President Barack Obama greets James Clapper, his nominee for director of national intelligence, in the Oval Office, Saturday, June 5, 2010. Photo credit: Pete Souza
Spy Chief James Clapper: We Can’t Stop Another Snowden -- Eli Lake, Daily Beast
President Obama's Director of National Intelligence spent his life protecting secrets. Then came the biggest leak of all.
Every morning at around 4:30 a.m., James Clapper wakes up and prepares for the worst job in Washington. He is the nation’s top intelligence officer at a time when the intelligence community is derided because it can’t keep its secrets, and loathed because some of the secrets it has tried to hide concern the same American citizens it was charged with protecting. Thanks to rogue contractor Edward Snowden, the machinations of the shadow bureaucracy Clapper heads have for the last eight months been exposed one news story at a time. Clapper is often the guy who has to call newspaper editors to tell them not to print stories that they usually publish anyway.
Clapper, 72, a 51 year veteran in the intelligence community, is also the first director of national intelligence to hold the post when the annual intelligence budgets are being slashed instead of fattened. (Between 2002 and 2010 the annual intelligence community budget doubled from around $40 billion to $80 billion.) Add to this the fact that the legal authority Clapper needs to command the 16 intelligence agencies under his control is murky at best.
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My Comment: A little public honesty from spy chief James Clapper in this puff piece from Eli Lake.
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