Obama’s Wars

by Bob Woodward

  The CIA director described a range of secret operations and techniques—some of which had been effective, some of which had yet to work. After stopping attacks from terrorists, the covert efforts against Iran were President Bush’s top priority.

  • Deter North Korea from building more nuclear weapons. The regime headed by Kim Jong Il, among the world’s most erratic and irrational leaders, probably had enough weapons-grade plutonium for another six bombs. This finding was supported by an array of clandestine intelligence gathering operations aimed at that closed and oppressive society.

  • Conduct anti-proliferation operations in other countries to prevent them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

  • Carry out lethal and other operations independently or in support of the U.S. military in Afghanistan. This included the unmanned aerial drone attacks and the CIA’s 3,000-man army of Counter-terrorism Pursuit Teams (CTPT).

  • Run an array of lethal operations and other programs in Iraq. The CIA had a continuing and deep involvement with the Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces. Hayden claimed they “owned” certain entities and people.

  Greg Craig, for one, was shocked by the term. He thought Hayden might be overstating it. The director was showboating, he concluded, and could have conveyed the same degree of influence without resorting to “We own them.”

  In addition, Hayden said the CIA pumped tens of millions of dollars into a number of foreign intelligence services, such as the Jordanian General Intelligence Department, which he said the CIA also “owned.”

  • Support clandestine efforts to stop genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. President George W. Bush, who signed the finding, had said, “I want to fix Sudan and stop the slaughter.”

  • Provide Turkey with intelligence and other support to stop the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in northern Iraq from setting up a separatist enclave inside Turkey.

  The Turks had deployed about 100,000 troops along the Iraqi border in late 2007 and threatened to clean out the PKK camps. That could have opened another front in the Iraq War. Vast portions of the U.S. air cargo and fuel flowed through Turkey.

  “Do something,” President Bush had ordered. The small-scale covert operation appeared to be the lowest cost option to help Turkey conduct limited air strikes and force the PKK back into Iraq.

  Hayden also described several covert actions, including counter-narcotics and propaganda operations. Disclosure of these could hamper U.S. foreign relations and possibly jeopardize the lives of operatives and others, so they are not revealed here.

  The last on the list of covert actions was Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI). This was what Hayden was itching to explain.

  Rendition—picking up suspected terrorists abroad and transporting them to another country or the United States for interrogation or prosecution under American law—had first been used in the Clinton administration and remained in effect. The suspects might be transported to various countries in the Middle East.

  Biden interrupted Hayden right there, almost as if the CIA director was testifying before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

  “General,” Biden said, “suppose we send somebody to Egypt or so forth, and they torture him. You know if you send them to that country they’re going to be tortured.”

  “No, no, no,” Hayden said, insisting the CIA received assurances there would be no torture. The legal standard was that they had to have the highest confidence there would be no torture.

  Biden and several others stared skeptically at him.

  Hayden then noted that the secret overseas CIA detention facilities had been closed and all the prisoners transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—a facility that President Bush said he wanted to shut down. During the presidential campaign Obama had repeatedly said he would close the prison.

  On enhanced interrogation techniques, Hayden said only six remained. A participant at the meeting later said that because sleep deprivation appeared to be the lone technique that worked on hard-core terrorists, these six methods were to prevent a detainee from falling asleep. President Bush had approved them in 2006, supplanting the earlier finding that authorized additional harsher techniques. That finding included sleep deprivation for up to 96 hours, which could be extended under exceptional circumstances.

  “I want to talk about that,” Obama said. “What are they?”

  Hayden said: Isolation of the detainee; noise or loud music; and lights in the cells 24 hours a day. There was limited use of shackles when moving a prisoner or when the prisoner was a danger. In addition, blindfolds were used when moving prisoners or when the prisoners might gain information that could compromise the security of the facility.

  “David, stand up please,” Hayden said to David Shedd, the DNI’s deputy director for policy. Shedd rose. Hayden gently slapped his face, then shook the deputy DNI.

  It was as rough as what might happen in “Little League football,” Hayden said. The key to a successful interrogation was to make it intimate, not violent. By subjecting suspected terrorists to these methods, he said, it took less than a week to break them. This entailed getting them to a point where they feel that Allah can release them, that they’ve endured enough and can now tell their story. Hayden said that the revised interrogation program was essential to fighting terrorism.

  McConnell thought Hayden’s presentation conveyed the impression that this was all the CIA had ever done.

  “Okay,” Obama said, “what used to be on the list?”

  There had been 13, Hayden said, including waterboarding one terrorist 183 times (see chapter notes for full details).

  Several of the techniques described were new to Obama. He seemed transfixed. McConnell detected a trace of disbelief in the president-elect’s stoic face.

  Hayden, too, looked hard at Obama. He was accustomed to Bush, who in a briefing would spontaneously let you know how you were doing and react, often emotionally. Obama offered no clear reaction other than an acknowledgment that the transmission had been received.

  “I’m going to have Greg come talk to you about this,” Obama said, referring to designated White House counsel Greg Craig.

  Obama then thanked McConnell, Hayden and the others for coming to Chicago. Now, he noted, he had to go back to the pressing issues of the transition, which suddenly included the arrest of the Illinois governor.

  As best Hayden could tell, he had made the sale on the whole package of covert actions. He believed that the reduced interrogation program would win broad support inside the new White House. And he believed that the very existence of the interrogation program was more important than its content. Terrorists would know they faced a more severe interrogation if picked up by the CIA than by the military, which used the Army Field Manual.

  On the way out, the CIA director told McConnell that he thought he had surprised Obama and his team by showing that the interrogation tactics were strictly limited. The bad stuff was gone. He had aced the exam.

  Not so fast, McConnell thought. Hayden had gotten cocky, a little flippant. He had misread the audience.

  Hayden spoke confidently about making a sale.

  “We’ll see. I hope so, Mike,” McConnell said.

  Later as president, Obama abolished the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program—even in its reduced form. The agency would have to follow what was in the Army Field Manual.

  When I asked the president about this covert action briefing, he said, “I’m not going to comment on my reaction to our deep secrets.”

  In discussions with Jones, McDonough and Lippert, DNI McConnell urged that the Obama administration come up with some intelligence professionals for the top jobs. “If you’re not going with Hayden and me, at least pick a professional—an apolitical professional, someone who grew up in that world,” he said. Hayden and he had 74 years of combined experience, and experience mattered. It was too easy to get misled or sidetracked if you didn’t know about the hardware, personnel, special language, r
ituals, protocols and the traditions—good and bad—of the secretive and turf-conscious intelligence agencies.

  Put people in charge who have lived in that world. It’s different than anything else. You can’t learn it overnight. It would make no sense and might have a tragic outcome to use the top intelligence posts for political appointees.

  The Obama team responded politely, but indicated that the president-elect had a different agenda. They had to get people confirmed, and a large part of the Obama win had turned on the country’s attitude toward President Bush. In their eyes, they made it clear, Bush had tarnished the image of the nation, especially with the enhanced interrogation techniques and expansive electronic eavesdropping.

  At minimum, McConnell said the law on intelligence had to be rewritten so someone was clearly in charge. The 2004 reform law didn’t make the DNI the boss of the CIA director, who still had authority on covert actions and reported to the president on them. They needed a Department of Intelligence just as they had a Department of Defense and the Department of State. He and Hayden had worked it out. But it was an uneasy alliance among old hands, and with the wrong people it could spin out of control.

  If you don’t fix it, he warned, you will pay an enormous price.

  But neither McConnell nor Hayden was given the opportunity to talk to Obama about the basic dysfunction of the intelligence organization. As the transition of government proceeded, neither requested a chance to explain to the president-elect how intelligence was not working.

  Obama had told Podesta the kind of person he wanted in his administration. “I don’t want just the same old crowd in Washington who do the same old things the same old way,” he said. Change would be the dominant factor.

  The selection of Clinton, Gates and to some extent Jones contradicted this approach. No one better represented the same old crowd than Republican Gates and Clinton, the wife of the former two-term president. Filling the two top intelligence posts would give Obama a chance to repot the plant, find people of broad experience and proven capability, and thrust them squarely in the middle of the espionage game. This was an opportunity to emphasize the “change” theme as the president-elect rounded out his national security team.

  Rahm Emanuel had an idea for CIA director. In his view, one of the strongest men in the Democratic Party was Leon Panetta, a former California congressman and Clinton White House chief of staff. Their friendship went back to the mid-1980s, when Panetta was in the House and Emanuel was political director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

  Podesta had previously thought Panetta could be Gates’s deputy at the Pentagon. Because Gates was a Republican, the White House would need someone with Democratic credentials. “A guy on our team,” as Podesta put it. But after Obama had selected Bill Lynn, an executive at defense contractor Raytheon, as deputy secretary of defense, Emanuel felt there was still room for the 70-year-old Panetta. If he could do Pentagon deputy, why couldn’t he do CIA?

  Podesta called Panetta. “Your name’s come up for CIA director.”

  “You’re kidding me,” Panetta replied. The idea floored him. Panetta had said he was ready to serve in the new administration if something came up, not that he expected it would. But the CIA? Was this a genuine offer?

  It’s serious, Podesta said. Will you come back out to talk? The reasoning: Panetta knew the intelligence programs from his time as chief of staff and had considerable exposure to national security issues, having served on the Iraq Study Group, which examined the war in 2006. Panetta was not a political or bureaucratic naïf. And Obama needed someone with unquestioned integrity who could pick up, reorient, reenergize and redefine the CIA.

  Obama phoned Panetta, who was in Minneapolis visiting his son.

  “Leon,” he said, “I really want you to take the job of CIA director.”

  “I’m honored that you would ask me,” Panetta replied. “You should know that my record in office is to be very truthful and to not pull any punches.”

  “That’s exactly why I want you in that job.”

  By that time, the Obama team had publicly floated a replacement for McConnell as DNI, though it had yet to be made official. Dennis Blair—a Rhodes Scholar and retired four-star admiral—had an impressive résumé and none of the associations with the Bush administration that McConnell had.

  Blair was astonished to be under consideration. “Before the election of last November, I had a grand total of one conversation with then Senator Obama,” he said in a later speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It was an hour-and-a-half meeting when Blair had been head of the U.S. Pacific Command. “But I was, at any rate, quite surprised to receive a phone call the day of the election asking me to join his team.”

  Podesta had known Blair from work both had done for the CIA during 1995, when Podesta consulted for the CIA director and Blair was the agency’s associate director for military support.

  On Monday, January 5, 2009, Hayden read an online Washington Post story confirming the rumors he had heard the day before about Panetta succeeding him as CIA director. “Rahm Emanuel’s goombah,” he said in disgust. Being replaced by a politico was a personal humiliation, as was learning about it from a newspaper.

  Steve Kappes, Hayden’s deputy at the CIA, called the transition office to say, “Is anybody ever going to talk to Mike Hayden?”

  That next evening, Obama phoned Hayden. “General, this will make it easier for us to focus on the way ahead … to look forward, not backward,” he said. “I will have pressure on me, and this will make it easier for me.”

  After the Panetta nomination was announced, Hayden and Panetta met at transition headquarters. Panetta can exude congeniality and breaks easily into giddy laughter. Among the political class, his ability to build personal relations might be equaled, though it probably was not exceeded. But Hayden was there to brief his successor, not to make a new friend. The CIA director pulled out a 3x5-inch card.

  “Number one, Leon—don’t know if you expect this—but you are the nation’s combatant commander in the global war on terrorism,” Hayden said. “You’re going to be making some interesting decisions.” The word “interesting” was a sufficiently vague substitute for “lethal.” The CIA director had Predator drones to attack terrorists and a 3,000-man army inside Afghanistan. Panetta would have to help settle the rules for how the agency captured, transported and interrogated terrorists, the outcome of which might stop a terrorist attack.

  Yeah, yeah, Panetta agreed.

  “Number two,” Hayden said. “You have the best staff in the federal government. If you give them half a chance, they—like they did for me—will not let you fail.”

  Panetta indicated that he revered the CIA.

  “Number three, I’ve read some of your writings while you’ve been out of government,” Hayden said. “Don’t ever use the words ‘CIA’ and ‘torture’ in the same paragraph again.”

  Panetta said nothing.

  “Torture is a felony, Leon,” Hayden said. “Say you don’t like it. Say it offends you. I don’t care. But just don’t say it’s torture. It’s a felony.” The Justice Department had approved what the CIA did in long, detailed memos, so—legally—the CIA had not tortured anyone.

  Again, Panetta did not respond.

  McConnell had drafted an order that he knew could exacerbate tensions between the CIA and DNI. The order declared that the DNI, not the CIA director, would decide the senior intelligence representative in each foreign country. This power had traditionally belonged to the CIA station chief. While McConnell knew the station chief would remain the intelligence representative about 99 percent of the time, the intelligence issues in some countries were mostly military. For example, with 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea, it would be logical for the top U.S. intelligence person to be the J-2, the military intelligence chief, of the Korean command. That was where the critical intelligence issues resided.

  McConnell had told Hayden, “I won’t break CIA. I won’t push
it to the point where they lose face or stature.” He thought he was getting close to persuading Hayden. So in transition meetings between Bush National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and Jones, he announced he was close to issuing the directive.

  “This will be a knife fight,” said Steve Kappes, who was likely to stay on as Panetta’s deputy.

  McConnell talked to Blair, who was going to replace him as DNI, and explained his plan. “This is a fight. CIA believes they’re losing manhood. … I am prepared to sign it and walk out the door … blame it on me.”

  “You leave it for me,” Blair said. “I’ll work it out with Leon. We can solve this.” They were friends.

  “Okay, it’s your call. I’ll take the heat or leave it for you.”

  “Leave it for me,” Blair said confidently.

  McConnell was blunt, “You have to understand the battle you’re going to have with the CIA, because they see you as the enemy, as taking their birthright. And any way they can, they’ll cut you off at the knees.”

  6

  Obama asked Vice President-elect Joe Biden to go to Afghanistan and Pakistan before the inauguration. Biden, a six-term senator from Delaware, was 19 years older than Obama and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had traveled the world. This should be a bipartisan effort, Obama said. Biden ought to bring a Republican along.

  “Lindsey Graham has the best instincts in the Senate,” Biden said. Obama agreed. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was 54, but his toothy grin and good ole boy charm made him look a decade younger. He was a lawyer and colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Graham could tap-dance between the red-meat right and moderates, and had acted as a kind of shadow and best friend during the presidential campaign for the volatile Senator John McCain. He also had a backchannel relationship with Obama’s camp through Emanuel.

  On Friday, January 9, 11 days before the inauguration, Biden and Graham landed in Islamabad. President Zardari rolled out the red carpet. Pakistanis often referred to Zardari as “Mr. 10 Percent,” a nickname he earned for allegedly taking kickbacks during the premiership of his late wife, Benazir Bhutto. Zardari had a playboy reputation, yet his office contained loving photographs of Bhutto, who was assassinated by terrorists during the 2007 national parliamentary campaign. The widower had inherited a political dynasty from her family. In August 2008, Pervez Musharraf—an army general who had seized control of the government in a 1999 bloodless coup—stepped down as president. Zardari was elected as his successor.