Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (49 page)

The next morning Mike Mullen called to tell me he had talked with Jones, who was ready to quit. When I told Hillary about it, she was very worried Jim might indeed resign.

When I saw Jones alone late that afternoon, he said, “Yes, it can’t go on like this.” He lamented that he had no personal bond with the president, maybe because of their age difference. He described his difficulties in the White House and confided that he had seen the president alone only once since inauguration day. He complained again about Lippert and Donilon, telling me he had told Lippert he wanted something done, and Lippert, who was a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve, had pretty much ignored his retired four-star-general boss. “Rank insubordination,” Jones called it. Jones said the president had told him he would be the last voice he heard on national security issues, but it wasn’t true: “There are too many cooks, and I can’t go on.” I told Jim he was the glue holding the national security team together, the only person in the White House in the national security arena, other than the president and vice president, with gravitas and an international reputation. It would be a “catastrophic blow” for him to leave. I told him I was prepared to talk to the president if necessary: “We can’t afford to lose you.” Jim called me the next day to say he had arranged some time alone with the president and believed that things would get sorted out. He seemed upbeat, thanked me for our talk, and said it had helped a lot.

After this crisis, the national security process in the White House did get more orderly and somewhat more disciplined. Jim would survive at the White House for nearly two years, though he was never a good fit there.

Rounding out the major players on the national security team were CIA director Leon Panetta and the director of national intelligence (DNI), Dennis Blair. Panetta and I had gotten to know each other as members of the Iraq Study Group. There were some raised eyebrows at Leon’s appointment, given his lack of experience in national security and
unfamiliarity—except as OMB director—with the intelligence business. Based on what I had learned about him on the ISG, I had no problem with his appointment. I knew that most CIA directors had no previous experience in the business—in fact, up to that point only three career officers in its history had become director of central intelligence (Richard Helms, William Colby, and me). What counted was that Leon was smart and tough, had run large government organizations before, and above all, knew Congress—a perennial deficiency at CIA. And he plainly had the confidence of the new president and a long-standing friendship with the secretary of state. Occasionally Leon would doff his CIA hat and offer the president some hardheaded political advice on contentious national security issues; I thought he had more insight into the political realities in Washington than anyone at the table, including Obama and Biden. He was very careful about making clear when he was speaking not as CIA director but personally. His respect for the CIA professionals, his quick wit and easy laugh, and his wisdom and common sense made him a welcome addition.

I first met Blair in the mid-1970s, when he was a young Navy officer on assignment as a White House fellow and I was on the NSC staff. A Rhodes scholar, he was described to me then as one of the smartest officers in uniform. We would have little further contact until the Obama administration. Denny was a retired four-star admiral, his last position being commander of Pacific Command, responsible for military operations covering about half the earth’s surface—about as close as you can get to being an imperial proconsul in the modern American military. Mike Mullen and I got along fine with Denny, but his relationships with others on the team and in the intelligence community were scratchy from the beginning. He actually believed that he was the boss of the U.S. intelligence community, with authority over most, if not all, its constituent elements, including CIA. In reality, despite the understandings and accommodations that Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Jim Clapper, former CIA director Mike Hayden, and former DNI Mike McConnell and I had reached in 2008, the DNI still did not have the statutory basis or political clout to assert complete authority over others in the intelligence community. If the freewheeling White House national security staff was a headache for Jim Jones, the national intelligence apparatus was a nightmare for someone who had been a four-star admiral and combatant commander. As I would often comment, the job
of DNI is less akin to a chief executive officer than to the powerful chairman of a congressional committee—there are some inherent authorities, but mostly you have to persuade people to go along with you. Denny wasn’t much into persuasion.

Unfortunately, his first big clash was with Panetta, who was both politically and bureaucratically savvy and determined to earn loyalty at CIA. Blair provided just the opportunity to do so. An earlier DNI proposal to designate the senior intelligence officer in capitals abroad—the CIA “chief of station”—also as the DNI representative had predictably languished at CIA for a year. The CIA had always filled this job. Implicit in the proposal was the notion that chiefs of station would be appointed by the DNI and might or might not be CIA officers. In the spring of 2009, Blair unilaterally issued a worldwide directive simply implementing the proposal. (As a former director of central intelligence, I thought Denny was crazy to make such a frontal assault on the agency and its new director.) Panetta immediately issued his own worldwide cable countermanding the DNI’s directive, at which point Blair sent a letter to Panetta ordering him to retract his cable. A relationship that had begun as fragile had become poisonous. Leon prevailed, making it clear to all that the CIA director had more clout in the White House than the DNI did.

Blair did not have good chemistry with the president and other members of the national security team. He had a tendency to offer his views in meetings forcefully and with a certain finality, including on policy matters on which he shouldn’t have taken a position in the first place, and that displeased the president. According to Jones and others, Obama also did not like the way Denny conducted himself in the morning intelligence briefings, often interjecting his own opinions. I could read the body language in the Situation Room when he spoke, and it was pretty clear that his only friends in the room were Mullen and me, and maybe Hillary.

I would spend a lot of time with two other Obama appointees, both in the White House. I had never met Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff, who was hell-on-wheels and became well known for terrorizing everyone, even cabinet officers. Armed with an inexhaustible supply of “f-bombs,” he was a whirling dervish with attention deficit disorder. Jones told me once that Rahm would have an idea at ten in the morning and expect it to be implemented by four in the afternoon—regardless of complexity. I enjoyed Rahm. He made me laugh. He was a political
animal to his core and often a source of considerable insight into politics and Congress. He was also far from the first bombast I had worked with in the White House. I would have some very serious differences with Emanuel over “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (the law concerning gays in the military), the budget, and Afghanistan, but we got along personally. After I dropped several “f-bombs” of my own on him during a heated argument, he said admiringly that he didn’t know I could talk like that and seemed to treat me with new respect. Actually, he—and everyone else in the Obama White House—always treated me with great courtesy and even deference.

The one other White House player I want to mention is John Brennan, whom Obama appointed assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for homeland security and counterterrorism. Brennan was a career CIA officer and one of the few who had served in senior positions in both the analytical and the operational sides of the agency. I don’t recall ever having met him at CIA, although during his early years as an analyst, he must have worked for me. Obama had wanted to nominate him to be CIA director, but his role at CIA during the Bush years resulted in significant pushback from the Hill, and so he ended up with a White House appointment that did not require Senate confirmation. In White House meetings I attended, Brennan would offer an opinion only when asked directly by Jones or by the president. Brennan came to have great influence in the Obama White House and, as best I could tell, was quite effective in his job, playing a central role in the grievous damage done to al Qaeda. (He would become CIA director in Obama’s second term.)

A new phenomenon for me was the appointment of “special envoys” to work on important regional problems—Ambassador Richard Holbrooke for Afghanistan and Pakistan, former senator George Mitchell on Middle East peace, and retired Air Force Major General Scott Gration for Sudan. The Clinton administration had used special envoys or “representatives” to deal with difficult and time-consuming foreign policy issues such as the Balkans, where Holbrooke had rendered successful service in a brokered deal (the Dayton Accords) that brought about peace, if an uneasy one. Personally, I think the idea of high-profile personalities working on sensitive issues outside normal channels is a mistake because it leads to bureaucratic conflict in Washington and confusion abroad as to who speaks for the president.

Holbrooke’s success in the Balkans in the 1990s had been a one-off due to the unique combination of the nature of that conflict, the leaders involved, and Richard’s skills and personality, both aptly suited to the Balkans. His “in your face” approach seemed unlikely to work with countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the leaders, culture, and political conditions were not susceptible to the Holbrooke style. Hardly had he been appointed before conflict arose with the National Security Staff (as the National Security Council staff was restructured and renamed in order to give it a broader range of responsibilities, including homeland security), Holbrooke enjoying Hillary’s steadfast support. The president’s curtness in addressing Richard made clear he was not Obama’s cup of tea, further limiting his influence and effectiveness. Holbrooke soon alienated both the Pakistani and Afghan leaders and would become a peripheral participant in the war discussions, despite his valuable insights and strong team.

Mitchell came to his new appointment with success as a mediator in Northern Ireland under his belt, not an inconsiderable achievement. His chances for achieving success in the Middle East were slim. As we saw in the Camp David Accords in 1978, which led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty signed in early 1979, only when both the Israelis and their Arab interlocutors are strong politically at home
and
willing to compromise is progress toward peace possible. In early 2009, those conditions did not exist. There was a weak Palestinian government on the West Bank composed of reasonably pragmatic politicians, and Hamas extremists in Gaza who were determined to destroy Israel. In Israel, the administration had to deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, leading a right-wing coalition government, who was unwilling to take meaningful steps toward a two-state solution. The Obama team was divided between the old Middle East hands, including Dennis Ross, who thought we should proceed step-by-step in the process with great caution, and those like Jim Jones and me, who preferred a bolder approach in which the United States would sketch out what a comprehensive agreement might look like so both sides could evaluate what they might have to give up and what they might gain. The balance tilted to the old hands, and George would shuttle endlessly back and forth to the region, with nothing to show for it. Scott Gration encountered an intractable situation in Sudan, and a split in our own government on how to deal with the regime there, but
he did help secure a peaceful referendum that led to the creation of South Sudan.

That was the new core team. Then there was the president himself. Interviewers would persistently ask me to compare working for Bush and Obama, and how I could work for two men who were so different. I would remind people that Obama was the eighth president I had worked for, each very different from the others. Career officials, at least those lacking a partisan agenda, learn to adapt to different presidential styles and personalities. I did not have a problem making the transition from Bush to Obama.

My relationship with Obama would become quite strong, but it was always a business relationship. That had been true as well with Bush, although, as I mentioned earlier, he did invite Becky and me to Camp David on several occasions, none of which panned out. Obama would occasionally say we ought to get together for a martini, but it never happened. Until my last night in Washington as secretary, when he and Michelle hosted a small going-away dinner for us in the family quarters of the White House, we did not socialize. Just as I was not into mountain biking and so missed my sports bonding opportunity with Bush, I was a foot too short, too athletically inept, and too old to be considered for the Obama presidential basketball team, nor did I play golf. So, our two and a half years together were spent almost exclusively in the Oval Office and the White House Situation Room.

Although Obama to my mind is a liberal Democrat and I consider myself a moderately conservative Republican, for the first two years, on national security matters, we largely saw eye to eye. As with most presidential transitions, there was considerable continuity in this area between the last years of the Bush administration and the first years of Obama’s presidency, as loath as partisans on both sides were (and are) to admit it. The path forward in Iraq had been mostly settled by the 2008 Strategic Framework Agreement with the Iraqis, and Obama essentially followed the path Bush had agreed to in December 2008, ending the war “responsibly,” as he put it. Obama had campaigned on the need for more resources in Afghanistan, and he clearly was prepared to go after al Qaeda aggressively. For the first year we worked together, he was supportive of robust funding for Defense. We had a strong foundation for a productive partnership. On some lower priority issues, as I will examine later, while
I might disagree, I was willing to acquiesce or be supportive—as I had been in the Bush administration. Nobody in Washington wins on every issue, and as long as I was comfortable on the big stuff, I would be a team player on other matters. I don’t recall Obama and I ever discussing his domestic policies, and that was probably just as well.