The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (6 page)

A briefing would generally include seven or eight items, each of them placed in a three-ring blue leather binder with the words “President’s Daily Brief” and the president’s name embossed on the cover. Copies were made for the others in the room, although each of them, except Card, had already received his or her own briefing before the session with the president. If Rice or the vice president had had an issue with a particular piece, the briefers tried to alert me before I went into the Oval Office so that I would not be blindsided.

It was up to me to decide both what to show the president and how to brief complex issues so that he took away the key points. Typically I would “tee up” each item in the briefing book with a few words—for example, reminding him of the last thing we had told him about the topic, telling him how this new piece advanced the story, and giving him a preview of the key points. The president would then read the item, often quite carefully. But sometimes,
with a complicated or poorly constructed piece, I would have to do more. One morning I found on my desk a two-page piece containing a detailed chart on the Palestinian intifada. After reading the piece several times, I could not see the bottom line. After more reading and a detailed study of the chart, I concluded that the key point was that, despite the very high levels of violence in the West Bank, the vast majority of it was occurring in only three towns. Interesting, I thought, so I simply asked our cartographers to put all the violent incidents on a map, which showed three main clusters, and I showed the president only this map, making the main point orally.

After reading a piece or listening to me brief it, the president would either ask me questions about the item’s substance or, more frequently, ask the senior officials in the room questions about the policy implications of the intelligence. When the discussion ended on the first topic we would move to the next item in the binder. Although thirty minutes were usually allotted for the briefing, more often than not it ran much longer.

Bush entered office with a strong-willed and strong-minded national security team including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. But he personally did not have a particularly deep background in foreign affairs. One thing that made him stand out, however, was that he was the son of a former president who was also a former CIA director. The president told me that his father, George H. W. Bush, had stressed to him the importance of his daily intelligence briefing. He had clearly taken that advice to heart, and I found him incredibly interested in the broad range of subjects I would bring to him each morning. The president was very quick to understand the essence of an issue, and I found his gut instincts on policy to be right on the mark. Sometimes I thought the president too quick to make a decision, but I also know from my own experience as a leader that a quick decision is better than a late decision or no decision.

Some of the most special moments for me were when President George H. W. Bush, aka “41,” would join the briefing, which he did fifteen or so times during my year as briefer. As a former president, he had that right; as a national security expert and a former CIA director, he very was interested; and as a man who commanded deep respect inside the Agency, he was more than welcome. One morning, just days before the inauguration, 41 joined us for the briefing, which was being held in Blair House (the president’s official guesthouse). In the middle of a discussion about the steps Russian president Vladimir Putin was taking to rebuild the Russian military after a decade of decay, the former president said to the president-elect and the rest of us, “I’ve done this before. You guys deal with this. I’m going to play with the grandkids.”

43 asked many questions—just as Miscik had predicted. One of the things he was interested in knowing was how we knew what we knew. For a piece of information provided to us by a human spy, he would want to know the source’s position so he could judge for himself the credibility of the information—perhaps the informant was an aide in the prime minister’s office who had been at the meeting when the issue was discussed, or a friend of the aide who’d heard the information secondhand. When the intelligence was derived from intercepted communications, he would want to know exactly who was communicating with whom and how—by phone, e-mail, fax, etc. In response, I developed separate mechanisms with CIA operations directorate and with the National Security Agency to get the information I needed. I was now sharing with the president and the others in the room some of the most sensitive information anywhere inside the US intelligence community or even the entire US government.

For the first briefing I did following the inauguration, I was accompanied by George Tenet, who had been director of central intelligence since 1997 under President Clinton. After that, Tenet
came only sporadically, and I was on my own most of the time. This ended in the second week of February when President Bush, at the end of a briefing, asked me, “Does George understand that I would like to see him here with you every day?”

“He will, as soon as I get back to the Agency,” I responded.

“Good,” said the president. That had never been the practice, but Tenet, as any Agency director would have been, was happy to comply. It was awkward at first, since the Bush team had not told Tenet whether it planned to keep him on or not, a decision it did not make until late February.

I asked Tenet how he wanted to handle the sessions and he quickly decided that I was to continue doing the “play-by-play” and he would jump in periodically to do the “color commentary.” It proved successful. When the president traveled, only I would be with him, but when he was in Washington, I had Tenet as my wingman. It’s a bit odd having your boss watch you do your job every day, like being named starting quarterback and finding your coach in the huddle. But I had been his executive assistant for two years; Tenet and I were close, and he helped my performance by regularly giving me useful tips and critiques.

Tenet and I would meet every morning in his “downtown” office in the Old Executive Office Building at the White House. There we would plan the briefing, with Tenet deciding which pieces he wanted to remark on. Then, at 7:55 a.m., we would walk across West Executive Avenue to be outside the Oval Office at precisely eight a.m. for the briefing. The president was almost never late.

Tenet’s presence in the room was extremely helpful to the president. For almost any national security issue that came up, Tenet was able to explain the history of the issue, how the Clinton administration tried to deal with it, what had worked, and what had not. I was worried at first about Rice’s reaction to Tenet’s talking about policy, but she too seemed appreciative of the background. There
was an early tendency on Bush’s part to be leery of any of Clinton’s approaches to issues—investing US credibility in trying to find an accommodation between the Palestinians and the Israelis, for example—but Tenet’s commentary seemed to ease that tendency. Tenet provided a continuity in national security policy that most presidents do not get.

The briefings during those first few months were tough sledding, not because of the president or anyone else in the room, but because the Agency was not producing a sufficiently high-quality product to meet the president’s expectations. Tenet would routinely pull pieces from the book—sometimes at my urging—judging them to be not good enough for the president, either because they told him something he already knew or because the analysis was not insightful enough. Our Middle East analysis was most often the victim—the analysts for that region frequently produced pieces that did not advance the president’s thinking. Occasionally one of these pieces would slip by, and after reading it, the president would look at me and say, “Duh, no shit.”
That
is customer feedback. But to its credit, the analytic side of the Agency worked hard to improve its game and the number of pieces pulled by Tenet or criticized by Bush declined sharply over time.

There were a number of international incidents during the first few months of the Bush administration that dominated the briefings. The biggest crisis in those early months was when a US Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft had a midair collision with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea and was forced to land at a Chinese military base on Hainan Island. A tense ten-day diplomatic crisis ensued, and I think our analysis proved extremely helpful to the president. One piece that seemed particularly useful was a comparison of China’s public statements about the United States regarding the EP-3 incident with its statements during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996 (when the Chinese moved military assets in response
to an independence-minded Taiwanese president and the United States responded by moving an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait). This comparison showed that the Chinese were much less concerned about the EP-3 incident than they had been about Taiwan, and spoke to the need for patience on the part of the United States. Bush was indeed patient and the crisis ended peacefully.

While the briefings were filled with analysis and discussions about serious issues, the sessions were not without their lighter moments. I particularly remember the president’s dog Barney chewing on the tassels on Tenet’s loafers as the CIA director struggled mightily to give Bush the impression he didn’t mind. I also remember the president’s telling a not particularly funny joke one morning in the Oval Office. When no one laughed, the president turned to me and said, “Michael, your job is to laugh at my jokes—even if they are not funny.”

And during a briefing at Camp David as the president, George Tenet, Steve Hadley, and I were sitting around a coffee table discussing a PDB article, Barney got a piece of plastic stuck in his throat. The president was the first to notice. Both the president and I pushed the briefing books from our laps and tried to reach the dog, who was under the table. The president grabbed Barney, and the piece of plastic popped out of his mouth onto the floor. I quickly grabbed it, and when I did, I said proudly, “Mr. President, I got it.” The president responded by saying, “Good job, Michael.” And during this entire time, Tenet and Hadley continued their substantive discussion. The president looked at them with wry irritation.

* * *

When it came to al Qa‘ida and Bin Ladin, the early 2001 briefings focused on two issues. The first surrounded responsibility for the October 2000 terrorist attack on the USS
Cole
. President Clinton had left office with no clear intelligence linking the al Qa‘ida
leadership with the bombing that had killed seventeen of the ship’s crew and wounded thirty-nine. On January 25 we wrote a piece for the new president outlining our preliminary assessment, that the plot had been directed from Afghanistan by the al Qa‘ida leadership. Because we could not nail down responsibility with certainty and because President Bush believed that the “pinpricks” of cruise missile strikes did not serve any real military objective, there would be no US response to the
Cole
bombing pending development of a more robust response to al Qa‘ida, which in the spring and summer of 2001 was in the process of being put together.

The second issue with regard to al Qa‘ida in the early months was bringing pieces to the president designed to educate him about the group. We provided the president with analytic pieces on the group’s training camps in Afghanistan, its fund-raising capabilities and networks, its complex relationship with the Taliban, and the Taliban’s multifaceted relationships with some of our allies. In short, I wanted to give the president as much as we could provide about what CIA believed was the leading national security threat facing the United States.

In retrospect, I think it would have been helpful had the intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for the new administration on the threat posed by al Qa‘ida. An NIE is the community’s premier product—the authoritative voice of the analysts throughout the IC on an issue. It is discussed and approved by the leadership of the community. I think such a document would have helped put al Qa‘ida in context for the new administration and helped it understand the seriousness with which intelligence officials took al Qa‘ida.

I should add, however, that during the transition and during those first three months, there was little to no specific threat reporting on what al Qa‘ida was plotting. That changed dramatically in the spring. In fact, starting in the spring and through early summer,
the bulk of my time in the Oval Office was taken up with wide-ranging and increasingly frightening reports about terrorist threats from al Qa‘ida. From late April until early July we were picking up very worrisome intelligence, with al Qa‘ida members telling each other of “very good news to come,” and that “significant victories” were on the horizon. None of the reports were specific in terms of location, timing, or method of attack, but all were shared with the president and his entire national security team.

On the morning of April 18, I walked, as I did every morning, into Tenet’s “downtown” office at the Old Executive Office Building. As soon as he saw me, he said, in a tone that I knew meant there would be no debate, “I’m taking over the briefing today.” The night before, at his daily CT update, our officers had briefed Tenet on credible information that Bin Ladin was planning multiple significant attacks. The analysts were writing a piece to put this information together and explain it, but Tenet was not going to wait to tell the president. He switched seats with me to place himself closer to the president and vice president—the only time he did that in my entire year of briefing—and he did both the play-by-play and the color commentary in vintage Tenet style. And there was a lot of color that morning. When Tenet gets rolling it can be an amazing thing to witness. He is an outstanding briefer who speaks with great clarity and with a conviction that commands the room, and that morning he expressed in words, tone, and body language his deep concern that al Qa‘ida was going to hit us. While he had the floor in the Oval Office, I was watching the reactions of the president and his senior advisors. It was not clear to me at the time if the tactic was working, however. I could see that they did not know what to make of Tenet’s passion, which made sense in the context of what the previous administration had been through—the East Africa bombings, the attempted attacks during the pre-millennium period, and the
Cole
attack. The piece produced by the analysts the
next day, on April 19—based on the same information that Tenet had orally presented the previous morning—was titled “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations.” The 9/11 Commission would later title one of the chapters of its report with a quote from Tenet about this period: “The system was blinking red.”