The president is standing now.
“That is what is at stake in Oosay. That is what people inside our government do not understand. Oosay may feel like just another terrorist incident. But if we use attacks by outsiders against the United States as a way of attacking ourselves, rather than rallying together, the incidents become part of an infection that is more dangerous than our enemies could ever be.”
The president has moved behind his desk, the one from which he commands the free world but apparently not his own federal domain.
“This isn’t about this incident. It’s not even about how to win the war on terror. It’s about whether we can govern at all.”
The words, coming from Nash himself, normally so confident, silence the room.
The president looks out the windows. There has been December snow, a rarity in Washington. On the other side of the country, there are winter fires threatening Los Angeles because the temperatures are so hot. The government is imploding from within. And the seasons no longer make sense.
The president turns and leans over his desk, as if the weight of it were pulling him down.
“It’s a symptom of the same political schisms you see everywhere in the country and on the Web. Those same divisions are now dividing coworkers in their cubicles at the FBI and the NSA. Everyone feels it’s okay in America if their private feelings and political allegiances color their jobs. I’ve got nests of Common Sensers running the New York FBI office. And liberals at the CIA who hate the FBI. I have a memo telling me the Texas office of Immigration and Naturalization is ‘BakkeLand.’ And the vice president is already telling Democrats he would be a different kind of president than I am.”
Brooks knew from years in Washington how much leaks infuriated leaders. People you had confidently assumed were on your team, who had nodded to you in meetings and said “yes sir,” had betrayed you. Nash’s anger, however, seems different.
“Tell us where your investigation is,” says Rawls.
Brooks isn’t sure how to answer him. Tell him their investigation is a mess and the president is correct that people are hunkering down with something to hide, and that this isn’t the worst part? The worst part is they think they have discovered a cover-up.
Fortunately, Peter coolly answers for both them.
“As we know them so far, the facts in the Tribune story are accurate,” he begins.
He walks through the details of what they know—that Walt Smolonsky in Oosay found the gates were blown up, not overrun as Howell had suggested on TV. That the compound walls had not been made higher and more secure, as Secretary of State Manion had suggested on TV a few days later—another unnecessary misstatement. That Roderick’s security team had indeed been minimal.
There was more the Tribune didn’t have, Rena says: The survivors of the Oosay attack are clearly hiding something. And the five men who had been in the highly secure Barracks that night have disappeared somewhere in Europe or Asia.
They would be able to work faster, Rena tells them, but they are getting little or no cooperation from the president’s team. The CIA, State, NSA, and Pentagon are all dragging their feet in answering questions. That includes Diane Howell, Rena says, looking directly at the national security advisor.
“Diane will cooperate fully,” the president says.
“I will tell Virginia to call you to set it up,” Howell says. Presumably Virginia is Howell’s scheduler.
There was another story the Tribune didn’t know and couldn’t be told. The night of the Oosay incident was one of most successful in history in stopping terror. Western allied governments, in sharing their monitoring of chatter on the radical Dark Web, had successfully thwarted planned attacks in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Tunisia, and England. But none of that could be made public. Doing so would reveal too much about the most precious power rings of all spydom, “sources and methods.” That’s why the stories of spy war successes were often secret, like the exploits of the fallen heroes whose stars were marked on the CIA wall.
“George, we need you to lean on people to get us more access,” Brooks adds.
Spencer Carr answers, not Rawls. “You should know, I got a call from the Senate majority leader last night. Senator Dick Bakke called her at home shortly after the story broke. He’s demanding hearings.”
Bakke, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Reform, is just a second-term senator. But as the Common Sense movement, which began as a middle-class revolt, merged with a more blue-collar and even fiercer anger in the country, Bakke quickly emerged as a national leader. He was given the committee to appease him. Now he wants to run for president. That would make his chairing a special committee on Oosay a nightmare.
“What did she tell him?” Brooks asks.
The Senate majority leader, Republican Susan Stroud of Mississippi, the first woman to rule the Senate, is someone Brooks respects but is also frustrated by. She feels Stroud has failed to live up to her promise to govern, not just obstruct, and in the end has only enabled the right wing that now threatens to overtake the GOP, giving in to them too often. Stroud would argue she has done what she had to and kept them at bay.
“She put him off, for now,” Carr says. “Not even Susan Stroud wants Bakke chairing hearings on this.”
This last remark seems to tip the president past some point he has been holding at. “Do you appreciate what’s at stake here?” he says to no one in particular.
The president leans over and touches a pen on his desk.
Brooks has heard the story of this pen. A Wisconsin woman found it in a box in an attic when her father died. Inside the box, along with the pen, was the Congressional Medal of Honor. The medal had been awarded to her grandfather posthumously for his courage in France during World War II. The grandfather had deployed before his son was born and died without seeing his child. The medal had been given to the son, and he had kept it a secret all these years. The woman had no idea her father had it, or that her grandfather had even won the Medal of Honor. But when her own father died, she found the box with the medal inside it, along with the pen President Dwight Eisenhower used to sign the order awarding her grandfather the medal and the note about it from Eisenhower to her family. Though she hadn’t voted for him, the woman had sent the pen to President Nash, she said, because she wanted whoever sat in the Oval Office to think about the impact of war down the generations. That story had never leaked to the press.
“People today seem to think they will find freedom in their own selfishness and own separateness. We have a whole new digital economy built on it. They’re wrong. We find freedom in tolerance and common purpose. That’s what is at stake here.”
The president leans over his desk and says without looking up, “I need you to go faster. Stay ahead of this. Whatever you are doing, it isn’t enough.”
* * *
When they return to 1820, Peter and Randi assemble their team in Rena’s office to review the case. Enough people are out or on the road that they don’t need to retreat to the attic conference room.
They summarize what they know one more time. The administration had clumsily and inaccurately described the attack in Oosay the first day on television. Either that was bad intelligence or they were hiding something. National Security Advisor Howell in particular seemed poorly briefed.
The evidence on the ground quickly established those first statements to be flawed—there were various signs in the explosive forensics that the attack was carefully organized.
They don’t know what advance warnings the team in Oosay had about an attack because the NSA was withholding from Rena and Brooks the classified traffic that night.
The men in the Barracks were being hidden. Smolonsky had gone from Africa to Europe to try to find them. So far, he had had no luck.
The two survivors of the Oosay attack were both clearly hiding something.
They’d been hired because Nash didn’t entirely trust his generals and his spies to tel
l him the truth. Those same generals and spies were hiding from Rena, Brooks, and their team. Even Diane Howell was dodging them.
General Roderick almost certainly was on a secret mission in Oosay. If they could find out what it was, they were convinced that they could begin to unravel the mystery.
“And we were moving too slowly,” Brooks says. “Spencer Carr warned us about this, and he was right.”
“I think we should lean on Howell,” says Maureen Conner.
“We shouldn’t lose track of those men from the Barracks. They’re missing for a reason. They know something,” says Robinson.
As they continue to debate, Rena gets up and starts dialing his new secure cell phone, which he takes into the hallway for privacy.
“Please have him call me when he can on this number,” he is saying as he returns.
They stand around a few moments more until they recognize the meeting is over.
AT HOME A FEW HOURS LATER, Senator Llewellyn Burke returns Rena’s phone call.
Burke, the senior senator from Michigan, is Rena’s old boss, but neither description is adequate. When Rena, then a rising army officer, refused to ignore a pattern of sexual harassment by the general slated to take over Central Command, it was Burke who rescued him by giving Rena a job on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And it was Burke who later encouraged Rena to create the private consulting firm with Brooks. Though Rena had not known it at first, Burke was also behind him and Brooks being hired by President Nash to steward the nomination of Judge Madison to the Supreme Court.
With an unseen hand, Rena had come to realize, Llewellyn Burke guided a good deal of what occurred in Washington. If anything remained of what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once called “the vital center” in American politics—people still trying to find some common ground by which American democracy could govern—Burke was part of it. This governing center had no formal shape or institutional presence anymore. There were no meetings or members. There was only a fluid and informal network, made up of those handful who understood real power—former presidents, some cabinet members, a few members of Congress, and some presidential advisors—people who, whatever their party, at one point had felt the frightening weight of being responsible for millions of lives and the safety of nations. To the degree the vital center existed at all anymore, it operated in the shadows, in private, even covertly, out of sight of press or party, for in the twenty-first century bipartisanship and compromise put one at risk of political suicide. But in odd moments here and there you could glimpse flashes of the vital center’s presence, in a huddled session in the corner of a banquet room, in an impromptu conversation after a chance meeting at a party, occasionally at White House dinners, in moments at social gatherings. And sometimes, as with the Madison nomination, the center changes things. Compromises that matter are forged. Problems are unstuck.
Burke managed in this role, privately crossing party lines, because he was a political rarity, a northern Rust Belt Republican who kept winning the support of voters who generally agreed on little else—white elites, religious conservatives, people of color, and the so-called white working class. They saw something in Burke they didn’t see in many others.
Whatever that quality of character was, Burke, the heir to a Michigan auto dynasty and a successful high-tech investor, also had no higher ambition than the U.S. Senate. So he moved with almost unprecedented freedom, guiding the actions of friends in both parties and acting as a bridge in a city where most other bridges had crumbled.
“Peter, how are you?” Burke says.
“A challenging day, sir. I was at the White House.”
“Oosay?”
“Yes, sir.”
Though he cannot prove it—and there would never be any traces or footprints—Rena suspects Burke had a hand in his having this assignment from Nash as well.
“May I help in some way?”
“I need someone in the intelligence community to guide us, sir. To act as our sponsor. Our protector. To vouch for us.”
Burke and Rena both know that people who operate in the covert world, the fearful space of hidden knowledge and secret plans, tend to distrust everyone unless they have been otherwise assured someone is a friend. Paranoia is survival, trust temporary and conditional.
Burke is quiet for some time, and says at last, simply, “Yes.”
Sixteen
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26, 11:10 A.M.
BIG LAKE, WASHINGTON
The drive from Sea-Tac Airport takes ninety minutes. It rains most of the trip. Mount Rainier, shrouded in clouds of gray linen, appears and disappears like some kind of Indian spirit in the sky. Brooks, driving, asks more about the man they are going to see.
“Anthony Rousseau,” Senator Burke had told Rena on the phone four days earlier. “He’s your rabbi.”
It took Burke three more days to persuade Rousseau to see them, including two calls yesterday, on Christmas.
“He’ll be wary,” Burke had counseled Rena. “But if you can persuade him to help, he knows everyone. And if you push the right button, Tony can’t keep a secret.” After a pause Senator Burke added: “I know, ironic for a spy.”
Rousseau had retired to a little town in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle called Big Lake.
With the possible exception of Bill Donovan, who created the CIA, and Allen Dulles, who directed it under two presidents, arguably no one had left more of an imprint on the Agency than Anthony Rousseau, though he never became director.
When the planes hit the twin towers, Rousseau had been the leading voice arguing that Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism were the next great threat. In the aftermath, he helped shift the Agency’s focus away from cloak-and-dagger spying to paramilitary operations, thus reviving the Agency’s budget at a time when some in Congress wanted to slash it. Ellen Wiley’s background file on Rousseau said “he helped transform the CIA from secret agents to a secret army.”
Brooks had asked what “secret army” meant. Rena explained that in the hot war zones of the Middle East, the CIA’s supersoldiers, specially trained military personnel, armed with the best weapons and high-tech intelligence, ran military operations that were entirely covert.
“I was Special Forces,” Rena had explained to Brooks. “The CIA recruited its secret army from the best of that group. They were more special. We called them Captain Americas.
“In six weeks, Rousseau’s secret soldiers, working with northern rebels, swept most of the Taliban out of Afghanistan before the bulk of U.S. troops arrived. It didn’t last, but they did it.”
As the ground war cooled and troops were withdrawn, Wiley’s brief explained, Rousseau innovated again. He became an early champion of arming drones. That was when the Agency budget really started to grow. “Seventy percent of the intelligence budget is now outsourced to contractors and other services,” the brief said.
“Jesus,” Brooks says.
Then Jim Nash chose Owen Webster to be his CIA chief over Rousseau.
“Why?” Brooks asks.
Rena ponders the question. “I have two guesses,” he says finally, “but that’s all they are. Rousseau was an innovator. Inevitably making change means making enemies.”
“And?”
“As prescient as he was for so many years, Rousseau in the end missed the rise of ISIS, the whole second wave of radical terrorism we’re facing now. For all he got right, maybe some people thought he had lost his mojo.”
Rousseau worked for a while under Webster as number three in the Agency, director of Operations, the division in charge of collecting intelligence. A different division, Analysis, decides what it means. But soon Webster wanted him gone. When Rousseau left, three years ago, he moved back home to Washington State and this small, isolated lake.
“You’ve met him?”
“Only briefly, Iraq in early 2004. I was pretty green still. Then a couple times through Senator Burke.”
“What’s he like?”
“Burke warned he’s
sort of haunted. He used the term Shakespearean.”
“Haunted by what?”
“He didn’t stop 9/11, couldn’t stabilize Afghanistan, was part of a war in Iraq that obviously was a mistake, and didn’t anticipate the next wave of jihadists.”
“That isn’t exactly all his fault.”
They see a lake appear below them not long after they leave the interstate. The lake is smaller than they expect, given the name of the place, and it is surrounded by a mix of late 1950s fishing cabins, 1970s ranch-style suburban houses, and a few modern multimillion-dollar mansions.
They stop in front of what was once a small cabin that had grown over the years into an impressive modern vacation home. At the door, Rousseau greets them in blue jeans and Patagonia flannel.
“Look at you,” he says, taking Rena’s hand. “Out of uniform and in politics. What has happened to us?”
Now just past sixty, Rousseau has the looks of a James Bond kind of spy—broad shouldered, thick black hair, and deep wary eyes—but the impression is deceptive. Rousseau was a Senate staffer and National Security Council aide before joining the CIA. A suit, not a spook. A minder. A purse keeper. A man who knew appropriations and how to please overseers—necessary skills in the quaint days after the Cold War when the Agency was contracting.
Few expected him to become a visionary spy.
He leads them to a back deck overlooking a lake the color of dried basil. He brings coffee, warm cider, and cookies, and they sit, three figures around a teak table, bundled in jackets against the chill of a clearing storm.
He has owned the house since college, Rousseau tells them, when it was a one-room cabin. He knew the lake as a boy, bought the place “for nothing, with money I’d saved from a paper route, literally. Now there are houses here worth five million dollars.”
The Good Lie Page 9