Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

As strange as it may sound, Afghanistan was not an all-consuming issue for the president and his administration in the latter part of 2009; it just seemed so for those of us in the national security arena. Preoccupied at home with a politically troubled health care initiative and the continuing economic crisis, Obama also faced challenges with China, Russia, North Korea, the Arab Middle East and Israel, terrorism—and especially Iran. Unlike Afghanistan, there were generally no serious divisions within the administration on these issues during 2009 and 2010.

By 2009, Iran had become a kind of national security black hole, directly or indirectly pulling into its gravitational force our relationships with Europe, Russia, China, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states. Each key issue related to Iran’s nuclear program—preventing the enrichment and weaponization of its nuclear material, imposing sanctions to accomplish that objective, and using missile defense to protect against its potential capabilities—affected multiple countries in different ways. It was like a great web; when we touched one part of the periphery, others would reverberate.

The stakes could not have been higher. Israel’s leaders were itching to launch a military attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. If they did so, we were almost certain to be drawn in to finish the job or to deal with Iranian retaliatory attacks against Israel, our friends in the region—and probably against the United States as well. The war drums were beating once again. Likely the only way to prevent a third war in the region within a decade—a war possibly more widespread and terrible than those in Iraq and Afghanistan—was to bring enough economic pressure to bear such that Iran’s leaders would abandon their aspiration for nuclear weapons.

No relationship is more important to Israel than the one with the U.S. president and leaders of Congress. In that respect, Obama’s outreach both to Iran and to the Islamic world more broadly, early in his presidency, scared the hell out of the Israelis. On February 20, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu had again become prime minister, leading a right-wing coalition. I first met Netanyahu during the Bush 41 administration, when I was deputy national security adviser and Bibi, as Israel’s deputy foreign minister, called on me in my tiny West Wing office. I was offended by his glibness and his criticisms of U.S. policy—not to mention his arrogance and outlandish ambition—and I told national security adviser Brent Scowcroft that Bibi ought not be allowed back on White House grounds.

Soon after I became CIA director in 1991, I met Ehud Barak, then a lieutenant general and chief of the Israeli general staff. After thirty-five years in the Israeli army, Barak entered politics, became prime minister for a time at the end of the 1990s, and in June 2007 became minister of defense under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Barak retained his position when Netanyahu became prime minister in early 2009, so we were both holdover ministers. By the time Bibi took office, my nearly twenty-yearlong acquaintance with Barak had become a very good, even close, relationship. We had spoken and met often during my time as Bush’s defense secretary and would do so even more frequently during my tenure under President Obama. Barak would travel to Washington to see me about every two months. It was not by accident that even though the political and diplomatic relationship between the Obama administration and Netanyahu remained frosty between 2009 and 2012, the defense relationship remained strong and in every dimension would reach unprecedented levels of cooperation.

Netanyahu’s first visit to Washington in his latest incarnation as prime minister, in mid-May 2009, included a meeting and lunch at the White House and a working lunch with me at the Pentagon. He and I focused on military cooperation and a broad discussion of Iran and its nuclear program. Our first no-punches-pulled discussion of Iran came during my visit to Israel in late July, when images of the rigged Iranian election and subsequent repression of the Green Revolution in June were still fresh. Bibi was convinced the Iranian regime was extremely fragile and that a strike on their nuclear facilities very likely would trigger the regime’s overthrow by the Iranian people. I strongly disagreed, convinced that a foreign military attack would instead rally the Iranian people behind their government. Netanyahu also believed Iranian retaliation after a strike would be pro forma, perhaps the launch of a few dozen missiles at Israel and some rocket salvos from Lebanese-based Hizballah. He argued that the Iranians were realists and would not want to provoke a larger military attack by the United States by going after American targets—especially our ships in the Gulf—or by attacking other countries’ oil facilities. Closing the Gulf to oil exports, he said, would cut the Iranians’ own economic throats. Again I disagreed, telling him he was misled by the lack of an Iraqi response to Israel’s destruction of their Osirak reactor in 1981 and the absence of any Syrian reaction to destruction of their reactor in 2007. I said the Iranians—the Persians—were very different from Iraqis and Syrians. He was assuming a lot in anticipating a mild Iranian reaction, and if he was wrong, an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities would spark a war in the region, I said.

These two lines of argumentation would dominate the U.S.-Israeli dialogue over Iran for the rest of my tenure as secretary, though there was not much difference in our intelligence assessments of how far along the Iranians were in their nuclear program, nor in our views of the consequences of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Whether (and when) to act militarily and the consequences of an attack would remain contentious.

The last gasp of Obama’s engagement strategy with Iran was an ingenious proposal, developed by the United States in consultation with our allies in October 2009, that Iran ship about 80 percent of its known 1.5 metric tons of low-enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be enriched, then sent to France for conversion into fuel rods, and finally sent back to Iran for medical research use in the Tehran Research Reactor. According to the experts, once used in the research reactor, the uranium would be extremely difficult to convert for other purposes—such as nuclear weapons. The proposal was seen as a way to get most of the low-enriched uranium out of the country and rendered useless for weapons, while acknowledging Iran’s right to use nuclear reactors for peaceful purposes. France, Britain, China, Germany, Russia, and the United States supported the proposal, and tentative agreement was reached with Iranian negotiators in Europe on October 22. Iran backed out the next day, having second thoughts about giving up its big bargaining chip—the low-enriched uranium—without, in their view, gaining any strategic benefit. Given French president Sarkozy’s open loathing of the Iranian regime, I believe the Iranians also had no intention of putting their uranium in French hands.

The failure to make a deal had significant international consequences. The Obama administration, including me, had seen the deal as a way to get the low-enriched uranium out of Iran and thus buy more time for a longer-term solution. Ironically, but as I had believed it would, the diplomatic effort to reach out to Iran was critical to our success in finding more willing partners in a new, tougher approach.

Central to the new approach would be getting international agreement. The Deputies Committee had met several times in early November and agreed that the United States should first pursue a UN Security Council resolution imposing new economic sanctions on Iran, then widen the net of pressure. The president chaired a National Security Council meeting on November 11—just preceding the important NSC session on Afghanistan—to consider next steps. He said we had to pivot from engagement to pressure as a result of the Iranian rejection of the Tehran Research Reactor initiative, the Iranians’ lack of full cooperation with the IAEA inspection of the Qom enrichment facility (a secret facility, the existence of which we revealed to put Iran on its heels and to build support for more sanctions), and their unwillingness to pursue negotiations with the six big powers (France, Germany, Britain, Russia, China, and the United States).

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt we were unlikely to get a strong new resolution out of the Security Council. I said that the clock was ticking on both the progress of the Iranian nuclear program and Jerusalem’s patience. We needed a new resolution as a foundation for stronger sanctions, and because we didn’t expect much anyway, I thought we should accept a diluted resolution if we could get it passed quickly. Then we could develop additional sanctions and other punitive actions beyond the strict terms of the resolution. Militarily, I thought we needed to prepare for a possible Israeli attack and Iranian retaliation and figure out a way to use our actions to send the Iranians a message in parallel to economic pressures.

I had hoped for UN action in January or February; the resolution passed in June 2010. The resolution was better than nothing, but it demonstrated that Russia and China remained ambivalent about how hard to push Tehran. China was leery of losing the significant amount of oil it bought from Iran and, in any event, was in no mood to do anything remotely helpful to the United States after we announced the sale of $6.5 billion in arms to Taiwan at the end of January 2010. Russia, I think, still harbored hopes of future economic and political influence in Iran.

Bush and Obama had said publicly that the military option to stop Iran’s nuclear program remained on the table, and it was our job at the Pentagon to do the planning and preparation to ensure that it was not an idle threat. U.S. military leaders were increasingly worried that either the Israelis or the Iranians might take military action with little or no warning and that such an action could require an immediate response from U.S. forces in the Gulf. There would be no time for protracted meetings in Washington or for the president to consult anyone but me, the next person in the chain of command. Other than the U.S. response to a small-scale Iranian “fast-boat” attack on one of our Navy ships, there had been no discussion in either the Bush or the Obama administrations—other than private conversations I had with each president—about momentous decisions that might be required within minutes if serious shooting broke out in the Gulf. It was my view that such a discussion was long overdue.

Accordingly, on January 4, 2010, I sent Jim Jones a memo recommending a highly restricted meeting of the principals to discuss the possibility of a conflict with Iran with little or no advance notice. I wanted to discuss actions we ought to take to strengthen our military posture in the Gulf for Iran-related contingencies, as well as military actions we ought to consider—short of the use of force—to keep the pressure on. I asked in the memo, if Israel attacked Iran, would we help Israel, hinder it, take no action, or conduct follow-up operations (especially if Israel failed to destroy the nuclear sites)? If Iran retaliated against Israel, would we come to Israel’s defense? If Iran were to hit U.S. troops, facilities, or interests in retaliation after an Israeli strike, how would we respond? What measures should we take to deter Iranian military actions, to maintain “escalation dominance” (to overmatch any Iranian military action and try to keep the situation from spinning out of control)? Should we emplace forces in advance? How would we respond to closure of the Gulf, terrorism, manipulation of oil prices, and other Iranian responses? Many of these questions and issues had been framed for me by the deputy assistant secretary for defense, Colin Kahl, and his team, whom I greatly admired and relied upon heavily. The questions I posed, and the answers, had not been discussed—in part, I think, because the consequences of a leak could be explosive, both literally and figuratively.

A little over three months later, on April 18, The New York Times ran a front-page story asserting that in my January memo I had warned that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability.” A source characterized as a “senior official” described the memo as a “wake-up call.” It seemed likely that the authors’ (David Sanger and Thom Shanker) source apparently did not provide them with any of the questions I had posed but rather characterized the memo as dealing with policy, strategy, and military options.

Geoff Morrell gave NSC chief of staff Denis McDonough a heads-up about the story before it appeared, and needless to say, he, Donilon, Ben Rhodes (the NSC’s strategic communications director), and others at the White House went into a tizzy over a story suggesting that the White House was not properly prepared to deal with Iran. I thought it would be silly to deny the existence of the memo and, in consultation with Morrell, Robert Rangel, and McDonough, agreed to issue a statement clarifying the purpose of the memo. The national press gave the Times’ story prominent coverage and, regrettably, paid little attention to my statement that the memo was not intended (or received) as a wake-up call but instead had “identified next steps in our defense planning process where further interagency discussion and policy decisions would be needed… it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision making process.” (Much later others alleged that the memo called for “containment” of Iran rather than preventing them from getting a weapon. That assertion was also wrong.) The Times story was pretty accurate overall, but it did misrepresent my intent and—fortunately—did not deal with the militarily sensitive concerns I had raised.

Three days later I went through many of those concerns in the Oval Office with the president. Biden, Mullen, Jones, Donilon, Brennan, and Tony Blinken, the vice president’s national security adviser, were there. I told Obama he needed to consider the ramifications of a no-warning Israeli attack or Iranian provocation, either of which likely would require a U.S. military response within minutes or hours. I said that the principals had not “chewed” on these issues, and they should. To be better prepared for any eventuality in the Gulf, I told Obama I wanted to take several military steps by November 1, including deploying a second aircraft carrier there, adding better missile defense and radar capabilities, sending a third Aegis destroyer, and forward-positioning other equipment. I asked that the policy issues and added deployments I recommended be addressed urgently, in particular because the military moves required significant lead time. Obama said we should look at options, but he would make no concrete decisions now.

I was put off by the way the president closed the meeting. To his very closest advisers, he said, “For the record, and for those of you writing your memoirs, I am not making any decisions about Israel or Iran. Joe, you be my witness.” I was offended by his suspicion that any of us would ever write about such sensitive matters.

Toward the end of May, we discussed the implications of an Israeli attack on Iran, though not as thoroughly as I would have liked. The administration did, however, proceed fairly quickly in important areas mentioned in my memo. It further strengthened our military relationships with key states in the region by providing (or selling) enhanced missile defense capabilities and advanced weapons and made proposals for closer military cooperation. In early February, I traveled to Turkey, where I met with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. We had a long discussion about Iran, during which he said that no country should be denied the right to nuclear technology for peaceful means; he said that he had encouraged the Iranians to be more transparent and cooperate with the IAEA. He was skeptical of the value of further sanctions and thought the Tehran Research Reactor proposal was still a possible course of action. I agreed about the right to peaceful use of nuclear technology “if properly safeguarded” but, in my usual subtle diplomatic way, warned him that if the Iranians proceeded with their nuclear weapons ambitions, proliferation in the region would be inevitable, military action by Israel would be likely, and he would have a war in his neighborhood. I told him it was necessary to proceed with sanctions in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table. Erdogan was interested in missile defenses that would provide coverage of Turkey but wanted to be sure that any initiative was cast in terms of “common security” among allies and not based on a specific threat (such as Iran). I felt I had made little progress with Erdogan; he was just too wary of anything that might provoke the Iranians.

That was plainly not the case at my next stop, to see President Nicolas Sarkozy in France. Sarkozy reminded me of Rahm Emanuel, lithe and short and full of energy—they both sort of explode into a room. Sarkozy went straight to the point: “The Iranians are liars and have been lying from the start.” The extended U.S. hand, he said, had been seen in Iran as a sign of weakness. It had led to “a great deal of wasted time.” He regretted that new sanctions had not been put in place the preceding fall and asserted, “We are weak. This will all end badly.”

In the middle of our meeting, Sarkozy’s personal cell phone rang. He answered, holding his hand over his phone and mouth as he talked with his wife, singer and former model Carla Bruni. I had never heard of or experienced a head of government interrupting a meeting to take a personal call. The incident did, I admit, later that evening provoke some amusing commentary between my staff and me.

In early March, I resumed my anti-Iran tour, visiting Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Outside Riyadh, I met with the crown prince and deputy prime minister as well as King Abdullah at the king’s “farm.” I grew up in Kansas, and this wasn’t like any farm I had ever seen. We had dinner inside a tent—with crystal chandeliers—that could have held the entire Ringling Brothers circus and then some. The huge, horseshoe-shaped table sat at least a hundred people, and as with Condi Rice’s and my dinner with the king a few years earlier in Jeddah, there were at least forty or fifty dishes in the buffet, not counting dozens of desserts. The king and I sat at the head of the table with no one seated near us, but a large television right in front of us was airing an Arab news show. I thought it a bit strange to have the TV on during dinner—until I realized the wily old guy wanted white noise in the background so he and I could speak without being overheard by anyone.

After dinner, we talked privately for a long time about Iran, as I explained to him the president’s pivot from engagement to pressure, which the king heartily welcomed, having been opposed to any kind of outreach in the first place. As we talked about sanctions, I encouraged him to consider an overture to the Chinese, proposing that they sharply cut their purchases of Iranian oil, which Saudi Arabia would replace. I made no formal request, and he made no commitment. We discussed upgrading the Saudis’ Patriot missile defense systems, and we agreed to discuss further their acquisition of other, more advanced missile defenses. I promised to send the head of the Missile Defense Agency to Saudi Arabia quickly to brief the king and his ministers on these capabilities, which would also make the Saudi missile defense interoperable with our own and that of other countries in the Gulf. We talked about modernization of the Saudi navy.

In that private meeting, the king committed to a $60 billion weapons deal including the purchase of eighty-four F-15s, the upgrade of seventy F-15s already in the Saudi air force, twenty-four Apache helicopters, and seventy-two Blackhawk helicopters. His ministers and generals had pressed him hard to buy either Russian or French fighters, but I think he suspected that was because some of the money would end up in their pockets. He wanted all the Saudi money to go toward military equipment, not into Swiss bank accounts, and thus he wanted to buy from us. The king explicitly told me that he saw the huge purchase as an investment in a long-term strategic relationship with the United States, linking our militaries for decades to come. At the same time, Abdullah was very cautious about any kind of overt military cooperation or planning with the United States that the Iranians might consider an act of war.

I then went to Abu Dhabi, where I met with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed. “MBZ,” as we referred to him, is one of the smartest, canniest people I have ever met, very soft-spoken and given to long pauses in conversation. His thoughtful insights on the other Gulf states and on Iran were always useful. We met with a larger group for a few minutes, and then the two of us went outside on his patio to meet privately for an hour or so. We talked about the change in Obama’s Iranian strategy from engagement to pressure, making sanctions more effective (a lot of Iranian business was done in the UAE), and about additional missile defense and other military capabilities for the Emirates.

Any sale of relatively sophisticated weapons—especially combat aircraft and missiles—to an Arab state met with opposition in Israel. In the case of the big arms deal I had just concluded with King Abdullah, the Israelis were especially exercised. And it came at a bad time in the relationship. The administration had leaned heavily on Netanyahu in the summer of 2009 to impose a ten-month freeze on building new settlements on the West Bank, as an inducement to get the Palestinians to the negotiating table. Meanwhile construction continued on settlements in East Jerusalem, which the Israelis consider their sovereign territory. As a result, the Palestinians refused to negotiate. In March 2010—just as I was talking with King Abdullah—the Israelis announced they would continue to build settlements in East Jerusalem, an open slap at the administration, made all the more insulting because Biden was visiting Israel at the time. Secretary Clinton presented an ultimatum to Israel soon thereafter, demanding among other things a freeze on all settlement construction. This led to a notoriously acrimonious meeting between Obama and Netanyahu at the White House on March 26, during which the president bowed out to have dinner with his family, leaving Bibi cooling his heels downstairs.

As these tensions boiled, on April 27, Barak came to see me about the Saudi arms sale. As had become standard practice between us, I greeted his limousine curbside at the Pentagon, escorted him and his delegation up the stairs to my formal dining room, and then I walked him straight through the door to my office, where we met alone, leaving our delegations to chitchat for most of the allotted meeting time. As part of our relationship with Israel, the United States had long pledged that no arms sales to Arab states would undermine Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME). Barak felt the sale to Saudi Arabia compromised their QME. I told him I thought Israel and Saudi Arabia now had a common enemy—Iran—and that Israel should welcome enhanced Saudi capabilities. I also pointed out that not once in all of Israel’s wars had Saudi Arabia fired a shot. I urged that if Israel couldn’t see Saudi Arabia as a potential ally against Iran, he should at least tactically concede that its hostility to Iran was in Israel’s interest. Pragmatically, I warned that if the Saudis could not buy advanced combat aircraft from us, they would surely buy them from the French or Russians, and the Israelis could be damned sure those countries wouldn’t give a second thought to Israel’s “qualitative military edge.”

We agreed to set up a joint U.S.-Israeli working group to ensure that Israel’s QME was not diminished by the F-15 sale to Saudi Arabia and to identify enhanced capabilities we could provide to Israel to satisfy that goal. I reassured Barak that, as I had promised two years earlier to Prime Minister Olmert, we would sell Israel the same model F-35 Joint Strike Fighter we were going to provide our NATO allies. Barak returned to Washington in late June to review progress of the working group and seemed generally satisfied that Israeli interests would be protected by the measures we were considering.

Netanyahu took another view. I met with him at Blair House, the guesthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue that the president uses to host foreign leaders, on July 7. I told him I had my marching orders from the president, and that General Cartwright would lead a senior U.S. team to Israel the following week to talk about military cooperation and needs and to get “specifics about what you need and just how fast you want it.” I told Netanyahu we intended to notify Congress soon about the F-15 sale to Saudi Arabia, that we had addressed the QME issues with his defense experts, and that “it would be helpful for Israel to say that there had been an unprecedented effort to take into account Israel’s concerns, and that they did not object to the sale.” When he complained about the number of F-15s the Saudis would be buying or upgrading, I pointedly asked him, “When did Saudi Arabia ever attack Israel? How long would those planes continue to work without U.S. support? You need to talk to Ehud [Barak] about what we have done to address your concerns!” When Netanyahu asked how to explain to Israelis such a large arms deal with the Saudis, I used the line that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. He replied acidly, “In the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my ‘frenemy.’ ”

“What about a counterbalancing investment in our military?” he asked me. “How do we compensate on the Israeli side?” Exasperated, I shot back that no U.S. administration had done more, in concrete ways, for Israel’s strategic defense than Obama’s, and I listed the various missile and rocket defense programs we were providing or helping to fund, together with stationing an Aegis-class warship with missile defense capabilities in the eastern Mediterranean. Further compensation? “You are already getting air and missile defense cooperation in addition to the F-35. There have been conversations on all of this. This is not new. There has been enormous work done to address your QME. Talk to your defense minister!” I was furious after the meeting and directed Flournoy to call Barak and chew him out for not adequately briefing Bibi on all that we had done to address Israel’s concerns. Barak talked to Netanyahu, and by the end of July, Bibi had agreed not to object to the Saudi arms sale—in exchange for more military equipment, including twenty additional F-35s.

Israel lives in a dangerous neighborhood, populated by various groups and countries that are not only its sworn enemies but committed to its total destruction. It has fought four wars against those neighbors, three of them—in 1948, 1967, and 1973—for its very survival. While a few governments, including Egypt’s and Jordan’s, have found it in their interest to make peace with Israel, the Arab populace—including in those two countries—is more hostile toward Israel than their governments are. I believe Israel’s strategic situation is worsening, its own actions contributing to its isolation. The Israelis’ assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai in January 2010, however morally justified, was strategically stupid because the incompetently run operation was quickly discovered and Israel fingered as responsible, thus costing Israel the quiet cooperation of the UAE on security matters. Similarly, the Israeli attack on May 31, 2010, on a Turkish ship carrying confrontational activists to Gaza and the resulting deaths of eight Turks on board, together with Israel’s subsequent unyielding response, resulted in a break with Turkey, which had quietly developed a good military-to-military relationship with Israel. These incidents, and others like them, may have been tactically desirable and even necessary but had negative strategic consequences. As Israel’s neighbors acquire ever more sophisticated weapons and their publics become ever more hostile, I, as a very strong friend and supporter of Israel, believe Jerusalem needs to think anew about its strategic environment. That would require developing stronger relationships with governments that, while not allies, share Israel’s concerns in the region, including those about Iran and the growing political influence of Islamists in the wake of the Arab Spring. (Netanyahu would finally apologize for the Turkish deaths in 2013, opening the way to restoring ties with the Turks.) Given a Palestinian birthrate that far outpaces that of Israeli Jews, and the political trends in the region, time is not on Israel’s side.

MISSILE DEFENSE AGAINST IRAN

The United States began working on defenses against ballistic missiles in the 1960s. Stringent limits were imposed on the development and deployment of missile defenses in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty we signed with the Soviet Union. Even so, the missile defense endeavor received a huge boost in 1983 with President Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), intended conceptually to provide a “shield” for the United States against an all-out Soviet attack. Generally speaking, in the years after Reagan’s SDI (or “Star Wars”) speech, most Republicans supported virtually all missile defense programs and most Democrats opposed them as both unworkable and far too costly. In 2002, as we’ve seen, President Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the 1972 treaty, thereby removing any restrictions on our development and deployment of missile defenses. By the time I became secretary of defense, most members of Congress had come around—with widely varying levels of enthusiasm—to support deploying a very limited capability intended to defend against an accidental launch or a handful of missiles fired by a “rogue” state such as North Korea or Iran. Few in either party supported efforts to field a system large or advanced enough to protect against a mass strike from the nuclear arsenals of either Russia or China, an effort that would have been at once technologically challenging, staggeringly expensive, and strategically destabilizing.

At the end of 2008, our strategic missile defenses consisted of twenty-three ground-based interceptors (GBIs) deployed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four more at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. By the end of FY2010, thirty such interceptors were planned to be in place. Those associated with the program had reasonable confidence that the missiles could accomplish the limited mission of knocking down one or a few missiles aimed at the United States. When I became secretary of defense, the president delegated to me, as he had to Secretary Rumsfeld, the authority to launch these interceptors against incoming missiles if there was no time to get his approval.

This was the situation when I recommended to Bush, a few days after I took office, that we approach the Poles and Czechs about cohosting a “third” GBI site on their soil—radar in the Czech Republic and ten ground-based interceptors in Poland. Both countries had shown interest in hosting elements of the missile defense system. Our primary purpose in this initiative was to better defend the United States (and limited areas of Europe) against Iranian ballistic missiles, whose threat was growing.

As I wrote earlier, by the end of 2008 it looked increasingly certain that Czech political opposition to the radar would prevent its construction there. Poland had agreed to host the interceptors immediately following the Russian invasion of Georgia after stalling for more than a year, but their growing demands for U.S. security guarantees beyond our NATO commitment, as well as other disagreements, brought the negotiations to a halt. By the time Obama took office, it was pretty clear that our initiative was going nowhere politically in either Poland or the Czech Republic, and that even if it was somehow to proceed, political wrangling would delay its initial operating capability by many years.

A technically feasible alternative approach to missile defense in Europe surfaced in mid-2009 in the Pentagon (not, as later alleged, in the White House). A new intelligence estimate of the Iranian missile program published in February 2009 caused us in Defense to rethink our priorities. The assessment said the long-range Iranian missile threat had not matured as anticipated, but the threat from Iranian short- and medium-range missiles, which could strike our troops and facilities in Europe and the Middle East, had developed more rapidly than expected and had become the Iranian government’s priority. The Iranians were now thought to be capable of nearly simultaneous launches of between fifty and seventy of these shorter-range missiles at a time. These conclusions raised serious questions about our existing strategy, which had been developed primarily to provide improved defenses for the U.S. homeland—not Europe—against long-range Iranian missiles launched one or two at a time. But the Iranians no longer seemed focused on building an ICBM, at least in the near term. And ten interceptors in Poland could at best defend against only a handful of Iranian missiles. The site would easily be overwhelmed by a salvo launch of dozens of shorter-range missiles.

In the spring of 2009 General Cartwright briefed me on technological advances made during the previous two years with the sea-based Standard Missile 3s (SM-3) and the possibility of using them as a missile defense alternative to the ground-based interceptors. New, more capable versions of the SM-3, originally designed to defend our ships against hostile aircraft and shorter-range ballistic missiles, were being deployed on a growing number of U.S. warships and had been used successfully to destroy that falling U.S. satellite during the Bush administration. These new SM-3 variants were still in development, but there had been eight successful tests, and they were considered to be at least as capable against short- and medium-range ballistic missiles as GBIs and could be fully operational years earlier. The SM-3, due to the significantly lower cost than GBIs, could be produced and deployed in large numbers.

There had also been technological advances in airborne, space-based, and ground-based sensors that considerably outperformed the fixed-site radar originally intended for the Czech Republic. These new sensors not only would allow our system to be integrated with partner countries’ warning systems, but also could make better use of radars already operating across the globe, including updated Cold War–era installations. Cartwright, former commander of Strategic Command, was a strong and early advocate for a new approach, which was affirmed by the early findings of the Pentagon-led Ballistic Missile Defense Review, begun in March 2009.

Based on all available information, the U.S. national security leadership, military and civilian, concluded that our priorities should be to work with allies and partners to strengthen regional deterrence architectures; to pursue a “phased adaptive,” or evolutionary, approach to missile defense within each region, tailored to the threats and circumstances unique to that region; and because global demand for missile defense assets over the following decade might exceed supply, to make them mobile so they could be shifted from region to region as circumstances required.

Independent of these findings and assessments, in preparing the fiscal year 2010 budget, I decided to cancel several huge, expensive, and failing missile defense programs, such as the airborne laser and the kinetic energy interceptor, as described earlier. At the same time, I decided to keep the number of silo-based GBIs in Alaska and California at thirty rather than expanding the deployment to forty-four, and I authorized continued research, development, and testing of our defenses against the long-range-missile threat from Iranian and North Korean missiles. (I also canceled completion of a second field of silos for the GBIs at Fort Greely, but after visiting there a few months later and seeing how close they were to completion, I reversed myself and approved finishing the second field. I was no expert but was always willing to listen to those who were.) Meanwhile, reflecting the new emphasis on regional missile defense, I allocated a great deal of money in the budget to accelerate building the inventory of SM-3 missile interceptors, as well as other regional missile defense systems. I also agreed to fund improved missile defense capability on six more destroyers.

I was determined to increase our capability as quickly as possible to protect our deployed forces and our allies. We briefed Congress on these changes on several occasions between May and July, and the response was generally favorable. The only opposition was focused on my cancellation of several of the big—and failing—development programs.

Those who would later charge that Obama walked away from the third site in Europe to please the Russians seemed oblivious to growing Polish and Czech opposition to the site and, more important, to the reality that the Defense Department was already reordering its missile defense priorities to focus on the immediate short- to medium-range-missile threat. While there certainly were some in the State Department and the White House who believed the third site in Europe was incompatible with the Russian “reset,” we in Defense did not. Making the Russians happy wasn’t exactly on my to-do list.

In August, the NSS asked the Defense Department to prepare a paper on what had changed to warrant a new direction for missile defense in Europe, and we laid it all out. The principals met on September 1, 2009, and agreed to recommend that the president approve the phased adaptive approach to missile defense in Europe, while agreeing to my proposal to guard against the longer-term threat by keeping open the option for eventually deploying European-based radar and GBIs. The continued investment in GBIs was opposed by some Obama appointees at the State Department and the NSS. We agreed to continue to seek opportunities for cooperation with Russia, including the possible integration of one of their radars that could provide useful tracking data. I formally proposed the Phased-Adaptive Approach in a memorandum to the president on September 11, nearly three years after proposing the third site to President Bush. Times, technology, and threats change. We had to change with them.

Then, as so often happened, a leak made us look like a bunch of bumbling fools, oblivious to the sensitivities of our allies. To date, there had been none of the obligatory consultations with Congress or our allies about what would be the first major reversal of a Bush national security policy and a major shift in the U.S. missile defense strategy in Europe. When we learned on September 16 that the details of the new missile defense approach were in the hands of the press, we had to act quickly to correct that. That evening Hillary dispatched a team of officials from both State and Defense to brief European governments and NATO. The president called the prime ministers of both Poland and the Czech Republic to inform them of his decision and to promise that he was dispatching administration officials immediately to Warsaw and Prague to brief them.

The morning of the seventeenth, the president publicly announced the new approach. In one of those unanticipated and unfortunate coincidences, that month was the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland. Some news stories asserted that Poland had again been “betrayed,” and most suggested that our timing had added insult to injury with the Poles. The president and his domestic advisers clearly wanted me out front to defend this new strategy; I had recommended the earlier approach to Bush and had the credibility to justify a different approach under Obama. It was neither the first nor last time under Obama that I was used to provide political cover, but it was okay in this instance since I sincerely believed the new program was better—more in accord with the political realities in Europe and more effective against the emerging Iranian threat. And I had been successful in preserving the GBI alternative, at least for the time being.

By the time General Cartwright and I sallied forth to the press room to talk about the new program, Republicans in Congress and former Bush officials were all over the airwaves harshly criticizing this “betrayal” of our allies in order to curry favor with the Russians. Senator McCain called the move “seriously misguided.” I told the press what had prompted the reassessment and explained the details of the planned system. In response to a question, I said the Russians had to accept that there was going to be a missile defense system in Europe. We hoped they’d join it, but we were going to proceed regardless.

The damage from the leak was manageable in Europe. I thought the Polish and Czech governments were probably relieved that they could avoid a showdown with their parliaments; the plan would have lost for sure in Prague and probably in Warsaw. In my calls with both defense ministers on the eighteenth, I said we still wanted them to be involved with missile defense in Europe.

Under both the Bush and Obama missile defense plans, I thought our goals and those of the Polish and Czech leaders were completely different, although no one ever had the audacity to say so publicly or even privately. Their goals were political, having nothing to do with Iran and everything to do with Russia: the U.S. deployments on their soil would be a concrete manifestation of U.S. security guarantees against Russia beyond our commitments under the NATO treaty. Our goals under both plans were primarily military: to deal with a rapidly evolving Iranian missile threat, as we repeatedly made clear to them and to the Russians. Indeed, Rice and I had told Putin that if the Iranian missile program went away, so would the need for U.S. missile defenses in Europe. That’s why I had offered to Putin in 2008 to delay making the sites operational until the Iranians flight-tested a missile that could reach Europe. Obama would catch hell for saying nearly the same thing to Russian president Medvedev.

The New York Times bottom-lined all this with the headline “Obama Reshapes a Missile Shield to Blunt Tehran,” and The Washington Post subheadline was “New Plan Designed to Confront Iran’s Capabilities More Directly.” I never understood the fury of the U.S. critics. The new plan would get defenses operational in Europe and for our 80,000 troops there years earlier than the Bush approach, while still going forward with development of the ground-based interceptors for homeland defense. Obama would still be taking heat for “canceling” missile defense in Europe during the 2012 election.

Obama’s new missile defense plan had one unintended, but welcome, consequence. For the first time since before Reagan’s “Star Wars” speech, building a limited American missile defense had broad bipartisan support in Congress. That was no small thing.

RUSSIA

The Obama administration’s desire to “reset” the relationship with Russia got off to an awkward start. Hillary had her first meeting with Russian foreign minister Lavrov in Geneva on March 6, and someone persuaded her to present him with a big red button, with the word “reset” printed on the top in Russian. Unfortunately, the Russian word on the button actually said “overcharge.” This reaffirmed my strong view that gimmicks in foreign policy generally backfire. They are right up there with presidents putting on funny hats—they result in pictures you have to live with forever.

Russian behavior in 2009–10 vis-à-vis Iran was mixed. At one point early on, Medvedev conceded to Obama that the United States had been right about Iran’s nuclear and missile ambitions (words that could never have crossed Putin’s lips). The Russians would not block efforts to get new sanctions against Iran approved by the UN, even though they would continue to work to water them down. They refrained from sending the Iranians a very sophisticated new air defense system—the S-300—which would have made an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities considerably harder. Putin had promised Bush he would not send the system to Iran and, after Obama became president, actually broke the contract with the Iranians.

When it came to missile defense in Europe, however, the Russians almost immediately concluded that the new approach announced by Obama was potentially a bigger problem for them than the Bush plan had been. They were worried about the possibility of future modifications to the systems that would, in fact, give them capabilities against Russian ICBMs. They came to believe the potential deployment of hundreds of advanced SM-3 missiles that we were planning between 2018 and 2020 posed an even bigger threat to them than the GBIs. From that point—a few weeks after the September announcement—the Russians mounted an even more aggressive campaign against the new approach than they had the old, and they would continue to do so for the rest of my time as secretary and beyond. Discussion of potential partnering on missile defense continued for political purposes on both sides, but in reality, a slim chance had become no chance. Missile defense would continue to be the Russians’ principal target in meetings of the NATO-Russia Council and in bilateral meetings with all senior U.S. officials. The Iranian threat simply did not outweigh concerns over their own long-term security. How ironic that U.S. critics of the new approach had portrayed it as a big concession to the Russians. It would have been nice to hear a critic in Washington—just once in my career—say, Well, I got that wrong.

With one exception, I played a minor role in the U.S.-Russian relationship during my time in the Obama administration. Where Condi Rice and I had traveled to Russia on several occasions for “two plus two” meetings with our counterparts and to meet with Putin and Medvedev, I visited Russia only once during my two and a half years working for Obama, and that was near the end of my tenure in 2011. There was not a single “two plus two” meeting during that period. I had regular bilateral discussions with Russian minister of defense Serdyukov at NATO sessions when the NATO-Russia Council met, but these rarely lasted more than half an hour and, with translation, provided little opportunity for serious dialogue; he usually had only enough time to poke a stick in my eye over missile defense.

The one exception was negotiation of a new treaty imposing further reductions on the strategic nuclear delivery systems of both countries. I had a personal history with this decades-long endeavor. I had been a junior intelligence adviser to the U.S. delegation negotiating the first such treaty with the Soviets in the early 1970s (SALT I—Strategic Arms Limitation Talks I), and a junior member of the U.S. delegation present in Vienna when President Carter signed the second such treaty in 1979 (SALT II), which was never ratified by the U.S. Senate because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Negotiations for additional limits on both sides’ nuclear arsenals continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s (the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty—START—talks), but not much was actually accomplished. Under Bush 43, the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT, also known as the Moscow Treaty), reducing the nuclear arsenals of both sides to between 1,700 and 2,200 operational deployed warheads, was signed in 2002, to expire at the end of 2012 if not superseded by a new treaty.

In early 2009, SALT, START, and SORT—acronym hell—gave way to “New Start,” an Obama administration effort to negotiate the next strategic arms limitations treaty. Medvedev signed on that spring. All the presidents I worked for except Carter found the details of arms control negotiations mind-numbing and excruciatingly boring. Most of the hard work was done by the negotiators and the sub–cabinet level experts in Washington, with only major issues or obstacles put before the principals. The broad outlines of an agreement emerged within a matter of weeks, limiting the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 and the number of strategic missile launchers and bombers to 800. Included were very important provisions for satellite and remote monitoring—for the first time, monitoring tags would be on each bomber and missile—and for eighteen on-site inspections each year. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of Strategic Command were supportive of the provisions, as was I. General Cartwright and Jim Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, were expert in the strategic nuclear world and played a prominent role in shaping the views of senior leaders in the Pentagon, including mine.

Agreement was reached on the terms of the treaty on March 26, 2010, and Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed it in Prague on April 8. I informed the president a few days later that at the exact moment of the signing ceremony, the Russian military had been conducting a nuclear attack exercise against the United States. A nice Putin touch, I thought.

Critics of the treaty in the United States wasted no time in describing its purported shortcomings. It was said the treaty would inhibit our ability to deploy missile defenses, to modernize our strategic systems, and to develop capabilities for conventional global strike (using ICBMs with conventional warheads for long-range precision targeting).

Because the treaty limited the number of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads, the viability of our aging nuclear warheads and production facilities became a growing concern during the ratification process. (A number of our nuclear weapons production facilities had been built for the Manhattan Project during World War II.) Principals had met on several occasions to discuss modernization, not new capabilities. The cost of replacement and upgraded facilities would be significant—$80 billion over ten years. Given Obama’s ultimate goal of zero nuclear weapons, the idea of modernization met with stiff resistance at the subcabinet level and in the White House and NSS.

Obama was the fourth president I had worked for who said outright that he wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons (Carter, Reagan, and Bush 41 were the others). Former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former defense secretary Bill Perry, and former senator Sam Nunn had also called for “going to zero.” The only problem, in my view, was that I hadn’t heard the leaders of any other nuclear country—Britain, France, Russia, China, India, or Pakistan—signal the same intent. If we were going to have nuclear weapons, we’d damn well better ensure they would work and were safe from both terrorists and accidents—and that meant incorporating new designs and technologies.

I spent most of my professional life dealing with the role of nuclear weapons in national defense—beginning with my assignment as an Air Force second lieutenant to the Strategic Air Command. Over the decades, the arguments over the circumstances in which they might be used and how many weapons were needed became highly charged and highly esoteric. The debates sometimes reminded me of medieval theologians arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. I never believed that nuclear weapons could be used on a limited basis in a war between the United States and the USSR, as a number of others did. I was a strong advocate of dramatically reducing the massive number of nuclear weapons in our arsenal on the basis of reciprocal agreements with the Soviets and subsequently the Russians. But I do not believe we should unilaterally reduce our nuclear forces. I also believe reducing to very low levels of nuclear weapons—below 1,000 to 1,500—offers the temptation to other powers to exceed those numbers and place us at a disadvantage, at a minimum in terms of perceptions. It is a matter of both global politics and military deterrence.

Led by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a number of senators made clear they wouldn’t consider voting for ratification of the New Start Treaty unless the administration put enough money in the budget to pay for upgrading our nuclear facilities and modernizing our weapons. The administration promised the funding, most of which I agreed to provide from the defense budget. (Kyl voted against the treaty anyway.)

During the ratification process and hearings, I (along with Mike Mullen) was placed front and center by the administration to defend the treaty. Clinton, Mullen, and I gave a briefing for all senators on May 6, and then we testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 18. Once again the Republican hawk—me—was rolled out to provide political cover for the Democratic president. But as with missile defense, I had no problem with it because I believed the treaty was in our national interest. The key question about the new treaty, I said, was the same one posed during over forty years of strategic arms control: is the country better off with the treaty or without it? During that period, I pointed out, every president felt we were better off with a treaty. Under the treaty, we could maintain a strong ICBM, ballistic missile submarine, and bomber deterrent, and the provisions of the treaty were verifiable. The treaty did not constrain our missile defense programs; it had been buttressed by a credible modernization plan for our nuclear weapons stockpile, for the infrastructure that supports it, and for the necessary funding to carry out these plans; and it did not limit our ability to make essential investments to modernize our strategic forces, including delivery systems, nuclear weapons themselves, and the supporting infrastructure.

Hillary spoke to the political aspects of the treaty and the consequences of not ratifying it, and Mullen talked about its effect on our military, adding the strong endorsement of the Joint Chiefs. The questioning was reasonably civil, the criticism perfunctory—except that Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina wanted to bring back Reagan’s missile shield. The three of us testified again on the treaty before the Senate Armed Services Committee in mid-June. Before the hearings, I wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal defending the treaty, and then Hillary and I wrote another in mid-November in The Washington Post. The two of us, together and separately, had a lot of “quality” time with individual senators through the summer and fall. The treaty was ratified by the Senate in the lame-duck session of Congress just before Christmas 2010. It passed by four votes.

A potentially serious crisis in the U.S.-Russian relationship, unrelated to nuclear arms or Iran, cropped up just when the treaty was under consideration. On June 16, John Brennan grabbed me after a meeting and confided that the FBI had penetrated a Russian “illegals” program in the United States. (Illegals, also known as sleepers, are trained spies sent to another country, where they spend years building a life and well-placed careers so that eventually they can be activated as agents with good access to gather information or influence decisions.) Over a period of years, the FBI had identified four couples of illegals in New York, New Jersey, and Virginia. Seven or eight of the adults were Russian military intelligence (GRU) officers. The immediate problem, according to Brennan, was that the source in Moscow who had identified the illegals to the FBI now needed to get out of Russia immediately. Brennan told me that the current plan was to arrest the illegals, who would be interrogated, tried, and held for a potential swap. The concern was that this would be playing out while the president was meeting with Medvedev—at the White House on the twenty-fourth and at the G-8 meeting in Canada on June 25–26. The potential for a major flap was self-evident. Brennan said there would be a meeting with the president on all of this on Friday afternoon, June 18, and I should be there.

CIA director Leon Panetta filled me in on the details regarding the illegals. Leon was passionate about getting the source out of Russia safely. As a former CIA director, I needed no persuading; we have an obligation to try our best to protect, and save, our sources.

As we took our accustomed places in the Situation Room the next afternoon, there was tension in the air. As happened so often during the Cold War, a spy case threatened to derail a political step forward in the U.S.-Russian relationship. The political and diplomatic players came into the room frustrated and angry about the spy case potentially wrecking their goals with Moscow; the CIA and FBI officials came determined to save the source and prosecute the foreign agents. Panetta and FBI director Bob Mueller informed the president of the planned exfiltration and arrests. The illegals were in the United States under false identities, though none of them had done any spying yet that we knew of. The president seemed as angry at Mueller for wanting to arrest the illegals and at Panetta for wanting to exfiltrate the source from Moscow as he was at the Russians: “Just as we’re getting on track with the Russians, this? This is a throwback to the Cold War. This is right out of John le Carré. We put START, Iran, the whole relationship with Russia at risk for this kind of thing?” Biden was adamant that U.S. national security interests would be best served by not acting at all. He strongly believed “our national security interest balance tips heavily to not creating a flap,” which “would blow up the relationship with the Russians.” Jones agreed and asked if we could hold off on the exfiltration until September. The president, betraying a cynicism (and realism) that had to be deeply offensive to both Mueller and Panetta, said he knew that if we let the illegals go back to Russia, folks in the FBI and at CIA would be mad and probably leak it. “The Republicans would beat me up, but I need to keep a broader perspective on the national interest. Isn’t there a more elegant solution?”

Medvedev probably didn’t even know about this program, I said, but Putin probably did. If we took down the illegals while Medvedev was here or immediately thereafter, he would be embarrassed and weakened at home: “Maybe there is a way to flip this on Putin.” Meanwhile “you must exfiltrate the source on schedule,” I said to the president. I suggested Obama meet privately with Medvedev in Canada, give him the list of Russian illegals in the United States with their true Russian names and GRU rank, ask if this kind of thing is part of “reset,” and demand that they all be recalled to Russia within forty-eight hours or they would be expelled noisily. This would allow the illegals’ children to go back to Russia too. I said this might give Medvedev a trump card with Putin: Why was he doing this? Why did he not tell him? I said we would likely get nothing from interrogations; the illegals had been kept isolated from one another, and we already knew a great deal about the program from the source. Based on past experience, a swap would take a year to negotiate.

The president said he would approve my approach. After he left the meeting, though, the principals talked further and concluded that my recommendation would put Medvedev too much on the spot and agreed—with my concurrence—to suggest that the president proceed with exfiltration of our agent from Russia and then just expel the illegals. This would show decisive action but would not put Medvedev in a potentially embarrassing position. Panetta and Mueller agreed. Panetta added, “The vice president got it all wrong—if the president looked like he didn’t take the Russian illegals program seriously, that would have jeopardized START and more.” The spy story would inevitably leak, he said, and there was no way the Republicans in the Senate would have ratified the New Start Treaty had Obama ignored the Russian illegals. I agreed with Leon.

The illegals were arrested on June 27. Much to my surprise, a swap was swiftly arranged—the illegals for four Russians in prison for spying for the West. The episode, I thought, had ended with no political damage to the president and no damage to the bilateral relationship with Russia—but only because the first instincts of the president and vice president, to sweep the whole thing under the rug, had yielded to a wiser path, and because Obama’s other advisers had rejected my initial proposal. I admired the president for moving past his anger and frustration to make a good decision.

While I did not go to Russia for the first twenty-six months of the Obama administration, I did meet regularly with my counterpart, Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov, at NATO. Putin and Medvedev had directed him to reform—and shrink—the Russian military, especially the army; to turn a lumbering, top-heavy Cold War leviathan into a nimble, modern force. He was charged with cutting 200,000 officers and some 200 generals and reducing headquarters personnel by 60 percent. Since retired Russian officers were promised housing, he also had to find or build apartments for all those officers.

Serdyukov had no experience in the security arena. He came to his new post by way of the furniture business and the Russian federal tax service. But his father-in-law, Viktor Zubkov, was a first deputy prime minister and confidant of Putin’s, and the longer Serdyukov stayed in his job and the more controversial his reforms, the clearer it became just how strongly he was being protected by both Putin and Medvedev. (Serdyukov later was embroiled in a corruption scandal that resulted in his sacking in November 2012.)

As I went forward with my internal reforms and budget reallocations within the Pentagon, I became increasingly curious about what Serdyukov was doing. And so I invited him to Washington, the first visit by a Russian defense minister in six years. He arrived at the Defense Department on September 15, 2010, and I pulled out all the stops to make him feel welcome, with bands and marching troops. (I probably did that for only a half-dozen visitors over four and a half years.) I set aside the entire day to meet with him, spending the morning on our respective internal defense reforms and the challenges we faced. In my Cold War days, I could never have imagined such a remarkably candid conversation on internal issues and problems taking place between our two countries. Although, as I wrote earlier, Serdyukov did not seem to be a significant player in Russia on foreign policy issues, that September day I came to admire his courage, skill, and ambition in trying to reform his military. One analyst in Moscow was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “That which Serdyukov is doing is a challenge to the Russian military culture as a whole, the culture that is based upon the idea of a mass-mobilization army starting with Peter the Great.” There was no doubt he had become a hated man among Russia’s senior military officers.

Our cordiality changed nothing on the big issue that most divided us—missile defense. And I would continue to annoy Putin. Soon after the Serdyukov visit, I had told my French counterpart, Alain Juppé, that democracy did not exist under Putin, that the government was little more than an oligarchy under the control of the Russian security services, and that although Medvedev was president, Putin still called the shots. That conversation leaked, and of course, Putin took offense. In an interview with CNN’s Larry King on December 1, he said I was trying to “defame” either him or Medvedev, and he described me as “deeply confused.” I never did get around to polishing my diplomatic skills.

All through 2010, at the bottom of the huge funnel pouring problems from Pandora’s global trove into Washington, sat just eight of us who, even though served by vast bureaucracies, had to deal with every one of the problems. The challenge for historians and journalists—and memoirists—is how to convey the crushing effect of dealing daily with multiple problems, pivoting on a dime every few minutes from one issue to another, having to quickly absorb reporting from many sources on each problem, and then making decisions, always with too little time and too much ambiguous information. Ideally, I suppose there should be a way to structure our national security apparatus so that day-to-day matters can be delegated to lower levels of responsibility while the president and his senior advisers focus on the big picture and thoughtfully make grand strategy. But that’s not how it works in the real world of politics and policy. And as the world becomes more complex and more turbulent, that is a problem in its own right: exhausted people do not make the best decisions.

ASIA

During each of my first three years in office, I had traveled to the Far East twice, including a visit to China in the fall of 2007. In 2010, I would make the long trip from Washington on five separate occasions.

On any trip to Asia, even if China isn’t on the itinerary, it is on the agenda. Improving the military-to-military relationship with Beijing was a high priority. I had first traveled to China at the end of 1980, with then CIA director Stansfield Turner, to implement the 1979 agreement between Jimmy Carter and Deng Xiaoping to begin technical intelligence cooperation against the Soviet Union (to replace the radar sites in northern Iran that CIA lost after the 1979 revolution). That extraordinary relationship had continued uninterrupted over the decades through the ups and downs in the two nations’ political relationship. As secretary of defense, I wanted to build a similar relationship—that is, one largely immune to political differences—in the military arena. Above all, I wanted to open a dialogue on sensitive subjects like nuclear strategy as well as contingency planning on North Korea. I was convinced that the prolonged dialogue between Washington and Moscow during our many years of arms control negotiations had led to a greater understanding of each other’s intentions and thinking about nuclear matters; I believed that dialogue had helped prevent misunderstandings and miscalculations that might have led to confrontation. In my 2007 visit to China, I tried to lay the groundwork for such a relationship. My Chinese hosts and I decided at that time to build on previous cooperative exchanges with a fairly ambitious list of initiatives, from exchanging officers among our military educational institutions to opening a direct telephone link between ministers and beginning to expand a strategic dialogue. It was clear, though, that Chinese military leaders were leery of a real dialogue.

Not much headway was made during the last year of the Bush administration. A pall was cast over the relationship in October 2008, when Bush 43 announced his multibillion-dollar arms sale to Taiwan. Things only got worse in March 2009, when the U.S. Navy ship Impeccable, an ocean surveillance ship, was aggressively harassed by Chinese boats in the South China Sea. It was a serious incident and a potentially dangerous one, both because of the Chinese actions and because the Chinese were asserting by those actions that we had no right to be in those waters. We would later conclude that this action had been taken by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) without the knowledge of the civilian leadership in Beijing; we believed the same of their test of an antisatellite weapon some while before. Both were worrisome because of the apparent independent behavior of the PLA. Nonetheless, for the most part, lower-level military and civilian visits and exchanges continued in 2009 as planned. Our primary interlocutor was a PLA air force general, Ma Xiaotian, a deputy chief of the general staff. Or, as we referred to him, the “handler of the barbarians”—us. I would see a lot of him over the years.

During my 2007 visit, I had invited senior Chinese military officials to the United States. On October 26, 2009, General Xu Caihou, vice chairman of the Central Military Commission, finally made the trip. I hosted him and his delegation for dinner at the summer cottage used by President Lincoln several miles from downtown Washington. It was a crowded room, and the seating arrangement gave me my only opportunity to talk privately with Xu. I raised the subject of North Korea. I went into some detail about the risks of instability there and the dangers of its collapse both to China and to the South Koreans, and I said we had a mutual interest in a frank dialogue about what we both would do in such circumstances—including how to ensure that the North’s nuclear weapons and materials would be kept secure. It was plain that I was way out of Xu’s comfort zone in even raising these subjects. “Thank you for your views on North Korea” was all he said to me in response. We discussed the possibility of my visiting China again in 2010, but as always, the Chinese made clear that all bets were off on our relationship if we continued arms sales to Taiwan. Still, our public statements were largely positive, if only to preserve a good atmosphere for Obama’s visit to China the following month.

On January 29, 2010, the Obama administration announced the sale of over $6 billion in arms to Taiwan, including Patriot missiles, helicopters, communications systems for their F-16 combat aircraft, mine-hunting ships, and other equipment. Everyone knew there would be a strong Chinese reaction. As with the Bush team, we were trying to find the best balance between meeting our obligations to Taiwan and preserving the critically important relationship with Beijing. As long as what we sold to Taiwan could reasonably be described as “defensive,” we thought we could minimize the damage with China, and we did. The sale, though, put the military-to-military relationship back on ice.

The most visible casualty was my visit to China. General Xu had invited me to return in 2010, but after the Taiwan arms sales announcement, in a typically Chinese manner they made clear I was unwelcome but wanted me to cancel the visit so they could avoid taking a diplomatic hit. More than a little mischievously, I said from time to time that spring that I was still planning to make the trip. Finally we received official word from China that a visit by me in June would not be convenient. Much was made of this “snub” in the press and its consequences for the broader bilateral relationship.

I went to Singapore in early June for the “Shangri-La” Asia Security Summit, hosted annually by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. The sessions were boring, but the conference attracted senior defense officials from all over Asia and provided a good opportunity to do a lot of bilateral business, and for me to make a major speech. Because my canceled visit to China was the buzz of the conference, I decided to tackle it—and the bilateral relationship more broadly—head-on in my speech. The deputy chief of the PLA general staff, General Ma, representing China, was seated in the front row. I reminded the largely Asian audience that Presidents Obama and Hu had agreed the preceding November “to advance sustained and reliable military-to-military relations” between the two countries. I went on that “the key words here are ‘sustained’ and ‘reliable’—not a relationship interrupted by and subject to the vagaries of political weather.” The Chinese breaking off interactions between our militaries because of arms sales to Taiwan, I said, made little sense: “First, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan are nothing new…. Second, the United States for years has demonstrated in a very public way that we do not support independence for Taiwan…. Finally, because China’s accelerating military buildup is largely focused on Taiwan, U.S. arms sales are an important component of maintaining peace and stability in cross-strait relations and throughout the region.” I pointed out that Taiwan arms sales had not impeded closer U.S.-Chinese political and economic ties, “nor closer ties in other security areas of mutual interest…. Only in the military-to-military arena has progress on critical mutual security issues been held hostage over something that is, frankly, old news.”

In the question-and-answer session, a retired PLA general aggressively pursued the Taiwan arms-sales issue. I replied that the Chinese had known full well at the time we normalized diplomatic relations in 1979 that arms-sales to Taiwan would continue. Why, then, I asked, did China still pursue this line? The general’s response was as direct as it was revealing. China had lived with the Taiwan arms sales in 1979, he said, “because we were weak. But now we are strong.”

Perhaps my most important individual meeting in Singapore was with President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea. I really liked Lee; he was tough-minded, realistic, and very pro-American. (All in contrast to his predecessor, President Roh Moo-hyun, whom I had met with in Seoul in November 2007 and decided was anti-American and probably a little crazy. He had told me that the biggest security threats in Asia were the United States and Japan.) A little over two months earlier, on March 26, the North Koreans, in a brazen provocation, had sunk the South Korean warship Cheonan. Lee told me he had warned the Chinese premier that the North must “feel consequences.” Failure to act, I said, would encourage Kim Jong-il’s successor to show the military he is tough and can “get away with things.” Lee agreed and said the UN needed to impose economic and diplomatic sanctions on the North and that we needed show-of-force exercises. I said we were already talking about further exercises, but the United States was willing to follow his lead on timing and their nature. Lee was adamant that there could be no return to the six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program “until they admit their wrongdoing and renounce it.” I concurred: “Resumption of the six-party talks would be seen as a reward—the sequence must be consequences, then talks.”

In its disputes with neighbors, China always prefers to deal with each country individually. They are easier to intimidate that way. Thus the United States looks for opportunities to encourage countries in the region to meet together, including with China, to address these disputes. The Obama administration was particularly active in pursuing this tack, including our own participation wherever possible. Secretary Clinton was very much in the lead. A major step forward in this regard was her planned official visit to Vietnam in July 2010, followed immediately by her participation in the Association of Southeastern Asian Nations (ASEAN) regional forum in Cambodia (where her comments on the South China Sea disputes and the multilateral criticism of China’s aggressive behavior would surprise and anger Beijing). While I was in Singapore attending the Shangri-La conference, my Vietnamese counterpart invited me to attend a meeting in Hanoi in October of the ten ASEAN defense ministers, expanded to include the ministers from Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Russia, and the United States. Because I knew Hillary was going to Vietnam and Cambodia in July, I assumed Washington would have no objection to my going later in the year, and so I accepted the invitation on the spot. This was exactly the kind of forum we wanted to encourage.

After the Singapore conference, I flew to Azerbaijan to try to strengthen its participation in our Afghan supply route through Central Asia—the Northern Distribution Network. I had never been to Baku before, but I knew a fair amount about its history. Its president, Ilham Aliyev, ran the oil-rich country on the Caspian Sea with as strong a hand as his father, Heydar Aliyev, had done. Heydar had run Soviet Socialist Azerbaijan for eighteen years before Mikhail Gorbachev fired him for corruption and expelled him from the Soviet Politburo in 1987. He reinvented himself after the collapse of the Soviet Union and served as president of the country from 1993 to 2003; then his son took over. For all practical purposes, Azerbaijan was a family-run enterprise. I met with Ilham in a huge palace and gave him a letter from President Obama that underscored the importance of the relationship to us and our desire to expand it. Neither the letter nor I mentioned human rights. The main Azeri complaint was that we weren’t paying enough attention to them. So just showing up accomplished the main purpose of the visit.

Baku seemed to have one principal thoroughfare, a very wide boulevard with many new and impressive buildings and tony shops. But a few blocks behind that showpiece street was an ancient, dusty, shambolic central Asian city. We ate that night at a traditional restaurant, which served all kinds of grilled meats on a long wooden plank. We were just digging in with gusto when one of my security staff told me the restaurant was on fire. Members of my group began evacuating, but since I saw neither flames nor smoke, I kept eating, along with one or two of my more intrepid comrades. A few minutes later, at about the time I heard the fire engines, my security team made clear they weren’t giving me a choice about staying or leaving. I walked out the door just as the first fire truck arrived. I really hated leaving the food behind.

My second noteworthy trip to Asia in 2010 was in mid-July, to South Korea and Indonesia. The main purpose of the visit to Korea was the annual “two plus two” meeting of Secretary Clinton and me and our two Korean counterparts. This meeting took on significant added importance because of the sinking of the Cheonan. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il had been ill for some time, and speculation was that the sinking was the bright idea of his twenty-something son, Kim Jong-un, to prove to the North Korean military, as I suggested earlier, that he was tough enough to succeed his father. This line of thinking suggested that other provocations might be coming, so underscoring the strength of our alliance was very important.

Apart from the meetings, an important symbolic part of Hillary’s and my program was visiting the demilitarized zone at Panmunjom. We were driven to a hilltop observation post, where we ritually looked through binoculars toward the North’s side of the DMZ. (We avoided the embarrassment of an earlier U.S. official who had earnestly looked through the glasses for a photo op, not noticing that the lens caps were still on.) All I could see were trees. At Panmunjom, we entered the small building situated right on the DMZ line, where military representatives from the North and the UN command met. As we were briefed, a very large, menacing North Korean soldier stood outside the window glaring at Hillary and me. We worked hard to keep straight faces, and I resisted the temptation to go to the window and do something quite undiplomatic. Those kinds of offbeat ideas were always going through my head on such occasions; fortunately I mostly resisted them.

The third significant trip was to Hanoi in October for the ASEAN defense ministers-plus meeting. Apart from the unprecedented nature of the gathering itself, there were a couple of notable developments. Eight different ministers spoke up about the need to resolve disputes in the South China Sea and other international waters peacefully and through negotiations—clear criticism of China, whose defense minister, General Liang Guanglie, was in attendance. All agreed on the need for a “code of conduct” for such disputes. Normally, all this would have elicited a strong reaction from the Chinese, but Liang was clearly under instructions not to create a scene—unlike what China’s foreign minister had done in Cambodia the previous July under similar circumstances. Liang, a blustery sort, just sat and took it. It seemed obvious that the Chinese had realized their publicly aggressive approach to issues was isolating them, and therefore they tacked before the wind.

Liang and I met in Hanoi. President Hu was planning to visit Washington the following January and wanted all aspects of the relationship to appear positive. Thus the PLA, and Liang, had obviously been told to be nice to me. He began by referencing Hu’s forthcoming visit and said that the overall relationship was positive. He went on to say, “Secretary Gates, I know you place great value on military-to-military relations, and I appreciate that, but the key is to respect each other’s core interests and major concerns.” He then invited me to visit China early in 2011, making explicit the Chinese desire to have me visit in January before Hu traveled to the United States.

I accepted the invitation, put down my prepared talking points, and spoke straight from the shoulder. “I hope our military-to-military relationship can be shielded from political ups and downs, just as the intelligence relationship has been.” I said that a strategic dialogue on nuclear weapons was critical to avoid mistrust and miscalculation, and that there was no substitute for a direct government-to-government dialogue on the subject. “Let’s be honest with each other,” I continued. “Taiwan arms sales are political decisions and not made by the secretary of defense or Department of Defense, so if our political leaders continue with their relationship despite this disagreement, it seems strange to stop the military-to-military relationship.” I reminded him that we had discussed an ambitious list of areas where we could expand our relationship when I visited three years earlier and expressed the hope we could return to it. “There are a lot of opportunities,” I said. Always eager for the last word, Liang replied, “Opportunities, yes, but the U.S. should seriously consider our concerns.” Similarly interested in getting in the last word, I said, “As in all things, respect for concerns and perspectives is mutual.”

While in Hanoi, I gave a speech at the Vietnam national university. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. The speech was an unremarkable review of the development of the U.S.-Vietnamese military relationship over the preceding fifteen years. But my reception was quite extraordinary. As I entered the hall, funky dance and disco music was blaring, strobe lights were flashing, and the audience—many young military officers but also a lot of young female students—was applauding, whistling, and carrying on. I knew that the only way I would ever get such a rock star’s reception would be at the order of a dictatorship.

DISASTERS

Twice during 2010, the U.S. military was called upon to provide major disaster relief. At 4:53 p.m. local time on Tuesday, January 12, a catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit Haiti. Ultimately, three million people were affected and 315,000 killed. As the scale of death and destruction became evident, President Obama placed the highest priority on getting U.S. military assets to Haiti for rescue and relief and to maintain order. While there was never any doubt in my mind that the president’s primary motivation was humanitarian, I believed he also wanted to show how fast he could mobilize the U.S. government after a disaster (in contrast to Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina) and to score as many political points as possible both at home and abroad.

The first request from the White House for disaster assistance for Haiti came to Defense early on January 13, and I was told the president wanted a “highly visible, very fast response.” He said the deployment didn’t have to be perfect, “just get them there as soon as possible.” He also wanted to keep tabs on how well we were doing and so asked for daily morning and afternoon reports on our progress. Two U.S. Coast Guard cutters were the first U.S. assistance to get to Haiti on the thirteenth, and that evening two U.S. Air Force C-130 aircraft from the Special Operations Wing landed with emergency supplies, medical units, and communications gear. A team of thirty military engineers, operations planners, and communications specialists also arrived that first day. I had immediately directed several Navy ships to head for Haiti, including the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson. Additional Air Force personnel were deployed to reopen the international airport in Port-au-Prince, and I approved “prepare to deploy” orders for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Haiti, about 3,000 soldiers. There were sixty-six U.S. military personnel on the island at the time of the earthquake, and they reported that the port was unusable, there was no fresh water, medical care was urgently needed, and many mortuary officers would be needed to deal with fatalities. We began moving heaven and earth to get ships, aircraft, equipment, and people there as fast as possible. I told the commander of Southern Command, General Doug Fraser, “The president considers this our highest priority. Whatever you need, we will get it to you. Don’t hesitate to ask.”

All this wasn’t good enough. When we briefed the president in the Oval Office that night on our actions and plans, he, Donilon, and others were impatient. Mullen and I tried to explain that there was chaos on the island, roads were blocked, air traffic control at the international airport was down, and the port facilities were largely destroyed. Our first priority was to get the airport operating so it could handle a volume of air traffic far beyond its previous capacity. Donilon was especially aggressive in questioning our commitment to speed and complaining about how long we were taking. Then he went too far, questioning in front of the president and a roomful of people whether General Fraser was competent to lead this effort. I’ve rarely been angrier in the Oval Office than I was at that moment; nor was I ever closer to walking out of that historic room in the middle of a meeting. My initial instinct was to storm out, telling the president on the way that he didn’t need two secretaries of defense. It took every bit of my self-discipline to stay seated on the sofa.

By the fourteenth, the Air Force team had cleared the runway at the airport and begun setting up twenty-four-hour-a-day air traffic control. At dawn on January 15, five C-17 cargo aircraft with more communications and air traffic management equipment, as well as 115 Air Force personnel, landed at the international airport and assumed responsibility for restoring air traffic control and expanding the airfield’s capacity. From January 16 to 18, 330 aircraft landed at the airport, many times the field’s pre-earthquake volume. Half of the flights were civilian relief aircraft, and more than eighty were from other countries. (Our effort at the airport would later be characterized as the largest single-runway operation in history, with 4,000 takeoffs and landings—one every five minutes—in the first twelve days after the earthquake.) The Vinson arrived on the fifteenth, with 600,000 emergency food rations and nineteen helicopters. The same day the deputy commander of Southern Command, Lieutenant General Ken Keen, arrived on the island as head of a joint task force to coordinate the U.S. military effort. Over the weekend, several more large U.S. ships arrived with more helicopters and Marines. Within days of the earthquake, we had 17 ships, 48 helicopters, and 10,000 sailors and Marines on the island or off the coast. In Washington, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Dr. Rajiv Shah, was appointed overall U.S. coordinator of the relief effort. In this endeavor and in others, I always gave Shah high marks for competence and compassion. He was also easy to work with.

On the other hand, to my chagrin, the president dispatched the NSS chief of staff, Denis McDonough, to Haiti. He arrived on the fifteenth, accompanied by Navy Captain John Kirby, who was press spokesman for the Joint Staff. After the Iran-Contra debacle, I considered NSC involvement—or meddling—in operational matters anathema. I had nothing personal against McDonough, just that such staffers are almost always out of their depth, and the chain of command is blurred when you have someone from the White House in the field who claims to speak for the president. McDonough’s purported task was to coordinate communications, but his presence was seen as much more than that. Even Jim Jones, who probably had no say in the decision to send his own subordinate, seemed to recognize this was a bridge too far. He called me a day or two after McDonough’s arrival on the island and asked me only partly in jest, “Is our screwdriver too long?” I confided to my staff that I thought this was yet another example of a White House consumed by the crisis of the day and bent on micromanaging—still stuck in campaign mode a year into the presidency.

Our military efforts to assist Haiti were complicated by history and the situation on the island. There was deep suspicion of us in Haiti, for good reason. In 1915, amid political chaos and six Haitian presidents in four years, not to mention Imperial Germany’s domination of the island’s international commerce, President Woodrow Wilson sent in 330 Marines to safeguard U.S. interests. The United States, for all intents and purposes, ran Haiti until the Marines departed in 1934. In September 1994, President Clinton sent 20,000 troops to Haiti to oust a military junta and restore the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to office. Just prior to the arrival of the troops, Jimmy Carter arranged a deal under which the junta gave up power and its leader left the country. Shortly thereafter U.S. troops escorted Aristide into the capital to reclaim his presidency. The U.S. forces left some six months later. And then in 2004, President George W. Bush sent in 1,000 Marines after the ouster of Aristide (amid allegations that the United States had orchestrated or at least abetted his removal), a force quickly augmented with troops from France, Chile, and Canada.

I had this history in mind as we quickly assembled a huge military force to render assistance. Others remembered the history as well. About the same time the Vinson arrived offshore, the French “minister of state for cooperation” publicly accused the United States of again “occupying” Haiti, citing our takeover of air traffic control; both he and the Brazilian foreign minister complained about our giving preferential treatment to U.S. aid flights. There was other international political pushing and shoving over our growing military presence on the island and our control of the airport, and other allusions to our past history in Haiti, but my real concern was the potentially negative impact on Haitians of U.S. Marines and soldiers patrolling the streets and performing security duties. I thought our relief effort gave us the opportunity to improve the long-tarnished image of the U.S. military in Haiti, and I didn’t want to blow the chance by taking on missions that might involve the use of force against Haitians.

We also had to work around the collapse of the Haitian government, which had been a fragile and barely functional institution even before the earthquake. How to respect Haitian sovereignty if there was no Haitian leadership or partner? Many officials had been killed, including in the national police, survivors had little or no communications equipment, and President René Préval was initially reclusive and nearly incommunicado. Once he and some of his ministers established offices in the police headquarters at the airport, they formally asked the United States to assume control of the airport, but confusion among the Haitian leaders reigned—including who was in charge of what. That made coordination difficult to say the least.

Our relationship with the UN mission in Haiti was also problematic. The “UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti” (MINUSTAH) had been established in 1994 after the ouster of Aristide. Its roughly 9,000 security personnel from about a dozen countries had been commanded continuously by Brazilian officers. The force commander at the time of the earthquake was Brigadier General Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto. Keen worked hard to establish a good working relationship with Neto, and after several tense days of jockeying over roles and missions, on January 22, agreement was reached that MINUSTAH and the Haitian national police would provide domestic security, and the U.S. and Canadian militaries would distribute humanitarian aid and provide security for aid distribution. Our troops were authorized to defend themselves if attacked but otherwise were only to provide a secure environment to get relief supplies to the people.

Criticism that the U.S. military response had been too slow in ramping up came from the press and Congress as well as the White House. We were asked, in particular, why we had not just air-dropped relief supplies to the Haitians. The answer seemed obvious, at least to me. There was the risk that supplies dropped near concentrations of people would actually hit those clamoring to be the first to claim the water and food. Without security and order on the ground, airdrops might provoke riots and widespread violence. We were trying to put in place a relief infrastructure and logistics supply chain that could be sustained for weeks and months. We knew speed was important, but disorganization and more chaos would only hurt the Haitian effort. I told the press on January 15 that I did not see how the United States, and the Pentagon, could have responded any faster.

Some of the forces we deployed to Haiti had been in the pipeline to go to Afghanistan, so I was eager to begin drawing down our relief commitment as early as feasible. Both State and the White House wanted our military there as long as possible. We worked it out amicably, reducing force levels in early May and concluding our efforts in June. I met with the Brazilian defense minister at the Pentagon in early April, and we agreed that, after some “rough patches,” we had developed a positive and effective partnership. I give Keen—and General Fraser—a lot of credit for that, and for the overall effectiveness of our relief effort. Looking ahead, though, the task of rebuilding a ravaged, desperately poor, and badly governed Haiti was not a military mission.

The U.S. military also rendered substantial assistance during the historic flooding in Pakistan during the summer of 2010. By late July, one-fifth of the country was underwater, with 20 million people affected and some 2,000 dead. Many of the roads needed to reach victims were destroyed or inundated. Our military help began on August 1–2 with the delivery of food, water filtration plants, and twelve temporary bridges. I then directed the deployment of six CH-47 Chinook helicopters to Pakistan from Afghanistan on August 11. With the arrival of the USS Peleliu, we were able to provide a total of nineteen helicopters for rescue and relief, and toward the end of August, the USS Kearsarge was deployed to help as well.

Our relief help after a massive earthquake in Pakistan in 2005 had been warmly welcomed and led to an overall, if temporary, downturn in anti-Americanism there. But five more years of war in Afghanistan, drone attacks inside Pakistan, and growing problems between our governments had taken a toll. By summer 2010, 68 percent of Pakistanis had an unfavorable view of the United States. I was therefore extremely nervous about security for our helicopters and their crews. They were operating in northwestern Pakistan in areas such as Swat that were hotbeds of extremist and Taliban fighters. Villagers and even local police and Pakistani military accustomed to attacks by U.S. drones looked upon our military arrival with suspicion, if not outright hostility. I insisted that the Pakistani military have an officer on every flight to explain we were there to help and to organize distribution of supplies as the choppers were unloaded.

The Pakistani press reported that villagers waiting for aid showed no enthusiasm for the crews of our helicopters, and that there were no waves, smiles, or handshakes. Our crews reported some favorable reactions from Pakistanis, but overall there was great suspicion of our motives, and questions as to why we weren’t doing more in the way of long-term assistance to improve their roads and bridges. Despite the dour reception, during the first three weeks of August, our aircrews evacuated some 8,000 people and delivered 1.6 million pounds of relief supplies. Nonetheless, anti-Americanism in Pakistan was undiminished.

OTHER DISASTERS

The end of July 2010 brought another kind of flood, from which there would be little relief. On July 25, an online organization named WikiLeaks, created by Julian Assange, posted some 76,000 documents originating from classified Central Command databases in Iraq and Afghanistan. WikiLeaks, as we later learned, operated from computer servers in a number of countries and advertised itself as seeking “classified, censored, or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic, or ethical significance.” I told reporters on July 29 that the security breach had endangered lives and damaged confidence overseas in the U.S. government’s ability to protect its secrets. I said the documents released could have “potentially dramatic and grievously harmful consequences.”

From a military standpoint, the release of these documents was much worse than embarrassment. There was a lot of information about our military tactics, techniques, and procedures, as well as the names of Iraqis and Afghans who had cooperated with us. As hundreds of thousands of documents continued to be released through October, we determined that nearly 600 Afghans who had helped us were at risk, and that the Taliban was reviewing the postings to gather the names of those people. Just as worrying was the release of 44,000 documents revealing our tactics for dealing with IEDs, and many others that described our intelligence-collection methods and our understanding of insurgent relationships. There were voluminous documents from Iraq detailing detainee abuses, civilian casualties, and Iranian influence. Nearly all the Joint Task Force Guantánamo documents were released, including all assessments of individual detainees.

The flood assumed a totally different dimension in November when Assange warned that he was going to release hundreds of thousands of State Department documents and cables from more than one hundred embassies. On November 22, he said on Twitter, “The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined.” He made good on his threat. These cables revealed private conversations between American officials and foreign leaders and other officials, and embarrassingly candid evaluations of those leaders (including above all President Karzai), as well as intelligence-collection priorities, bilateral intelligence relationships, intelligence sources and methods, counterterrorism-related information, and on and on.

Army Private First Class Bradley Manning was quickly identified and charged with downloading the documents from a computer at his base in Iraq and sending them to WikiLeaks. In violation of security rules, he had apparently carried compact discs disguised as music CDs into a secure facility and spent his duty hours downloading the documents from classified networks.

Manning had gotten such broad access to so many databases because, after the Gulf War, and particularly with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a concerted effort to make as much information as possible available to every level of command. Huge broadband capacity was developed in both Iraq and Afghanistan, and wide access was provided to all levels. But we would learn, after the fact, that in many forward-deployed areas there was poor physical and operational security in and around facilities holding classified information, a failure to suspend the access to classified information of individuals who displayed behavioral and medical problems, and “weak to no implementation of tools restricting the use and monitoring of network activities.” According to the findings of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence in January 2011:

Secretary Clinton had a lot of explaining to do in capitals around the world for a problem caused by the Defense Department. Both she and I noticed that once open and candid interlocutors around the world now turned silent the second they saw an American official take out pen and paper for notes.

I tried to offer some perspective in one press briefing. I pointed out, for example, that these State Department documents demonstrated for everyone to see that there was no significant difference between what American officials said in public and what they said in private. Drawing on my many years of painful experience, I also reminded people that the American government leaks like a sieve—“and always has.” I cited President John Adams’s lament: “How can a government go on, publishing all their negotiations with foreign nations, I know not. To me it appears as dangerous and pernicious as it is novel.” I also recalled that when serious congressional oversight of CIA began in the mid-1970s, many thought foreign services would stop sharing information with us, but it never happened. I said I thought terms being bandied about such as “meltdown,” “game-changer,” and so on were overstated and overwrought.

Another disaster, at least as far as I was concerned, was my trip to Bolivia at the end of November 2010 for a meeting of the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas. I detested these huge conferences. They are boring beyond words, and little ever results. But because it involves every country in North and South America, the U.S. secretary of defense must go for political and diplomatic reasons. My first such conference, in 2008, was tolerable because it was hosted by the Canadians at the spectacular mountain town of Banff, Alberta. The second, in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, promised to be awful in several respects. In a conference hosted by the government of virulently anti-American leftist Bolivian leader Evo Morales, I foresaw a full day of getting pounded on by my Bolivian hosts and their buddies from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. When I made known I was considering not attending, both the Canadian and Brazilian defense ministers promised me they would lean on the Bolivians to behave. I took them at their word and showed up on November 21.

The drive from the airport in Santa Cruz to the hotel was the only time as secretary when I was actually uneasy about my personal security. I was discomforted knowing that Morales didn’t care if I got killed, and I figured that that attitude might well trickle down to my heavily armed Bolivian military escort. The route was along narrow back roads crowded with cows, chickens, dogs, and people—every corner looking like an opportunity for an ambush right out of Tom Clancy’s novel Clear and Present Danger. Each time we had to slow or stop, I got a little more nervous. Then we arrived at the un-air-conditioned Hotel Camino Real, which was open to the street. The doctor traveling with us advised us essentially to curl up on the bed in a fetal position and not to touch anything. Don’t eat the food, he said. Don’t touch the water (even to shower). Don’t go outside the hotel. The staff put a fan in my room that was about three feet in diameter and created the sense of sleeping outdoors during a tornado.

My meeting with the Bolivian defense minister wasn’t too bad. He clearly had gotten the message from the Canadians and Brazilians. The conference opened, however, with a fifty-five-minute-long welcoming diatribe from Morales. He accused former U.S. ambassadors of backing coup attempts against him and the U.S. consulate of “using machine guns against my administration.” He said U.S. embassies all over the world sponsor coups. Then he got personal, looking straight at me and accusing CIA and the Defense Department of being behind all these depredations.

Morales was trying to provoke me into walking out in protest. Tempered by the fires of countless tirades from members of Congress over the years, I sat expressionless throughout Morales’s performance. After he finished and departed, a number of Latin American ministers came up to me to apologize because they felt Morales had violated the region’s rules for hospitality. I just wanted the damn meeting to end so I could get out of Bolivia. The return trip to the airport was just as exciting and nerve-racking as the trip into town, and I was never so glad to feel that Air Force plane lift off from a runway.

Every administration must deal with difficult allies and difficult foes. I thought President Obama and the administration in 2009 and 2010, for the most part, handled both kinds of relationships well, although I would often cringe at the rhetorical excess of how wonderfully we were doing, especially compared to the Bush administration. Fortunately, the rancor and bitterness of the Afghan debate in late 2009 did not spill over into other areas, and the team worked together better than most I had observed.

There were only two major personnel changes during the period. In May 2010, Denny Blair was forced out as director of national intelligence. He was replaced by my old friend and colleague Jim Clapper. Blair had never been able to develop strong relationships at the White House, and I think the final straw was his single-handed attempt to negotiate an agreement with the French intelligence services limiting activities in each other’s country. The idea had zero support anywhere in the administration and, frankly, was considered kind of bizarre.

And then, after publication of Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars in September 2010, Jim Jones left as national security adviser. He had never been a good fit in the Obama White House, as I said, and frankly, I was surprised he lasted as long as he did. I believe the timing of his departure was influenced significantly by Woodward’s book. Jones appeared to be a major source; there were many disparaging comments about the rest of the White House staff and even his own staff that could only have come from Jim. Based in no small part on what he had been telling me all along about Donilon, I was quoted as saying that Donilon would be a “complete disaster” as national security adviser. That quote could only have come from Jones. There were a number of other comments I felt had come from Doug Lute, particularly many of the negative references to Mullen and me and to the military’s purported efforts to box in the president on Afghanistan. After an auspicious beginning in the Bush administration and although I felt indebted to him for taking on the NSC war coordinator role, Doug had turned out to be a real disappointment in the Obama administration. In both the Bush and Obama administrations, the NSC/NSS seemed to be a rich lode of information for Woodward, a level of cooperation I never understood.

On October 1, the president and I met privately in the Oval Office. He was sitting as usual in a wingback chair in front of the fireplace, and I was seated on the couch to his left. He grabbed an apple from the bowl on the coffee table, took a bite, and then, out of the blue, asked me who should replace Jones. He said he was looking at Donilon, General Cartwright, and Susan Rice. I said, “In the privacy of this room, I suspect Hillary would have a problem with Susan as national security adviser.” He laughed and said, “That’s well known outside of this room. Hillary’s forgiven me, but not the people who came over to me.” He then said he had read my comments about Donilon in the Woodward book and asked why I felt so negatively. I told him I had made those comments to Jones after the Afghan review and Tom’s disparaging comments about senior military officers—especially during the Haiti operation. Tom had recognized I had a problem with him and called me; we had met privately several months earlier and cleared the air: I said, “I’d be fine with Donilon as national security adviser.” I asked the president to tell Tom what I had said. Donilon and I would develop a strong, cordial working relationship, although his suspicion of the Pentagon and the military would not diminish.

I had expected to be another departee in mid-2010. The president and I originally had agreed that I would stay on about a year, and by late 2009, especially after the Afghan travail, I really wanted to leave in the spring of 2010. I intended to tell the president that, right after I returned from a Christmas holiday in the Northwest. He beat me to the punch. Obama called me into the Oval Office on December 16, 2009, the day before I was to fly west. After he shut the door, he said, “I want to talk about you. I’d like you to stay on indefinitely, but that’s probably too much to ask of your family. So I’d like you to stay at least until January 2012.” He was very generous, saying, “I honestly just don’t know where I would even begin to look for a replacement, not just [because of] the effective way you manage the Defense Department but [because of] the other skills and experience you bring to the administration.” I told him I was very flattered and that he had preempted me. I told him I had intended to propose in January that I leave at the end of May 2010. I thought we were proceeding reasonably well in Iraq, Afghanistan should be on the right track by then, and we would have completed a second year of budget reforms. “I will have done all I can do,” I said, but that I had talked to Becky and that if he said I was needed longer, I would stay until January 2011. He smiled broadly and said, “And we’ll evaluate again then.” I thought I had ended my sentence with a period, but he ended his with a comma.

That “comma” led to further discussion between us, and I eventually agreed to remain until the end of June 2011. Thinking ahead, I suspected that if I couldn’t help him identify a successor, I might get extended until after the 2012 election. And so, in the same meeting on October 1 when I supported Donilon to replace Jones, I told Obama, “I have a seed to plant in terms of my successor—Leon Panetta.” I said he had led CIA and OMB and had been White House chief of staff, so he knew how to lead big organizations; he was good with Congress; it was clear from CIA that he cared about the troops; he would continue the Defense reform effort; he would work well with the Joint Chiefs; and he was up to speed on the issues. I said I’d talked to Leon about succeeding me, and he didn’t say “Hell, no.” “I think he’d be willing to do it for eighteen months.” The president responded, “Very interesting. I hadn’t thought of that.”

Difficult allies and difficult foes were not limited to our relations abroad. I had my hands full with both in Washington, D.C., as well. For me, 2010 was a year of continued conflict and a couple of important White House double-crosses.