Steve Hadley had found over the past four years that some of the principals would rather complain about problems than fix them. General Myers once complained to Hadley that he had a problem on coordination on military matters with the Saudis.
I just fixed that, Hadley replied.
Well, great, Myers replied. That's a good example but I got nine other things.
Send me your list, Dick, Hadley said, and I'll tick them off one at a time.
On Saturday evening, January 22, 2005, Rumsfeld and Myers cornered Hadley at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner in Washington.
You know, the interagency's broken, Rumsfeld said, launching right into him. Interagency coordination was Hadley's job. Dick Myers has a long list. Every day he comes in and bitches to me about the interagency is broken. He has a long list of things he wants done.
You know, Don, Hadley replied, I told Dick Myers we needed to do this four months ago. Send me your list, and I'll treat it like a punch list for a home closing.
Two weeks later Hadley was waiting for the list.
Rumsfeld later confirmed in an interview that he believed the interagency process was broken. In the 21st century, he said, in the information age, we're still functioning with an interagency process and a governmental structure that is in the industrial age in the last century. And it would be like if the DOD tried to function today without the Goldwater-Nichols reform of the JCS, where each service was going to go off and fight the Navy war and the Army war and the Air Force war, and that doesn't work in this world we're in. And it is not a—my comment about the interagency being broken was not in any way characterizing the people that are in it or even the structure that they control. It's a reflection of that fact that the government structure is a leftover from an earlier era. And it is something that I think all of us feel on occasion.
Have you told the president this? I asked.
Sure.
What does he say?
I don't say what he says.
But that's—that would be something worth fixing, wouldn't it?
Indeed, Rumsfeld said. On the wall of his office, right across from his large desk, hung a copy of the old Uncle Sam I WANT YOU recruiting poster from World War I. The slogan on Rumsfeld's poster read, We're at war. Are you doing all you can? He said he did not think the rest of the government was doing all it could.
This department is at war, Rumsfeld said. The other departments are not here for that. They're being asked to do something that they were not organized, trained and equipped to do. And it takes time and it's hard and there's resistance in the Congress. People are attracted to different organizations depending on what their bent is, and the people that are attracted here are the people that are ready to be deployed and ready to go into danger zones. And the people that are attracted in other departments may or may not be. And if they're asked to, it wasn't something they signed up for. And it may not be career-enhancing.
Rumsfeld cited an example from 2001, when he said he'd been unable to get funding to train soldiers in Afghanistan. Why couldn't we? Well, because the Department of State has the training funds, and they're programmed out two or three years in advance.
Many in the military felt the rest of the U.S. government had not shown up for the war, I told him, and were not doing their fair share.
Can you share the concern the military people have? I asked.
Well, sure. I do! My Lord! Can I share it? I'm here!
Can you mobilize the rest of the government?
We've tried and tried and tried, Rumsfeld said.
Miller was still on his mission to implement the president's order allowing the British and Australians access to the full secret SIPRNET military network. He went to a meeting at the Pentagon with some of the key civilians and Joint Staff officers dealing with the issue. He read both Rumsfeld's and the president's directives to the group.
You don't mean unfettered access, said one of the three-stars on the Joint Staff.
If the president or the secretary of defense had wanted to say give them access according to the following limitations, they would have said so, Miller replied, looking straight at the general. This is an interagency cleared document. Your people signed up to it. Access means access. What about 'access' don't you understand?
Miller put something together for Hadley to send to Rumsfeld in the president's name, requesting him to fix the SIPRNET access.
Look, Hadley replied in a friendly tone. I've got two difficult tasks for me personally. I've got to establish my own relationship with the president, and I've got to change my relationship with Rumsfeld from being a deputy to being a peer. And my first step out of the box will not go well to send a 'Don, your people are screwing it up. Fix it.'
There was a certain logic to that, Miller recognized. They had a lot more to work on than just this information-sharing issue. But still, it meant they had to work the back channel that much harder to get the president's order implemented. Miller was stunned that everyone at the senior levels—the president, Rumsfeld, Rice and Hadley—seemed to accept the laxness and defiance in the system.
Up in his second-floor West Wing office Karl Rove was at loose ends, almost bouncing off the walls four days after Bush's second inauguration. His real job, getting Bush reelected, was over. What would he do now at age 54?
Has-been. Downhill from here, bubba, he tried to joke to a colleague. I don't know what I mean. I like my job and I'll stick around for a while. As Bush's senior adviser he would have a big role in economic and other policy. My job is to be a good colleague. I stir up a lot of shit without pissing people off.
But Rove was bored. He played with a battery-powered Redneck Horn that he had shown the president. Every time he pressed a button on the four-square-inch plastic novelty, suitable for dashboard mounting, it rattled off recorded obscenities and insults in an angry Southern drawl. Slow down, dumbass! Wal-Mart's open all night, the red toy blared as Rove pressed the button. And again. Driver's license? You ought to get one, asswipe! *
The CIA kept up its steady stream of warnings about Iraq's upcoming exercise in democracy. The Sunnis would be excluded and violence would go up, it warned. The alarmist classified briefings were unremitting, and grew in the days before January 30. In Baghdad, Negroponte
* The toy had eight other recordings: Hey, hogneck, who taught you how to drive? What the hell was that maneuver? What race are you in, shithead? Son of a bitch! Get the hell out of my way! Are you freaking blind? Put the cell phone down, dickhead! and finally, You're a goddamn moron!
disagreed with the CIA's view, and the embassy was encouraging the U.N. and the Iraqis to go ahead. He said publicly that security was adequate.
After one CIA briefer presented another warning, Bush chimed in, Is this Baghdad Bob? referring to Saddam's propagandist. It was a stunning insult. I'm not hearing that from anyone else but the CIA, Bush said. If I take more time there's no evidence the security will get better. I'm depending on the prospect of the elections and an elected government to get the insurgency down and get the security improved.
The election would be for an interim National Assembly that would appoint an acting government and draft a permanent constitution. The constitution would then be put up to a vote of the Iraqi people in a referendum in the fall—nine months away. If it passed, a second national election would follow in two months to choose a permanent government under the new constitution. It was a long, tedious three-step process. But it had been approved by the United Nations and everyone was stuck with it. Bush said again that he did not see how waiting would help.
Finally, at an Oval Office briefing just before the Iraqi election day, after hearing the latest dire CIA predictions, the president suddenly clapped his hands loudly, like a rifle shot, and slammed his briefing book closed.
Well, he said, we'll see who's right.
As the date approached, violence surged. I expect something spectacular to occur either on election day or right before it, warned Major Gener
al Peter Chiarelli in Baghdad, who was wrapping up a year as the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division. On January 26, a Marine Super Stallion helicopter crashed in the western part of the country, killing 31 Americans. It was the deadliest single incident for U.S. forces since the invasion.
In his Saturday radio address the day before the Iraqi elections, the president went further out on a limb, if that were possible. Tomorrow the world will witness a turning point in the history of Iraq, he said. He noted that the al Qaeda terrorist Zarqawi, who was behind many of the car bombings and beheadings in Iraq, had recently called democracy an evil principle.
Rice woke up Sunday morning, January 30, and turned on CNN. The sound came through before her television's picture warmed up.
... an extraordinary day for Iraqis, she heard.
The picture came on, and there were pictures of long lines of Iraqis waiting to vote. Rice called the president.
You have to turn on the TV, Rice said. You just have to see this.
Is it good? Is it a good outcome? Bush asked.
It's really amazing. It's amazing to see what those Iraqis are doing.
Some 8 million Iraqis went to the polls. Many waved their purple-inked fingers in the air to signify they had voted. It was a stunning turnout with minimal violence.
Bush thought it was a vindication not only of his Iraq policy but of his freedom agenda. Iraqis were seizing the moment and taking control of their future. Bush gave a brief televised address to the nation.
The world is hearing the voice of freedom from the center of the Middle East, he said, and Iraqis have taken rightful control of their country's destiny.
The mood and atmosphere in the White House shifted, Gerson felt, and it was as if a corner had been turned. But the minority Sunnis had effectively boycotted the election, leaving 20 percent of the population out—an important, critical segment that had been the elites under Saddam. The Sunnis were the backbone of the insurgency.
In Baghdad during January 2005, the CIA station compiled an AARDWOLF, the name given an overall chief of station assessment. It was an important document saying that the insurgency was gaining strength and Iraq was on the verge of civil war. Despite the excitement over the elections, enemy-initiated attacks had jumped from about 2,000 in December to 3,000 in January. The AARDWOLF was reviewed by Negroponte, who told the CIA division chief, Rob Richer, and the Baghdad CIA station chief to be vocal with President Bush.
I'm making the same point, he told the station chief.
Negroponte merely told Bush, We've got some hiccups.
Richer felt this was a classic case of sugarcoating bad news. He later confronted Negroponte for failing to back up the station chief like he had promised.
I get my message across, Negroponte said.
As Hadley took over as national security adviser, Bush had one basic instruction: I'm trusting you to make sure that I have a process where I hear from my cabinet secretaries. The president believed in letting the line managers run their departments. You can have your own views, Bush told him, and if I ask you for them, you tell them to me.
From his experience as Rice's deputy, Hadley knew he would be spending lots of time working closely with the president. There would be a way for him to get his thoughts across. But Hadley believed firmly that he and the NSC staff had a limited role. They were not elected, not even confirmed by the Senate. Running programs by committee was to be avoided because no one was responsible.
Success would be to the credit of the president or the cabinet secretaries, Hadley concluded. Failure would in part be his. His job was important but ultimately thankless. It was unthinkable that he try to be a national security adviser in the mold of the globe-trotting, high-visibility Henry Kissinger, who competed with and ultimately dominated the cabinet secretaries. He didn't even want to be as visible as Rice had been. Hadley hoped to be like Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush senior, who was low-key and operated largely offstage.
As Rice's deputy, Hadley had been the fix-it man, the one to call Armitage or Wolfowitz or someone at the CIA to solve an immediate problem. Now the president told Hadley that he could no longer be Mr. Fix-It. Hadley, Bush said, you've got to get yourself a good deputy because you need to help me think up here about what's our overall strategy, and are we organized right, and get it done. At the same time, as Hadley knew only too well, the president's predominant emotion was often impatience. If he wanted something fixed, he would generally assign it to the nearest person. Most frequently that had meant Rice or Hadley. So Hadley would be in some respects retaining his old job, while also getting a new one.
He made an assessment of the problems from the first term.
I give us a B minus for policy development, he told a colleague on Saturday, February 5, and a D minus for policy execution.
Hadley knew that nearly two years after the invasion, the basic problems of Iraq had not been solved—security, infrastructure and governance. His assessment was especially interesting because he continually insisted that the NSC had no role in executing policy. So the D minus apparently would not apply to him. It was for the job done by people such as Powell and Rumsfeld.
What did Rumsfeld think of that notion?
If I were going to do it, I might flip those, Rumsfeld told me in an interview later when I relayed Hadley's assessment. The problem wasn't the execution; it was the policy development. I think there's been execution in a lot of things that has been very good, he added.
In other words, the problem was the interagency, not him.
35
bandar came over to the White House on February 5 to see Bush. An Afghani had recently walked into the Saudi embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and said he knew where Osama bin Laden was hiding. He could point out his location if they gave him a map, he claimed. Since he'd be putting himself and his family at risk, he wanted the Saudis to promise to take them to the Kingdom and let them live there for the rest of their lives.
The Saudis did some preliminary evaluations and the walk-in informer looked interesting, so the Saudis promised asylum. He had located a spot on a map that seemed plausible.
Bandar said the Saudis planned to send a military or intelligence unit to the spot and get bin Laden. We're not going to go through a trial, Bandar explained. We get him, we kill him. Get it over with.
Go ahead, the president said. I could care less.
Bandar asked if the CIA could assist in evaluating the source, and Bush gave his approval.
Bandar did not get along with Porter Goss, so before he left the White House, he called Rob Richer, the CIA Near East and South Asia division chief.
We're going to Pakistan, Bandar said.
I can't take orders from you, Richer objected.
But almost instantly, Richer got his orders through regular channels. He went to Bandar's mansion, and soon they and another expert from the CIA were on Bandar's plane.
Once they arrived in Pakistan, they started an evaluation of the walk-in. Ah, Jesus, the CIA men soon realized. The walk-in was a known commodity to both the CIA and the British MI6 intelligence service. He had tried the scam before.
Why hadn't the Saudis and the CIA been able to figure that out before going to the president and sending a mission to Pakistan? Because nobody ever shares sources with anybody, said one of the people involved. That is standard modus operandi. He was a fabricator. He was looking for money basically.
The message was relayed to Bush: no bin Laden.
In early 2005, Rumsfeld sent retired General Gary E. Luck to Iraq for a sweeping review. Luck, a former head of U.S. forces in South Korea, was an adviser to General Franks during the 2003 Iraq invasion.
Luck, who has a Ph.D. in math, was to examine strategy, troop levels and training programs. He found that the training of the new Iraqi army was totally screwed up, a disaster. In some cases it consisted of not much more than handing the recruit a rifle, giving him three days of training and calling him a member of the New Iraqi A
rmy.
Luck told General Myers, You know we have underestimated the effect Saddam Hussein and his regime had on the spirit of the Iraqi people. Nobody got any credit for showing any initiative under Saddam Hussein. Now we're asking them to show all this initiative and they don't know how to do it.
Rice didn't need the Luck report to tell her the training of the Iraqi army was a disaster. But the report did make a good point, she thought, that they couldn't just train individual soldiers; they had to train entire units.
Rice hired Philip Zelikow, an old friend, as the counselor to the State Department, a powerful but little-known top post that would leave him free to undertake special assignments for her.
Zelikow, 50, a lawyer with a Ph.D. in history, headed the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, which studied the modern presidencies. He and Rice had co-authored a 1995 book, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, the only book former President Bush and Brent Scowcroft said they used in writing their memoir. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union had left Rice and Zelikow optimistic. It was possible to get foreign policy right.
Zelikow, who could be taken for a well-groomed banker, had also co-authored books on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and served on the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Most recently he had been the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, forcing Rice to testify in public and raising serious questions about the administration's pre-9/11 response to al Qaeda. He had also supervised the writing and editing of the final 9/11 Commission report, a widely praised best-seller with exhaustive, groundbreaking details about the origins, planning and execution of the attacks.
Bob Woodward Page 45