DNI Clapper: Career military intelligence officer

WASHINGTON: Retired lieutenant general James Clapper, confirmed Thursday to head the US spy community, is a decorated Vietnam war veteran who champions using people to gather raw intelligence, known as HUMINT.

Clapper has served as the Pentagon’s intelligence chief, a job to which he was nominated in 2007 by then-president George W. Bush. He was kept on in that senior post by President Barack Obama.

Clapper, whose nomination as director of national intelligence won unanimous US Senate approval, has also served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency under former president Bill Clinton – his last military assignment.

Obama tapped Clapper, a veteran of US spy efforts, in early June to replace retired navy admiral Dennis Blair and help turn around troubled US intelligence efforts.

Blair left after a string of high-profile security lapses including the failure to detect the attempted Christmas Day airline bomb plot and the failed Times Square bombing. The acting DNI had planned to retire in late August.

Clapper retired from the US Air Force in 1995 after a 32-year career in which he held senior intelligence jobs during the first Gulf war as well as in US Forces Korea, the US Pacific Command, and the Strategic Command in charge of US nuclear weapons, space operations, and intelligence efforts.

Clapper has been nicknamed “the Godfather of HUMINT” – using human contacts for gathering intelligence in addition to high-tech methods like satellite imagery or intercepting communications.

He has also reportedly pushed for greater Pentagon control over the treatment of suspected terrorists detained by US forces, requiring military monitoring of all interrogations, where previously the CIA and foreign officials could question them without such oversight.

And in 2007 he recommended an end to a database, TALON, meant to keep tabs on suspected terrorists, but sharply criticized for keeping information on peace activists.

After leaving the Air Force, Clapper worked as a private-sector consultant and served on the Downing Assessment Task Force that investigated the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex that housed US military in Saudi Arabia.

In September 2001, he became the first civilian head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) that collects and analyzes data from commercial and government satellites or aircraft, among other sources.

Under his command, NGA was among the US intelligence agencies that supported charges that then-Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein possessed programs to develop weapons of mass destruction.

In his previous position, Clapper served as Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s top intelligence adviser and as the Pentagon’s liaison to the Director of National Intelligence.

During the Vietnam war, Clapper reportedly flew 73 combat support missions. –AFP

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