab at an old adversary.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Obama never took for granted all the “invisible” people who work behind the scenes”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Culture, custom, and resistance to change are formidable obstacles that take time to overcome.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“When one of them yelled, “I can’t hear you,” Bush responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people—and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” I thought that was an inspired, and inspiring, statement to those responders and to the nation, and I wanted to get to work.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“I took the opportunity to complain about our typical government approach of making the same mistakes again and again. I said, “It reminds me of the ancient tribal wisdom that goes, ‘When you’re riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ Well—in Washington—we sometimes do things differently.” I explained: When we find ourselves riding a dead horse, we often try strategies that are less successful, such as: buying a stronger whip, changing riders, saying things like: “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse,” appointing a committee to study the horse, lowering the standards so that more dead horses can be included, appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse, hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse, harnessing several dead horses together—to increase speed—attempting to mount multiple dead horses in hopes that one of them will spring to life, providing additional funding and training to increase the dead horse’s performance, declaring that, since a dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it’s less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore, contributes more to the mission than live horses, and my favorite—promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“The question for me is, to what extent are we as a society willing to sacrifice personal liberties in the interests of common safety?”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Some fifty-five years earlier, I'd first taken an oath to defend the Constitution, and now, in 2016, I was confronted with the fact that our election was under attack by a foreign power—the Russians no less, who'd wanted to destroy the United States for nearly the entire time I'd been alive—and that a candidate for president had just encouraged them to use their intelligence services to help him defeat his opponent. I didn't know what would come next, but I felt I bore some responsibility for protecting America from these threats. I'd grown up in a family devoted to serving the nation. I myself had served in every administration since President Kennedy's and was a political appointee for both President Bush and President Obama. I'd tried to serve apolitically, and yet, hearing Donald Trump ask Russian intelligence to attack his political opponent—in a very specific, direct way—made me fear for our nation.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Sue and I stood in the hallway, waiting on Vice President Biden to arrive to officiate at the ceremony. When he appeared, I took a couple of steps forward, preparing to shake his hand, but without making eye contact with me, he went straight to Sue, thanking her for the sacrifices she'd made, for her service, and for letting me come back to government. What a classy thing to do! I thought. In that moment I knew that he understood how difficult life can be for families, who also serve, and who often see when we're frustrated, sad, or angry--or sometimes, elated--but can't always be told the reason why.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“I observed, as I entered, that the office is designed to impress and intimidate. My eyes took in the blue presidential seal, embedded directly in the center of the oval rug. Rays of gold and bronze radiated out from it across the rug and projected onto the vertically striped walls. Between my meeting in May and my first President's Daily Brief in September, President Obama would swap out the radiant rug for a solid, cream colored one with a white presidential seal. His more muted color scheme projected a still confident but more relaxed commander in chief, one who embraced the power of the office but equally exhibited the humility inherent in his character ... When I was finally lead to the Oval Office entrance, I saw President Obama standing at a credenza in front of his scheduler's desk, casually looking over the front pages of a pile of newspapers. He looked up, gave me his patented smile, stepped over, and shook my hand. I have no doubt that his greeting was choreographed to put me at ease.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“After we exchanged uncomfortable pleasantries, he inquired if I'd been to Egypt before. John piped up and said, 'Hey, general, why don't you tell the president about that time your dad took a swing at King Farouk?' Mubarak, who speaks fluent English, turned his gaze on me, and I nearly choked. I stuttered for a moment, sure an international incident was under way, but after I told the story, he roared with laughter and kept us way past schedule.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“While airborne, we ran exercises to assess our readiness to respond if threatened. We could always respond with catastrophic force. We could never prevent the annihilation of our homeland. No one who'd held the responsibility for deploying nuclear weapons during an exercise could deny that reality. It was this experience that convinced me that neither side would ever intentionally inflict a nuclear attack on the other.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“As control of the regime passed from Kim Il-sung to Kim Jong-il to Kim Jong-un, my personal assessment of the threat posed by the Hermit Kingdom never changed. If anything, the actions and public pronouncements of the 'Dear Leaders' over the decades reinforced my conclusion that none of them wanted to go back to fighting, but that they've kept the mechanics of war set on a hair trigger, and that any sane US policy on North Korea needed to be based on an understanding of that dynamic.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“At the Pentagon I'd often heard the military truism that every nation is preparing to refight its last war. Militaries are led by bureaucracies that want to prove they've learned from their past mistakes, and they'll apply those lessons to whatever situation they encounter next.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“On day one, he made it very clear that the Korean War had never formally ended, the 1953 armistice was just a cease-fire agreement, and North Korea could, and would, invade the South if given the opportunity.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“I want to make this clear: Putin’s government used intelligence tradecraft and social media savvy to lie to the American public throughout the 2016 campaign and afterward, and it was those lies that led directly to the deepening of divisions in our society, to the erosion of our government institutions and destabilization of our democracy, to Donald Trump’s election, and to the demonstrations of hate in Charlottesville.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“We have elected someone as president of the United States whose first instincts are to twist and distort truth to his advantage, to generate financial benefit to himself and his family, and, in so doing, to demean the values this country has traditionally stood for. He has set a new low bar for ethics and morality. He has caused damage to our societal and political fabric that will be difficult and will require time to repair. And, close to my heart, he has besmirched the Intelligence Community and the FBI—pillars of our country—and deliberately incited many Americans to lose faith and confidence in them. While he does this, he pointedly refuses to acknowledge the profound threat posed by Russia,”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“In a 2005 Russian “state of the nation” speech, Vladimir Putin had said: “Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our cocitizens and copatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself.” He blamed the United States for that disaster and wanted nothing more than for Russia to regain glory at our expense. By May 2017, when Jim Comey was fired and I began appearing on the talk shows, we’d learned that the Russian operation had been even more expansive than the IC had assessed in January. We knew now that the Russians had thousands of Twitter accounts and tens of thousands of bots that posted more than a million tweets. They posted more than a thousand videos on YouTube with days of streaming content. Facebook has said Russian content reached 126 million of its American users—an astonishing number, considering that only 139 million Americans voted.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“In 2017, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times, “Trump is not good at much, but he is wickedly good at sticking his thumb in the eye of the educated elites.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Throughout the day, Republicans in the committee grilled Secretary Clinton on why more wasn’t done to provide the necessary security for Ambassador Stevens in Libya prior to the attack that resulted in his death. Now, the irony of this is, when looking at congressional votes, it was actually the Republican-controlled House that voted to cut funding to foreign embassies, leading up to the September 11, 2012 attack.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“By that point I had read the emails in question and come to my own conclusions. None of them was sent to or from anyone outside of government, and none was marked in a way that would indicate it was classified, but several did discuss sensitive intelligence sourcing that shouldn’t have been transmitted across open internet connections, where they could be intercepted by an adversary.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“The Center for American Progress had published a report in the fall of 2014 with some astounding statistics. As it wrote in an analysis of the 2007–9 recession, “Ninety-five percent of all income gains since the start of the recovery have accrued to the top 1 percent of US households.” This was only part of a longer trend. From 1983 to 2010, the top fifth of US families by net worth had increased their wealth by 120 percent and the middle fifth by only 13 percent; the net worth of the bottom fifth had decreased in that period. Looking at the theoretical household at the perfect center of American earnings—50 percent of American families earning more, and 50 percent earning less—they wrote, “The median family saw its income fall by 8 percent between 2000 and 2012.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“And here’s where an IC security vulnerability became glaringly evident. The CIA hadn’t attached any alerts to his background profile, and when Snowden applied to become an NSA IT administrator, contracted through Dell Technologies, NSA supposedly never verified his references. NSA assigned him in Asia, then back to Maryland, and then to Hawaii in March 2012, where he worked on IT systems in the agency’s information-sharing office. In that role, he had access to a vast array of NSA systems, programs, and data. In March 2013, he left Dell to work for Booz Allen Hamilton in a similar role, still at NSA Hawaii, and he continued to steal classified material.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“The materials Manning had leaked were embarrassing; the secrets Snowden was releasing were revealing to our adversaries and international terrorist groups how to avoid or thwart our surveillance.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Bob Gates wrote: When “the little red light went on atop a television camera, it had the effect of a full moon on a werewolf.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“The theory accords far too much credit to Hussein and doesn’t attribute the failure where it belongs—squarely on the shoulders of the administration members who were pushing a narrative of a rogue WMD program in Iraq and on the intelligence officers, including me, who were so eager to help that we found what wasn’t really there.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“We drew on all of NIMA’s skill sets to determine whether and how the suspect WMD sites might be interconnected and mutually supportive. This served as a compelling, persuasive example of what the integration of our two major legacy professions could achieve . . . and it was all wrong.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence

“Studies, of course, are one of Washington’s time-honored pastimes for simultaneously responding to criticism and conveying the image of taking action while kicking any big decisions down the road, and NIMA had become the study piñata of the Intelligence Community.”
― James R. Clapper, Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence