INTRODUCTION
THE BRIEFING
THE MOTORCADE pulled up to the side of the gleaming new FBI building on Chicago's west side at midmorning on the first Tuesday in September, just as the 2008 presidential campaign was shifting into its final, most brutal phase. There was a brief pause as Secret Service agents made one last check of the surroundings and radioed back to their headquarters that the man they had codenamed “Renegade” had arrived. Barack Obama emerged silently, a few foreign policy advisers in tow, and quickly took a waiting elevator to the tenth floor. The candidate strode past the long corridor lined with identically framed portraits of the special agents-in-charge who have run the FBI's operations there since the era when bank robbers such as John Dillinger were still considered Public Enemy Number 1. Obama and his team were headed for the FBI's secure conference room—a “bubble” that deflects any electronic intercepts—for one of the quietest rituals of the quadrennial presidential campaign season: a ninety-minute, classified briefing about the world that the winner of the 2008 presidential election would confront.
Waiting for him in the windowless room was a man who, unlike Obama, had been able to walk into the FBI building almost completely unnoticed. At sixty-five, J. Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, was pale, a bit stooped because of a bad back, and wearing wire-rim glasses that made him look like a well-heeled consultant—the job he had held until President Bush convinced him to return to government at the lowest point of Bush's presidency, as Iraq was dissolving into chaos in the fall of 2006.
The two men who shook hands in the bubble could not have come from more different worlds. When Obama was a six-year-old living in Jakarta, McConnell was patrolling the Mekong Delta on a small Navy boat, seeking out the Vietcong. In 1991, the same year Obama graduated from Harvard Law School, McConnell was already a veteran of the Cold War, directing the National Security Agency, the biggest and most technologically complex of the intelligence agencies. By the time Obama was heading into government service in the Illinois state legislature, McConnell had already retired from the covert world and had started a second career earning millions from corporations desperate to protect their computer systems.
Bush had enticed McConnell back to take over a demoralized, disorganized “intelligence community” that was anything but communal. It employed 100,000 people spread over sixteen agencies and had become more famous for its internal rivalries than for the quality of its analysis. McConnell's first job was to bind those agencies together. But early in 2008, McConnell and his top aides had identified the first twelve months after the presidential election as a period of critical vulnerability. It would mark the first transfer of power since the 9/11 attacks, and McConnell and other top intelligence officials believed America's rivals and enemies would seek to exploit the inevitable disruptions of a government transition—even a smooth one—to test a new president.1 In 2009 there would be little time to get up to speed. The plan for dealing with al Qaeda had been sitting on Condoleezza Rice's desk at the White House on the morning of September 11, waiting for discussion. The administration's slowness to understand the threat was sharply criticized by the 9/11 Commission; after that searing experience, a similar mistake by a new administration would be unforgivable. But McConnell had a second motive: After the intelligence disasters leading up to the Iraq War, the new president would come to office deeply suspicious of anything that landed on his desk in a red “classified” jacket. McConnell needed to demonstrate that the agencies he oversaw had learned and evolved.
The spy chief commissioned a stack of digestible reports for Obama and his rival, Senator John McCain, as a sort of field guide to American vulnerabilities at the end of the Bush era. “We came up with thirteen topics,” McConnell said. “If you made a list, you'd probably get eleven or twelve of the thirteen.”2
Among the reports was a grim assessment that al Qaeda—the terror group whose middle ranks Bush used to claim were being decimated—had not only reconstituted but had more allies and associates than ever along the forbidding border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.3 There was a description of how the Taliban were making huge inroads into Afghanistan and how other militants saw an opportunity over the next two years to attempt the first violent overthrow of a nuclear-armed state: Pakistan. The country was ripe for the picking: Its weak, corrupt government faced national bankruptcy, an insurgency raged on the doorstep of the capital, and the Pakistani government had no comprehensive strategy to confront either threat. Nor did it seem to want one. McConnell himself had come to the conclusion months before that Pakistan's aid to the Taliban was no act of rogue intelligence agents but instead was government policy. Nonetheless, Washington kept paying billions in “reimbursements” for counterterrorism operations to the Pakistani military.1*
Another report summarized the huge strides Iran had made in its nuclear program while America was focused elsewhere: By Inauguration Day, Iran was estimated to have amassed enough partially enriched uranium to manufacture a single bomb—if the Iranians could find a covert way to finish the enrichment process. The report's timeline made it clear that in his first term, the new president will have todecide whether to live with a nuclear Iran or attempt—by diplomacy, stealth, or force—to disarm it.
There was a study of the economic and military implications of China's rise, and another detailed Russia's angry mix of nationalism and its perpetual sense of victimization—a dangerous brew on display just weeks before, during Russia's invasion of parts of Georgia. Yet another report focused on a recent analysis of North Korea's nuclear arsenal, which had expanded dramatically on Bush's watch. There was even a report on the national security implications of global climate change—not the usual fare for the intelligence community.
For ninety minutes Obama listened, sometimes tipping back his chair at the long, beechwood-toned conference table. His aides were largely quiet as they looked around the room that was decorated in government-issue flags at one end and screens for secure video links at the other.
Obama wanted to know more—much more—about Iran's race for the bomb, the subject of a confusing, internally contradictory “National Intelligence Estimate” that he had read in its full, classified version in late 2007. How much time would the next president have to conduct talks with Iran—negotiations Obama promised during the campaign—before the Iranians got the bomb?
Obama also had questions about Afghanistan, to which he had committed to send more troops while accelerating the American exit from Iraq. He had already publicly argued that the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was the real “central front” in the war on terrorism and rejected Bush's insistence that the true battle was in Iraq. Everything in the reports McConnell provided backed up Obama's assertion. As Michael V. Hayden, the director of the CIA, put it a few months later, “Today, virtually every major terrorist threat my agency is aware of has threads back to the tribal areas.”4
Over the course of their discussion the two men wandered onto McConnell's favorite subject: America's huge, unaddressed exposure to cyber threats that could paralyze the country's banks, its power stations, and its financial markets. “They spent a fair bit of time on that,” one of the participants said. “More than you might expect.” (It was a subject that struck close to home: Both the Obama and McCain campaigns’ computer systems were hacked during the race, the kinds of attacks the federal government and American businesses face each day. The intrusions appeared to have come from abroad.)5
It was a daunting set of conflicts as broad and complex as those that Britain faced a century ago or that Franklin Roosevelt faced in 1933. It was a lot to digest. Obama and McConnell vaguely agreed to try to meet again before the election for another “deep dive”— McConnell's phrase for a plunge into specific subjects, something he did frequently with Bush.
The follow-up session did not happen before Election Day. Two weeks after the briefing came the second September shock of the Bush era: the collapse of Lehman Brothers, followed by the terrifying plunge of America's financial markets—and then the world's. The last eight weeks of the campaign were dominated by questions of how to right the economy: bailout plans were announced, discarded, reformulated, and announced again by Bush and his treasury secretary, Henry Paulson. There were emergency meetings at the White House that in one case put both Obama and McCain at the same table in the Roosevelt Room, with Bush in the middle; and a $700 billion authorization by Congress, reluctantly supported by both Obama and McCain, to save some of America's biggest institutions and try to stabilize a crumbling market. It was rocky territory for McCain, who had regularly praised deregulation and declared on the day of the Lehman collapse that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” a sentence that seemed so out of touch with reality that it cost him immeasurably.
Then, at a little past eleven p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, November 4, exactly nine weeks after that meeting at the FBI, McConnell's world of problems became Obama's future. In a night that shimmered with history, Americans decisively—but not overwhelmingly-repudiated George W. Bush and his approach to the world. They embraced a candidate with less experience than Jack Kennedy had in 1960 and elected the first black president since George Washington, a slave-holder, took the oath of office.
His victory secure, Obama appeared at a huge rally in Chicago's Grant Park. He had canceled the campaign's plans for fireworks and strode to the oversized wooden podium with a relaxed air of command, but little sign of jubilance.
“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is still alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” Obama said as he peered out over a crowd of more than 100,000, a pastiche of a new America: white and black and Hispanic and Asian. It was a crowd whose many dreams had been poured into the man just elected the forty-fourth president of the United States.
But Obama knew that while parts of the world would welcome him as the anti-Bush, it would not be long before he would be tested. Something in McConnell's thirteen briefing papers—or something that the intelligence apparatus did not anticipate— would soon erupt. Then would come the moment to show that he, like another young senator propelled into the presidency on soaring oratory and a nation's hope for a fresh start, had a spine of steel. In a speech that Obama crafted to sound less like a victory celebration and more like an inaugural address, he added some Kennedy-esque lines that suggested that while an Obama administration would be about diplomacy and dialogue—with enemies as well as friends—it would not be about weakness.
“To those who would tear the world down: We will defeat you,” he told the throng. “To those who seek peace and security: We will support you.”
It was an inspiring declaration, aimed at an audience far beyond America's shores. But Obama's neat separation of the world into builders and destroyers had echoes of the man leaving the White House, the president who had famously declared early in his first term to all the nations of the world that “you're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.”2* Bush quickly discovered that the nations of the world refused to choose sides quite that clearly and that some of the nations he needed most, starting with Pakistan, would be with him on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but against him on Mondays and Fridays. Many things might change with the arrival of a new president. This fact of geopolitics would not.
Thirty-six hours after Obama's victory, McConnell slipped back into Chicago and the two men met in the same FBI conference room. This time the director came with the day's “PDB,” the President's Daily Brief, the summary of intelligence that occupies the first hour of the president's day. This briefing, Obama's first as president-elect, was unlike the one before. At Bush's orders, the candidates’ previous briefings had been restricted to the problems America faced around the world. This time, McConnell came armed with the PDB's descriptions of covert actions, classified “special action programs,” and other steps that the nation's intelligence agencies, sometimes in concert with the Pentagon, were taking at a moment when most Americans were understandably focused on the crumbling of the American economy. It would be weeks—maybe months—before Obama would be able to get a full sense of the secret efforts that Bush had launched, the legal authorities that justified them, and the political land mines he was about to inherit.
“Bush wrote a lot of checks,” one senior intelligence official told me in the early summer of 2008, “that the next president is going to have to cash.”
UNTIL 1952, incoming American presidents rarely had a clue of what they were getting into.
With the Korean War raging, Harry Truman declared that none of his successors should enter office as ignorant as he had been about the world he was about to face. It was twelve days after Franklin Roosevelt's death in April 1945, that Truman was fully briefed on a project he had heard only vague rumors about: the huge undertaking in the deserts of New Mexico to build a nuclear weapon. Within weeks, he would have to decide whether to drop the first atomic bomb on Japan, the momentous decision that cost hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives and likely saved untold numbers of Americans slated to invade Honshu, my father, Kenneth Sanger, among them.
At Truman's instigation, a quadrennial tradition began: The newly created CIA briefed both the Republican nominee, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson. (In one of those odd accidents of historical geography, Stevenson received briefings at the Illinois governor's mansion in Springfield, two blocks from where Obama began his political rise a half century later.) Unlike Obama and McCain in 2008, Eisenhower and Stevenson did not get the same briefing. The agency trusted only Eisenhower, the hero of World War II, with the fruits of its communications intercepts.6
By the time John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, the briefings centered on the most contentious issue of the campaign: the bitter argument over the alleged “missile gap” between the Soviets and the United States. Kennedy charged that Eisenhower and Nixon had allowed the United States to become dangerously vulnerable. There was also the question of who would be tougher in the defense of Taiwan against Communist China: Nixon alleged Kennedy didn't have the steel to face down Mao's forces. Then there was Cuba. Kennedy's campaign accused the sitting administration of doing too little to help Cuban exiles oust Castro. Nixon later wrote he “assumed” that Kennedy's CIA briefings included news of the covert program already under way to send exiles onto the island to lead an overthrow of Castro. That program, of course, launched the biggest disaster of Kennedy's first year, the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. The fiasco unfolded less than three months after Kennedy took office, before the young, inexperienced president had learned the strengths and weaknesses of his advisers and before he understood that even the most confident-sounding intelligence officers and military officials blow smoke—and underestimate what can go wrong. It was a bitter lesson for Kennedy in 1961 and an even more bitter one for Bush in 2003.7
Obama was born four months after the debacle on the coast of Cuba. But forty-eight years later, as he prepared to take office, several of his top national security aides were asking the same question Kennedy's young aides had asked then: What weren't they hearing? “The Bay of Pigs is the right analog here,” one of Obama's national security advisers told me the week of the presidential election. “We can guess what we are walking into. But until you turn over the rocks, you really don't know what's there.”
It turned out there were a lot of rocks.
In the last year of his presidency, Bush secretly opened several new fronts in what he called the war on terrorism—the defiantly ill-defined, ever-evolving conflict that became the raison d’être of his presidency.
In January 2008, and then more dramatically in July, Bush rewrote the rules of war against the militants who had built a seemingly impervious sanctuary inside the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they could strike in two directions: against the Western coalition in Afghanistan and against Pakistan itself. Publicly, Bush insisted that he was respecting Pakistan's sovereignty, that its inept government was a “partner” in rooting out terrorists. In reality, he had faced up to the fact that the Pakistani government was aiding both sides of the conflict, and he ordered regular strikes inside the Pakistani border—both by Predator drones and, when necessary, by his favorite branch of the military, the Special Forces. It was an act of desperation, driven in part by the fact that more than seven years after the defining, awful morning of his presidency, Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had reconstituted al Qaeda. “The idea that he would go home to the ranch in Crawford with these two guys still walking around ate at the president,” one of Bush's aides told me. “He didn't say it, but you could see it in the new strategy.” During the campaign, Obama voiced support for going into Pakistan to hunt al Qaeda. But what Bush had ordered was something far more extensive: a search for extremists of many stripes—a very different kind of undeclared war, and one that, as Bush left office, was already prompting a ferocious backlash among Pakistanis.
Obama would soon learn of another major covert operation, also born of desperation. This time the target was Iran.
Sanctions had taken their toll on the Iranian economy but had not changed the regime's behavior. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had made clear that a military strike, while possible, would have awful repercussions. Whatever his inner thoughts, Bush professed to agree. “I think it's absolutely absurd,” Bush insisted to a group of White House reporters in early 2007, “that people suspect I am trying to find a pretext to attack Iran.” He was talking as if his first term, and the preemption doctrine, had never happened.
Early in 2008, Bush authorized something just short of an attack: a series of new covert actions, some that the United States would conduct alone, others designed in consultation with the Israelis and the Europeans. Most were centered on a last-ditch effort to undermine the industrial infrastructure around Natanz, the site of Iran's largest known nuclear enrichment plant. Such attempts had been made before, even during the Clinton administration, but now the clock was ticking faster. Few believed the effort would amount to much. “We may be past the point of stopping the Iranians,” one senior intelligence official acknowledged to me months after Bush signed the orders. But the hope was that the covert actions would at least slow down Iran's effort to produce enough nuclear fuel for several weapons.
Obama had vowed never to allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon. During the post-election transition, however, several of his top advisers acknowledged that the harder question, never discussed on the campaign trail, would be how close to that goal Obama would allow the Iranians to get. Should he take the risk of letting the CIA's covert efforts move forward before he understood their scope and what could go wrong—the mistake that Kennedy made? “I wouldn't want to bet my country on any of these,” one skeptic of the covert programs told me, being careful not to reveal more than what was already circulating about the highly classified projects. Similar efforts had been tried before, he said, and while they worked briefly, the Iranians had soon discovered them. “I hope,” he confided, “someone's ready to tell the next president there's not much chance any of this crap is going to work.”
The Israelis had apparently arrived at the same conclusion. In Bush's last months in office, they feared that Obama, if elected, would enter endless, ultimately fruitless negotiations with the Iranians. So they came to the White House in 2008 asking for help with a plan of their own—a military option to try to neutralize Iran's known nuclear facilities. The secret approach triggered a panic in the Bush White House that the Middle East would again be in flames as Bush left office, with the United States quickly sucked into the attacks and counterattacks that would almost certainly follow. The Israelis were deliberately vague about their intentions, and Bush deflected the request. His aides were hoping that with Israel's leadership engaged in a power struggle to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the question of military action against Iran would be put on hold for a while. But the Israeli threat—and the crisis it could provoke—was bound to be among the most pressing of the issues on Obama's desk when he walked into the Oval Office.3*
EXACTLY A WEEK after the huge stock-market plunge in September 2008, Robert Gates, the former CIA chief who had been appointed to the Pentagon to undo the damage done by Donald Rumsfeld, offered America the words it had been waiting five years to hear. Understandably, given the din of collapsing banks, few heard it.
“I have cautioned that, no matter what you think about the origins of the war in Iraq, we must get the endgame there right,” he told a Senate committee. “I believe we have now entered that endgame.”
When Gates took the job in 2006, he told colleagues that he had one overarching goal: to guide Bush to that “endgame” as quickly as possible. From his post as president of Texas A&M, he had been mystified by Bush's constant talk of “victory” and appalled by Bush's brief sojourn into describing America's struggle as one against “Islamofascism,” a misguided effort to cast the war in World War II terms, a step that even Bush's own aides believed inflated the enemy's perception of itself. As a member of the Iraq Study Group—the bipartisan panel that made the case for an accelerated move toward the exits by early 2008—Gates had visited Iraq and was sobered by the strategic disarray.8
But Gates's “endgame” comment wasn't intended to be taken simply as a progress report on Iraq. Instead, seizing on the success of the “surge,” he was testifying about the need to turn more attention toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was there, he said, “the greatest threat to the homeland lies.” This was the unclassified, watered-down version of what McConnell was telling the candidates—and it appeared to give the imprimatur of a Republican former chief of the CIA to one of Obama's campaign themes.
Just a year earlier, such a comment would have been heresy in the Bush administration. But Gates was bulletproof. He hadn't sought this job. And while he was a skilled bureaucratic player who made sure he didn't openly contradict Bush, he was blistering in his descriptions of how the United States had gotten into this mess. “We are at war in Afghanistan today,” he told an audience at West Point in April 2008, “in no small measure because we mistakenly turned our backs on Afghanistan after the Soviet troops left in the late 1980s.” (At that time George H. W. Bush was in office, and Gates himself was at the CIA.) He pulled no punches about the NATO allies in Afghanistan, asking the question of what to do when “some of your allies don't want to fight.” By his own account, he had learned during his years in the intelligence world to frame the question in this way: “If we do this, what will they do? Then what? And then what?” He would never say so, but he was trying to force an administration and a president who had spent the first term imagining how a quick victory in Iraq would beget a resurgence of American power to adjust themselves to a world in which some investments go bad.
“We are overinvested in Iraq; it's fixing us in place,” one of Gates's closest high-ranking allies told me in the Pentagon one day in the summer of 2005. The war was about to become America's longest military commitment, save for the American Revolution, and he compared his and Gates's problem to one of managing a portfolio with some money-losing stocks—the familiar trap of sunken costs. “It's like you invested in a bad mutual fund. You know, then you get your emotions tied up in the investment. You had an objective in mind—maybe sending the kids to college. But you become so enamored of the fund that over time you lost track of the objective. And suddenly you find that you are getting negative returns, but you just can't get yourself out.”
Gates's hope was to get down to ten combat brigades in Iraq by the time Bush left office—which was about half the fighting force at the time we spoke. (He didn't make it, but came close; as Bush was preparing to leave office, the force was down to fourteen combat brigades.)
Once America got on the path out of Iraq, Gates said to me in his office a few months before his Senate testimony, a new president could begin to prepare the American public for the fact that we would need a far, far longer commitment to Afghanistan. That was clearly a message Obama's faithful did not want to hear.
Yet Afghanistan was not Iraq. Overwhelming military force wouldn't work, Gates argued, because it would be impossible to maintain “a much larger Western footprint in a country that has never been hospitable to foreigners, regardless of why they are there.” But the American people, the Congress, and the European allies had not yet learned this lesson, he worried. They were not yet prepared for the kind of world in which we were forced to pour many kinds of talent and resources—not just troops—into the failing states that now rank among our gravest national security threats.
For the next president, Gates said, the deeper lesson of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and problems like them is that America's challenge is much more far-reaching. “The structures of national security are outdated,” he told me. “They are sixty years old; they were products of lessons learned from World War II and what we needed to fight the Cold War, and they were great for that. They worked. But we live in a different and much more complex world.”
Obama was about to discover how much more complex. In the weeks after his election, it became increasingly obvious that the architecture of the world's financial institutions, also created in the 1940s, was as outdated as the national security infrastructure. It had been designed for a world in which economic crises could be contained in individual countries or regions; the assumption was that the United States and other large economies would be healthy enough to pull the world through. But this crisis was different from the one that struck Mexico in 1994 or Asia in 1997. The crash that began with falling property prices in Florida and California and everywhere in between was radiating out around the world. At home, Obama was confronted by the prospect of the collapse of General Motors and other automakers. Abroad, fragile nations, unable to attract loans or capital, were being pushed to the brink. At a meeting of his foreign policy advisers, Obama was told that Pakistan was in about the same shape as GM: It would run out of cash in months. What looked like a domestic economic crisis was, simultaneously, a global crisis.
Obama's advisers agreed his first priority had to be the deepening recession at home. An America wracked by credit freezes, foreclosures, bankruptcies, deflation, and unemployment would have little leverage in the world. But the reports coming in to Obama once he began to regularly receive the President's Daily Brief made it clear that America's rivals around the world were not waiting for his economic initiatives. Seizing on the moment of transition, the Russians were threatening to base missiles near Poland, in hopes of forcing Obama to back away from Bush's missile defense plan for Eastern Europe. The North Koreans were reneging on the deal they had struck with Bush on nuclear inspections. The Taliban and their associates were fracturing Afghanistan, tribe by tribe, village by village, compound by compound. An attack on Mumbai, the commercial capital of India once known as Bombay, threatened a resurgence of the six-decade-long conflict with Pakistan and once again put the volatile subcontinent on a hair trigger. And in Iran, perhaps the problem Obama had the least time to solve, the mullahs were getting closer to the day when they could claim they had everything they needed for a nuclear arsenal.