“Let’s try that again,” called Tim Lea, the very fit Secret Service lead agent, after a mediocre practice throw I’d just let loose while warming up in the tunnel underneath the Washington Nationals’ baseball stadium. It was minutes before the start of the Nats game against the New York Mets on Saturday, July 27, 2013.
For the last month I had been back at the White House in my new role as national security advisor. On Day One, I found myself smack in the middle of a maelstrom of crisis that would presage the next two years of nonstop crazy pressure. In just six months, we would grapple with Egypt, Edward Snowden, Syria, a wholesale internal review of our Middle East policy, the launch of secret negotiations with Cuba, and private talks with Iran, among other challenges.
Yet none of those critical issues and all-consuming demands caused me more stress than when I was slated to throw out the ceremonial opening pitch at Nationals Park before a capacity crowd.
For well over a month, I had been practicing sporadically with several agents, first from Diplomatic Security, and then from the Secret Service, which took over my detail when I moved from USUN to the White House. When the big day arrived, before it was time to head out to the field, Tim Lea and I made sure to warm up in the tunnel—where the two of us tossed long balls back and forth, and I fought back nerves.
Tim took my baseball debut very seriously. Like a brother, he had worried aloud that I could not afford to embarrass myself. I appreciated that he seemed almost as keen on protecting me from public humiliation as from any potential physical threat. Normally crowds don’t faze me. I can easily give a major speech to a stadium-size audience, as I had done at the Ohio State University and Stanford commencements. Somehow, this felt different.
When I walked out into the massive stadium, my stomach flipped over. Ian, Jake, and Maris, along with Johnny and Andrea, my niece Kiki and nephew Mateo, all joined me on the first base line, offering last-minute encouragement. Johnny, typically less diplomatic than the others, warned, “Don’t mess this up, Spo,” employing the high school nickname given me by my basketball teammates.
I took the mound. The stadium erupted with a lot of friendly cheers but also some audible boos. Benghazi was not far in the past. Still a tomboy jock in my own self-image, I refused to take the girly way out by throwing from in front of the mound. I would try to throw the whole distance. The time between when the umpire told me to head to the mound and I had to pitch felt like a nanosecond. The pressure to throw immediately felt intense. Through my terror, I wound up and let it rip. It felt like it was going high, but the umpire yelled “Striiike!” and the catcher Wilson Ramos nodded with smug satisfaction.
Rarely, if ever, have I felt more relief. I didn’t let womankind down. Fox wasn’t going to be able to loop me throwing a dirt ball. I could come back to the White House and report to the president that I hadn’t humiliated him or myself.
Seven months earlier on a Sunday morning in January, I’d found myself unexpectedly sitting in the Oval Office, my back killing me. I could barely sit. The soft sofa adjacent to the president’s chair was the last place I needed to be. That same day, I’d thrown my back out lunging for a backhand volley during my weekly tennis game with Karim Najdi, the coach at St. Albans School, who for years sacrificed his Sundays to help keep me sane as a service to his adopted nation. When President Obama’s assistant called me that morning to ask if I could come to see the Boss, I had no idea what the topic was or why we needed to have a rare, off-the-calendar, private meeting in the Oval.
Trying to mask my severe pain, I appreciated that, as usual, Obama quickly got to the point. He noted that, for his second term, Deputy National Security Advisor Denis McDonough would take over as White House chief of staff, and he now needed to consider potential replacements for Denis. While Denis’s successor would initially serve under the current NSA, Tom Donilon, Obama wanted my view, because, as he indicated, “It’s important that you can work well with the new deputy—whomever it is I choose.” He added matter-of-factly, “once you take over Tom’s job.” Back pain notwithstanding, I sat up a little straighter. This was the first direct confirmation from Obama that he intended to name me NSA, which I appreciated but let pass unremarked.
Over the past weeks after withdrawing from consideration for secretary of state, I’d been continuing in my role as U.N. ambassador—content to stay a while longer. The president had hinted earlier that he might choose me to be his second-term national security advisor. But anything can change, and in Washington you can never be certain.
The president floated two potential names for his principal deputy national security advisor. Though I liked and respected them both, I expressed my preference for the one he ultimately chose, Tony Blinken. Tony was Vice President Biden’s national security advisor and his longtime aide from the Senate. We had served together in the Clinton administration and, under Obama, we had found ourselves frequently aligned on major issues at the Principals table. Tony was affable, formidably smart, and superbly prepared for the role but also a trusted friend with whom I enjoyed working. Funny and serious, nice but firm, and always unflappable, Tony would effectively run the crucial Deputies Committee, which is (normally) the hardest working team in Washington and reports to the Principals Committee, which I would chair.
Left unsaid by the president, but obvious, was that I was meant to keep this conversation in utter confidence, except from Denis. The time frame for my start at the NSC was unclear, but it appeared that the president might wish Tom to stay for the bulk of 2013 to provide continuity, since much of the rest of the national security team was turning over. No one on my USUN team knew if or when I might move back to Washington. Nothing is done until it’s done, and folks needed to see me fully grounded at the U.N. until I was no longer. Following that confidential Sunday meeting in the Oval, it was back to New York first thing Monday morning to find a good doctor who could fix my back.
Strangely enough, when the president called in late May to tell me it was time to prepare to come home to Washington—in advance of Tom’s late June departure—my private reaction was muted. I was pleased, not thrilled—gratified that this opportunity had finally come but sobered by the trials that had preceded it. Above all, I felt ready to step in, glad to be reunited with my family, and sad to leave my wonderful USUN team.
The president also sought my views on my successor at the U.N. He was inclined toward Samantha Power, then senior director for multilateral affairs at the NSC, whose portfolio during the first term included all U.N.-related issues. She and I had worked amicably and closely over my tenure, and I knew Samantha really wanted the job. I told the president I thought she would do well.
On June 5, 2013, in the White House Rose Garden, fully in bloom on a perfect Washington summer day, President Obama thanked Tom Donilon for his dedicated service and announced before our families and the assembled press corps that I would succeed Tom as national security advisor, effective July 1. Samantha would replace me at the U.N.
In his remarks, President Obama, recalling my role in his 2008 campaign, said: “I’m absolutely thrilled that she’ll be back at my side.” Perhaps as a subtle counterpunch to my Benghazi detractors, he called me a “consummate public servant—a patriot who puts her country first.”
After reviewing my experience on the NSC staff and as assistant secretary of state, President Obama gave me (and Johnny) the highest compliment, “She is fearless; she is tough. She has a great tennis game and a pretty good basketball game. Her brother is here, who I play with occasionally, and it runs in the family—throwing the occasional elbow—but hitting the big shot.” Pretty apt, I thought, at least as it pertained to Johnny and our elbows. Obama ended by acknowledging Ian, Jake, and Maris for their sacrifice and quipped that I would be “the first person ever in this job who will see their family more by taking the National Security Advisor’s job.”
During the rest of June, I split my time between New York and Washington, where I joined the customary daily meetings with Obama and spent hours with Tom, as he briefed me on the various sensitive issues he handled, many of which were not discussed at the Principals table. Smart, meticulous, and politically astute, Tom had served in every Democratic administration since Jimmy Carter’s, including as deputy national security advisor from the start of Obama’s tenure. He was steeped in both policy issues and the national security decision-making process. As we conducted a thorough handoff over the course of a month, I quickly realized that, while at the U.N. I had literally been covering the world, and in the Principals Committee we discussed a wide range of policy issues, the job of national security advisor was broader than both.
My additional responsibilities would span coordination and oversight of sensitive intelligence matters that I had not previously been read into, defense policy, military operations, counterterrorism and cyber security issues, and certain national security legal and law enforcement issues. I also had to master the national security elements of the federal budget, international economic issues from trade to sanctions to export controls, our nuclear policy and procedures, and continuity of government protocols in case of a major crisis.
I felt well-prepared for the NSA role, given that in my prior jobs I had seen the national security decision-making process from every vantage point. Having served as both a junior and senior NSC staffer, I understood the extraordinarily important role the staff plays in crafting policy options and coordinating the agencies. As a regional assistant secretary, I had joined the secretary of state and her deputies as a backbencher in countless Principals and Deputies Committee meetings and saw policymaking succeed and fail. Finally, as U.N. ambassador and a principal myself, I had an appreciation for what works from the perspective of the other senior policymakers around the table. Most valuably, I was walking in with an established relationship with the president, which was already grounded in mutual trust and respect.
My work in New York had afforded me a hands-on feel for the interests and attitudes of Russia and China, as well as valuable experience with other important global players—from the Europeans to India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia, from Mexico and Brazil to Israel and the Gulf Arab countries. And, Africa was well-known to me. In sum, I was confident in having the necessary grasp on the major countries with which I would do business.
Still, the job of the national security advisor is very different from that of U.N. ambassador. The U.N. role is outward-facing—representing the U.S. to the world, prominently speaking to the public, press, and Congress, negotiating with scores of foreign countries, traveling abroad frequently in service of U.S. and, as appropriate, U.N. business. The NSA role is primarily an inward-facing job—advising and supporting the president, formulating and coordinating policy among the agency heads, guiding strategy, and managing the NSC staff.
While the NSA gives some public speeches and interviews, he or she neither testifies before Congress nor customarily takes on such a high public profile as to risk overshadowing the secretaries of state or defense. I knew that I performed well in both types of jobs but soon would be reminded as I settled in the role of national security advisor that, temperamentally, I preferred being less in the public spotlight.
When I returned to the White House, I brought with me a deep and personal respect for the NSC staff, knowing firsthand how skilled and hardworking they are and how critical their role would be in enabling me to perform optimally. The staff consists mainly of career professionals assigned for a year or two from their home agencies (e.g., State, Defense, the Intelligence Community, USAID, Justice, Homeland Security). There are a few political appointees sprinkled throughout, but most are apolitical, highly talented career professionals.
The NSC gets its pick of the best, and that was what I worked to ensure we had. I brought just a couple of my great team from USUN to join me at NSC initially. Salman Ahmed, my brilliant, gentle, and wise USUN chief of staff, became my senior advisor and NSC senior director for strategy and planning. Taara Rangarajan, a young but trusted and mature personal aide in my Washington office, served as my special assistant and right-hand administrator. Later, I recruited a number of other staffers from USUN.
To enable a smooth transition and allow myself time to evaluate key members of the NSC staff, I made no immediate personnel changes. Only after months of observation did I move to swap in some players with strengths more suited to my vision. The staff had grown from about 150 people during the Clinton years to about four hundred by the time I became NSA. The increase was due mainly to the growth of the technology/systems staff and the international economic team, which is jointly shared with the National Economic Council, as well as the creation after 9/11 of the Homeland Security Council and its subsequent incorporation by President Obama into the “National Security Staff” (NSS).
I swiftly learned that my team detested being termed “NSS.” Many shared the view that it was “demeaning,” and ahistorical. In a small but not insignificant way, I sensed that it sapped their pride in serving at the White House. As a former NSC staffer, I too disliked the term “National Security Staff.” We were the staff of the statutorily constituted National Security Council and should be so designated. So, once I was well-ensconced in the job, I asked President Obama to sign an executive order changing our name back to its hallowed original. Few things he did made the president (and me) more popular with the dedicated men and women of the NSC.
Similarly, while I came to the White House with a personal bias in favor of reducing the size of the unwieldy NSC staff, I waited a year and a half to launch an NSC “right-sizing and reform” process in order to pressure-test my hypothesis and to ensure that we made any changes gingerly and wisely so as not to disrupt our ability to serve the president. By the time I left, I was proud that I managed to shrink the NSC staff by 15 percent through attrition and rebalancing portfolios, without firing or curtailing anyone simply to cut positions.
When I started my tenure officially on July 1, 2013, it was hard to believe that twenty years had passed since I’d first gone to work in government as a twenty-eight-year-old entry-level staffer at the NSC. My early NSC mentors—Dick Clarke, Tony Lake, and Sandy Berger—had each helped me build a foundation and prepared me in the fundamentals of national security policymaking. Much had changed in the interim. Back then, the internet was not widely accessible, infant CNN was the only cable news network, and cell phones were the size of bricks. It was a different world entirely.
Despite all that I had learned in the intervening years, it was hard to feel ready for the full-blown shitstorm that hit me on Day One. In all those hours of pre-briefing, no one had warned me that Egypt would implode on my first day in office. On July 1, Tom was already gone. Obama was away, completing a major trip to Africa, and I was getting settled at my large wooden desk in my northwest corner office on the ground floor of the White House’s West Wing. Home alone.
In Cairo, millions massed in the streets demanding the ouster of Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi, who had taken office one year earlier. Thousands of counter-protesters rallied in support of Morsi, who remained defiant, refusing several opportunities to compromise with the opposition, including an appeal from Obama delivered in an urgent phone call from Tanzania. So far, there had been only sporadic violence, but the risk of civil conflict was real. The military, led by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, gave Morsi an ultimatum: make peace with his opponents within forty-eight hours, or else. President Obama urged Morsi to “Be bold,” to be a leader for all Egyptians and to forge a unity government before it’s too late.
Soon after Obama’s call, I spoke by telephone with Morsi’s foreign affairs advisor, Essam el-Haddad, to warn that the window for accommodation was quickly closing. I stressed that they needed to take urgent steps to deescalate the crisis and avert military intervention. While reiterating that the U.S. strongly opposed any extraconstitutional moves, I reinforced President Obama’s point that the Egyptian military “is not taking direction from us.”
By the time Obama returned from Africa late on July 2, Egypt was in the midst of a nonviolent, popularly driven coup stoked by Gulf Arab leaders that resented Mubarak’s departure and feared Morsi’s election. The next day, Sisi declared Morsi deposed, placed him under house arrest, installed an interim president, and pledged new elections. While many Egyptians had grown weary of Morsi’s failed economic policies and his autocratic tendencies, a sizable portion of the population, including those sympathetic to the Islamists, insisted (correctly) that Morsi was legitimately elected and must continue to govern. The country was combustible, and the U.S. (always focused on the security of our personnel) ordered all nonessential embassy staff and their families to leave Egypt.
This crisis was the subject of the first Principals Committee meeting I chaired—on Day One as NSA. I would have preferred a few days to settle into the job, meet the staff, and read briefing materials before convening the Principals. In this instance, as in many others, crisis interceded to upend my best-laid plans. When Obama returned, he swiftly requested a meeting of his full National Security Council, in which he chaired the assemblage of cabinet Principals.
But first things first. It was July 4, and I had to uphold the family tradition of marching with our neighbors, the “Millwood Mob,” in the Palisades Independence Day parade. After completing that duty and downing my annual hot dog, I showered and rushed to the White House to staff my first NSC meeting.
As NSA, I always sat to the immediate left of the president in these meetings—close enough to exchange notes or a quiet comment and to take his temperature with respect to the issues and my agency counterparts. Alternatively, as had long been the case, we were able to communicate without reliance on words.
On this day, it was plain from the outset that the Situation Room was not the place Obama wanted to be. July 4 is his elder daughter, Malia’s, birthday, and the president was due to host not only a family birthday celebration but also thousands of military families and staff for the evening fireworks display on the White House lawn.
We quickly got down to business. The proximate issue was how should the U.S. respond to the military takeover in Egypt? On one level, the answer appeared obvious: a coup had occurred, and U.S. law requires that we halt all assistance to extralegal governments, like Egypt’s new military-backed regime. Yet it wasn’t so simple. Egypt was the second largest beneficiary of U.S. aid after Israel, receiving $1.5 billion a year, including $1.3 billion for the military. While corrupt, repressive, and undemocratic, the Egyptian military had long been a reliable partner for the U.S.—a bulwark against terrorism, a valued neighbor to Israel and our Gulf partners, and an important contributor to security in the Sinai and Suez. If we cut all assistance, the U.S.-Egypt partnership would grind to a halt. Moreover, we viewed the Morsi government as more than a disappointment, having lost our sympathy, if not its legitimacy. Still, it was hard to justify circumventing the coup designation.
Several principals, including Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and CIA director John Brennan argued we should not deem this a coup. Others, including Deputy NSA Ben Rhodes and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Martin E. Dempsey, emphasized the difficulty of pretending otherwise. The president listened intently, challenging the arguments on both sides, and then decided: We will not call it a coup, nor will we say that it was not; we will remain silent on the question, thereby not invoking the law that would cut off all assistance and effectively acquiescing in the coup without saying so.
It was an artful, if contorted, finesse, which I endorsed at the time. Yet the nondesignation both strained credulity and infuriated some members of Congress, like John McCain, who in this instance preferred legal orthodoxy (calling it a coup) over pragmatism. Reaching that fundamental decision sufficed for the moment on the 4th of July. It enabled me to take a break long enough to enjoy Malia’s poolside birthday gathering and the fireworks with my family.
Yet the turmoil in Egypt continued to consume us. Days later, Morsi supporters took to the streets in large numbers demanding his restoration to power. The military responded by firing into crowds, killing over fifty people and wounding hundreds on July 9 alone. By August, when the president took his week-long vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, the situation in Cairo was spinning out of control.
When the president travels domestically, he is always accompanied by a senior NSC staffer. Usually, I delegated that responsibility to a trusted colleague, but I made a habit of joining President Obama on Martha’s Vineyard, as I had learned the hard way that bad things often happen in August (e.g., the 1998 embassy bombings). Being new in the job, I also felt obliged to limit my own vacation, so I tried to combine staffing him with family time. Ian and the kids joined me on the Vineyard, and I hoped to be able to work in the mornings and hang with family in the afternoons and evenings. It was a flawed plan, which in future years I did not replicate. Martha’s Vineyard afforded a nice change of scenery, but since I was always on-duty it was no vacation.
Every morning during the president’s so-called “vacation,” I would get up early to send him a daily briefing memo and often visit or call him from our makeshift, secure NSC office across the island to discuss pressing matters. On August 14, the issue was the Egyptian military systematically slaughtering Morsi supporters in Cairo’s streets. Up to a thousand were killed and thousands wounded by heavy weapons in a horrific display of bloody repression.
President Obama instructed me to convene his NSC by secure conference call. Outraged by the carnage, he ordered a full review of our assistance to Egypt. In a statement to the press the next day, Obama canceled the upcoming major annual U.S.-Egypt military exercise originally planned for September and set in motion a process that resulted in the suspension of both cash assistance and the delivery of heavy weapons systems, including fighter jets, helicopters, tank kits, and antiship missiles. The president allowed military training and counterterrorism support, as well as education and health programs, to continue.
Relations between the Obama administration and Sisi’s Egypt never returned fully to normal. Sisi is a strongman, who craves power and crushes dissent. Obama remained distrustful of him and disappointed in his leadership. The president, my fellow White House staffers, Samantha Power, and I were more inclined than State, Defense, and CIA to punish Sisi and the Egyptian military for their myriad abuses, but most of us were also pragmatists who understood we could not afford to sever the relationship. For the remaining years, we sought to strike an awkward balance between demonstrating our discontent and forcing an irreparable breach. I always found this middle ground unsatisfactory but do not think the alternatives—fully breaking with the Egyptian military or failing to hold them at all accountable—were preferable.
I am not a morning person. Thankfully, neither is President Obama.
That made life easier than it could have been. Working for President George W. Bush, who reportedly started in the Oval Office before 7 a.m. and ended most days by 5 p.m., might have killed me. By contrast, Obama worked in the residence until late into the night, devouring his briefing materials and decision memos, sometimes calling or emailing with a question or concern. Luckily, I never had to wake him with a “3 a.m. phone call,” because I knew that, if I emailed him even at 2 a.m. or later, he was likely to respond or call me back. Obama rose around 7 a.m., worked out religiously, ate breakfast, read his intelligence materials, and came down to the office usually around 10 a.m. That suited me just fine.
I woke up to NPR’s Morning Edition—usually around 6 a.m. Most days, I would work out in our small basement gym, reading the newspaper on the elliptical machine while listening to the television. If I could stand it, I turned on Morning Joe. On those many days when their commentary risked raising my blood pressure even before 7 a.m., I would divert to the BBC. After showering and saying goodbye to the kids, I would jump into the Secret Service armored Suburban for the twenty-minute ride to the White House.
Waiting in the car was my intelligence briefer, the person assigned to hand me my secure iPad, which contained my morning briefing materials, including the very closely held PDB (the President’s Daily Brief), and other items he or she selected for me to read. My briefer was there to answer questions, receive and respond to requests for follow-up information, and occasionally field my praise or criticism about the quality of the day’s product. Not being a morning person, I was not especially talkative. Sometimes I had to make or receive a call, often with John Kerry, on the secure phone in my vehicle. Mainly, I focused on readying myself for the day ahead. Following the White House chief of staff’s morning meeting, I scrambled to prepare for briefing the president—finishing my intelligence take, reading morning briefing notes prepared by the NSC staff, devouring the press, preparing my points for the president, and being armed in case he wanted to discuss any of the memos I sent him the night before.
Just before 10 a.m., our small NSC team would gather in the lobby outside the Oval. In addition to the president and vice president, the group consisted of: me; the deputy national security advisor (first Tony Blinken, and from January 2015 Avril Haines); Lisa Monaco, the president’s counterterrorism and homeland security advisor; deputy NSA and speechwriter Ben Rhodes; Denis McDonough; and the vice president’s national security advisor (first Jake Sullivan, then Colin Kahl). A senior leader from the office of the Director of National Intelligence would join at the top of the meeting, usually DNI Jim Clapper himself or one of his deputies.
When we heard the door from the Rose Garden colonnade to the outer Oval slam shut, we knew it was showtime. Obama was in the house. Sometimes Bo, the elder and more mellow of the Obamas’ two large, very soft, white-shoed Portuguese Water Dogs, lounged lazily in a big leather chair to greet him. These meetings began with varying degrees of levity or trepidation, depending on the day. Bo’s cheerful presence meant we collectively started in a better mood as we filed in to the Oval.
We each always sat in the same place. My spot was on the couch just to the left of the president’s brown leather chair. That put me directly in the line of fire for whatever he was dishing that day—humor, frustration, firm direction, or a diversionary topic such as his perennial quest for a particular type of straw hat from Cuba. Like Ben and Denis, whose wardrobes the president regularly dissected, I occasionally endured a ribbing on things ranging from my shoes to the rationale for the weird holes in my suede jacket with a distinctive angular cut, a unique acquisition from a craft fair. And frequently, without impetus, Obama took the opportunity to remark on how short I am, as if he were noticing for the first time. His fascination with my height (or lack thereof) was a recurrent annoyance in our interactions. For my part, I gave as good as I got, although I confess to commenting approvingly on his notorious tan suit, which I actually welcomed as a respite from navy or gray.
Amidst all the seriousness and intensity of being in charge of the national security team, we made time for levity. Tony Blinken, my first deputy, was a wonderful colleague and friend who did an excellent job managing the Deputies Committee process with a hokey humor and smooth style that provided a kinder, gentler counterbalance to my own. He kidded me about my colorful language and my occasional feigned threat for someone who was getting on my last nerve to come and “kiss my black ass.” For Christmas our first year, Tony gave me a small package. Inside was an ink stamp with four letters on it: “KMBA.” I howled in laughter. Tony’s advice was that I use it to display in shorthand my disapproval of certain memos that came across my desk.
A big day in the Obama White House, I would learn, was St. Patrick’s Day, when each year the president would host the Taoiseach, Ireland’s prime minister, in the Oval Office. The meeting was usually a festive affair complete with mandatory, leafy green boutonnieres, and green garb all around. Obama, with his part-Irish heritage, embraced this meeting and the celebration that followed on Capitol Hill. Given his typically excellent taste, I was surprised one St. Patrick’s Day when he walked into the Oval looking his usual dapper self—but something was off. I realized his tie was all wrong. Rather than any discernible version of green, it was teal bluish and flecked with a strange pattern. It wasn’t an ugly tie (but it was nothing special). It just plain as day was not green.
“Mr. President,” I ventured, “your tie is not actually green.”
“What are you talking ’bout Rice? Of course it’s green.”
“No,” I held it closer to his face, “this is not green. It’s a kind of blue.”
“Give me a break. This is plenty green,” he insisted.
I called for backup: “Ferial,” appealing to the president’s assistant, “does this look green to you?”
“No,” she said, “not really.”
Pete Souza, the president’s photographer, agreed. Exasperated, Obama trudged back up to the residence and came back wearing a truly green tie. I was both amused and puzzled by this exchange, but when he returned I moved on to the daily briefing.
The next year, on St. Patrick’s Day, I was taken aback when he came down again in that same bluish, flecked tie. I thought—WTF? With some trepidation, but determined, I started: “Mr. President, don’t you remember we had this same conversation last year? That tie is not green.”
“Yes it is!” he again insisted.
“No it’s not. It wasn’t green last year, and it isn’t green this year,” I braved.
This time, I didn’t need to call for backup. It came swiftly, and the president retreated to the residence only to return again with the same correct green tie. I began to wonder if he was slightly color-blind.
Most mornings, our meetings began with less contention. And on some days, we just started with a celebration, like on August 4 when I typically led off with a (highly imperfect) rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “Happy Birthday to ya’. Happy Birthday to ya’. Happy Biiirthday…” The first time I sang for his birthday, Obama smiled, turned to Biden and said, “See, that’s what happens when you have a black national security advisor.” After a few laughs and a couple more bars, we got down to work.
The DNI briefer typically departed after ten or fifteen minutes of fielding the president’s questions. Then it was my turn. For the next half hour or so, I updated, fireproofed, sought guidance, and offered the president whatever insight I thought he might need that day. On my trusty graph paper pad, I kept a daily list of items to raise with the president as well as my “to-do” tracker. My briefing would cover not only high-profile topics like North Korea, Syria, Russia, or China, but also matters of interest and importance ranging from political developments in West Africa to the long-term strategic implications of water scarcity or space technology and threats to undersea cables. After I exhausted my list, or occasionally triaged it because I sensed the president was running out of patience, I handed off to Lisa, Avril, and Ben for matters they wished to raise.
We didn’t use these meetings to circumvent the Principals Committee process by trying to persuade the Boss of our preferred course before others could weigh in, and he would not have permitted that. But sometimes we did seek a sense of his gut instinct on tough topics in advance of a policy debate, so we would not be surprised, or surprise him, if our approaches were likely to diverge. This morning briefing time was a valuable opportunity to ensure that we stayed closely attuned to the president’s judgment and that he received daily the good, bad, and most often the ugly of what was going on around the world. Thankfully, Obama received bad news as we did—with equanimity rather than excessive emotion. His cool temperament and rationality enabled him to confront tough challenges with his formidable intellect, offering thoughtful direction and asking probing questions rather than shooting the messenger. Because President Obama is a voracious reader with huge capacity to retain information, our time was spent less on simply briefing him and more on collectively assessing the implications of key developments and considering potential paths forward.
Following the president’s daily briefing, the balance of the day was usually mine to manage—barring a bolt from the blue that screwed everything up, like a terrorist attack, hostage scenario, coup, or threat to U.S. personnel overseas. Often, I chaired a staff meeting after the morning briefing: either a small, internal meeting of my deputies to plan our Principals Committee and Deputies Committee schedule, discuss personnel, or resolve internal differences; or a larger meeting of NSC senior directors representing each of the regional and functional offices—roughly thirty highly skilled, mostly career public servants (diplomats, intelligence analysts, military officers) crammed tightly into the Situation Room. Senior directors would flag issues that they anticipated would require senior-level involvement and sought quick guidance on pressing matters. These sessions enabled me to keep my fingers on the pulse of the staff and be readily accessible to them.
I devoted the afternoons to meetings with outsiders like visiting foreign counterparts, and to preparing either for NSC meetings with the president or, more often, to run Principals Committee meetings. The PC met roughly two to three times per week for approximately an hour and a half each meeting. The frequency and length of the meetings varied, depending on the topic and the press of events. When the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was on the march or Ebola raging, when Syria negotiations were intense, or South Sudan was imploding and putting our embassy at risk, we would meet more frequently and sometimes with little advance notice.
Evenings were the only time available for reviewing and editing the thousands of memos my staff prepared in my name to send to the president. Briefing memos. Information memos. Decision memos. Thick binders of trip preparation materials. The volume of paper that we sent to the president, and which he read thoroughly, was all but overwhelming. Every night and weekend, I spent many hours ensuring that every page sent to the president was of uniformly high quality. A stickler for proper grammar and punctuation, I have a particular pet peeve about proper comma usage. (My chief of staff at USUN had to restrain me, in my own best interest, from giving an all-staff seminar on the comma.) I was not about to send garbage to any president, let alone the former president of the Harvard Law Review.
Occasionally, the tyranny of paperwork and tedium of the evenings were interrupted by a colleague dropping by before heading downstairs to go home. My favorite unannounced visitor was Vice President Joe Biden, whose office was just down the hall. Unlike President Obama, who rarely ambled into our suite and never without a purpose, the VP liked to pop in with no agenda and linger. He came to check on how we were doing, buck us up, tell a joke, shoot the breeze, or deliver a Bidenism—a family aphorism that never lost its value. In rare instances, the vice president surprised me by baring his soul, sharing his agony over his son Beau’s cancer and later his tragic passing. Even when in pain, Joe Biden was warm and generous, always leaving me feeling better than when he walked in.
Evenings were when things typically loosened up at the White House. In the absence of a crisis, we had a moment to breathe, to laugh, and tend to the trivial—like the bizarre arrival of a snowy owl just blocks from the White House in McPherson Square. Jake, the avid birder, pinged my cell phone incessantly in January 2014 seeking my help in locating the snowy owl so that he could get a good photograph. My colleague in the front office, Anne Withers, volunteered to track sightings of the owl online for a few days (until it got injured by a Metrobus) so that, despite my work hours, I could still be of some use to my teenage son.
Rarely would I escape the office before 8 p.m., staying many nights past 10 or 11 to move the paper that had to go to the residence that night or out to the agencies. Avril, who as deputy NSA had the hardest job in government, was much more of a fiend. She almost never left the office before midnight and often much later. I had a small fridge and cabinets, in which I discreetly stocked the necessary provisions, including adequate supplies of beer, wine, and other necessities to keep me, my front office team, and any visitors tolerably disposed well into the night.
Too often, we ordered snacks or dinner from the White House Mess. By evening, my dietary restraint often lapsed, and I could be tempted by some of the best chicken fingers in the world as well as waffle fries, jalapeño poppers (Avril’s favorite), or cheese and crackers. Being national security advisor, as I like to say, was “bad for my butt.” In fact, it was worse than the U.N., where Madeleine Albright often quipped, the job is to “eat and drink for your country.” In New York, I was usually able to leave the office in time to snag at least a late dinner at the residence, and there was no Mess. In Washington, I would graze on Mess food and then come home late and eat again with Ian, who had kindly prepared healthy dinners.
The job also wasn’t good for my blood pressure, though neither was the U.N. When my dad was very ill in 2010, I went to the White House Medical Unit to have my back pain checked. As a matter of routine, the doctor took my blood pressure, which had always been excellent. I was shocked to see it was well over 150 systolic. It had never been an issue, but at forty-five, suddenly I developed a problem that had long plagued my dad. Medication controls my blood pressure well, and regular exercise helps, but the stress of the NSA job definitely exacerbated the challenge.
She kept slapping the table and yelling in Portuguese. How could the U.S. have eavesdropped on my personal calls?
For what felt like an eternity, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff berated President Obama over allegations that the U.S. had tapped her personal phones. While the Brazilian foreign minister translated, I sat with the president at a small table in a quiet corner on the grounds of a Russian palace in St. Petersburg, where we were meeting for the 2013 G20 Summit. The hotter Dilma got, the cooler Obama became. He listened quietly at first, but I could tell his patience was running out. When it did, he interceded in a calm, low voice to explain antiseptically that he had not been aware of the reported eavesdropping. He had not directed the tapping of any friendly foreign leader’s phone. Such surveillance would not continue. The U.S. and Brazil should address this challenge to the valued bilateral relationship in a measured and rational manner.
Dilma wasn’t having it. She kept ranting until finally she ran out of steam. I watched half amused at this fascinating study in male-female dynamics. Obama failed utterly to meet Dilma where she was, to defuse her anger with reciprocal passion in his regret. This exchange reminded me of a scene between old-marrieds, when the wife is going berserk over her husband stepping out on her, and the husband is so icy in response trying to chill her out that it totally backfires. It would have been funny, if the whole thing were not so serious.
President Obama was royally pissed that he had to eat crap from foreign leader after foreign leader for a set of transgressions that he did not even know had been committed. It was only a few days after I started at the White House in early July that we learned from The Guardian that the massive cache of extraordinarily sensitive, highly classified documents—which a young, self-righteous intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden stole from the National Security Agency and selectively leaked to the press—alleged that the NSA was eavesdropping on the European Union and at least thirty-eight friendly countries. We later learned these targets purportedly included the personal communications of allied leaders.
Snowden’s leaks did immeasurable damage to many aspects of U.S. national security, from our ability to detect and prevent terrorist attacks to revelations about how the U.S. allegedly conducts intelligence collection. To add insult to injury, after releasing vast quantities of stolen information, Snowden absconded to Vladimir Putin’s Russia where he shared God knows what.
Particularly upset by the eavesdropping allegations was Obama’s good friend and invaluable ally, Angela Merkel. In October 2013, she called so angry that she spoke the whole time in German for the first and only time I can recall in their many discussions. Her understandable fury (exacerbated by echoes of East Germany’s Stasi past) was palpable from across the Atlantic, despite Obama’s assurances that the U.S. “is not” and “will not” eavesdrop on her or other close allies’ personal communications. Merkel was not mollified, and public opinion in Germany, where privacy protections are highly prized, turned sharply against the United States.
Obama was deeply concerned that this breach might ruin his closest foreign partnership. My own early dealings with my German counterpart, Christoph Heusgen, were also poisoned by the Snowden revelations, especially after I implied that we believed their reaction was somewhat overheated. For months, Christoph and I did not speak directly but conducted business through my very capable senior director for Europe, Karen Donfried. When Karen later departed the NSC, Christoph and I had no choice but to engage each other on pressing issues from Ukraine to counterterrorism. Necessity bred familiarity and, ultimately, a strong partnership and friendship between me and Christoph. But the Snowden allegations substantially set back the larger U.S.-German alliance, which took time and real effort on both sides to repair.
French president François Hollande also lodged a firm protest about the Snowden revelations, but France’s objections were somewhat leavened by the tacit acknowledgment that the French are no boy scouts when it comes to spying, and their understanding of the importance of maintaining our joint counterterrorism cooperation. The Japanese and Mexican leaders were unhappy but less exercised.
For all the damage Snowden did to important bilateral relationships that is known to the public, the greatest harm was less visible. Suffice it to say, I spent much of my first six months as national security advisor trying to recover from and help clean up Snowden’s mess. Rarely, if ever, did I see President Obama more frustrated and insistent on the urgency of resolving a major problem than on the Snowden disclosures. Obama almost never raises his voice in anger, and I never saw him display explosive rage. Yet on this issue, he was fit to be tied, as he quietly pressed his almost daily demands that we fully fix the flaws that we inherited, and fast.
For my part, I was furious and incredulous that unaccountable people years ago seemingly made hugely consequential decisions about how to target our collection capacity—without senior-level oversight or thorough consideration of the policy implications of getting caught. Equally, I felt nearly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the damage Snowden inflicted and its almost infinite implications. My nerves were close to fraying, as from one day to the next we never knew what new shoe might drop.
I led intense and sometimes contentious separate negotiations with my French and German counterparts on how to modify our security relationships. The president commissioned a five-person, outside review panel to offer expert advice. My team, colleagues in the various agencies, and I conducted a months-long, comprehensive interagency review of our intelligence collection policies, targets, and procedures. After painstaking and near constant work to bring this vast issue under control and ensure that the most sensitive collection decisions are carefully vetted, we implemented a wide range of reforms, including those the president codified in Presidential Policy Directive 28, “Signals Intelligence Activities,” issued in January 2014.
Snowden’s leak of classified programs and practices constituted one of the most difficult and serious problems I encountered in government. Congress and the American people were outraged by the (mis)perception that the NSA was spying indiscriminately on U.S. citizens’ phone calls and emails. The European Union protested vehemently that U.S. intelligence agencies were vacuuming up vast quantities of E.U. citizen information without their knowledge or consent. American tech and telecom companies sought to put public and practical distance between themselves and the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community, taking steps that made critical cooperation on terrorist and other threats far more difficult. Trust on all sides—domestic and international—was sorely strained, if not ruptured.
The damage Snowden caused to U.S. national security cannot be overstated. Those who praise him as a “whistle-blower” and a hero have no idea what they are talking about. Snowden deserves a full reckoning with the U.S. justice system, which I am confident would render the punishment he has earned. Instead, he remains coddled in Moscow, where he escaped to the warm embrace of our committed adversary and precipitated the sharp, ongoing decline in U.S.-Russian relations. Snowden’s picture ought to be in the dictionary next to the definition of “traitor.”