Jerry Boykin & Lynn Vincent (2 page)

Or so it seemed at the time.

2

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, as the defense department built up for operations in Iraq, the Pentagon called. “Secretary Rumsfeld would like to see you again,” his military assistant told me over the phone.

Unusual
, I thought. I hadn’t heard of any three-star nominee being called back for a second interview. But Rumsfeld was the boss, so I was off again to Washington.

“I want to talk more about your time at CIA,” he said after we’d settled into his office in mid-March, two days after the U.S. launched operations in Iraq. I had worked for the CIA from November 1995 until June 1997, and I briefed Rumsfeld on my responsibilities there. Then he told me a story.

The rest of the federal government was rich in spy agencies—the CIA; the National Security Agency; the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; the State Department’s Intelligence and Research; and other outfits totalling fifteen agencies in all. But the military intelligence problem became clear to Rumsfeld, he said, when he wanted to send Army Special Forces into Afghanistan to link up with the Northern Alliance to fight against the Taliban.

“My staff told me that the only way to do it was to send them in with CIA,” Rumsfeld told me. “I said, ‘Why do I have to put military people in harm’s way under the authority of George Tenet?’ ” Tenet was still Director of Central Intelligence at the time.

He didn’t have to, Rumsfeld’s advisors said, except that he really had no choice. Military intel had never established the kind of liaison with the Northern Alliance that CIA had. And it had been doing it for years. In other words, CIA had its spooks deployed all over the globe, building relationships with key factions that might become strategically important in future conflicts. After 9/11, the Northern Alliance became strategically important, and CIA was the only game in town.

“I don’t want that to happen in the future,” Rumsfeld told me. “To prevent it, I’m forming a new undersecretary for intelligence and I’m nominating Steve Cambone for the position. I want you to go down and talk to him.”

Rumsfeld meant right then, so I did.

Steve Cambone was one of those PhDs who is brilliant, sometimes abrasive, and usually right. Earlier in his career, he worked at Los Alamos Laboratories. But by the time I walked down the E Ring corridor to see him that day, he had been on Rumsfeld’s team in one capacity or another for about seven years and was his most trusted staff officer. A visionary, Cambone was a rare breed in the defense department: a person who was able to say no to things that didn’t make sense to him. He was fiercely loyal to Rumsfeld, but one of the few people who could actually influence him even when he didn’t want to be influenced.

When we sat down in his office, Cambone asked me about my background, and I gave him the twenty-five-cent biographical sketch. Then, without any kind of run-up or drum roll, he said, “We’re trying to put together a team here that will help this department in the area of intelligence. I’d like to know if you’d be willing to be part of that team.”

The next thing I knew, Cambone offered me the position of deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence.

Believe it or not, my heart sank. I could see the TRADOC dream tour crumbling away. It was clear Cambone and Rumsfeld had already talked about me, and I was professional enough to know that I needed to serve where I was asked to serve.

“Yes, sir,” I told Cambone. “I’m willing.”

It was the only right answer. Had I known that by fall my answer would lead directly to the greatest trial of my life, I might have given him a different one.

3

THE OFFICE WAS STILL GETTING ORGANIZED when I arrived in July. I was back on the E Ring, this time in an office of my own. But on a corridor housing more brass than the Queen Mary, my three stars didn’t rate fancy accommodations. I had what they call a “breadbox” office. Temporary, they said, a tiny room just big enough to hold a desk, two chairs, and a bookcase. I had a nice view, though, with a window facing the Potomac.

That’s where I was when my phone chirped on October 14, 2003. My secretary, Sandy, was on the line. “General, Aram Roston from NBC News is on the phone for you.”

For more than three decades, I managed to keep a low media profile. Even during the
Black Hawk Down
uproar—the book, the movie, and all that—I tried hard to steer clear of reporters and writers, preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. Unfortunately, I learned that doesn’t always happen. As much as anything, that got me wondering what Roston wanted.

“General Boykin, I’m Aram Roston from NBC,” he said when I picked up the phone.

“Hi, Mr. Roston. What can I do for you?” I said.

“I’d like to talk to you about high-value targets.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“It’s your responsibility to track these people down,” he said.

CIA and NSA would be surprised to hear that,
I thought.

“You’re getting into a classified area here,” I told him. “It’s really not something I can talk about. But so that you know, chasing HVTs is not my primary task.” What I didn’t say was that the undersecretary for intelligence neither collected nor analyzed intelligence. We were a policy organization.

Then the conversation turned a weird corner: “You know, you’re a controversial character,” Roston said.

Controversial? In nearly thirty-three years, I’d hardly poked my head into public view. How controversial could I be?

“Why am I controversial?” I asked Roston.

“They’ve chosen you to go after these high-profile Islamic figures, and you have a track record of hating Islam,” he said. “Are you suitable for this job?”

Hating Islam?
What was he talking about? I had hunted down war criminals who tortured and murdered Muslims in Bosnia, and helped train Muslim Special Forces in Sudan. And hadn’t I just told him I wasn’t in charge of pursuing HVTs? Apparently this reporter considered himself so savvy he wasn’t going to let a simple thing like honest answers throw him off track.

“I respect the right of everyone including Muslims to worship as they choose,” I told Roston. “I’ve spent thirty-three years defending those rights.”

He went on, “You’ve made a statement to a Somali warlord that your God was bigger than his.”

He had to be talking about Osman Atto, chief financier and glorified henchman for the Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid. Atto ran the profiteering end of Aidid’s theft of United Nations food shipments, brokering the sale of food taken from the mouths of starving people to make money for Aidid, who during the early 1990s brutalized and murdered the leaders of rival clans in order to consolidate his own power in the Somali capital.

As commander of Delta Force, on assignment with Task Force Ranger in the fall of 1993, I oversaw the hunt for Atto during the U.S. attempt to capture Aidid. Whenever news cameras were near, Atto mocked us.

“The Americans will never catch me,” he boasted on CNN. “Allah will protect me.”

So, when Allah failed to do so, and Atto was in our custody, sure—I confronted him with a message of my own. But it wasn’t the one the American media reported, the one Roston was now repeating.

“I didn’t say that to him,” I told Roston. “I made that statement in a church.”

I hadn’t run an op since 1998 (as a general, you fire off more memos than bullets), but my talks before churches and civic groups were my way of helping regular citizens join in an epic battle. I urged Christians to pray not only for our troops, but for the leadership in America. I sometimes ended my talks by saying, “Fight with me!” I didn’t mean through some kind of holy war. I meant spiritually, through prayer, interceding with God that He would keep our men and women safe, and help our leaders make just decisions.

At every event, people would come up after my talk and say something like, “I have a son serving in Afghanistan. I am so encouraged to know that there are Christian leaders in today’s military who believe in prayer. I’ll be praying for my son and praying for you, too.”

But I didn’t have a chance to explain all that to Roston, who then said, “You’ve made statements like, ‘God put George Bush in the White House.’ ”

“Yeah, I believe that.” I also believed He put Bill Clinton in the White House, Tony Blair at Number 10 Downing Street, and Pol Pot over Cambodia. I believe God is sovereign over the affairs of men. Generals from George Washington to Stonewall Jackson to Douglas MacArthur believed that, too.
When did that become controversial?
I thought.

Roston went on. “You’ve said that the majority of the people in America didn’t vote for Bush, but God put him in there.”

In my head, I’m thinking,
Come on, Roston, the entire left wing of America believes that the majority of the people didn’t put George W. Bush in the White House. Bush “stole” the election, remember?

But I said, “Yes, sir, I believe that.”

Roston continued, “You’ve said that this is a Christian nation.”

“Well, that’s just a historical fact. It also happens to be an English-speaking nation. Those are just facts of our country’s history.”

“You’re an evangelical,” Roston said.

It was an accusation. His tone would have fit easily with “You’re a Nazi,” or “You’re a Klansman.”

“Yes, I’m an evangelical.”

“You’re a public official now. You’ve cast this war in religious terms. And you’re the man who is being held accountable for finding these high-value targets who are Islamic leaders.”

“That’s just not true. You’re just wrong on that.”

The truth was I would’ve been much happier if he had been right about the HVT part. I had chased HVTs all over the world, and I was good at it. I would’ve enjoyed hunting bad guys a lot more than pushing paper. But there was no way I would tell him that because it had become crystal clear that Aram Roston of NBC News was going to report the story he wanted to report, no matter what I said.

I decided I’d better at least make it official.

“Tell you what you need to do,” I said. “You need to call the public affairs office.”

Again, he appeared not to have heard me. “I’d like to come interview you.”

“You need to call public affairs, and if they clear it, I’ll sit down and have a talk with you.”

He would keep agreeing to talk to public affairs, but would then ask another question.

Again and again, I repeated, “Look, you need to call public affairs. You need to get them involved in this, and then I’ll talk to you.”

We hung up. But the next day, Cambone’s military assistant walked into my office and sat down across from me. “Aram Roston called again,” she said. “He still wants to come and interview you. He says the story is going to air tonight on NBC.”

“Has he talked with public affairs?”

“I asked him if he had. He said no.”

Of course he said no
, I thought. I wondered if Roston was playing an old reporter’s game: put in a couple of calls, but don’t take the steps that would actually result in a real interview.

“Tell him to call public affairs and I’ll be glad to talk to him,” I told Cambone’s assistant.

But, of course, Roston never did call public affairs. That would’ve ruined the story—which, I would learn by sundown, had already been written.

4

SINCE MOVING into the E Ring, I’d kept pretty late hours, so it wasn’t unusual that I was still at the office when the
NBC Nightly News
aired. My office opened off an administrative area where the deputy undersecretaries’ secretaries had their desks. They had a television bolted to the wall out there that was usually tuned to the news. At six-thirty, I stepped out of my office to see what Aram Roston had managed to cobble together. Tish Long, the civilian deputy undersecretary for policy and resources, was already standing there, looking up at the set.

In a segue from international coverage, Tom Brokaw said, “Back in this country, there’s a strange new development in the war on terror involving one of the leaders of a secretive new Pentagon unit formed to coordinate intelligence on terrorists and help hunt down Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and other high-profile targets.”

Secretive new Pentagon unit?
I rolled my eyes at Tish. Calling the new undersecretary job a “secretive new Pentagon unit” was like calling a new variety of apple a “mysterious new red fruit.” My job wasn’t a secret, I wasn’t coordinating intelligence, and I wasn’t leading a “unit.” They didn’t even get the “new” part right: the Senate confirmed Steve Cambone eight months prior, in March. Apparently, Aram Roston hadn’t listened to a word I’d said.

As these thoughts flashed through my mind, Brokaw finished his segue: “NBC News has learned that a highly decorated general has a history of outspoken and divisive views on religion, Islam in particular.”

NBC’s Lisa Myers began her report: “He’s a highly decorated officer, twice wounded in battle, a warrior’s warrior. The former commander of Army Special Forces, Lieutenant General William Jerry Boykin has led or been part of almost every recent U.S. military operation from the ill-fated attempt to rescue hostages in Iran to Grenada, Panama, Colombia, and Somalia . . . But [his] new assignment may be complicated by controversial views General Boykin, an evangelical Christian, has expressed in dozens of speeches and prayer breakfasts around the country. In a half dozen video and audio tapes obtained by NBC News, Boykin says America’s true enemy is not Osama Bin Laden . . . NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin, who’s been investigating Boykin for the
Los Angeles Times
, says the general casts the war on terror as a religious war.”

NBC then began to air audio and video clips from talks I had given at churches, interspersing them with commentary from Myers.

Myers: “Boykin recalls a Muslim fighter in Somalia who bragged on television the Americans would never get him because his God, Allah, would protect him.”

Then, audio only of me, speaking at First Baptist Church in Daytona, Florida: “Well, you know what I knew, that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God, and his was an idol.”