The day after the presidential election, on Wednesday, November 9, a dozen or so officials from the Trump transition team showed up at Trump Tower in Manhattan. Clutching multiple binders in their hands, they went to the fifth floor, where they spent the first two days in a conference room, doing nothing.
For the past seven months, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey had managed a traditional transition process. Trump had paid no attention to the transition planning, believing superstitiously it was “bad juju” to make any plan for what might happen in the event that he won the presidency. The planning for the transition was, however, mandated by federal law, and it was a large effort; there were more than four thousand positions to fill. Hundreds of those jobs were the most senior positions in the government, and the candidates for those jobs, in particular, needed to be extensively vetted.
It was only when Trump read in the newspaper that Christie was raising money to pay for the transition that he focused on the effort. Trump thought it was not only courting bad luck to focus on the transition but he worried it might divert resources away from his campaign. He asked Christie how much money he had raised for the transition. Christie told him that it wasn’t much more than a million dollars. Trump asked Christie if he could close down the transition effort. Christie explained that federal law mandated that the campaigns prepare and pay for their own transitions in preparation for the moment when one of them took over the government. Bannon, who had heard Trump talking about the transition with Christie, pointed out that if Trump closed down the transition team, it would look like he wasn’t running a serious campaign. Trump allowed the transition planning to proceed.
Christie and his team had assembled short lists of candidates for cabinet-level and senior staff positions. They also prepared rollout plans for how to repeal Obamacare, implement tax cuts, and overhaul infrastructure. All this planning was contained in some two-dozen binders. For Trump’s national security adviser, Christie had short-listed General Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Admiral Bill McRaven, the architect of the raid that had killed bin Laden five years earlier. Christie considered Flynn to be a loose cannon and was adamantly opposed to his taking a senior role in Trump’s cabinet. The Christie transition team had also short-listed a number of other heavy hitters for cabinet posts, such as the former governor of Indiana, Mitch Daniels, and Wisconsin governor Scott Walker.
For all his diligence in planning for the transition, by the final weeks of the Trump campaign, Christie was on the outs with Trump and his inner circle. On October 7, 2016, an Access Hollywood video from 2005 leaked, on which Trump boasted that his fame was such a magnet that he could grab women by their genitals. Christie, who was the first major Republican politician to endorse Trump, appeared on a New York radio station and said of the Access Hollywood video, “It’s completely indefensible, and I won’t defend it, and haven’t defended it.” This earned Christie no plaudits in Trumpworld.
On the morning of November 10, Bannon summoned Christie to his office on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower. Bannon was concerned that Christie was pitching a bunch of Never Trumpers for senior jobs. Bannon told Christie, “We decided to make a change.”
Christie replied, “Good. What are we changing?”
“You,” said Bannon.
Bannon went on: “The vice president is going to be the new chairman of the transition and you’re out. Going forward, you have no position of any kind in the transition, and we do not want you in the building anymore.”
Christie realized he wasn’t just being fired; he was being vaporized.
That evening, Rick Dearborn, the chief of staff for Senator Jeff Sessions, a close Trump ally, went to the conference room where the Trump transition officials were gathered, closed the door, and said, “I don’t know what you guys are doing, but I’m going to need you here all night. It’s not yet public but Chris Christie is out. The vice president is in. I am taking over as executive director. I need to look at everything that’s going on.”
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, had shoved a shiv in Christie’s back because more than a decade earlier Christie was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey who had put Kushner’s father in jail for two years for tax evasion and witness tampering.
In an episode that seemed lifted from The Sopranos, Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, was convicted of witness tampering because he had arranged for his brother-in-law to be secretly videotaped while having sex with a prostitute. Kushner Sr. then sent the tape to his sister and her husband, who were cooperating with the feds who were investigating him for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions. Welcome to Jersey!
With Christie gone, all the planning for an orderly transition was thrown out with him. The two dozen binders were literally consigned to the garbage. David Bossie, deputy campaign manager of the Trump campaign, said, “Everything that Chris had done was thrown out. There was no ‘Hey, let’s evaluate it.’ It was ‘Let’s start from scratch.’ ”
The jockeying for power and position at Trump Tower was intense. “It really felt like a mix of Survivor meets Big Brother meets The Apprentice, because it was highly competitive,” a transition official recalled. As he chose his cabinet, Trump drew on many of the tropes of reality TV that he knew so well. Trump presided over a beauty pageant of men and women contestants who looked the part and who all had to walk the gauntlet of TV cameras in the lobby of Trump Tower before they ascended to Trump’s aerie high above Central Park to audition for some of the most powerful jobs on the planet. This was the same building where The Apprentice had been filmed, which had turned Trump from a blowhard local businessman well known to the readers of the gossipy New York Post into a national celebrity who hired and fired aspiring moguls on network television.
Just as on The Apprentice, as Trump made his cabinet picks there were celebrations of the winners and the ritual humiliations of the losers. The former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who was auditioning to be secretary of state, even subjected himself to the ultimate reality TV convention of a candlelit dinner with Trump at the Trump International Hotel in Manhattan that played out for the cameras. Romney, who had called Trump a “fraud” during the campaign, didn’t make the cut.
Frances Townsend, who was George W. Bush’s top counterterrorism adviser, was one of the most prominent Republicans who had signed a public letter on behalf of the Never Trump campaign. Townsend was a serious contender for the key post of secretary of homeland security. When she spoke with Trump for about an hour at his Trump Tower office, the president-elect never mentioned Townsend’s opposition to his presidential run. Instead, Trump was charming and asked a number of sharp questions about national security, presenting quite a different persona than the boorish tycoon known to the public. Townsend decided to bow out of consideration for the job because of personal reasons.
Mattis wasn’t Trump’s first choice to be “Sec Def,” nor even his second. Mattis was his third choice. Trump loved “killers,” and if ever there was a real killer, it was retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal, who led JSOC during the Iraq War. McChrystal had turned “Jay-sock” into one of the most efficient killing machines in history.
McChrystal seemed to be the ideal candidate to run Trump’s Pentagon; not only had he overseen the final moments of uncounted thousands of jihadist militants, he had also resigned as the commander of the Afghan War in 2010 for disparaging remarks that some officers on his staff had made to a Rolling Stone reporter about top Obama administration officials.
The fact that McChrystal had to resign when he was working for President Obama was a huge plus for Trump. McChrystal had also worked closely with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn when they were both serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. Flynn was now the de facto leader of the Trump national security transition team.
Eight days after Trump won the election, on the afternoon of November 16, 2016, McChrystal was taking the train from Washington, DC, to Manhattan when his phone rang.
On the line was a Trump transition official. “We want you to come over to Trump Tower now. The president-elect is very excited to meet you and talk to you about the secretary of defense job.”
McChrystal replied, “Listen, I’ve been watching the campaign, and I don’t think I’d be a good fit for the president-elect’s team. I don’t think I’d be happy. Also, I’m not sure you’d be happy in the end.”
After a long silence, the Trump official asked, “Are you sure?”
“I’m absolutely sure,” McChrystal replied.
McChrystal wasn’t making his views publicly known, but he was disgusted by Trump’s rhetoric and conduct during the campaign and felt that he would likely serve as a president with much the same characteristics.
Around the same time that McChrystal took himself out of consideration to run the Pentagon, Vice President-Elect Mike Pence called Jack Keane, another retired four-star general and a frequent Fox News talking head, telling him, “The president-elect is very interested in you being secretary of defense.”
Keane’s wife, Terry, had died only a few months earlier. Terry Keane had had Parkinson’s for the past decade and a half, and Keane had taken care of her. Keane told Pence, “I’m not able to do that because of my wife’s recent death.”
Pence replied, “Well, I’m fairly confident that when I tell them this, he still is going to want to talk to you.”
Keane met with Trump on November 17 at his Trump Tower office, overlooking Central Park.
Trump said, “I understand about your wife passing away. How long were you married?”
Keane replied, “Fifty-one years. I was actually with her for fifty-five years. We met when we were both eighteen.”
Trump pushed himself back in his chair. “Oh my, you are really going through something.”
Keane went on, “I’m not in a position to do this emotionally and even financially. I had issues with my wife’s long-term health care. To go back and live on a government salary right now is not possible.”
Trump asked Keane, “Who do you think should be the secretary of defense?”
Keane asked Trump if he was insisting on a former senior military officer for the role. Keane believed that the United States was long past the Eisenhower and Marshall era when it made much sense for top generals to play in the political arena. Trump indicated that a retired four-star general was still his preference.
“What do you think of Jim Mattis?” Trump asked.
“Jim Mattis is somebody who could do the job,” Keane replied.
Retired now for three years, Mattis was volunteering at the Tri-Cities Food Bank in his hometown of Richland, Washington, when he received an unexpected call from a man who said, “Hi. It’s Mike Pence. I’d like to talk to you about coming and having a conversation about secretary of defense.”
Mattis told Pence: “Well, I’m doing food bank stuff. Can I call you back?”
On November 19, Mattis traveled to Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, to talk to the president-elect about the Defense job. They quickly had two important disagreements. On the campaign trail, Trump had campaigned on the promise of bringing back torture for suspected terrorists and had even talked about killing the families of terrorists.
Mattis had a very different view of how to interrogate terrorists. In real life, he told Trump, “you can get more with a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee.”
During the campaign, Trump had also repeatedly dumped on the NATO alliance, deeming it “obsolete.” Again, Mattis begged to differ, telling Trump, “If you didn’t have NATO, you’d have to build it.” Their disagreement about NATO would linger and intensify over time.
An issue that Trump and Mattis were in total agreement about was the need to annihilate ISIS. Asked if he could destroy ISIS in a year, Mattis said yes. “If you let us off the chain, we can do it.”
After the meeting, Trump came out to talk to the press. Framed by the white columns of his golf club, he and Mattis posed for pictures. Reporters shouted questions at the president-elect about whether Mattis was being considered for a cabinet job.
“He’s just a brilliant, wonderful man,” Trump replied. “What a career! We’re going to see what happens, but he is the real deal.”
In picking Mattis to be his secretary of defense, Trump said, he had found his “General George Patton.” That label did not capture what made Mattis a distinctive choice. Mattis’s “call sign” on the battlefield was “Chaos” in part because of his ferocity in battle and his colorful aphorisms, such as “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” After the 2003 invasion of their country, Mattis told Iraqi military leaders, “I come in peace. I didn’t bring artillery. But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.” But he was also an intellectual, a general who easily quoted the Roman stoic Marcus Aurelius as well as Eliot Cohen, the Republican military historian who was a leader of the Never Trump movement.
Mattis had worked with General David Petraeus on the 2006 counterinsurgency manual that helped to revolutionize the US approach to the Iraq War by emphasizing that fighting insurgents required assuming greater risks for American troops, who had to get out of their massive bases and live among the Iraqi people if they were to have a chance of really understanding and ultimately defeating the Iraqi insurgency.
In the summer of 2010, soon after Mattis took charge of CENTCOM, which oversees all American military operations in the Middle East, President Obama asked him what his top priorities were. Mattis said that he had three: “Number one Iran. Number two Iran. Number three Iran.”
A year later, an Iranian jet shot at an American drone flying in international air space over the Gulf. Mattis wanted permission to shoot down any Iranian aircraft that was attacking American drones. This permission was denied. Obama wanted to initiate the talks that eventually led to the Iran nuclear deal, and an attack on an Iranian target would surely undercut that. The Obama team forced Mattis to retire from the military early because of his hostility to Iran.
Mattis first learned about his defenestration when he was passed a note by one of his aides telling him that the Pentagon was announcing his replacement as the commander of CENTCOM. Neither the White House nor the Pentagon had bothered to give Mattis notice of his termination.
Mattis joined Flynn in that select category of senior generals whose careers were cut short by the Obama administration who would join Trump’s cabinet. Obama officials didn’t push General John Kelly out of office early, but he did occasionally clash with them when he was the commander of Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Kelly championed the expansion and renovation of the prison camp at Guantanamo, which was in SOUTHCOM’s area of operations, at a time when the Obama administration was trying to close the prison. Kelly would serve as Trump’s secretary of homeland security and later his chief of staff.
Shortly after Trump’s surprise victory, Kelly was at home on a Saturday afternoon watching college football with his wife, Karen, when the phone rang. On the phone was Reince Priebus—the man that Kelly would later supplant as White House chief of staff—who told Kelly, “Mr. Trump would like to have an opportunity to talk to you about maybe going into the administration.”
After serving forty-five years in the marine corps, General Kelly was only eight months into his retirement. Kelly consulted with his wife about the possible offer from the Trump team. Karen said, “If we’re anything, the Kelly family is a family of service to the nation. If they think they need you, you can’t get out of it.” She added jokingly, “Besides, I’m really tired of this quality retired time we’re spending together.”
Kelly met with Trump, who told him, “I’d like you to take the hardest, and what I consider to be the toughest, job in the federal government.” Trump said he was asking him to run the Department of Homeland Security. Kelly was surprised by the offer: he didn’t know Trump at all and he didn’t know anyone who knew Trump. Kelly took the job because he felt it was his civic duty to do so. If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency and made him a similar offer, he would have worked for her.
Running the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was indeed one of the toughest jobs in the government. DHS was an ungainly giant of twenty-two federal departments and agencies that merged together in the wake of 9/11; it was made up of 240,000 employees who handled everything from hurricanes to cybersecurity to border security to terrorism. Illegal immigration was an issue with which Kelly was quite familiar, as his last job in uniform was as the four-star general in charge of SOUTHCOM, which was focused on Central and Latin America and protecting the southern border.
When Jack Keane turned down the secretary of defense job, Trump had pressed him for advice about his national security team and the type of security challenges that his administration would be confronting. It was an advisory role that Keane was quite comfortable with. Keane, a Vietnam vet who had served as the vice chief of staff of the army, had played a key role in advocating the measures that had changed the course of the Iraq War, which the United States was clearly losing three years after Saddam Hussein was removed from power. In December 2006, Keane, recently retired, had gone to the White House to advise President George W. Bush that he needed to adopt a counterinsurgency approach to fighting the war, as well as surging the number of American troops in Iraq and selecting General David Petraeus to be the war’s new commander. Bush implemented all of those suggestions, and within three years the tide of the war had turned in favor of the American military.
Keane was determined to give honest counsel to the president-elect. He told Trump that he wasn’t the first commander in chief with scant foreign policy or national security experience: “Most post–World War II presidents have not had a significant background in these areas. George H. W. Bush is probably the exception to that. All presidents are quick studies, but it’s critical what you’re doing now in selecting leaders who understand that world.”
Keane grew up in a housing project in Manhattan and he connected easily with Trump as a fellow New Yorker. Keane went on, “You’ll start spending more and more time with the national security team because the world has a way of intervening regardless of what your domestic agenda is. So pick the team not only for their experience and knowledge, but pick them because you’re comfortable being around them; you’re going to spend a lot of time with them.”
Trump started sounding Keane out about the long wars he would soon be inheriting. Trump observed, “We have been in the Middle East for a long time. And we’ve lost thousands of soldiers and it’s cost trillions of dollars.” Keane acknowledged that this was true.
Trump asked, “Is the situation worse now or better?”
Keane said, “It’s worse.”
Trump asked, “Why?”
Keane replied, “The Middle East is the most dangerous neighborhood in the world. It is very challenging. But we did make it worse when we forced Mubarak out of Egypt and we got a Muslim Brotherhood government followed by a military coup; when we pulled all US troops out of Iraq and we got ISIS who established a sanctuary in Syria and invaded Iraq; we failed to help the Syrian moderate forces in any consequential way, and the war raged on resulting in a humanitarian crisis; we deposed Qaddafi in Libya but failed to help the elected regime that followed, and the radicals destroyed the US consulate, killed our ambassador and three other Americans, and forced the closure of the US embassy; and we made a bad deal with Iran where they received billions of dollars to fuel their malign aggressive behavior. Yes, it’s worse.”
Keane continued, “The alternative is that we could just pull away and leave it to themselves. I think about the 1930s in Europe. And you look at what leaders in Europe did by ignoring what was happening in Germany. They helped light a match to the greatest calamity in the history of mankind, which was World War II.”
Keane said that there was now “this ideology that sits inside the Middle East, and it’s a breeding ground for radicalism worldwide. We have the radicalism of Iran, which is trying to achieve regional hegemony. And they have two objectives to achieve that—one is to drive the United States out of the region, and the other is to destroy the state of Israel.”
Trump talked about the massive US trade deficit with the Chinese. Keane then shifted the focus to China’s rising military power, saying, “President Xi intends to replace the United States as the world’s global leader. They have a brilliant asymmetric strategy to take away some of the military and technology advantages the United States has in air and maritime power. I think the Obama administration did not take on the challenges that China was presenting, despite the fact that we were supposedly pivoting to Asia to do that very thing, but you couldn’t see that in the Obama military defense budget. We need new airplanes, missiles, and ships and also improved ground fighting capability. We can’t do this for just a year or two. This is a five- to six-year minimum investment to dig us out of this big hole.”
Shifting to Afghanistan, Trump observed, “No one can win there.”
Keane disagreed. “No, Mr. President, this is not true. That’s a myth: that somehow thirty thousand Taliban soldiers that used to run a brutal regime are now going to take it back. You’ve got to understand something: eighty-five percent of the people don’t want the Taliban to be in charge. That’s been true for all the years we’ve been there.” Trump indicated that this was news to him.
Keane said, “I don’t want to take too much of your time, but I did a lot of assessments in Afghanistan.” Keane observed that it was Obama who had sabotaged the Afghan War by publicly announcing in 2009 a premature withdrawal date of the forces that he had surged into the country. “That decision doomed us to a protracted war in Afghanistan.”
The foreign policy issues Keane discussed with the president-elect that day would indeed prove to be some of the biggest and most contentious questions Trump’s national security team would wrestle with in the months to come.
The Trump team was casting around for a confirmable nominee for secretary of state. One possibility was former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, but his consulting company had dealings with countries and businesses around the world and presented many potential conflicts of interest; it would likely make for a messy confirmation process.
Keane saw that Trump was struggling to find the right candidate for secretary of state. Keane thought that David Petraeus, the retired four-star general with a history PhD from Princeton who had turned around the faltering Iraq War and was now working for the global investment bank KKR, would be excellent as the country’s top diplomat.
Keane made the case first to Kushner and then to Trump about why Petraeus was so well qualified to run State.
Trump asked Keane, “Is he a Democrat?”
Keane replied, “I don’t have a clue. Petraeus and I have something in common: neither of us votes.”
Trump seemed surprised. “You don’t vote?”
Keane responded, “Because we want to stay out of politics.”
Henry Kissinger had also told senior Trump transition officials, “You’ve got to take a hard look at Petraeus.”
On November 28, Petraeus took the well-trodden path to Trump’s office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower where he met with the president-elect, Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus. Both Trump and Petraeus had brought lists of questions to the meeting to ask each other. It was the first time that the two men had met, and they were feeling each other out.
Trump asked the general, “Should we build a wall?”
Petraeus replied, “Sure, we should build a wall if it’s part of a comprehensive approach to improving border security, such as relationships with the Mexicans, better intel-sharing between the intel agencies.”
Petraeus asked Trump, “Mr. President-Elect, you are not against trade? You are just against unfair trade, right?”
Trump replied, “Yeah.”
Everybody at the Trump Tower meeting was blown away by Petraeus, who gave a cogent tour d’horizon of the world and had a strong command presence. After their friendly meeting, Trump tweeted, “Just met with General Petraeus—was very impressed!”
If Trump selected Petraeus to be secretary of state, retired generals would now have a lock on all of his key national security cabinet posts, with Mattis at the Pentagon, Kelly at Homeland Security, and Flynn as the national security adviser.
Trump’s top advisers didn’t think it was much of an issue that Petraeus had handed over classified materials to his biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell, which had led to his resignation as Obama’s CIA director in 2012. But when they consulted Mattis and Kelly about whether Petraeus should head the State Department, they both gave an emphatic, hard no. They said selecting Petraeus as secretary of state would send a terrible signal to the officer corps that mishandling classified materials and extramarital affairs could be glossed over.
Two days later Kelly met with Trump at Trump Tower and told him, “Cannot happen. I think it would have real morale issues for the non-field-grade officers.” The next day Mattis also made the same points to Trump in person. Within three days of his meeting with Trump, Petraeus’s possible nomination as secretary of state was over.
Robert Gates arrived at Trump Tower on December 2. Gates had served as secretary of defense for both George W. Bush and Barack Obama and had worked in Washington going back to the time of the Lyndon Johnson administration. The Trump team saw Gates as a “Bush guy.” Even though he hadn’t signed a Never Trump letter, the fact that he was a Bushie was a major strike against him, as was his service in the Obama administration. The Obama team had nicknamed Gates “Yoda,” after the diminutive Star Wars character who was both wise and powerful. Gates was certainly the wisest of the wise men in the Republican Party, which was why he was at Trump Tower to advise Bannon, Kushner, Priebus, and the president-elect.
Trump asked Gates to evaluate each of the candidates he was considering for secretary of state—Giuliani, Petraeus, and Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Gates didn’t give ringing endorsements for any of them. Trump asked Gates who he would suggest as most qualified if he were starting with a clean sheet of paper.
Gates replied, “A guy with experience in a couple of administrations and who understands the Defense Department because Defense is such a big part of what the State Department is now. Knows the Hill. Knows intelligence.”
Was Gates—also a former CIA director—making a pitch to be Trump’s secretary of state?
Gates added half jokingly, “If I can humbly say, it’s someone like myself.”
There was dead silence. Trump just sat there and didn’t say anything. The silence went on for almost a minute; it seemed like an eternity.
Finally, Gates pivoted to a new subject. “Of course, I don’t need another job! I’ve talked extensively with Condi [George W. Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice]. And we think a guy to look at is Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon.” Gates said Tillerson was a tough negotiator and he already knew a lot of leaders around the world. Trump seemed intrigued.
Pence called Tillerson and asked him to come to meet the president-elect. Tillerson asked if he could skip the gauntlet of cameras that were always staking out the Trump Tower lobby and meet with Trump discreetly. Tillerson was whisked from a private entrance in Trump Tower to Trump’s office, where Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus were waiting with the president-elect.
Tillerson owned the room. The silver-haired Texan came off like a head of state. And in a sense he was. ExxonMobil had revenues exceeding $250 billion a year; if it were a country, it would be the forty-first largest economy in the world, putting it on par with Pakistan.
Tillerson had spent decades working in the Middle East and in Russia and he could speak with great knowledge about them. When he was a young oil engineer, Tillerson had lived in Yemen! Exxon was the largest taxpayer in Saudi Arabia! Tillerson had known Russian president Vladimir Putin for almost two decades! For his work developing oil fields in Russia, Putin had given Tillerson an Order of Friendship award!
Tillerson dazzled Trump and his inner circle. On the spot, Trump offered Tillerson the secretary of state job.
Bannon looked at Tillerson, asking him, “You’re surprised?”
Tillerson replied, “Yeah. I already have a job.”
Trump observed, “Yeah, but you’re going to retire soon, aren’t you?”
Indeed, Tillerson was supposed to retire to his Texas ranch in a few months, where he would get to spend time with his grandkids. He said he would have to discuss the job offer with the Exxon board and his family.
Back at home, Tillerson’s wife said to him, “I told you God’s not through with you.”
Kushner told colleagues that his father-in-law’s best cabinet choice was tapping Tillerson to be secretary of state. That halo would soon dim.
Although Trump made his cabinet choices relatively quickly, below that level the key national security agencies were dealing with the most chaotic transition in memory. At the State Department and the Pentagon, the Trump “landing teams” that were supposed to come in to ease the transition from one administration to the next barely showed up. At the State Department, no one in the counterterrorism bureau had any contact with the Trump transition team, despite the fact that Trump had made the fight against terrorism such a key part of his campaign. Similarly, at the Pentagon, few of the members of the Trump landing team held top-secret clearances, which meant that most of the team could not be briefed on the key programs at the Department of Defense.
A civil servant who worked at Obama’s National Security Council for a year and then for Trump’s NSC for several months summarized the transition from Obama to Trump as a “shitshow.” Another NSC staffer who worked for both Obama and Trump was even blunter, describing the transition as a “a total goat fuck.”
It wasn’t supposed to have been this way. Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, summoned an all-staff NSC meeting in the spring of 2016, at which she declared, “The Bush team gave us a very good transition and our role is to meet and exceed that bar that they set for us. You NSC staffers are going to work very hard for the next eight months in setting up the incoming team, whoever that may be.” Over the following months, NSC staffers churned out memos for a variety of scenarios, such as what a war might look like on the Korean Peninsula.
The morning after Election Day, some Obama staffers were weeping openly in the halls of the West Wing and the adjoining Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the massive gray, wedding-cakelike nineteenth century building where the National Security Council staff is housed. Staffers who had worked for many hundreds of hours on Obama initiatives such as the Iran nuclear deal or the Paris climate change agreement knew that all their work was likely to go up in smoke.
Obama consoled his staff, telling them, “The people have spoken. We need the best possible transition.” But nobody from the Trump team showed up at the NSC during the month of November. By early December there were a couple of meetings between Trump staffers and NSC staffers. It was an oddly quiet holiday season at the White House.
An early indicator of the likely trajectory of Trump and his inner circle was the dumping of former congressman Mike Rogers from the Trump transition team. Rogers, who had chaired the House Intelligence Committee, was one of the first serious players in Congress to endorse Trump, but he was deemed to have been insufficiently zealous in his prosecution of then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton during the Benghazi hearings. Meanwhile, the star of Representative Mike Pompeo rose because Pompeo had filed his own blistering report about the Benghazi attack and had publicly claimed that the Benghazi matter was “worse” than Watergate. Pompeo would be tapped to be CIA director.
Another early indicator about where the Trump administration was headed was the dual appointment of the head of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, as chief of staff and Steve Bannon as “chief strategist” in the White House. Those appointments signaled that Trump would sometimes heed the establishment types and at other times the ideologues in his administration. It also created a White House with major competing power centers. This was compounded by the large portfolio that Jared Kushner accorded to himself, taking responsibility for relations with China, Mexico, and the Middle East, which effectively made him the shadow secretary of state.
The chaos of the transition was so profound and the Trump administration had so few of its senior officials in place when it assumed office that to keep the national security apparatus running with a semblance of order, the Trump administration asked a handful of senior Obama administration officials to stay on. Among them was Nick Rasmussen, who ran the National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinated counterterrorism strategy and intelligence across the government. In this, the Trump administration was following an honorable post-9/11 bipartisan tradition when it came to counterterrorism. Rasmussen had previously served in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations in senior White House counterterrorism roles. Joshua Geltzer, the senior director for counterterrorism at the White House for Obama, was also asked to stay on in that role by the Trump administration, as was Brett McGurk, who oversaw the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS at the Department of State.
It was clear, however, that any contender for a senior job in the Trump administration was subject to a litmus test: you would not be considered for a role if you had criticized Trump in the past. This meant that many qualified candidates were passed over by the Trump team, and certainly the many dozens of leading Republican foreign policy experts who made up the Never Trumpers. This set up some immediate conflicts between the Trump White House and Mattis, who didn’t want Trump loyalists who were either amateurs or weirdos serving at the Pentagon.
Mattis wanted Michèle Flournoy to be his top deputy. Flournoy, a Democrat who had worked in defense policy in Washington for decades, would likely have been tapped to be Hillary Clinton’s secretary of defense if Clinton had won the election. Flournoy would have been the first woman to serve in that position. Flournoy knew the Pentagon and its massive bureaucracy well because she had served in the key role of undersecretary for policy in Obama’s Pentagon.
Flournoy was torn about taking the job. Her father had served in World War II, her husband was a naval officer, and she was the mother of a soon-to-be naval officer. She felt it was her duty to serve, and she and Mattis were close. But then there was Trump and his treatment of women and his demonization of refugees, immigrants, and Muslims. Added to that was his complete lack of understanding of the United States’ historical role as the leader of a rules-based international order and the unique strategic value of America’s alliances. For Trump, every country seemed to be judged only through the narrow lens of its bilateral trade balances with the United States. Not least, there was Trump’s impulsiveness, which Flournoy found deeply worrisome in a commander in chief. Flournoy went to meet with a couple of officials on the Trump transition team at Trump Tower in Manhattan, but in the end she decided to drop out of consideration for the job given all of her misgivings.
To fill the important job of undersecretary for policy, Mattis wanted to bring on Anne Patterson, a recently retired career diplomat. The White House nixed Patterson because when she was US ambassador to Egypt, she had performed typical ambassadorial functions with the democratically elected Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi. This made Patterson suspect in the eyes of some Trump officials and supporters. They thought she was some kind of closet Muslim Brotherhood fan, when in reality Patterson was a seasoned diplomat simply doing her job.
At the State Department, Tillerson faced some of the same issues Mattis did. Tillerson wanted Elliott Abrams, a sharp observer of the Middle East who had worked in Republican administrations going back to Reagan, to serve as his number two. Abrams hadn’t signed any of the Never Trump letters, but he had written an opinion piece in the Weekly Standard with the self-explanatory title “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate” after Trump had clinched the Republican nomination. Tillerson felt he needed someone seasoned like Abrams to help him navigate Washington’s tricky shoals. Kushner and Republican senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who was closely allied with Trump, also pushed for Abrams.
Tillerson brought Abrams to meet Trump at the White House and they had a cordial exchange. Trump wasn’t happy about appointing Abrams but went along with it because Tillerson wanted him.
Trump later watched Tucker Carlson on Fox who was interviewing the isolationist senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, who railed against Abrams saying, “He said that the chair that Washington and Lincoln sat in, that Trump was not fit to sit in it. . . . Elliott Abrams is one of the key architects of the Iraq War. We don’t need people with the failed policies back in. Donald Trump does represent something new and different, I think a welcome relief from the neocons. So I hope he doesn’t appoint someone who doesn’t really agree with him.”
Trump called Tillerson saying, “Fire your buddy.”
Tillerson said, “I can’t do that. I just offered the job. The city will go nuts. We told everybody.”
Trump replied, “He’s fired. You get rid of him.”
In mid-November 2016, Obama ordered a full review of the Russian meddling in the election to be finished before Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017. Media reports soon emerged that the CIA had concluded in a secret assessment that Russia had intervened in the election to help Trump win the presidency, rather than merely to spread doubts about the American electoral system. The intelligence agencies also had identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who had provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee, which WikiLeaks published for maximum effect on July 22, 2016, just before the Democratic convention.
Around Christmas, the Trump transition team dismissed these findings in a statement: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’ ” Trump was famously unpersuaded that the Russians were behind the hacking, saying, “I don’t believe they interfered . . . it could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey.” This put him in the unusual position of rejecting the findings of the CIA even before he took office.
There were also significant differences between the CIA’s weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco a decade and a half earlier and the evidence that was offered by the American intelligence community about the Russian hacking. Unlike the Iraqi WMD case, which relied on dodgy defectors and shaky circumstantial evidence, the evidence in the election hacking case was based on “digital fingerprints” that pointed definitively to Russian involvement.
In late December, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security took the unusual step of publicly releasing an account of the Russian hacking efforts (code-named by the US government GRIZZLY STEPPE), which went into detail about how and when the hacking was accomplished. The report portrayed a sophisticated set of spear-phishing campaigns that began in the spring of 2015 that targeted the Democratic National Committee. The report said that spear-phishing emails “tricked recipients into changing their passwords” and through the harvesting of those credentials the Russians were “able to gain access and steal content, likely leading to the exfiltration of information from multiple senior party members.”
On December 29, 2016, Obama sanctioned top Russian officials for their role in the election meddling in the States, ejected thirty-five Russian diplomats who were alleged to be intelligence operatives, and denied the Russians access to some of their diplomatic facilities in New York and Maryland. It was the most robust response the United States had ever made to a cyberattack.
Trump reacted to the news of the Russian sanctions and expulsions with nonchalance, saying, “It’s time for our country to move on to bigger and better things.” Trump seemed unable to separate his narcissistic fears that the Russian hacking might tarnish his presidential victory from the very real problem that the Russians had successfully undermined one of the bedrock principles of the nation, its ability to have free and fair elections unhampered by outside interference. Trump’s intransigence set the stage for what was shaping up to be the most serious crisis of any presidential transition in memory, pitting the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency (NSA) against the incoming president.
The showdown was set to climax with CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers, and FBI director James Comey all briefing the president-elect at Trump Tower on January 6, 2017, about the Russian hacking. In the days leading up to this meeting, Trump sent out a number of tweets, including one that quoted Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, an archenemy of the US intelligence community because of his role in the leaking of tens of thousands of classified US government documents. Trump tweeted that “Julian Assange said, ‘a 14-year-old could have hacked Podesta’—why was DNC so careless? Also said Russians did not give him the info!” In an interview with the New York Times, Trump said, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, that he was the victim of a “political witch hunt.”
Trump also claimed that he had “secret” intelligence he would soon reveal about the hack. He also took time out from dissing the intelligence community to dis the new star of Celebrity Apprentice who had replaced him on the show, tweeting, “Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got ‘swamped’ (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT.”
By now, senior members of Trump’s national security team were seriously worried that Trump might come out of the briefing and say or tweet something that would irretrievably harm his relationship with the CIA, FBI, and NSA and also render the future president suspect among anyone who took the nation’s security seriously.
At the intelligence briefing, Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and Rogers laid out for Trump the case that the Russians had seriously meddled with the election. In an extraordinary unclassified version of the briefing that the CIA, FBI, and NSA released immediately after Trump was briefed, they said that the hacking was personally ordered by Putin “to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability.” They also said that the Russians had developed a clear preference for President-Elect Trump and that Putin’s animosity against Clinton sprang from the belief that she was to blame for the mass protests against his regime five years earlier and also because he nursed a grudge against her for some unflattering comments that she had made about him.
The US intelligence community concluded that Russian intelligence had gained access to the Democratic National Committee networks and had harvested a large amount of data from the personal email accounts of Democratic Party officials. US intelligence officials also laid out the close links between WikiLeaks, which had released the hacked emails, and the Russians. They also explained the key role that the Russia Today (RT) television network had played in an information warfare campaign against Clinton. This latter point must surely have discomfited Mike Flynn, given his friendly relationship with RT. The classified version of the intelligence report said that senior Russian officials were caught on phone intercepts cheering Trump’s victory, including some of the officials who knew of the secret hacking campaign.
After the Trump Tower briefing, Trump released his most conciliatory statement about the issue to date: “I had a constructive meeting and conversation with the leaders of the Intelligence Community this afternoon. . . . While Russia, China, other countries, outside groups and people are consistently trying to break through the cyber infrastructure of our governmental institutions, businesses and organizations including the Democrat [sic] National Committee, there was absolutely no effect on the outcome of the election. . . . Whether it is our government, organizations, associations or businesses we need to aggressively combat and stop cyberattacks. I will appoint a team to give me a plan within 90 days of taking office.”
This statement was enough to head off a complete rupture between Trump and the intelligence community, but it was far from the end of the story. Four days after the Trump Tower briefing, CNN broke the news that a classified annex to Trump’s briefing contained uncorroborated information from a trusted former British intelligence officer that the Russians had acquired significant derogatory information about Trump, including that he had allegedly consorted with prostitutes on a business trip to Moscow in 2013. There were also allegations that officials in the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russians to undermine Clinton’s campaign and that as a quid pro quo Trump would not criticize Putin for his annexation of parts of Ukraine, and would also attack NATO in his public statements.
From Trump’s point of view, the Democrats were simply going to use Russia to explain why they lost the election, and he didn’t appreciate that one bit. Trump did not want his presidency to be understood as the fruit of a foreign intelligence operation rather than a historical achievement of extraordinary consequence. This also colored how he viewed the US intelligence and law enforcement communities, as well as the measures taken by the Obama administration against the Russians. All this had created such a negative environment that Trump thought that his ability to engage personally with Putin was going to be severely limited. Trump resented all of this.
The “lead pens” on Trump’s inaugural address were Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller. They were Trump’s America First brain trust. They had both spent key parts of their lives in the uber-liberal Los Angeles enclave of Santa Monica on the Pacific Ocean. As a teenager, Miller had rebelled against what he thought was the knee-jerk liberalism being rammed down his throat at Santa Monica High School. At the same time that Miller was railing against liberalism at his school, from his own perch in Santa Monica, Bannon was producing conservative, nationalist films with titles such as In the Face of Evil about Reagan’s struggle with communism, which Bannon connected to America’s post-9/11 struggle with “radical Islam.”
A key message that Trump wanted in the inaugural address was that the fight against ISIS wasn’t going to take a generation. As commander in chief Trump would take down their physical caliphate as quickly as feasible and would “eradicate completely from the face of the Earth . . Radical Islamic Terrorism.”
As they were writing the speech, Bannon told Trump, “This is an inaugural address. People are going to be talking about this a hundred years from now, right? You’re saying eradicate radical Islamic terrorists from the face of the earth. This is one they’re going to hold you accountable. This is a declarative sentence. This is much bolder than Kennedy’s address.”
In his bleak inaugural speech, Trump painted the United States as a crime-ridden economic basket case that he had come to rescue. Trump declared, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” In fact, crime was at a twenty-year low and the economy was at an eight-year high. Trump went on to trumpet: “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this moment on, it’s going to be America First!”
After the speech, Miller told Bannon, “You know, it was just perfect. Just perfect.”
“There’s only one problem,” Bannon replied. “We should have turned the podium around and had it face the group of assholes on the platform.”
The irony appeared to be lost on Bannon that the inaugural address, a manifesto of America First populism working in the service of the common man, was delivered by a multibillionaire and cowritten by a multimillionaire many times over and the scion of a wealthy Santa Monica family.
Following his inaugural address, at a lunch on Capitol Hill, Trump pointed to his new secretary of defense Jim Mattis and said, “This is central casting. If I was doing a movie, I pick you, general.” Mattis certainly “looked the part,” which was a matter of crucial importance to Trump, the former reality TV star and beauty pageant impresario.
The day after he was installed as president, Trump traveled from the White House to CIA headquarters just across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia. The visit was intended to build bridges to the CIA, but Trump squandered the opportunity by bragging (falsely) about the size of the crowd at his inauguration, a speech that he made in the CIA’s main lobby in front of the Memorial Wall of stars, representing all the CIA officers who have died in the line of duty.
Former CIA director John Brennan, who had stepped down from his post a day earlier, dispatched an aide to NBC News to say that he was “deeply saddened and angered at Donald Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes.” The bridge building was clearly still a work in progress.
Four days after his inauguration, Trump hung a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in his office. The choice was significant. Bannon found that he could talk to Trump through history. Bannon told Trump, “You are a historical figure, a transformational figure—you are Andrew Jackson. You’re an outsider, fucking tough as boot leather. Women love you, you’ve got animal magnetism, and you’ve got charisma. You’re Jackson and, trust me, the fucking elite hated Jackson and they hate you.”
The first foreign leader to visit the newly inaugurated President Trump at the White House was British prime minister Theresa May. As they were discussing over lunch what was happening in Ukraine, May asked Trump, “Have you spoken with Putin?”
Trump said, “No, I haven’t.”
Mike Flynn leaned in and said, “Sir, we’re arranging that call now. President Putin called several days ago, but we haven’t been able to get it on your calendar yet.”
Trump looked down the table and said, “Are you kidding me? Vladimir Putin tried to call me, and you didn’t put him through? What the hell were you thinking?”
Flynn replied, “Well, sir, you know, you have a lot of calls coming in, and we’re trying to manage who you talk to.”
The president said, “Vladimir Putin is the only man on earth who can destroy us, and you didn’t put the call through?” Trump realized that this was not the discussion to have in front of Theresa May, so he changed the subject.
After the lunch, Trump called his senior staff together, asking them, “What kind of bullshit is this? How is it possible that Putin calls me and you don’t put the call through? I don’t know what you guys are doing.” Then the president stormed out of the room.
A week into his presidency, Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum that gave Bannon a full seat on the National Security Council. The same order also bizarrely removed the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs from having a permanent seat on the NSC. They could only attend the NSC on an ad hoc basis rather than as a “principal” such as Bannon. Not having the leading intelligence official and the top military officer attend every NSC meeting as a matter of course was unprecedented.
Bannon later said he was appointed to the NSC to keep an eye on the national security adviser. “I never went to one NSC meeting. I was just kind of there to keep an eye on things and make sure crazy shit didn’t happen,” Bannon recalled.
The Obama White House had a well-deserved reputation for micromanaging military operations from the West Wing. Sometimes this made sense to ensure a thorough process to consider the risks of any operation, but combat commanders generally understood what was happening on the ground far better than officials in the White House, and waiting for West Wing approval for an operation could be time-consuming.
Bannon told Flynn, “We are de-operationalizing the NSC. We need to go to the [former national security adviser Brent] Scowcroft model, which is the curation of an interagency process that gives the president a wide range of options. We ain’t running any fucking wars out of the West Wing. That’s over. We’re devolving those powers back to combatant commanders with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and particularly Mattis. Mattis is on board to eradicate ISIS.”
Bannon and Flynn were both surprised by how bloated the NSC staff had become. Flynn asked Bannon, “How many guys do they have at the NSC?”
Bannon said, “I don’t know, one hundred, max?”
Flynn told him, “Four hundred and fifty.”
“We’re going to get rid of all the Obama appointees and detailees out of here ASAP and get our own people in,” Bannon responded.
While he was national security adviser, Flynn never sent out an all-staff email, and he didn’t hold his first all-staff meeting until two weeks into his brief tenure. At the all-staff, Flynn gave a rambling speech that included the observation, “If you get out in the country, and I know because I have been traveling the country with the president throughout the campaign, you just know things are really messed up.” Flynn’s speech sounded like a Trump campaign rally. If the national security adviser had a substantive view about how he would go about implementing the president’s vision, he didn’t speak to it.
At the meeting, a State Department detailee to the NSC asked Flynn, “What about the president’s attack on the media and the ‘deep state’? Any advice for those of us conducting relations with other countries that are cracking down on their media? How should we deal with this?”
Flynn replied, “Well, that’s how our republic works, and the president won. Civil servants who don’t like it should get out.”
Another NSC staffer asked Flynn, “What does an ‘America First’ foreign policy look like?”
There was a long pause. A couple of hundred key foreign policy and national security officials waited for an answer. Suddenly, it became painfully obvious that the national security adviser of the United States couldn’t explain what the Trump administration’s foreign policy actually was. This was quite surprising. Even alarming.
Flynn turned to the deputy national security adviser, K. T. McFarland. “K. T., do you have an answer?”
McFarland was a longtime Fox News talking head who had been out of government since she had worked as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration. Flynn appointed her to be the deputy national security adviser despite scant relevant expertise or experience.
McFarland didn’t answer the question directly. Instead she addressed the room. “Wow! Look at all these people! I didn’t know there were so many people on the NSC staff. Together we are gonna Make America Great Again!”
NSC staffers found McFarland to be charming, but unversed in substantive issues. McFarland told the staffers that she wanted instructions about what to do in meetings at the White House. “I am a TV person,” she said. “Give me the script and tell me what to say. Tell me what to do at two minutes, what I do at five minutes, and what I do at ten minutes.”
McFarland did attempt to bring some order to the first chaotic weeks of the new administration, calling the first “deputies” meeting of subcabinet officials in the Trump administration to focus on North Korea. She also was able to interpret Trump well, warning the NSC team that getting Trump to commit to the war in Afghanistan was not going to be easy.
Adding to the overall sense of confusion about the national security policy-making process, parallel to the NSC, Bannon headed up something called the Special Initiatives Group (SIG), which also involved fellow Breitbart alumnus Sebastian Gorka. Gorka grandiosely described his work to CNN as “doing long-range initiatives of real import to the president.” But it wasn’t at all clear what the SIG’s actual role was. A senior White House official described it as not much more than “two people going to lunch.” After a few months, the SIG simply faded away.
Now that he was without a real role, Gorka spent much of his time on television pontificating about the “new sheriff in town” and asserting that “the alpha males are back.” Meanwhile, at the White House, those with the most sensitive clearances stayed away from Gorka and didn’t invite him to meetings about counterterrorism, his supposed specialty, because they found him to be an uninformed blowhard. Other White House officials deemed Gorka to be “harmless.” Most NSC staffers could never figure out what Gorka actually did.
Flynn, who had the reputation of building smart teams when he was an army officer, appointed a group of NSC officials who were deeply knowledgeable in three areas key to American national security interests: China, the Middle East, and Russia. The top NSC official on Asia was Matthew Pottinger, who spent many years in China working as a Mandarin-speaking reporter for the Wall Street Journal. After leaving the Journal, Pottinger joined the marines and served as a captain in Afghanistan, which is where he met Flynn. Together they wrote an influential paper, “Fixing Intel,” which made the entirely reasonable case that American intelligence agencies had to do a better job of getting “outside the wire” if they really wanted to understand what was happening in countries such as Afghanistan. The paper’s publication in 2010 by a Washington, DC, think tank caused quite a ruckus, especially as it was published outside of normal government channels.
Pottinger became a key architect of the Trump administration’s more skeptical approach to China. He had experienced the authoritarianism of the Chinese firsthand during his seven-year stint as a reporter in China. When Pottinger was reporting on the sale of Chinese nuclear fuel, he was confronted by a government goon in a Starbucks in Beijing, who punched him in the face.
During the Obama administration, China was largely framed as a “frenemy.” Under Trump, the framing shifted to focus more on the “enemy” side of that equation. Indicative of where Trump was going to take the relationship with China was the phone call he had during the transition with the president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-wen. The Chinese were panicked by the call because they regarded the island of Taiwan as part of “One-China” and here Trump was treating them as if they were a separate country. Top Chinese foreign policy official Yang Jiechi flew over to New York immediately to meet with Kushner, Flynn, Bannon, and Priebus. Yang told Trump’s top advisers, “Would you mind if we say something at the beginning? The territorial integrity and sovereignty of China will not be questioned.” He then spent the next hour lecturing them in perfect English about the history of China and its various humiliations by Western powers over the past century and a half.
Flynn appointed Colonel Joel Rayburn as the NSC senior director for Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. An intelligence officer and historian who had served in Iraq as an adviser to General David Petraeus, in 2014 Rayburn published Iraq after America, a must-read book for anyone who wanted to understand how Iraq had descended into chaos following the American troop withdrawal three years earlier. Michael Bell, a retired colonel with a PhD who had served as the head of Petraeus’s internal advisory group when he was the commanding general in Iraq, was appointed to oversee the Gulf States and Yemen. The NSC’s top official on Russia was Fiona Hill, a frequent critic of Vladimir Putin who had worked as a US intelligence officer focused on Russia under President George W. Bush and President Obama.
The overall director for the Middle East at the NSC was retired colonel Derek Harvey, an intense intelligence officer who had served as the head of the US military cell examining the insurgency in Iraq in 2003. Harvey concluded after talking with a number of insurgent leaders that the decisions by the Bush administration to disband the Iraqi military and to fire tens of thousands of members of the Baath Party were pivotal to fueling the insurgency, as the military and Baath Party were dominated by Sunni Iraqis who largely ran the country under Saddam Hussein. Their abrupt dismissal had flipped the social, economic, and political order on its head, creating a large group of disenfranchised men willing to take up arms against the new rulers of Iraq. It was Colonel Harvey who first laid out for President George W. Bush at the White House in the winter of 2004 the real scale and nature of the Sunni insurgency at a time when the Bush administration wouldn’t use the word “insurgency,” as it implied that they were facing something much more serious than the “dead enders” that Vice President Dick Cheney was then publicly talking about. Later CENTCOM’s intelligence chief under Obama, Harvey came to feel strongly that the Obama administration’s dominant narrative after the death of bin Laden that al-Qaeda was on the run was dangerously out of whack with the growing and metastasizing jihadist threat that he was observing in the Middle East.
Bell, Harvey, and Rayburn were all protégés of General Petraeus, with whom they had worked closely during the Iraq War, and they all brought much experience and expertise to their new jobs. An understandable bias they shared was their visceral disdain for Iran, forged during the Iraq War, which saw hundreds of American soldiers die as a result of sophisticated Iranian-supplied roadside bombs or fighting against Iran-backed Shia militias.
Flynn also brought on Christopher Costa, a retired US Army intelligence colonel with extensive special operations experience in the field in Afghanistan, for the crucial role of running counterterrorism at the White House. Costa largely kept in place a consummately professional counterterrorism directorate at the NSC that he had inherited from Jen Easterly, a retired army lieutenant colonel and Rhodes scholar who had worked for the National Security Agency in Iraq, and who had directed counterterrorism during the Obama administration. Costa made a point of avoiding the bluster of typical incoming senior administration officials, who often took the position that the previous administration had gotten it all wrong and the new team was coming in to fix everything. Costa understood that in the CT (counterterrorism) realm, the tactics and personnel he was inheriting from the Obama team were sound.
During the first days of the Trump administration, senior national security officials immediately had to make a tough call about a possible SEAL Team Six raid in Yemen. Joint Special Operations Command, of which SEAL Team Six is a key component, had launched only two previous ground raids in Yemen. There were good reasons for that. Yemen was in the grip of a brutal civil war and pretty much every adult male was armed with an AK-47, so ground operations in the country were quite risky. The two previous JSOC raids in Yemen were both in 2014 and authorized only when the lives of American hostages held by the local al-Qaeda affiliate seemed to be at risk. In the first operation, eight Yemeni, Saudi, and Ethiopian hostages were freed, while in the second raid, both Luke Somers, an American photojournalist, and Pierre Korkie, a South African citizen, were killed during a botched rescue attempt.
In part because of the risks of ground operations, Obama had vastly expanded the CIA drone program in Yemen targeting Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a branch of al-Qaeda that was quite capable. AQAP had tried to bring down an American passenger jet over Detroit during the first year of Obama’s first term, deploying a suicide bomber wearing an “underwear bomb.” The device didn’t detonate properly, but the threat posed by AQAP was an intense preoccupation for the remainder of the Obama administration.
During the waning weeks of Obama’s second term, the planning for a third SEAL ground raid in Yemen was quite advanced, including rehearsals by the SEAL Team Six operators who would eventually deploy for the mission. But Obama didn’t authorize the operation because the first moonless night in Yemen came on January 28, a week after he would be out of office. A moonless night gave the SEALs, kitted out with night vision equipment, a great advantage.
On January 25, Bannon and Kushner attended a dinner at the White House where the decision to authorize the Yemen operation was weighed with President Trump. Also at the dinner were Mattis, Joint Chiefs chair Joseph Dunford, and Flynn.
Trump asked the group, “Why are you coming to me with this decision? General Mattis can decide if this goes ahead or not.”
During the Obama administration, decisions about even relatively small-scale but risky ground operations in countries such as Yemen were decided by the White House. Trump was serious when he said he was going to empower his commanders to make their own decisions rather than micromanaging them. Typically, a decision about a ground operation involving significant risks would be weighed in the White House Situation Room, but Trump wasn’t going to be running a typical administration. Trump gave a verbal okay to the mission at the dinner and signed the order for the operation the following morning.
On a moonless night in the early morning hours of January 29, some thirty SEALs along with a group of Emirati special forces raided a well-defended al-Qaeda complex in a remote area of western Yemen, their target an al-Qaeda leader. The SEALs encountered heavy resistance, and during a firefight Chief Petty Officer William “Ryan” Owens was killed, three SEALs were wounded, and a $75 million Osprey helicopter that took a “hard landing” had to be destroyed. Ten children and six women were also killed. One of the victims was the eight-year-old daughter of the militant Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed six years earlier in a US drone strike. Their target either evaded capture or hadn’t been there.
When news of the raid became public, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, “It’s hard to ever call something a complete success, when you have the loss of life or people injured,” but he concluded, “It is a successful operation by all standards.”
The Pentagon released a video made by AQAP that was recovered by the operators on the ground in Yemen to make the case for the valuable “intel” that was supposedly recovered by the SEALs. It quickly emerged that the video was about a decade old and could be easily found online.
Joshua Geltzer, senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council at the time, says, “It’s obviously insufficient to use an already-public video to make the case that an operation with those costs is a success. The bar for me is very, very high when you lose a US service member to call something a success.”
A senior US military officer shared that assessment of the operation, saying, “It didn’t yield what we had wanted it to do, and of course we paid a heavy price for it and lost a helicopter and ended up killing civilians and losing a valued operator on the ground.” A senior special operations officer also lamented, “The SSE [Sensitive Site Exploitation] intel: We hoped for a bigger take.” This wasn’t a successful operation; it was a failed mission.
Owens’s body was transported back to the United States, to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. President Trump was there to pay his respects, but Owens’s father refused to meet the president. Bill Owens felt that the Yemen operation was badly botched and certainly wasn’t worth his son’s life.
The trip to Dover unsettled Trump. It was the first time that as commander in chief he had to confront the death of a serviceman that he had sent into harm’s way. There would be no more casual greenlighting of such operations over dinner. Trump thought the generals had presented him with an in-and-out operation in Yemen that wasn’t a big deal. Now he realized that the generals weren’t always right.
Famously, President Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk in the Oval Office saying “The buck stops here.” For Trump the buck stopped somewhere else. Trump told Fox News, “This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something [the generals] wanted to do. They came to me, they explained what they wanted to do—the generals—who are very respected. . . . And they lost Ryan.” All of which was true, but Trump was commander in chief and so he was ultimately responsible for all the military operations on his watch.
A month after the botched raid in Yemen, Trump invited Owens’s widow, Carryn, to sit in the audience during his first address to Congress. Trump lauded Owens and his sacrifice, saying, “Ryan was part of a hugely successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future.” Owens’s weeping widow received several standing ovations during Trump’s peroration.
Trump’s speech was great TV, so effective that even Van Jones, a CNN commentator and frequent Trump critic, praised the president, saying, “He became President of the United States in that moment, period.” Trump, ever the showman, had taken a failed special operations raid and refashioned it into the emotional highlight of his young presidency.