Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  As Lute examined the situation there, he found about 10 distinct but overlapping wars in progress. First, there was the conventional war run by a Canadian general in charge of the region for NATO. Second, the CIA was conducting its own covert paramilitary war. The Green Berets and the Joint Special Operations Command each had their own wars, tracking down high-value targets. The training and equipment command ran its own operations. The Afghan National Army, the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Directorate for Security, the country’s CIA-sponsored intelligence agency, were also fighting separate wars.

  Lute and his team visited the southern province of Kandahar, which had 2 million people in its namesake city and the surrounding area and was the cradle for the Taliban movement, which had governed the country from 1996 to 2001. The province and the city appeared to be slipping back into Taliban control.

  By placing different icons on a map of the regional command that included Kandahar, he could see how the ten different wars were sprinkled around. They looked like the scribbles of a child. Nobody was in charge. There was no unity of effort or command.

  Afghanistan was the poor man’s war, Lute concluded. But as the czar of both wars knew, the only way to get more resources and capabilities would be to remove them from Iraq. This was a zero-sum game. There were no more troops, the military was stretched to the brink.

  Upon returning to Washington, Lute set up a series of 19 in-depth meetings over six weeks with all the interagency representatives—State, Defense, CIA—in Room 445 of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. In all, these meetings took some 45 hours, grinding down to the finest detail. They grilled Afghan ministers, the military commanders and the CIA people about what was really going on.

  Lute and his team summarized their findings in a report of about 25 pages, keeping it short so it would be easy to read.

  “I know this is kind of bad timing, but here it is,” Lute said when he delivered the review to President Bush earlier in November. He was tossing a rock into a quiet pond. There would be ripples.

  “I’d rather not be reading this,” Bush said, “but I appreciate your candor. You’re doing what I asked you to do.” Bush took the review with him for the weekend.

  “We’re not losing, but we’re not winning, and that’s not good enough,” was one of the opening lines in the review. The effort was barely enough to keep from losing, but that was all.

  The report identified Pakistan as a much more strategically troubling problem than Afghanistan, because the sanctuaries there for al Qaeda and other affiliate groups were more of a threat to the United States.

  The review concluded that the U.S. couldn’t prevail in Afghanistan unless it resolved three large problems. First, governance had to be improved and corruption curtailed. Bribes and embezzlement were rampant. There were, for example, about 42 steps to get an Afghan driver’s license, nearly all an opportunity for someone to pocket a bribe. Second, the opium trade was out of control. It fueled corruption and partially financed the Taliban insurgency. And third, the Pakistani safe havens had to be reduced and eventually eliminated. If the United States didn’t accomplish these three things, it could never claim to be done in Afghanistan.

  With Pakistan, the review said the U.S. should expand the scope of its aid beyond that country’s military and try to stabilize its economy. If Pakistan’s $168 billion economy collapsed, the chaos in the tribal areas would then spread to the country’s more cosmopolitan cities.

  Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, was unhappy with the review. After four years as national security adviser and then three and a half as secretary of state, she treated this as a legacy issue, kind of a last semester report card. She pushed back on the notion that Pakistan was more important than Afghanistan. She thought they were doing better than the disorder and weakness suggested in the review, arguing that they were doing more than just hanging on.

  On Wednesday, November 26, Bush convened a National Security Council meeting to consider what should be done with the highly classified and critical document.

  “We’re not going to release this publicly,” Bush said. “Look, I’m in my last couple of months. A public release will just make people scratch their heads.” Release could also prejudice the incoming administration from at least taking the review under consideration, he said. What was left unsaid was that the review could also be embarrassing because it exposed the extent to which the Afghanistan War had been neglected.

  “I don’t want any public rollout,” Bush said. “There won’t be any rollout plan. The rollout plan will be up to the new administration coming in, because this is going to be their bailiwick now.”

  Just as Bush was deciding not to release the damning Afghanistan War report, 10 gunmen were roaming the Indian city of Mumbai, effectively holding its 15 million people captive. The gunmen created a spectacle of chaos and violence on live television for about 60 hours. Terrorist theater had not been anything like this since the 9/11 attacks.

  When the gunfire ended, the body count totaled 175, including six American citizens. The siege had been organized by a group called Lashkar-e-Taiba, which means the Army of the Pure and is commonly referred to by the acronym LeT. One of LeT’s primary goals is to overthrow India’s control of Kashmir, a Muslim-majority province that borders Pakistan. Its broader mission involves founding an Islamic nation across South Asia. Intelligence showed that ties between LeT and al Qaeda were increasing.

  The open secret is that LeT was created and continues to be funded and protected by the Pakistani ISI. The intelligence branch of the Pakistani military uses LeT to inflict pain and hardship on India, according to U.S. intelligence. These gunmen had, quite possibly, committed an act of war.

  President Bush called his national security team into the Oval Office as Mumbai sorted through the blood and rubble.

  You guys get planning and do what you have to do to prevent a war between Pakistan and India, Bush told his aides. The last thing we need right now is a war between two nuclear-power states.

  But what worried the president was not just tensions between India and Pakistan. Americans had been killed in an act of terrorism. In his nationally televised address on the evening of 9/11, Bush had declared what became known as the Bush Doctrine: “We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who harbor them.” The doctrine was the basis for launching the war in Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, which had harbored and given sanctuary to al Qaeda.

  Bush was extremely proud of the hard-line doctrine and told me in an interview the doctrine meant, “We’re going to root out terror.” A foundation of his presidency was this zero tolerance for terrorists and their enablers.

  The Mumbai attacks presented him with something of the same problem—hard-core LeT terrorists and their enablers, the Pakistani intelligence service. An upset Bush asked his aides about contingency plans for dealing with Pakistan.

  This is like 9/11, he said.

  The United States military did not have “war” plans for an invasion of Pakistan. Instead, it had and continues to have one of the most sensitive and secret of all military contingencies, what military officials call a “retribution” plan in the event of another 9/11-like attack on the U.S. by terrorists based in Pakistan. Under this plan, the U.S. would bomb or attack every known al Qaeda compound or training camp in the U.S. intelligence database. Some locations might be outdated, but there would be no concern, under the plan, for who might be living there now. The retribution plan called for a brutal, punishing attack on at least 150 or more associated camps.

  Within 48 hours of the Mumbai attack, CIA Director Hayden contacted Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani. CIA intelligence showed no direct ISI link, Hayden told him. These are former people who are no longer employees of the Pakistani government.*

  Bush informed the Indians himself. He called Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with whom he had a strong personal relations
hip. My intelligence shows that the new Pakistani government is not involved, Bush said.

  It looked like a war had been averted for the moment.

  In a call to Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, the head of the Pakistani ISI, Hayden said, “We’ve got to get to the bottom of this. This is a big deal.” He urged Pasha to come clean and disclose all. On the day after Christmas, Pasha flew to the United States, where he briefed Hayden at CIA headquarters.

  Pasha admitted that the planners of the Mumbai attacks—at least two retired Pakistani army officers—had ISI links, but this had not been an authorized ISI operation. It was rogue.

  “There may have been people associated with my organization who were associated with this,” Pasha said. “That’s different from authority, direction and control.”

  He provided details that fit with the picture developed by U.S. intelligence. Hayden told Bush he was convinced it was not an official Pakistani-sponsored attack, but it highlighted the problem of the sanctuaries in Pakistan. The ease of the planning and execution, the low cost, and the alarming sophistication of the communications system that LeT had used were all troubling. The attackers relied on an easily obtainable global positioning system device, Google Earth maps, and commercially available encryption devices and remote control triggers.

  They spoke with handlers back in Pakistan with satellite phones that went through a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service in New Jersey, making the calls difficult, if not impossible, to trace and routed them in a way that also concealed the locations of those talking.

  The FBI was horrified by the low-cost, high-tech operation that had paralyzed Mumbai. American cities were just as vulnerable. A senior FBI official responsible for thwarting similar attacks in the United States said, “Mumbai changed everything.”

  * The CIA later received reliable intelligence that the ISI was directly involved in the training for Mumbai.

  5

  Up in his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Director Michael Hayden had been stewing for months, waiting in frustration to be contacted by Obama. But Hayden had been cut out of the loop with the next first customer.

  During the summer, candidate Obama had asked to see him. On June 18, Hayden was being driven to Capitol Hill for their meeting when his phone rang. Obama apologized, explaining he had to cancel. The memorial service for NBC newscaster Tim Russert, who had died of a heart attack the week before, had unexpectedly run late.

  “General, I really want to talk with you,” Obama said. “I feel really bad.” They would get together. We’ll do lunch, he in effect promised.

  Obama never rescheduled. Hayden tried to pretend he didn’t take the slight personally, concluding it showed that Obama didn’t understand the importance of the CIA. But being stiff-armed for months bruised his ego. He figured he was being blocked from Obama, refused a chance to advertise his achievements as director.

  Hayden had built his career around selling his intelligence wares person to person. Able to think and talk about 20 percent faster than most people, Hayden seemed to have an edge in any debate.

  When he became CIA director in 2006, Hayden had inherited an agency suffering from what he called “battered child syndrome.” There was the botched intelligence that mistakenly concluded Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the main premise of the Iraq War, and the accusations that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding or simulated drowning, amounted to torture. Hayden felt he was restoring morale, putting the CIA on the road to recovery. During the controversy about the interrogation methods—techniques Obama had promised to abolish—Hayden had persuaded President Bush to drop the harshest practices. He was eager to brief Obama, convinced he could sell the next president on the need for an independent CIA interrogation program that played by more flexible rules than the U.S. military.

  Hayden also hoped to stay on as CIA director, at least for six more months. He thought he deserved to be asked, even though his wife, Jeanine, reminded him that this was unrealistic. Hayden believed he could provide continuity during the first year of the new presidency—a time of maximum vulnerability. The first bombing of the World Trade Center had been in 1993, at the start of the Clinton administration. And 9/11 occurred during Bush’s rookie year. With a large foreign policy agenda and two wars, Obama would need the CIA. “No contact,” Hayden complained. “I’m in absolute limbo. No one’s talking.”

  Obama’s closest national security advisers from the campaign, Denis McDonough and Mark Lippert—whom Obama affectionately referred to with the Dr. Seuss book nicknames of Thing One and Thing Two—had told Hayden they would reach out to him during the transition. But weeks of silence had passed.

  “We do covert action at the CIA,” Hayden reminded them, convinced they underestimated the importance of these missions—the stuff of spy thrillers—that were specifically designed to disguise America’s hand. By law, the president authorized covert actions in a “finding,” a document stating that the action was necessary for national security.

  “It is authorized by the office of the president, not the person,” Hayden explained. “So everything we do will be popping at 4 P.M., January 20”—just hours after Obama would take the oath of office. “If there are changes the president-elect wants to make, I need to brief him on the active covert action programs.”

  One of Hayden’s top CIA deputies went to McDonough and Lippert to ask again, what about Hayden?

  Tell the general not to worry, we will reach out to him, they said. That meeting was finally arranged in Chicago for December 9.

  Hayden did not alert or invite DNI McConnell, who found out about the meeting on his own.

  McConnell worried that the temptation of covert action might entrance Obama. Any president, especially a new, relatively inexperienced one, could be vulnerable. Imagine the allure of solving a foreign policy problem by secretly funding a regime change—literally buying a country’s government. As Richard Helms, the CIA director from 1966 to 1973 during Vietnam and Watergate, once said, “Covert action is like a damn good drug. It works, but if you take too much of it, it will kill you.”

  The CIA did some spectacular work, McConnell knew. It essentially recruited people to betray their countries through espionage. Recruitment was a delicate art, fraught with opportunity and peril. The one target the CIA loved to recruit was the American president, to unfurl the secrets and wonders of spying for the first customer. The CIA wanted no one between it and the White House.

  McConnell phoned the CIA chief when he heard about the December 9, 2008, Obama briefing.

  Did Hayden plan to discuss RDI, meaning Rendition, Detention and Interrogation, the controversial CIA counterterrorist programs? McConnell asked.

  Hayden said he would because they were covert actions. The CIA director was certain the president-elect would be impressed that the modified interrogation techniques made sense and were legal.

  “I will be there,” McConnell said, giving an RSVP to the invite he should have received.

  “Well, that’d be nice,” Hayden replied.

  On the morning of Tuesday, December 9, Hayden and McConnell were in Chicago, ready to have the president-elect focus for two hours on the CIA’s covert actions. A somewhat astonished and distracted Obama greeted them.

  “They just arrested the governor for trying to sell my seat,” he said. The FBI had taken Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich into custody that morning after wiretaps showed he was asking various politicians for money in exchange for being appointed to the Senate seat Obama had resigned.

  The entourage of intelligence and administration officials crammed into the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF.

  Hayden sat directly across from Obama at a table so narrow that they were uncomfortably close to each other. His bald head was about 30 inches from the president-elect’s face. Vice President–elect Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Greg Craig, the designated White House counsel, and seve
ral others sat on Obama’s side.

  “Mr. President-elect,” said McConnell, who was next to Hayden, “we’re going to give you the background on the findings and covert actions, where we are and how it’s working. We talked to you about this in summary terms when we briefed you in September. We gave you a little more detail in November. But now we’re going to get down to more sources and methods.”

  Hayden jumped at this opening, practically brushing McConnell aside, several from the Obama camp noticed. This was his opportunity and he wanted to create what he called an “oh, shit moment” to prove how grave the threats were and to show how seriously the CIA was taking them. He had brought a chart the size of two dinner place mats. It listed 14 highly classified covert actions, the nature of those actions, and the written findings from Bush and other presidents. Referring to the chart he spread in front of Obama, Hayden said the current covert actions were authorized to:

  • Conduct clandestine, lethal counterterrorism operations and other programs to stop terrorists worldwide. Operations were active in more than 60 countries. Bush senior signed the initial finding, which his son, the current president, later modified. If al Qaeda planned to detonate a nuclear weapon in an American city or launch an influenza pandemic by using a biological agent, these covert actions are all you’ve really got to try to stop them, Hayden explained. The finding included unmanned aerial Predator drone strikes on terrorists and terrorist camps worldwide.

  “How much are you doing in Pakistan?” Obama asked.

  Hayden said about 80 percent of America’s worldwide attacks were there. We own the sky. The drones take off and land at secret bases in Pakistan. Al Qaeda is training people in the tribal areas who, if you saw them in the visa line at Dulles, you would not recognize as potential threats.

  • Stop or impede Iran from developing nuclear weapons.