Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

No president, not even in wartime, has the luxury of being able to focus on just one problem. Bush 43 was no exception. Indeed, during the last two years of his administration, while fighting two major wars, we faced serious challenges with Russia, Syria, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, China, North Korea, NATO, Eastern Europe, Georgia, and, of all things, piracy. These problems collectively would take as much, if not more, of the president’s time, and that of his senior national security team, than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And several of them would provoke serious disagreements among us.

The world had changed dramatically since 1993, when I retired as CIA director. At that time, the United States had routed Saddam Hussein’s army—then the fourth largest in the world—in less than one hundred hours during the Gulf War. Eastern Europe had been liberated, Germany was reunified, the Soviet Union had recently collapsed, and China was quiescent, its leaders focused on economic growth and developing trade. As victor in the Cold War, the United States stood supreme, the only surviving superpower—a political, military, and economic colossus.

What we did not realize then was that the seeds of future trouble were already sprouting. There were early stirrings of future great power rivalry and friction. In Russia, resentment and bitterness were taking root as a result of the economic chaos and corruption that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the incorporation of much of the old Warsaw Pact into NATO by 2000. No Russian was more angered by this turn of events than Vladimir Putin, who would later say that the end of the Soviet Union was the worst geopolitical event of the twentieth century. China, seeing the USSR’s collapse, as well as America’s military prowess in the Gulf War, resolved to expand its own military power. Al Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center in New York was launched in February 1993, and other attacks would follow throughout the 1990s. Meanwhile other nations increasingly resented our singular dominance and our growing penchant for telling others how to behave, at home and abroad. The end of the Soviet threat also ended the compelling reason for many countries to automatically align with the United States or do our bidding for their own protection. Other nations looked for opportunities to inhibit our seeming complete freedom and determination to shape the world as we saw fit. In short, our moment alone in the sun, and the arrogance with which we conducted ourselves in the 1990s and beyond as the sole surviving superpower, caused widespread resentment. And so when the World Trade Center came down on September 11, 2001, many governments and peoples—some publicly, many more privately—welcomed the calamity that had befallen the United States. In their eyes, an arrogant, all-powerful giant had been deservedly humbled.

I believe the widespread resentment of the United States, publicly suspended briefly in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on 9/11, was rekindled and exacerbated by President Bush’s “You are either with us or you are against us” strategy as we launched the war on terror. The invasion of Iraq and subsequent revelations about renditions, prison abuses at Abu Ghraib, the detention facility at Guantánamo, and “enhanced interrogations” all fueled further anti-American feeling. This animosity, I think, began to recede by 2006–7, particularly in Europe, where leaders hostile to the United States and our Iraq policy had left office. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in Germany was replaced by the more conservative Angela Merkel in September 2005, and President Jacques Chirac in France was replaced by the openly pro-American Nicolas Sarkozy in May 2007. So by the time I reentered government in December 2006, the overall relationship with most European countries—and others—was on the upswing, though bruises remained from the acrimony engendered in the run-up to the war in Iraq. Still, our relationships with many countries were worse than when I had left government with the first President Bush in January 1993.

The passage of fourteen years had led to another significant change in the international environment. As I told Bush 43 and Condi Rice on more than one occasion, when I had been in government before, problems or crises more often than not would arise, be dealt with, and go away. The Yom Kippur War in October 1973, a serious crisis that risked confrontation with the Soviet Union, was over in a few days. Even the Iranian hostage crisis, as painful and protracted as it was, ended in 444 days. Now hardly any issue or problem could be resolved and put aside; instead problems accumulated. And while the national security apparatus to deal with such problems is gigantic, ultimately they all had to be addressed by just eight people: the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, the director of CIA, and the national security adviser.

Much of the time we spent together was in the White House Situation Room, which in no way resembles the high-tech, flashy “situation rooms” portrayed in movies and on television. Indeed, many of the military’s four-star commanders—as well as the CIA—have significantly more technologically advanced conference rooms and operations centers with more gee-whiz gizmos. When I left in 1993, the Situation Room was a simple windowless conference room. It had several screens for television or displaying maps, but mostly people just used an easel for charts because the screens were too user-unfriendly. The table normally seated ten, four on either side and one at each end—one of whom was the president, with the presidential seal on the wall behind him.

The Situation Room complex had been upgraded during the Bush 43 years, sort of. It had been relocated and now had two windows, which I thought pointless because both were always covered for security reasons. The biggest improvement was the videoconferencing capabilities: the president or others could now hold face-to-face meetings with colleagues or counterparts half a world away. The president used the videoconferencing regularly for conversations with our commanders and ambassadors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The screens for maps were slightly better than before. The new conference table could seat up to fourteen, with perhaps another twenty seats around the walls for staff and others. It was close quarters, and the backbenchers were physically at risk if a principal at the table unexpectedly pushed his or her chair back too quickly. The growing number of these straphangers attending all but the most sensitive meetings (and all taking notes) was an unwelcome change from when I had last served in government, especially in terms of preventing leaks. This became more problematic during the Obama administration, especially in our deliberations about the Afghan War.

Seating was always by protocol rank, in both the Bush and Obama administrations. The president sat alone at the head of the table, with the vice president on his right and the secretary of state on his left. During the Bush administration, I sat next to Secretary Rice; during the Obama years, I was on the other side of the table and sat next to Vice President Biden—awkward placement given how often we disagreed.

The table had hidden electronic connections down the center for laptops and other devices. I never saw anyone use them. We mostly worried about spilling our coffee into the electronics and frying everything—and maybe everybody—at the table. I came to dread the long hours sitting in there—endless meetings, repetitious debates, the stress of spending so much time trying to find the least bad solution to a problem. (There were almost never “good” options available.) A few months into the Obama administration, I proposed adding a bar for the early evening sessions. A lot of heads nodded agreement, but wisely, nothing ever came of it. By then, some enterprising soul put curtains up over the covered windows. Obama came in and accusingly asked, “Who did that?” The curtains were gone the next day. The Situation Room remains a spartan place, perhaps fitting given the life-and-death, war-and-peace decisions that are taken there.

I also spent a great deal of time on airplanes. The plane I used for nearly all of my international travel is a several-decades-old Boeing 747, designated the E-4B and modified as the National Airborne Operations Center—a flying war room. There are no windows, as the entire plane is shielded against all manner of electronic interference. The airplane can be refueled in midair so, barring a maintenance problem, I would always fly nonstop wherever I was going—eighteen hours to Singapore from Washington, fourteen to Baghdad, seventeen to Kabul. I had a spacious office/bedroom (bunk beds) at the front of the plane, quite utilitarian, and, of course, secure telephone connections to anywhere in the world. The only disconcerting aspect to my quarters was that the pipes from the midair refueling port went through the ceiling, and I could hear the gushing of the thousands of pounds of jet fuel we were taking on—and hope there was no leak. There is a nice conference room, where my senior staff traveled; a large but usually crowded press cabin; and then row after row of electronic stations, where other staff would be located. In addition to flight crews, the plane carried a full complement of technical specialists to keep the old bird flying and a security contingent to guard it when on the ground. Being on the plane was like being in the office in most respects—I was always reachable by telephone, and through the magic of modern electronics, my office in-box at the Pentagon managed to find its way to the plane. My most junior military assistant on board usually brought another load of paperwork to me just as I was settling down to read a book or take a nap. The generals and admirals wanted no part of my impatience with the endless stream of work.

I had been flying in the plane for over a year before I discovered that I could actually choose the meals we ate. For the next several years, everyone on board had to share my singularly unhealthy eating preferences: primarily bacon cheeseburgers, Reuben sandwiches, and barbecue. In fact, the crew dubbed the plane “The Big Brisket.” In four and a half years, I traveled to 109 countries, spent the equivalent of thirty-five work weeks on the plane (250 travel days), and personally ate sixteen pounds of brisket. The Air Force keeps track of important things like that.

I was proud to fly in that airplane. When the huge blue and white plane, with the words United States of America emblazoned on the side and a big American flag on the tail, landed anywhere, I felt it made a statement about American presence and power. A high point for me came in Munich when we spotted President Putin’s pilots in the cockpit of his plane taking pictures of ours.

RUSSIA

One of my first trips in that plane was in early February 2007, to Seville, Spain, for a NATO defense ministers meeting and then on to the Munich Security Conference. While in Seville, I met with Sergei Ivanov, who had been Russian defense minister for nearly six years and would soon become first deputy prime minister. Ivanov was in Seville for a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council. He is a cosmopolitan person, very smooth, fluent in English, and more candid than most Russian officials. In our meeting, he told me that Russia wanted to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty signed during the Reagan administration, which prohibited the United States and the Soviet Union (later Russia) from deploying medium-range ballistic missiles (with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles). Ivanov said it was ironic that now the United States and Russia were the only two countries in the world that could not deploy these types of missiles. He said Russia would not deploy them in the west but wanted to place them in the south and the east—to counter Iran, Pakistan, and China. I responded that if Russia wanted to abrogate the treaty, “You are on your own. The United States will not support discarding the INF treaty.” We agreed to disagree on missile defense in Europe—though he consented to send Russian experts to Washington to continue discussions on the subject—and on Russian arms sales to China, Iran, and Venezuela. We also agreed to keep open the channels of communication between us. He then invited me to visit Russia.

Every year senior government officials, political figures, academicians, and security experts from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere gather at the Munich Security Conference to network, exchange ideas, listen to speeches, and generally be seen hobnobbing with other influential people. The “three amigos” of the U.S. Senate—John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman—were always there. I found the gathering incredibly tedious and, after my second time, demurred on going again.

In 2007, though, I was still new to the job and felt obligated to go. In the spacious meeting room of the old hotel, senior government officials sat at long, narrow tables laterally arranged in rows with a center aisle. Behind the rows of tables were perhaps twenty or twenty-five rows of chairs for other participants, who had a good view of the dais—and the backs of all of us at the tables. I sat on the aisle in the front row. Just across the aisle from me were, in order, Russian president Putin, German chancellor Angela Merkel, and Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko. Yushchenko, who very much wanted to distance Ukraine from Russia and even join NATO, had been quite ill and his face was badly pitted—the result, he strongly believed, of the Russian intelligence services attempt to fatally poison him. When Merkel went to the podium to open the conference, she left only an empty chair separating Yushchenko and Putin. From my vantage point only a few feet away, I could see Yushchenko glaring at Putin with undisguised hatred. I am confident the sentiment was reciprocated.

Putin spoke next and, to everyone’s surprise, launched a diatribe against the United States. He claimed the United States had used its uncontested military power to create and exploit a “unipolar” world and that, because of U.S. dominance, the world had become more destabilized and was seeing “more wars and regional conflicts.” He said that the “almost uncontained hyper-use of force” by the United States and its disdain for the basic principles of international law had stimulated an arms race as insecure countries turned to weapons for security, including weapons of mass destruction. Putin asked why the United States was creating frontline bases with up to 5,000 troops on Russia’s borders; why NATO was expanding aggressively toward a nonthreatening Russia; and why a missile defense system was being deployed in Poland close to the Russian border. He concluded by saying that Russia, “with a thousand years of history,” hardly needed advice on how to act on the international scene. In response to a question, he backed off a little bit by describing President Bush as a decent man and someone he could do business with. Still, the overall impact of Putin’s remarks, particularly on the European participants, was like an ice-cold shower. He was clearly trying to drive a wedge between the Europeans and the United States with his anti-American remarks, but all the questions he was asked were hostile in tone and content. He had misread his audience. As Putin was returning to his seat, he came up to me, smiled, shook hands, and repeated Ivanov’s invitation for me to visit Russia.

I felt the harshness of his remarks had handed me an opportunity. So even as he was speaking, I began to rewrite the opening of my prepared remarks, to be delivered the next day. My speech would mark my first public appearance abroad as secretary of defense, and there was considerable anticipation among the participants as to how I, known as a Cold War hard-liner, would respond to Putin. Some U.S. officials there, including several from the State Department, felt strongly that I should be tough.

Consulting with my deputy assistant secretary for Europe, Dan Fata, whose judgment I trusted, I decided not to respond in kind to Putin but instead to use humor as a weapon.

By the nods and smiles throughout the hall, I knew I had taken the right tack. The rest of my speech focused on NATO and a number of problems around the world, including the need for alliance members to invest more in defense and to do more in Afghanistan. I also held out an olive branch to our oldest allies. Secretary Rumsfeld had once referred to the differences between “old Europe” (our original NATO partners) and “new Europe” (those former states of the Warsaw Pact that had joined the alliance), with the clear implication of American preference for the latter. I decided to clear the air on that distinction but also make a point about the alliance that I would make often for the rest of my time as secretary:

The reaction in Europe and at home to my speech was uniformly positive. I received a note from Sir Charles Powell, who had been Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s national security adviser, that captured the general view. I had “struck absolutely the right note of wicked humor in swatting Putin and put him in his place,” he wrote.

When I reported to the president my take on the Munich conference, I shared with him my belief that from 1993 onward, the West, and particularly the United States, had badly underestimated the magnitude of Russian humiliation in losing the Cold War and then in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which amounted to the end of the centuries-old Russian Empire. The arrogance, after the collapse, of American government officials, academicians, businessmen, and politicians in telling the Russians how to conduct their domestic and international affairs (not to mention the internal psychological impact of their precipitous fall from superpower status) had led to deep and long-term resentment and bitterness.

What I didn’t tell the president was that I believed the relationship with Russia had been badly mismanaged after Bush 41 left office in 1993. Getting Gorbachev to acquiesce to a unified Germany as a member of NATO had been a huge accomplishment. But moving so quickly after the collapse of the Soviet Union to incorporate so many of its formerly subjugated states into NATO was a mistake. Including the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary quickly was the right thing to do, but I believe the process should then have slowed. U.S. agreements with the Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in those countries was a needless provocation (especially since we virtually never deployed the 5,000 troops to either country). The Russians had long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored. Trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots of the Russian Empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an especially monumental provocation. Were the Europeans, much less the Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters to defend Ukraine or Georgia? Hardly. So NATO expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests. Similarly, Putin’s hatred of the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (limiting the number and location of Russian and NATO nonnuclear military forces in Europe) was understandable. It had been negotiated when Russia was weak, and the provisions limited Russia’s freedom to move troops from place to place in its own territory. As I later told Putin directly, I would not stand for restrictions on my ability to redeploy troops from Texas to California.

Throughout my career, as I said, I had been characterized as a hard-liner on the Soviet Union. Guilty as charged. Many of the problems between post-Soviet Russia and the United States grew out of Russian leaders’ efforts to seek domestic political advantage by portraying the United States, NATO, and the West more broadly as a continuing threat to Russia; bullying their neighbors, particularly those that had once been part of the Soviet Union; using oil and gas supplies as a means of politically pressuring and extorting money from the nations on their periphery and in Europe; crudely abusing human and political rights at home; and continuing to support a number of thuggish regimes around the world. But during the Cold War, to avoid military conflict between us, we had to take Soviet interests into account, maneuvering carefully wherever those interests were affected. When Russia was weak in the 1990s and beyond, we did not take Russian interests seriously. We did a poor job of seeing the world from their point of view, and of managing the relationship for the long term. All that said, I was now President Bush’s secretary of defense, and I dutifully supported the effort to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO (with few pangs of conscience because by 2007 it was clear the French and Germans would not allow it). On missile defense, however, I did look for ways to accommodate Russian interests and persuade them to become partners. Still, I was always clear that we would move ahead, with or without them.

The relationship between the United States and Russia during my time as secretary under George W. Bush would be dominated by the president’s decision to emplace missile defenses against Iran in eastern Europe, U.S. efforts to expand NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine, and Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Our commitment to missile defenses in Europe would also dominate U.S.-Russian relations during Obama’s first term.

Russian opposition to the United States developing missile defense capabilities has deep roots. During the first strategic arms limitation talks under President Nixon, the Soviets ultimately sought to prohibit only the development and deployment of missile defenses, which they believed the United States could build and they couldn’t—thus giving us a significant advantage in the strategic nuclear relationship. The result was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty signed in 1972, along with an agreement limiting offensive strategic weapons essentially to the programs both countries already had planned. President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), announced in 1983 and calling for a nationwide missile defense using very sophisticated technology, both angered and, I believe, terrified the Soviets. As I joked at the time, there appeared to be only two people on the planet who actually thought SDI would work—Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviets were under enormous economic pressure by that time and knew they could not compete with such a system.

President Bush’s 2002 abrogation of the 1972 ABM treaty (thereby allowing the United States to develop any kind of missile defenses it wanted), and our subsequent development of ground-based interceptors and radars based in Alaska and California, our efforts to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, and our support for the independence of Kosovo (which the Russians strongly opposed), taken together with Russian opposition to the United States in Iraq and elsewhere, all had brought the bilateral relationship to the low point of Putin’s February 2007 tirade in Munich. The personal relationship between Bush and Putin, however, remained civil.

I made a difficult situation with Russia worse by signing off—the day after I was sworn in as secretary in December 2006—on a recommendation to the president that the United States locate ten long-range missile defense interceptors in Poland and an associated radar installation in the Czech Republic. Construction would, we hoped, begin in the second half of 2008. The system would provide significant protection from Iranian missiles for the United States and many of our European allies, although I acknowledged that the negotiations could be difficult: Poland would want significantly greater military assistance, and the makeup of the Czech government was uncertain. The Russians saw the proposed deployments as putting their nuclear deterrent at risk and as a further step in the “encirclement” of their country. The president approved my recommendation a few weeks later.

I took up the invitation to visit Russia and landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport on a Monday morning in April. My first meeting was with the new Russian minister of defense, Anatoly Serdyukov, who had been in the furniture business, had run the Russian tax service, and was personally and politically well connected. The meeting was at the Russian Ministry of Defense, a massive building with no distinguishing features, characteristic of Soviet architecture. The conference room was also nondescript. Serdyukov knew little about defense matters and had been brought in to reform the Russian military—a daunting, even dangerous, proposition. In our meetings, he was tightly scripted and chaperoned by the chief of the Russian general staff, General Yuri Baluyevskiy. Our meeting, like the others I would have in Moscow, focused almost entirely on missile defense.

Reading from a script, Serdyukov immediately said that our proposed system would diminish Russia’s nuclear deterrent and have a negative effect on world peace. We had said the system was a counter to Iran and North Korea, but he contended that neither country had missiles capable of reaching Europe or the United States; nor was that likely in the foreseeable future. Russia, he said, was very concerned that our system could intercept Russia’s ballistic missiles. I responded that the concerns of both sides needed to be taken into account, that the opportunities for cooperation between us were unprecedented, and that we both needed to think ten or twenty years into the future. My undersecretary for policy, Eric Edelman, reassured the Russians that the radar in the Czech Republic would be too close to get a fix on missiles launched from Russia; the system had no capability again Russian ICBMs; and debris from the missiles would burn up in the atmosphere. The Russian military experts seemed increasingly intrigued and interested. We repeated a long list of potential areas for cooperation previously mentioned to the Russians, including working together on research and development, sharing data gathered by the system’s radar, jointly testing the system’s components, and possibly using a Soviet-era radar in Azerbaijan. I invited the Russians to visit our missile defense sites in Alaska and California and suggested that, with the permission of the Polish and Czech governments, the Russians would be allowed to routinely inspect missile defense installations in those countries. What I put on the table went well beyond anything presented previously to the Russians. The Russians’ real worry was clearly not about the current system we were describing but about the possibility that at some point in the future we might introduce additional capabilities that would threaten their deterrent. While Serdyukov and Baluyevskiy were unyielding, they agreed to further discussions among technical experts from both sides.

I then moved on to the Kremlin to meet with Putin. I had last entered the Kremlin in 1992 as CIA director, and driving through the gate then, in the U.S. ambassador’s limousine with American flags flying on the front of the car, had felt like a victory lap. By 2007 the world had moved on, and so had I. Putin and I encountered each other at a table in his ornate, very large office with plentiful gold leaf and spectacular chandeliers—all courtesy of the tsars and preservation efforts by the Communists. As I reported to President Bush, the meeting with Putin was cordial, far different in tone from Munich. He blessed the idea of the experts meeting on missile defense and invited me to return to Russia. He recited a litany of woes besetting Russia, which he blamed on the West. His talking points were predictable: We have a similar view of threats and challenges; many in the United States don’t think Russia is a partner; why are you putting bases near our borders?; North Korea and Iran will not have missiles that are threatening anytime soon; why is the United States supporting “separatists” in Georgia?; tensions are not surprising given that we have “looked at each other through the barrel of a shotgun”; we want to be partners, even strategic allies. The issue that really stuck in his craw was the conventional forces in Europe treaty, which he called the “colonial” treaty, “imposed on Russia.” I tried to put a positive spin on the potential to work together.

With fifteen minutes to go in the meeting, an aide came in and whispered something in Putin’s ear. He abruptly, but not impolitely, concluded the meeting, and I was ushered out of his office. Former Russian president Boris Yeltsin had died.

Later that afternoon I met again with Sergei Ivanov, in his new deputy prime minister’s office in the Russian White House. We covered much of the same ground, although Ivanov added some candor about Iran. “You know, the Iranians don’t need a missile to get a nuclear weapon into Russia,” he said, clearly prepared to ratchet up the sanctions pressure on Iran if Tehran didn’t suspend uranium enrichment.

While the press reported that I had received a “cool” reception in Moscow, I told President Bush that my meetings had been warm, businesslike, and surprisingly constructive. I can see now that our two countries were just kicking the can down the road on missile defense, playing for time. The Russians recognized that they were being presented with a fait accompli, and that our offers of cooperation were more like take it or leave it. They hoped they could build enough opposition in Europe to stop the project. We wanted Russian participation, but we would not let their opposition slow our plans, though I would spend four more years working on this problem.

On my way home, I stopped in both Warsaw and Berlin to brief those governments on my meetings in Moscow. President Lech Kaczynski in Warsaw made clear he wanted to move fast on missile defense, concluding negotiations well before Poland’s 2009 election. His defense minister, Aleksander Szczyglo, was standoffish, saying that the U.S. proposal (to emplace ten long-range interceptor missiles in Poland) would be “carefully considered” and that we shouldn’t “prejudge the negotiations.” In a refrain I would hear repeatedly for years, he said that for any plan to be accepted, it must increase Poland’s security.

After the trip, I reported to the president that both Poland and the Czech Republic had domestic political problems associated with the proposed system, with two of the governing coalition parties in Poland opposed to missile defense and the Czech government faced with a hung parliament and elections in the offing. Polls showed that more than half of the Czechs were against deployment of the missile defense radar on their soil. In Poland, one poll had 57 percent opposed. Secretary Rice, in Moscow in mid-May, and the president soon afterward at his ranch in Crawford and during visits to Poland and the Czech Republic, both underscored U.S. resolve to go forward. Putin by then had offered data sharing from the Russian radar in Azerbaijan as an alternative. At a NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels in June, in the presence of Russian defense minister Serdyukov, I stated explicitly that we would go forward with the missile defense project despite Putin’s offer.

On October 12, 2007, Condi and I met in Moscow with our counterparts—a “two plus two” meeting—as well as with Putin. We came bearing proposals even more attractive to the Russians than those I had put forward the previous April, including the possibility that the interceptors might not be made operational until there was a demonstrated Iranian nuclear-armed ballistic missile capability.

Putin invited us to his dacha outside Moscow. En route, we passed through some very swanky new estates and shopping centers, with stores like those in a high-end shopping center in a wealthy American suburb or in a fashionable part of London, Paris, or Rome. Life was clearly good for at least some Russians, especially those who lived in Putin’s neighborhood. His dacha was large and perfectly nice, but it seemed very utilitarian to me, more like a corporate guesthouse. He kept us waiting for about twenty minutes, which the U.S. press played up as a slight to us both. When he came in, he apologized, explaining that he had been on the telephone with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, talking about the Iranian nuclear threat.

We met in a plain, medium-size conference room, dominated by a large oval table. Each of us was provided with mineral water, coffee, and a little plate of pastries. Condi and I were accompanied by our very able ambassador, Bill Burns, and an interpreter. Putin was joined by the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov; the defense minister, Serdyukov; the chief of the general staff, General Baluyevskiy; and an interpreter. We had no sooner sat down than the room was flooded with press, shoving and pushing. Putin’s press audience in place, he harangued us for nearly ten minutes, mainly about missile defense. He was sarcastic: “We may decide someday to put missile defense systems on the moon, but before we get to that, we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans.” He warned us against “forcing forward your previous agreements with Eastern European countries.” Condi and I weren’t too happy about being used as stage props but kept our game faces and, in the brief moment we were allowed to respond before the Russians shooed out the press, tried to put a positive spin on the opportunities to work together. After the press left, the secretary of state and I looked at each other and just rolled our eyes. Putin’s dacha, Putin’s show.

When we got down to business, Putin continued to insist that our plans were aimed at Russia because Iran was not a near-term threat to either the United States or Europe. He shared with us a map featuring circles that showed the ranges of different Iranian missiles and the few countries they could reach. He said the circles, which appeared to be hand-drawn with a grammar school compass and colored pencils, represented the best estimates of Russian intelligence. I flippantly told him he needed a new intelligence service. He was not amused. As prearranged with Condi, I then laid out our new offerings, meant to persuade the Russians that the Polish and Czech sites were no threat to them, and to get them to work with us. We offered a new proposal for joint cooperation in developing a missile defense architecture that would defend the United States, Europe, and Russia; accepted Putin’s offer for radar information sharing, with a view to creating an integrated command and control of U.S. and Russian missile defenses; proposed transparency measures, including personnel exchanges that would allow the Russians to monitor our system and for us to participate in their system; and, as I said, suggested the possibility of tying our missile defense deployments in Europe to development of the Iranian missile threat, including joint monitoring of Iranian developments and a commitment to make our system operational only when warranted by the evolving threat. Putin seemed genuinely interested in these ideas and acknowledged that we had made some interesting proposals. Indeed, all the Russian officials except for General Baluyevskiy seemed convinced that the United States was sincerely interested in cooperating with Russia, and we agreed that experts would meet to flesh out our ideas.

During the meeting with Putin, I wrote a note to Condi that Baluyevskiy reminded me of “the good old days,” and she wrote back, “He was once considered a forward-leaning moderate. Shows how much has changed.” After several hours of meetings with our counterparts later that same day, I wrote Condi another note: “I don’t have the patience for diplomacy. I’d forgotten how much I really don’t like these guys.” A little later Condi, Ambassador Burns and his wife, and I were hosted for dinner by Sergei Ivanov and his wife. After dinner I told Condi, “Well, I do like some of them.”

The next morning I gave a speech at the General Staff Academy, another monument of Stalinist architecture, to several hundred Russian officers. From the moment I walked into the room, I knew this would be a tough event. The general in charge was an old bull out of Red Army central casting, and the pale, frowning faces in the audience radiated skepticism and resentment. I talked about reform efforts under way in both our militaries and the opportunities for cooperation in the future. These officers were not buying what I was selling: they were deeply suspicious of the United States, our military, and me, and they probably hated the reform efforts in their own military. During the question-and-answer period, a colonel asked me why the United States wanted to take over Siberia. After years of handling off-the-wall questions from members of Congress, I thought I was pretty quick on my feet, but that question really threw me. So I simply said that there was no truth to that idea. Bill Burns told me later that Madeleine Albright had given a speech a few weeks before in which she posed the question of how Russia could develop Siberia as it became depopulated and Russia’s overall population continued to shrink. That the colonel and others had reached the conclusion they did based on her question was, to me, a measure of Russian paranoia.

Like Sisyphus trying to roll that rock uphill, we kept at it with the Russians on missile defense in 2008. The Russians felt that the written version of what Condi and I had offered at Putin’s dacha “diluted” what we had said. The only change made in the written version was to note that the presence of Russian officers at our sites in Poland and the Czech Republic would, of course, require the consent of those governments. Nonetheless I told Ivanov at the Munich Security Conference in February that we had been thinking about how to achieve progress on missile defense and strategic arms control before President Bush left office. If an outline of agreements on these issues could be achieved, I said, Condi and I would be willing to move up the next “two plus two” meeting and come to Moscow again. The two presidents subsequently talked, and on March 12 Bush sent Putin a letter laying out opportunities for agreement and progress in the bilateral relationship before his term ended. Our ace in the hole was that Putin desperately wanted Bush to visit Sochi, future site of the Olympics, after the NATO summit in Bucharest in early April. Bush made no commitments, waiting to see how Putin would behave in Bucharest.

Condi and I converged on Moscow on March 17 and later that day met with President-elect Dimitri Medvedev and then separately with Putin. The atmosphere during this visit was even better than the previous October. The Russians were interested in moving forward with continuity as the Bush administration came to an end and Medvedev assumed the Russian presidency. Still, I told my staff beforehand that I thought the odds for progress on a Strategic Framework Agreement on this trip were a hundred to one against, and that the obstacles in the path of progress with Russia on NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine as well as for Kosovo independence were too great to be overcome.

I was struck by how diminutive Medvedev was, about my height—five foot eight—but probably thirty pounds lighter. He was on top of his brief, knowledgeable and impressive, but I had no doubt Putin was calling the shots.

We met with Putin in the Kremlin, in a beautiful oval room with high, lime-green and white walls—and more gold leaf. Our session was scheduled for an hour but lasted two. He said he had carefully analyzed the president’s letter, and there were many issues to discuss. During the meeting, Condi handed Putin a draft Strategic Framework Declaration addressing some twenty proposals for cooperation or agreement in four areas: promoting security (including strategic arms limits and missile defense); preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction; combating global terrorism; and strengthening economic cooperation. We managed to clarify some of the proposals relating to missile defense that had become muddled since the October meeting, including Russian presence at the sites in Poland and the Czech Republic, and discussed the next steps for negotiating additional limits on strategic nuclear forces. With regard to the latter subject, I said we were prepared to consider a legally binding treaty but that it should be short and adaptable to changing circumstances. I noted that I had been involved in the first strategic arms treaty in 1972 and that the last thing we needed was an agreement the size of a telephone book. To which Putin responded, “You are really old.” I laughed and nodded in agreement.

The next day we met with our counterparts, Foreign Minister Lavrov and Defense Minister Serdyukov. Lavrov did almost all the talking for the Russians, and all I can say is that it was a good thing Condi had to deal with him. My patience and my limited diplomatic skills would both have failed me. We rehashed missile defense issues, and our proposals for greater partnership, again and again. Lavrov cut to the chase when he observed, “We take it as reality that you will build the third site [in Poland and the Czech Republic; the first site was in California, the second in Alaska], but want to make sure it will not be turned and targeted against Russia.” A few minutes later he candidly described what was eating at the Russians: “I would not call it a positive development that we cannot stop your third site even as we see it as destabilizing. Our position is pragmatic, not positive.”

At a joint press conference after the meeting, both sides tried to put lipstick on the pig, calling the talks “fruitful” and positive. In truth, the only two areas in which real headway was made was the Framework Declaration, which the Russians desperately wanted signed by Bush and Putin at Sochi after the NATO summit, and the follow-on Strategic Arms Agreement. Inviting Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, Lavrov said simply, “would destroy bilateral relations between our two countries.” Independence for Kosovo, he said, “would be a violation of international law.” While the president would go to Sochi and the Framework Declaration would be signed, it was clear by now that the Bush administration would accomplish nothing further with Russia.

I was convinced the Russians would never embrace any kind of missile defense in Europe because they could see it only as a potential threat to themselves. What I hadn’t counted on was the political opposition to the missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. As early as January 2008, the new Polish center-right government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk made clear they would not consider hosting the interceptors unless the United States agreed to an accompanying defense package of shorter-range missile defenses for Poland and made a greater commitment to come to Poland’s aid than provided under the NATO charter. In June 2008, Polish defense minister Bogdan Klich told me that to bring the negotiations to closure, it would be “important for President Bush to make a political declaration and commitment of assistance to Poland similar to those the United States provided to Jordan and Pakistan.” For their part, the Czechs were making demands about bidding on our contracts associated with site construction and also letting us know that U.S. companies and citizens working on the project would be subject to Czech taxes. Our presumptive partners for missile defense in Europe were stiff-arming us.

GEORGIA

As the Soviet Union was collapsing and Georgia (an ancient country in the Caucasus that had been annexed by Russia early in the nineteenth century) declared its independence, two pro-Russian Georgian provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, declared their independence. Bloody conflict followed until 1994, when Russia was finally able to negotiate a cease-fire sustained by Russian peacekeeping troops in both provinces. A fragile peace lasted until January 2004, when an aggressive and impetuous Georgian nationalist, Mikheil Saakashvili, was elected president. In the summer of 2004, Saakashvili sent Interior Ministry troops into South Ossetia, on the pretext of putting down “banditry,” to reestablish Georgian control. The Georgians were forced into a humiliating withdrawal, but their violation of the status quo infuriated the Russians. When Saakashvili sent troops into a third independence-minded province in the summer of 2006, it signaled that he was prepared to fight to regain the two pro-Russian separatist provinces. Russian hatred of Saakashvili was stoked further when, in 2007, he went to the border of Abkhazia and promised loyalists there they would be “home” within a year.

The Russians used Kosovo’s declaration of independence (it had been a part of Yugoslavia and had long historical ties to Serbia) in February 2008, which the United States and Europeans supported and a pro-Serb Russia opposed, as a pretext to turn up the temperature on Georgia. The West’s logic in supporting Kosovo’s independence, said the Russians, ought to apply as well to Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin in April said Russia might possibly recognize the independence of the two provinces. On April 21, Saakashvili telephoned Putin to demand that Russia reverse course on recognition and cited statements by Western governments opposing it. Putin had used highly colloquial Russian in telling Saakashvili where he could put the Western statements. Soon thereafter Georgia mobilized its troops, and in response, Russia sent 400 paratroopers and a howitzer battery to staging areas near the cease-fire line. Acts of violence in both provinces increased during the summer. On August 7, Georgia launched a massive artillery barrage and incursion to retake the South Ossetian capital of Tskhinvali.

The next day Russian forces poured into South Ossetia, routed the Georgians, and drove deep into Georgian territory, a punitive attack aimed at the destruction of the Georgian military infrastructure. They attacked military facilities—especially those that had been certified by NATO—and destroyed coastal patrol boats, military equipment, communications, and a number of villages. The deputy chief of the Russian general staff said at the time that the Russian mission was to weaken Georgia’s military, but plainly the Russians were also sending a warning to other governments in Central Asia (and Ukraine) about the risks of trying to integrate with NATO.

The Russians had baited a trap, and the impetuous Saakashvili walked right into it. The Russians, Putin in particular, wanted to reassert Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, including in the Caucasus. I was asked by a reporter if I trusted Vladimir Putin “anymore”? I responded, “ ‘Anymore’ is an interesting word. I have never believed that one should make national security policy on the basis of trust. I think you make national security policy based on interests and on realities.” After meeting with Putin in 2001, President Bush had said he looked into Putin’s eyes and “got a sense of his soul.” I said to some of my colleagues privately that I’d looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.

As the invasion unfolded, President Bush, Condi, Steve Hadley, Admiral Mullen, and I were all on the phone with our counterparts in both Russia and Georgia—urging the Russians to stop and withdraw to the cease-fire lines while urging the Georgians not to do anything else stupid or provocative. When I talked with Serdyukov on August 8, I told him we were alarmed by the escalation of hostilities and urged him “in the strongest terms to halt the advance of your forces and stop the missile and air attacks inside Georgia.” I asked him point-blank if they intended to take all of Georgia. He said no. I was equally blunt with my Georgian counterpart. I told him, “Georgia must not get into a conflict with Russia you cannot win” and that Georgian forces needed to cease hostilities and withdraw to defensible positions. Above all, direct contact between Georgian and Russian forces had to be avoided. I assured him we were pressing the Russians not to introduce more forces into Georgia and to respect Georgia’s territorial integrity. These calls continued over the next several days.

The Georgians requested the immediate return home from Iraq of 1,800 Georgian troops who had been sent there to help us. We had much earlier agreed that if Georgia wanted to bring these troops home, we would not object. At the same time, we were very concerned that the Russians might interfere with our airlift of these Georgian troops and subsequent humanitarian aid to Georgia. The last thing we wanted was a military confrontation with the Russians, or to have them target one of our transports. Accordingly, Admiral Mullen was in close touch with his Russian military counterpart, now General Nikolai Makarov, and our embassy people in Georgia were in contact with Russians on the ground to provide them with precise information on when each of our planes would enter Georgian airspace, and to state our expectation that they would be left alone. We gave assurances that we were not providing the Georgians with additional military capability to take on the Russians. The airlift of Georgian troops began on August 10 and was completed the next day, and on August 13 I directed that the humanitarian assistance begin. There was no interference from the Russians.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy negotiated a cease-fire that was supposed to take effect on August 12, and Medvedev said on that date that the Russians were complying. It was not true. On August 17, Russia pledged to begin withdrawing troops the next day. At that point, Russian troops were forty miles west of Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and occupied large areas of the country. The Russians did not withdraw until mid-October. Meanwhile, in September Russia recognized both Abkhazian and South Ossetian independence. They were joined only by Nicaragua and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Rice would later chide Lavrov about this “triumph” of Russian diplomacy.

While there was broad agreement in our government and elsewhere that Saakashvili’s aggressiveness and impetuosity had given the Russians an opportunity to punish Georgia, the violence and extent of Russian military (and cyber) operations were eye-openers for many. I said at a press conference on August 14 that “Russia’s behavior over the past week has called into question the entire premise of [our strategic] dialogue and has profound implications for our security relationship going forward—both bilaterally and with NATO.” I went on to say, “I think all the nations of Europe are looking at Russia through a different set of lenses.” However, reflecting the challenges we faced with both Russia and Georgia, I observed dryly, “Both parties have been undisciplined with the truth in their dealings with us.”

President Bush and all his senior advisers knew that if we took strong unilateral political and economic action against Russia, we ran the risk of the United States, rather than the Russians, becoming isolated over the invasion. A statement by the European Union criticizing the invasion by was predictably tepid. So as much as most of us wanted strong action against Russia, we suppressed our feelings and agreed to march in lockstep with our NATO allies. (It reminded me of my initial crisis in government when, during my first week on the job at CIA in August 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia. As horrified as the Europeans said they were by the brutal invasion, for them, everything was back to business as usual with the Soviets within three or four months.)

The Bush administration was out of time, energy, and patience to try to get the relationship with Russia back on track. With less than five months left, nobody really cared. There was one ancillary, modest gain after the Russian invasion: six days later, the Poles signed a deal with us to allow ten missile defense interceptors to be based in their country.

SYRIA

Syria had been a problem for the United States for the last two decades of the Cold War. The regime, controlled by the Assad family, had fought several wars with Israel, invaded Jordan, allied with Iran, and supported a number of terrorist and militia groups causing trouble in the Middle East. In the spring of 2007, the Israelis presented us with compelling evidence that North Korea had secretly built a nuclear reactor in Syria. The administration was divided about how to respond, our options constrained by the fact that the Israelis had informed us of this stunning development and therefore were in a position to significantly influence—if not dictate—what could be publicly divulged and when. The case for the existence of the reactor and the North Korean role in building it depended heavily on Israeli intelligence. Our debates during the ensuing months as to whether to take military action, and about how closely to work with the Israelis, were important regarding Syria, but they also prefigured in many respects the arguments regarding the Iranian nuclear program in 2008 and later.

Contacts between North Korean nuclear organizations and high-level Syrians were believed to have begun as early as 1997. In 2005, we found a large building under construction in eastern Syria, but its purpose became clear only with photographs of the inside of the building provided by the Israelis in 2007. The design was very similar to that of a North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, and our analysts concluded that the reactor would be capable of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Syria for years had been a high-priority intelligence target for the United States, as was anything having to do with possible development of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons in particular. Early detection of a large nuclear reactor under construction in a place like Syria is supposedly the kind of intelligence collection that the United States does superbly well. Yet by the time the Israelis informed us about the site, the reactor construction was already well advanced. This was a significant failure on the part of the U.S. intelligence agencies, and I asked the president, “How can we have any confidence at all in the estimates of the scope of the North Korean, Iranian, or other possible programs” given this failure? Surprisingly, neither the president nor Congress made much of it. Given the stakes, they should have.

As the Bush national security team discussed what to do about the reactor, I asked Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, acting commander at Central Command, to provide us with a number of military options and different target lists associated with each. I sent Dempsey’s report to National Security Adviser Steve Hadley on May 15 for the president to see. The report also focused on how we might disrupt Syrian support for Hizballah in Lebanon and, specifically, how we might prevent Hizballah from toppling the weak Lebanese government in retaliation for a military strike on Syria. Successfully restraining Hizballah would require using American ground forces, and that the president would not do. I told Hadley there were a number of other considerations to be taken into account as well, including the impact in the broader Middle East of a military strike on Syria—after all, we were already in two wars in or near the region. We also had to consider whether the kings of Saudi Arabia and Jordan would publicly support a strike. And what about the risk to the 7,000 Americans in Syria?

In the coming weeks, Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and I frequently discussed our options in Syria. Cheney thought we should attack the site, the sooner the better. He believed not only that we had to prevent Syria from acquiring nuclear weapons, but also that a military strike would send a powerful warning to the Iranians to abandon their nuclear ambitions. We could also, he said, hit Hizballah weapons storage sites in Syria at the same time to weaken them—always a key priority of the Israelis. By attacking, we might even be able to rattle Assad sufficiently so as to end his close relationship with Iran, thus further isolating the Iranians. Cheney often raised the question of what our actions, or inaction, would have on our relationship with the Israelis and their own decisions about what to do. As always, Dick laid out his views logically and analytically. He, Rice, Hadley, and I—often joined by Mike Mullen, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and CIA director Mike Hayden—would sit around the conference table in Hadley’s White House office and, while eating lunch or munching on chips and salsa, go over the choices facing the president. Cheney knew that, among the four of us, he alone thought a strike should be the first and only option. But perhaps he could persuade the president.

Our first long meeting as a group with the president was on the evening of June 17. Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and I were joined by Mullen, White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, and several NSC staff members. My views then, and for the next four years, were shaped by several overriding considerations: we already had two ongoing wars in Muslim countries, our military was overstretched, we were already considered by most countries as too quick to use military force, and the last thing America needed was to attack another Arab country. I also thought we had both time and options other than an immediate military strike. Using notes, I spoke bluntly:

I told the group that I agreed the reactor should not be allowed to become active, but that we shouldn’t use it as a pretext to try to solve all our problems with Syria and placate Israel by hitting other targets, as Cheney had suggested. We should focus just on the reactor. I said that my preferred approach was to begin with diplomacy and reserve a military strike as the last resort. We should expose what the Syrians and North Koreans had done and focus on their violations of UN Security Council resolutions, the nonproliferation treaty, and more. At the United Nations, we should demand an immediate freeze on activity at the site and prompt inspection by representatives of the five permanent members of the Security Council (United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China). We should be specific in saying that the United States would not allow the reactor to become operational but were turning to the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Commission to negotiate its destruction or permanent immobilization. I said this approach would require Syrian president Bashar Hafez al-Assad either to accede or to prove that the facility was not what we said it was. If he did the latter, we would have used diplomacy to defuse a crisis; if, as we believed, he could not, then we could hold other governments’ feet to the fire—to put up or shut up on nonproliferation. As I would later tell the president, the option to delay operational status of the reactor by destroying the pump house (without a water supply, the reactor could not become operational) or by destroying the reactor itself would remain available to us throughout the diplomatic process. I concluded my remarks by saying, “I suspect no one in the world doubts this administration’s willingness to use force—but better to use it as a last resort than as a first step.” The next day, after a videoconference with Petraeus and our ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, the president pulled me aside and thanked me for my comments the evening before. He knew that Hadley, Rice, and I had discussed the “Tojo option”—referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—earlier that morning and simply said, “I’m not going to do that.”

In the latter part of June, the debate intensified as the Israelis pressed us to act or to help them do so. The president was very pro-Israel—as was Cheney—and greatly admired Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and I was genuinely worried that Bush might just decide to let the Israelis take care of the reactor, forgoing any benefit of a sequenced approach and still leaving the United States with all the consequences of an attack. The administration’s senior leaders again staked out our positions in a meeting with the president on June 20. Cheney said we should hit the reactor immediately. Rice and I argued for a sequenced approach, beginning with diplomacy, but if that failed, we should take military action. General Pace supported that approach, saying it “gives you two chances to win.” Hadley observed that if we gave Assad too much time, he would organize the Arab world against us. I warned the president that Olmert was trying to force his hand.

In early July, I communicated my views privately to the president. I told him that I had recently read various statements on the use of force by former defense secretaries Cap Weinberger and Don Rumsfeld, as well as by Colin Powell and Tony Blair, and that the only thing they all agreed on was that the use of force should be a last resort after all other measures have failed. I warned that a preemptive U.S. strike to destroy the reactor would lead to a “huge negative reaction” at home and abroad, risking a fatal weakening of remaining support for our efforts in Iraq, and that our coalition support there could evaporate. At the same time, if we let the Israelis take care of the problem, we would be regarded as complicit or a coconspirator and that this option also ran the risk of igniting a wider war in the Middle East and an unpredictable reaction in Iraq. I urged Bush to “tell Prime Minister Olmert that we will not allow the reactor to become operational but Israel must allow us to handle this in our own way. If they do not, they are on their own. We will not help them.” Further, I told the president he should tell Olmert very directly that if Israel went forward on its own militarily, he would be putting Israel’s entire relationship with the United States at risk.

The president talked to Olmert on July 13, and while he declined to put the matter to him in the way I had urged, he did push the prime minister hard “to let us take care of this.” Olmert responded that the reactor represented an existential threat to Israel that it could not trust diplomacy to fix, even if the effort was led by the United States. In the course of the conversation, the president pledged not to expose knowledge of the reactor publicly without an Israeli okay.

All the president’s national security team met the next morning, and the focus was on the Israelis. I was furious. I said that Olmert was asking for our help on the reactor but giving us only one option: to destroy it. If we didn’t do exactly what he wanted, Israel would act and we could do nothing about it. The United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making. If there was a secret attack, all the focus would be on what the Israelis did, not what Syria and North Korea had done. I warned that if a wider war occurred after the attack, the United States would be blamed for not restraining the Israelis. “Our proposal [the first step being diplomatic/political] will emerge, making it look like the U.S. government subordinated its strategic interest to that of a weak Israeli government that already had screwed up one conflict in the region [against Hizballah in 2006] and that we were unwilling to confront or cross the Israelis.”

I am, and always have been, strongly pro-Israel. As a moral and historic imperative, I believe in a secure, viable Jewish state with the right to defend itself. But our interests are not always identical, as I said earlier, and I’m not prepared to risk vital American strategic interests to accommodate the views of hard-line Israeli politicians. The president said that he was impressed with Olmert’s “steadfastness” and that he was unwilling to preempt the prime minister through a diplomatic initiative or even to put much pressure on him. Rice called me late that afternoon to express her deep unease over the situation. I said I might talk to the president again, and she said, “Use my name and count me in.”

Hadley, Rice, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Cartwright, McConnell, Hayden, Bolten, and I met on Monday, the sixteenth. Bolten asked if the president was in the “right place” on the reactor issue and Israel. I was emphatic in saying no. I said he was putting U.S. strategic interests in Iraq, in the Middle East, and with our other allies in the hands of the Israelis and that he must insist to Olmert that he let the U.S. handle the Syrian problem. Olmert should be told that vital American interests were at stake, as I had argued earlier, and if necessary, the problem would be dealt with, one way or another, before Bush left office. I repeated what I had said about Olmert boxing us in. Notwithstanding, it was clear that the vice president, Elliott Abrams of the NSC staff, my own colleague Eric Edelman, Condi’s counselor Eliot Cohen, and others were all for letting Israel do whatever it wanted. I’m inclined to think that the president himself was sympathetic to that view, perhaps mainly because he was sympathetic to Olmert’s view of the reactor as an existential threat to Israel, though I never heard him say so. By not confronting Olmert, Bush effectively came down on Cheney’s side. By not giving the Israelis a red light, he gave them a green one.

On September 6, the Israelis attacked the reactor and destroyed it. They insisted on keeping the existence of the reactor secret, believing—correctly, as it turned out—that the lack of public exposure of the reactor and embarrassment over its destruction might persuade Assad not to retaliate militarily. But Condi and I were frustrated that Syria and North Korea had undertaken a bold and risky venture in violation of multiple Security Council resolutions and international treaties to create a covert nuclear capability in Syria, probably including other sites and labs, and had paid no political price for it. Nor could we use their gambit to our advantage in detaching Syria from Iran or in seeking harsher sanctions on Iran.

Within a week, the Syrians began a massive effort to destroy the ruined reactor building and to remove all incriminating nuclear-related equipment and structures. They worked at night or under the cover of tarpaulins to mask what they were doing. As the Israelis insisted, we kept silent as we watched the Syrians work. Finally, in April 2008, when the Israelis decided the risk of Syrian military retaliation had greatly diminished, we went public with the photographs and intelligence information on the Syrian reactor. By then, any real opportunity to leverage what the Syrians and North Koreans had done for broader political and nonproliferation purposes had largely been lost. The absence of any Syrian reaction to the Israeli attack—after the absence of Iraqi reaction to the bombing of their Osirak reactor by Israel in 1981—reinforced the views of those in Israel who were confident that any attack on Iranian nuclear sites would provoke, at most, only a very limited response.

On our side, a very sensitive and difficult security challenge had been debated openly with no pulled punches. The president heard directly from his senior advisers on a number of occasions and had made a tough decision based on what he heard and on his own instincts. And there had been no leaks. Although I was unhappy with the path we had taken, I told Hadley the episode had been a model of national security decision making. In the end, a big problem was solved and none of my fears were realized. It is hard to criticize success. But we had condoned reaching for a gun before diplomacy could be brought to bear, and we had condoned another preventive act of war. This made me all the more nervous about an even bigger looming national security problem.

IRAN

The Islamic Republic of Iran has bedeviled every American president since the overthrow of the shah in February 1979. Events in Iran contributed to Jimmy Carter losing his reelection bid in 1980 and nearly got Ronald Reagan impeached in 1987. Every president since Carter has tried in one way or another to reach out to the leadership in Tehran to improve relations, and every one of them has failed to elicit any meaningful response.

I was a participant in the first of those efforts. In October 1979, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, represented the United States in Algiers at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Algerian revolution. I accompanied him as his special assistant. He received word that the Iranian delegation—the prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister—wanted to meet with him. Brzezinski received approval from Washington and met in a hotel suite with the Iranians. I was the notetaker. He offered recognition of the revolutionary regime, offered to work with them, and even offered to sell them weapons we had contracted to sell to the shah; we had a common enemy to the north of Iran, the Soviet Union. The Iranians brushed all that aside and demanded that the United States return the shah, who was then receiving medical treatment here, to Tehran. Both sides went back and forth with the same talking points until Brzezinski stood up and told the Iranians that to return the shah to them would be “incompatible with our national honor.” That ended the meeting. Three days later our embassy in Tehran was overrun and more than fifty Americans taken hostage. Within a few weeks, the three Iranian officials with whom we had met had been purged from their jobs.

On April 24, 1980, the United States attempted a daring military operation to rescue those hostages. As executive assistant to the head of CIA, Admiral Stansfield Turner, I was aware of the planning and was with him in the White House the night of the mission. The operation ended in a fiery disaster in the desert sands of eastern Iran, with eight Americans killed when a helicopter collided with a C-130 transport plane on the ground. It was a humiliating failure. The only good to come out of it was that this tragedy soon led to the creation of the Joint Special Operations Command and the superb military capabilities—both in people and in equipment—that would kill Osama bin Laden thirty-one years later.

Nineteen-eighty also saw the beginning of an eight-year war between Iraq and Iran, which began in September with an attack by the Iraqis. The U.S. approach during the Reagan administration was ruthlessly realistic—we did not want either side to win an outright victory; at one time or another we provided modest covert support to both sides. This effort went off the rails with the clandestine sale of antitank missiles to the Iranians, with the profits secretly being funneled to help the anti-Communist Contra movement in Nicaragua. This was the essence of the Iran-Contra scandal, which broke publicly in November 1986, nearly wrecked the Reagan administration, and derailed my nomination to be director of central intelligence early in 1987. I had learned to be very cautious in dealing with Iran.

During the last two years of the Reagan administration, the United States would actually confront the Iranians militarily in the Persian Gulf, when we provided naval protection to Kuwaiti oil tankers. Several of our ships struck Iranian mines, we responded with retaliatory strikes, and in one tragic incident, a U.S. Navy ship accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger airplane.

From the early 1980s, the fact that Iran has been the principal foreign supporter of the terrorist organization Hizballah, providing money, intelligence, weapons, training, and operational guidance to its fighters—including the suicide bombers who destroyed the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut during the early 1980s—has further poisoned the air between our two countries. Until al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Hizballah had killed more Americans than had any terrorist group in history.

In 2004, Brzezinski and I were asked to cochair a task force on U.S. policy toward Iran under the auspices of the Council on Foreign Relations. One reason I had moved to the Pacific Northwest after retiring as CIA director was to avoid getting roped into projects like this. But because of my respect for, and friendship with, Brzezinski and council president Richard Haass, I agreed.

The task force issued its report in July 2004, acknowledging the failure of repeated efforts over the preceding twenty-five years to engage with Tehran but expressing the view that the U.S. military intervention in both Afghanistan and Iraq, on Iran’s eastern and western borders, respectively, had changed the “geopolitical landscape” and might offer new incentives for a mutually beneficial dialogue. The report recommended selective diplomatic engagement as a means to address issues such as Iran’s nuclear program. The report also proposed withdrawing U.S. objections to an Iranian civil nuclear program in exchange for stringent safeguards; suggested using economic relationships as positive leverage in dealing with Iran; and recommended U.S. advocacy of democracy in Iran “without relying on the rhetoric of regime change.” The recommendations acknowledged the likelihood of Iranian obstinacy preventing progress.

With “reform” president Hojjatoleslam Mohammed Katami in office—someone who in 1998 had called for a “dialogue with the American people”—and “reformers” winning a landslide victory in the Iranian general election in 2000, the recommendations of the report did not seem particularly radical, despite Iran’s continued support for anti-Israeli militants. However, given events over the ensuing two years, including the election of a hard-line president in Iran and Iranian support for Shia extremists killing our troops in Iraq, by the time I came back to government in late 2006, I no longer supported most of the recommendations in the report. It so quickly slid into oblivion that after I was nominated to be secretary, someone asked Steve Hadley if the administration had been aware of the positions I had taken in the report vis-à-vis Iran. I was told Steve was quite taken aback and asked, “What report?”

On December 23, 2006, five days after I became secretary of defense, the UN Security Council voted to impose limited sanctions on Iran, thus internationalizing some of the economic sanctions the United States had imposed on Tehran during the Clinton administration and first years of the Bush administration. In his January 10, 2007, speech announcing the strategy change and the surge in Iraq, Bush also said that henceforth U.S. troops would target Iranian agents inside Iraq who were helping the insurgency; more significantly, he also announced that he was sending a second aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf and deploying Patriot missile defense batteries to the region as well. During a White House meeting on January 21, Rice passed me a note saying, “The Iranians are getting very nervous. Now is the time to keep the heat up.”

The trouble was that the Iranians were not the only ones getting nervous. A number of members of Congress and commentators worried publicly whether the Bush administration was getting ready to launch another war, a worry that only grew every time we announced some new nefarious act by the Iranians. I tried to strike the right balance in a press conference on February 2, saying that the second carrier was intended to increase pressure on the Iranians in response to their training and providing weapons to Shia extremists fighting the United States in Iraq (we believed the Iranians either killed or trained the killers—murderers, actually—of five American soldiers in Karbala on January 20), as well as to serve as a response to their continued nuclear activities. I underscored that “we are not planning for a war with Iran.” On February 15, I said, “For the umpteenth time, we are not looking for an excuse to go to war with Iran.” Cheney’s affirmation a few days later that “all options are still on the table”—the administration’s position—hardly helped dampen the speculation.

Ayatollah Khamanei, Iran’s “supreme” leader, had weighed in publicly on February 8, warning that Iran would retaliate against our interests if attacked by the United States. At the same time, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy announced the test-firing of an antiship missile “capable of sinking a large warship.” Trying to downplay its significance, I told the press at a NATO defense ministers meeting in Seville that we had watched the test, and “other than that, I think it’s just another day in the Persian Gulf.”

About the same time, the administration went public with evidence that the Iranians were supplying sophisticated IED bomb-making materials to Iraqis trying to kill our troops. We couldn’t prove that the most senior Iranian leaders knew about this, but I found it inconceivable that they did not; I was eager for us to be even more aggressive in picking up their agents—or killing them—in Iraq. Tensions with Iran rose further in March 2008, when the Iranian Revolutionary Guards navy seized fifteen British sailors and marines accused of intruding into Iranian territorial waters. (I immediately directed that no U.S. sailors or Marines were to patrol or board other boats in the Gulf without cover from helicopter gunships or without a U.S. warship within firing range. I wasn’t about to risk any of our sailors or Marines falling into Iranian hands.) Four days later the United States began a naval exercise in the Gulf, including two aircraft carriers and a dozen other warships—it was the first time two carriers had held a joint exercise in the Gulf since 2003.

These actions set off another round of speculation that President Bush was laying the groundwork for attacking Iran. The Economist speculated that Bush “might not be prepared to leave office with the Iranian question unresolved.” In an editorial, the magazine explained why Bush might act:

Frankly, I shared some of The Economist’s concerns. One thread running through my entire time as secretary was my determination to avoid any new wars while we were still engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan. Remember the old saw “When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging”? Between Iraq and Afghanistan, I thought the United States was in a pretty deep hole. Were we faced with a serious military threat to American vital interests, I would be the first to insist upon an overwhelming military response. In the absence of such a threat, I saw no need to go looking for another war. I kept a 1942 quote from Winston Churchill in my desk drawer to remind me every day of certain realities: “Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

I therefore opposed military action as the first or preferred option to deal with the Syrian nuclear reactor, to deal with Iran’s nuclear program, and later, to intervene in Libya. I was convinced Americans were tired of war, and I knew firsthand how overstretched and stressed our troops were. There were those inside the Bush administration, led by Cheney, who talked openly about trying to resolve problems—like ours with Iran—with military force before the end of the administration. I’d been told that some at State believed that if the Israelis struck Iran militarily, always a possibility, there likely would be a regional conflict, so we should “do it” ourselves. Bush fortunately opposed such actions. But I wasn’t entirely sure where he stood at the time, and so I consistently opposed anything that might draw us into a new conflict.

During my time in the Bush administration, I worried about the influence of the Israelis and the Saudis in the White House, particularly Prime Minister Olmert and King Abdullah, and their shared desire to have problems like Iran “taken care of” while Bush was still president. Cheney had a very close relationship with both men, so they had a direct pipeline into the White House. As I said, the president also had very high regard for Olmert as well as a good personal relationship with the king. Between April and August 2007, I would have extremely frank discussions with both those foreign leaders.

On April 18, 2007, I arrived in Israel. I met with both the defense minister and the foreign minister in Tel Aviv and the next day drove to Jerusalem to meet with Olmert. The drive has always fascinated me, in no small part because as you wind through the hills, you can see the wreckage of military vehicles that have been preserved since the 1948 war—a reminder of the security threat Israel has faced for its entire modern existence. The drive is also a reminder of how small Israel is. Olmert and I met privately (with one associate each) in his rather spartan office for most of our time together. It was our first encounter, and he was very gracious. With respect to Iran, we agreed on the importance of continuing to share intelligence on the nuclear program and reviewed the impact of sanctions and other measures to delay the program. Olmert left no doubt that Israel saw a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat—as was Syria’s reactor—and would not allow the program to succeed. He agreed that there was still time for sanctions and other pressures on Iran to work, but he insisted that all options had to remain on the table. I agreed with that, but there was no discussion of military planning or options.

We talked at length about Israel’s security, and I pledged that the United States would ensure that Israel maintained its qualitative military edge (QME) over any potential regional adversaries by providing them with some of our most sophisticated military equipment, including tactical aircraft, weapons, and missile defenses. We agreed to set up a mechanism to address Israel’s QME concerns. I asked Olmert not to oppose the sale of military equipment, including weapons, to Saudi Arabia. In arguments that I would use for the next four-plus years, I urged him to think more strategically about the region; that Saudi Arabia was focused on the threat from Iran, not on acquiring capabilities to threaten Israel. When I left Jerusalem, I well knew that there were different clocks ticking on the Iranian nuclear program. The challenge was how to slow down both the Iranian nuclear and the Israeli military clocks, while speeding up the sanctions/pressure clock.

My opportunity for candor with King Abdullah came three months later. In a rare, if not unprecedented, joint trip of the secretary of state and secretary of defense, Condi and I met up in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on July 31 to meet with President Hosni Mubarak and other Egyptian officials, and then meet with our counterparts from the Gulf Cooperation Council (a political and economic union consisting of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the UAE), as well as representatives from Egypt and Jordan. Our joint participation was intended to send several messages—above all, the importance of all the governments involved to work together to support the Iraqi government and to oppose Iranian activities in the region. We knew a number of the attending governments were deeply worried about the United States withdrawing from Iraq too soon, and we could provide reassurance on that score. We also wanted our joint appearance to hammer home the message that the U.S. Departments of State and Defense were working with the same agenda. The stage was set for the trip with the announcement in Washington the day before the meeting that the Bush administration would propose ten-year military assistance packages of $20 billion for Saudi Arabia, $13 billion for Egypt, and $30 billion for Israel. One unintended consequence of the highly unusual joint travel of the secretaries of state and defense was that nearly everyone in the region thought we were coming to tell them we were going to attack Iran. All the governments but one—which will become clear momentarily—were relieved when we made clear that that wasn’t the case.

After the meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, Condi and I flew together on my plane to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to meet with the king. Our meeting with the king at his palace was preceded by a sumptuous banquet. The room where we ate was the equivalent size of five or six basketball courts, with an Olympic-size pool in the middle. The buffet must have had fifty or more dishes. But the most striking aspect of the room was a floor-to-ceiling aquarium, about 50 to 75 feet across and 30 feet high, that formed the wall behind where we dined. Among the many kinds of fish in the tank were a number of big sharks. When I asked one of the Saudis how they prevented the sharks from eating the other fish, he replied that it was important to feed the sharks on a careful schedule.

The king’s usual practice was to begin a meeting with a large delegation on both sides in attendance, and then for the guest(s) to ask to meet privately. Condi and I did so and had a long meeting with the king, with only an interpreter present. It was one of the most memorable meetings during my tenure as secretary. It was also the only encounter with a foreign leader in which I lost my cool. Abdullah, a heavyset man in his eighties with a history of health problems, was very sharp and did not mince words as he smoked one cigarette after another. He wanted a full-scale military attack on Iranian military targets, not just the nuclear sites. He warned that if we did not attack, the Saudis “must go our own way to protect our interests.” As far as I was concerned, he was asking the United States to send its sons and daughters into a war with Iran in order to protect the Saudi position in the Gulf and the region, as if we were mercenaries. He was asking us to shed American blood, but at no time did he suggest that any Saudi blood might be spilled. He went on and on about how the United States was seen as weak by governments in the region. The longer he talked, the angrier I got, and I responded quite undiplomatically. I told him that absent an Iranian military attack on U.S. forces or our allies, if the president launched another preventive war in the Middle East, he would likely be impeached; that we had our hands full in Iraq; and that the president would use military force only to protect vital American interests. I also told him that what he considered America’s greatest weakness—showing restraint—was actually great strength because we could crush any adversary. I told him that neither he nor anyone else should ever underestimate the strength and power of the United States: those who had—Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the Soviet Union—were all now in the ashcan of history. I was pretty wound up. And then we were done.

Nearly four years later, in my last meeting as secretary with the king, he referred—smiling—to that discussion in Jeddah as the night I “turned the table over.” He told me that he had been seeking clarity from the United States on what we were likely to do about Iran and had been unable to get it—until that night. He said my candor demonstrated to him that he could trust what I said.

Our efforts through the summer and fall to gain approval of more international sanctions—and pressure—on Iran and to persuade China and Russia, among others, to curtail their dealings with Iran were dealt a self-inflicted, grievous blow on December 3, 2007. U.S. intelligence agencies on that date issued a national intelligence estimate, Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities. The first sentence of the key judgments said it all: “We judge with high confidence that in fall, 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” It went on to say that Iran was keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons and that, while it had not restarted the nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, “we do not know whether it currently intends to develop nuclear weapons.” Because I believed the estimate would be leaked and quoted out of context, I recommended, and the president approved, that we issue an unclassified version of the key judgments. In my entire career in intelligence, I believe no single estimate ever did more harm to U.S. security interests and diplomatic efforts. Because in virtually all other countries of the world intelligence services work for the government in power and are expected to toe the official line, the independence of our intelligence community in preparing assessments is hardly understood at all. Accordingly, most governments wondered what in hell the Bush administration was up to in releasing an intelligence report that was directly at odds with the positions it had been taking diplomatically. My French counterpart, Defense Minister Hervé Morin, characterized the situation best when he told me that the intelligence estimate was “like a hair in the soup.”

Then on January 6, 2008, a group of five small armed Iranian speedboats approached three U.S. warships in the Gulf at a high rate of speed. The rules of engagement for our Navy ships in the Gulf were clear: they were not to take actions that might be seen as provocative by the Iranians, but they were to do whatever was necessary to protect their ships. If the Iranians were to approach within a range considered threatening, the Navy was free to fire. The captain of one of our ships was within seconds of giving the order to fire when the boats turned away. After some back-and-forth with the White House, we released a video of the entire incident two days afterward. That same day I was on the phone with the president talking about a number of issues when he asked me what I would recommend if an Iranian fast boat, loaded with explosives, sank a U.S. warship. I gave him an initial response—still highly classified because it remains an active option—and we agreed we’d discuss it further.

Just when I would begin to wonder what else could go wrong, something always did. A week or so later I met with the president to review senior military personnel issues and appointments through the end of the administration. It was clear that something was bugging Bush, and that was when he asked me, “What is it with these admirals?” As mentioned earlier, I knew he was unhappy with Admiral Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, for an interview he had given The New Yorker in which he characterized waterboarding as torture—always a sensitive subject with Bush. Then the president expressed concern as to whether the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mullen, and the Central Command commander, Admiral Fallon, would continue to support what he was trying to accomplish in Iraq after a new president was elected. If not, should he replace them while he still could? Bush was clearly miffed at some of the things Fallon had been saying about how the United States must not go to war with Iran and at what Mullen had been saying about Iraq preventing us from providing adequate resources to the war in Afghanistan. The next day the president took me by surprise when he told me he had asked Petraeus if he would like to take Central Command. Dave had said no, that he wanted to go to Europe and also didn’t want to push someone out prematurely. Soon afterward I got a call from Hadley, again about the “Navy guys.” I asked Steve if someone on the NSC staff was “gunning” for Fallon. He replied, “The president and vice president are very concerned.” I asked if it was because of his purported remarks on Iran. Steve said, “Yes, mainly.”

A few weeks later Fallon called late in the afternoon to warn me that Esquire was going to publish an article about him in the next few days that likely would cause some heartburn. The press characterization of the article—usually more important in Washington than any article itself—was essentially that only Fox Fallon was keeping Bush from attacking Iran. It indeed caused heartburn and then some—mainly because it was untrue. It was clear, though, that the president had lost confidence in Fallon, the cumulative effect of a number of press statements that together seemed to portray a commander seriously at odds with his commander in chief on both Iraq and Iran.

Three days later, on March 6, Mullen and I met with the president, who asked, “Do we have a MacArthur problem? Is he challenging the commander in chief?” To me, he said, “I know what you’d do if he challenged you.” I told Bush that he did not have a “MacArthur problem,” that Fallon wanted to come in and apologize to him. The president responded, “No, I don’t want to humiliate the guy, but he kind of boxed me in.” When Mullen said that Fallon should volunteer to resign, Bush said, “But no signals, no coaching. If he acts, it needs to be without any pushing or hinting, solely on his own. He’s given a lot of distinguished service to the country.” He concluded, “Let’s let it ride and continue to think about it.” The president and I had another exchange on Fallon the next day. He said he had decided not to do anything and to wait and see if Fallon did “the right thing.” I replied, “At some point I may need to act. I can’t have a combatant commander who does not have the trust and confidence of the president.” Bush said, “I didn’t say I’d lost trust and confidence in him,” and I said, “Right. I would say he’s lost mine.” We agreed not to take any action for the time being.

In truth, Fallon’s actions as a commander had been wholly consistent with administration policy, but his interactions with the press left a different, and unacceptable, impression. I received a very gracious, handwritten letter of apology from Fox on March 7 that also made clear that he hoped to retain his command. However, Admiral Fallon, probably with a nudge from Mullen, on March 11 sent the chairman and me an e-mail requesting approval to step aside as Centcom commander. “The current embarrassing situation, public perception of differences between my views and administration policy, and the distraction this causes from the mission, make this the right thing to do,” he wrote. Fallon had been in the job five days less than a year. Later in the day at a press conference, I praised his forty-plus years of service to the nation and concluded, perhaps stretching the truth a bit, that “Admiral Fallon reached this difficult decision entirely on his own. I believe it was the right thing to do even though I do not believe there are, in fact, significant differences between his views and administration policy.” Fallon, with great class, had done the right thing.

Once again partisan leaders in Congress lived down to my expectations, using Fallon’s resignation to attack the administration. Harry Reid called the resignation “yet another example that independence and the frank, open airing of experts’ views are not welcomed in this administration.” Nancy Pelosi said Fallon’s resignation was “a loss for the country, and if it was engineered by the administration over policy differences, that loss is compounded.”

Presidents and Congress expect senior military leaders to provide their personal and professional military opinions candidly and honestly. There is no requirement for them to do so through the news media. Admiral William Fallon would not be the last senior officer on my watch to lose his job through a self-inflicted wound with the press.

We needed a new Centcom commander, and Mullen and I quickly agreed it should be David Petraeus. The problem with making unanticipated changes in senior military leadership is that there is always a daisy-chain effect, affecting other positions; for instance, who should replace Petraeus in Iraq? I was obsessed with not losing any momentum there, and that meant the new commander had to be someone with current experience and knowledge not only of the campaign plan but also of the Iraqi players. Ray Odierno, just back from his assignment as corps commander in Iraq in charge of day-to-day operations and already nominated to become vice chief of staff of the Army, seemed the best choice. After discussing the situation with the president, I announced on April 23 that I would recommend nominating Petraeus to take Centcom and Ray to return to Baghdad. It was a huge sacrifice on Odierno’s part—and his family’s—to have to return to Iraq only six months after leaving, but he did not hesitate. Because we wanted Petraeus in Iraq for as long as possible, we delayed the change of command until early fall. Lieutenant General Marty Dempsey was doing an excellent job as acting commander at Centcom, and we had confidence he could carry that burden of command alone in the interval.

For the next two months, command changes notwithstanding, Iran was front and center on my agenda. On April 8, 2007, I met with the chairman, Dempsey, and the undersecretary for policy, Eric Edelman, on our next steps. I observed that while most revolutions tend to lose their radical edge over time and degenerate into old-fashioned dictatorships, with the election of Ahmadinejad as president and with the radical students associated with seizing our embassy in 1979 assuming leadership roles, Iran was regaining its revolutionary edge. Dempsey said that Centcom had a “containment” strategy for Iran that integrated all previous military planning. He wanted to present it for review by the Joint Staff. I said it would be very hard “for this administration” to adopt a containment strategy that would require the United States to live with a nuclear-armed Iran. A couple of weeks later Mike Mullen advised me that Centcom and the Joint Staff were planning for potential military courses of action, among several options, as the Iranian government exercised “increasingly lethal and malign influence in Iraq.” Meanwhile the president directed the CIA and Defense to accelerate efforts to develop an array of options between traditional diplomacy and conventional military power to set back the Iranian nuclear program.

Debate within the administration heated up considerably in May, prompted by several Israeli military requests that, if satisfied, would greatly enhance their ability to strike the Iranian nuclear sites. In a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and me in the Tank on May 10, in the middle of a conversation on Afghanistan, the president suddenly asked if anybody was thinking about military action against Iran. He quickly added that the goal was of course to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and that he “just wanted you to be thinking about it—not a call to arms.”

Two days later the national security team met with the president in his private dining room adjacent to the Oval Office. The participants included Cheney, Rice, Mullen, Bolten, Hadley, Hadley’s deputy Jim Jeffrey, and me. We addressed two questions: How do we answer the Israelis and what should we do about the Iranian nuclear program? In many respects, it was a reprise of the debate over the Syrian nuclear reactor the year before. Hadley asked me to lead off. When making my case to the president on a significant issue like this one, I always wrote out in advance the points I wanted to make, because I did not want to omit something important. Given Bush 43’s green light to Olmert on the Syrian reactor, I was very apprehensive as the meeting began.

I recommended saying no to all the Israelis’ requests. Giving them any of the items on their new list would signal U.S. support for them to attack Iran unilaterally: “At that point, we lose our ability to control our own fate in the entire region.” I said we would be handing over the initiative regarding U.S. vital national interests to a foreign power, a government that, when we asked them not to attack Syria, did so anyway. We should offer to collaborate more closely with Israel, I continued, doing more on missile defense and other capabilities, “but Olmert should be told in the strongest possible terms not to act unilaterally.” The United States was not reconciled to Iran having nuclear weapons, but we needed a long-term solution, not just a one-to-three-year delay. I went on to say that a strike by the United States or Israel would end divisions in the Iranian government, strengthen the most radical elements, unify the country behind the government in their hatred of us, and demonstrate to all Iranians the need to develop nuclear weapons. I warned that Iran was not Syria—it would retaliate, putting at risk Iraq, Lebanon, oil supplies from the Gulf (which would lead to skyrocketing oil prices), and the end of the peace process, as well as increasing the likelihood of a Hizballah war against Israel. Addressing what I knew to be Cheney’s desire to deal with the Iranian nuclear program before Bush left office, I observed that our current efforts to isolate Iran, significantly increase their economic problems, and delay their nuclear program might not be successful in bringing about a change of policy in Tehran during the Bush presidency, but they would leave his successor a robust array of tools with which to apply pressure. Finally, I pointed out that the president’s own conditions for preemptive war had not been met, our own intelligence estimate would be used against us, and we would be the ones isolated, not Iran.

Cheney spoke next, and I knew what was coming. Matter-of-factly, he said he disagreed with everything I had said. The United States should give Israel everything it wanted. We could not allow Iran to get nuclear weapons. If we weren’t going to act, he said, then we should enable the Israelis. Twenty years on, he argued, if there was a nuclear-armed Iran, people would say the Bush administration could have stopped it. I interjected that twenty years on, people might also say that we not only didn’t stop them from getting nuclear weapons but made it inevitable. I was pretty sure Condi did not favor accommodating Israel’s requests, but the way she expressed her concerns about not leaving our ally in the lurch or feeling isolated led Mullen and me after the meeting to worry that she might be changing her mind. Mullen talked about the difficulty of carrying out a successful attack. Hadley remained silent. At the end, the president was noncommittal, clearly frustrated by the lack of good options for dealing with Iran. He had a lot of company in the room on that score.

That afternoon I flew to Colorado Springs to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Aboard the plane, I became increasingly worried that the president might be persuaded by Cheney and Olmert to act or to enable the Israelis to act, especially if Condi’s position was softening. I decided to communicate once again with Bush privately. I said,

In the end, the president deflected the Israeli requests but simultaneously directed a dramatic intensification of our bilateral intelligence sharing and cooperation on ways to slow down the Iranian program. In the years ahead, I would enthusiastically oversee a dramatic expansion of our military cooperation with Israel, direct an intensification of our military planning efforts vis-à-vis Iran, and significantly increase U.S. military capabilities in the Gulf. Whatever our differences internally or with Israel on what to do about the Iranian nuclear program, there was no disagreement that it posed a huge threat to the stability of the entire region.

It probably was not coincidental that a few weeks later, in mid-June, the Israelis held a military exercise that they knew would be monitored by many nations. In what appeared to be a rehearsal for a strike on Iran, one hundred Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighters flew from Israel over the eastern Mediterranean to Greece and returned. The exercise included the deployment of Israeli rescue helicopters and the use of refueling tankers. Flight tactics and other elements of a potential strike were rehearsed. The distance the fighters flew was 862 nautical miles. The distance from the Israeli airfield to the Iranian uranium enrichment facility at Natanz was 860 nautical miles. Israel wanted to signal that it was prepared for a strike and could carry it out.

I think my most effective argument, and one that even the vice president came grudgingly to acknowledge, was that an Israeli attack that overflew Iraq would put everything we had achieved there with the surge at risk—and indeed, the Iraqi government might well tell us to leave the country immediately. I discussed this with the president in a meeting on June 18, and he emphatically said he would not put our gains in Iraq at risk. I responded that the Israelis had to be told this.

Given the connections the Israelis had in the Bush White House, they quickly knew of my role in the policy debate. They intensified the dialogue between Defense Minister Ehud Barak and me to see if I could be persuaded to change my view. I had known Ehud since I was CIA director and he was chief of the Israeli Defense Forces fifteen years earlier. I liked and respected him and always welcomed our meetings—well, almost always. Our first get-together after the Iran policy debate was on July 28. Then, and subsequently, we worked out some significant enhancements for Israeli security, including sending to Israel a U.S. X-band missile defense radar system and contributing to the development of several Israeli missile defense programs, perhaps most importantly one named Iron Dome to defend against short-range missiles. Barak and I would sustain our dialogue, and our friendship and cooperation, for the rest of my time as secretary.

Iran would get at least one more senior military officer in trouble with President Bush. In early July, Admiral Mullen apparently told reporters that, in essence, the U.S. military was too stressed to take on Iran. This mightily displeased the president, as Hadley told me. I called Mullen and advised him to “cool it” on Iran. I did not tell him that the president had said it “looked like Mullen was auditioning for a job with the next commander in chief while he still works for this one!” I just couldn’t understand the lack of political awareness by senior officers of the impact at the White House of their remarks to the press.

FREQUENT FLYER

I traveled to scores of countries over a two-year period working for Bush 43. I made more than a dozen trips for various NATO meetings, at which I almost always hammered away on three themes: the need for greater European investment in defense, the need for the Europeans to do more in Afghanistan, and the need for NATO to reform its structures and way of doing business. For a decade or so, member states had committed to spend at least 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense (reduced from the earlier guideline of 3 percent). By 2007–8, just five of twenty-eight members met that guideline, including Greece and Croatia; all others spent less. Given the economic downturn during this period, telling the Europeans to increase their defense spending was about as useful as shouting down a well.

I found the NATO meetings excruciatingly boring. On every topic, representatives of each of twenty-eight countries could speak their piece, reading from a prepared script. My secret to staying awake was revealed publicly at one meeting by the French defense minister, who was in a rant about how boring the meetings were—he confessed to doodling to pass the time and then outed me for doing crossword puzzles.

At the NATO summit in Bucharest, Romania, in April 2008, President Bush lasted longer at the meeting table than most of his counterparts—at least five hours—but as the afternoon wore on, he was eager to get a little downtime before a long formal dinner and “native” entertainment. Condi and I, sitting behind him, also wanted to leave. But who would stay and represent the United States until the bitter end? I offered the president and Condi a deal: I would stay at the table by myself until the meeting was over in exchange for not having to attend the formal dinner. They agreed immediately. Over time I made some good friends among my ministerial colleagues, and I would continue to value the alliance greatly. But I didn’t have the patience for those long meetings.

I made three trips to Asia during my first fourteen months as secretary. The first, in early June 2007, was to Singapore for the “Shangri-La” Asia Security Summit, named for the hotel where it was held every year. My maiden speech in Asia focused on urging the Chinese to explain the purpose behind their major military buildup, but I also tried to turn down the temperature in the relationship with China by calling for a bilateral dialogue on a range of issues. During this trip, I again visited the troops in Afghanistan. In Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, where Manas airfield had become a vital link in our aerial resupply of soldiers in, and troop movements to, Afghanistan, the amazingly corrupt government of Kurmanbek Bakiyev saw our continued need for the airfield as a rich source of revenue or, as I called it, extortion. The Kyrgyz were once again making noises about closing Manas to us, and we had to have it open, so I had to see Bakiyev and let him pick our pockets again. He, his officials, and his generals looked and acted just like the old Soviets, whose vassals they had been. Bakiyev reeled off a list of areas where we were ignoring Kyrgyz sovereignty and Kyrgyz people, and how we were “cheating” them of revenues. In the crassest kind of insult in that part of the world, the big crook didn’t even offer me a cup of tea. He was, without question, the most unpleasant foreign leader I had to deal with in my years as secretary, and I celebrated when he was overthrown in April 2010.

My trip ended at the American cemetery in Normandy on June 6, the sixty-third anniversary of D-Day, where French defense minister Morin and I presided over the commemoration ceremonies. It was rainy, windy, and cold, just like that historic day in 1944. After the ceremony, I walked alone among the countless rows of white crosses, deeply moved by the sacrifice they represented but also reflecting on the new gravestones being erected at home above the remains of young men and women I was sending in harm’s way, making their own sacrifice for our country just as the GIs had done at Normandy. It was a hard day.

I went to China, South Korea, and Japan in early November 2007 on my second trip to Asia. President Bush and Chinese president Hu Jintao had agreed that the military-to-military relationship between our two countries needed to be strengthened, and so I made my first pilgrimage to Beijing in more than fifteen years. My first visit had been as a CIA officer at the end of 1980, when bicycles still reigned supreme on the capital’s streets. Now traffic was horrible, and the pollution made the air nearly unbreathable. The Chinese were preparing to host the Olympic Games the next year, and it was plain they had a lot of work to do to avoid all the visitors having to wear gas masks. In all of my meetings, the same three topics were discussed: international and regional security issues, with me spending a lot of time on Iran; state-to-state relations between our two countries; and specific issues in the military relationship. Bush and Hu had agreed in April 2006 to pursue bilateral discussions of nuclear strategy, but it was pretty plain that the People’s Liberation Army hadn’t received the memo. Still, I pushed for beginning a “strategic dialogue” to help us understand each other’s military intentions and programs better.

My third trip to Asia, at the end of February 2008, was an around-the-world jaunt including stops in Australia, Indonesia, India, and Turkey. This trip was made difficult by the lamentable fact that a week before we departed, I slipped on the ice outside my house in Washington, D.C., and broke my shoulder in three places. I had been lucky in that the bones had remained where they needed to be, so I didn’t need surgery or a cast, just immobilization in a sling. The arm caused some awkward moments during the trip. At a very nice dinner given in my honor by Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd, I was doing fine at table conversation until Rudd began a long soliloquy on the history of Australia. I had made it just past World War I when the combined effect of a painkiller, jet lag, and a glass of wine caused me to fall asleep. This led to not-so-subtle attempts by my American colleagues at the table to rouse me. Rudd was very gracious about the whole thing; my team less so, as they took raucous delight in making fun of my undiplomatic snooze. I was shocked when I got out of bed the next morning to see that my entire upper body was totally black and blue and yellow. The U.S. Air Force doctor traveling with me called in a couple of Australian physicians, and everyone was puzzled that the bruising had appeared a week after my fall, but in typical Aussie fashion and with good cheer, they said it would take care of itself. The rest of the trip was uneventful, if long.

Most of my many other trips abroad during the Bush years, apart from the frequent visits to Iraq and Afghanistan, fell into the category of what former secretary of state George Shultz called “gardening”—shoring up or nurturing relationships with friends, allies, and others. The highlight for me always was meeting and talking with our men and women in uniform around the world. Each encounter seemed to provide a much-needed transfusion of energy and idealism from them to me, which I would need when I returned to Washington.