by Bob Woodward
“God,” Mullen said, taking Obama’s hand, “get some sleep!”
“My staff won’t let me,” Obama replied.
The chance meeting was a bit of good luck for Mullen. Had he encountered a sleep-deprived McCain, he would likely have said the same thing. But to politicians in the heat of a national campaign, the country is binary—either for you or against you. Mullen, in his dress blues with a breastful of ribbons and the gold braid of a full admiral—one thick and three thin around each forearm above the wrist—felt he had successfully reached out to the Illinois senator.
Obama, who had never served in the military and possibly knew as little about it as any major presidential candidate in years, called Mullen two or three times during the campaign, just to check in, say hello, not talk about anything really. Mullen believed the calls were designed to build a personal connection. The admiral could not have been more responsive, eager, gentlemanly or deferential.
In one of the presidential debates, Obama even used Mullen to back up his position, noting that the chairman himself had “acknowledged that we don’t have enough troops to deal with Afghanistan.”
The invitation to Chicago was almost as welcome as another promotion, and it could practically amount to that. On a hunch, Mullen concluded that Obama wanted to have more of a conversation and less of a briefing. Accompanied by a single aide, he arrived about 20 minutes before his noon appointment on Friday, November 21.
“I’m here to see President-elect Obama,” Mullen told a young female staffer at the Obama headquarters.
“Well, who are you?” she asked.
“Mike Mullen, Admiral Mullen.”
“Who are you?”
“Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”
“Well, he just left for lunch,” the woman explained. She quickly got up to check.
Mullen gazed out the window as he waited. When he turned around, there was Obama three inches from his face, inviting him into his office, which was strewn with campaign memorabilia—a football, a basketball and posters.
Mark Lippert, a key Obama foreign policy aide and a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, came in to take notes.
“I’ve been running for this bus,” Obama said, “and now I caught it.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “And it’s a big bus.”
There is an economic crisis, Obama continued, and it would have to get most of his attention.
I got that, Mullen said, adding, as the former budget guy for the Navy, he had no expectations Defense would ever be exempt from trimming expenditures.
“I’ll give you some time here at the end,” Obama said. “I want to ask questions.”
On Afghanistan, and by extension Pakistan, he asked, what is the degree of difficulty?
The Afghanistan War has been under-resourced for years, Mullen said. In truth, there was no strategy, he added, knowing that Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, would kill him for saying that. It was an indictment of Bush, Hadley, Gates and, in a way, himself. Mullen had testified the previous year that, “In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”
Obama made it clear that would change.
With the proper resources, Mullen said, they could succeed in Afghanistan. But there are almost no resources on the civilian side, and the U.S. embassy has a very bad relationship with just about everybody, even the military.
I want to get Afghanistan and Pakistan right, Obama said, but I don’t want to build a Jeffersonian democracy.
He said he still intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq but would do so responsibly. On Iran, Obama said he would open a dialogue with the Iranians. But he also made it clear that he had no intention of pulling the military options off the table.
• • •
But Obama soon found out there were problems with the options. The existing contingency plan for Iran seemed to have dated from Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It started with 90 days of bombing before a Normandy-style invasion from World War II that involved more troops than the U.S. had in its inventory. No serious process had been in place for updating the many contingency plans a president needs.
Nor did adequate plans exist for Somalia or Yemen, two countries with a growing al Qaeda presence. And most tellingly, nothing on the shelf specifically addressed securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Obama’s team would have to develop a graduated plan dealing with a range of circumstances from Pakistan losing a single nuclear weapon all the way up to the Pakistani government falling to Islamic extremists, who would then have a nuclear arsenal. Compounding the problem was a lack of knowledge about the location of all of Pakistan’s nukes. The sites were scattered across the country, with the weapons frequently moved in a classic shell game.
One of the closest held secrets of President Bush’s inner circle was that the president had lost his appetite for military contingency planning. The tough-talking, saber-rattling Bush administration had not prepared for some of the worst-case scenarios the country might face.
Obama later said he would neither confirm nor deny any specifics about contingency plans, but he acknowledged that he had inherited unfinished business from Bush. “Wars absorb so much energy on the part of any administration,” Obama told me, “that even if people are doing an outstanding job, if they’re in the middle of a war—particularly one that’s going badly, as it was, obviously, for a three-year stretch there in Iraq—that’s taking up a huge amount of energy on the part of everybody. And that means that there are some things that get left undone.”
4
Two weeks before his election, Obama had asked retired General James L. Jones to Richmond, Virginia, for a private meeting. Jones, 64, was a figure out of a Marine Corps brochure, 6-foot-5, with a brush haircut, a long handsome face, bright blue eyes, a boyish smile and a genial manner. He was called “Gentleman Jim” because he treated everyone from presidents to corporals with respect. His national security credentials appeared gold-plated, having served in the Marines for 40 years and rising to the top position, commandant, then four years as NATO commander, the top U.S. and allied commander in Europe, before retiring in 2007.
Jones had expressed distaste for Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s leadership, publicly confirming a report that the secretary had “systematically emasculated” the Joint Chiefs and warning a fellow Marine general, then Chairman Pete Pace, “You should not be the parrot on the secretary’s shoulder.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had asked him to be her deputy, a post he declined. Jones instead served as Rice’s part-time envoy for security in the Middle East, but he made no secret of the fact that he found the Bush administration woefully disorganized and embarrassingly unserious about Middle East peace.
In the Richmond hotel, Obama told Jones, “It looks like I might win this.” He wanted to talk to him about being secretary of state or national security adviser.
Jones said he would be a better fit as secretary of state than as a presidential aide. “What I can do is set up an organization to get the best people to help you as president” at State, he explained. Noting that he had served as chief aide to the Marine commandant and later as senior military aide to Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, Jones acknowledged, “I wasn’t very good” at being an aide.
Obama drew him out on how he thought the National Security Council should work.
Jones said he had seen the Bush NSC up close. It was understaffed, under-resourced and deeply dysfunctional. The national security adviser had little clout and failed to think strategically by plotting out the detailed steps and plans of a policy for a year or two. This was the biggest missing piece in the Bush operation. The national security adviser had to develop measurements to ensure reasonable progress was being made toward the goals. If not, the plans had to be revised—radically if necessary. Too much policy was on automatic pilot. Second, Jones said, the national security adviser had to find a way to get results without “micromanaging” what the departments and agencies should do.
How
should that be done? Obama asked.
Convince your subordinates that your vision is their vision, Jones said. That meant giving them a stake, creating “buy-in” so they also have personal ownership of the policy. If a president tried to do all the work by himself, he added, his subordinates would let him. An example of this was President Bush’s secure videoconferences every two weeks or so with the leaders of Afghanistan and Iraq. That meant no one else in the U.S. government had any real leverage or could speak with authority. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki always insisted on taking up any dispute directly with Bush, who effectively had both the Afghanistan and Iraq accounts, living deeply in the tactical weeds—precisely where a president didn’t belong.
• • •
From that meeting on, Obama made it clear to Podesta and his foreign policy campaign aides that he wanted Jones as national security adviser. It would, he said, give him someone outside the Pentagon with the credibility to deal with the secretary of defense and the generals on a more or less equal footing. It looked like Jones could manage big personalities, and he had a theory on how to energize the National Security Council.
After hearing Obama out, Podesta had the strong impression that Obama wanted a national security adviser who wasn’t perceived as his guy, a mere extension of the president. He seemed to have reached the baffling conclusion that the lack of a personal relationship could be an asset. Jones would not only be speaking on behalf of Obama, but as a retired Marine general, a former commandant and NATO commander. It could give Obama more leverage with the Pentagon. Jones’s record of outspokenness and independence might make him a counterweight to the military establishment.
But most of all, Jones knew the military as well as anyone, and that was the terrain Obama knew the least. In the White House, Jones could help him navigate what could be a difficult relationship, particularly given Obama’s fervent opposition to the Iraq War. Jones could be an inoculation, guide and shield.
Podesta and several of the others were coming to realize that once the president-elect got an idea for who should fill a critical post, he stuck with it, unless something disqualifying was found. Podesta examined Jones’s record and talked to several people in the national security community. He did not find Jones to be very strategic, certainly not in the mold of what he called “the Kissingerian, master-, über-strategist.”
Maybe that would be less crucial under Obama, Podesta thought, because Obama’s approach was so intellectual. He compared Obama to Spock from Star Trek. The president-elect wanted to put his own ideas to work. He was unsentimental and capable of being ruthless. Podesta was not sure that Obama felt anything, especially in his gut. He intellectualized and then charted the path forward, essentially picking up the emotions of others and translating them into ideas. He had thus created a different kind of politics, seizing the moment of 2008 and driving it to a political victory.
But, Podesta thought, sometimes a person’s great strength, in this case Obama’s capacity to intellectualize, was also an Achilles’ heel.
Obama had several more phone conversations with Jones. Since Clinton was going to get State, the top foreign policy job, he offered national security adviser to Jones. If it was a consolation prize, it certainly had its own appeal. It required no Senate confirmation and the corner West Wing office carried its own highly visible cachet.
Jones was astounded that the president-elect would give such a position of responsibility and trust to someone he hardly knew. His basic philosophy was that everything hinged on personal relations, and he didn’t have one with Obama.
Jones told Obama that he would have to consult his family.
In retirement, he was heading the energy program for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, serving on several boards, consulting and speaking, earning over $2 million a year. Accepting would mean an 80 percent pay cut. But the family agreed it was worth the chance to cap his career with one of the most important posts in government. What sealed the deal for Jones was a promise Obama made. If he accepted, Obama said that on national security issues, “I will always ask your opinion or judgment before I do anything.” It was a personal pledge. To the former commandant of the Marines, whose motto is “Semper Fidelis” (“Always Faithful”), it meant everything. Jones said yes.
One of the first orders of business for Jones was picking a deputy—a key post that had been occupied by half a dozen men who had then gone on to be promoted to national security adviser. Obama had told him that he could pick whomever he wanted. His deputy would occupy a small, closet-size office critically located in the West Wing suite of the national security adviser. All other senior NSC staffers were down one floor in the basement or in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Most importantly, the deputy would run the deputies committee meetings to tee up issues and decisions for the principals and full NSC.
Emanuel had suggested Jones consider Tom Donilon, a 53-year-old lawyer and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the Clinton administration. A political junkie and workaholic who attended foreign policy seminars as recreation, Donilon was a detail man and extremely close to Vice President–elect Biden. Donilon’s wife, Cathy Russell, would become Jill Biden’s chief of staff. He was a member of nearly every council, advisory board, group or institute that dealt with foreign affairs, and had served as co-head of the transition team for the State Department. His friendship with Emanuel went back several decades.
Donilon had been preparing all his life for a top national security post. He had helped Democratic presidential candidates going back to Jimmy Carter. He had advised Obama in the presidential debates and wanted to be deputy secretary of state. But Donilon had served seven years as in-house counsel to Fannie Mae, the federally chartered mortgage giant that had nearly gone bust in the financial crisis, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. The Fannie Mae connection was toxic, and Donilon might have serious problems in a Senate confirmation.
Emanuel lowered the hammer. First he had suggested and now he was almost insisting. He wanted Donilon in the White House.
Jones did not know Donilon but agreed to interview him. They hit it off. Clearly a Democratic Party insider with what appeared to be sterling national security credentials could be a help, since Jones didn’t know the political insiders. He quickly decided to pick Donilon, and could almost hear the collective sigh of relief from Obama’s political and transition teams.
On Wednesday, November 26, President Bush convened one of his last National Security Council meetings. It was to consider a highly classified report on the Afghanistan War. The report was the work of Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, the “war czar” Bush had appointed the year before as the top NSC deputy for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lute, 56, lived under the public radar as much as General David Petraeus lived in it. The West Point class of 1975 graduate—a year after Petraeus—had also earned a Harvard master’s degree in public administration. It might be easy to assume he was another “Bush general,” but Lute had a streak of daring independence. His favorite military book was Thucydides’ history of the fifth-century B.C. Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens. The book taught him about the relationship between the military and civil society, two cultures he now bridged at the NSC. He remained a three-star general, yet by serving in the White House he was no longer among the Army brotherhood.
Lute personally briefed Bush about both wars each morning at 7 A.M. Because Bush was sometimes early, Lute made sure to be outside the Oval Office at 6:45. That summer, Bush had ordered Lute to do an Afghanistan strategy review. Go deep, go wide, Bush had said, get to the bottom of where we are after seven years. Lute wasn’t entirely sure whether he was on a fact-finding or a rescue mission. Perhaps both. He wanted to see the entire horizon and the ground truth in a way that he couldn’t from a Washington office. Lute traveled with a high-powered team from the departments of State and Defense and the CIA.
In his 33
-year Army career, Lute had punched some of the key command and operational tickets overseas and on the Joint Staff. But nothing was quite like being at the center of the turmoil in the White House, where he acted as unofficial information link with cabinet officers, generals, admirals, diplomats and intelligence officers in two wars. He kept in touch with an exhaustive list of officials through secure telephone calls and one-to-one conferences on a Tandberg video phone.
Lute had arrived in Afghanistan from Iraq, where the United States had 150,000 troops, a 1,000-person embassy that coordinated with the military, and a foreign assistance program of several billion dollars a year. In Iraq, Prime Minister Maliki had shown surprising leadership skills, while the Iraqi security force was becoming stronger and better. The United States had stared failure in the eye in Iraq, and, for the moment, failure had blinked. Overall, the strategy that accompanied the 2007 troop surge seemed to be working as planned.
The contrast with Afghanistan was stark. Afghanistan had about 38,000 U.S. troops, plus 29,000 from NATO and other allies. They were thinly dispersed across the country, so it was impossible for the troops to have a big impact. The U.S. embassy was not working well with the military. Economic development for most Afghans was minimal. Afghan President Hamid Karzai proved a growing disappointment, while the Afghan security force remained woefully inadequate. Put simply, all the hopeful signs in Iraq were missing in Afghanistan.
Lute also found that while Taliban insurgents had a clear presence in the southern Afghan provinces along the Pakistani border, the U.S. hadn’t dedicated the resources to stop them. Over the summer, attacks and security incidents had doubled to about 200 a month in the south alone. The insurgents’ capability was deemed “strong, effective” or “demonstrated” in nearly half the country, predominantly in southern Afghanistan, according to intelligence reports.