The Threat

by Andrew G. McCabe

  Then Mueller leaned back—easy, heavy lidded—and said, All right, what the hell are we gonna do with this thing? What are we gonna do? Panetta said, We’re gonna do it. What do you need? Mueller looked at me: What do you need? I said, Well, sir, I need three analysts and a logistics officer. Panetta said, Fine! Done! Next week.

  They moved on to other topics. The whole meeting seemed unnecessary. And in that way it was a lesson. This is how government works. There’s no need to get histrionic and polarized and scream and yell. We all want the same thing. Sometimes we don’t all agree on how to get where we’re going, but if we just sit down and talk, we can figure it out.

  A year later, in September, Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen. The following month, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to all eight charges on which he was indicted, including conspiracy to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries, attempted murder within the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States, and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. At some point, after all the cooperation he provided in all the interrogation sessions, he just shut down. He went back into his shell, and off to Colorado—to ADX Florence, the federal Supermax prison. Five years after that, in 2017, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The New York Times, the U.S. government released almost two hundred pages of the 302s of Abdulmutallab’s interrogation. The same ones I’d read in the FBI computer system back when they’d first been filed. The Times story about the documents, by Scott Shane, noted that Abdulmutallab, in his interrogation, had “tried to reconstruct the layout of a training camp, Mr. Awlaki’s house and many other Qaeda buildings. His descriptions were so precise that it is likely they have helped shape targeting decisions in the American drone campaign in Yemen.”

  Déjà Vu

  Now, to bring the story forward: During the 2016 campaign, candidate Donald Trump was clear about his views on some traditional hot-button national-security issues, such as the use of torture (he was for it), the prosecution of foreign terrorists in regular criminal courts rather than by military tribunals (he was against it), and the future of the detention facility at Guantánamo (he wanted to keep it open and put more people in it).

  For many of us in national-security positions, this was like being dragged back into a part of your past that you did not wish to revisit. We had been through these issues before, fought these battles many times, and over the years found what we believed were the best ways to do the job of keeping America safe. After eight years of finding ways to hold, interrogate, and prosecute terrorists that did not involve sending them to Cuba—eight years of doing these things successfully, with a track record that “enhanced” methods have not matched—we found ourselves having these conversations all over again. And needing to justify our success all over again. And arguing once again that torture, in addition to being wrong, was not necessary—and not even helpful—to the project of collecting the best, most reliable intelligence from subjects. And trying to persuade policy makers once again that confinement for life in maximum-security federal prisons—from which no one has ever escaped—without the possibility of parole was a pretty reliable way to keep terrorists from harming anyone. All the facts were on our side, but I got the distinct feeling that we might lose the arguments this time.

  Attorney General Sessions had strong preconceived beliefs about all of these issues. Early in the new administration, George Toscas, the deputy attorney general in the National Security Division, expertly used the ongoing trial of a hard-core al-Qaeda fighter known as Spin Ghul as an example to show why trying a foreign terrorist here in the United States was sometimes the only reasonable course. Ghul was responsible for the deaths of two American servicemen in Afghanistan in 2003. After spending years in a Libyan prison, he was arrested for attacking a police officer on a boat while en route to Italy. The Italians couldn’t prosecute him for anything other than simple assault, and Ghul was likely to be released into the wilds of Western Europe—only a plane ride from the United States. The Italians would never give him to us if they knew he would be sent to Guantánamo—most Western nations did not approve of our use of that facility, or of the jerry-built and controversial legal regime that had grown up around it, and the European Union’s Court of Human Rights would not permit such a transfer. But they would give him to us for federal criminal prosecution. Ghul was tried and convicted in New York and will spend the rest of his days in prison. The attorney general was not impressed.

  The issue came to a head a few months later with the case of a detainee in custody overseas—a detainee whose situation, suffice it to say, was parallel to the case of Spin Ghul. The attorney general flat-out refused to allow this detainee into the United States for trial. He seemed not to appreciate that the likely alternative was the detainee’s imminent release from custody.

  And he did not just oppose bringing the detainee here—he was volcanically offended that we had even proposed it. This sent Sessions into a mode that I witnessed a number of times: He would grab the arms on his chair and prop himself up a bit higher in his seat. His face would redden. His voice would rise. Then he would stare, not at anyone in particular, but at the table, his eyes darting back and forth, as he berated us for treating terrorists like criminals. For giving constitutional rights to enemy combatants. He was not able to see the work as we saw it: as taking one more terrorist out of circulation.

  At a Principals Committee meeting in early 2018, I remember Sessions erupting at Defense Secretary James Mattis over another aspect of the same issue. He tore into Mattis for the Defense Department’s role in detaining terrorists on foreign battlefields and then proposing that those detainees be tried in U.S. courts. Defense was creating problems that Justice had to solve, Sessions declared. Mattis politely answered that he would work on establishing a facility for detaining military combatants in the United States.

  Nobody even bothered to point out to the attorney general that the so-called problems he believed Defense created for Justice were in fact an example of how the system was supposed to work: a prime example of two very different departments, with different powers and different techniques, collaborating on their shared mission. No one said this, I think, because everyone understood that such collaboration was no longer valued by the federal government’s most powerful decision makers. Not anymore. This was the new team. Things were going to be different.

  HOW WE WORK

  President’s Daily Brief

  Finished Intelligence

  Information is the lifeblood of effective government. You can’t manage the administration of anything unless the people involved draw on the same knowledge and understanding, and the same sense of what needs to happen and in what order. Interrogations produced raw intelligence—reports eventually written up as 302s. Then these 302s were analyzed, interpreted, and discussed by the investigators in counterterrorism. Working with prosecutors, agents used information from those 302s—about the detainee’s associates, his habits, the places he visited—to build cases, using techniques described by the enterprise theory. Analysts also took the raw intelligence in select 302s from all the FBI’s operational divisions—primarily the criminal, counterterrorism, and counterintelligence divisions—and turned it into the finished intelligence of briefings. An “operational” division is one that is responsible for some piece of the FBI’s investigative work. “Finished” intelligence means that it has been contextualized, rewritten, and presented in a way that can be understood by informed readers whose government positions—in departments such as State, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Justice; and, most critically, in the White House—require them to make decisions about how the government should act on the briefing’s information.

  Traditionally, the briefing structure that maintains the flow of information between Justice and the Bureau has been regular and reliable. (I am describing that structure as it was during my time in FBI leadership; I do not know the present structure of briefings.) Every
Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning, the Bureau’s director and members of his senior team briefed the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the National Security Division folks, and some other Department of Justice staff members. As I rose in the ranks at the FBI, I dealt with Justice officials of corresponding rank. In my first years at headquarters, I was occasionally called in to brief the attorney general. During the administration of President George W. Bush, I gave one briefing each to Alberto Gonzales and Michael Mukasey. One of them seemed very bored and the other one actually fell asleep. I didn’t take it personally. I started briefing the attorney general on a regular basis when Eric Holder held the job and I had become assistant director of counterterrorism at the FBI. Holder was President Obama’s first appointee to lead the Justice Department.

  What mainly drove these thrice-weekly meetings was a presentation of intelligence called the President’s Daily Brief. If intelligence is information for decision makers, the President’s Daily Brief is the information that the intelligence community believes the ultimate decision maker must have. It covers a wide—literally, global—range of subject matter, from migration patterns to weapons sales to economic intelligence. The briefing is assembled in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and to the extent that the FBI is involved in preparation of the PDB, the work chiefly concerns terrorist threats and counterterrorism work—highly classified stuff. You need a whole suite of security clearances and read-ins to different compartmented programs to even read the document.

  For a small number of people in offices that are not Oval—including about half a dozen each from the FBI and from Justice—it is also helpful to know what the president knows. In an elemental way, the President’s Daily Brief gets all the relevant people focused on the same targets at the same time, especially when crises are breaking. The PDB also organizes the fire-hose blast of information these people require so that they can do their jobs more broadly. For Bureau officials who read it, the PDB shows how our cases fit into the wider world of national-security threats and the government’s other priority issues and concerns.

  A Rough, Rough Gig

  At the PDB meeting with the attorney general, everybody from the FBI would sit on one side of the table and everybody from Justice would sit on the other side, like in a strategic-arms-negotiating meeting or a summit with a foreign leader. The briefer, an FBI analyst exclusively assigned to the PDB, sat at the head. Every day, except Friday and Saturday, that person arrived at work in the early evening and worked through the night reviewing the book, looking hard at every piece of new intelligence and trying to anticipate all possible questions about every issue that anyone might ask. The main qualification for becoming the briefer: having brains to burn. The job is a one-year assignment. By the end of that year, the person in the job is smoked. It’s a rough, rough gig. But smoke gives flavor. Briefers know this country’s most sensitive intelligence as well as or better than anyone else. When people left that role, I always tried to steer them into jobs in counterterrorism or counterintelligence.

  The briefer generally began the PDB meeting like this: In the book today, I’d like to draw your attention to … And then he or she orally presented the most important pieces of intelligence. That has been, for a long time, the baseline of the established process for the PDB meetings. Beyond that, every attorney general has adapted the process to his or her liking. Attorney General Holder asked many questions, and there was a lot of discussion back and forth.

  When it came to FBI operations, I discerned no defining political or philosophical slant in Eric Holder. Never did I sit there and think he was speaking from a set of firm biases or preconceived opinions. He was focused on the work in the way you’d expect a good attorney to be. I also never thought of Holder as someone I needed to educate or for whom I needed to provide background information. He had been acting attorney general under George W. Bush, deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton, and U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia before any of that. Also, he was firmly in charge as attorney general when I started briefing him, which would not be the case years later when I briefed President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions.

  I only saw Holder get angry once in the many dozens of times I briefed him, and that was because we pushed. It was on a complicated, difficult issue. The FBI wanted to do something and Justice was holding the Bureau back. We pushed the disagreement all the way to paper: wrote him an actual letter to try to put him in a corner. At the FBI, even something as seemingly straightforward as a letter on stationery has an acronym—LHM, for “letterhead memorandum.” You know you’re in a bureaucratic war when “going to paper” is the equivalent of DEFCON 5—it means there’s now a record, something to judge future decisions and behavior against. And Holder did not appreciate that. Looking at the matter from his point of view, I can understand his reaction and might well have had the same one if I had been sitting in his chair. He read the memorandum right there at the table, then stood up and said, This is bullshit. He threw the paper down. Walked out. Slammed the door. With Mueller sitting right there. Even Mueller reacted to that one. It got a Hmmm out of him.

  At the next briefing, Holder walked in, and the first thing he said was, Listen, I just wanted to say I got a little heated the last time we were in here, and I apologize for that. I should not have reacted that way. I was not happy about what I was reading. But I don’t want you to take that the wrong way. I respect the work you are doing and the work you are putting into this. We just need to work through it.

  Holder made lots of decisions I disagreed with. Fine. The ball bounces. But I admired his generosity, his sense of responsibility, his magnanimity, and his intelligence. Others at Justice followed that example. His deputy attorney general, James Cole, was another official I disagreed with a lot. One day we got in each other’s faces. I made an argument, he shut me down, I kept arguing, he kept shutting me down. Eventually he said, Enough—meaning, Don’t say another word. And I shut up. And felt that second-guessing afterburn: Did I overstep my bounds? At the end of the meeting—papers shuffling, briefcases clasping, Florsheims clopping—Cole caught me for a second and said, You know, I did not agree with you today, but I respect the way you advocate for your position, and I thank you for that.

  When Holder left and Loretta Lynch took over, the atmosphere around the table changed. There was less talking, more reading. I don’t know if Lynch hadn’t read the book before she came to the meeting, or if she didn’t like to listen to the briefer as much. Whatever the reason, there were a lot of us sitting there while the attorney general and deputy attorney general would read in silence.

  Loretta Lynch is gracious and considerate. She comports herself in a way that is controlled at all times. She speaks in the measured tones of an NPR broadcast: positive but not peppy, concerned but not angry. I never went into a meeting with her afraid of what I was going to hear. Edges, though, are useful for a leader. It’s okay for a leader to have limits that others do not want to test. That can be motivating. Lynch seemed to loathe conflict. Oftentimes she and her people would have little to say in the President’s Daily Brief. We had a run of very intense counterterrorism events in 2016 and 2017 when Lynch was attorney general, and I don’t remember her asking many specific questions. Sometimes I wondered if she spent so much time reading and so little talking in those briefings because she wanted to avoid the possibility of any friction or dispute.

  ‘Where’s He From?’

  After Trump’s inauguration, when Jeff Sessions came in, we were ready to help orient him to this process. Or to adjust the process, to reshape it to suit his preferences—to make the briefings more effective for him. Sessions changed the venue for the Bureau’s meetings. He asked that instead of holding them in the Hoover building, we come over to the Justice Department’s operations center in the Robert F. Kennedy building, where his own office was.

  Sessions had been a senator for twenty years. He had been attorney general of Ala
bama for two years and U.S. attorney for Alabama’s southern district from 1981 to 1993. In public statements he frequently indexed back to his experience as a prosecutor, even though the Justice Department in those days was very different from the department he inherited. The National Security Division was not even a twinkle in anyone’s eye when he was a U.S. attorney. (The National Security Division of the Justice Department was created by the USA Patriot Act, in 2005.) And Sessions had never received the PDB. He had never been a part of the intelligence community. As soon as he became attorney general, he began to encounter all kinds of information that he hadn’t seen before. To understand the documents he was receiving now, to see what those documents could show, he needed to be able to register at a glance the author, source, and subject. It’s not hard to learn to read those documents. But it is a skill. And it was all the more important to learn the shape of this information because the substance was largely unfamiliar to him, too.

  In the first few briefings with Sessions, conversations necessarily covered a lot of basic material. Jim Comey was the FBI director, and he began at the beginning. Described the differences between the Sunni and Shia practices of Islam. Explained which terrorist groups lined up with which religious philosophies. During the PDB, Comey and Sessions would have religious discussions: wide ranging, even free flowing. As a double major in chemistry and religion, Comey was well positioned to engage the AG on the groups we tracked and the religions they followed. Sessions believed that Islam—inherently—advocated extremism. The director tried to explain that the reality was more complicated. Talking about religion was Comey’s way of trying to connect with Sessions on terrain familiar to them both.