11.

Crosswise with the President

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A few months later I was asked to go back to the White House for another deep dive. However, my role in this meeting was to back up the Gulf analyst who would be talking to the president about trends among the region’s Shiites. I would be there to handle any questions related to Iraq or Iran. We did everything we always did before such meetings. A paper was written and fully vetted. We held our murder board meeting and gave our presentation to the seventh floor so the brass would know what we were going to say. But no matter how hard you prepare, you never know how things are going to go. As it turned out, this was one of the most painful—and one of the most fascinating—experiences I had while working for the Agency.

The meeting was scheduled for May 8, 2008, and I was looking forward to it. I thought to myself, “I’ll go to the Oval Office and sit with the high and mighty again and finally get a chance to take a look around and absorb the surroundings.” I was so keyed up on my prior visit that I couldn’t even remember what the Oval Office looked like. I didn’t feel the same pressure “backbenching” the primary analyst (even though I had almost no background on some of the more controversial points in my colleague’s paper). There was a big section on “Iranian support for terror,” and I was told to be prepared to answer questions about that. Why someone from Iran Issue was not going I’ll never know, except that most of their analysts were new and untested. So I dug into the subject in hopes that I could give authoritative answers.

As the day approached, I began to feel even more confident about the Oval Office briefing. I was now steeped in the Iran terror issue and felt sure I could give an intelligent answer to almost any question. I woke up at three a.m. to get ready for the ride to the CIA and then to the White House. I got my first inkling that it was going to be a screwy morning when I went to the seventh floor to see the briefers and they asked me about a report that had come in overnight that seemed pretty important. I could tell at a glance that the report seemed odd and at variance with everything I knew about the subject. Therefore, I gave it very little credibility. I then rode downtown with the briefer for the director of National Intelligence.

DNI Mike McConnell had seemed gruff in our first meeting, but he was actually a nice man faced with an impossible job—reining in an out-of-control intelligence community and dealing with a president who reputedly bullied his staff and advisers. Sad to say, someone of McConnell’s temperament was not suited to the bare-knuckle work of the DNI. He seemed pleased when we went over our presentation. But he appeared miffed when I told him I was going only as a “backbencher.” He said that I had to be prepared to say something, so I gave him my analytic line on the paper that we were presenting. I think he may have thought that I was unprepared, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Looking back on it, I again thought it was crazy to be sending an analyst to be the secondary briefer on a topic that was not his usual area of competency. In any event, McConnell said the president was very busy and probably would not have much time for us. He said we would be in the Oval Office for no more than five minutes and told me to expect a question about Muqtada al-Sadr.

After a short wait, we were ushered into the Oval Office. The president and vice president seemed to recognize me and said hello. All the people attending the briefing had a glass of water or a Diet Coke in front of them except the two who needed them the most—the briefers. My colleague Greg launched into a summary of his paper on the Gulf Shiites and immediately got peppered with questions from the president. The president looked annoyed, distracted, and uninterested. This was the week his daughter Jenna was getting married. He also was getting ready for a big trip to the Middle East, from which he would return just before the wedding. I don’t think he had read the briefing paper the night before, as he usually did. He seemed put out when I brought up the subject of Sadr and the possibility he would move to Saudi Arabia. Bush said that King Abdullah didn’t like Sadr and that the only reason he let him into Saudi Arabia was to perform the hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca. (This was probably more a case of an Arab leader telling the president what he wanted to hear. King Abdullah was not above trying to flatter Sadr and at times gave him much-needed financial help.)

Bush then told me that Adil Abdul-Mahdi, a member of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, had told him that Sadr was practically “retarded.” I said that I had heard comments about Sadr like that before, but that Abdul-Mahdi was an enemy of Sadr and that their bad blood might color his view. The president had not factored in that Iraqi rivals might badmouth each other to gain advantage with the United States. Bush seemed to think that Iraqis would not lie to him after he had saved their country from the clutches of a tyrant. I was surprised by his naiveté, because the president was an intelligent man, not the lazy C student caricatured in the media. I could tell by talking to him that he read a lot of the cable traffic and raw intelligence reports. During our briefing he recalled the name of a participant in a meeting with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani when that name escaped me. He appeared to be able to retain information and had good recall of intelligence reporting; he just had trouble coming up with what to make of it.

After five minutes of this, Bush got a bored look on his face, put the paper down, and said, “OK, so what you’re telling me is that everything is OK, right?” Greg, the Gulf analyst, said that was correct. Bush then replied, “OK, what’s up with Sadr?” and looked at me. Sadr was a source of constant interest in the Bush White House. Even though I had briefed the president on Sadr in February, he wanted an update on the cleric. To be honest, I had prepared to answer questions that pertained to the paper that had been given to the president. The president’s request for a briefing caught me by surprise. I was fully up on the latest developments relating to the Iraqi cleric, but now I was being asked to put together a polished presentation in less than thirty seconds and be prepared to answer whatever questions were fired at me. Now, this was not as easy as it may sound. Whenever the CIA went to the Oval Office to do a deep dive on a particular subject, we produced a paper that would help frame the discussion. This was very important because Bush had a tendency to start firing questions at the briefer that went in multiple directions. Having the paper as the point of departure helped keep the president within the framework of the discussion at hand.

The president had completely changed the focus of our meeting. We would no longer discuss Greg’s topic. Now the president wanted a briefing on an entirely new subject: Sadr. Suddenly I found myself briefing the president without the paper and without the necessary framework that would be needed to keep him focused. In March 2008, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki had attacked the Sadrists in Basra and, despite almost being surrounded by the Sadrist militias, was able to deal a stern blow against the cleric’s gunmen. I wasn’t ready for a detailed discussion of Sadr, because I had spent most of my prep time working on Iranian terrorism to support Greg’s presentation. Suddenly, all eyes were on me and I had to wing it. I swallowed hard and said, “Well, that is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” I was not trying to be funny. I merely said it to give myself five more seconds so I could come up with an answer. Bush looked at me and said, “Well, why don’t you make it the seventy-four-thousand-dollar question, or whatever your salary is, and answer the question!” I thought to myself, “What an asshole!”

Here I was in the Oval Office, the place where McGeorge Bundy used to brief JFK and LBJ. I had always thought this was the place where you discussed weighty issues in a serious and deliberative way. I said “Understood, sir,” and proceeded to piece together my briefing as I went along. Keep in mind that I was the only analyst in the room who could speak to this issue; usually, the Agency sent two analysts to cover a topic. I told the president about possible Iranian efforts to prosecute Sadr over the 2003 murder of a rival cleric. Bush seemed to get a kick out of this and guffawed: “Who’d have thought the Iranians would put the screws to Sadr.” He asked me why they were doing this, and I told him that the Iranians had been looking for a way to get leverage over Sadr and keep him in line with their own intentions. This led the president to ask where all this was going. I said that Sadr might surprise us all, that he still had a substantial following and might be more resilient than we had thought. Bush looked at me in a funny way and asked if I thought that Sadr could play a constructive role in Iraq or be reconciled to the Maliki government. I said it was possible but unlikely in the current political environment.

Bush then told me that Sadr was a punk and a thug and someone the United States didn’t have to deal with anymore. I responded that Sadr represented the views of a large number of Iraqis and could move big crowds when he wanted to. The president asked what evidence I had for this. I said Sadr recently told his followers not to demonstrate for fear they would spark violence. Bush countered that he had seen reports saying Sadr said this because he knew no one would show up for the demonstrations. This was news to me—I couldn’t imagine where he had come across such claptrap—but I didn’t pursue the point. Frankly, I was stunned that the president wanted to argue with me. I kept looking over at the CIA briefer to get her to shut down the session. She, or more likely the DNI, should have explained that the CIA was here to brief on the Shiites and could arrange a deep dive on Sadr later. However, both she and the DNI sat there like a bumps on a log. Everyone seemed afraid to say the wrong thing to Bush, including his senior advisers.

Bush’s national security team could see that the president was confused, from the way he reacted to what I was saying. They then proceeded to circle the wagons around the president, attacking me as a hostile outsider. Defense Secretary Robert Gates simply swatted away what I was saying. “Oh, Mr. President, we feel that Sadr is not a threat anymore. He says one thing one day, another on another day. He’s all over the place, and what he says doesn’t matter.” I interjected that Sadr had been very consistent with his messaging about opposing the United States and was, in fact, becoming more sophisticated in his ability to rally his followers. Condoleezza Rice said to me, “But don’t you think he is just a flake? Why should anyone take him seriously anymore?” I said, “With all due respect, Madam Secretary, I have been hearing this for five years now, and by attaching labels like ‘flake’ to Sadr, I think we do ourselves a disservice by underestimating him.” Bush broke in and practically screamed at me, “Oh, yeah? Well, I think we overestimate him! The man’s a thug and a killer, and the Iraqi people don’t want that.”

At the end of the day, the president said, the future belonged to freedom. The Iraqi people wanted security for their families and the right to earn a decent living for themselves. And they were tired of Sadr killing them. Bush then asked me what I thought of that. I agreed that it was true that Sadr’s Mahdi Army had certainly hurt itself with its violent behavior, but that religion mattered a great deal to the followers of Sadr. I added that Muqtada, along with his revered father, Muhammad Sadiq, enjoyed an almost iconlike status among Iraqi Shiites, who were, after all, the majority of the Iraqi population. I remember thinking how ironic it was that I had to explain to the president, a religious man, how important religion was in Iraq.

At this point, Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, jumped into the fray. He had read that some of Sadr’s associates had told the cleric that they had dreams of pictures of his father with bleeding eyes. Mullen looked at me and asked, “What the hell are they all talking about?” I explained that it was not uncommon for Sadr to express himself that way or for his advisers to do the same. I said that Sadr was prone to mysticism, that he was studying to be an ayatollah, and that he often saw things through the prism of his father’s experiences. I explained that dreams in Islamic culture are viewed differently than they are in the West. We regard dreams almost as hallucinations, while among Shiites dreams are sometimes seen as having a real effect on events or as portents to be taken seriously. I said that I had talked with some people who had known Sadr’s father, and they spoke of him with a reverence and awe that was similar to the way in which some Sunnis used to talk about Saddam Hussein.

Bush looked at me with disbelief. “Reverence and awe?” he thundered, as if he couldn’t believe his ears. Then he chuckled and looked at his advisers and said, “What Iraqis were you talking to?” and everyone laughed with the president. I explained that there were Iraqis to that day who still gathered at the grave of Saddam Hussein to remember him. I decided to tell the president about some of the Iraqis I had talked to. One in particular, whom I had debriefed in 1998, was a former aide to Uday Hussein. I explained that the man was articulate, spoke English well, understood international politics, and knew how to maneuver in Saddam’s political system. He also believed that Saddam and Uday could read minds. I tried to use this as an example of what Iraqis were like, particularly Iraqis who had been traumatized by the arbitrary use of terror inflicted on them.

The president just laughed and said, “Maybe we can get a few mind readers in here.” Bush’s prep-school humor was a little hard to take. With his black-and-white view of the world, he couldn’t accept the possibility that any Iraqi revered the deposed dictator.

Bush kept asking me whether I thought Sadr could be a constructive player in Iraq or whether he would always be at odds with the United States. I said that his father was anti-American and that Muqtada tended to hold the same beliefs. “Why didn’t his father like us?” the president asked. I mentioned that the elder Sadr had condemned the Gulf War and American policy toward Israel. At that, Bush just rolled his eyes and motioned for me to stop. I said Sadr could probably be both a constructive player and a nuisance. I knew that was not the answer Bush wanted to hear. I had been told beforehand that the president wanted clear-cut opinions and didn’t care if you were wrong; he just didn’t want equivocations. I explained that Sadr in the short term would probably continue to harbor anti-U.S. views. But once back in Iraq, he would probably harbor anti-Tehran sentiments that could work in America’s favor.

Bush leaned over and asked me again, “Should we have killed him?” He had asked me this question in our first meeting in the Oval Office and had asked it of several other analysts. I don’t know why he kept harping on it, or why he would ask a GS-14 if the United States should break the law. I replied, “No, we should not kill him. Killing him would only make him a martyr and rally more people to his movement.” I cautioned the president that in dealing with issues and people in the Middle East, it’s hard to put them into neatly defined boxes, such as whether someone was a clear friend or foe. People in the region often didn’t fit into any category and sometimes did contradictory things at the same time.

“Well, what’s the answer?” he asked. ”What should I do?” I said that while it was hard to take a passive approach, Sadr could be his own worst enemy. Without the United States as bogeyman, he might make a mistake that could cost him his leadership. Bush looked at me and said, “There were people who said that I should let Saddam be Saddam, and I proved them wrong.” I wanted to say, “And that worked out so well?” But I just said, “Yes, you did, sir.”

We had been talking about Sadr, but it could have been Saddam. After more than seven years in office, Bush had assiduously studied his Iraq brief but still didn’t understand the region and the fallout from the invasion. A colleague who had briefed him told me that Bush was reading David Fromkin’s 1989 book The Peace to End All Peace: The Making of the Modern Middle East. It’s a fascinating study of how the Allied powers became embroiled in the Middle East during World War I and carved up the region into spheres of influence with little or no regard to the ethnic or sectarian tensions that might result. One would think that a president with this level of intellectual curiosity would have thought long and hard before loosing the dogs of war. But Bush was reading the book in 2007—not in 2002, before he placed the United States into the ruinous conflict in Iraq.

Finally, a voice of reason in the room piped up. It was none other than Dick Cheney, who wanted to know about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. We talked a bit about his health—in 2004, Sistani went to London for treatment of a heart condition—and how he had urged Shiites to practice moderation in the face of Sunni violence. Both the president and the vice president seemed interested. The hostile mood lessened once we got off the topic of Sadr. They asked me who I thought might succeed Sistani. I told him that we thought Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Ishaq al-Fayyad al-Afghani was the most likely candidate. Bush laughed again and said, “Ha, an Afghani. That’ll teach ’em!” Once again, everyone laughed, at which point the president announced to me and my fellow briefer, “That is all, gentlemen,” and we were dismissed.

As I walked out of the Oval Office, Josh Bolten, Bush’s chief of staff, stood holding the door for us. He locked eyes with me and smiled, giving me a look like “Wow, you got the treatment.” I got out of the room and said to Greg, “What the hell just happened in there?” I had never experienced a grilling like that from the president of the United States. Greg said to me, “You were great. There is no way I could have handled any of those questions. You fielded them well.” I wasn’t so sure. McConnell looked pretty annoyed with me as we left. I knew that the president wasn’t pleased, and I feared that this was going to be a problem once I got back to CIA headquarters.

We traveled back in the car with the CIA briefer, and I asked her how she thought it had gone. She hemmed and hawed and said, “It was all right, I guess.” Not much of a vote of confidence. The last time I had briefed the president, the briefer had been effusive in his praise. After I got back to Langley, I told my office about the session, and my colleagues couldn’t hide their concern. To careerists, it didn’t matter what you said as long as you made the president happy. I then went to the seventh floor to fill in the brass. I told them it was a spirited discussion and left it at that. I saw their nervous looks, and no one wanted me to stay for a longer discussion.

I then got word that CIA director Mike Hayden had been told that things hadn’t gone well and that the president was upset. The day was such a whirlwind—after going to the Oval Office, I then had to go to the Pentagon to brief Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman—that I didn’t get a chance to write up my own report of how the meeting went. The next day I had to write a memo for the president’s daily briefing and again didn’t have time to pull together my notes about our meeting. Then I noticed something strange: No one was asking for them. I realized that the only way to protect myself was to write them up and get my version of things into management’s hands. I quickly banged out a memo for the seventh floor.

The one bit of good news came when Mike Morell, the CIA deputy director, sent a note to my management saying he thought I had been put in an extremely difficult situation but had handled myself well. At the time, none of my managers shared this note with me; they preferred to keep me in the dark and let me dangle above their disapproval. When I walked around headquarters during the next few weeks, it was if I were radioactive. Only close colleagues talked to me. I felt like a modern-day Trotskyite, someone in an old Soviet photograph who had been airbrushed out of the picture because of a doctrinal dispute. When I later heard about Morell’s message, I was grateful for the support from someone who understood the pressures analysts face.

I had an opportunity to go back to the Oval Office in the waning days of the administration. I chose not to, and I later felt terrible that I hadn’t gone. Here I was, with an opportunity to once more meet with the president, and I let someone else take my spot. Going a third time would have been a feather in my cap. But I was not sure how much of an impact my paper would make on a president with roughly forty-five days left in his term. And most important, I didn’t want to get the same treatment I received the last time. I felt that if the president saw me, it would be like waving a red cape at a bull. It is sad enough to think how much of taxpayer money gets wasted by the intelligence community, but it’s even sadder when the president dismisses all this expensive work when it doesn’t support his political views.