HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

by Jonathan Allen

  The White House was also anticipating questions about Iran and Israel because Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was scheduled to be on TV that Sunday morning, and the White House had reason to be concerned, with only several weeks left before the election, that he might try to make Obama look bad on the subject of Iran’s effort to develop a nuclear weapon. All in all, it added up to making sure that someone very familiar with foreign policy was sitting across from the tough interrogators on the five Sunday shows.

  “We thought it made sense to have her or Susan [Rice],” the White House official said. Obama aides, conscious of how busy she was in the aftermath of the attacks, made a soft request to State for Hillary to go on. Reines declined on her behalf.

  The White House had moved on to Rice by Friday morning, offering her up to all five of the Sunday shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, Fox News Sunday, CBS’s Face the Nation, ABC’s This Week, and CNN’s State of the Union. The feat of appearing on all of them on the same Sunday is known in Washington as the “full Ginsburg,” a reference to Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer, William H. Ginsburg, who pulled it off in 1998.

  For Rice, the Sunday shows offered an outsize opportunity to audition for a bigger job in Obama’s second term. For Hillary, they were a nuisance to be avoided unless she needed to get a message out, like when her presidential campaign started flagging or when newspapers were writing that she had been sidelined at State in her first six months. She didn’t need the platform, it was a politically risky proposition in the middle of a crisis, and it was true enough that she didn’t have extra time for the arduous preparation required of any guest on the big political programs.

  As most of the State Department mourned, Capricia Marshall and her team worked through their grief. It fell to the protocol office to plan the somber Andrews Air Force Base ceremony at which Hillary and Obama would receive a military plane bearing the bodies of the four murdered Americans, which had since been flown to America’s Ramstein Air Base in western Germany. Deputy Secretary Bill Burns, who had known Stevens, cut short a trip to Baghdad to accompany the remains home on the long, lonely flight from Ramstein to Andrews.

  Marshall and her staff dug through their archives for precedents. They met with Pentagon officials and coordinated with the White House. The transfer of the bodies was scheduled for Friday, September 14, at Andrews. Marshall, the former White House social secretary, was a clinician when it came to pulling off major events. But she had just two days and so many arrangements to make.

  Reines told Marshall that she should talk to the families of the men who had died. Even though the State Department had provided grief counselors, it was important to walk them through the ceremony so that they could raise any concerns or objections beforehand. On Friday morning, Marshall went to the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown to have coffee and juice with the families. Most were fine with the plan, but one family broke down at the mention of cameras and reporters. Marshall called Reines, who came up with a solution: the press would be held back until all the families were seated so that only the backs of their heads would be visible to television audiences.

  Hillary arrived early for the afternoon ceremony at Andrews so she could meet with the families. Marshall welled up as they shared their stories, but Hillary did not.

  “It was almost as if they were pouring their grief out upon her,” said a source who was in the hangar. “Bodies were slumped and hanging, and children were all around. I did not see her tear up. I just saw her feel it. The face of ‘I’m here.’ I think a bit of it is her Methodist roots and her belief in the Lord and her faith, and then it’s this kind of ‘What am I here to do? I’m here to be that person.’ She believes in service to country and government, and part of her role is that—being that compassionate person.” Marshall had planned to introduce Obama to the families, but when the president arrived, Hillary took on that job.

  This was the darkest moment for Clinton and Obama. At the home of Air Force One, where Obama often played golf on the weekends, they stood together to bear witness to a horrific homecoming.

  The flag-draped coffins containing the remains of the four dead Americans were unloaded from a military jet for the formal transfer back to U.S. custody. During the opening prayer, Clinton and Obama stood as mirror images, heads bowed, hands delicately crossed in front of them.

  As if speaking to her own resilience, Hillary issued a call for fortitude. “We will wipe away our tears, stiffen our spines, and face the future undaunted,” she said. Her voice cracked and the exhaustion and emotion of the week were evident on her face. She had lost a new friend, the man she had sent to Libya as a special envoy, and administration critics and journalists were already asking tough questions.

  When it was his turn to speak, the president quoted the book of John: “ ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Their sacrifice will never be forgotten.”

  With the election looming, pressure was mounting—on State Department staff, who had just lost four of their own; on Hillary, who ran the agency; on Obama, the man who had sworn the most solemn oath to defend the country; and on a policy of supporting certain revolutions in the Arab and Muslim worlds that suddenly looked less wise. Both Obama and Clinton had a lot on the line—they would be judged by whether this policy ultimately made America safer or more vulnerable to volatility and hostility in the region. This moment required resolve, Hillary said at Andrews. “The people of Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Tunisia did not trade the tyranny of a dictator for the tyranny of a mob,” she said. “Reasonable people and responsible leaders in these countries need to do everything they can to restore security and hold accountable those behind these violent acts.”

  It was still striking to see Obama and Clinton, once fierce political adversaries, standing and speaking in unison. But over the previous four years, whenever the nation had had an international inflection point—from the surge in Afghanistan to the Bin Laden raid to the Arab Spring and its aftermath—they had stood within arm’s length, physically and substantively. Hillary had served as the dutiful executive of Obama’s policy. But in the previous few days, he had demonstrated a political loyalty uncommon for him. He had brought Hillary to the Rose Garden for a public statement the day after the attack. He had gone that day to the State Department to address the beleaguered staff, and he had put his arm around her as they received the bodies of their fallen compatriots. When their speeches were finished, Hillary reached out for Barack and grasped his right hand in her left hand. He had been there for her during the most deeply emotional period of her four years at State. She whispered in his ear, “Thank you.”

  While Obama and Clinton were at the service at Andrews, the president’s national security team was in the early stages of a tussle over talking points. At a private briefing, Maryland representative Dutch Ruppersberger, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, had asked CIA director David Petraeus to provide talking points about the Benghazi attack that lawmakers could repeat in television, radio, and print interviews. It is not uncommon for members of Congress, particularly those of the president’s party, to seek guidance on what should and should not be said publicly when matters of national security are at stake. Running afoul of laws prohibiting the unauthorized disclosure of classified information happens all too easily, even by accident.

  The CIA’s career staff worked up a batch of talking points for the committee members to use. The original draft asserted that the Benghazi attack was “inspired by” the assault on the embassy in Cairo earlier that day; there had been a crowd outside the compound before violence erupted; militants with ties to Al Qaeda participated in the attack; an extremist group called Ansar al-Sharia had not denied participation; the easy availability of weapons in Libya contributed to the deaths of the American personnel; previous terrorist acts had been carried out in Benghazi; and the intelligence community was working with Libyan officials and other American agencies to find the perpetrators.

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sp; But some CIA officials were unhappy with the draft because it didn’t mention warnings the agency had given to State about a possible disturbance at the Cairo embassy. In an internal CIA e-mail time-stamped 4:42 p.m. that Friday, a new version of the talking points deleted the specific mention of Al Qaeda. The previous version had referred to the “attacks” in Benghazi as being inspired by the protests in Egypt and evolving into a “direct assault” against the compound and the annex. That didn’t make sense—it said the attacks evolved into an assault. The word “attacks” was changed to “demonstrations” in the internal CIA edit. There were also two new lines added. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy,” read one of the new bullet points. The other said that the CIA had “produced numerous pieces” about the threat of Al Qaeda–linked terrorism in Libya.

  Surely it didn’t take a world-class intelligence agent to know Benghazi was a dangerous place full of armed extremists. The additions were the equivalent of saying the CIA monitored Twitter and read the newspaper, but they were also a signal that there would be a fight between the CIA and State in avoiding blame. Had the CIA failed to predict and prevent the attacks on the compound and the annex, or should the State Department have taken more precautions, given the intelligence provided by the CIA?

  On a separate track, Dag Vega, who headed up broadcast bookings for the White House, confirmed at 6:16 p.m. that Rice would be appearing on all five Sunday shows. In an e-mail to the producers, with whom he had negotiated a common set of rules, Vega outlined the lineup of in-studio interviews, which would be pretaped on Sunday: CNN at 7:15 a.m., Fox at 7:45 a.m., ABC at 8:15 a.m., NBC at 9:00 a.m., and CBS at 9:40 a.m.

  “Each interview should be no longer than ten minutes,” Vega wrote. Neither the State Department nor Rice’s team at the United Nations had been looped into the e-mail discussion of the talking points for the House Intelligence Committee yet.

  Toria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, was the first to get a copy early in the evening, after the CIA and White House had been tweaking them for a few hours. Nuland wondered why the administration would give members of Congress talking points that could prejudice a probe by the FBI, which, under standard operating procedure, was investigating the crime on the American soil of the Benghazi consulate. She also caught on to the danger that the CIA’s additions created for her department.

  “The penultimate point could be abused by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to [CIA] warnings, so why do we want to feed that either? Concerned,” she wrote at 7:39 p.m., copying Sullivan and another State Department official, David Adams, into an e-mail chain.

  “I’m with Toria,” Adams replied. “The last bullet, especially, will read to members like we had been repeatedly warned.”

  The CIA revised the talking points but did not delete the references to threat assessments. “These don’t resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” Nuland wrote in an e-mail she later forwarded to Sullivan with the letters FYSA (for your situational awareness) to ensure he knew that there were still red flags for the State Department. “They are consulting with [National Security Staff].”

  Republicans would later use the phrase “building leadership” to suggest that Clinton was engaged in the editing of the talking points. Hillary has said she was not. But Sullivan, according to the publicly released e-mails, was acting in the interests of his boss and her department by making the case to Vietor and Rhodes—members of the National Security Staff—that the CIA’s additions should be dropped.

  “Talked to Tommy,” Sullivan wrote back to Nuland at 9:32 p.m. “We can make edits.”

  At 9:34 p.m. Rhodes called a halt to the discussion. The issue would be taken up at a “deputies meeting” in the morning. Among other things, that ensured that any decision making would be done face-to-face, without the risk of e-mail chains being leaked or later made public in archives or through press requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

  Under political pressure to clarify the origin of the talking points, the White House would eventually release what it touted as one hundred pages of Benghazi talking-points e-mails. But the document was puffed up by the repeated inclusion of long e-mail chains from messages that were replied to and forwarded. More important for anyone attempting to do a forensic analysis of the decision-making process, the e-mails represented only a slice of the conversations that were going on within and between agencies on phone calls and through other forms of communication.

  “Needless to say, there were other exchanges on other systems,” said one senior government official familiar with the debate over the talking points.

  In the end, the talking points sent to lawmakers—and to Susan Rice—the next day were pared to three bullet points. The language that had bothered State was removed. The exercise had started out as an effort to answer the request of a single lawmaker involved in national security issues. It then morphed into a set of talking points vetted by the public relations folks, and more-senior officials, at the various agencies involved.

  At some point deputy CIA director Michael Morrell had made similar edits without sharing them among the agencies, according to the White House. Petraeus, his boss, was not pleased with the outcome. “No mention of Cairo cable, either?” Petraeus wrote to officials at the agency, referring to the CIA’s effort to make State aware of the planned protests in Egypt. “Frankly, I’d just as soon not use this, then.…”

  Rice went out on the Sunday shows and delivered talking points drawn from the set sent to Capitol Hill. The difference was that she drew a straight line from the anti-Muslim video to the Cairo demonstration to the Benghazi attack, and she erroneously stated that a protest had morphed into the assault.

  “Putting together the best information that we have available to us today, our current assessment is that what happened in Benghazi was in fact initially a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired hours before in Cairo, almost a copycat of—of the demonstrations against our facility in Cairo, which were prompted, of course, by the video,” Rice said on Meet the Press. “What we think then transpired in Benghazi is that opportunistic extremist elements came to the consulate as this was unfolding.”

  But there had been no demonstration in Benghazi. Rice gave slightly varying versions of the same talking points to all five of the programs. There’s little doubt that anyone representing the administration in that hot seat would have said something similar. Hillary had sidestepped a political minefield—or so it would seem later, when Republicans focused in on Rice’s appearances on the Sunday shows as evidence of an Obama administration cover-up. At the time, it was Obama, in the stretch run of a campaign against Romney, that Republicans hoped to score points against. All the better to hit him through Rice rather than the still-popular Hillary. Rice would pay a stiff price for the talking-points fiasco, and for not showing expected deference to senators, when she lost out on the nomination to succeed Hillary at State.

  “Susan just got fucked,” said one White House official.

  Four days later, on September 20, Hillary organized separate classified briefings on the Benghazi attack for the House and Senate. Along with deputy defense secretary Ash Carter, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Sandy Winnefeld, director of national intelligence James Clapper, and other senior administration officials, Hillary delivered a presentation to the House members in a cavernous auditorium in the Capitol Visitor Center and sat for a question-and-answer session. The meeting was both uneventful—save for Hillary shooting Representative Michele Bachmann a death stare after one question—and long.

  That meant senators had to wait for the caravan of Hillary and deputy secretaries and deputy directors from various agencies to arrive on their side of the Capitol. The senators, unaccustomed to waiting for anyone, much less administration staff and a former colleague, were growing ant
sy, and Hillary’s Senate legislative affairs team sent word ahead to the staffers with her that Majority Leader Harry Reid was on the verge of disbanding the group.

  When Hillary walked in, she and her aides could feel the tension. Reading the room, she said she would dispense with her prepared remarks and just answer questions. Clapper told the senators he’d better get started because he knew from delivering the remarks to the House that they would take up a little less than fifteen minutes. Reines noticed Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) growing increasingly irritated. “Watch him,” Reines told Mills. “He’s going to blow.”

  When Clapper wrapped up, Carter began speaking in his painfully deliberate style, adding to the feeling that senators in the back were beginning to express, in just-audible-enough comments, that the administration officials were wasting their time. McCain, a former Navy pilot and longtime Armed Services Committee bull, interrupted Carter, telling him he didn’t need an assessment of U.S. naval assets. When Carter resumed speaking, McCain stormed out of the room. Winnefeld seemed to take the hint and quickly dispensed with his opening remarks.

  “They went right to questions, and it was pretty bad,” one State Department source said. “It was the moment they decided that Susan lied.”

  Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) quarterbacked the GOP assault, dispensing questions for colleagues to ask. Finally he stood up to make his own point. “Every time we ask you a question about something you don’t want to answer, you tell us you can’t talk about the investigation or you don’t know the answer,” he said. “But every time there’s a fact you want us to know, you sit here and make us listen to it for twenty minutes.”

  Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), for whom Hillary had once thrown an engagement party, asked the panel how five diplomatic security agents had made it out of the compound alive when their protectees were killed.

  During the briefings, lawmakers later recalled, Hillary had distinctly suggested that the attack had been staged by terrorists, a marker that contrasted subtly but importantly with Rice’s account of the events.