Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (55 page)

Most support inside the administration for engagement ended with the Iranian regime’s rigging of the outcome of the June 9 elections and the brutally harsh repression of protesters that ensued, although the administration would not fully abandon the idea until fall. The president was strongly criticized then and later for failing to speak out more clearly on behalf of the “Green Revolution.” At the time, I was persuaded by the State Department’s experts and by CIA analysts who briefed us in the Situation Room that too powerful an American voice on behalf of the protesters might provide ammunition for the regime to label the protest movement a tool of the United States and CIA and thus be used against them. In retrospect, I think we could and should have done more, at least rhetorically.

Another Iranian problem we faced had its roots in Bush’s final days in office. On January 7, 2009, I was heading out of my office to celebrate with my infinitely patient wife our forty-second wedding anniversary when I heard Geoff Morrell talking to my chief of staff, Robert Rangel, right outside my door. Geoff had received a call from
New York Times
reporter David Sanger that afternoon alerting him that Sanger was writing an article that would say Israel had asked the United States early in 2008 for bunker-busting bombs and for permission for overflight of Iraq in order to strike the Iranian nuclear enrichment site at Natanz. Sanger claimed that the United States had refused both requests, believing that the Israelis would be able to delay the Iranian program only a short while but would put 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq at risk. He also referred to a covert program intended to delay the Iranian nuclear program. Sanger wanted Morrell to ask me what I made of all this. I was furious. I called Bush’s national security adviser, Steve Hadley, to report what Morrell had just told me. I suggested Hadley call executive editor Bill Keller of the
Times
to try to stop publication of the article. Hadley thought that would never work, and then, at Rangel’s suggestion, I proposed bringing Jim Jones up to speed and then recommended that Hadley and Jones together call Keller. I don’t think that ever happened. Sanger’s article was published on January 11. A month later Obama was still so angry about the leaks to Sanger that he told me he wanted a criminal investigation.

As long as I had been in Washington, I could not for the life of me understand why someone would leak information about programs that were an alternative to war. But the leaks would continue. I didn’t know whether they were coming from the administration, from the Israelis, or from both. What I did know was that they were terribly damaging to the prospects for a nonmilitary outcome with Iran, and that that was unforgivable.

As an old “Russia hand,” I had no objection to Obama’s reaching out to Moscow as long as no unilateral concessions were involved. I was greatly reassured in an early meeting when Hillary said that she had no interest “ever” in doing something for nothing. She sent Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov a handwritten note on January 29 outlining a number of areas where the two sides could work together constructively, including a follow-on strategic arms agreement, global economic challenges, Middle East peace, Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan. This was followed by a letter in early February from Obama to Russian president Medvedev setting forth a similar agenda, adding that both of them were young presidents with a different mind-set from those who came of age during the Cold War. (I wonder who he could have been talking about.) As reported publicly several weeks later, Obama wrote Medvedev that if we could satisfactorily resolve the Iranian nuclear problem, the need for missile defenses in Europe would be removed. This caused consternation in some conservative circles in the United States but in fact was very close to what Condi Rice and I had told Putin during the Bush administration. Although the administration would pursue a wide range of possibilities for cooperation in the months ahead, the focus of our dealings with Russia, as for so long before, narrowed principally to arms control and missile defense. There was progress on the former, failure and rancor on the latter.

Although by 2009 it was politically incorrect to describe Iran and North Korea as “rogue nations” or an “axis of evil,” they still acted as if they were, even in small things. In March 2009, two American women journalists who had crossed on foot into North Korea from China were arrested for spying. A few months later, in July, three other American hikers—two men and one woman—crossed into Iran from Iraq and were arrested. Frankly, I had no patience with any of them; no sentient person goes tootling anywhere near either the North Korean or Iranian border. But we had to try to get them out nonetheless.

The North Korean government said it would release the two women only if a former U.S. president came to get them. Hillary, Jim Jones, several others, and I gathered in Jones’s office in early August to discuss what to do. Hillary had asked President Carter to go, but he made clear that if he went, he would discuss broader aspects of the U.S.–North Korean relationship—as ever, an unguided missile—in addition to negotiating the terms of their release. When Clinton told Carter he could not go without a prior guarantee of the women’s release by the North, the former president responded, “You can’t dictate terms—they’re a sovereign state!” I was against either Carter or former president Clinton going. I had no objection to lower-profile emissaries who had been suggested, such as former defense secretary Bill Perry, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, or New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, but I was very much against giving the North a chance to humiliate a former U.S. president or allowing Pyongyang to dictate terms to one. I don’t remember who it was who said the two women had a lot of media connections and the families could go public, charging that the administration had turned down a chance to get the women back. I was frustrated that the others seemed more sensitive to the domestic U.S. ramifications of not doing as North Korea wanted than to the foreign policy implications. Ultimately, President Clinton made the trip and secured the release of the two women. The Iranians released the woman hiker after about a year, but it was nearly three years before the two men were released. All of this took up an enormous amount of time and effort.

The president wanted very much to reach out to the Muslim world and looked for an opportunity to do so. There was general agreement he should give a major speech in the Middle East but considerable debate about the best location to do so. On June 4, 2009, eighteen months before the Arab Spring, he stepped to the rostrum of a huge auditorium at Cairo University and delivered one of his best speeches. He spoke forthrightly about tensions between Muslims and the United States around the world, about shared principles, the dangers to all of violent extremists, the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict, the Iranian nuclear program, and the American commitment to governments that reflect the will of the people—democracy. I thought he threaded the needle well in terms of advocating for human and political rights while not losing sight of the importance in the region of the American relationship with Mubarak’s Egypt. His talk was welcomed in most Muslim countries and raised our
standing among the Arabs. His words were not well received in Israel, and he was criticized by the more hawkish neoconservatives in the United States, who accused the president of apologizing for his country. For me, the real downside of the speech was not that it was an acknowledgment of mistakes—free and confident nations do that—but that it raised expectations very high on the part of many Arabs that, for example, the United States would force Israel to stop building settlements and accept an independent Palestinian state. It wasn’t long before perceptions of us reverted to the by-then normal distrust and suspicion.

In the early months of the Obama administration, there was another Defense-related agenda item high on the president’s priority list—getting rid of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) law. Early in President Clinton’s administration, he had pushed hard to allow gays and lesbians to serve openly in the American armed forces but ran into opposition in Congress and a brick wall of resistance from the senior military leadership. The result was a compromise that left everyone unhappy: in essence, gays could continue to serve as long as they remained in the closet and kept their sexual orientation a secret, that is, as long as they did not engage in homosexual “conduct.” Between 1993 and 2009, some 13,000 service men and women were discharged from the military for homosexuality, either self-admitted or as a result of being reported by someone. Obama was determined to allow gays to serve openly but was willing to wait a bit. He did not want to repeat the 1993 Clinton experience of having a confrontation with the Joint Chiefs early in his term. That suited me just fine. I think all of us at Defense, civilian and military, knew that a change in the law was inevitable at some point, but with our military engaged in two wars and already under great stress, the prevailing view was that waiting was the right thing to do.

I was conflicted. As director of central intelligence in 1992, I had lifted all the restrictions and practices that effectively had previously barred gays from serving in CIA. If a person was open about his or her sexual orientation and therefore not vulnerable to blackmail, they were welcome to serve as long as they met the same CIA standards as other employees. CIA officers, however, do not live and work together 24/7. They do not share foxholes for days at a time or live in the extremely close quarters of a warship. The military is therefore different from CIA—a perspective strengthened by my conversations with troops, particularly young soldiers, in Iraq and Afghanistan. At a lunch with ten or so junior
enlisted soldiers, one asked about the prospects for DADT. In the conversation that followed, one of them told me very matter-of-factly that if gays were allowed to serve, “There will be violence.” Another asked if “combat arms units”—those on the front lines—could be exempted. I heard such comments elsewhere as well. At the same time, I was mindful that there were gay men and women in uniform who were serving with courage and honor yet were required to live a lie, constantly in fear of being outed and having their careers ended. Still, when asked about changing the law in a television interview on March 29, 2009, I replied, “I think the president and I feel like we’ve got a lot on our plates right now, and let’s push that one down the road a bit.”

In the spring of 2009, though, we faced a growing risk that the courts would take control of the issue and make a decision requiring a change overnight. I felt that that was the worst possible outcome, and that risk increasingly shaped my view of the need to move forward. The president faced his first decision on a court case in early April. Major Margaret Witt had been a highly respected nurse in the Air Force Reserve for seventeen years. She never disclosed her sexual orientation to anyone in the military, but in 2004, the estranged husband of a woman Witt had begun dating reported the major to the Air Force. When informed in 2006 that the Air Force was beginning the process that would culminate in her discharge, she sued. Her suit was dismissed in district court, and she was discharged from the Air Force in July 2007. On her appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court in May 2008 reinstated certain aspects of the case and remanded it back to the district court. The Air Force in December urged appealing the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to the Supreme Court. In early April 2009, Obama chaired a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the West Wing to discuss what to do. He clearly hated the idea of upholding a law he considered abhorrent. Some in the meeting said DADT was the law of the land and that was that. The president said if he had to take that approach, he was going to say publicly that he was going to change the law.

On the advice of the Defense Department’s general counsel, the well-respected New York lawyer Jeh Johnson, I agreed we should not appeal to the Supreme Court, and that was subsequently the decision. Johnson’s primary reason, and therefore mine (because I trusted and respected him like no other lawyer I had ever worked with), was that he thought the government’s case as it stood was weak and that we might very well
lose the appeal, resulting in my nightmare scenario of a Supreme Court–mandated overnight change in the DADT law for the military. I told the senior defense leadership that the decision not to appeal did not represent a change in policy but was a very technical and narrow legal decision about how to dispose of a specific case.

This discussion formed the backdrop of Mullen’s and my first in-depth discussion of DADT with Obama on April 13. We understood his commitment to changing the law, but the question was how to fulfill that promise in a way that “mitigates the negative consequences.” I was quite candid with him. He needed to remember, I said, that a high percentage of our service men and women come from the South, Midwest, and Mountain West, more often than not from small towns and rural areas. They come from areas with conservative values, and they are, broadly speaking, more religious than many Americans. While they join the military for a variety of reasons, they often enlist because of the encouragement or at least support of their fathers, coaches, and preachers. The demographic and cultural realities of the U.S. military could not be wished away, and we had to acknowledge and address them if a change in the law was going to be successful.

I went on to tell him that no one in the Pentagon had any idea what the impact of eliminating DADT would be on the force with regard to unit cohesion, discipline, morale, recruitment, and retention. We didn’t know how quickly a policy could be implemented without major disruption to the services. The military had never had an open conversation internally about gays serving. What dialogue there had been was, I suspected, mostly among groups of soldiers in the barracks or in small groups over a few beers. If the policy was to change, I cautioned him in the strongest possible terms, it should not be by presidential order; it could not be seen by the military as simply the fulfillment of a campaign promise by a liberal president. DADT was the law. Any change had to come through a change in that law by the elected representatives of the American people. That, and only that, would have legitimacy. I said he could count on the fact that when the law and the policy changed, the military would implement it quickly and smoothly. He took all that in, I thought, with surprising equanimity.