 Writing a book, and by the way, I'm one and done. It's one lesson I've learned. I'll never write another book. But it afforded an opportunity to be both, it was both a cathartic and allowed an opportunity to be contemplative. And most of the book, and that's what I'm going to talk about that in a few moments, it's biographical. So it goes back to my early childhood, and I'll speak about that, and how that particular vignette that had influenced on me later. But the bulk of it deals with the last 10 years when I served in both the Bush and Obama administrations first as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, three and a half years in the Pentagon, and followed by, that ended on a Friday and following Monday as DNI, almost six and a half years as Director of National Intelligence. So the bulk of the book is on that interlude. I'm going to just highlight a few vignettes from that. But I don't want to talk too long, because what I've enjoyed certainly during the book tour I did in the United States was the interaction with the audience. And I'm very touched, honored, and overwhelmed by this turnout. And I understand two other remote breakout rooms where there are more people. So I'm very pleased about that. This is, as far as I know, the one and only foreign engagement I've had. And the place I would most want it to happen would be Australia, which means a great deal to me. Had about a 34-year association with Australian intelligence. And I love this country and the people that are here. This is my second year at ANU, which was here last June of 17. And now again, it's been just an extraordinary experience. So early, one of the things I learned was what a tremendous impact my parents had on me. My dad was served in the US Army for 28 years. He was a signal intelligence officer himself in World War II. So he was involved in intercepting, at the time, German and Japanese communications messages and converting that to useful intelligence. And most everybody got out of the military at the end of the war on demobilization. But he was so captured by this work that he stayed in it. And then we drew down greatly in a very lean time for the US Army after the war. So as a consequence, I grew up in a antenna farm, we used to say, traveling around with my father as he was assigned from post to post. And I realized in the course of writing this book, how much, even though I was young, how much that impact had influenced me later on. So I'd like to tell a story about when I first knew I was going to be an intelligence officer. I was about 12 years old, 1953, you can do the math. And we were moving from Hokkaido, Japan, where my dad had been number two in a small Army Security Agency signal intelligence detachment that was collecting communications against the Russians. And so we were on our way to Fort Devon's Massachusetts in the summer of 1953. And typically what my parents would do is go ahead to the next duty station, park my sister and me at one of the grandparents, move on, get settled, and then come back and retrieve us. And so that's what my parents did in the summer of 1953. My grandparents lived in Philadelphia. And now as a grandparent, the first line in the grandparent's job description is spoil the grandkids. So that's what my grandparents did. And the big thing, the big deal then, was television. We didn't have television in Japan in the early 50s. And it was fairly new in the United States in 1953. But my grandparents said I could watch as much television as I wanted. So I did. So the fact the first Friday night I was there stayed up and watched an old movie. And after the movie was over, about 12, 30 in the morning, I did what you'd call today surfing. Except in those days, you actually had to walk up to the TV set and turn the dial. It wasn't remote. So I'm turning the dial. There were only four channels between channel four and five. I remember this. And I just paused a little bit and picked up talking. No picture. Just talking. Well, I just stood there and held the selector dial in that position for about 15 minutes and figured out that this was the Philadelphia Police Department dispatcher. And in those days in Philadelphia, there's all kinds of murder and mayhem going on, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights. Shootings, robberies, burglaries, domestic disputes, police chases. And it was just interesting to me, for some reason, to listen to that. So after about 15 minutes, I got tired of holding the selector dial. So I ran out to the kitchen, got some toothpicks, stuck them in the selector dial. So I could just listen and have both hands free. So I guess I hacked my grandparents' TV set. So I just stayed up till 3 or 4 in the morning listening to this. So the next day, I scrounged a map of the city of Philadelphia from my grandfather. And that following evening, I started listening again. And I started plotting where the police calls were, where the police did that. And then the police used brevity codes, so-called, 10-4, 10-6, 10-8. I think they use them here in Australia, too. They all have certain meanings. And so I got the 3 by 5 cards and started writing those down when I could figure out what the meaning was just by inference. Then I figured out that just by listening that the police officers and the great lieutenant and above all the way up to the police chief had a unique call sign. And I also figured out by listening what the threshold was for getting the police chief out of bed at night. They had some bad thing happen. So I kept doing this. And I had my 3 by 5 cards plotting the police calls where they were and how they assigned cruisers. So from then, I figured out what the police district boundaries were on this map. So about three weeks later, my parents come back to retrieve my sister and me. So my dad, just to make conversation, says, so what are you even doing? So I whip out my map. I whip out my 3 by 5 cards. And I gave my dad about a 20 or 25 minute dissertation on the organization and operation of the Philadelphia Police Department. How it's organized, high crime areas, the whole thing. And it's 65 years ago, but I will never forget the expression on my dad's face. My god, I've raised my own replacement. So that's when I first knew I was going to be an intelligence officer. I like to tell the story. Fortunately, it's at least semi-humorous. But it also illustrates, and I like to do this at colleges and universities I speak to in the States, it does illustrate in a simple way a lot of what intelligence work is all about. Where in this case, and this gets to ASD does, listening to communications not intended to be collected, and then drawing hypotheses or inferences from what you hear. And can you turn that into hard information that you can confirm corroborate? You develop a hypothesis, you test those hypotheses. So that's kind of what I was doing, even though I didn't know it at age 12 years old. So I just share that with you. But the serious point is the tremendous influence that my dad had on me, and unfortunately, I didn't really comprehend that until after he's dead. So I'm going to talk briefly about five vignettes in the book, all of which occurred during my six and a half years as Director of National Intelligence. So first I'll highlight the high point of my time as DNI, which had to have been the takedown of Osama bin Laden on the 2nd of May of 2011. And so I was in the White House sitting room all day, about 13 hours straight, watching this evolution go down. And when we were reasonably sure, about 90% sure, that yes, it was Osama bin Laden. And the White House staff then put together a speech for President Obama to give that evening about 11 o'clock or so that Sunday night, announcing what had happened. And I will never forget walking out of the West Wing first time all day, and to be greeted by the sounds of a crowd across the street in Lafayette Park chanting USA, USA, USA. Boy, it really hit me then. That was an emotional impact. It was closure, certainly for the country, closure for the intelligence community, and certainly closure for me personally. And it struck me that way. Textbook example of the confluence of special operations and intelligence, a really magnificent operation. CIA understandably gets lion's share of the intelligence credit, but the operation would not have happened without both NSA, National Security Agency, and my old agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, provided crucial support to the takedown of UBL. I think the low point, if that was a high point, the low point for me was the revelations of Edward Snowden. That raises a whole range of issues that we can certainly talk about, safety and security on one hand, civil rights and privacy on the other. At some, I've encountered college students in the United States who regarded him as a hero for what he did. And I could almost understand and maybe accept what he did if it was only limited, if what he exposed was only limited to so-called domestic surveillance. But unfortunately, he exposed a whole lot of other capability that had absolutely nothing to do with domestic surveillance. This has seriously impacted our foreign intelligence capabilities. And I say our, I send that to the Five Eyes to include Australia. So when I'm speaking to a US audience, I tell them, if you are paying taxes, you're going to be paying to recover from the damage that Edward Snowden has done for some years to come. Because it seriously impacted our foreign intelligence capabilities and jeopardized our safety and security. So that was clearly the low point, both institutionally for the intelligence committee and for me personally. It was an occasion of the infamous exchange I had with Senator Wyden. I won't go into all the detail there unless you want to talk about it. Most frustrating thing, and this is one time where it's a great time to be a former, most frustrating thing, particularly last year or two, was dealing with our Congress. Which became very frustrating because of the Congress's dysfunctionality, if I can use that word. The Congress in our system, with two intelligence oversight committees, one in the House of Representatives, the other in the Senate, is supposed to perform a very valuable and crucial service. In that, they have to act as surrogates or proxies for the American public. Because the very nature of intelligence work inherently is secrecy. Which automatically, and this has been my experience, my 50 plus years in intelligence, generates suspicion because of the aura of mystery and the fact that the intelligence community is not like the Department of Agriculture, cannot be fully transparent. So the two committees have a especially important role to play in guarding for the American public who can't be exposed to all this to ensure that what we do, the intelligence community does, is legal, moral, and ethical. Very frustrating. The most interesting experience I had as DNI was my trip to North Korea in November of 2014 to retrieve two of our citizens who were in hard labor conditions. And I had a couple days of very intense dialogue with the North Koreans. They had their expectations all built up because I was the first cabinet level official since Madeleine Albright to go to North Korea since when she went in the year 2000. That experience profoundly influenced my current view of North Korea and its behavior. And again, I won't go along that right now. I will say that everything you've read about how bizarre North Korea is is all accurate. It's a bizarre place. So that was clearly the most interesting experience. I recount in the book an article that was done by Mark Sanger in the New York Times after I went to North Korea. And he asked rhetorically the question, why on earth would you send a DNI, the head spy, on a delicate diplomatic mission like this, especially this DNI? And his response to the question was, gruff, blunt, a relic of the Cold War ideal for North Korea. I've always loved that story. I think the most disturbing event or set of events had to be the Russian interference in our election in 2016. In fact, that was one of the stimulus, stimuli, catalyst for writing the book. I wasn't going to write a book until I watched what the Russians did in the election in 2016. I spoke to a class this morning about this subject. And it was very disturbing to me. I've seen a lot of bad stuff in my 50-plus years in intelligence, but nothing had disturbed me as much as this because what this effort was intended to do was to undermine our fundamental system. And the Russians had, unfortunately, great success at that. The Russians have a long history of interfering in elections, theirs, and other peoples, certainly in Europe. And we have records going back to at least the 1960s, maybe before, in which the Russians attempted to interfere and influence our elections, but never, never as direct and aggressive and full-throated and multidimensional as what they did in our election 2016. And of course, the big difference was the enabler that they took advantage of that they exploited of social media. The Russians touched, we figure, about 123 million voters in our country. They had messages for everybody, Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, pro-Muslim, anti-Muslim, pro-Israel, anti-Israel, pro-Nazi, anti-Nazi, pro-gun control, anti-gun control. And they worked those constituencies reflecting a very sophisticated understanding of American society. It is scary watching that. Very scary. One of the FAQs frequently asked questions is, gee, why didn't Obama do more earlier? And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it's always in 2020, looking through the rear of every mirror, well, maybe so. You can always do the code of what it should is. At the time, though, and it's always important when you go back and do post-event critiques, is try to recapture the contemporaneous conditions. So we had a lot of debate and discussion about this in the fall of 2016, about what to do, about the Russian interference that we were watching. So the president was reluctant, and I think this is understandable, to magnify what the Russians were doing if he went on national television one evening and spoke about it. And the other thing, of course, that candidate Trump was already setting the stage by alleging a rigged election, because even he, like everybody else, let him lose. And so President Obama didn't want to feed that narrative. So we had more and more debates. Finally, on the 7th of October, 2016, we prevailed upon the inter-agency. We, Jay Johnson, who was then the Secretary of Homeland Security, and I, issued a joint release laying out for the public, and this is a month before the election, laying out for the public what the Russians were doing and what they were doing was being directed at the highest levels of the Russian government, which means one guy. So that release went out, coincidentally, on the 7th of October, which happened to also be the day that the excess Hollywood audio tape came out, and also the day that, coincidentally, strange coincidence, that John Podesta emails were exposed. So our message, as well intended as it was, we issued on the 7th of October, got lost. It was completely emasculated. Russians had three objectives which evolved over time. First one was to sow doubt, discord, and discontent in our country, which they did do a fairly well. And, regrettably, our country is a ripe, my country, U.S., ripe target for that, still is. I've done a couple of CNN appearances from here since I've been here, and I commented on one of them that it's much less stressful here, the political atmosphere is much less stressful in this country than they are in the United States. I mean, it is palpable, in my opinion. Anyway, that was the first objective. The second objective was to hurt Hillary Clinton's candidacy any way they could. Really quite remod- and this stemmed directly, and we saw this in the intelligence, from personal animus that Vladimir Putin had for both Clintons, but especially Hillary Clinton, alleging that she was responsible for fomenting a color revolution in 2011 during the election for Putin. And so he was after her, and was going to do everything he could to hurt her candidacy. So by definition, he's going to help the other one, who turned out to be Donald Trump. And the intelligence also shows that the Russians didn't take him seriously either until he became the Republican nominee. And they saw in him a much more appealing candidate for the office of President of the United States because he was a businessman. He had dealings. That's another issue with Russia. And that he wouldn't beat the Russians up about human rights abuses. So they saw him as a more appealing candidate. So they set out to help him. In the book, I have to plug the book again, in the book, I spend a good bit of time talking about these striking, thematic parallels and similarities between what the Trump campaign was saying and doing and what the Russians were saying and doing, notably against Hillary Clinton. Not suggesting collusion. Don't know about that. But the parallels and similarities between what they were doing and saying was striking. So that, by the way, continues. So let me take a look at the time here. I think I'll stop right there, because that's the five vignettes I wanted to talk about. And hopefully that will whet your whistle for questions you might have. And I really want to leave some time for that. So I think we're off to a great start there. And I'm sure there are questions. And I might just add that for those of you who are in the other theaters who are following this on livestream, if you want to ask questions, please email them to nsc.events at anu.edu.au. And they will be intercepted by my colleague over here. And we will try to share a few of those questions with Jim Clapper in the next 30 minutes or so. But first, I would like to take a question from the room. So if anyone has a question, please try and get my attention and wait for a roving mic. And I'll be astounded if you don't have questions. And the test will be to ask a question that's never been asked of Jim Clapper before. So we'll begin here and take it from there. And please wait for the mic and introduce yourself. And I'll try to. Now a word of, I'll have to appeal to you here, because I don't hear worth a damn. I had too much time in uninsulated airplanes in the Air Force and caught up with me. So I've asked you to repeat your questions just because I can't hear. That's a polite way of saying what you think of the Australian accent, isn't it? Well, I'm getting used to them, please. Thanks for your reflections there, Jim. Really appreciate it. It's a big no. I just had a question. So you rightly talk about Russia a lot. In Australia, we more focus on China. And I'd just be grateful for any reflections you could make on China during your time, particularly in the context of the rebalance and pivot under the Obama administration. Well, the premise that I laid out to the class I spoke to this morning about the Russian interference is an instructional example of the influence of a foreign country, particularly an adversary. Now the Chinese involvement here, I believe, is for different motivations, much more economic, just as it is in our country. And so the Chinese, at least to this point, have not been bent on undermining our fundamental governmental system, which is what the Russians are doing. So for the Chinese, it's all about intellectual property, buying things up in our country, collecting intelligence in our country, but it's basically economic motivation. In this country, I was here last year when there were indications of the Chinese attempting to influence members of parliament. And that is, of course, to me, using a popular phrase, a red line, and I would hope it would be for Australia. So it's interference of a different nature because it's a different motivation. Now we may take questions in twos or threes depending how many there are, so let's take another one. We'll see how we go. I will take in the middle, please, thank you. We'll take both of these two questions in the middle. Well, James, thank you very much for your presentation. My name is Ali. My question is that you have come up with a book, Facts and Fears. And recently, there is a book called Spy Chronicles, which has come from the intelligence chiefs of India and Pakistan. Are we entering into a stage of new fiction writers or the world wants to change? I mean, are we going towards a consensus that we don't want to interfere into each other's issues? And we just want to protect our national security. I'm sorry I didn't get to do that. Yeah, look, I mean, is your question about transparency or maybe a bit more... It's about the intelligence interference. So most of the intelligence agency people like you are vocal about what their intelligence agencies did wrong. I'm talking about India and Pakistan. Spy Chronicles is a book by India and Pakistan. So it's raw and ISI coming in public and talking about their interferences. So are we going towards an era where intelligence is deciding of not to interfere and just to protect national security, which is their main job, I think? But just generically interference in other people's elections, like by the United States, for example. Is that what you mean? In any other country. Well, in the book I recount a very credible think tank study that documented some 81 examples of the history of U.S. interfering in other's election processes. This may sound simplistic or naive, but I think for the most part it was motivated, at least in the U.S. view, by what it thought was trying to help press people or was simply in the best interest of the world to try to influence the election. Well, I think probably the U.S. will rethink that in the future as to whether that is a good thing to do or not. I will say, and this came up this morning in the class and I think I would point out that at least in the, at least up until this administration, at least, there were pretty strict legal regiments, legal checks and balances over anything that we would do to involve ourselves in the election affairs of a foreign country. I'm not quite sure I get what the point is with India and Pakistan. Is that, maybe I missed something? Let's move on because there's a lot of other questions, but thank you, yes. Thank you for your talk. My name is Caitlin and I'm a student here at the ANU International Relations and Latin American Studies. My question is, from your vignette about your childhood dissertation on the police force to the Russian interference, how do you think intelligence gathering and intelligence work will change as technology changes? Well, that's a great question. And in fact, a point I made in the book is looking back over my 50 years in U.S. intelligence that the single most important driver of change in the U.S. intelligence community was technology. When I went to Vietnam in 1965, that was my war, Vietnam. I went early, 1965 and 66. And automation and intelligence in those days was acetate, grease pencil, and two corpals. Everything was very, very slow, manual. Intelligence was entertaining history. It was not in a position really to be very anticipatory. So as technology has evolved, the intelligence community in our country, in your country, has had to respond in two dimensions. One, what are the adversaries doing technologically? And what must we do to stay up with what the adversaries are doing? So as we evolve through, in our case, our overhead reconnaissance system, which at the time when it started in the 60s was a technological marvel. Even though the film return system weeks later, we got over that. We made huge progress in the conveyance of intelligence in large volumes. And of course, the internet, the advent of the internet and all the technology that that pretends has huge impact on intelligence. Your country, my country. Now we look forward to things like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and all that sort of thing, and that's gonna have the same impacts on intelligence. Another comment I've made about technology, two-edged sword, for everything that man can create, man can manipulate. Meaning it has both a positive and a negative implication, just like fire. Fire is a good thing in some instances. This is not such a good thing in others. And so it is with the technology. And we all have that challenge. Australia does, we do, in staying up with it. Now I've got a couple of questions from the other rooms, or certainly one of them is actually a set essay question for one of my courses. So I'm actually, I'm going to leave that one. One of the students has put a question to you that we put to them as an assessment requirement for their master's degree. So we'll leave that. But I've got a few good questions from the group. That was a coincidence, I'm sure. Any others from the room first before we go externally? We'll go to the gentleman in the middle and then I'll move over to the corner. Thanks. Hello, my name's Neil. I'm a student here at ANU. My question relates to going to war with Iraq on the premise of weapons of mass destruction, which was subsequently found not to exist. How do you reflect on that decision to go to war on that intelligence? Yeah, that's a great question because my fingerprints were on the infamous national intelligence estimate that the US produced in October of 2002. I was then serving as director of what was then called NEMA, National Immersion Mapping Agency. And so it was a terrible mistake. There are all kinds of explanations for it, not the least of which was we had an administration that wanted evidence to support what they wanted to do anyway. That's part of the problem. The ultimate blame and responsibility though was rest entirely on the intelligence community. So what I would say is US intelligence community attempts to be a learning organization. So we went to school on that experience right away and made a number of fixes certainly in our national intelligence estimate process, which is the apex of our intelligence products in the United States because they go to the policy makers to include policy maker number one, the president. The major fault of, if I had to pick one thing, their number, but the major fault from my standpoint was that people, those of us at senior levels, who sat as a member of what was then called the National Foreign Intelligence Board, did not have full insight into the veracity of the collection sources that were used to write that NIE. So we fixed that. And this is a fix already made, but certainly when I continued, when I was DNI for six and a half years, that any time we met, we, the senior corporate board, if you wanna call it that, for the US intelligence community, the first thing we do is to discuss collection sources. So if a contributing organization had one footnote in the NIE, then the director of the head of that component had to sign a memo attesting to the veracity of the sources used, particularly if any of them were, had to be withdrawn, which sometimes happens with human intelligence. And so each, they represented it from each of the components who contributed to the content, to that NIE then has to stand up at this meeting and review all the collection that they contributed as to its accuracy, pedigree, and veracity. So that's one major fix because I had no idea who curveball was, for example. When I pat, I, you know, I voted, yeah, on that NIE. The other thing we've done, which continues is to allow a prominent display of dissent, which we didn't do as well then as we do now. In fact, President Obama on more than one occasion said, you know, if all 16, 17 components of the community agreed on everything, I'd be suspicious. So he looked for dissent. And so, you know, it had to be well-reasoned, had to be justified. And we've done all kinds of other things, red teams, we've referred to outside readers, we do what if contingencies, what if we're wrong? So all kinds of things we've built into the system to try to safeguard against a, a recurrence of what you asked about. Thank you. We'll take one more from the room. I actually, in the interest, I will come to you in a moment, but I'm also interested if any of our students or any of the women in the room have questions because I want to get a bit of a balance and a diverse in the questions. So look, there we are. Over on the far right or left, depending how you look at it. Thank you very much. My name's Fiona McKenzie. I'm an undergraduate student here at the Coral Bell School of Asia and the Pacific, and I'm studying Burmese. I'm interested to hear about what you were saying about the toxic nature of the political experience that's happening in Washington because I get quite concerned about, I'm an Australian and I like Australia and I get quite worried about the fact that we're quite shoulder to shoulder with you people. And if you do something, we're all going to have all of our young people have big problems. Oh, that's a very... What are we doing here? Thank you. A very relevant question because we have a tendency, certainly in the United States, to be all consumed with President Trump and his tweets and all that. President Trump is simply a manifestation of a much larger trend. And what bothered me, continues to bother me, is the assault on truth. So you'll notice in our country, the elements who rely on empirical fact as a part of their endeavors, which includes academic institutions, journalism, science, law enforcement, intelligence, et cetera, where the primary thing, they try to rely ideally on empirical fact. So what we have now is an environment where there's always doubt cast on truth. And the Russians exploited that. That's a tool they use in their information operations campaign to sow doubt that anyone can ever know the real truth. And of course, that gives rise to something that many people in our country revel in, which are these weirdo conspiracy theories that have no basis in fact. And so what we've devolved to in our country is tribes who have their own view of fact of the world and the prospects for compromise itself is an evil word. You do not compromise what your tribe purports to advocate. Now that's a very dangerous and insidious thing. It is not good for any democracy. So we'll take this question out in the corner and then I've got a few questions from the outside of the room. I know, we'll come back to you, sir. Just trying to share it around. Thanks very much. Anker Brodersen, retired Air Force. I'm curious on your perspective, given the potted history of the UN, of its mixed success and the current behavior of China and Russia, what do you see as the future prospects for the international global rules-based order? I mean, UN or other international bodies? Well, I guess I'm interested more broadly on the international rules-based order. What do you think, what's the likely prospects for it in the future? How well will it succeed? I mean, did you hear that? I didn't hear it. You're talking about the UN and specifically or? No, no, more broadly, international rules-based order. Okay, rules and values. Right, well, under the banner of America First, we're getting away from the world order that the United States kind of dominated setting up in the aftermath of World War II. I mean, that was probably gonna happen anyway, just because we've moved to a much more multipolar world. But I think the Trump administration is going to accelerate that. Now, I don't, in a personal view, you know, I don't think that's a good thing. I don't think you can reverse global, I think reversing globalism is absurd proposition. You couldn't do it if you wanted to. And so these international bodies, like United Nations and all of their subordinate organizations, yeah, it has its drawbacks and weaknesses. But I think it is important for a rules-based international order. And in the absence of that, I'm not sure what we're gonna have other than chaos, where everybody's looking after their own sovereignty, which I think is ridiculous. You know, one of the things that I worry about, I'll give you one example of why that's a bad thing, is climate change. And you can argue until the cows come home, you know, how much of it is man-made or not. Doesn't matter. What's the impact? Climate change has huge national security implications. It also has huge implications for the environment and for the spread of disease. And disease does not recognize national boundaries. You only take this on globally and internationally. I cite this as one example. And I tell you, there are some scary things out there that could be very, very dangerous for the safety of the world. And if you don't have the international organizations, World Health Organization, for example, that is recognized and supported and participated in, mankind is gonna be in a very bad place. Because that's the one example of a kind of issue that cannot be resolved on a nation-state by nation-state basis. I'll give you one or two questions from outside the room now. One interesting question is about intelligence sharing and intelligence cooperation. Now, we've talked about the Five Eyes, United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. What observations can you make about whether it's Five Eyes or whether it's beyond Five Eyes, the value and importance of cooperation and whether it's time to develop new networks of intelligence cooperation beyond the Five Eyes? Well, one thing that has impelled intelligence sharing globally is a common threat of terrorism. So that has fostered more intelligence sharing than I'd ever seen in my career. So that's point one. Point two with specific respect to the Five Eyes Alliance. I deliberately went around my last year as DNI to include all the farewell town halls I did here, New Zealand, Canada and the UK. And I said that I believe it's not gonna be long before we're gonna go do away with the No Foreign Convention with our Five Eyes Alliance. And the reason for that is we make so many exceptions now. And when you start making a lot of exceptions to a rule, probably time to think about changing the rule. And I would argue that when we're in each other's intelligence footprint, we should simply extend dual citizenship privileges for that purpose and for that length of time. Now when I, I always made that statement when my general counsel was absent because he would go nuts when I'd say that publicly. But I did it deliberately to try to foster the dialogue and try to move that along. Now when, I'm gonna say when it happens, not if, then we then have another circle of allies that would be like the Five Eyes is now, that is so-called second party. So we have a lot of other great allies, Japan, South Korea, Norway, all the Scandinavian countries who do great things intelligence wise. And so they will then I think assume that so-called second party role. But the first thing, first and most important thing is just, let's forget the foolishness here and extend dual citizenship privileges whenever we're in each other's intelligence footprint. Well I was here in early 2000s. I think my first tour here, first time I visited when I was director of National Imaginary Mapping Agency and I visited what was then called Daigo. So I'm walking around the workspaces and I came upon, they escorted me to the counter-terrorism section in Daigo. And the branch chief was an American. What? Well turns out she worked for me, you know? Well I'm glad I know that. So we're talking about how she did business because she was a line supervisor integrated in Daigo. I said, well what happens when, you know, if you're exposed to Australia and I's only material? She said, I just tell my management because Australia trusted her to do her job and protect Australia's sense of information. You know, why can't we be like that? I've got another question here from, I think that may also be one of our set essay questions but this is from a former student so I'm going to ask it from Jennifer Jackett. So her question is what are some of the challenges associated with the intelligence community remaining relevant for policy makers? Well. How do you remain relevant? Obviously offering unique insights and perspectives that the policymaker can otherwise get. Now the intelligence community has, in this country and our country, has the advantage of access to secrets which hopefully, you know, are not commonly known. That's not to say that you can ignore what we call open source. You know social media has huge intelligence implications so you have to take that into account. So, and the other question, it's back to the earlier question about the impacts of technology. So if the intelligence community doesn't stay up on technology and if the government that owns that intelligence apparatus chooses not to invest in intelligence, do research and development? Well, over time that intelligence apparatus will become less and less relevant to policy makers. You know, one of the first things you learn in intelligence school, first week, there are only two conditions in life. There's policy, success, or there's intelligence failure, no other condition in life. So this gentleman here, thank you for your patience. Thank you very much, Mr. Clapper. My name's Philip Eliasson and I wanted to remark on what a fantastic answer you made about going back to school following the Iraq invasion and re-looking at the way intelligence is managed when you've got an administration which is very interested in consuming a certain line of thinking. Last week we had Anga, we had President Trump speak on Iran, we had Foreign Minister Zarif speak on America, we had Mr. Rouhani or President Rouhani speak on the same subject. How would you describe Washington now in terms of its appetite for directive intelligence on achieving a political goal in Iran as opposed to dealing with Iran as a persistent actor which must be lived with? To be more specific, are you talking about, I guess, the risk of politicized intelligence on Iran today? Yeah, it's perfect. Well, it's not just on Iran. One of the things, you know, fundamental tenet of intelligence, I think it's certainly true in our country and yours as well, is the importance of truth to power. And it's almost a religious writ that intelligence always tee up the best assessment that they possibly most accurate, however incomplete it may be for a policymaker. And to do anything less is really dangerous. Now, I had a few occasions where I got to go in the Oval Office and give bad news to President Obama and sometimes he didn't like it very much. But he always stressed to me and to the intelligence committee when he met with us as a body, I don't care, I want your unvarnished portrayal of what you see from intelligence. Now, when after the election and was then President-elect Trump, and our custom is that the President-elect then between the election and inauguration day receives essentially the same President's daily brief as the incumbent President. So he's getting the same thing as President Obama and we've done this for decades and the reason is, of course, to try to ensure the smooth transition as possible. So I hand wrote a note to President-elect Trump in which I said to him, congratulations on your victory and all that. And I said, the intelligence community stands ready to support you, to provide you as the best relevant anticipatory intelligence as possible for all the hard decisions you're gonna have to make. I fervently hope that you will subscribe to, in fact, protect the principle of truth to power. On some issues, he does, he does that. But it doesn't matter whether he's receptive or not. The intelligence community's sacred responsibility is to tee it up. And if he doesn't like it, then okay. And I hope that continues. My impression is it has, whether it's on Iran or not. Now, one classic question you always ask, well, if you tee up intelligence to a policymaker who ignores it or delays doing anything about it, is that an intelligence failure? You know, I'll just leave that hang there. In my view, it's not, but people argue, no, it's your fault. So we'll take, we can take one more question, I think from the room. I think there's a question here in the middle before. Yes. If you've got, I'm sorry, behind you. So we'll come to you next if that's all right. But we will come to you. I'll take both the questions and then we're done. Yeah. Thanks, Rory. My name's Caitlin Gouchy. In the past week in Australia, in our media and in a few of our mastheads, we've seen the head of Australia's national intelligence community come out and give some quite public comments about the important role the intelligence community plays. This has been quite a transition from previously working in the shadows, operating in the shadows. Have you seen in the US a similar transition and necessity for the intelligence community to become much more public facing? And do you think this is an important transition? To be more public. Well, this very issue, and I described some of this in the book, I encourage you to read the book, came up in the aftermath of Edward Snowden. And the issue that was there, how transparent could and should the intelligence community be? Remembering, as I indicated earlier, that inherently what intelligence does is secret. And so the intelligence community will always labor under the aura of suspicion because of the mystery connected with what we really do. Well, in the aftermath of Snowden, it was my view, one of the take away lesson is that we should have been, the intelligence community should have been more transparent. And by that I mean, the most controversial thing that he exposed was the limited metadata telephony storage program maintained by NSA. And by limited, I mean the from number, the to number, and the length of the call. No names, no content. Well, he exposed that. In retrospect, had we had the intelligence community at the time or somebody, the president, I don't know, and the reason of that program is put in place, direct result of 9-11, where we had foreign communicants overseas communicating on the phone with plotters in the United States, and there was no way to link them up. That was the reason for having that program. In retrospect, had that just been explained to people and to the Congress in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, well, they could have got legislation big enough to drive a truck through. No one would have objected. And by the way, just explaining the need for the program, and it wouldn't make people any more hinky than they are about the fact that our FBI maintains millions and millions of fingerprint files on innocent citizens, but people understand why it's done. And so it was with the 215 program. So by the way, two years later, after Snowden revelations, they passed another law. There's an irony to the story. Pass the law where instead of NSA maintaining the metadata, what NSA now does is go to the providers and ask for it. And I'll leave it to you to decide how much you trust the providers to protect that information. And the irony is now NSA can request even more data because NSA was only storing data from three providers, about 30% of phone calls. Now they get 90%. But it hit the government. So that makes everybody feel better. One last quick question, and then we're done. So, yeah. My name is Andrew McBride. I'm a former student of the National Security College. I was just curious, given your experience on North Korea, if you think the Trump-Kim summit would cause a genuine change in behavior by the North Koreans. How much time we got? Who do you try to use? Yeah, yeah. I actually, I was, and I spoke to this on CNN publicly, that I supported the notion of President Trump meeting with Kim Jong-un. And the reason I supported it is because of my observation when I was there in 2014. Basically, the North Koreans are stuck on their narrative and the United States is stuck on our narrative. And our narrative was, the first talking point, I was issued by the White House that I was to recite to the North Koreans was, we won't negotiate with you unless you denuclearize. Well, I was there about five minutes and realized that was a non-starter. They ain't gonna denuclearize. So, and I tried to impart that when I came home, and of course it fell on deaf ears in the last administration and certainly did this one. What I regretted about the summit was President Trump had all kinds of leverage just by the mere fact of agreeing to meet with Kim Jong-un, which is something North Koreans have lusted for, for decades. And I saw evidence of that when I was there. They wanted the recognition, the face value by having a direct personal meeting with their leader and our leader. And it would've been really cool had President Trump take advantage of the opportunity to get from the horse's mouth the answer to the following question. What would it take for you to feel sufficiently secure that you don't need nuclear weapons? Because right now, as far as I can tell, we don't know the answer to that question. So I don't know how we negotiate with them when we don't know at least what their end game is. I'm not sure the North Koreans do either, but it sure would've been instructive to ask the question. The other thing we failed to do, are you giving me the hook? No, not yet. No, no. I wouldn't try to. But the other thing we failed to do, he failed to do, was let's decide on what denuclearization means. Now the North Koreans, in the North Korean perspective, denuclearization's two-way street. It isn't just them doing one of the yang, gan, all that. It applies to us. And as I learned when I was there, by the way, my chief interlocutor was the very same Kim Yong-chol, now the number two guy. Well, he was then head of what's called the Reconnaissance General Bureau, which is basically the GRU for North Korea. And that guy's a neanderthal. He was terrible. You know, hated Americans, hated me. He was just doing it, you know, hosting me because he'd been instructed to. But from his standpoint, denuclearization means no more B-1s, B-2s, or B-52s in the Korean Peninsula, or with an operational proximity of the Korean Peninsula. Well, we're not even thinking about that. That's why those two issues, what is it you need to feel secure so you don't need nuclear weapons? And by the way, what's the definition of denuclearization? I was an advocate in the last administration for establishing interest sections. In other words, diplomatic presence in the respective capital, Pyongyang and Washington, below that of an embassy. Several reasons for doing that. One, just to have a diplomatic presence there, I would argue, I have to US audiences, that things might have gone differently for poor auto-wombier, the University of Virginia student. Had we had somebody there, daily bugging the North Koreans about his health and welfare. Secondly, can't go into this, but one of the reasons North Korea is such a tough target for us because we're not there. I'll leave it at that. The third reason is to have a conduit for information into North Korea about the outside world, which they are very nervous about. And fourth, and this sounds a little weird, but if we had a full, the US had a full-time diplomatic presence in Pyongyang, that in itself would give the North Koreans some sense of security that we're not gonna bomb them because we have people there. I'm telling you, that's the way it is. I just, for fun, about three weeks ago, I threw out on CNN, I was asked about this. I said, maybe we need to rethink how we're trying to deal with North Korea. Now that this administration is finding out how much fun it is to deal with them, just like the previous administrations. Maybe the time has come to think about accepting North Korea. You know, this is obviously heretical and it's not the US government position, but accepting North Korea as a member of the nuclear club. Why do I suggest we at least think about that? Well, it's been months since the North Koreans conducted a missile test, conducted an underground nuclear test. They gave us back the remains of 55 soldiers from the Korean War. They released two hostages, which is their trade bait. Their dialogue has been more temperate. And importantly, a very significant thing, in my view, was the absence of any long-range missiles in that parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers' Party. So I could suggest to you that the North Koreans are trying to display responsible behavior. And so maybe we need to think about that. Because I think getting the North Koreans to denuclearize my experience, any indicator, it's gonna be a toll over. Now, we need to press on with talking to them and all that, but they will, North Koreans, one step forward, two steps back. They're classics. And by the way, they are rational. They know what they're doing. And they understand right now that without nuclear weapons, no one would pay any attention to them. And they understand that we just as in their economy, they understand that they are facing looking south. If you're sitting in Pyongyang and South, you see an overwhelming conventional military force who they believe is poised on a hair trigger to invade North Korea and overturn the regime. That's the way they think about it. So why have the North Koreans changed their behavior? Well, I would argue it's not because of any tweets from President Trump. It's because the North Koreans achieved whatever it is they think they needed in the way of nuclear deterrence. Now that may not be the way we'd evaluate or validate a weapon system. Doesn't matter. They think they achieved that. So that when they come to the negotiating table, they will not be a supplicant, as they always have been in the past whenever the U.S. and North Korea have had dialogue on nuclear weapons. I can tell from Rory's body language. No, we are, you're just warming up. You're just warming up, Jim. And I'm gonna ask you one more question. Okay. In that case. Okay, I think just to take a future-focused question, what is your advice to a young person considering a career in the intelligence community and is it an honorable profession? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question, as we say in the Congress. It's one of the reasons why I've made a point of traveling around the college and university of the United States to generate interest in public service, specifically public service and national security and specifically in the intelligence community. For reasons I think you understand, I, having been brought up in it, I've always considered services intelligence officer as a noble profession, a sacred public trust. You're part of an endeavor that's bigger than yourself and what is more important to your country than participating in keeping it safe and secure? And the people that, while technology's changed, the caliber of the people that I've been associated with in intelligence, ever since I got in it in 1963, is superb, dedicated professionals. And what I tell young people is, even if you don't make it a career, just the experience that you gain if you go on to something else. My grand, you know, you're old when you got a grandson in the intelligence business. My oldest grandson works at CIA, he's an IT contractor. And we have a lot of interesting discussions, 53-year age difference. Of course, you know, he's a millennial and he's lots of feedback and all that. And what I notice in him, which I think is probably characteristic of his generation, is he's ever been as dedicated and patriotic. He loves what he does at work. And it's a tremendous mission and he feels, you know, a part of it. And he's been there almost, you know, four years now. But the difference is he doesn't have the institutional commitment that I had. You know, when I started, my God, I'm gonna do 30 years plus in the Air Force. And I did, I did 32 years in the Air Force. He didn't even feel that way. What detracts him is the technology, the professional challenge. Can he add to his credentials? And in his case, since he's a contractor, can I make more money? And it's not say, he's not patriotic and all that. So I've tried to appeal to people, young people, because I do think there's a lot to be said for. It's not a career, certainly exposure to intelligence and understanding it. And even if you don't stay in it, you can be an advocate for it among those who have not had that kind of exposure. So on that note, and that is after some rather gloomy facts this evening, I think quite an uplifting note to end on. I want to, in a moment, ask you to join me in thanking Jim Clapper for what was meant to be a book launch but has actually turned into a masterclass in intelligence and security. And that's, I think, and with some real depth on the North Korea question. So thank you for that. Now, for those of you who want to recap any of this, of course, we are going to be putting this recording on our website, and there'll be a podcast that the National Security College will record with Jim Clapper with probably some more questions in the weeks to come. But at this stage, I want you to join me in thanking Jim Clapper. And don't forget, there are books outside. So thank you.