"Yesterday, I was ashamed to have to sit there and listen to the president express his great angst about the leaking in this town," Clapper said, adding he could not fathom the idea of "widely quoted amorphous and anonymous senior intelligence officials who get their jollies from blabbing to the media .... people who are allegedly government officials in responsible positions who have supposedly taken an oath."
He said the president noted that "the irony here is people engaged in intelligence who turn around and talk about it publicly."
The comments follow days of nonstop coverage about US intelligence on a European terrorism threat, even though much of the details of the threat are still secret. This resulted in forcing the State Department to issue an alert last Sunday acknowledging an increased risk of terrorist attack in Europe.
Just three weeks ago, following the publication of back-to-back stories outing CIA agents in Afghanistan and Special Forces operations in Yemen, Clapper issued an unusual public statement urging intelligence officials to stop leaking.
He said the leak of thousands of classified cables to the Wikileaks website threw up a "yellow flag" that would, at least in the short term, "have a chilling effect on need-to-share," referring to the principle within the intelligence community that analysts and operators should have easier access to compartmentalized information.
Wikileaks, a website that gathers and releases internal documents, in July made public thousands of US military field reports from Afghanistan that included sensitive information, such as the identities of Afghan nationals who spied for the US. The disclosures prompted the Taleban to announce a campaign to find and kill so-called collaborators.
In voicing his criticism of leaks to Clapper, Obama joins a long list of presidents frustrated by the publication of sensitive government information in the press. President Nixon famously set up a counterleak squad known as the "plumbers" after Daniel Ellsberg, a military analyst, gave the New York Times a secret history of the Vietnam War known as the Pentagon Papers.
Clapper, who stepped in as the fourth director of national intelligence in August, said he has sought to emphasize counterintelligence - the identification and countering of foreign spies, work that requires compartmentation, or tightly controlling intelligence data.
Clapper has called for a better legal framework to allow foreign and domestic intelligence to be shared more efficiently, but he said that "Nirvana" would never be achieved.
Like DNIs before him, Clapper has promised to try to make his relationship with the congressional intelligence committees "positive," but has expressed concern that the Government Accountability Office, which now has some authority to investigate programs inside the intelligence community, might interfere in the relationship between the congressional oversight committees and the DNI. He has said that he welcomed their work, "so long as it does not get to the core essence" of intelligence work.
The remarks came in sharp contrast to his predecessors who called for increased information among the 16 agencies that make up the US intelligence community.
