Chapter 8
PLEASE HOLD FOR THE PRESIDENT
I DON’T REMEMBER MY first time.
At the top of every interview conducted for this book, I asked each person the same question: Do you remember your first time in the Situation Room? It was a good icebreaker, and many people described in great detail their initial impressions and the intensity of their experiences. I always felt a bit sheepish because I don’t remember my own. But I like to think I have a good excuse.
I had been to the White House only once before Bill Clinton was sworn in. During the transition, I went to the West Wing to meet with President Bush’s press secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, who handed me a bulletproof vest that had been passed down by presidential press secretaries since the 1970s—an ironic nod to the flak we take at the podium. There wasn’t time for a full tour, though, so the White House was still unfamiliar territory for me. Then came Inauguration Day, and I entered a whirlwind that wouldn’t subside for four years.
As I wrote in my White House memoir, All Too Human, “Inaugural week was a manic mix of public celebrations and private chaos.” All-nighters revising the president’s speech. Then the inaugural ceremony and balls—a time of celebration before my first White House press briefing, where I bombed. To be fair, I had a tough brief: The president’s first nominee for attorney general, Zoë Baird, was getting pilloried in the Senate over a tax issue and was about to be dumped. So was Clinton’s campaign promise to lift the ban on gays in the military, which faced veto-proof opposition in Congress. And the press corps was livid about a decision (soon to be reversed) restricting their access to the West Wing. It was a harsh welcome to the White House briefing room.
I assume that at some point in those first couple of days I ducked into the Situation Room—maybe when I was grabbing a bite right next door at the White House mess. As just about everyone from that era agrees, the room at first glance was unremarkable and underwhelming. In those days, before being renovated in 2006, it was just a conference room without any high-tech trappings. What makes it special is what’s debated and decided there.
By the end of my White House tenure, in December 1996, I had spent dozens of hours either in the Sit Room or in contact with its staff. There were pre-dawn phone calls to the duty officers after an overnight crisis, so I could brief the White House correspondents doing their morning broadcasts from the North Lawn. I would often check back during the day, whenever the latest news broke on CNN, so I could update the president with additional information.
I wasn’t a member of the NSC’s principals committee, but I did sit in on Situation Room meetings covering a wide range of issues: Russia’s economic struggles. North Korea’s efforts to build nuclear weapons. A coup in Haiti and civil war in Somalia. Also domestic crises, such as the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, both of which spawned multiple conspiracy theories. When I attended those meetings, my job was to offer advice on how to communicate the administration’s response, anticipate how Congress would react, and keep an eye on how decisions aligned with President Clinton’s past statements and campaign promises.
This was a delicate balancing act for all foreign policy issues. But the one that bedeviled Clinton most during the first term was the crisis in Bosnia.
PRESIDENT CLINTON’S U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright was only four foot ten, but with her colorful scarves and signature brooches, she cut a striking—and often imposing—figure. This was never more true than at a 1993 meeting in the Situation Room, where she let her temper fly. She wanted the United States to bolster U.N. peacekeeping efforts by supporting NATO air strikes.
“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about,” she snapped at chairman of the joint chiefs General Colin Powell, “if we can’t use it?” War was raging in the Balkans, and up to that point, the Clinton administration had taken a wait-and-see attitude. But as Bosnian Serbs intensified bloody attacks on their Muslim neighbors, the Czech-born Albright decided she’d seen enough. She wanted the administration to support air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, to stop the killing. And if she had to embarrass someone to make that happen, she was willing to do it.
The general, who at six two towered over the diminutive Albright, was livid at her blunt critique. “I thought I would have an aneurysm,” he wrote in his memoir. “American GIs were not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game board.” His namesake policy, the Powell Doctrine, set a high bar for military action: A vital U.S. interest had to be at stake, and the nation had to be prepared to go in with overwhelming force with public support. In his mind, the situation in the Balkans hadn’t cleared the bar.
Jane Lute, the NSC’s director of European affairs, was in the room that day. “Colin was not happy,” she told me. Then she offered some insight into clashes that often occur between high-level civilians and military personnel over sending troops into combat.
Ever since the 1991 invasion of Iraq, Desert Storm, “the Army does not conceive of, or really talk about, ‘boots on the ground,’” Lute told me. Instead, it focuses on “military solutions… in a very complicated system of rotation, preparation, recovery.” In her view, most civilians—with the exception of some, such as Albright—are clueless when it comes to war. She recalled one conversation with a civilian aide to President Clinton. “She said, ‘We could move a brigade.’ I said, ‘How big is a brigade?’” The aide couldn’t answer. Lute and others referred to this as “the brigade test”—a pretty reliable indicator of who doesn’t know what they’re talking about with regard to military intervention.
At a later Sit Room meeting, President Clinton asked Lute what she thought about the situation in the Balkans. “Jane,” he said, “you’re in the military. Would you put troops on the ground in Bosnia?” Lute felt her eyes widen as a lower part of her anatomy clenched shut, a reaction she colorfully characterizes as the “eyeball to asshole” ratio. “There’s principals in the room—and me,” she told me. “And I remembered when Scowcroft said, ‘When the president asks you a question, do not say, Well, Mr. President, it’s your decision. He knows that.’”
Lute knew she had to give the president a real answer, so she said, “Yes, sir, I would. Under two conditions: if we’re asked for a capability that only we can provide, or in an emergency where the preservation of NATO allies, lives and troops are at stake.” Clinton took this in. And still the discussions continued.
Between 1993 and 1995, there were countless meetings about Bosnia. Most followed the same script: Albright, national security adviser Tony Lake and the NSC’s Europe expert Sandy Vershbow agitated for action. Powell and secretary of state Warren Christopher opposed it. These two camps were locked in a stalemate, with President Clinton caught in the middle.
He was anguished by the killings and had staked out an aggressive stance on Bosnia in 1992, promising to do “whatever it takes to stop the slaughter of civilians.” But his top campaign promise was to “focus like a laser” on the economy. The public and Congress were wary of risking American lives in a Balkan civil war—a fear reinforced after the October 1993 Black Hawk Down disaster, when Somalian forces killed eighteen U.S. soldiers after shooting down two helicopters. NATO allies and a newly democratic Russia were also pushing back against the use of force. Given the cross pressures, the noninterventionists prevailed. “Muddling through seemed the safest course from their point of view,” Vershbow concluded. They feared that “taking a high-risk initiative could end in embarrassment.”
Tony Lake was disturbed by the ongoing, grinding horror of the war. “Clinton hated it. I hated it,” he recalls. “And if we were going to solve it, we had to run some risks, come to grips with it.” Lake was eager to make something happen. True to form, he would do so behind the scenes.
A national security adviser in the mold of Brent Scowcroft, Lake was ambitious, yet content to be unknown to the general public. He was a proud man but not burdened by an overactive ego. And he was moral without being a moralist. A foreign service officer and veteran of the Carter administration, Lake served because it was in his blood, not because he needed the validation or attention for doing it. He was dry and self-deprecating, a man who kept his focus on the long game. The hamster wheel of the Bosnia situation was driving him crazy, so by summer of 1995, he decided he had to act.
“Do you remember the British queen Mary?” he asked me in our interview. “[She] said that when she died, they would find a C for ‘Calais’”—the northern French town she lost in battle—“written on her heart. I always felt like, in the morning meetings with the president, I had a ‘B’ written on my forehead, for Bosnia.” Every time he’d walk into the Oval, he could feel Clinton wincing, knowing that another one of their endless conversations about Bosnia was coming.
Lake recalls that in the more formal Situation Room meetings, it was impossible to get consensus on how to proceed. “So I decided to go smaller still. And rather than continuing to argue it out in the Situation Room with all the formal papers and discussions, I started to have lunches at my little table in my office, with just the secretaries of state and defense and Madeleine.” This gave the key people a chance to argue things through.
I asked him why he felt it necessary to switch to smaller meetings about the so-called endgame strategy, involving more military pressure combined with more flexible diplomacy. “So the conversation would become all the more flexible,” he told me. In Lake’s view, the Situation Room itself was part of the problem of why no consensus had yet been reached.
Lake wasn’t the only one who felt that way. David Scheffer, who was serving as a senior adviser to Albright, told me, “I’m gonna be very blunt and succinct when I say this. I think there’s a failure far too often in the Sit Room for the big ideas to be presented and even to have any chance of prevailing.” He believes that people are hesitant to put forth their big ideas and bold policy concepts in the Sit Room, because “once you do that, you are opening yourself up to all the conventional criticism… that is usually centered [on] minimizing risk and the cost of what you just proposed.”
Scheffer felt that this was the situation Albright faced in 1993, when she first began agitating for intervention in Bosnia. “What she was doing was saying, ‘Look, the way to break this is with something unconventional: unleashed NATO airpower against a non-NATO force.’ And while she was able to do that, once it was shot down, she had to shelve it for a couple of years until the circumstances permitted her to put it on the table again.”
The July 1995 Srebrenica massacre forced the issue. Serbian forces killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men, expelling 20,000 more Muslims in a bout of ethnic cleansing. The scale of the atrocity was not fully known right away, but reports started to come in the first week of July. The U.N. requested more air strikes, and President Jacques Chirac of France pressed Clinton for action in a personal phone call. Clinton finally decided to act, and he did it through the orchestration of Tony Lake.
On July 17, Lake hosted a breakfast meeting in his office. Albright, Christopher, deputy national security adviser Sandy Berger, secretary of defense William Perry and JCS chairman General John Shalikashvili attended. Lake presented his “endgame strategy”—a complex package of bold initiatives intended to end the war. It was “an NSC/Tony Lake–sponsored effort to think outside the box and develop some options,” Sandy Vershbow told me, “even as the formal interagency process kept coming back to muddling through and nothing else but muddling through.”
As had happened so many times before, Christopher, Perry and Shalikashvili believed the risks of intervention were too high, and they began urging Lake back toward the stagnant but safe strategy already in play. Just then, President Clinton appeared at Lake’s door. He came in and announced that he wanted to change tacks. “I don’t like where we are now,” he said. “This policy is doing enormous damage to the United States and to our standing in the world. We look weak.” He asked the group to come up with new ideas.
“There was a moment of theater,” Lake told me with a smile, “because Clinton wanted to end it, and he knew what I was doing at these lunches. I didn’t exactly put him up to this, but during one lunch, he suddenly appeared through the door and said to all of us that he really wanted to bring an end to this.”
The consensus view, however, is that Lake did put him up to it. “I was there as the notetaker,” Sandy Vershbow told me, “so I guess I can say after all these years… it was definitely staged.” Clinton and Lake had discussed both the endgame strategy and the casual drop-by in advance. “The president was a willing co-conspirator in staging this surprise appearance,” Vershbow says.
That drop-by at Lake’s office marked a turning point in the discussions. Now, the principals had no choice but to recognize that the president wanted a change in strategy. This was reinforced by their knowledge that American troops would have to go in if the U.N. mission failed. “We needed a new paradigm,” says Vershbow. “We couldn’t just drift any longer. And so at least their people started working with us, though they still opposed decisive action.”
Clinton knew he couldn’t let the conflict in Bosnia become a weight around his neck in the 1996 campaign, which was just around the corner. “In the Sit Room, we all knew it was there,” recalls David Scheffer. “The elephant in the room.” At that time, Clinton also confided in me. We need “to bust our rear to get a settlement in the next couple of months,” he said. “Explore all alternatives, roll every die.” Otherwise, he feared it might be “dropped in during the middle of the campaign.” He’d made his decision, but it would take another tragedy halfway around the world to put it into action.
IN MID-AUGUST OF 1995, assistant secretary of state Richard Holbrooke led a delegation to the region, traveling there with Lieutenant General Wesley Clark and a team of negotiators to present a new peace plan. The Americans needed to get to Sarajevo for meetings, but Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic couldn’t—or wouldn’t—guarantee them safe passage by air. Instead, the team set off on August 19 in two armored vehicles, planning to traverse a narrow, waterlogged red-clay road over Mount Igman, southwest of Sarajevo.
Holbrooke and General Clark buckled themselves into a U.S. Army Humvee, and the rest of the negotiating team piled into a French armored personnel carrier, or APC. Midway through the drive, as they came upon a U.N. convoy heading in the other direction, the two vehicles carrying the Americans moved to the outer edge of the roadway. Suddenly, the red clay began crumbling beneath the APC. The vehicle slid, then tumbled more than three hundred feet down the side of the mountain. And then it exploded.
General Clark leapt out of the Humvee and scrambled down the mountainside, in a desperate attempt to save the men in the APC. But it was too late. NSC aide Colonel Nelson Drew and special envoy Robert Frasure died in the conflagration, and deputy assistant secretary of defense Joseph Kruzel succumbed to his injuries later that day in a field hospital. A French soldier accompanying the delegation also died.
“I remember racing down the hall at the State Department to tell the ops room,” David Scheffer recalls, “and asking for as much detail as I could about it, and reporting to Albright.” In the back of his mind, he was thinking about how many months Robert Frasure had spent trying to negotiate peace. “He was a brilliant negotiator, a very articulate individual who produced narratives in his cables that were fantastic to read,” he told me. “And then we lost him.”
Sandy Vershbow learned of the accident from the Situation Room. “It was a Saturday, and I was at home,” he recalls. “I got a call from the Sit Room, from one of the duty officers, saying, ‘Okay, we’re getting preliminary reports of this road accident.’ And we very quickly got more details.” Vershbow, too, was devastated at the loss of the three negotiators. But he had other, more complex emotions mixed in as well, because at one point he was supposed to have been on this particular mission. “It was a kind of ‘There, but for the grace of God’” situation, he says. “I would have been in that armored personnel carrier instead of Nelson Drew.”
For Tony Lake, Drew was not just a colleague, but also a friend. He was the only NSC staffer ever to die in the line of duty, and “while he was in the Air Force, I was kind of his commanding officer,” Lake recalls. “I had to drive out to tell his wife that her husband was dead.” He brought Sandy Vershbow, Sandy Berger and the Air Force chaplain with him, and the three men stood on the doorstep of their colleague’s home. When Lake knocked, Drew’s wife opened the door. “She just saw me, saw my face and told her two kids to go back into the dining room,” Lake told me. She knew instantly that this particular knock could mean only one thing.
“We told her the bad news,” recalls Vershbow, “and she said, ‘You’ve got to solve this for Nelson.’ So if there was any need for additional motivation, that was it.” In Vershbow’s view, the accident “steeled everybody’s resolve that failure is not an option. We have to succeed where all previous initiatives have failed.”
President Clinton “had already made the decision that he wanted something done,” says Ivo Daalder, an NSC staffer at the time. “But now he really wanted something done.” Four days after the accident, the three diplomats received a memorial service at Arlington National Cemetery. The president decided to seize the moment: He called together all the top-level officials who attended the funeral, pulling them in for a meeting at Fort Myer, an Army outpost adjacent to the cemetery grounds.
A photo of that meeting shows President Clinton sitting in a small, modestly decorated room, addressing the top members of his administration. Tony Lake, General Wesley Clark, chief of staff Leon Panetta, Richard Holbrooke, Warren Christopher, William Perry, Madeleine Albright, General John Shalikashvili—all listen raptly as Clinton exhorts them to find a way to end the war.
“Clinton at that point said, ‘Because of what happened, we have to succeed,’” says Daalder. “When members of your staff [die] as a result of the effort, it becomes even more personal and even more direct.” Ending the war would mean their colleagues hadn’t died in vain. Intervention wasn’t just necessary—now it was urgent. This unscheduled meeting in an unremarkable Fort Myer room would prove to be a turning point in the Bosnian crisis.
One week later, with the support of the United States, NATO unleashed a fierce bombing campaign in an effort to bring the war to a close—exactly the kind of intervention Madeleine Albright had argued for two years earlier. As she had predicted, it worked—which means that if the men in the room had heeded her recommendation in 1993, thousands of lives might have been saved. Instead, those who finally green-lit the aerial assaults took the credit for the decision, however belatedly they made it.
Unfortunately, as I would learn in the course of doing interviews, that’s an all-too-common experience for women in the Situation Room.
“I REMEMBER SHE told me a story once,” Gayle Smith recalls of Madeleine Albright. “There was a call on a Sunday—a conference call on some crisis. All the men kept talking and she kept trying to break in, and they kept talking over her. She was pushing the buttons on her phone, going ‘Hello?! I’m not on mute here. Hello!’” The men ignored her until finally she interjected loudly, pointedly announcing her name and title.
Albright “fought for the space,” says Smith. “But then she commanded a respect.” She also became a resource for other women, a mentor who understood what they were going through because she had been through it all, too.
Smith, the NSC’s senior director for African affairs under Clinton, told me another, more personal story about Albright. “I had lived in Africa for twenty years, moved back on a Saturday, and started at the NSC on a Monday,” she recalls. “You want to talk about interplanetary change? It’s like, Holy shit, how did I end up here?” Smith was standing outside the Oval Office on her first day, feeling self-conscious about her unconventionally short, spiky haircut, when Albright walked up to her.
“You’re the funkiest person in the whole U.S. government!” Albright exclaimed brightly.
“Do you think that’s okay?” Smith asked her.
“Totally,” Albright said with a big smile. “Just go with it!”
“People had asked me whether I was going to change my hair or dress differently” in the West Wing, Smith recalls. “I said, ‘They hired who they hired.’ But she was incredibly supportive… She had solidarity with every woman in government.”
In the Sit Room’s earliest years, no women served there. Dr. Sally Botsai was one of the first, if not the first, and she started during the Nixon administration. The number of women grew with each successive administration, and by the time Clinton was in office, “it was male-heavy, but probably about a 60:40 distribution,” senior duty officer Bonnie Glick recalls. There were fifteen duty officers in her tenure during Clinton’s second term. “There was one officer from each branch of service,” she told me. “They were not all men. We had three men, two women… Before my generation in the Sit Room, I think all of the military had been men.”
Glick, who was a foreign service officer, sensed a difference between how nondiplomats and diplomats behaved in the room, but also how men and women did. “The Navy guy was so stern at first, I asked him if he had to rise to a certain rank before he was issued a sense of humor,” she recalled in an early 2000s interview. The Sit Room is “this space with a lot of major egos coming in, and people may or may not pay attention to the fact that human beings run [it].” Glick made a point of checking in on people’s well-being, an unofficially designated “Jewish Mother” to the NSC staff. She recalled once disarming a cranky Sandy Berger with a granola bar and a bottle of water she’d brought in, telling him, “I think you need this more than I do.”
Glick handled Sit Room attitudes with humor and a light touch. But some others found themselves pushing back, hard, to be heard.
I asked Jane Lute whether she ever ran into implicit sexist bias in the room. “Oh my god,” she replied. “You don’t know a senior woman who has not.” She then recounted how things had changed for women in the military over the years.
“When I went into the Army in the seventies, the unspoken rule was, whatever you do, don’t make my job harder,” she recalls. “So, don’t be a ditz. Don’t be coming on to anybody. And if you’re gay—and there was a fair chance that you were, ’cause a lot of them were—then just be discreet about it. Don’t make my job harder.” In Lute’s recollection, rather than lifting each other up, women mostly tried to stay out of each other’s way.
“Over the course of time, what you learn is that everybody wants to be at the table, and not everybody wants to do what it takes to be at the table,” she told me. “But if you’ve done what it takes… you’re at the table.” Lute had made it into the corridors of power, and she was determined to make the most of her time there. “I’m not apologizing to anybody. You want to know what I think? I’ll tell you.”
Lute recounted several instances when she had to speak forcefully to ensure male colleagues heard her. There was, she told me, “a four-year knife fight between me and [NSA director] Keith Alexander that played out in the Situation Room most weeks” while she was serving as deputy secretary of homeland security. “He said, ‘The only way I can defend the country is if [the NSA is] in all the networks.’ I said, ‘Over my dead body. We are not deploying military soldiers to every street corner of the Internet in the United States of America.’” In Lute’s recollection, no one else in the room dared talk to Alexander the way she did. “I thought, This is bullshit. Why are we all [tiptoeing]? He’s wrong here!”
Lute was frustrated by what she called the “well-worn grooves of how we made national security decisions.” This included the fact that her male colleagues often didn’t listen to the women in the room. “Time and time and time again, a woman would make a really smart interjection or observation,” she recalls. “And people would blow past it.” Then a man would say the same thing, and everyone would praise his insights.
Once again, it was Madeleine Albright who came up with a solution. In conversations with other women, she pointed out that this was happening. Undersecretary of state for global affairs Paula Dobriansky remembers her saying, “Women, you have to stop it! You’ve got to have a network.” Albright urged the women to speak up, right there in the room, when men took credit for their ideas.
“There were women with serious jobs at the table,” recalls deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman, who served in the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. “But voices were still heard differently. It was almost like we understood it amongst ourselves. And so we would try to have each other’s back.” Whenever a woman’s suggestion was ignored and a man later given credit for it, “one of us would pipe up and say, ‘Great that you underscored the point that she just made!’” Some of the men noticed and changed their habits. Many never noticed at all.
Sherman, who was a friend and close colleague of Albright, also became a mentor to young women. She spent years fighting the good fight for her female counterparts, though now, she jokes, she’s “post-ambition. I’m seventy-three years old.” She also feels that she’s “earned the right to say what I believe. So I tend to call things out.”
Many of those serving under Biden worked together in the Clinton and Obama administrations, which “means we are all much more direct with each other,” Sherman told me. There’s a comfort level. But also, “norms have changed,” she says. “You guys have more awareness that sometimes you could be, shall I say, less than understanding of what’s happening to the women around you.”
IN MAY 1999 the Situation Room broke another barrier, welcoming its first African American director, Elliott Powell. A Navy captain who had commanded a minesweeper during the Gulf War, Powell was also a history buff. So he was excited to be taking command of the Sit Room—and even more thrilled when, on his first day, he found himself witnessing a call between President Clinton and British prime minister Tony Blair.
Outgoing Sit Room director Kevin Cosgriff walked Powell into the Oval Office and introduced him to the president. “We shook hands, and then Admiral Cosgriff said, ‘He’s going to sit in for the call, to see how things work,’” Powell recalls. “Because that’s one of the things the Situation Room does, we set up the calls for heads of state.” In fact, this is one of the most important tasks the Sit Room team takes on—and it’s much more complicated, and more diplomatically fraught, than most outside the room realize.
“I used to joke that it was like a Bolshoi ballet choreography,” Obama-era Sit Room director Larry Pfeiffer said with a laugh. Ideally, you wanted the two leaders to get on the call at the same time, but that was extremely difficult to do, as each side maneuvered to make sure their guy didn’t have to wait. “Sometimes it could get prickly,” Dave Radi told me, “because we always want to bring our president on last. Our president waits for nobody.”
Former senior duty officer Rob Hargis makes the mundane process of connecting a call sound like an action film. “We’ve got headphones on, down in the Sit Room,” he told me. “We’ve established the call: ‘Hey, 10 Downing. This is Rob in the Sit Room, setting up the Clinton call with Tony Blair. How far out is Blair?’ ‘Blair is going to be on time. He’s gonna be here in about three minutes.’… And then they’d say, ‘Hey, Rob, I’ve got the prime minister. Blair is about thirty seconds from the phone.’” At that point, the Sit Room would transfer the call to the Oval Office, where an aide would give a second-by-second update on the president’s position. He’s walking down the hall! He’s getting closer! Please hold for the president! And then the handoff, with aides on both sides crossing their fingers that the timing was perfect and the connection clear.
From the president’s perspective, “I’m sure it looked like things are smooth,” Hargis said with a laugh. “‘Hey, I’ve got a two o’clock with Tony Blair, let’s go!’ You walk in at 1:59, he picks up the phone and says, ‘Hey, Tony! How ya doing? Let’s catch up!’ But that takes a half hour of work. The feet under the duck were hauling duck butt, all the time.”
Because the calls were time-consuming, the duty officers hoped not to have to do more than one or two a day. A busy day might see five or more. In the hours following the 2011 raid that took out al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the Sit Room had to set up sixty-five such calls—the most anyone ever recalls being made in a twenty-four-hour period.
No one wants to be made to wait, but of all the world leaders, Russian president Vladimir Putin hates it the most. His people would manipulate the situation, telling the Sit Room that Putin was on the line when he wasn’t. “President Obama would come on and say, ‘Hello, Vladimir,’ and the Russians would say, ‘Please hold for the Russian president,’” recalls former Sit Room duty officer Drew Roberts. “Every fucking time.”
Putin “always made Obama wait, and I’m gonna tell you, time travels very differently when you’re standing in the Situation Room” trying unsuccessfully to get the president connected, recalls Pfeiffer.
“There was one time we must have waited, it felt like twenty minutes. It was probably five,” he went on. “And I finally looked at President Obama and said, ‘Sir, if you would like, we can disconnect. I’ll go downstairs and we’ll get this call connected again.’ And he laughed. He said, ‘Nah, it’s fine. Gives me time to play Words with Friends.’ And he’d have his iPad up and be playing Words with Friends with God knows who. I think he actually enjoyed being put on hold by Putin, because it gave him a few minutes of time just to chill.”
Occasionally, the Sit Room staff turned the tables on the Russians. A duty officer who could do a passable impression of the president would get on the line and imitate his “hello.” The U.S. side would then hear a click, followed by Putin’s voice. “And then you heard a Sit Room duty officer break in and go, ‘President Putin, please hold for the president of the United States.’ Then boom, you have the U.S. president come on,” says Hargis. Mission accomplished, though Hargis always felt a little bad about the ruse. “You had to think, Oh, I bet someone is on their way to Siberia right now. I got someone in trouble.”
Prank calls to the Sit Room are not unheard of. When in doubt, duty officers occasionally give little pop quizzes to callers who claim to be heads of state (or calling on behalf of one). Usually, these questions will root out impostors, but every once in a while, the person turns out to be who they say they are. Once, during the Reagan administration, someone called claiming to be Prince Charles. People thought it was a crank call, but then David Sedney quizzed the man on British history. He answered everything correctly—and it turned out that it was indeed Charles. Yet even when the caller is who he or she claims to be, the Sit Room never connects the person to the president. Instead, they report it to the national security adviser, who sets up a return call for later.
Even for scheduled calls, it can be difficult to confirm who’s on the other end of the line. In March 2012, Saudi Arabian crown prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz flew to Ohio for medical treatment at the Cleveland Clinic. President Obama wanted to offer his well-wishes, so the Sit Room tried to arrange a call between the Oval and the clinic. But the receptionist there didn’t believe it. “They said, ‘Sure, fella!’ and hung up,” recalls Drew Roberts. “We called five more times with various ‘No, wait! I’m serious!’ ploys and were hung up on five more times.” Finally, he says, the Sit Room staff stole a plot point from a scene in the movie The American President: “The sixth time we called back, we told them to call the number we provided, which was the White House switchboard, and ask for the Situation Room.” They did, and the president finally got to wish the Saudi prince well.
Clinton had an excellent relationship with Tony Blair, and he was obviously comfortable speaking his mind. But when Clinton first came to office, Conservative party leader John Major was the prime minister—and relations between those two were decidedly chillier. Toward the end of the 1992 presidential campaign, Major had approved a search for damaging information about candidate Clinton, in hopes of helping George H. W. Bush win reelection. Upon taking office in 1993, the new president was still salty about it.
Jim Reed, who was the Sit Room director at that time, remembers how the first scheduled call between the two leaders unfolded.
“We set up the phone call,” he told me, “and I think we were on the phone with John Major for perhaps forty-five minutes. It was a very long time, and we’re sitting there making small talk with [him]” while Clinton kept him waiting. This was obviously a power play—but the new president wasn’t content simply with keeping his counterpart waiting. “[Major] finally realized Clinton wasn’t going to take his call. And he said, ‘This is ridiculous!’ and slammed down the phone.”
I asked Reed if the Sit Room staff knew in advance that Clinton had no intention of taking the call. “No, he didn’t tell us that this was his way of punking John Major,” Reed said with a laugh. “When we finally called back up to the Oval Office to let him know that Major had hung up the phone, I think Clinton had already departed for the Army-Navy golf course… You know, for a man who’s a brand-new president, I thought it was a pretty good way of sending a message to a foreign leader: Don’t mess with me.”
The vast majority of head-of-state calls are conducted over nonsecure telephone lines.
Perhaps the strangest occurred when the Sit Room had to find a Turkish interpreter with the requisite security clearance on extremely short notice. President Obama needed to speak with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but the only available interpreter was driving down I-95 from New Jersey to D.C. She agreed to interpret while driving, and with all parties alerted to the unusual circumstance, the call went forward.
“About halfway through the call, she interrupted the conversation, saying she needed a three-minute break, which annoyed both President Obama and Prime Minister Erdogan,” Drew Roberts remembers. She told them she was about to drive through a tunnel near Baltimore and would lose cell service there, but that once through, she’d pull over and call them back. “No more than two minutes after she did this, we hear a knock on her window, and it’s the state police going, ‘Ma’am, are you okay? Do you need assistance?’ And she’s going, ‘No, no! I’m fine! I’m just trying to finish a phone call!’”
TO THIS DAY, none of the calls between heads of state are recorded. Instead, three Sit Room staffers listen in on headsets, typing furiously as the two parties talk. When the call is finished, they compare notes and try to compile as accurate a document as possible. This is called the memcon—the memorandum of conversation. And creating it is a stressful, thankless job.
“Our best friends during this time were the talking points outline provided for us in advance by the White House staff and the word ‘inaudible’ to fill in conversation gaps we missed,” says Drew Roberts. Trying to create an accurate record of two people speaking in real time is incredibly difficult. “Now throw in interpreters, broken English, and multiple other people on the call speaking when we cannot see them,” he says, and it’s nearly impossible to create a document that’s 100 percent accurate.
“Erdogan talked so fast, and he talked in broken English,” recalls Roberts. “He would say something, and if you paused to say, ‘What was that word? I don’t know what he meant by that,’ you’re two sentences gone. He’s just plowed on… We always said, ‘Just hire stenographers, for God’s sake!’ But they never would.” Anyone listening in to the president’s calls had to be an intelligence professional with a security clearance.
“The reason we had two intelligence analysts during the day was to cover the extra workload of typing out what we were hearing on presidential phone calls,” Rob Hargis told me. Everyone would do their best to capture the conversation, and at the end, “we would look at each other and go, ‘Okay. One of us now has to produce the memcon.’” Nobody wanted to do it, so the group would do a round of rock-paper-scissors. “Everybody would print out what they had typed in a Word document to the best of their ability, and give them all to the poor SOB” who lost the game. That person would have to painstakingly piece together the full conversation into a memcon.
“It wasn’t an exact conversation,” says Hargis. “It wasn’t a legal transcript.” So, why not just record the phone calls, in order to have the exact words?
“I was told that ‘gentlemen don’t record other gentlemen’s conversations,’” Tony Campanella says. “I didn’t believe it. I believe it was the plausible deniability.” In Campanella’s view, the president might prefer to have a little wiggle room. “Maybe they wanted the human error in there so the president could turn around and say, ‘No, that’s not what I said. Somebody in the Sit Room misunderstood.’” This would come into play in the infamous call between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that led to his first impeachment.
Phone calls weren’t the only way the president could communicate with other global leaders. There were also dedicated video connections—created, not surprisingly, by the ever-present Gary Bresnahan. He told me about the impetus for setting them up, during George H. W. Bush’s administration.
“Bush 41 was in the lower conference room, and he was talking to the Iraqi prime minister,” Bresnahan told me. “It was scheduled for a certain time, say two o’clock. And the president went down there, and half an hour later they came out. They never did the call.” Assistant secretary of defense Steve Hadley walked out of the Sit Room, his face stony, and said, “Gary, it didn’t happen. You need to fix this.” Hadley wasn’t happy, but he was professional about it. Then, Condoleezza Rice emerged, giving Bresnahan a death stare. “Steve Hadley yells like a mouse,” Bresnahan told me. “Condi Rice yells with her eyes.”
As it turned out, the problem wasn’t technological—it was a security issue, with the Iraqi prime minister unable to get to the designated phone in time for the call. “When does security become a comm guy’s problem?” Bresnahan asks. The answer is, when the president demands an untraceable way to communicate with someone. Which is how, two days later, Bresnahan found himself on a plane to Iraq, tasked with setting up a secure video for the Iraqi prime minister on his own turf.
Once Bresnahan set up that first dedicated connection, others followed. “There’s twenty-five of them now out there,” he told me, “to talk to adversaries as well as our friends. And I’ve done every one of ’em.”
For decades, Bresnahan kept the Situation Room on the cutting edge of audio and visual technology. But in other respects, the Sit Room tended to lag behind the times. During Clinton’s second term, articles from the Washington Post and New York Times were still circulated by making photocopies of the physical newspapers and faxing them. Then duty officers started noticing that the papers’ websites were posting all the news online. Around 1998—nine years after the invention of the World Wide Web, four years after the Yahoo! search engine went online and two years after the “dancing baby” became the first viral video—senior director Kevin Cosgriff finally had an “Internet terminal” installed in the Situation Room. It was well and truly overdue.
“Even in ’97, they didn’t have any kind of automated message handling system,” Tony Campanella recalls. “So we would just be reviewing feeds of message traffic that came either out of CIA, the State Department, DOD, NSA… and we would have distribution groups that would send out those messages.” Much of the duty officers’ time was spent compiling mundane message traffic, a time-consuming job that didn’t take advantage of their skill sets. So when Kevin Cosgriff asked his staff how they would modernize the Sit Room, Campanella was ready with an answer.
“One of the things I was an advocate for was doing some kind of push system, instead of us being the push system,” he told me, referring to the kinds of alerts we all get every day now on our phones. The technology existed for NSC members to develop a profile of subjects they were interested in, then have that intelligence automatically sent to them. And yet, “It was still GS-11 Tony Campanella reading the message traffic and going, ‘Ehhh, I guess [a higher-up] needs to see this,’” he said. “It was a little bit backwards.”
Tony Lake was also dismayed by the Sit Room’s lack of capabilities. In his book 6 Nightmares: The Real Threats to American Security, he opined that this was emblematic of bigger problems facing the nation: “One day in 1996 the President’s national security team (I was his national security adviser) met for a discussion of chemical and biological terrorism. I found the low-tech setting symbolic of our position in addressing such new threats to our nation’s security.”
When considering what the Sit Room does on a 24/7 basis, however, it’s understandable why change is slow to come. The staff must fulfill its core function of funneling information to the president. They cannot miss a beat. Even upgrades to equipment have to be done in a way that minimizes disruption, as Elliott Powell described to me. “When we were changing networks, going from copper to fiber optic, that train had to continue on regardless,” he said. The team built a whole backup network, to make absolutely sure there was no gap in service. “It’s the old saying,” Powell laughed. “How do you eat an eight-hundred-pound gorilla? One bite at a time.”
OF ALL THE incredible technological feats Gary Bresnahan pulled off, one request caught him completely off guard.
It came in the summer of 1998. “Sandy Berger calls me and says, ‘Gary, Charles Ruff is going to call you.’” Ruff, who was then serving as White House counsel, was representing the president in the investigation over the Clintons’ long-ago real estate deal known as Whitewater. In the course of the investigation, independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s team had uncovered his relationship with twenty-two-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky, a revelation that sent a seismic jolt through Washington, D.C., and beyond.
In late July, Lewinsky received immunity in exchange for testifying to a grand jury about the relationship. She directly contradicted statements Clinton had earlier made under oath, confirming that they had been intimately involved. Now in legal peril, he agreed to give taped testimony to the grand jury. Which is why Sandy Berger was calling Gary Bresnahan.
Berger told him, “When Chuck Ruff calls, he’s gonna say that the president wants you to be his videographer for the Whitewater thing,” Bresnahan recalls. “I said, ‘Why me? I’m not a videographer. I can spell the word “videographer,” but that’s about it. You need a professional.’ He said, ‘No, they want you because they can trust you.’”
“Clinton wanted it to be secure,” Richard Clarke told me. “He didn’t want to have the deposition in the lawyer’s office. He wanted to have the deposition with him in the White House. He wanted it to be highly secure, point to point. And no unauthorized recording.” He chose the Map Room—the former billiard room where, more than four decades earlier, FDR had set up his Sit Room–style war headquarters—to make the videos.
“All these press people were [assuming], ‘Oh, we’ll be able to get this link and hear everything they say in the Map Room,’” Bresnahan recalls. “I so badly wanted to tell somebody, ‘They’re not gonna get this,’ because we used one of our NSA encryptions.” He was taking no chances. The president wanted his testimony to be secure, so Bresnahan would make absolutely sure that it was. “We wired that place,” he said.
Bresnahan told me about one of the practice sessions, in which the president’s lawyers peppered him with questions about the Whitewater deal. “They were drilling him,” Bresnahan recalls, and then they “took a break. And he’s in a corner of that room… and he turns to me, which, I’m ten feet from him, and he goes, ‘How do you think I’m doing?’ I said, ‘You’re doing great, sir!’ You know—how do I know?”
By this point in his career, Bresnahan had been present for dozens of extraordinary situations and great historical moments. He masterminded the communications between President Carter and the Desert One rescue mission. He was at the hospital when President Reagan underwent surgery following the assassination attempt. He traveled to Iran in 1986 on the secret “cake and Bible” mission, when national security adviser Robert McFarlane gave a Bible inscribed by Reagan to the Iranian leadership. He snuck into Beijing following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Later, he would set up the communications between President Obama and the team that took out Osama bin Laden. He would be present in the Sit Room complex when bin Laden was killed, and he was also there on September 11, 2001. Bresnahan is the most important White House figure you never heard of, the guy jerry-rigging technology for every turn of history throughout seven presidential administrations.
And when I asked him what his most incredible memory of all those times was, he said, “Doing all the stuff for Clinton during his time from Whitewater on to the impeachment stuff. That was quite exciting for me, as a technical guy, being totally involved with that.” He remembers thinking, I can’t believe I’m in the Map Room with the president of the United States [testifying] in a session of court.
“It was amazing,” he said.
AS THE TWENTIETH century drew to a close, Americans were on edge. In August 1998, simultaneous terrorist bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya killed more than two hundred people. Four months later, President Clinton was impeached for lying under oath and obstruction of justice in the Lewinsky affair—at that time only the second president in history, after Andrew Johnson, to have been impeached. In 1999, two students at Columbine High School in Colorado murdered twelve of their classmates and a teacher, horrifying the nation. And in October of that year, EgyptAir Flight 990 plummeted into the ocean off the coast of Nantucket, killing everyone aboard, in a crash that was later deemed intentional.
Adding to the feelings of dread and uncertainty was the looming threat of the Y2K bug. For decades, the code underlying computer programs had been written using only the last two digits of the year. With the year 2000 coming, many feared that these programs would confuse “00” with the year 1900, causing them to crash. Some predicted worldwide outages of banks, stock markets, airline systems—anything that relied on computers. The worst doomsayers warned that these disruptions would provoke an apocalyptic societal meltdown.
In the months leading up to December 31, 1999, businesses, NGOs and governmental agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars to update code in hopes of averting catastrophe. Coders developed and disseminated patches, without any real idea if they would work—or even if they were truly needed. Radio provocateurs like Glenn Beck and Alex Jones revved up their listeners, who rushed to buy software-fixing kits along with doomsday prep staples such as freeze-dried foods, guns and gold bars.
Richard Clarke was “the lead White House person for Y2K,” Gary Bresnahan told me. A room at the General Services Administration served as Y2K headquarters, and in the months leading up to New Year’s Eve, Clarke, Bresnahan and others had multiple meetings to prepare for every possible outcome. In the Sit Room, director Elliott Powell recalls, “We did look at what we would do for backup, and how quickly it would take to put up—I don’t want to say a ‘shadow network,’ but another network to run in parallel.
“We had those computers set up just in case, because if worse came to worst, we’re expected to continue to keep going,” Powell told me. “Everybody was prepping for the worst and hoping for the best.”
“Talk about crisis, I don’t think I slept for the three days leading up to it,” deputy national security adviser Jim Steinberg told me—but not because he was worried about a possible computer meltdown.
“I had no idea about Y2K,” he told me, “but we had actual knowledge of planned terrorist attacks.” On December 14, U.S. border guards at Port Angeles, Washington, had detained an Algerian man named Ahmed Ressam, who turned out to have more than a hundred pounds of urea sulfate in the trunk of his car. Ressam, who had trained under al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, revealed that his mission was to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve.
“So, a known plot had been thwarted. But the thing about terrorism is,” Steinberg says, “it’s not the plots that you discover that you worry about. It’s the plots you haven’t discovered.” In the last two weeks of December, there were meetings every day, because the chatter—meaning intercepted communications among potential terrorists—was constant. “If you ever saw Spinal Tap,” he said, referencing the classic film This Is Spinal Tap, “we were at eleven on terrorism. We were at ten on Y2K.”
When December 31 finally arrived, Steinberg was at home. “I was so sure that something would happen, that the terrorists… would get through,” he told me. “The whole thing was terrifying—the combination of Y2K and a terrorist attack.” All day and into the night, Steinberg waited for the dreaded phone call. “It’s just, ‘Is the phone gonna ring? Is the phone gonna ring?’”
Elliott Powell was in the Situation Room on December 31. “The funniest thing about that was, of course, Australia gets the New Year first” because of time zone differences, he recalls. “So, you’re in the Sit Room, and the president’s there and the vice president’s there [by phone] and all the other principals from the other places are there, and it’s like, Okay, here we go now.” One million revelers in Sydney rang in the New Year with hugs, drinks and a huge show of fireworks over the harbor. And the lights stayed on, and the ATMs kept dispensing cash. All was well. It was 10:01 a.m. in Washington, D.C.
“The moment the clock struck midnight [in Australia], I know I breathed a sigh of relief, and I think everybody on the other end did as well,” Powell recalls. “I think we all just wished each other Happy New Year, and Hey, here we go—on to the new millennium!” By the time midnight was striking in Europe, hours later, “it was just me and the other guy in the Situation Room for England,” Powell says. The Y2K crisis had ended with not so much as a whimper. But the threat of terrorism was still real, as the United States had yet to ring in the New Year.
Elliott Powell remained in the Situation Room until midnight East Coast time, popping open a bottle of champagne. Jim Steinberg stayed on high alert at home for another three hours, until midnight Pacific time. At that point, he too finally breathed a sigh of relief: There hadn’t been a massive terrorist attack on American soil. Everything was going to be fine.
Or so we all thought.