Her day starts around 3am, when she rolls out of bed, rides her Peloton, takes the dog out, grabs a V8, and heads into the ODNI office, a sprawling complex just down the road from the CIA, where she worked for 27 years. She reads through overnight intelligence, answers a few emails and does some thinking, to get a head start on the day before her first meeting, usually around 6:45a.
Gordon has had a long career in intelligence. Before taking on her role at ODNI, she served as Deputy Director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency – and before that, she served in senior executive positions at four of the CIA's directorates: operations – analysis – science and technology – and support.
Cipher Brief CEO & Publisher Suzanne Kelly sat down with Gordon to talk about her role in the IC, the complexity of the threats facing the U.S. today, the driving need for innovation and what it’s like to brief President Trump.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity, but you can download the full conversation - which includes a larger focus on the private sector's role in national security - in this week’s State Secrets podcast, available on iTunes.
The Cipher Brief: Let’s talk about the threats. It feels like there are more now than ever and that they are more complicated now than ever before. Partnerships with allies are more important, partnerships with the private sector are more important.
Gordon: This is a really interesting time where we're looking at different relationships with the private sector. We're still interested with the private sector, as being a provider of capability to the government. Right now, it's in information technologies and the whole boom in artificial intelligence is really exciting from a national security perspective, because the person that owns and can command the data, can make the world transparent, and we'd like to be the ones to do that. There's so much energy in the private sector, but they're not doing all the things that we might need. They're not assuring the algorithms in the same way that we would need in order to be able to use those algorithms for national security purposes. And they're still doing relatively simple kinds of A.I. in single domains like computer vision, not the kind of sense making or cross domain work that I need in order to really be able to understand patterns. So that's just a great example on that one.
The Cipher Brief: The big question of course, what worries you the most? Is there any one thing anymore? Is there long term/short term?
Susan M. Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
"This is a big old goofy world and it is more fraught, more complex and more dynamic than anything I have ever seen. We say the names of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, counter-terrorism, transnational organized crime and cyber as though they are somehow the same things that we talked about five years ago, because they have the same names, but the nature of them has changed."
Russia, boy, they are so aggressive with their intent right now, and so aggressive in what they're talking about in terms of the weapons they want to develop, and so aggressive in terms of what they're doing with information. And you know in part, we're able to see what they're doing in terms of cyber, because they're brazenly doing things in cyber and they are more expansionist outside of their landmass than we have seen. If you think about their presence in the Middle East and Syria, they have bases there. I mean it's a very different Russia that's expansionist, kind of from a military operation.
Then you have China, who always was kind of a monolith. Even in cyber, you can see their activities and now you see China as an economic power looking to wield that economic power in a worldwide way with the Belt and Road initiative, as they are sweeping through, not only the South China Sea, but throughout Africa into Latin America and they are so economically intertwined that it is a really interesting proposition.
The Cipher Brief: They’re playing the long game?
Gordon: They are, and not just in America, but kind of world wide. And just like here, they're offering real investment. But it also comes with some pretty real tails in terms of security impact that are not obvious when you just think short term.
The Cipher Brief: Can you think of a good example of that?
Gordon: I think you just see it in the telecommunications market where China has been so aggressive. They educate people at our universities. Those students become post-doctoral candidates, they become involved in startups, they learn, and then they take those companies back home, and it's not that they're just stealing and using it themselves, they're using that as a way to bootstrap themselves in supercomputing and artificial intelligence in the same areas that we're interested, but they're doing it, in part, by insinuating themselves economically into our environment. And again, not illegally, just using the systems that are here. And you see it too throughout the world.
Iran- what's so interesting about Iran is in the kind of hot mess that the Middle East is in all the fights we've done - and even the aggressive work we've done - to rid ISIS from the geography of the Middle East. You almost see Iran moving into that vacuum and becoming a stability - but an unwelcome stability - in terms of their willingness to be state sponsors of terrorism and malign actors.
And then you have North Korea, which you know, we're all really hopeful about the prospects for denuclearization and you have to admit that no missile or weapons testing in the past year is definitionally a good thing. But we're still watching that closely.
And then terrorism, while we've taken away a lot of the geography of ISIS and Al Shabaab and Al Nusra and al-Qaeda, that threat is diffuse, and now it's a lot harder to see. And while it may not have the same massive strategic impact, you can't tell that to the nightclubs or the places where innocent people have been attacked.
And then transnational organized crime and the Opioid crisis, is massively real. I think I heard this and I'm not sure I'll get it totally right, but we are losing the equivalent of a plane full of Americans every day. Think about a 737 crashing. That's how many were losing a day. Now think about the TV if a plane crashed. And every day. So that's a massive national security problem.
And then cyber. I don't talk about that as much directly, not because it's not pervasive, because it allows reach and aspiration and tests nation states in ways that we’re not used to, but it has become so ubiquitous that it really is the way that every aspect of national interest is going to be affected.
The Cipher Brief: I want to ask you about the future and the importance of information because almost all of the things you just touched on have some component of who is able to most effectively use information to their advantage. Whether it's Russia launching influence operations or whether it's terrorists trying to persuade people to carry out lone wolf attacks. How important is information to the future and is that something that the ODNI spends time thinking about?
Susan M. Gordon, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
"If I'm trying to sound way cooler than I actually am, I’d say data is the new black, or data is the new oil. Someone told me the other day I should say data is the new bacon. I think it's everything, and especially for the intelligence community when our whole purpose is to know the truth, see beyond the horizon and allow our leaders to act before events dictate. Our whole history is predicated on the ability to go and find information that allows us to know a little bit more a little sooner."
The President
The Cipher Brief: How often do you sit with the President?
Gordon: The ODNI has a pretty regular, three-time a week, cadence just in terms of regular intelligence briefings. The DNI mostly carries that load, and I admire him for this. He's the President's senior adviser on intelligence and he carries that out seriously. But I go periodically - so two to three times a week.
The Cipher Brief: Without disclosing anything super-secret, how do you find that engagement process?
Gordon: Well, it’s a remarkable opportunity to try, in a very short time, to impart pieces of information that the President needs. This President has a penchant for action. He is voracious in terms of the consumption of information and the sources that he listens to. He's impatient, as I think many people who didn't grow up in the government are, and he's trying to solve problems, and we're trying to provide him information.
