by Leon Panetta
At the end of the ceremony, I asked Bill Danvers, my congressional liaison, to pull aside the chairmen and ranking members of the intelligence committees. Danvers escorted that small group—Senators Feinstein and Bond, Representative Hoekstra, Staff Directors Mike Delaney and David Grannis—into a small waiting room off the marbled lobby on CIA’s first floor. I joined them a few moments later. Earlier that day, the national security staff had formally approved an effort to kill or capture Anwar al-Awlaki. The discussion focused on that decision.
That crossed a significant threshold. Awlaki, though a committed enemy of the United States, was also an American citizen, raising significant questions about our responsibilities under the Constitution and our obligations to ensure the nation’s safety. Those issues had been carefully debated inside the government and among the agencies—the Justice Department had considered the question at length—and final approval from the president now had been given.* The members of Congress and their aides voiced strong support for the president’s decision. They appreciated the special process that was undertaken to ascertain the legality of the operation and were supportive of the outcome.
America was hitting Al Qaeda hard, but Al Qaeda and its allies were fighting too. On May 1, Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-one-year-old naturalized American citizen born in Pakistan, parked a Nissan Pathfinder in Times Square. He had packed it with gasoline, fireworks, three propane tanks, and a couple of clocks with batteries attached. It wasn’t the world’s most sophisticated bomb, but Shahzad turned on the hazard lights, lit a fuse, and walked away. Fortunately, a T-shirt vendor was concerned and called over a mounted officer, who quickly began moving people away as the NYPD’s bomb squad rushed to the scene.14
As with the Christmas Day underwear bomber, alert citizens combined with inept bombers prevented anyone from being hurt that day, but as we dug into Shahzad’s past—after being read his Miranda rights, he willingly cooperated with investigators—we learned that he had received explosives training in Waziristan from the Tehrik-e-Taliban. The same group supplied him with $12,000 to carry out his mission.15
In the wake of the Times Square attempt, the president asked me to go to Pakistan to confer with officials there about what we knew. More specifically, National Security Adviser Jim Jones and I were on a mission to deliver a warning. I told Pasha when we met in mid-May that if another terrorist act or attempt on our soil had its roots in Pakistan, it would invite the gravest response from our country. We would, under such a circumstance, reserve the right to conduct our own military operations, with or without Pakistani permission, in order to protect ourselves. He protested that Pakistan could not be held responsible for every lunatic who passed through it, but Jones and I were unyielding. Either Pakistan did its part to combat terror operations within its borders or we would. I then turned around and flew home, arriving before dawn on May 21.
That morning was the last of the funerals for the officers who died at Khost, this one for Elizabeth Hanson. Though she was not a veteran, she had died in the service of her country fighting a war, and her family wanted her interred at Arlington. At first the military authorities balked, understandably if stubbornly citing the rule that only veterans may lie at Arlington. I interceded, however, and Bob Gates granted permission; he too attended her funeral. Not long after she was laid to rest, one of her killers would die in a missile strike in a South Waziristan village.
The strike that killed him was not an act of vengeance. It was one of national security. But I hope that those who felt relief from his removal from this earth included the families of those whose lives he had wantonly taken at Khost.
The deaths at Khost haunted me, as they did so many of my colleagues, and I felt compelled to see the scene for myself. I asked our staff if I could visit the base, and at first met resistance, as it was very much on the front lines. After elaborate security precautions were arranged, however, I made the trip. When I found the scarred CIA post within the military base, the pockmarks from the ball bearings contained in the suicide vest were still visible on the walls. I ran my fingers over them. And I placed a small plaque there; it included a quote from Isaiah:
I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?
Then said I, Here am I; send me.
No words better express the selfless heroism of the men and women of the CIA, including those who died for their country on that frigid afternoon in a windswept, dusty village in Afghanistan, thousands of miles from home, fighting for the security of their country. I asked for copies of the plaque to be made, and I presented one to each of the families. The names of these young men and women deserve to be remembered. They are:
Harold Brown Jr., age 37
Elizabeth Hanson, age 30
Darren LaBonte, age 35
Jennifer Lynne Matthews, age 45
Dane Clark Paresi, age 46
Scott Michael Roberson, age 39
Jeremy Wise, age 35
TWELVE
“Everywhere in the World”
My first goals as director of the CIA—the tasks that President Obama assigned to me at the outset—were to restore its standing with the American public and political leadership and to hone the agency’s capacity for fighting terrorism. But those weren’t my only jobs. The CIA’s original purpose was to supply American leaders, especially the president, with clear, insightful intelligence—“the most accurate and up-to-the-minute information on what is going on everywhere in the world,” as Truman said.1 That intelligence is produced by officers and analysts, and it’s enhanced by our relations with other services on every continent. As a result, those interservice relationships are vital to our knowledge of foreign affairs, and tending to those relationships is an essential duty of the director of the CIA. As director, I traveled to dozens of countries, usually without much fanfare, and glimpsed some of the world’s most delicate operations.
Early in my tenure I visited the Middle East, for the obvious reason that so many of America’s security interests connect back to that region in one way or another. It is of course a breeding ground for much anti-Americanism, including terrorism, and in 2009 thousands of American forces remained in Iraq, where they confronted an increasingly complex sectarian conflict. Israel is America’s most stalwart ally in that part of the world, and it was among my first stops on this visit in the spring of 2009.*
Upon arriving in Tel Aviv, I was taken directly to the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s legendary intelligence service, housed inside a series of modern, low-slung buildings along Israel’s coast. I was greeted by Meir Dagan, an intelligence operative as legendary as his agency. Short and paunchy with an easy smile, he seemed benign at first, almost a kindly grandfather. But Kappes had warned me not to underestimate him. As Kappes noted, above Dagan’s desk hung a photograph of his grandfather kneeling before a Nazi guard, who had a billy club dangling from his right hand. Moments after the photograph was taken, Dagan’s grandfather was executed. This was the image Dagan used to remind himself of his duty. He himself had been born on a train between the Soviet Union and Poland. After surviving the Holocaust, he and his family made their way to Israel in 1950. He served thirty-two years in the Israel Defense Forces, rising to the rank of major general. He was, in short, not to be taken lightly.
Meir and I were scheduled to have dinner that night, but before the meal began we were joined by General Amos Yadlin, head of Israeli defense intelligence. Amos is an intense general, whose wire-rimmed glasses and gentle manner mask an inner toughness that has made him one of Israel’s most influential military men. He came armed with a stack of charts, graphics, and maps—the topic was Iran.
• • •
For President Obama’s national security team, an increasingly ominous centrifuge facility near the city of Qom was a significant and long-running source of concern. In September 2009, President Obama would describe this work to the world at the G-20
meeting along with our allies. The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, as it was called, was being built underground.
There was much about it that was troubling. Fordow was built on a base of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the elite commandos of the Iranian state responsible for its campaign of terror around the world. Moreover, the facility was buried under a mountain, deep inside a hardened bunker. The size was also alarming, though for a paradoxical reason: It was too small to produce nuclear energy, and yet perfectly sized to create a stockpile for weapons use.
Iran’s two enrichment facilities, Natanz and Fordow, both could produce highly enriched bomb-grade uranium. Israel’s security would depend in part on the willingness of the United States to help prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
The intelligence community assessed in 2009 that Iran already had the ability to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon in a few years, and the completion of the facility at Qom would advance that timeline. Iran also had, and was continuing to develop, missiles capable of carrying a nuclear weapon. With the Qom facility under construction, the clock was running on Iran’s achieving a capability to enrich uranium to the point where it could not be stopped with an airstrike.
Meanwhile, the Iranian people were becoming restless with their country’s growing international isolation. During the June 2009 election, the Green Movement nearly brought historic change to Iran. But the regime cracked down and crushed the dissenters. In a sense, then, Iran’s leaders were running two races, one to build a bomb, the other to hold on to power. The question became: Could the ayatollahs build a weapon before history caught up with them?
That topic dominated much of my time in the Obama administration, until my final hours as secretary of defense. Ultimately our strategy was to pursue a resolute diplomatic approach—sanctions and negotiations—while also trying to demonstrate to Israel and the world that we were serious when we said we refused to let Iran develop a bomb.
• • •
That first dinner with Israel’s military and intelligence leadership was notable for its level of shared trust and even intimacy. On top of that, one moment in particular drove home to me the stakes of these conversations and the seriousness of my Israeli counterparts. It occurred late in the evening, after the conversation had drifted away from Iran. I used the opening to ask Meir for some advice:
“Look,” I said, “we’re dealing every day with Al Qaeda. What would you do?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I’d kill them,” he said. “And then I’d kill their families.”
One of his aides gently interjected, sensing how impolitic that was. “You can’t do that,” he began.
“Why not?” Dagan asked. I don’t know whether he was serious, but I wouldn’t want to be the one to doubt him.
• • •
Anyone who has traveled to the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea knows what it is like to look back in time. Around the rest of the globe, the Cold War has receded. The great superpower standoff that tensely held the peace from the end of World War II to the fall of Soviet communism has been replaced by plenty of stress and tension, but at least the threat of imminent attack by the ally of one superpower against the ally of another is for the most part a remnant. Not so along this border, the world’s most heavily guarded.
I got my first look at the barricades and barbed wire and the almost theatrical hostility between the North and South during a visit to Seoul in 2010. We approached from above, and I gazed from the window of my helicopter as we choppered in from the airport to a U.S. military helipad in downtown Seoul. To fly over Seoul is to witness one of Asia’s modern marvels. A sprawling city of almost ten million people, it is as dense and modern as lower Manhattan, but spread out for miles and miles. It is industrious and thriving, in stark contrast to the plight of its neighbor to the north.
General Skip Sharp, commander of U.S. Forces Korea, soberly briefed me that day on the contingency plans that governed our more than 28,500 men and women on the peninsula. If North Korea moved across the border, our war plans called for the senior American general on the peninsula to take command of all U.S. and South Korean forces and defend South Korea—including by the use of nuclear weapons, if necessary. Our forces maintained a readiness posture that allowed them to “fight tonight.” I left our meeting with the powerful sense that war in that region was neither hypothetical nor remote, but ever present and imminent.
After a meeting with South Korea’s president, Lee Myung-bak, at the Blue House—South Korea’s White House—I boarded a U.S. military Black Hawk helicopter again, this time for the brief ride from Seoul up to Camp Bonifas, about four hundred yards south of the DMZ. From there, a bus took us into Panmunjom where the 38th parallel divides North from South Korea.
The DMZ is about as far from Seoul’s Blue House as Dulles Airport is from our White House. And in that zone, two lines of enemy soldiers spend all day, every day, staring across a four-kilometer divide that has separated the two countries since an armistice was struck in July 1953 bringing to an end the Korean War. To this day, that conflict remains halted by a truce, but no peace treaty has ever been finalized, so the armistice in theory could fail at any time, and both sides keep a wary watch on one another in Panmunjom.
Standing on a bluff on the southern side of the line, I looked across the border at a North Korean soldier, who in turn used his binoculars to watch me. He probably had no clue who I was. The blankness of his stare was as inscrutable as the regime behind him.
At Panmunjom, there is a row of buildings used for the rare talks between North and South. One straddles the border itself, with a line running down a square table to mark the actual boundary. We entered, and for a moment I crossed the line, putting a toe into North Korea. As I did, guards outside on the North Korean side of the border pressed against the windows, menacingly glowering and brandishing their weapons.
That regime has been a principal focus of American concern for more than fifty years, but even as I took the reins of the CIA, I realized that we knew precious little about it. Its severe isolation from the rest of the world and its highly insular power structure—the only three presidents it has known have been father, son, and grandson, each more eccentric than the last—have made it an exasperatingly difficult culture to observe and understand. In 2009, Kim Jong Il, the second of those three leaders, was in failing health, and we were anxious to learn more about who might take over after his death and what that might portend for the future of the Korean Peninsula. Those uncertainties were magnified by North Korea’s determination to cause trouble: In July 2009 it launched two sets of missile tests, the latter on the Fourth of July, no less.
Unfortunately, our insights into the regime were few and shallow. Our only real ability to understand and influence North Korea was through China, its lone source of support, and even China’s reach was limited. First as CIA director and later as secretary of defense, I would persistently push the Chinese to rein in their North Korean allies, or at least to give us assurances that they would intervene if the regime suddenly collapsed, as it realistically could. Still, the regime remained infuriatingly hard to penetrate. When Kim Jong Il began to send signals that he would empower his son to be his successor in 2010, it took us almost completely by surprise.
North Korea remains one of the most problematic and dangerous nations on earth as far as the United States goes. Virtually all of our two-war scenarios involves one war between North and South Korea and another somewhere else, so we devote considerable time and energy to anticipating the potential for trouble in that part of the world. And, of course, we station nearly thirty thousand American soldiers along the border to repel an invasion should that day ever come. North Korea is locked in the past, desperately attempting to cover its inadequacies, squash free expression, and spend the little money it has on nuclear weapons. It’s hard to believe that such a government will find its way ea
sily into the present; while it flails about, the United States is forced to remain vigilant and to cultivate our other relationships in the region, to at least contain the potential damage that this backward country might someday attempt to inflict.
• • •
The CIA’s history in Latin America is not entirely a proud one. In 1954, CIA officers, with the approval of President Eisenhower, staged a coup against Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz, a reformist leader wrongly believed by some in Washington to be a communist or at least to tolerate communists in his government.2 That covert action and the CIA-led toppling of Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 are mainstays of the critique of the CIA’s adventurism and have left bitter feelings in both countries for decades.
So it was with some uncertainty that I traveled to Latin America during my CIA tenure, visiting Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. Somewhat to my surprise, I was warmly received in each country. Our cooperative work in the region to combat the narcotics trade was appreciated and even admired, as were other aspects of our alliances. America was helping Argentina fend off Hezbollah in the region where Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay share a border (Hezbollah was smuggling in the area to raise money for its terrorist work there and elsewhere), while also helping Peru in its long battle against the Shining Path. We were keeping tabs on Venezuela’s brusque and combative leader, Hugo Chávez, and those in Nicaragua and Ecuador who were following Chávez’s lead. And we were recalibrating our relationship with Honduras, where a coup had led to turmoil in that country’s politics and a breakdown in civic order that was allowing crime and drug trafficking to flourish.