Howell had caught the attention of a young Nebraska governor named James Nash, who saw her eviscerate the outgoing chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at a Brookings Institution event. The admiral had just denigrated women, intellectuals, and civilian control of foreign policy in the same breath. Howell’s rejoinder was so sharp, Nash would recall, “the poor man didn’t know he had been fatally wounded, and, as his humiliation dawned on him, it was all the worse because Howell had been so charming twisting the blade.”
When Nash ran for president, Howell became his foreign policy advisor. After his election he named her UN ambassador and finally national security advisor. She had a reputation for mixing “the charm of a Georgetown hostess, a gift for straight talk, and an ability to make diplomacy understandable without sacrificing the nuances,” a New York Review of Books essay had said.
Lately the press had turned on Howell, as it had on Nash. One former colleague had written damningly in Foreign Policy: “While she can be an eloquent spokesperson for her superiors and a sharp and brutal critic of those who challenge them, it is unclear whether Howell has any views of her own or if she stands for anything other than her own ascent.”
Ever since Brooks had read that line in the file she had been waiting for the right moment, and the right lever, to go to Howell hoping that doing so would help break their investigation open. “What utter sexist bullshit,” she’d said after seeing that quote for the first time. “She’s interested in her own ascent? Show me a man in the cabinet about whom that couldn’t be said. But no one would say it. Or even think it.”
It’s not hard to track down a national security advisor. They’re reachable twenty-four hours a day, if you know how. And it is easier to get their attention if you call after hours to say you have made a discovery damaging to the administration and need to speak to them as soon as possible.
Howell could make an opening at 10 A.M.
Brooks would approach Howell as a social acquaintance and a woman, she decided. They had a number of friends in common. Howell had even spoken to Brooks’s book group when she was promoting the work that would eventually win her a Pulitzer Prize. Maybe, Brooks hoped, approaching her woman to woman, almost as a friend, would make a difference. The first clues aren’t promising.
HOWELL BRINGS HER COMMUNICATIONS ADVISOR and a staff counsel with her. A studied move, Brooks thinks, and a signal to White House eyes that she is not revealing much in this interview. It reinforces rumors that some of Howell’s aides may be reporting on her to former colleagues at the CIA and Pentagon. Such is the level of palace intrigue in most White Houses.
In the geometrics of Washington, the national security advisor has power because of proximity. Her office is in the West Wing, down the hall from the president, even if in the opposite diagonal corner from the Oval Office, as far by distance as one can get, the office next to the vice president’s. But it is still the West Wing; you can just wander into the Oval Office—as long as Chief of Staff Spencer Carr doesn’t stop you. That is a lot closer than State, blocks away at Foggy Bottom, or the Pentagon, CIA, or DNI across the river in Virginia.
Howell is dressed impeccably, as always, burgundy suit and cream blouse, the colors chosen to project strength but tastefully complementing her blond hair. Brooks feels pangs of recognition at the effort, the premeditation Howell apparently feels is required to level the ground in rooms of men. No male of similar rank would spend a fraction of the time worrying about appearances. Women in Washington talk often among themselves about the tactics and strategies required to be heard in meetings, to avoid being interrupted, to stop your points from being appropriated, to protect your ideas from being dismissed.
At sixty-two, Howell is imposing, slender and tall, with high cheekbones and striking gray eyes, the mature echo of the young European beauty from the high school pictures Brooks had seen in Wiley’s file.
Brooks begins by asking about mutual acquaintances whose parties they had both been at and reminding Howell of her visit to the book group years earlier. But the national security advisor is formal in response.
“How is Amanda?” Howell says of the book group’s well-known leader. “I haven’t seen her in far too long. Please pass on my regards.”
She and Brooks are acquaintances, Howell is suggesting, but not friends.
Brooks and Rena had war-gamed the night before what to do if the attempts at informality were rebuffed. They had agreed on a simple answer: level with her.
“We have the drone video, Diane,” Brooks says.
Would she know already? Would Rawls have told her? Howell appears to wince slightly, and Brooks can tell at once this was one more thing the national security advisor didn’t know.
“Are we on the record here?”
“We don’t have to be.”
If they are not, it means Brooks might get another chance at Howell later—if necessary.
Howell looks at her two aides, who promptly put their writing pads away. The writing pad held by Maureen Conner, who had come to take notes, also disappears.
“I have seen the footage,” Howell says.
“When?”
More hesitation. “Yesterday.”
Not until after the Tribune story broke.
It’s an answer with several implications. It begins to distance Howell from the mistakes of Oosay. But it also establishes her lack of influence over national security.
“Why were those men running toward General Roderick when they died, rather than already protecting him?”
Howell spreads her hands out to smooth a wrinkle in her skirt. The move gives her time to form a response.
“I don’t know the answer to that yet.”
“Have you asked?”
“Of course I have, Randi.”
Now it is first names.
“And what were you told?”
“The people I asked have said they don’t know yet.”
“Do you believe them?”
A partial smile, appreciative and intelligent. “I don’t believe that is a question I should answer. It would be conjecture on my part. It would not be relevant to your task, what you called fact finding.”
“If I may, who did you ask?”
Another smile. “Fellow members of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council.”
This is also a more revealing answer than it seems. The Principals Committee is a subgroup of the National Security Council, made up of just six people: the president, Howell, the secretary of defense, the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and the director of national intelligence. Either none of these people knows what happened in Oosay, or one or more of them is lying to Howell. And without saying so explicitly, Howell has pointed a finger at them.
“When did you find out General Roderick would be in Oosay in the first place?”
Another hesitation. “The night he died.”
This means Oosay was either too small an operation for the national security advisor to be briefed on, or it was an advance action, a special op about which the president was not informed because of its risk and the need to act in a timely manner. Over the last few weeks, Rena and Brooks have also come to know that advance action orders were being employed because Nash’s generals and spymasters were frustrated by what they considered the president’s growing meddling and micromanaging. As he became frustrated with them, they became elusive with him.
If the Oosay incident occurred during an advance action, then Roderick was meeting someone in Oosay, arranging something covert, and once he had died, the president had decided he did not trust the chain of command to tell him the truth.
“And what were you told about what General Roderick was doing there?”
“The same thing the American people have been told,” Howell says. “Meeting with moderates.”
“When did you finally learn the truth?”
This is pure bluff. Brooks and Rena don’t know the truth about what Roderick was doing in Oosay. Brooks want
s to discover if Howell knows.
The national security advisor takes too long to answer.
“Ask me a different question,” Howell says.
Grudgingly, Brooks admires Howell’s skill. She is dodging Brooks’s questions but deftly. She has made it clear she didn’t know in advance that Roderick would be in Oosay—exonerating herself from the planning of whatever he was doing there—but she has sidestepped nearly everything else, including whether she now knows the details of his mission. Howell’s evasion accomplished two things: it avoided revealing just how isolated and irrelevant she had become inside the national security team, and it signaled to her colleagues, the boys, that she was protecting their secret.
In short, she was playing multidimensional chess at a White House level, which is like playing twelve different boards at the same time, and with your opponents moving pieces when you aren’t looking.
“Why did you say on television the first day that you thought this was a protest that had spun out of control rather than an organized attack?”
Brooks is certain that the national security advisor was given poor intelligence before she went on camera. Brooks wants to know where it came from.
“I misspoke.”
“That seems out of character.”
“I wish that were true.”
Brooks waits for more but there isn’t any. “Why was the secretary of defense more circumspect the first day?”
“He did a better job.” A gracious smile.
Brooks shakes her head. “You know the irony of all this, Diane?”
“I’m sorry, the irony?”
“Yes, of all this: what’s happened in the Middle East and North Africa, it’s just what you predicted. We’ve made a mess of the world with our hubris. We’ve bred terrorism with our impatience and our prisons. The men who make up the National Security Council were part of that. And you and the president have the job of cleaning it up.”
To that, Howell says nothing at all.
Brooks is frustrated the national security advisor has given her so little. But she cannot help feeling some sympathy for Howell, too, and she is struck by the change in the woman in front of her. Missing is the graceful wit and bracing eloquence Howell displayed before she entered politics. There is only caution and precision now, and Brooks has the distinct feeling Howell is deeply unhappy: power is not what she imagined.
They go on almost another hour, covering details one by one. Why the failure to build up the compound? What has she seen since the night of Roderick’s death about advance intelligence warnings about an attack in Oosay? What does she know about Roderick’s chain of command? All of the answers are careful. Some are more informative than others. None gives Brooks more than incremental additional details she and Maureen Conner can add to the Grid.
“I’m afraid I’m out of time,” Howell says finally. “It was lovely, Randi, seeing you again.”
Howell’s communications aide walks Brooks and Conner out through the Old Executive Office Building, where their coming and going would go unnoticed by journalists. When they reach Seventeenth Street, Brooks looks at Conner.
“She seems tortured,” Conner says.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
“And what did we learn?”
“That’s what we have to figure the hell out.”
Twenty-Nine
“She protected herself,” Rena says.
“Skillfully,” Brooks agrees.
They are in Brooks’s office reviewing notes of the interview. Leaving the White House, Conner and Brooks sat on a bench in Lafayette Square and made the notes before their memory faded.
“She also pointed the finger, I think, at the boys,” Conner says.
“Which doesn’t tell us very much,” says Brooks. “I thought we’d get more, frankly. I was wrong.”
NOT ENTIRELY WRONG, it would turn out.
That night, after weeks of dodging them, CIA Director Owen Webster at last reaches out—in his serpentine way.
Rena is home trying to read, though Nelson the cat, coming out of his shell, has become insistently affectionate. He is competing with the book in Rena’s hand. Lord Nelson, Rena thinks, is turning into something of a twelve-pound occupation force.
The call comes from Spencer Carr, the White House chief of staff. After asking, without much sincerity, how Rena is doing, Carr suggests that tomorrow Rena and Brooks might call Webster’s office and ask again for an interview.
“Did you call Webster?” Rena asks, rubbing the sore spot that the White House has not done more to help them.
“Look, Peter, I know you’re frustrated. We’re asking you to get to the bottom of this and do it quickly, and we’re not helping you. But we can’t lay hands on your investigation and then call it independent. These folks need to speak to you on their own or everyone will say your inquiry is just White House spin.”
“Then how do you know Webster will see us?”
“He called me.”
“What changed?”
“I think congressional hearings concern him. And media leaks.”
Those factors have been in play for more than a week.
What’s changed, Rena thinks, is that he and Brooks have gotten their hands on the drone video, and they’ve told Howell they have it. Diane Howell, Rena marvels. She gave Brooks only what she wanted to, but she used what Brooks told her to apply pressure, subtly, to help them.
“Good night, Spencer,” Rena says. “Thanks.”
THE NEXT DAY, a young woman in a nondescript blue suit is waiting for Rena and Brooks in the gleaming white marble lobby of the CIA. She doesn’t give her name, and it isn’t readable on the plastic tag she wears around her neck. She leads them up an elevator, down an absurdly long hallway, and then around a corner.
Webster is waiting for them outside the door of his office. The CIA director’s suite, tucked in one corner of the Agency’s secret campus in Virginia, is a throwback to another era, a dark cavern of power and intimidation. The walls are mahogany. The secret CIA seal hangs on the wall. Webster’s desk, which might have belonged to Allen Dulles in the 1950s, is a hand-carved wooden creature the size of a small battleship. To its left, in a space large enough to be a separate room, is a meeting table with chairs. To the right there are two enormous saddle-brown leather couches. The darkened room is so large Rena wonders if there are agents lurking in the shadows.
They sit on the leather couches on one side of the room. Someone introduced simply as “Alan Durson from our team” sits in, no job title or explanation for his presence. Rena assumes a lawyer.
“I’m glad we were finally able to make the schedules work,” Webster begins.
Rena and Brooks are approaching the interview as they might a hostile interrogation with someone who cannot be bullied, someone who is nothing if not a survivor.
To counter that, they have decided to be as candid with Webster as they can, because he almost certainly will know if they are not. While Rena listens, Brooks begins by describing the state of their inquiries.
They have interviewed the two survivors, Franks and O’Dowd; they’ve sent their own scientific team to the site in Oosay; they’ve interviewed Moratian eyewitnesses; they’ve also done a forensic review of Web traffic that night on social media. And, she says, they have seen the drone video.
They have concluded the following: allied intelligence also had great success monitoring intelligence traffic that night, enough to thwart attacks in other countries.
But Oosay was different. The attack was premeditated, not a protest run amok. The gates of the compound were blown up, not overrun. Nor had the Manor House simply caught fire, as some had speculated. It was destroyed in an explosion. There appeared to be some effort to obscure, if not inhibit, any inquiry, including Congress’s. Elements of an after-action report being compiled at the CIA had been modified, and parts were now missing. Potential witnesses that night from the Barracks were missing, off somewhere in Europe.
&nbs
p; She leaves only one thing out. That they believe, from the video, that the men were running the wrong way and that there is a cover-up going on.
Now Brooks waits to see how her gift of candor will be received. Is Webster part of the cover-up, or will he help them untangle it—as they now think Howell is trying to?
Owen Webster does not look like a spy. He looks more like a sea lion. Over the years he has found escape from the boredom of dull meetings and the stress of a secret life in the pleasure of long and rich meals. His girth, though, is a deception. Webster played basketball at Princeton, was all-state in high school, an agile but undersize center who could play taller than his height. He had been a field agent once, too—and a good one. Covert operations are not the typical CIA path to rise as high as Webster had. Field agents, “the outdoor set,” tend to resist authority, not become it. As is often the case with people who rise to the top, Webster is the exception to many rules.
He eyes his visitors now, but rather than rewarding Brooks’s candor with his own, he explains his various constraints.
“I appreciate the position you are in, trying to conduct an independent inquiry for the president. But you need to appreciate my position, too. I have a responsibility to protect the lives of the personnel and agents and contractors who work for the Agency, and to maintain operational security.”
The old spy, Rena thinks, has summoned them to say: Hey, thanks for accepting my invitation. I wanted to say, sorry, can’t help you.
“You also have a grave disadvantage,” Webster continues. “When the FBI interviews someone, as law enforcement, they have legal leverage you do not. It is a crime to lie to the FBI. It is not a crime to lie to you. I am not under oath. This is not an FBI interview.”
“Is the Barracks facility in Oosay an interrogation site?” Brooks asks, pulling Webster’s attention back to her.
Webster frowns.
This allegation—that the new building in Oosay is a secret detention center to interrogate Moratians—has surfaced in press accounts abroad and spread to right- and left-leaning obscure media in America.
The Good Lie Page 16