The Adelman and Rumsfeld families had shared countless vacations over the years. They visited each other's homes in Taos, Santa Fe, Chicago and the Dominican Republic. They often stayed up deep into the night discussing politics, literature and the weighty questions of life. In 2002, Adelman published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post declaring that an invasion of Iraq would be a "cakewalk" because Rumsfeld and other senior officials in the Bush administration were so competent.
Along with Jack Keane, Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger, Adelman was a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, so he knew the many ways the Iraq War had turned sour. This Friday afternoon, as he sat alone with Rumsfeld at the small table inside the secretary's spacious office, with its dark navy carpet and heavy drapes, he felt at ease. He'd spent so much time in this room during the 1970s and so much time with the man across the table, it was familiar ground.
"I wanted to call you in," Rumsfeld began. We've been friends for most of our adult lives, he said, and "I personally hope that we remain friends for the rest of my life."
Rumsfeld, in all his gruffness and insensitivity, rarely revealed such emotion, and it caught Adelman by surprise.
"Don, I just want you to know that you've been a gigantic influence in my life and a very big presence. You've been wonderful to Carol," Adelman said, referring to his wife. "You've been wonderful to our daughters. And for 30-some years, I've loved you like a brother." I've loved you more than some of my brothers, he added.
"I know which ones," Rumsfeld said, cracking up. But then he turned serious. "It might be a good idea if you got off the Defense Policy Board," he said.
"Listen," Adelman told Rumsfeld, "if you want me off the Defense Policy Board, just tell me. It's not a big part of my life. It's not a big part of my identity. You put me on there; you can take me off."
"I'm not saying that I want you to get off," Rumsfeld replied, apparently not wanting to fire Adelman himself. "I'm saying it might be better if you got off."
If it were better for me, I would have gotten off, Adelman said. I'm on it because I enjoy it. "If it's better for you," he told Rumsfeld, "tell me, write me a letter, and I'll get off."
Rumsfeld tried to explain. As the war had progressed and grown grimmer, Adelman had begun asking more questions at briefings, interrupting more often, expressing more skepticism. "You are disruptive," he said. "You are negative."
The kind words from minutes earlier had evaporated.
"The disruptive part is bullshit, Don. It is just bullshit," Adelman said. "And the negative part is absolutely right."
Rumsfeld flashed with anger. "Let me tell you what I mean," he said. "When people are giving briefings, you sometimes interrupt those briefings. You don't let them finish."
"Well, if that's what you mean by disruptive," Adelman said, "I guess that's true. But let me tell you, you know where I learned all that? In this office. I learned it 30 years ago." He pointed to where Rumsfeld usually sat. "I learned it from the master."
Rumsfeld couldn't help but chuckle at that. Okay, he said. Okay. But they weren't finished.
"To tell you the truth," Adelman continued, "you are right on the negative thing. I'm extremely negative on two things, Don."
"What's that?"
"Your total lack of accountability," Adelman replied, and the "abysmal quality of your decisions."
"What do you mean by accountability? I'm accountable for everything," Rumsfeld said.
Adelman pointed out that Rumsfeld always blamed problems or screwups on othersóthe State Department, the commanders, the Iraqis. "I don't see you taking any responsibility in any of this," he said.
"Well, that's just wrong!" Rumsfeld fired back. "I take a lot of responsibility."
"I cannot understand the abysmal quality of your decisions," Adelman said again.
"Like what?" Rumsfeld asked.
Adelman said he could single out plenty of bad decisions, but two in particular troubled him mostóRumsfeld's "stuff happens" response to the widespread looting in Iraq after the invasion and the handling of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.
"I could not understand how you can go on at the podium of the Pentagon and say, 'Stuff happens. That's what free people do,'" he said. "That's not what free people do. That's what barbarians do."
"I don't remember saying that," Rumsfeld replied.
"Oh, c'mon, Don," Adelman said. It was likely the most quoted line Rumsfeld had ever uttered, a shoo-in entry to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
The 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq hadn't done "jack shit" about the constant looting, Adelman said. Why hadn't anyone ordered them to put a stop to it?
They had been ordered to stop it, Rumsfeld said.
"Oh, did you give the order?" Adelman asked.
"I didn't give the order!" Rumsfeld shouted. "Somebody around here gave the order."
"Oh, well who gave the order, Don?"
"I don't know who gave the order."
"You didn't give the order. You don't know who gave the order. How do you know the order was given?"
"Because I know an order was given."
They argued the point for a few minutes. If the order was given, Adelman finally asked, "Tell me why 140,000
troops didn't obey the order."
"Well, I don't know that," Rumsfeld said.
They moved on to Adelman's other complaintóAbu Ghraib. Adelman made clear he didn't blame Rumsfeld for the abuse that had happened, but he did fault him for handling the situation poorly.
"You found out about this on January 14, and you didn't do jack shit about it till May," he said.
"Goddammit, that's just not fair!" said Rumsfeld, fuming. "I didn't know how serious it was."
If it was serious enough to tell the president about, Adelman said, it must have been a big deal. "Didn't you know there were pictures?" he asked.
Rumsfeld said he didn't know.
So, Adelman continued, there was nobody between January and May, when the story broke, who recognized what a bombshell this was?
"No," Rumsfeld said.
"Well, that's a pretty sad system, when no one goes and says, 'Holy cow, this is gigantic,'" Adelman said. "The way you handled that was just abysmal, and it just aggravated what was a serious blight."
Rumsfeld argued back that even as secretary there was only so much he legally could do, because he had to ensure the military criminal investigations were handled independently of any "command influence" or meddling from the top.
Adelman didn't buy it one bit. He had gone on the Web and read the defense secretary's guidelines on interrogation.
How could any young soldier interpret such mangled language? "I have a doctorate from Georgetown, majored in philosophy, and I couldn't understand what you were talking about," he told Rumsfeld. "I couldn't diagram one of those sentences. I doubt that you could understand it. You signed it, but it was all lawyerese. And it didn't tell you what you could or couldn't do. It was unintelligible." It was another example of hiding behind lawyers and vague language and not giving the troops on the front line meaningful instructions. As a result, he had let them down.
Rumsfeld had heard enough. "I got to go," he said.
"Thank you for doing this," Adelman said. "This was really very nice of you to do."
Rumsfeld walked his old friend out of the office and offered a quick good-bye. As Adelman walked away, their three decades of camaraderie flashed through his mind. He thought about their trips around the world, the family get-togethers and the unusual intimacy, about their conversations that had probably numbered in the thousands. He thought, "This is going to be our last."
Adelman knew it was best to forgive others for their transgressions, and Rumsfeld had never done anything to hurt him. He'd been a kind and loyal friend. But Adelman simply could not forgive him for the havoc he had wreaked on the country. Even worse, like so many who enjoyed being on the inside and close to power, he couldn't forgive himself for not speaking his mind sooner.
/> A couple of weeks later, Adelman received a letter in the mail from the secretary of defense's office. It said the Pentagon would be reorganizing the Defense Policy Board and would soon name a replacement for Adelman.
It concluded, "Thank you for being so cooperative on this. Sincerely, Donald."
* * *
That same week, the phone rang inside an office at Arundel House, a centuries-old brick building overlooking the Thames River in London. Colonel H. R. McMaster had recently moved his wife, Katie, and two of their three daughtersóthe third was away at collegeóacross the Atlantic to begin a stint as a senior research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a prestigious think tank focused on political-military conflicts. They were still unpacking boxes.
McMaster answered the call. It was a member of the Army chief of staff's office.
"Can you be in Washington tomorrow?"
"What's it about?" McMaster asked.
"We can't tell you."
"Well, how about two days, man?"
He wanted time to pack a few things and say good-bye once again to Katie and the girls.
* * *
Nearly 5,000 miles away, in Kansas, Colonel Pete Mansoor checked his e-mail and found a note from David Petraeus. It told him to be in Washington in two days to begin a three-month temporary assignment inside the Pentagon at the request of the Army chief of staff. Mansoor, like Petraeus, had forged a reputation as one of the Army's foremost thinkers. He'd graduated at the top of his class from West Point in 1982 and gone on to earn a master's degree and a doctorate in military history from Ohio State University, as well as a master's in strategic studies from the Army War College. He'd written a book about World War II titled The GI Offensive in Europe, taught at West Point, and served a stint on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, where he had worked on planning for operations in Bosnia and Kosovo during the late 1990s.
Mansoor wore wire-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a university professor than an officer who had commanded the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division in Iraq during 2003 and 2004.
Barely two months earlier, he had arrived with his family at Fort Leavenworth, Kansasóat Petraeus's requestóto help establish the new U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center.
When the call came, Mansoor packed a bag and called a cousin in Silver Spring, Maryland, to ask if he could crash in the guest room.
* * *
Around the same time, the phone rang inside Marine Colonel Tom Greenwood's home in Virginia. An aide in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told Greenwood that he had been selected to be part of a secret group of colonels who would conduct an in-depth review of the Iraq War and related strategic issues. The assignment would last through Christmas, the aide said. And oh, by the way, could he report to the Pentagon tomorrow? Greenwood, a modest, cerebral career officer who had served as an aide to the Marine commandant and worked on the Bush National Security Council staff during the invasion of Iraq, was delighted. He viewed it as an opportunity to use his years of Washington and policy experience to speak frankly to the top brass.
Greenwood had recently returned from a year in Iraq's Anbar province, where he had overseen the training of Iraqi security forces. He was 50, the son and grandson of military men, and had graduated with an economics degree from Washington and Lee University, a small liberal arts school in Virginia. He later earned a master's degree from Georgetown.
At 5-foot-10, with close-cropped hair and soft eyes, Greenwood looked and spoke like Andy Griffith without the accent, more small-town neighbor than a senior Marine. But he had commanded at every level up to brigade and had traversed the world in service to Uncle Samótraining at Camp Pendleton, tsunami relief in Asia, counterinsurgency in Iraq. After his recent stint in Iraq, he had been named director of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College in Quantico. But that would now be on hold during this secret Pentagon assignment.
During his time on the National Security Council staff years earlier, Greenwood had been a front-row witness to what he considered the alarming failures of the Bush White House, the Defense Department and the State Department to coordinate and communicate honestly with one other. One example came in the fall of 2002.
Rumsfeld had just gone through a presentation in the White House Situation Room on the latest version of the TOP
SECRET plan for the invasion of Iraq.
Greenwood was sitting along a back wall, the "cheap seats," as he called them. Rumsfeld and Rice were on either side of the president at the main table. After the presentation, Rice reached for a copy of the TOP SECRET
PowerPoint packet of slides, code-named Polo Step, which had been handed out during the briefing.
"You won't be needing that," Rumsfeld said, reaching across the table to snatch the sensitive packet from the national security adviser. He didn't want it left aroundóeven in the White Houseóadding, "This is highly secret and classified."
"Well," the president said sarcastically, "I think it's pretty safe around here, but I'll let you two work it out." He turned and walked out. Rice didn't leave with a copy of the slides.
Later that day, Frank Miller, his immediate boss and the senior director for defense policy on the NSC staff, called Greenwood to his office.
"Hey," said Miller, a 22-year veteran of sensitive Pentagon posts, "come over here and see me."
"You're going to tell me to go over to the Pentagon," Greenwood said, "and get those slides that they refused to leave over here."
Exactly right, Miller said.
Greenwood, who normally wore a civilian suit at the White House, changed into his Marine uniform to improve his chances. He also had an official courier identification and a briefcase. He didn't rate a car and driver, so he took the underground Metro subway. At the Pentagon, he went to the office of a friend on the Joint Staff. It was way too risky to approach the several people he knew well on the civilian sideóRumsfeld's staff. They would surely feel compelled to inform Rumsfeld.
"I need a favor," Greenwood said. "Isn't it a crazy world?"
The friend complied, knowing it would be reciprocated, most likely in the form of a briefing from Miller or Greenwood on what happened in NSC meetings. A formal "summary of conclusions"óa classified document that outlined the decisions or conclusions from a meetingówas circulated after the meetings but could take days or weeks to make its way to the Pentagon. Even then, they were often bleached-out versions of what had happened, making them bland and hardly useful.
To Greenwood, the subterfuge was symbolic of an administration infected with distrust.
Several months later, just before Christmas 2002, Greenwood had been in his office and was planning to leave about 1 P.M. to do some holiday shopping, excited about the prospect of time off.
Miller again summoned him. "What are you doing this afternoon?" he asked.
Greenwood's heart sank. It was code for "I've got a really lousy deal coming your way."
"I've got to go Christmas shopping," Greenwood said.
"You're not going to go Christmas shopping for a couple of hours because we've got to go on a little trip."
"Do I need my toothbrush?"
"No, but you need your map of Iraq and you need your brief on war preparations for the invasion. And bring all that stuff. We've got a car meeting us downstairs in 15 minutes." Rice was sending them to brief Secretary of State Colin Powell, Miller finally revealed.
Normally, Greenwood prepared for these briefs and rehearsed all day.
Greenwood gathered his material. Rice's instructions had been clear: "Keep this quiet because I don't think the Pentagon"óread Rumsfeldó"would appreciate my NSC staff going over to brief the secretary of state on war preparations."
A White House driver took Miller and Greenwood the 10 blocks to the State Department. Up on the seventh floor, the halls were quiet and empty. The holiday already had begun. Powell wore a casual windbreaker and was reading a newspaper. His deputy and best friend, Richard Armitage, the
outspoken, barrel-chested former naval officer who had served three tours in Vietnam, also was there.
Greenwood pulled out his charts and descriptions of the war plan. They included a major multidivisional southern thrust from Kuwait north into Baghdad. The U.S. 4th Infantry Division was still on ships in the Mediterranean, waiting to strike into Iraq from the north.
"A two-front war would certainly make sense," said Powell, the former Army general. "How are they going to help, being on ships?"
"Well, sir," Greenwood said, "the idea is that they get diplomatic permission to cut in from the north, but that hasn't been achieved yet."
"It's getting late in the game for that," Powell said, turning to Armitage. He was skeptical that Turkey would give permission for a whole U.S. infantry division of 20,000 troops to march through it. Leaving the division on ships was
"a stupid idea." It was important to get the 4th Infantry into the fight. He added, "That's one of a number of problems that I see with this plan."
As the other divisions move to Baghdad, Powell asked, how many U.S. forces will be left behind to stabilize the area and prevent attacks from the rear?
Greenwood said he didn't have a lot of information on that, but it would not be many because the concept was a lightning, blitzkrieg drive to Baghdad to topple Saddam.
That's a hell of a distance, Powell said, looking askance, noting that it was more than 300 miles, with some big cities along the route. "Can you believe what you're hearing here?" Powell said to Armitage. To lighten the moment, the former general started poking fun at Miller and Greenwood for coming up with such a plan.
"Sir," Greenwood said sheepishly, "I can't take full responsibility for this."
Powell made it clear he understood exactly where it had originated, namely, with Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks.
Greenwood had witnessed midlevel battles within the Bush administration, but now he had seen the same dysfunction at the most senior levels. Near-catastrophic voids in cooperation and information flow existed at the top, even on the most basic matters. Given that Bush and his team were on the brink of starting a war, there was nothing comforting about this experience. For Greenwood, it was one of the lowest of lows in his decades as a Marine.
The War Within Page 16