The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries (15 page)

I went through the note done on the plane which she pretty much bought into but my heart sank a bit when she said Rumsfeld would in fact be agreeable to doing a lot of this. She said how can we set this up quickly? I said you just do, top down, all the way. Then to lunch with Condi Rice. She was already with DM and C, Dan Fried. Sebastian Wood from the embassy and Steve Hadley [US Deputy National Security Advisor] joined us later. Condi was a lot more relaxed than Karen and we started out laughing about the pictures of the Northern Alliance on horseback, suggesting we may have overestimated their military capabilities. She and DM had already gone over the problems caused by conflicting signals coming out of the different bits of government, the lack of a clear military plan. Condi had seen my paper and was pretty much signed up straight away. The concept I was pushing was a 24-hour cycle in which Washington, London and the region, probably Islamabad, were in permanent contact, and driving the news proactively in all the different time zones. There was some discussion about who and how to get into Islamabad. Condi said Bush believed the PR so far had been dreadful and had told her and Karen ‘go fix it’ and I was definitely pushing at an open door. Once or twice the conversation slipped into anthrax but it was important to keep that separate, not least because of the dire effect it had on their morale.

Condi was impressive, had the same kind of grasp of detail as DM did, good manners, pretty straight talking. I noticed no wine, just water on the table. She said she would give Karen the backing she needed to make this happen, and agreed Karen would chair a team here which liaised with me in London, and that we would send a Brit to them and get one of their best people to us. It was proving very straightforward to get them signed up to the kind of operation we needed. Then to the Pentagon, by now it was hot, and we had a fair old distance to walk before we finally reached [assistant secretary of defense for public affairs] Torie Clarke’s office. She was nice, smart, also spoke in a very fast, clipped manner like Karen. She felt Rumsfeld was doing too much and agreed we weren’t getting out enough pictures that showed progress. I also said it was important that she did what she could to stop the Pentagon/State Department public divisions and the best way to do that was to agree a very concerted ‘White House in charge’ strategy. She seemed up for that too though clearly one of her problems was the number of people who spoke to
the press on background. I told her what Steve Hadley had said, that the State Department had a war room, the Pentagon had a war room. I said they seemed to be at war with each other. I started to push on the idea of maybe [UK General] John Reith [chief of Joint Operations at Permanent Joint HQ] getting involved in a cross-national way. She said Rumsfeld had committed himself to doing daily briefings with the bureau chiefs and could not get out of it. I suggested they could get out of anything if they were busy enough, but told her that in the European and our context, he scored last behind Powell and Bush in terms of the buttons he pressed.

Then to the State Department to see Charlotte Beers who had been hired as undersecretary of public diplomacy and whose background was advertising. I had been warned she was a lot older than she looked, maybe well into her sixties, and had picked up some opposition to her. She instinctively seemed to get what I was on about and also had some clever ideas for how to spend the money she had won for advertising. Her basic pitch was that the Arab world had a very narrow view of America based upon wealth, politics, films and music, and all the big companies. She showed me a portfolio of absolutely stunning photographs of mosques, most of which looked at first glance as though they were in the Arab world, but all of which were in the States. Then some wonderful pictures and stories from ordinary American Muslims. She was clearly going to be useful on the soft stuff in particular. I could see why she was getting up a few noses there, but I liked her style.

Then back to the White House to link up with Jack and have a meeting with Cheney. Jack told me my communications paper had gone down well with Rumsfeld and Powell. When Cheney came in with his people – Scooter Libby, his chief of staff, Mary Matalin, his press woman, and three military advisers – Mary and Cheney both had the note in their hands. On the military campaign, Cheney was bullish. Jack asked him outright what the strategy was. He said NA should take Mazar, then he went over some of the whys and hows and wherefores of what might follow vis-à-vis Taliban, al-Qaeda, Bin Laden, but it wasn’t really an answer to the question what is the strategy. Jack said UK support was strong but could we hold the coalition together if this thing went on longer than expected? He said he thought so. They did the Middle East and Jack asked how difficult it was having such a strong pro-Israel lobby. Cheney said its influence is sometimes overstated and that at the moment they were pretty subdued. Jack said [Ariel] Sharon was doing things which were dangerous and could not be part of our strategy. I had always assumed
that Cheney would be more open and forthcoming when he was in charge of meetings rather than, as when Bush was there, clearly comfortable playing second fiddle. But he was not one to speak too much for the sake of it. He had cold, slightly menacing body language, listened very intently without giving much away, and usually paused before giving a thought-through answer. I went through the concept I was trying to get him signed up to and he was fine about it, said we should just do it.

Mary said on the way out she was so pleased I had sent over the note and gone there because they had been pressing for this kind of approach for ages. She was a real bundle, as you’d expect from someone hitched up with James Carville [Democrat strategist]. I was fascinated how that all worked. I just could not imagine living with someone from the other party. She said it just about worked, but they were able to separate out different parts of their lives and they just got used to having good arguments. We definitely made progress though. Jack did a brief doorstep while David and I left from a side door and headed back to the residence. We had a couple of hours at the residence. I chatted with Meyer about things we would need to keep the pressure on over. I spent the first two or three hours of the flight back writing up notes with Alison [Blackshaw] out of the various meetings. We had got the cuttings through at the airport and Northern Ireland decommissioning was getting big play, but positive.

I didn’t sleep well. I drove in from the airport with Jack, mainly small talk, how hard it was getting the time you needed for kids and family. I had really enjoyed his company, and his manner. Sometimes, because of the nature of the job, there was just too much stuff going on around TB, whereas I felt in the last couple of days, we had clear and limited aims, and pretty much met them in full. He was very sound on schools, and the need for kids like ours to go to schools with a broad mix. We got back for the War Cabinet, which was all a bit grim, not really going anywhere, not really making the progress we needed, CDS as ever telling us what we couldn’t do rather than what we could, weather bad, not enough agents alongside NA, not clear where key Taliban people were. TB said we must take Mazar before Ramadan. Boyce’s understanding was that the Americans did intend to continue bombing after Ramadan. TB said we have to be absolutely single-minded in the next two weeks. He asked for a paper on how it would be taken if all available resources could be found. RC said we would lose support quickly without real progress. I filled them in on the
media plans we had agreed with the Americans and TB was still banging on about the need to do more with Muslim opinion here. Scarlett said Al Jazeera had an OBL broadcast that had not been put out possibly because the interviewer had been asked to do certain questions, soft questions, and hadn’t.

Full Cabinet was pretty much the same as the smaller group, and I sensed people beginning to get a little bit low and worried. I started phoning round and organising volunteers to go out to Pakistan and the US. Karen called me later with Dan Bartlett and a guy called Jim Wilkinson [White House deputy director of communications] on the line. Jim was going to run their war room. We went over what they needed there, and what we needed in Pakistan. I called Hilary Synnott, our high commissioner in Islamabad, and got him on board for trying to find premises. I called George Robertson [Secretary General] at NATO to get him signed up, then a few UK-based ambassadors. The German guy was helpful as ever. We had applied a catalyst and things were finally starting to move. When I did a meeting of GICS [Government Information and Communication Service] staff, I got more volunteers than we could initially handle. TB was pretty down about the military side of things. There were going to be redeployments of UK troops from Oman tomorrow which would be big news, but we had a problem with Rumsfeld saying something interpreted as an admission we would never get OBL. I got home to see the kids, and Fiona and I went out for dinner, and she was desperate for me to leave, and couldn’t understand why now was not the moment.

I gave the morning meeting a miss and took Grace [AC’s daughter] to school. TB said he wasn’t sure he could cope with many more of these meetings where all he heard was things going wrong and things everyone agreed needed to be done but weren’t being done. I spent most of the day working on setting up the new media operation. We were talking about whether we could use the spiked Al Jazeera interview [with Bin Laden], then a note to Karen. The need for what we were doing in Pakistan was shown up every time I turned on the news. The Taliban were getting far too easy a ride. I chatted to TB about the pressure I was under at home to leave. He said it was the worst possible time. He thought the problem was that I had an enormous job and Fiona felt undervalued by comparison. But she was extremely bright and able and we should try to build up what she did.

George Robertson called with some names. I went over to see John
Kerr who was trying to find me premises for our war room. He greeted me in a ludicrous plumed hat he was supposed to wear when he went to see the Queen. He was very funny, very friendly, despite everyone saying how devious he was, my experience so far was that when he promised something, he delivered it. I got Anne Shevas [Downing Street chief press officer] working on turning the offices he was offering into a proper war room. I called Will Farish, the US ambassador, to beg for Lee McLenny [press counselor, US Embassy]. I had Deborah Hermer [GICS] heading out to Washington and briefed her. Tessa [Jowell] was due out in New York for a ceremony and I fixed her to do some media before and after. I went to see Fiona in the office and tried to assure her things would get better, but she wasn’t convinced. TB was obviously worried about what I had said about Fiona. But he said I had one of the best jobs in the world, I did it brilliantly and I would hate it if I was not involved. I was worried with all the trips coming up that Fiona would really decide she had had enough of it all.

We had computers brought into the war room. Mary Matalin called and said Jim Wilkinson would be fine, that he was one of those people who ‘walks through walls’. She said James sent his regards and was relieved that the Brits had finally kicked them into shape! I spoke to TB and agreed some lines for Tom [Kelly] to put out re moral fibre, this being a long-term battle. Boyce’s briefing of yesterday was going big.
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Boyce’s interview and the gloomy photos of him played into the idea, gathering too much pace, that the war was ‘going nowhere’.

TB was wondering whether I should take an upfront spokesman role either here or Pakistan and was worried 1. that we would lose sight even more of the domestic scene, and 2. that the media would not be able to resist turning it into the AC show. I felt we needed two different people to do it, one heavyweight, serious, big picture, maybe an ambassador, someone else doing the nitty-gritty. Paddy Feeny was out with Tessa and I persuaded her to let me redirect him to Washington to join the Jim Wilkinson effort. Boyce was still fretting about Guthrie’s profile and about Rumsfeld criticising him. TB asked me to advise him to stop reading the press.

I had to leave for Chequers for TB’s 9am meeting with him, David M, Jonathan, [General] Pigott plus two, C and the head of special
forces. We met in the Hawtrey Room.
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The message that came through from all of them was that the Americans were a bit all over the place. TB ended by saying that we had to become like an extra strategic mind for them, give them a real plan. Pigott said the Taliban obviously had to be attacked physically but we also had to attack their morale and attack the concept. For the moment their morale was quite high and the NA’s was low. A lot of this was about changing mindsets there about how this was all going. He said if the Americans were here, they would explain their current thinking as follows: 1. assemble all the hardware they needed; 2. initial strikes and create conditions for the third phase – we are well into that; 3. march onwards to decisive action; 4. sustained effort, fall of the Taliban, humanitarian and post-Taliban really steps up.

TB said what would Tommy Franks say if I asked him what was going on. ‘I’m building up, I’m looking to get the total picture by spring, I’m continuing air strikes, I’m giving sixty per cent support to NA at Mazar, twenty-five per cent Kabul, fifteen per cent Herat. I’m keeping the coalition engaged.’ He said there was also confusion about Ramadan and it was important not to let the sense build that there would be an automatic pause. We should see Ramadan and winter as opportunities. There had been a very long conference at the Pentagon, the seventy top brains including five C.-in-C.s, and it was very frank. The main complaint was that there was no central plan, no real strategic clarity from the Pentagon. One had said ‘We’re still working to the president’s speech on TV.’ TB lightened the mood, by saying ‘Christ, I hope you lot aren’t following my party conference speech.’ The special forces guy said they were.