“Casey, cut all of it until ‘This is what makes this hard.’ I’ll start there.”
Casey, working on the Toughbook, put the changes into the speech. He started to print out new cards with the correct-size font.
McChrystal didn’t want to screw up the talk. Six months earlier, during a speech in London, he’d made public comments that were critical of Vice President Joe Biden. Biden hadn’t wanted to put more ground troops into the country, preferring to draw down to a much smaller number of U.S. forces who would focus exclusively on a counterterrorism mission. In shorthand, the strategy was called CT Plus, an alternative to the general’s counterinsurgency plan. McChrystal had called the strategy Biden was promoting “shortsighted” and had said that it would lead to “Chaosistan.” The comments earned him his first public smackdown from the White House. It was also the first reported instance of the mutual distrust between McChrystal and the White House that would persist throughout the next year.
To prepare for the question-and-answer session, McChrystal’s staff started to throw out the possible questions he might be asked.
“I never know what’s going to pop out until I’m up there, that’s the problem,” McChrystal said, flipping through the printouts.
“Neither do we, chief,” said Jake.
“The French might ask if you’re here for more troops, and how the French are doing,” said Duncan.
“Hey, that’s too easy. I was just down in Kandahar and I saw the colonel from Task Force Lafayette—didn’t expect to see him there. I was like, ‘Hello, Pierre,’ ” McChrystal said, grinning.
“If you’re asked about women’s rights,” Duncan said.
“Women don’t have rights,” McChrystal answered. The joke fell flat.
“It’s true, though,” said Jake. “We shouldn’t be in there pushing our culture. It’s just going to anger the fundamentally conservative culture, like we say—”
McChrystal interrupted before Jake could go on.
“What was the Biden question we got yesterday?” McChrystal asked.
He couldn’t resist opening up the room for a few jokes at the vice president’s expense.
“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal said with a laugh. “Who’s that?”
“Biden?” Jake said. “Did you say: Bite Me??”
Everyone started laughing. Jake finished off the back-and-forth with another jab at the vice president.
“Are you talking about the guy who swears on television?” Jake said.
After the meeting, I waited outside the hotel for Duncan. I noticed an Arab guy, around five-feet-five, walking by in shorts and sneakers. I continued to smoke my cigarette. Duncan and I walked to the Métro to catch a train to the École Militaire. At the top of the Métro steps, I saw the same Arab guy again.
“Hey, man, do people really spy on you guys?”
“Yes, they try,” Duncan said.
“I think I just saw a guy I’d seen earlier walking by the hotel.”
“He’s not doing a very good job then, is he?”
Duncan and I arrived at the military academy, a regally styled, sand-colored complex built by Louis XV. I took a seat at the back of the auditorium. The audience was made up of French academics, military students, and active-duty military officers. I settled in to listen to the speech McChrystal had just rehearsed.
“Afghanistan is hard,” he began.
10 THE PHOTO OP
MAY TO JUNE 2009, WASHINGTON, DC
At four thirty P.M. on May 19, 2009, Stan McChrystal walks into the Oval Office. It’s the big time, the spotlight. He’s with Bob Gates, and the event is closed to the press, but there’s a White House photographer in the room. This is McChrystal’s first official meeting with the president, the man who has selected him to run his war. He meets Obama, shakes his hand; they’re standing in front of the president’s desk. They exchange pleasantries. The White House photographer snaps a shot: Obama, mouth open, right hand held up, frozen mid-gesture; McChrystal in full dress uniform, listening quietly. The photo ends up on McChrystal’s fast-growing Wikipedia page.
McChrystal walks out of the Oval Office.
McChrystal is let down. He is disappointed. Obama didn’t seem to even know who he was. Obama didn’t seem to get that McChrystal was his commander in his war. His war, McChrystal thinks. Obama’s war? No longer, McChrystal realizes: It’s going to be my war now. When the music stops in Washington, it’s McChrystal who’s going to be left standing without a chair. He knows this. “They all know it,” he says about his team. “It’s clear to me, it’s clear to us. I’m going into this open-eyed. And of course in good company.” He knows he’s just taken on a shit-ton of responsibility. Obama just gives him a perfunctory handshake and sends him on his way.
This isn’t what McChrystal expected. He’s expecting a commander in chief who is more engaged; who is able to express concern; who is willing to give him what he needs to win. That’s what he’d told the National Security Council when they offered him the job: “I’m going over there to either win it or lose it,” he tells them. Where’s Obama’s heart in this? His head? Sure, there’s health care and the bank bailouts and the recession, but this is his war we’re talking about—and I’m his general.
How’d the meeting go?
The staff see the disappointment on The Boss’s face. “It was a ten-minute photo op,” Dave Silverman tells me. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.” Casey and Duncan agree.
At the time, they try to pass it off as an aberration—shit, Obama has got a lot on his mind, probably not worth reading too much into it. Back to work. McChrystal’s selection is playing well in the press. Everybody is mentioning the Tillman thing, but everybody is also saying that the confirmation is going to go smoothly. The hearings are scheduled for the first week of June.
McChrystal’s team knows that detainee abuse is going to come up. The allegation: He was aware of the “harsh interrogation techniques” at a place called Camp Nama in Iraq. A Human Rights Watch report released in 2006 placed him on the scene, inspecting the prison while the interrogators at the site were torturing prisoners to find out information about men like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The New York Times reported that soldiers there “beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces at a nearby area, and used detainees as target practice in a game of jailer paintball.” An investigation by Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby into the unit, called Task Force 6-26, found that detainees there had “burn marks on their back,” and “witnessed officers… punching detainees in the face to the point the individual needs medical attention.” A 2004 memo describing the abuses was passed on to McChrystal. An interrogator who was there that same year said that “most abusive” interrogation techniques needed written authorization, “indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.”
McChrystal’s team has a preemptive strike: They prepare a letter stating that McChrystal promises to follow the Geneva Conventions. Good thinking.
The Tillman thing: How best to handle it? Pat Tillman had been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004. McChrystal knew about it almost immediately, but he still went ahead and signed off on a falsified recommendation for Tillman’s Silver Star that suggested he was killed by the enemy. A week after Tillman’s death, McChrystal sent a memo up the chain of command, specifically warning that President Bush should avoid mentioning the cause of Tillman’s death. “If the circumstances of Corporal Tillman’s death become public,” he wrote, it could cause “public embarrassment” for the president.
Coming from the secretive Special Forces world, he’d been able to avoid most questions on his role. There was an Army review, and McChrystal escaped any reprimand, despite his leadership position. His name was blacked out when the Army report became public. He’s refused to answer questions
from the Tillman family. Won’t be able to dodge it in the hearings, though. Duncan and the team confer: Maybe this time he’s going to have to apologize.
Tillman’s parents are out there. His mother, Mary Tillman, sends a letter to President Obama, saying McChrystal should be “scrutinized very carefully.” Her husband says McChrystal participated in a “falsified homicide investigation.” One of the interrogators from Iraq won’t shut up, either—he’s been talking to Hill staffers, and he’s even submitted a list of questions for them to ask McChrystal.
McChrystal’s staff is worrying too much. He gets only one question about Camp Nama—from Senator Carl Levin. He admits to Levin that he was “uncomfortable” with the harsh interrogation techniques used to gather intelligence in Iraq, and says that he “reduce[d]” them when he took over in 2003. He’s got a line prepared on Tillman: “We failed the family,” he says, five years after Pat Tillman’s death. “I apologize for it.”
Tillman’s parents and the interrogator aren’t getting much traction in the press. They are more or less ignored. The headlines from the confirmation reflect that McChrystal is preordained—he’s Mullen and Gates’s handpicked choice; nothing is going to stop him from getting the job. NEW APPROACH TO AFGHANISTAN LIKELY, reads The Washington Post; NEW COMMANDER SAYS AFGHAN WAR IS “WINNABLE,” says another paper; and MCCHRYSTAL NOT SURE IF MORE U.S. FORCES NEEDED IN AFGHANISTAN, says U.S. News & World Report.
McChrystal gets unanimous confirmation from the Senate. On June 9, 2009, he gets his fourth star.
11 TOTALLY SHIT-FACED
APRIL 16, 2010, PARIS
A man I’ll call C. was sitting against the wall in The Duke’s Bar, a cushy hotel watering hole with dark lighting and oak panels on the ground floor of the Westminster. The younger members of the team—Dave, Khosh, and Casey—were crushed in the booth around him.
C. was a member of the SAS, the most elite British commando unit, and if I used his real name, I could possibly put his life at risk. He was on leave from Afghanistan, and he’d taken the train from London to Paris to hang out with McChrystal’s team. C., in his early thirties, was a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. He was flying back to Kabul on Monday.
C., I’m told, is a crazy motherfucker. He liked to drive around Kabul in a Toyota Land Cruiser. He kept a nine-millimeter pistol in the driver’s side door compartment, an MP5 submachine gun resting on the driver’s side seat, a LAW rocket launcher in the backseat, and a machine gun mounted in the trunk.
C. was in the middle of a story: One of his Afghan soldiers had gotten fucked up in a gunfight, badly burned. He needed to get medical help, so he drove the soldier, who was screaming occasionally when not passed out, to a base where Italian doctors were on staff. The Italians refused to treat the patient—he was an Afghan, and they needed some kind of permission first, and it appeared that permission would take hours to get. C. told them to fuck off and tried the next clinic, run by French military doctors. “The fucking frogs told us the same thing,” C. said.
C. was getting really pissed off. His Afghan soldier was getting closer to death. He drove him to another NATO base. The guards phoned up a doctor. C. talked to the doctor—she seemed like a nice lady, he said.
Five minutes later, an American man showed up. Where is the doctor? C. asked him. “I’m the doctor,” the man said. “What can I do to help?” He had a really high-pitched voice.
“The guy was a fucking poof,” C. said. “I swear to God I was expecting to see a girl.” The American doctor treated the Afghan soldier and saved his life. “That American was a good fucking guy,” C. recalled.
The team jumped back into a conversation about last night’s drama—McChrystal’s dinner with the French minister. Khosh, the Afghan aide-de-camp, had gotten snubbed. The American military attaché in Paris, a colonel, realized that he didn’t have a seat at the table when McChrystal and his entourage arrived to dine with the minister. Rather than bringing this up to McChrystal or the staff, the American attaché pulled Khosh aside and told him he was taking his seat at the table. He made Khosh wait outside for the entire meal.
This incensed the team.
“Where the fuck was that attaché’s last posting? Hawaii, then Paris? I mean, what the fuck?” said Dave.
“It’s fine,” Khosh said diplomatically.
“It’s not fucking fine,” Dave said. The move, Dave explained, went against all fairness. It showed that these guys in Paris didn’t get it—they were completely disconnected from the war. The point of having Khosh at the dinner was to show that the Afghans were in the fight, that they weren’t just worthless shitbags who had to be prodded along by Americans and Europeans. The Afghans were part of the team, too. Khosh’s presence was meant to provide a “good visual” for the French government, as Dave put it, representing the importance of actually getting the people who live in the country you’re fighting in to fight for you. Stealing Khosh’s seat at the last minute undercut the message the team wanted to send.
There was an eagerness to tell McChrystal about it. He’d set the attaché straight.
“That guy is going to get fucking chewed out. I can’t wait to see that happen at the airport. His fucking career is over,” Dave said. Casey agreed.
C. stared at me. He had intense and hungry eyes, like a coyote on the hunt for a puppy. He had heard I was doing a profile of McChrystal. Unprompted, he decided to give me his input on him. The general, he said, was a living legend in the Special Operations community, a giant leap above the office-bound dipshits who usually had four stars on their shoulders. McChrystal had what C. considered to be the most important attribute for a leader: respect from men like himself.
“The fucking lads love Stan McChrystal,” he told me. “You’d be out in Somewhere, Iraq, and someone would take a knee beside you, and a corporal would be like, ‘Who the fuck is that?’ And it’s fucking Stan McChrystal.”
McChrystal and the other top staff officers came into the bar. It was McChrystal’s thirty-third wedding anniversary. What had originally been planned as a dinner for McChrystal and his wife had now ballooned to include part of his senior staff going out for dinner with the two of them. The younger members of the staff would eat separately at another restaurant. They invited me to join them.
We left the hotel and walked a few blocks. We peeled off at an overpriced tourist restaurant and headed up to the second floor. We ate. Wine was served. I didn’t drink.
Midway through the dinner, Dave turned to me.
“Mike, you have to fucking come to Berlin with us, man,” he told me. Berlin was the next stop on the NATO tour.
“Ah, shit, I’d love to, but I can’t. I have to be back in DC. I’m supposed to interview Holbrooke.”
“You can fucking interview him anytime, that’s fucking easy. He loves publicity. Come on. Come to Berlin.” Dave looked to Duncan. “Duncan?”
Duncan smiled.
“This is beginning to sound like fucking Almost Famous,” I said. “I’m getting kidnapped.”
The movie, directed by Cameron Crowe, was loosely based on his experience as a Rolling Stone reporter. His assignment was to write a story about a rock band. His one-day story turned into a lengthy road trip on tour with the band. (“Rock stars have kidnapped my son!” his mother cried.) Crowe befriended the band members, then wrote an extremely revealing story. (“Oh, the enemy. A rock writer,” one band member warned in the film.) The band got pissed off about what he’d written, and denied everything that happened. (“I am a golden god.”) At the end of the movie, the lead guitarist had an epiphany. He saw the error of his ways and showed up at the reporter’s doorstep, apologetic, and believing that the truth should ultimately prevail. Credits rolled. I’d enjoyed the movie, but my experience as a reporter had led me to believe that there wasn’t always a happy ending if you wrote about people with brutal honesty.
“You have to fucking come, man,” Dave said.
I didn’t want to stay with them. My editor, Eric Bates, ha
d warned me about falling into the access trap. By becoming so indebted to them for the access they’d given me, I’d lose my objectivity. I’d e-mailed Eric back: If I start getting Stockholm syndrome, I’m sure we can knock it out of me. I could already start to feel the pull. I was starting to like them, and they seemed to like me. They were cool. They had a reckless, who-gives-a-fuck attitude. I was getting inside the bubble—an imaginary barrier that popped up around the inner sanctums of the most powerful institutions to keep reality at bay. I’d seen the bubble in White Houses, on the campaign trail, inside embassies, at the highest levels of large corporations. The bubble had a reality-distorting effect on those inside it, while perversely convincing those within the bubble that their view of reality was the absolute truth. (“Establishment reporters undoubtedly know a lot of things I don’t,” legendary outsider journalist I. F. Stone once observed. “But a lot of what they know isn’t true.”) The bubble compensated for its false impressions by giving bubble dwellers feelings of prestige from their proximity to power. The bubble was incredibly seductive, the ultimate expression of insiderness. If I succumbed to the logic of the bubble, I could lose the desire to write with a critical eye.
After dinner, the gang headed to Kitty O’Shea’s Irish pub, right around the corner from the hotel. Kitty O’Shea’s was a touristy-looking bar, not exactly the hippest spot in Paris.
Drinking began in earnest.
Around ten thirty P.M., I ran into Duncan outside. He hung up his cell phone. The McChrystals, the Flynns, and the rest were on their way over, he told me. They’d finished up the anniversary dinner.
The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan Page 6