by Bob Woodward
During the week of the presidential election, General David H. Petraeus was 7,000 miles from Washington in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The distance was perhaps symbolic. Petraeus, 56, did not exactly share the ecstatic sense of renewal among Democrats and Obama supporters, many of whom had criticized the Iraq War, not least among them the president-elect.
Only months earlier, candidate Obama had visited Petraeus in Iraq. According to Obama, he told the general, “My job, if I have the honor of being commander in chief, is going to be to look at the whole picture. I expect you, as the commander of our forces in Iraq, to ask for everything you need and more to ensure your success. That’s what you owe the troops who are under your command. My job, then, which in some ways is more difficult, is I’ve got to choose. Because I don’t have infinite resources.”
If President Bush told Petraeus yes, Obama was prepared to say no.
Now Petraeus had a bigger job. Shortly before the election, he had taken over the Central Command, putting him in charge of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Over the two previous years as the Iraq commander, Petraeus had led the efforts that turned the war around, stabilizing the country and dramatically reducing violence. This was a result of the “surge” of 30,000 more troops and new top secret operations to locate, target and kill insurgents.
Petraeus had almost redefined the notion of warfare, authoring the new Counterinsurgency Field Manual and implementing it in Iraq. His primary insight was that the U.S. could not kill its way out of the war. It had to protect and win over the population, living among them, providing security so that a stable and competent government could thrive. A new kind of soldier in the Petraeus mold had to be a social worker, urban planner, anthropologist and psychologist.
Perhaps no general in America had been held in such near-universal esteem since General Dwight David Eisenhower after victory in World War II. Young-looking with his neatly parted brown hair, Petraeus could pass for a 35-year-old. He had few hobbies—no fishing, no hunting, no golf. When he jogged, it was “physical training.” He could run five miles in about 30 minutes. A solid pace put him in a good mood and helped with sleep. “I prefer running to Ambien,” he had said. When he read a book, it was often about a renowned general. He had a Ph.D. from Princeton, finishing the course work in double time, just two years. When his 92-year-old father died in the summer of 2008, Petraeus did not attend the funeral but stayed in Iraq to oversee the war.
He put other workaholics to shame, monitoring military business and his personal e-mail day and night. His new office on the second floor of the Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida, made the bridge of Starship Enterprise seem modest. It was filled with regular and special secure phones, computers and numerous screens arranged around a clean desk marked by its compulsive orderliness.
When Petraeus had turned over his Iraq command six weeks earlier, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had flown to Baghdad to declare that Petraeus had overseen a near-miracle.
The evening before the formal change of command, Petraeus was treated to a testimonial dinner. It was more like an Academy Awards ceremony, ending with a film of his 19-month tour called Surge of Hope.
“The darkness has receded,” Gates said in a speech. “General Petraeus leaves this country transformed.”
Six weeks later, on October 31, the 5-foot-9, 155-pound four-star had just been sworn in as the central commander, the combatant commander in charge of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His appointment was in part an insurance policy taken out by the Bush administration in hopes of avoiding a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq.
Gates again showed up to hail Petraeus as “the preeminent soldier-scholar-statesman of his generation.”
The Iraqis called him “King David.” Some on his staff called him “The Legend of Iraq.” Colleagues believed that Petraeus was so competitive that he preferred fighting a war when the odds were against him, even with both hands tied behind his back, so that his eventual victory would be all the greater. Petraeus was the recipient of countless awards, and the celebrity selected to do the coin toss at the upcoming Super Bowl.
But Obamaland was potentially hostile. When candidate Obama had visited Iraq over the summer, the conversation between the two had not gone well. Here were two of the most ambitious, driven men of their era. Obama, an outspoken, acerbic opponent of the Iraq War, said he still wanted to withdraw and would have to consider Iraq in the context of all the other pressing national security concerns, including Afghanistan.
The Obama presidency was going to dramatically alter Petraeus’s status. He had direct access to President Bush, and his mentor, retired General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, had an extraordinary pipeline to both Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
But Petraeus had gone to Afghanistan and Pakistan in early November to emphasize the forgotten war. “I was trying to send a signal,” he said later. “You show by where you go and by the use of your time what’s most important.”
He was no expert on Afghanistan, but he had gone there four years earlier to assess for then Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld the training of the Afghan army and police. Petraeus had immersed himself in the details. He studied the police training schedule for an eight-week course. He kept looking at it. Something was missing. He soon realized there was no time on the shooting range. None. He asked about it.
The response: “Oh, General, we don’t have time to go to the range.”
He looked at the schedule. “You have time to march for an hour each morning and an hour each afternoon?”
Yes.
It was almost day care, Petraeus concluded, not serious training.
On this November trip, he saw firsthand the lack of troops, the training problems, the absence of structure. There was no cell working to bring the insurgents over to the U.S. and Afghan side—a key tenet of counterinsurgency. His bottom line was that without more troops, money and attention, “We’re not going to achieve our objectives.”
Petraeus told his closest aides that Afghanistan would be different from Iraq, where he had become the poster boy of the war. “I do not want to be the face of policy,” he told one aide. “They can’t dump it on me.” Petraeus later denied this was his intent. He just wanted to be “a good soldier,” as he put it, and keep a very low public profile.
Obama’s campaign aides saw his prominence through a political lens. A popular war hero like Petraeus, a registered Republican, was always a potential presidential candidate. It had happened before. Petraeus denied he had political ambitions.
On Monday, November 10, Obama met with Bush alone in the Oval Office. The focus was the financial crisis, but Bush said the intelligence problem was hard to get right. He had made his share of mistakes. The different agencies did not always play nicely with each other. It is not as easy as it might look, he said. It’s finally running well under McConnell as DNI and Air Force General Michael Hayden as the CIA director. Both have said they would stay on for a year or so. Keep these guys for a while, Bush urged. Don’t throw them overboard, give yourself some continuity. This is working. Leave this alone. They are professionals.
But the professionals—despite the successes they could claim with the drone attacks, the human penetrations and real time signals intelligence—had yet to capture the prize. McConnell and Hayden had a special cell devoted to getting Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda deputy, Ayman Zawahiri. President Bush had set the last year of his administration as the deadline for accomplishing this task. On one level, it was a running joke. And on another, it was deadly serious. “I want him,” Bush had said.
At a regular Thursday morning briefing on terrorism, the president would ask at least every other week, “How are you coming on getting number one and number two?”
Their best answer that was they were working the problem, night and day.
“You only got three more months,” Bush was now saying.
Later on November 10, Ed Henry
appeared on CNN reporting on the president-elect’s day in Washington: “As soon as he left the White House this afternoon, he headed over to Reagan National Airport. And, while his jet was waiting, he went to the firehouse at National Airport for a long meeting with either a mystery person or persons—a lot of speculation tonight. Maybe it had something to do with first responders, since it was in the firehouse. Maybe it was a meeting with a potential secretary of homeland security. But I have been e-mailing Obama advisers tonight. They’re all in lockdown, saying they can’t talk about it.”
The mystery person was Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, whom President Bush had brought into the Pentagon two years earlier to salvage the Iraq War. Gates, 65, knew Washington, the White House, the world of espionage, war—and survival. No one else had ever held so many key positions in the CIA and the White House. A career CIA man, he had never been a covert operator but was an analyst with a doctorate in Russian history. Methodical and driven, he had served on the NSC staff from 1974 to 1979 and after Ronald Reagan’s election became the chief CIA Soviet analyst, executive assistant to CIA Director William J. Casey and later Casey’s chief deputy.
In 1987, Reagan nominated Gates to be CIA director but Gates withdrew because of too many questions about the Iran-contra scandal and his relationship with Casey. In his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, he made it clear he had learned about public humiliation, writing that he was “embarrassed” and felt “like a leper for whom people have sympathy but still don’t want to get too close.” When George H. W. Bush became president in 1989, Gates served as deputy national security adviser before Bush nominated him to be CIA director. He was confirmed that time, serving in the top post from 1991 to 1993.
Probably no one had better mastered the art of holding back in meetings, press conferences or congressional testimony than Gates. It was a disarming quiet that appealed to Obama, who saw Gates as someone who kept his ego in check, seemingly humble yet forceful. Obama had asked Podesta to set up a secret, one-on-one meeting.
Retaining Gates at the Pentagon might make sense, the president-elect said. Continuity during the wars could be essential. And it might be helpful as U.S. troops pulled out of Iraq to have at the Pentagon someone who had overseen the stabilization and reduction of violence there.
Podesta, who had other names in mind, was not sure Defense should be given to a Bush-appointed Republican. And, to his knowledge, no one else in the transition was arguing to keep Gates.
Set it up, please, Obama said. He didn’t want a public event that could raise the expectations and the stakes, in case Gates preferred not to stay or it might not work out.
Podesta realized that Obama seemed to have already made up his mind.
Obama told aides that he thought Gates was a breath of fresh air after the overbearing, fear-and-loathing approach of Donald Rumsfeld, the previous secretary of defense. Gates was liked in the Congress, and he seemed to be dismantling the Rumsfeld autocracy. All the signs were that this was a straight shooter.
Gates was aware of the speculation that Obama might ask him to stay. His public position was that he had promised his wife, Becky, that they would be getting back to Washington state, where they had a home.
But he was carrying around a personal secret, and it was a major reason he might agree to continue as secretary, according to what he had told one of his closest aides and advisers. It was not a secret about the strategies for the wars, nor was it privileged information about military operations or capabilities, or a piece of intelligence that could change the world.
It had been extensively reported in the media that Gates had launched aggressive, personal campaigns to help the troops in the field with armored vehicles, more sophisticated intelligence gathering equipment, and almost anything else to protect them. When he had talked about the problem publicly he blamed it on the “institutional base,” and the “bureaucratic structure” of the Pentagon.
What had not been reported was that he realized it was not just the structure, but the people. Inside the Pentagon, the uniformed military, the generals, admirals, colonels and thousands of other officers and civilians, were largely focused on planning and equipping the force for future wars rather than effectively fighting the wars they were in—Iraq and Afghanistan. There were too few officers on the Joint Staff or the various services working every day to help the war fighters come home alive, Gates believed.
Many of the Pentagon’s endless meetings, schedules and intense debates seemed to be about some distant, theoretical war. Those officers were busy designing and buying the new ships, jets, tanks, radars, missiles and the latest high-technology equipment in their modernization programs. They were gearing up to fight the wars of 2015 or 2020, while ignoring the wars of 2008.
At first, Gates couldn’t believe it. “He was shocked,” said one of his closest advisers inside the Pentagon. “We’ve complained the government’s not on a war footing when we’re not on a war footing ourselves.” It was as if nearly all of them were playing some role in an ugly parody of the military brass behaving badly. This aide went so far as to say, “It’s the only reason he stayed in the job.”
When Gates had taken over from Rumsfeld in December 2006, one of the biggest problems was the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or roadside bombs that were killing dozens of U.S. personnel a month in Iraq.
Gates read one of several articles in USA Today about the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. These MRAPs had a passenger compartment high off the ground, V-shaped hulls and heavy armor to deflect a blast away from the troops inside. It was an existing technology. The South Africans had used them, and the Marines were experimenting with them.
“Why aren’t we buying these things?” he asked the senior military leaders.
The MRAPs were expensive, nearly $1 million each. A large purchase would cost billions, the military explained.
They feared that any funding for MRAPs would come out of their programs, out of the hide of the Navy, Army, Marines or Air Force: the stealth F-22 fighter or the Navy’s latest ship or the Army’s exotic unmanned vehicles in the Future Combat Systems. They talked as if the two wars were some kind of passing distraction, and their pet projects took precedence.
The brass also argued that the MRAP had only limited use. They were transport vehicles to take troops from one place to another. The military needed fighting vehicles. MRAPs wouldn’t be part of a long-term arsenal. A big buy would eventually wind up in surplus.
“If anybody thinks IEDs are going away, you’re crazy,” Gates told them. “I think this is the new threat we face, and will probably be for this generation.” As for the worry about a big surplus, the U.S. military always had a surplus after a big, long war. It was the price of winning, he said.
The uniformed military in the Pentagon didn’t get it. No one picked up the ball and ran with it. Frustrated at the lack of response, Gates took ownership of the issue himself. As one of his first actions, he officially asserted it was a national priority to buy the ballistic steel used in making the MRAPs. That legally forced private industry to sell the steel to the military before all other customers. Gates ordered the Pentagon to begin buying the ballistic steel even before it was decided which company would build the MRAPs.
Instead of taking the money out of the budgets of the services, Gates asked Congress for more than $20 billion for about 16,000 MRAPs. Congress readily agreed. Such was the power of the secretary of defense when it came to getting money to protect the troops. Gates ordered crash production to begin in May 2007.
Gates had served in government long enough to not be surprised by government failure. It didn’t take a former CIA director to realize the power of aerial surveillance, which was known as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, or ISR. Commanders and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq told Gates that the Predators were a game changer, key to seeing where the lethal IEDs were being planted and to tracking IED networks. These were so-called Find, Fix and Finish o
perations—the finding of targets, fixing their locations, and then attacking them from the air or ground. Yet only about 25 percent of the military’s aerial surveillance aircraft were in the war zones. There were only 36 Predator drones allocated to the Central Command for both wars. Most of them were in Iraq.
Gates formed a task force and found that getting the services to go along with adding more Predators to Afghanistan was grinding. He had to push for additional air surveillance with two-engine propeller Beechcraft. Military pilots, who preferred the fast jets, didn’t want to be assigned to fly at slow speed, circling for 12 hours over Afghanistan. So Gates ordered changes, and soon three round-the-clock facilities were opened to retrofit the planes with sensor packages.
For four years before becoming secretary, Gates had been the president of Texas A&M University. He loved “Aggieland” and quickly formed a deep emotional bond with the school that, other than the service academies, produces more military officers than any other college. As secretary, Gates realized there had been cases over time in which he signed the diploma for an A&M graduate, the deployment order sending him into combat, and the condolence letter to his family.
The afternoon of November 10, firemen pulled their trucks out of the firehouse at Reagan National Airport so Obama’s and Gates’s cars could enter.