Brian Howey publishes at www.howeypolitics.com. His column appears Saturdays in the Journal Review. Contact him at bhowey2@ gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @hwypol.view.
INDIANAPOLIS — The Patriot came back home to Indiana on Tuesday. This would be Dan Coats, who began the day of Nov. 8, 2016, planning to retire, bounce grandkids on his knees and go to a Cubs game whenever he wanted. By the end of that year, Dan Coats was swept into Donald Trump’s vortex, destined to be “Director of National Intelligence.”
If you’ve had a complex, unrelenting and crushingly demanding job, you’ll understand this was, in essence, a duty, a burden and a nightmare. “In the first three months, I was literally overwhelmed,” Coats told the Economic Club of Indianapolis on Tuesday. “I could not get my mind around it. I finally concluded it was impossible. Once I did that, things settled in.”
He had background as a Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committee member as well as the ambassador to Germany during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and Washington. He described himself as a “liberal arts major” at the helm of a STEM group. “When a liberal arts major walks into a STEM group with thousands and thousands of analysts and experts, there’s a big learning curve,” Coats said. “It’s been quite an adventure.”
He found himself presiding over a sprawling array of threats that would boggle most minds. “People ask me, ‘What keeps you up at night?’” Coats said. “There are threats that when you see the picture, you focus in and you have to do it day after day on a 24-hour basis.”
He then began listing them: The “Big 4,” China, North Korea, Russia and Iran. And, of course, Afghanistan, North Africa, Venezuela, and “What’s happening in Indonesia. What about the terror states and the failed states? And, fentanyl.”
There is the threat of cyber attacks that could shut down electric and internet grids, with chaotic results that could throw societies into utter turmoil. There is climate change, encroaching deserts, and Category 5 hurricanes and tropical storms that stay in place for days, dumping yards (or meters) of rain.
“We have more displaced people in the world since World War II,” he said, before citing the Middle East, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt. “A spark goes off here and does that start a wildfire?” he asked. A miscalculation could start a war “if somebody got it wrong.”
He asked former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis what would happen in a worldwide nuclear war? Mattis responded, “Every single species will be extinguished and it will take 10,000 years to recover.”
Pressure? What pressure?
Beyond rogue actors, terrorists seeking to weaponize ebola in central Africa, and friends of Dennis Rodman hurling missiles into the Sea of Japan, there is the wickedly fast evolution of technology. “The technological changes in the private sector and around the world are evolving so quickly,” Coats said.While Presidents Xi, Putin and Chairman Kim can make unilateral weapon system decisions, American presidents need to go through Congress, through legislating, budgets, authorizations, and appropriations. “The change in technology is so fast, a government process cannot keep up. Decisions have to be made. Dictatorships and monarchies don’t have that system. A dictator can say, ‘I want this, do it in six months. Get it done.’”
“We had to reach out to private sector, to tech companies, others across the country, engaged in this technological revolution,” Coats explained. “That was an enormous task all the time I was there.”
“It is no secret we are living in a diversified, unsettled, threatening world, with a lot of chaos,” he said. He could be talking about Aleppo, or Kabul, or Reynosa. But he was also talking about Washington and “the turmoil inside the beltway.”
The worst kept secret in the world was the friction between Director Coats and President Trump.
Coats made a subtle appeal for “the truth, a commodity in short supply in Washington these days. “If you walk into lobby of CIA, the Gospel of John 8:32 reads ‘And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ I took that phrase and the need to seek the truth and speak the truth and I was grateful to do that.”
It was in that same CIA lobby the day after he was sworn into office in January 2017 that President Trump commenced more than 12,000 lies, half-truths, distortions and misleading statements that has marked his troubled presidency. Trump complained about the crowd size at his inauguration under the wall containing the names of fallen CIA agents.
Which made me ponder the notion of what Dan Coats really knows on a gigantic range of topics. It’s a wonder he can sleep at all.
“I’m a son of an immigrant,” Coats said. “I’ve opened doors of opportunities and the love for my country and the realization that has been reinforced by my travels around the world, there’s no place like America. There has never been a place like America.
“And isn’t our job for each of us, regardless of our profession, regardless of what we achieve in life, don’t we all want to join those in sacrifice and say, ‘I’m going to pass this on,” Coats asked? “I want my children, my grandchildren, future generations to discover the sweep of history, to be able to say, how is it that such a precious gift is ours?’”
