Chris Whipple writes in his 2020 book:
* Petraeus, Brennan’s predecessor, had suffered a precipitous fall from grace. The celebrated former commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, and architect of the Iraq War “surge,” Petraeus brought military acumen to the agency, but also a sense of entitlement that one CIA wag called “four-star general disease.” Rumors of Petraeus’s demands for special treatment while traveling became grist for Langley’s gossip mill, and undermined his authority. Barely more than a year had elapsed, during which Petraeus had recovered from that rocky start, when he was caught sharing top secret information with his biographer and lover; within days he’d resigned.
* Two directors who arrived on a mission to shake up the CIA—James Schlesinger, for Richard Nixon, and Stansfield Stansfield Turner, for Jimmy Carter—also crashed and burned. Schlesinger, brilliant but condescending and arrogant, abruptly fired more than one thousand veteran operatives; after five months Nixon moved him to the Pentagon as secretary of defense. Schlesinger was so unpopular at the CIA that he was given extra security guards after a slew of death threats. Turner, a spit-and-polish former Navy admiral, was earnest but too straitlaced for the rough-and-tumble spy business, and no match in the bureaucratic wars for Carter’s wily national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Turner would preside over one of history’s greatest intelligence debacles: the CIA’s failure to anticipate the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Another cautionary tale comes from the tenure of John Deutch, Bill Clinton’s director. A former deputy director of defense and MIT chemistry professor, Deutch was a visionary intellectual who helped usher in the era of unmanned drone warfare. Michael Morell, a two-time acting director, considered him the most intelligent person he’d ever met, followed by Barack Obama. But Deutch was politically tone-deaf. He insulted the CIA workforce, saying they weren’t as smart as their Pentagon counterparts. And he assured Clinton that he’d get rid of Saddam Hussein through a CIA-sponsored coup; unfortunately, the covert operation was penetrated by the Iraqis and failed miserably, leaving Kurdish allies abandoned. (And not for the last time; decades later the Kurds in northern Syria would be abandoned again by Donald Trump.) Deutch resigned after seventeen months. Soon thereafter top secret classified material was found on his home computer, and he was stripped of his security clearance.
Other directors were towering figures who transformed the CIA. Allen Dulles, who served Dwight Eisenhower, was a fierce Cold Warrior who ran the agency like a personal fiefdom; to combat the Soviets, he launched audacious covert operations that toppled governments in Iran and Guatemala. William Colby, who’d fought behind enemy lines as a young paratrooper for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the CIA’s precursor, during World War II, made public the agency’s darkest secrets—the so-called Family Jewels. In so doing he earned the enmity of the CIA’s secretive old guard, but the respect of those who valued his transparency, and arguably saved the agency. Colby’s death by drowning in 1996—at the age of seventy-six—while canoeing near his weekend house in Maryland, still strikes some of his colleagues as suspicious.
* When George H. W. Bush, with no intelligence experience but with a stint as envoy to the People’s Republic of China, became director, he was convinced it was the end of his political career. But Bush rescued the agency from scandal, restored its morale and reputation, and set the stage for his eventual presidency.
Few directors wielded more power than William Casey, who was empowered by Ronald Reagan to fight communism around the globe. A disheveled character who careened around CIA headquarters, mumbling unintelligibly, Casey waged covert wars against the Soviets and their proxies; on his watch, the mujahideen, armed with Stinger missiles by the CIA, turned the tide against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan. But later, in a bid to free American hostages in Lebanon, Casey spearheaded a harebrained plot to trade arms to Iran and illegally divert profits to the Central American guerrillas known as the contras. At the height of that scandal, Casey died of a brain tumor; he was so famously devious that one senator, unconvinced, asked to see the body as proof.
No one knew more about the CIA than Robert Gates, a suffer-no-fools analyst who rose through the ranks to become director under President George H. W. Bush. On his first bid for the top job, Gates withdrew his nomination after fierce criticism of his role in the Iran-contra scandal. He succeeded on his second attempt a few years later, though he was accused of exaggerating Soviet military capabilities, a charge he denied. As director, Gates helped President George H. W. Bush navigate the dangerous shoals of the post–Cold War world after the Soviets’ collapse.
* The most popular directors of the modern era were George Tenet and Leon Panetta. Charismatic, energetic, and down-to-earth, Tenet warned George W. Bush’s White House of an imminent Al Qaeda attack in the summer of 2001, months before 9/11, a warning that went unheeded by the Bush administration. He also launched the CIA’s lightning invasion of Afghanistan, routing the Taliban.
* The notion that the CIA has bungled its way through the last fifty years—missing real threats and ginning up false evidence for fake ones—is a common belief. It’s a version of history culminating in the agency’s botched estimate of Iraq’s WMDs. And Iraq has hardly been the agency’s only debacle. The CIA has had its share of intelligence failures—from missing Iran’s 1979 revolution to misjudging Russia’s social media assault on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
But that is a skewed version of history. The CIA has succeeded in disrupting terrorist plots and saving lives. It has also sounded alarms that politicians chose not to hear. Contrary to conventional wisdom, in the months before 9/11, though it could not specify the target, the agency repeatedly warned of an imminent attack by Al Qaeda; it was the Bush White House, not the CIA, that was asleep at the switch. More than an intelligence failure, the 9/11 attacks represented a dereliction of duty by policymakers. As Director Helms observed, “
It’s not enough to ring the bell; you have to make sure the other guy hears it.”
* Founded in 1947 to prevent a repetition of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the CIA mostly met that challenge during the Cold War: It was never blindsided by a Soviet attack, or surprised by a military advance that altered the balance of power.
* Perhaps the only president who understood the agency’s capabilities was George H. W. Bush, a former director. Another exception, arguably, was Dwight Eisenhower, who knew something about intelligence from his stint as D-Day commander.
* Leon Panetta was shocked to discover that he faced life-and-death decisions as director every day. When it came to authorizing lethal drone strikes—when innocent civilians were in the crosshairs—the devoutly Catholic director lamented: “You have to be true to yourself—and just hope that ultimately God agrees with you.” In the aftermath of 9/11, when prisoners were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, Director Tenet and his defenders insisted the methods prevented attacks and saved innocent lives. But McLaughlin, one of those defenders, concedes, “There’s an answer to that, which is: Slavery worked too but it was still wrong.”
* Helms’s standing with LBJ improved markedly after war broke out in the Middle East in 1967.
In the fall of that year, the Israelis warned the U.S. that without American help they faced defeat at the hands of their Arab enemies. Helms assured LBJ of the contrary. The CIA estimated that not only would Israel defeat her Arab neighbors but that the war would last no more than seven days. That prediction looked prescient after Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War. Helms proudly called it “the intelligence bingo of my time.”
* Now that he was outside the tent, [James Jesus] Angleton started lobbing stones back in. He gave rambling, apparently inebriated interviews, lambasting Colby for his naïveté. One Sunday morning, he called Hersh at his home. “Do you know what you have done?” he asked. “You’ve blown my cover. My wife, in thirty-one years of marriage, was never aware of my activity until your story.
Now she’s left me.” In fact, Cicely Angleton had left him to go live in Arizona, but it had nothing to do with Hersh—and she knew exactly what her husband did for a living. The master spy seemed a lost soul. Leslie Gelb, who’d left the Defense Department to become one of Hersh’s colleagues at the Times , remembered seeing Angleton on a Georgetown street corner. “He was the scariest-looking thing, slouched against the window of a store with his feet out in front of him, smoking a cigarette, just looking up at the sky.”
* It is remarkable how rarely CIA directors know when they’re about to be fired. They may be able to predict the duration of the Six-Day War to within twenty-four hours. But when their necks are on the chopping block they’re usually the last to realize it.
* But there is one family member for whom Bill Colby, in life and death, is still a mystery. A few years after his father’s death, filmmaker Carl Colby, Paul’s younger brother, made a documentary, The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby . The film drove a wedge between Carl and the rest of the family; Paul and Sally stopped speaking with him. On one level, the film is a straightforward, even admiring account of Colby’s journey from the OSS to the pinnacle of the intelligence world. On another, it suggests Colby’s complicity in the atrocities of Phoenix, implying that his father endured a kind of dark night of the soul.
* The notion that heading the CIA would be a political death sentence spoke volumes about the agency. Bush returned to Washington the following month to a flurry of terrible headlines.
* Bush would be starting cold, knowing almost nothing about the clandestine service. And he would have to gain the respect of its covert operatives, those “Scottish tribes waiting for the English King,” as Cofer Black, the veteran operative, had described them. Frank Wisner Jr. summed up Bush’s challenge in his own colorful way: “He had to master the spies, find a way to live with them, and direct them to be successful—or be hung up by his balls.”
* The CIA, unlike the FBI, was unaccustomed to pleading its case to the public. There was no agency equivalent of the hagiographic hit television show, The F.B.I. , starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr. “Intelligence has no constituency,” explained Richard Kerr, an analyst who spent thirty-two years at the agency, rising to deputy director. “The bureau has always had a constituency, they’ve been very good at PR. The Marines have always been really good at it. The CIA has no people out there who say, ‘Oh yeah, it’s a great organization,’ except the people who work there.”
* There were many reasons for the CIA’s Iran debacle: incompetence, wishful thinking, a failure of imagination, deception by the Shah himself—and secret deals that rendered the agency blind. Iran was virtually the only major country in which the CIA had no contact with the government’s opposition. How could that be? Because the Shah wanted it that way. Everyone—including, ironically, the ambassador to Tehran, Richard Helms—was willing to wear blinders to keep the Shah happy. Even more than his oil, the U.S. needed access to listening sites on Iran’s border with the Soviet Union. Helms’s old friend Burton Gerber, then an operative stationed in Tehran, recalled: “Everyone in the leadership gang—that includes Helms and my station chief—was very nervous about doing anything that could upset the Iranians because of the importance of the sites.”
* William Casey would become the most powerful CIA director since Allen Dulles, fighting covert wars against the Soviets in every corner of the globe. But Casey’s determination to run the CIA like an off-the-books enterprise, and his flouting of rules, would trigger the most serious political crisis since Watergate.
* Because there were no rules, in Casey’s view, congressional oversight was an annoyance.
* Casey chose an unlikely person as his Deputy Director of Operations (DDO): a streetwise entrepreneur named Max Hugel. Hugel (pronounced Who -gull) had made a fortune selling sewing machines and investing on Wall Street; as a businessman, he was even less scrupulous than Casey. Five-foot-two inches tall, sporting a toupee, a shirt open to his navel, and gold chains, Hugel cut a ridiculous figure amid the gray suits of Langley. He knew nothing about spycraft. This didn’t faze Casey; he thought Hugel was exactly the kind of unorthodox, idiosyncratic thinker the Directorate of Operations needed.
* Casey believed the showdown over Soviet expansionism would come in America’s backyard. Alan Fiers, who ran the CIA’s Central American Task Force, recalled a conversation with the director: “
Alan, you know the Soviet Union is tremendously overextended and they’re vulnerable. If America challenges the Soviets at every turn and ultimately defeats them in one place, that will shatter the mythology… and it will all start to unravel. Nicaragua is that place.”
During the 1980 election campaign, the head of French intelligence had made a prediction to Reagan. As Admiral Inman recalled: “He told Governor Reagan, ‘You are going to be tested, militarily, by the Soviets in your first year in office. And that will probably take place in Central America.’ ” A leftist faction known as the Sandinistas had taken power in Nicaragua and they were supplying arms to a guerrilla insurgency fighting a rightist government in El Salvador. This was the threat Reagan and Casey had been expecting. During the final days of his presidency, Carter had approved covert opera tions to thwart this communist menace. At Casey’s urging, Reagan accelerated those programs.
* Jack Devine, a veteran operative who’d worked under every director since Richard Helms, thought no one topped [Robert] Gates at working the levers of power in the intelligence community, the White House, and Capitol Hill. “Pound for pound, he was the best bureaucrat we ever had. He knew how to run the U.S. government.”
* Upon becoming director, Gates had reached out to his old boss, Richard Helms, the iconic CIA director, then retired for twenty years. The old spymaster and the new director had lunch alone in the private dining room high above the woods of Langley. They surveyed the state of the world and compared notes on intelligence-gathering and covert operations. Then Helms paused. He looked his young protégé in the eye to make sure he had his attention. Helms had one more bit of wisdom to impart. “I just have one piece of advice for you,” Helms said. “Never go home at night without wondering where the mole is.”
Gates was stunned. Was it possible that the CIA, at that moment, was compromised by a Russian mole?
* When it came to killing bin Laden, the legal bureaucracy reinforced Clinton’s skittishness. As Clarke explained: “Janet Reno, the attorney general, had a problem with saying, ‘Just go kill him.’ So we’d say, ‘Try to apprehend him.’ We already had bin Laden under sealed indictment, so we could arrest him. But only if that failed could you kill him.” The legal contortions drove Cofer Black up the wall. “I mean, I love this,” he said sarcastically. “This is such a Washington thing: Our instructions were to capture him. And that’s what we attempted to do. And the difference between capturing—and the alternative—is significant.”
Tenet was equally reluctant to kill bin Laden. His reasons weren’t just legalistic. “The CIA always used that as their excuse for not killing him,” said Clarke, “but in fact they just didn’t want to get in the killing business.” In Tenet’s view, the issue went to the heart of his role as CIA director.
* Now, in the spring of 2001, the warning lights were flashing again. Tenet presented to the Bush national security team an updated version of the Blue Sky paper, an aggressive paramilitary assault on the Afghan sanctuary. Bush’s NSC team not only rejected it, they deep-sixed it. “The word back was, ‘We’re not quite ready to consider this,’ ” said Tenet. “ ‘We don’t want the clock to start ticking.’ ” What did that mean? Tenet would not say. But the message seemed clear: In the event of a major Al Qaeda attack, the Bush administration did not want anyone to know that they’d been warned.
To Bush’s advisers, the enemies were nations, not terrorists. This group included Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy. “Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and others were worried over Saddam Hussein, Iran, and missile defense, getting radar in Czechoslovakia, ballistic missiles in Poland,” said Charlie Allen. “That’s what was driving them. They were in another world, a time machine.”
Dick Clarke pressed Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser, to convene a principals meeting to address the Al Qaeda threat. But there was no getting through to her. “They were mentally stuck back eight years ago, the last time they were in power,” said Black. “They were used to terrorists being euro-lefties: you know, drink champagne by night, blow things up during the day. So it was very difficult to communicate the urgency to this.”
In truth, the administration was obsessed with one country: Iraq. “It was transparently clear to me and to George Tenet very early in the administration,” said Clarke, “that the Bush inner circle had come into office with the intention of going to war with Iraq.” The very first National Security Council meeting was devoted to Iraq. There’d be seventeen NSC meetings devoted to Saddam in the first year alone. “George knew what they wanted from day one,” said Clarke. “We all did.”
But Al Qaeda demanded attention. At the Counterterrorism Center, Black and his team were monitoring a constant stream of threats. “For us the system was blinking red in the sense that we thought what we were uncovering was a top-down plot,” said Tenet. “Something was being ordered from Afghanistan out. But it was very difficult for us to figure out what it was.”
* July 10, 2001. Tenet picked up the white phone that connected his office to the White House. George W. Bush was traveling that day in Boston, but Tenet got through to Rice. “I said, ‘Condi, I have to come see you.’ It was one of the rare times in my seven years as director where I said, ‘I have to come see you. We’re comin’ right now.’ ”
When they got to the White House, Tenet, Black, and Blee met in the national security adviser’s office with Rice and Clarke. To underline the urgency, the CIA team sat not on the couch but at the table. Then Blee began his briefing with a PowerPoint presentation. “I always did PowerPoint,” he said, “and I personally wrote, ‘this is what I am going to tell Condi Rice, this is what I am going to tell the DCI,’ because I knew after the fact everybody would say, ‘Yeah, Rich never told me that.’ ”
Blee got straight to the point. “There will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months,” he said. “The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. Al-Qaeda’s intention is the destruction of the United States.” He continued: “This is an attack that is intended to cause thousands of American casualties somewhere. We cannot say it will be New York City or the United States, but it is geared toward U.S. citizens.”
When Blee finished, Rice spoke up: “What should we do now?”
Cofer Black slammed his fist on the table. “This country’s got to go on a war footing now!” he snapped. Tenet was silent. He left the talking to his deputies.
Afterward, on their way across the West Wing parking lot, Black and Blee high-fived each other, convinced their message had been heard. “Cofer and I came out and said, ‘Boom. We hit a home run. She got it,’ ” said Blee. “I mean, Condi said all the right things: ‘We’ve got to do something, policy papers need to move forward, we’ve got to be more aggressive.’ ” Even Black, the eternal cynic, was sanguine: “We congratulated each other: We thought we’d finally gotten through to these people. We had executed our responsibilities.”
The trouble was, their warning had not been heard. One might expect the nation’s top national security official to do something when alerted to an imminent, catastrophic attack. But Rice took no action. Alert levels were raised for U.S. personnel abroad, but there was no White House follow-up; no principals meeting was convened to discuss how to respond to the threat. “What happened?” I asked Black, almost fifteen years later. He paused. “Yeah, what did happen? Nothing happened.” To Blee, Rice’s inaction was incomprehensible. “We’re going to her and saying, ‘We need help.’ There should have been some order that said, ‘INS do more, FBI do more, NSA do more, DOD get ready.’ She didn’t do any of that. From July to September, nothing happened.”
Rice would later write that that her memory of the meeting was “
not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day.” It makes you wonder what it would have taken to get her attention. As one senior intelligence official put it: “When the director of Central Intelligence, the chief of counterterrorism, and the head of the Bin Laden Unit are saying, ‘Fuck me. They’re coming. Thousands of people are going to die. Get it on,’ the correct response is not to do nothing. The correct response is to call a principals meeting.”
* At the end of the month [of July], George Tenet and his counterterrorism team met in the conference room outside his office. “We were just thinking about all of this and trying to figure out how this attack might occur,” Tenet recalled. Until now, the intelligence had pointed to an attack on American interests overseas. Suddenly Blee spoke up. “They’re coming here,” he said.
In the silence that followed, Tenet said, “You could feel the oxygen come out of the room.”
* At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, George Tenet was having breakfast at Washington’s St. Regis Hotel with former Oklahoma senator David Boren. “The head of my security detail came over to me and said a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center,” he recalled. “My instinctual reaction was, ‘This is Al Qaeda. I’ve gotta go.’ ”
The drive to Langley took twelve minutes, an eternity to Tenet, who had no secure phone reception. Upon his arrival at CIA headquarters, the director went to the seventh floor and huddled with Cofer Black, head of the Counterterrorism Center, and his senior staff. Both of the World Trade towers were ablaze; Tenet, remembering an Al Qaeda plot to crash a plane into Langley headquarters, ordered nonessential CIA personnel to go home, and the rest to move to another building. But Black was having none of it; he refused to evacuate his staff. “People could die,” Tenet told his notoriously gruff lieutenant. Black replied: “Well, sir, then they’re just going to have to die.” The Counterterrorism Center was staying put.
George W. Bush had been speaking to an elementary school class in Florida that morning. Later, aboard Air Force One, he summoned his CIA briefer, Michael Morell, to his cabin. “Michael, who did this?” the president demanded. Morell replied that he’d bet his children’s future that it was Al Qaeda. For hours, Tenet tried to reach Bush but couldn’t get a clear connection. Finally, a little after 3 p.m., in a video conference with Tenet from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, the president learned the truth: On the passenger manifests of the hijacked planes were the names of known Al Qaeda terrorists Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
The 9/11 Commission would famously call the nation’s inabil ity to prevent the attacks a “failure of imagination.” But that wasn’t really true: Not only had the CIA been warning all summer about an imminent attack but it had previously warned of an Al Qaeda attempt to hijack commercial airliners. In 1995, in the so-called Bojinka plot, Al Qaeda operatives had planned to commandeer as many as ten commercial flights out of Manila in the Philippines and blow up the planes over the Pacific; the plot was foiled when the terrorists’ safe house caught fire. The CIA had warned that its failure wouldn’t deter Al Qaeda from deploying airliners as weapons again. “So dismissing something because it didn’t occur,” said Tenet, “turns out to be a terrible, terrible mistake.”
In retrospect, Tenet thought the real failure was the administration’s refusal, in the face of the CIA’s warnings, to take defensive precautions on a national scale. Only an effort involving the CIA, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and other agencies could have thwarted the attacks. “An entire government failed to recognize all the things that needed to be done,” he said. “When you don’t have a system of protection and defense built in place, when you don’t understand what’s going on inside the United States, when you don’t button up your airports, button up your buildings, harden your cockpits, change your visa policies, create a mechanism where there’s a quick swivel between foreign and domestic intelligence, you’re going to get hurt.”
But no one wanted to hear that prior to 9/11, and afterward the CIA bore the brunt of the blame; after all, in Washington there are only policy successes and intelligence failures. The 9/11 Commission Report never mentioned the July 10 meeting at which Tenet and his team warned Condi Rice. That was odd, because Tenet testified about the meeting in a closed session. Rich Blee, head of the Bin Laden Unit, who led the July 10 briefing, believed that both the commission and Congress were determined to deflect blame. “A deliberate effort was made by both the Democratic and Republican leadership to give Bill Clinton a pass and George Bush a pass—and I think Condi Rice got a pass.”
* The trouble began on Petraeus’s first day. All over Langley, a rumor had spread: Arriving at his suite on the seventh floor after a brisk morning run, the director was served a plate of bananas. But there was a problem. The bananas were sliced improperly. Petraeus wasn’t happy. Henceforth, he let everyone know, his bananas should be sliced… just so.
There may be no workplace in the world where gossip travels faster than at CIA headquarters at Langley. That’s because the work force handles top secret material that can’t be discussed with anyone else. Within hours, Petraeus’s rumored commandment about bananas was the talk of the CIA.
The bananas episode was followed by other stories of entitled behavior. Petraeus complained that his apples were too small. One aide was chewed out for failing to properly hand off a water bottle during a morning run. Before leaving a room, the new director supposedly would wait for someone to put his coat on for him. “Sir, we don’t do that here,” someone finally said.
“Petraeus was just a fish out of water,” said Ned Price, a former analyst. “He came from a culture that is just about the opposite of Langley’s culture. The military is hierarchical. It’s large. It’s bureaucratic. The agency is relatively small. It prides itself on its ability to be nimble. And he brought a formality and hierarchy to the building that I think rubbed a lot of people the wrong way.”
Eyebrows were also raised by Petraeus’s exacting and specific travel demands. “If you ever really want to get the unvarnished view of what a director is like, talk to the people who support him,” said one officer. “Holy Christ, the eye rolls, I mean, the faces people made.” The pièce de résistance for Langley gossips was an instruction sent to CIA stations before Petraeus’s visits. “There was this cable that was circulated around that was guidance to station chiefs,” recalled a former senior intelligence official. It reminded him of a story about the 1980s rock group Van Halen; the band had a rider in its contract demanding that all the brown M&Ms be removed from its candy bowls. “Petraeus had his own rider—with everything he wanted in his hotel room,” said this official. “It wasn’t a thousand brown M&Ms—but it was a bathtub of ice, thirty-one bananas… stuff like that.”
According to one other official, there was something else in Petraeus’s rider that was unusual. Station chiefs were advised: “Don’t ask him tough questions.”
Petraeus told me that accounts of his entitled behavior are untrue. The story about sliced bananas, he insisted, is “absolute nonsense—I eat my bananas whole.” After years of being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “my needs were pretty simple—just don’t keep me from doing my morning run!” Yet multiple CIA officers said that Petraeus suffered from “four-star general disease.” The perception damaged the new director’s leadership right out of the gate. “The slicing of the bananas and the prep, all of that stuff, the support guys were just completely repulsed by all that,” said one officer. “It was a real contrast with directors who came up through the agency and treated all of those people almost deferentially. That was not Petraeus’s style.”
Petraeus’s management style also took getting used to. “He’s not a warm and fuzzy guy,” said a former top intelligence official. “He’s not Leon Panetta or George Tenet. He’s not a hug-you kind of guy. He’s a give-an-order kind of guy—and his attitude was, ‘I expect it to get done and I’m going to ask for the next five days whether it’s done yet.’ ”
Petraeus was better at managing up; Obama respected his knowledge and experience. But some of Obama’s inner circle said he was slow to grasp the CIA director’s role as honest broker. “What the president needs when he’s making a decision is the best available intel,” said McDonough. “He doesn’t need another policy voice from his intel guy. I think that was a really hard transition for General Petraeus to make.”
Obama was a stickler about separating intelligence from policy; he expected his CIA director to deliver his brief and depart. “He was meticulous about that,” said James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence. “Whenever I’d go in the Oval to brief him, he wouldn’t start a conversation with his team until I was out of the room.” But Petraeus opined on policy. “A lot of times Dave would come straight with a policy brief,” said McDonough.
Obama and his CIA director locked horns over Middle East policy. Petraeus had strong views on the unfolding disaster in Syria; he argued for arming rebel groups to take the fight to the regime of Bashar al-Assad. After all, Obama had declared publicly that the Syrian dictator would have to step down. When Petraeus made his argument, the usually professorial Obama got right in his CIA director’s face. “The president was sparky,” said McDonough. “He’d push back. Notwithstanding his respect for David, they went at it.” Petraeus’s advocacy for the rebels stemmed from deeply held conviction about the stakes. Petraeus, according to a former senior government official, believed that Obama’s indecision—and his refusal to establish a no fly/no drive zone—had led to more than half of Syria’s population being displaced, the death of over 500,000 Syrians, and the establishment of the ISIS caliphate.
* Bruce Riedel, the former Middle East analyst, had left the agency for a job at the Brookings Institution. One day he got a phone call from a woman who was working on a book about Petraeus. She was attending a Brookings dinner event that night; could she stop by his office beforehand for an interview? Her name was Paula Broadwell.
“At about 5:00 p.m. in the evening she shows up,” Riedel recalled. “And she is dressed in this tight little black cocktail dress with platform heels six inches high. I was sitting there saying to myself, ‘Who comes to a Brookings dinner in a cocktail dress? That’s not our thing.’ And it never occurred to me. Thirty years in the intelligence business! It was right in front of my face and I couldn’t put it together!”
Broadwell was researching All-In: The Education of General David Petraeus. Since November 2011, she’d also been having an affair with the celebrated general, whom she’d met during his tour in Afghanistan. Broadwell had sent harassing emails to a Florida socialite named Jill Kelley, a family friend of the Petraeuses. After Kelley reported the emails to the FBI, the Bureau traced them to Broadwell—and discovered intimate messages to the CIA director in an email account they shared. The director and Broadwell had tried to conceal their email correspondence by accessing them in a draft folder. But with the FBI’s discovery, their secret emerged.
On October 26, 2012, agents from the bureau’s Tampa, Florida, office came to Langley, where they questioned the CIA director about his secret email account. Petraeus admitted to the affair with Broadwell, saying he’d lost his “moral compass.” When asked if he’d shared classified information with his lover, Petraeus denied it.
But that wasn’t true. Executing a search warrant at Broadwell’s home, investigators found more than one hundred photographs of highly classified information from eight bound notebooks belonging to Petraeus. They included code words for secret intelligence programs, the identities of covert officers, and confidential discussions with the NSC. Disclosure of these secrets could have caused “exceptionally grave damage,” according to the government.
* [Michael] Morell had set his sights on becoming director. He was respected but not beloved by his fellow analysts. “I think he had a tendency to kiss up and to kick down,” said one. “I think the power went to his head a little bit. It wasn’t all that long ago that he was writing PDBs and briefing them. Now he would pepper us: How do you know this? And why do we think that? And who is the source of that? When was it collected? And he would follow up with twelve taskings a day. And whether he wanted to make his authority known, or whether he really needed the information, I never quite understood.”
* Trump believed the CIA had been emasculated under Obama. Director Brennan had imposed strict rules on the Directorate of Operations. (“Some of the country’s greatest heroes were there,” Brennan told me, “but there were also people who thought the end justifies the means.”) Now Pompeo declared that the gloves were coming off; operatives would be left alone to do their jobs. A retired senior intelligence official spoke to a friend in the DO: “I asked, ‘So how are things going?’ He said, ‘It’s great. We can do what we want to do. We don’t have a lot of handwringing. We don’t have to go down to the White House, or if we do, they all kind of approve it.’ ”
“One of my colleagues was a longtime CIA guy,” recalled Rasmussen, the NCTC head. “And when Trump won and Pompeo was named director, he said, ‘It’s not Make America Great Again, it’s Make CIA Great Again.’ ” That meant “more willingness to put more people closer to harm’s way, to work with the Syrian rebels, or to spot for Iraqi forces in Mosul as they’re doing bombing campaigns. Or being closer to the fight. It wasn’t as if they went from zero to sixty, it was that they went from sixty to eighty.”
Whether this made the CIA great or not depended on your point of view. During the campaign Trump had said that the U.S. should kill terrorists and take out their families. Early on, Trump was shown video of a lethal drone strike on a terrorist’s lair; the drone operator waited before pulling the trigger until innocents cleared the area. Trump seemed baffled by this. “Why did you wait?” he asked. “Because killing noncombatants is a crime!” one CIA officer said to me privately. While some at the agency welcomed Trump’s anything-goes ethos, others were appalled by his complete lack of empathy.
