Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (40 page)

Even as the administration prepared for the presidential transition, American diplomacy worked feverishly to defuse the situation. The last thing a new president needed was another war in South Asia.

I began routinely harassing my counterpart in Pakistan, now Ahmed Shuja Pasha (the former director general of Military Operations, the Pakistan army’s top operational post), on the phone, urging him to get to the bottom of the attack and to discuss it frankly with us. We had no doubt that the attack was the work of LET, and there was mounting evidence that preparation for and direction of the attack took place from within Pakistan, where LET enjoyed the protection and support of ISI.

Pasha had come to ISI only a few weeks earlier and had no previous intelligence experience. ISI was a heavily compartmented organization, so I wouldn’t have been surprised if a lot of what he was now picking up was discovery learning on his part.

He flew to the United States on Christmas Day and spent most of the next afternoon in my office. He worked carefully from notes. His investigation had revealed that some former ISI members were involved with Lashkar-e-Taiba (no surprise there). Pasha admitted that these unspecified (and still uncaptured) retirees may have engaged in some broad training of the attackers, but he was characteristically vague about any detailed direction the attackers had gotten during the attack via cell phone from Pakistan. No admission of more formal ties between LET and ISI, either, even though the former was an intelligence service creation to contest Indian control of Kashmir. And ISI did not seem to
know much about LET’s recent movement from a Kashmiri-focused terrorist group to one with more al-Qaeda–like global ambitions, a migration easily traced through the group’s Web activity.

I took to passing sufficiently sanitized intelligence to Pasha on what we believed was going on in order to try to goad him into action. If he knew that we knew . . . perhaps we could get some movement.

We didn’t have a whole lot of success. Many Pakistanis viewed LET (like the Haqqani network and the Taliban) as some sort of strategic reserve rather than the strategic liability and regional danger they really were. Attempts by Pakistan to limit LET in the past had been short-lived and incomplete. This proved to be no different.

Pakistani intelligence officials agreed that the Mumbai attack was indeed a tragedy, but they had had nothing to do with it and really couldn’t find out much about it.

Thank God the Indians showed remarkable restraint.

And thank God that two successive presidents have decided to act unilaterally when American safety required it.

I
think that the intelligence community consensus was that the election of John McCain would have been more disruptive to the way America produced intelligence than the election of Barack Obama.

Senator McCain was a known quantity. Patriotic. Heroic. Forceful. Emotional. He once angrily stormed out of a meeting I was having on Capitol Hill for Senate Republicans, accusing me of covering my ass while exposing theirs (my summary, not his). He later returned to the session and apologized.

Barack Obama was an unknown. I had been scheduled to meet with him in the spring of 2008, at his initiative, for purposes that remain unclear to me to this day. The candidate got tied up in Tim Russert’s remarkable memorial service at the Kennedy Center, though, and he personally called me to cancel the engagement and promise we would get together soon. The campaign predictably swept him up, and the promised meeting never took place.

There were some at CIA who viewed the upcoming election with great concern, fearful that a new president would try to prosecute CIA officers involved in renditions, detentions, and interrogations. Indeed, both
candidates had expressed strong negative views on the programs, and Eric Holder had specifically promised a reckoning while campaigning for Senator Obama.

I was approached by a senior CIA lawyer with a package recommending a preemptive presidential pardon for everyone involved. To be clear, he was in no way imputing guilt to his fellow officers. He just feared politically motivated investigations and litigation that would disrupt lives and destroy savings. Given what Holder did once he was in office, he was damn prescient.

I sympathized with what he was trying to do, but saw that this was fraught with difficulties. There was already an active investigation under way on the destruction of the videotapes. I doubted that the president would even consider pardons and our even asking would be read by some as an admission of guilt. It would also moot the efforts we had under way to convince a new administration that these programs should continue.

I wanted a second opinion, so I grabbed Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, on the margins of a Sit Room meeting and briefly explained what I had. Fred and I had struck up a friendship since his arrival in early 2007. His savvy, avuncular style was welcome and calming. There was no better barometer of the political and legal wisdom of pushing this, and after a brief conversation, it was clear to me that Fred was markedly unenthusiastic. Although I didn’t know it at the time, he was also then advising against a full pardon for Scooter Libby, the vice president’s former chief of staff.

I let the matter drop. There was no need to put the president in an impossible position. Nor to act like we needed pardoning. But I would often parse this decision in the coming years as Eric Holder did indeed try to go after CIA officers.

On election night we had teams in Phoenix and Chicago. Barring a repeat of the long count eight years earlier in Florida,
someone
was going to get the PDB—the President’s Daily Brief—in the morning. Early in the evening it became pretty clear that that
someone
was Barack Obama.

The process would have been the same for either man. Like the rest of
the government we would work to get access to him and then create as many of what we crudely called “aw, shit” moments as possible.

That implied no disrespect. In fact, it was designed to protect the president-elect. This would be the folks who were around before the election and would be around after the next one telling you about the world as they saw it, not through the lens of campaign rhetoric, tracking polls, or the world as you wanted it to be. The “aw, shit” count simply reflected how many times they had been successful, as in “Aw shit, wish we hadn’t said that during that campaign stop in Buffalo.”

I had to wait until December 9 to get direct access to the president-elect and vice president–elect. The incoming team was getting its threat and situation briefings from the DNI, who was by law the president’s senior intelligence advisor. I needed to talk to them about covert action, which remained the province of CIA.

The December date was obviously a long time coming, and no sooner had I landed in Chicago than I was told that our long-sought appointment might be at risk. As I walked into the darkened lobby of our downtown hotel (we had arrived very late to low-key our presence), my chief of security whispered to me that we had a problem. The venue had been changed; the secure facility at the FBI office in the Federal Building was no longer available, but we had been able to book a smaller room at another location.

A bit exasperated, I asked, “Why?”

Leaning into my ear, the security chief whispered, “Because the FBI is arresting the governor in the morning.”

The next morning at the new location, the first time I saw the president-elect he was quietly repeating to himself, “The governor was trying to sell my seat. The governor was trying to sell my seat.”

The new venue was tight. We sat across a narrow table from the president-elect; vice president–elect; incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel; national security advisor–designate Jim Jones; Tony Blinken, national security advisor to the VP; and Mark Lippert, a navy reservist who had been with the campaign since before Iowa.

I laid out a global map between the president-elect and myself. Its
annotations highlighted all ongoing covert actions, some geographically focused, others organized around global issues. I began, “Mr. President-elect.” (Yes, it’s an awkward term, but shortening it to “president” is constitutionally presumptive and reverting to “senator” ignores an important constitutional reality—he
had
been elected president.)

“Mr. President-elect, I’m going to brief you on all the covert actions currently under way. These have all been authorized by the president. But the authorization comes from the office—not the person—of the president, so absent any action on your part, all of these will be going forward on the afternoon of January 20 [Inauguration Day].”

I then stepped through everything we were doing. The president-elect was focused, absorbing things with little visible reaction. The vice president–elect was his usual garrulous self, so one of my challenges was to get both men to the bottom of each page at about the same time.

The president-elect was more animated when we talked about proliferation. He wanted to know our division of labor, specifically how much did we focus on Iran? He accepted without comment my estimate of 80 percent.

We also explored how targeted killings along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border had ticked up in the last half of 2008 and how their results were now outpacing al-Qaeda’s ability to replace key personnel.

I saved the controversial bucket—renditions, detentions, and interrogations—for last.

Once there, I started with rendition—the extrajudicial transfer of someone to a third party. I broadly explained that we had done a series of these in the previous eight years, that they were not something newly created by the Bush administration, and what our moral and legal responsibilities were to the detainees, even in their new location.

“Oh, come on, General,” the VP-elect suddenly interrupted, “you shipped them to these places to rough them up so you could get information.”

The president-elect was attentive, but silent (as he was for most of the briefing) as I responded, “Mr. Vice President–elect, that’s simply not true.
And now that I’ve told you that, you need to stop saying it.” No sense letting an opportunity pass.

When we got to detentions and interrogations the president-elect took control of the narrative. No sooner had I started than he asked, “What are the techniques?”

I asked David Shedd, the DNI’s chief of staff, to stand next to me while I demonstrated on him the two grasps and the two slaps we were permitted. As we were sitting down, I added that we also manipulated sleep and diet and gave the president-elect a sense of our limits and authorities there.

I think he was underwhelmed, because his immediate response was, “What were the other techniques?”

I listed them, and he then said that I would have to get together with Greg Craig, soon to be his White House counsel, to work on a way ahead.

Flying back from Chicago, I still had no idea about my personal future, other than a vague comment from Denis McDonough (close advisor to the president who later filled a variety of trusted roles for him) that eventually the transition team would “reach out” to me. We had never had a presidential transition under a DNI before. DCIs, who were head of the American intelligence community as well as head of CIA, routinely swapped out with a new administration (George Tenet was an exception with the incoming George W. Bush), but the DNI now headed the community and I was “just” head of CIA. I was determined
not
to self-identify my post as political (it wasn’t), so I did nothing to suggest that I believed I
had
to leave.

The president-elect thought I should go, though, and by early January, Leon Panetta’s name was being informally floated as my replacement. Steve Kappes, my deputy, called John Brennan (head of the intelligence transition team) to ask if anyone was ever going to talk to me. The president-elect called me at home that night, told me that he was basing his choice on the need to turn the page (and not look backward), and asked me to stay on until Leon could be confirmed. I readily agreed. I could use the time, since I had not begun any real transition planning.

It was a mistake not to have been better prepared. I was taking a principled position to act like the CIA director position was apolitical, but it wasn’t a practical one. And President Bush’s endorsement to his successor that I stay on probably hurt more than it helped. I was leaving and I should have seen it. Intelligence is about good analysis, after all.

But if the transition was awkward for me, it was even worse for John Brennan, who had advised Obama during the campaign and was now the intelligence transition team chief. For the most part, his team was composed of intel veterans whom we knew and respected, and their apolitical approach was a perfect complement to President Bush’s direction to us to conduct a professional turnover. John confided that one of their directives was to make no news, which was fine with us.

Although he had told us that no members of the transition team were in it for future jobs, John clearly wanted to replace me as head of CIA. But the blogosphere was exploding at the very thought, with the likes of Andrew Sullivan (consistently anti-Bush) and Glenn Greenwald (pretty much anti-everything) in the lead and with human rights lawyer Scott Horton in strong support. They pointed to John’s senior roles under George Tenet (chief of staff, executive director, head of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center), when detentions were at their height as inherently disqualifying. They also pulled up quotes from as little as a year before in which John claimed that interrogations had saved lives and that renditions were a vital tool.

A little before Thanksgiving, John wrote a Shermanesque letter to the
Washington Post
withdrawing himself from consideration for a post with which the incoming team had never publicly associated him. He also took the opportunity to distance himself personally from previous CIA policies and practices.

The whole thing played out publicly, and it was pretty ugly. When John came to visit me the next day with Jami Miscik (former head of CIA Analysis) on routine transition business, I tried to lighten the air a bit. After greeting them in the outer office, I allowed myself a “Well, so much for keeping this low-key.”

When we sat down, I turned to John directly and sympathized, “I’m sorry, John. I know how you feel.” The reference was to the unfair press treatment.

John paused a second, then tersely answered, “With all due respect, Mike, no you don’t!”

There was a pause in the conversation. Miscik stared straight ahead. I tried to stay calm by silently counting to ten. Well, f— you, John (one). Well, f— you, John (two). Well, f— you, John (three) . . . and so on till ten. We then resumed the meeting as if nothing had happened.

(John eventually did become director in 2014, and his previous time at the agency did indeed continue to be an issue as he manfully defended CIA from scurrilous accusations.)

And John’s experience wasn’t isolated. For all the personal unpleasantness, this was a serious policy issue. A personnel structure that effectively had Greenwald, Sullivan, Horton, and the like vetting senior administration officials looked like trouble.

A later visible casualty was Phil Mudd, the nominee to be the under secretary of Homeland Security for intelligence and analysis. Phil was a thoroughgoing professional, a career CIA analyst with superb credentials and extensive experience in counterterrorism
.
When I was PDDNI, I pressured him to leave his CIA comfort zone to take on a challenging task as deputy head of the FBI’s fledgling National Security Branch. Phil’s task there was to expand the office and move FBI’s forensics-based and law enforcement–focused analysis toward a true intelligence function: predictive, disruptive, and working the “spaces between cases.”

No easy task, but Phil thrived. He earned the respect of the broader FBI and tirelessly moved his workforce toward the mainstream of the intelligence community. Along the way he became knowledgeable of and accepted by law enforcement officers at all levels of government. A national intelligence professional with credentials among cops, Phil Mudd was made for the Department of Homeland Security job, which was the key interface between national capabilities and the needs of state, tribal, and local defenders and first responders.

It was not to be. The blogosphere had already begun to light up about his unsuitability for the job. His sin? Phil had been the deputy director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and its chief analyst at the height of the agency’s counterattack against al-Qaeda.

As Mudd made the rounds of Hill staffers, he was told that this aspect of his past, rather than his credentials for the future post, would be the focus of his hearings. Phil calmly (and wisely) said no. He would not become the meat in the sandwich, being badgered to answer what his definition of torture was or whether he agreed with President Obama’s description that this had been a dark period in our history, or with the former vice president’s assertion that hundreds of lives had been saved, or with the Speaker of the House’s judgment that they “mislead us all the time,” or with my public statements that the CIA interrogation program produced valuable intelligence. Beyond what personal psychic costs such an inquiry would impose on him, Phil would simply not feed the partisan beast and create yet more distractions for the community he loved. And so the country did without the officer clearly most qualified to fill the head intelligence position at DHS.