The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (5 page)

In the aftermath of the East Africa bombings, President Clinton signed a number of new MONs related to Bin Ladin. Prior to the East Africa bombings, CIA had been permitted only to capture Bin Ladin, and the use of lethal force had been expressly prohibited. The draft of this new MON allowed CIA, using its Afghan surrogates, to kill Bin Ladin if it judged that capture was not feasible during an operation. It was a significant step—essentially allowing CIA to kill a terrorist. The Clinton administration’s position, which has remained consistent throughout both the Bush and Obama administrations, was that under the Law of Armed Conflict, killing a person who poses an imminent threat to the United States and who cannot be captured is self-defense, not an assassination.

Sandy Berger, the national security advisor, sent the draft MON to President Clinton on the morning of Christmas eve, 1998. The White House had told us that the president would sign the MON that day, and it fell to me to wait around the office until he did so. My job was to obtain confirmation that the president had signed the document, so that our headquarters officers could send the president’s instructions out to the field. Everyone else in the front office had gone home or was on annual leave, but there I was sitting by the phone waiting. Mary Beth was home with her parents and brother, who were visiting, along with the three kids, all under the age of six at the time, waiting for Daddy and Santa, not necessarily in that order. They were all frustrated by my absence, but I could not tell them that I was waiting for an order from President Clinton to kill Bin Ladin.

Late on the afternoon of Christmas eve, the president walked into the White House Situation Room, read the document, and signed it. The White House Situation Room called me, and I, in turn, called the director, the Agency’s general counsel, and our director of congressional affairs to inform them. I asked the latter to inform the relevant members of Congress, which he did that evening and the next day. I then sent word to the Counterterrorism Center, so that it could relay instructions to our officers in the field, where it was already the early-morning hours of Christmas day. I got in my car and went home to Christmas eve celebrations, feeling that we were hitting back now more than at any time in al Qa‘ida’s history.

But the truth was that we were still not fully engaged. There was much more that could have been done on the military and paramilitary fronts. Certainly more covert actions would be signed and more pressure would be put on Bin Ladin and his host the Taliban, but the United States still was not doing everything
it could to go after al Qa‘ida or to defend against the kind of attacks we were worried about. Even a focused, determined, and popular president, as Bill Clinton was, faced constraints on how far he could go. An attack against two embassies—with twelve Americans killed, including Molly—was not enough to bring the American people to the point where they would support all-out action. That would have to wait for two and a half more years.

CHAPTER 2

The President and the Sheikh

I
f you are a Little Leaguer, you fantasize about playing in the World Series. If you are a piano student, you aspire to perform in Carnegie Hall. And if you are a young CIA analyst, your dream job is to be the daily briefer for the president of the United States. I was no different. I grew up in CIA admiring the officers who briefed presidents—including an officer named Chuck Peters, nicknamed Pete, who briefed President George H. W. Bush and was a legend at the Agency for completely rewriting PDB (President’s Daily Brief) articles drafted by the analysts, or even writing his own PDB pieces and calling surprised analysts to his office to sign off on them. There was also an officer and friend named John Brennan, now the director of CIA, who was President Bill Clinton’s first intelligence briefer.

My dream came true in December 2000 when I was selected to be the briefer for the newly elected George W. Bush. My boss at the time, the Agency’s head of analysis, Winston Wiley, called me into his office and offered me the job, saying, “There is no one else who can do this as well as you can.”

Although I knew there was hyperbole in what Wiley said, if he thought that this was good for the Agency, then that meant a great
deal to me. When he asked me about the briefer job, he and I had just returned from a conference in Hawaii on Asian issues. My five-year-old son Luke was working on a Flat Stanley project for kindergarten class. The project involves a cutout doll—Flat Stanley—and the goal is to get photographs of Stanley taken in as many places around the world as possible. With that objective in mind, I had brought Stanley along with me to Hawaii. When Wiley heard about this, he’d insisted on driving Stanley and me around Oahu and Maui, snapping pictures on the sides of steep volcanoes, stunning green valleys, and beautiful sandy beaches. Luke’s project had hit pay dirt. Wiley was the kind of boss who earned total loyalty from his people.

I said yes to Wiley’s offer on the spot. He was asking me to walk into the Oval Office every morning. Being a presidential briefer is a huge honor but an even greater responsibility, because what a briefer chooses to show to a president and what he says about it helps shape a commander in chief’s view of the world and therefore the decisions he makes on important national security issues. This, of course, is widely known across the senior ranks of the national security team, which pays close attention to what a briefer says to a president. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, once sent a letter to George Tenet complaining that something I had told President Bush regarding Taiwan’s relationship with the United States was not accurate and he wanted the record corrected. When Tenet showed me the letter, it hit home just how big a deal this job was. Just a couple of months later the importance of the job was again driven home—this time by Steve Hadley, the president’s deputy national security advisor. Tenet and I gave Hadley a ride to Camp David on a Saturday morning, and he and I had a conversation about the PDB and the president. I learned a lot from the conversation that would help me in the months ahead but I particularly remember Hadley saying, “The Agency’s analysis shapes the
president’s view of the world. He makes decisions based on your analysis. So you have a huge responsibility to get everything right, every day.”

After talking to Wiley about the job, I walked across the suite and met with Wiley’s principal deputy, Jami Miscik, who had just returned from a few days of briefing President-elect Bush at the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas. What Miscik said scared the hell out of me. “You will really need to be prepared every day,” she said. “He will fire questions at you at a rapid pace and he expects you to be able to answer most of them. He will test you to see how much you know, and he will test you to see if you are willing to say you don’t know when you have reached the limits of your knowledge. He doesn’t want you guessing or speculating if you don’t know. In short, get ready for a challenging assignment.” All of a sudden, I was having second thoughts.

By the time I got home that night, I had mostly pushed the second thoughts out of my mind. I told my wife, Mary Beth, the news. Although I have this bad habit of accepting jobs and talking about it with her after the fact, she was OK with the decision. This not only made sense professionally but it also seemed to both of us to make sense from a family perspective. At the time our children were seven, five, and three, and we figured that starting work in the middle of the night and coming home about noon, I would be able to pick the kids up at school, help them with their homework, and just be around more.

With only a week of preparation, I was on my way to Texas to be introduced to the president-elect as his dedicated intelligence briefer. I walked into the kitchen of the Governor’s Mansion in Austin where the president-elect had just finished getting a haircut. George W. Bush stood from the chair and with a firm handshake, looking me straight in the eye, said, “Welcome to Texas. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s go upstairs to my study.”

* * *

The job was another baptism by fire. The first day I watched Wiley do most of the briefing, although he had me walk through one piece about Chinese military modernization “to get my feet wet.” The second day I did the entire briefing myself, with Wiley observing. I asked the president-elect if he wanted a Saturday briefing and he said, “No, but call me if you think I need to know something. Otherwise, I will see you on Monday.” From then on I would be flying solo.

The second day provided an indication of the high expectations of our new “First Customer,” as CIA analysts call the president of the United States. At the end of the briefing, Wiley explained that CIA planned to change the presentational format of the PDB. After a few sentences of detail, the president-elect interrupted him. “Winston,” he said, “I don’t care about the format. I don’t care if you bind it at the top, on the side, hold it together with a paper clip or even spit. What I care about is the content.” The president-elect then went on to speak for thirty minutes about his expectations for the intelligence community. He said, “There are people out there who want to hurt the United States. I want you to find out what they are trying to do and tell me. And I don’t want to hear that it is hard to do; I know it is hard, but I expect you to do it.” I thought to myself, “Not a bad mission statement for the collectors of intelligence.” The president added, “And I am going to be making many tough decisions as president on national security, and I expect that you will fully inform every one of those decisions.” I thought, “Great mission statement for our analysts.” I also thought, “I really like this guy.” Then came the punch line: the president-elect said, “I guess when I am president I will start seeing the good stuff.” It struck Winston and me that the president-elect thought we were holding back, not showing him the Agency’s most sensitive secrets. But we were
already showing him “the good stuff.” The president-elect had just raised the bar sky-high. We went back to the office we were working out of in Austin, called Director Tenet, and reported, “We just had an oh shit moment.”

President Bush had this way of always raising the bar, always challenging you to do better. Once, on Air Force One, I showed him an intelligence report based on the comments that a Middle Eastern leader had made to our chief of station. After reading the report, the president said, “Michael, that is interesting. But what I really want to know is not what the leader is saying to me through CIA but what he is saying behind my back to Saddam Hussein.”

Along with the very high bar, though, came one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life—getting to know the forty-third president of the United States. He treated me with respect and affection—like a member of his family, like a son. Before briefings at the ranch in Crawford, we would have cereal together, talk about the previous night’s baseball games, and wash and dry the breakfast dishes together (a requirement of the First Lady). On my first visit to the ranch, the president-elect insisted on giving me a tour. Into a golf cart we jumped, and with the Secret Service in tow, Bush drove through the ranch, describing the different environs and the flora and fauna in great detail.

What struck me quickly about the president was that he was a normal guy—informal and approachable. During one briefing at the ranch in January 2001, the phone rang, and the president-elect answered and simply said, “Of course.” When he finished the call, he explained to me that the First Lady was doing some work on the new home they were just finishing on the ranch and that she’d asked that he bring some light bulbs over when the briefing was done. He then said, “Pal, the most important thing you are going to do today is not let me forget those light bulbs when we’re done here.” On another occasion in Crawford, I walked into the house
to find the president tidying—picking up newspapers, straightening pillows, that sort of thing. I said to him, “Mr. President, it is sure good to know that even presidents have to do housework.” He responded, “Pal, you don’t know my wife!” All of this, of course, made me very comfortable around the president, and my biggest concern was that I would one day slip up and call him George instead of Mr. President.

Starting Monday, January 8, it was my job to deliver the PDB—five days a week during the transition and six days a week after the inauguration. I’d start work at four a.m., sifting through the most critical pieces of current intelligence and analysis, deciding which ones to present and in what order, cramming additional information on each topic into my head in case the president or any of the others in the room—almost always Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card—had additional questions, as they almost always did. The president told me once, “I’m easy. It is the other folks in the room that you have to worry about.” It was like preparing to orally defend several graduate school dissertations every day, six days a week.

And there was a new twist with this president, something we had never done before with any president—travel with him. The president’s first trip was to Mexico to see President Vicente Fox, and the day before the president was to depart, he asked me if I was coming along. Thinking that we had never done this before and having no idea how we would do it, I actually responded, “I think it is a long way to go just for a thirty-minute briefing.” As Tenet and I walked out of the Oval Office, Tenet whispered to me, “I can’t believe you just blew off the president of the United States.” Not surprisingly, the president got his way about the travel, and never again did my response to a presidential query carry so little tact. If nothing else, I am a fast learner.

I traveled with the president wherever he went—on day or overnight trips around the country, on foreign trips, and on vacations, which turned out to be either at his father’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, or, much more often, at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. The president spent Memorial Day weekend in 2001 at the Kennebunkport estate, and as I walked up the driveway for the briefing, he was playing fetch with his beloved dog Barney. As he threw a tennis ball across the lawn and with Barney in hot pursuit, the president said, “Michael, I have a question for you and this is a test.” “Oh, God,” I thought, “not a test!” The president continued, “Should we spend the month of August here, where it will be a beautiful seventy degrees, or in Crawford, where it will be one hundred degrees?” I knew the “right” answer, of course, but I went the other way. “Mr. President, no doubt about it. We should be right here.” “Wrong,” the president said, adding with a grin, “Michael, I am disappointed in you.”