James Clapper: the intelligence chief born here

born 1941

The claim: James Robert Clapper Jr. was born on 14 March 1941 in Fort Wayne, the son of an Army signals intelligence officer, First Lieutenant James Robert Clapper, whose trade the son inherited. A military family does not stay, and Clapper's Fort Wayne chapter is a birth and a beginning, printed at that size. What followed the beginning is the reason for the entry: a fifty-year career in American intelligence that ended at the very top of it, with a Fort Wayne-born officer coordinating the whole apparatus of the United States intelligence community.

The career: Commissioned in the Air Force in 1963, Clapper made intelligence his branch: signals intelligence commands, combat support missions flown over Southeast Asia, and then the directorships, one after another. He directed the Defense Intelligence Agency from 1991 to 1995. After retirement and a return to service, he became in September 2001 the first civilian director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the mapping and imagery agency he led, renamed the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, until June 2006. He served as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and on 5 June 2010 President Obama nominated him as Director of National Intelligence; the Senate confirmed him unanimously that August, and he served from 9 August 2010 to 20 January 2017, through the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and the storm over surveillance that followed the Snowden disclosures, which his tenure will always be argued over. His memoir, Facts and Fears, appeared in 2018. His full entry stands in the people record; the fame roll notes, simply, the ceiling a Fort Wayne birth reached in one particular American profession.

Sources:

1. The standard published biography of James R. Clapper Jr. (born 14 March 1941, Fort Wayne; the Defense Intelligence Agency directorship; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency directorship, September 2001 to June 2006; the Director of National Intelligence tenure, 9 August 2010 to 20 January 2017, and the unanimous confirmation).