Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror (42 page)

We had better luck with the incoming team on renditions, the extrajudicial movements of subjects from one point to another. John Rizzo, CIA’s acting general counsel, scanned the very late-arriving draft executive order on detentions and quickly noted that its language was so broad that it would have taken us out of the rendition business too. In a panic he called Greg Craig to ask if that was the intent. “Absolutely not,” Greg replied.

We had been explaining to the incoming team that we could neither
ask nor support another nation doing something that was beyond our legal authorities to do. It wasn’t hard to suggest a variety of scenarios where they would want someone to quietly (even covertly) detain someone and transfer him to a third party. Picture a bomb maker fleeing Afghanistan en route to Yemen through the Persian Gulf or a terrorist financier transiting the Emirates between Gulf donors.

The next day, when the EO was launched amid much fanfare, there was a new phrase tucked into it authorizing detentions “on a short-term transitory basis.” In other words, renditions—although that magic word was avoided, and of course, the incoming administration made much about guarantees against torture or cruel treatment as distinguishing it from past practitioners. We simply pocketed the continuation of a valuable tool and tolerated the claims of moral superiority. (That many of the actual movements since 2009 appear to have been in the Horn of Africa suggests the continued challenge of working with dicey partners.)

And renditions were but one example of continuity. Despite some caustic rhetoric, there was surprising persistence between the two administrations in the politically freighted area of countering terrorism. Much more than many expected. CIA black sites were closed, but targeted killings continued and even increased dramatically. Electronic surveillance pressed on unabated. Military commissions were revitalized. The administration routinely invoked the “state secrets” privilege in court cases. And the United States continued to define itself as a belligerent in a global conflict with al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

There were arguably more changes between President Bush’s first and second terms than there were between him and his successor. President Obama suggested as much in one remark buried in a lengthy interview with Peter Baker of the
New York Times
six weeks into office.

I think that I would distinguish between some of the steps that were taken immediately after 9/11 and where we were by the time I took office. I think the CIA, for example, and some of the controversial programs that have been a focus of a lot of attention, took steps to
correct certain policies and procedures after those first couple of years. I think that Admiral [
sic
] Hayden and Mike McConnell at D.N.I. were capable public servants who really had America’s security interests in mind when they acted, and I think were mindful of American values and ideals.

The shout-out was genuinely appreciated (although he could have been a bit more generous to the administration that Mike and I served). In any event, the comment got no bounce in the press, and the president never really returned to the theme, choosing instead to rhetorically stress the differences between himself and his predecessor (see especially chapters 12 and 20).

Correspondent David Sanger got a lot of access to administration officials, and he revealingly titled his perceptive book on the Obama administration’s security policy
Confront and Conceal.
A
New York Times
story on counterterrorism in 2012 echoed the thought when it described Obama as “a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric.” The campaign team, according to the
Times
, characterized all this as a victory of pragmatism over ideology.

Hence the continuity between administrations and also the rhetoric designed to disguise that continuity as much as possible. And also the later stresses on the intelligence community when it came time to reconcile apparent word and actual deed, most dramatically demonstrated with the revelation of NSA’s metadata program in 2013.

The formal inauguration ceremony imposed a pause on all the frenetic transition activity. For one thing, the security for the event itself had to be tended to by both the incoming and outgoing teams. There was limited specific threat information, but we weren’t taking any chances, and there was a delicate dance not to let the old guys’ security concerns unduly limit the new guys’ desire for a truly popular spectacle for the historic event.

For Inauguration Day itself, Jeanine and I had to decide where to be. Since I was still in government, we were offered two seats on the Mall for
President Obama’s formal swearing-in. We had also been invited to Andrews Air Force Base to say goodbye to President Bush.

People forget that I was a Clinton appointee to the NSA job. In 2001 the Bush folks were the new guys on the block and we were settling into
that
new team. It wasn’t particularly hard, except for one issue. Somebody in the new crew wanted to review and vet all the members of our advisory boards. Although it was never explicitly stated, I suspected that party affiliation was the issue. These boards are pretty carefully picked (I did mine personally) and they’re pretty busy; there isn’t room for honorific or emeritus status. I was looking for balance, expertise, and a willingness to work. Now I feared that the criteria would resemble something reminiscent of the 1950s: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the —— Party?” I decided to ignore the call for names for the new people to vet for as long as we could, and then, post-9/11, this just went away.

I had not met President George W. Bush prior to 9/11. I had met his father when I served on his National Security Council staff, and Vice President Cheney had visited Fort Meade early in the administration, but my first encounter with the president was that September 2001 morning when George Tenet ushered me into the Oval to discuss what more NSA could do. After another meeting or two, Stellarwind was under way. I went back periodically to update the president on the program, but the more detailed briefings to Congress over the next years were always in the vice president’s cramped office just down the hall.

I got to know the president a little better when he came out to Fort Meade to encourage and thank the workforce in June 2002. I was alone to greet him on the post parade ground when Marine One landed, and he invited me into the car with him and Andy Card for the short ride to NSA. The route passed the post’s golf courses, prompting speculation that the president might be able to run on the secure 3.5-mile jogging trail that snaked through them.

Once at NSA headquarters, the president jumped into the role of personally thanking folks and listening to them explain their work. His
advance team willingly agreed to a press availability under one of our near-ubiquitous “We Won’t Back Down” banners. After stops that included the Stellarwind shop and the operations center, the president mounted a stage we had constructed in the sun-drenched parking lot to a massive roar from the crowd of over five thousand that had gathered.

The president’s message was simple: I appreciate what you do—an important message in the face of congressional inquiries trying to affix blame for 9/11. He was the first president to come to NSA since his father visited after the first Gulf War; “W” visited again in 2006 a few weeks after the
New York Times
revealed aspects of the Stellarwind program.

President Bush worked the rope line for twenty minutes after his remarks. He autographed notepapers, dollar bills, and NSA access badges (which we then had to replace). It was a great day, marked by genuine emotion on both sides. They were his kind of people. He was their kind of president.

When I became director of CIA, I more routinely met with the president. He poked at my loyalty to the Steelers and took to calling me Mikey in lighter moments. That had actually been my handle growing up, as there were two other Mikes in the house, my grandfather (Big Mike) and my uncle (Brother Mike).

His informality often took me off guard. I was hanging in the small outer office of the Oval, waiting to go in, when the president bellowed, “Mikey, get in here!” As I entered, he gestured toward the fireplace and said, “You know Tony, don’t you?” I turned to see the prime minister of the United Kingdom extending his hand toward mine.

There is a plotline held by some that the real center of power in the Bush administration was the vice president. A more benign version of the story is that a young, untested president was fortunate to have surrounded himself early on with experienced old hands like the vice president, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and the like.

I really had little insight into the inner workings of the administration until the second term. From that perspective, though, there was never any doubt in my mind who the president was. I never left a meeting with
George Bush wondering what it was he wanted me to do. And I rarely had an important meeting with the vice president that did not end with the vice president saying, “We’ll have to take that to the president.” And if there was ever any truth about a new president benefiting from older, wiser hands, it was clear to me that the president had grown beyond
all
of his advisors by the time I approached his inner circle.

People learn and absorb information in different ways. George Bush was an avid reader, as evidenced by the scorecard kept in the office just outside the Oval with a running count of books and number of pages read by him and Karl Rove. But in terms of intelligence, the president really learned in the conversation. It didn’t take long for any briefing with him to go interactive. Questions. Alternative views. Comparisons with past presentations (“That’s not what you told me six months ago”). He was never rude, not even brusque, but he was challenging, and he had an appetite for details. Near fanatic about being punctual, he allotted a lot of time for intelligence briefings so as not to go long and create a domino effect on the rest of his schedule. And he acted on the intelligence.

I participated in my share of substantive intelligence discussions with the president, but the DNI was his principal intelligence advisor. My special relationship with him was through covert action, which we discussed weekly. It included conversations on the specifics of renditions, detentions, and interrogations. I don’t think that later charges by some Democrats that the president was in the dark about such matters were ever true, but they sure as hell weren’t true on my watch. I also updated him weekly about terrorists that were being taken off the battlefield one way or another, and I told him when things didn’t go well too.

For the last six months of the administration he often began these sessions by reminding me how much more time I had to get bin Laden while he was president. He must have been as angry as I was when his successor attributed the successful raid in Abbottabad to his personal re-prioritization: “And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al-Qaeda.” That night, watching President
Obama’s speech in our kitchen, I turned to Jeanine to mockingly comment, “Damn. Why didn’t they tell me this UBL guy was important?”

Covert actions are always edgy things. In one, we were controlling a plot that included an al-Qaeda bomb maker who had been brought in to attack an American facility. I was getting briefed daily and had good confidence this was all under control; the president was markedly less sanguine, based on his weekly updates. He leaned on me. Hard. Multiple times. The plan worked, though. A talented bomb maker was taken out of circulation. It all showed a level of presidential trust.

Some covert actions are particularly edgy. One such operation was going to have to thread a very narrow needle in every imaginable dimension: law, politics, ethics, operations, diplomacy. Steve Kappes and I wanted one final gut check with the president, which Steve Hadley arranged. We talked for about an hour. The president was patient. Steve Hadley later told me that the president characterized the session as two good Catholic boys clearing the air with him. When we left, we knew that the president believed that if we thought we should and could do this, we would. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t. He was happy with that. He didn’t speak to us about it again.

We did do it. The morning afterward the president walked into a crowded Sit Room, looked my way, and yelled, “Mike!” He gave me a barely perceptible nod, which I returned, and then he turned to the meeting as if nothing had just transpired.

Much later the president invited Jeanine and me (along with the Hadleys and some friends of the First Family) to Camp David for a weekend. Folks arrived midday Saturday, had lunch with the president and First Lady, and then got a few hours of free time while the president pounded the Catoctin Mountain bike trails. We reconvened for a showing in the theater of
The Great Debaters
, a 1930s Texas period piece about a small black college challenging the Harvard debate club.

Dinner followed shortly. All meals were informal and family style, and the president stimulated conversation by asking everyone what they were reading. In truth, all I was reading were intelligence cables, but the last
book I
had
read was
Friday Night Lights,
a controversial account of a football season at a high school in Odessa, Texas. Odessa is just down the road from Midland, where the First Lady was born and the president was raised. If the president thought I was just sucking up, he didn’t let on as he filled in the background on how the book had divided the town.

More important, as we were walking in for one of the meals on the weekend, the president pulled me aside for a private moment. “Mike, how are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine, Mr. President,” I honestly answered.

“I mean spiritually,” he continued, as I slowly understood the nature of his question.

“Mr. President, I’m really fine,” I once more honestly (and firmly) answered.