No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

16 NEW CHALLENGES IN IRAQ

BY THE TIME we returned from Africa, the controversy over the “sixteen words” in the State of the Union was in full froth. I appeared on the Sunday shows the next day to face a torrent of accusations about the Niger statement. I tried fruitlessly to explain that the British stood by their report but there had been CIA concerns about its veracity—concerns of which I hadn’t been made aware. People were saying that the President had taken the nation to war because of the Niger claim, which was ludicrous; at issue was one sentence in a long indictment against Saddam Hussein.

Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation was the most aggressive questioner: “How did the line get into the speech?” “Did your staff insist [over the objection of the CIA] on putting it in?” “Did the Vice President’s office review it?” The entire three-thousand-word interview transcript went like that. So too did the encounters with Wolf Blitzer on CNN and Tony Snow on Fox News Sunday.

After the Schieffer interview I got into the car with Anna Perez, who was unflappable in the face of almost anything. She was worried. I’d come across as evasive, she thought, and perhaps as not taking responsibility for what had happened. By the time I got home to the Watergate, there were reports that Senator Jay Rockefeller was condemning my refusal to take personal responsibility. I was caught in a tsunami of criticism and, more troubling, questions about my personal integrity.

The situation didn’t get better when the CIA suddenly produced the memorandum that had been sent to the White House at the time of the President’s speech in Cincinnati, questioning the soundness of the British report. I didn’t remember having seen it, but when Mike Gerson found the same document in his files, it was clear that it had indeed come across my desk. Perhaps I should have remembered one line in a long memo clearing a speech, but I didn’t.

Steve Hadley then stepped forward and selflessly took responsibility for the whole mess. Though it was true that Steve oversaw the speech clearance process, what had happened was simply not his fault. If the Agency had had problems with the sixteen words in the State of the Union, it had only to say so at the time and we would have removed the words immediately. Full stop. But Tenet admitted that he hadn’t read the speech.

I was attending a dedication of a library in Kansas for former Senator Robert Dole when Steve called the press together and methodically walked them through what happened. It was a searing experience for him—he the most honest of public servants.

Steve’s “admission” did not, of course, stem the tide. The press wanted an admission from me. Anna had been right that I had created a perception of dodging responsibility. I called the late Tim Russert of NBC News, whose counsel I valued. “What do I need to do?” I asked him off the record. “The American people can always forgive,” he said, “but they want to know that you feel remorse for what happened.”

On July 30 I appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer with Gwen Ifill. I knew that Gwen would be tough but fair and, most important, credible. I stated clearly that I felt personally responsible for the whole flap. Earlier that day in a press conference the President had been asked whether he wanted me to resign. He gave me his strongest possible endorsement, but it really cut to hear the President have to give one of those “I have full confidence in …” statements that only demonstrate the depths of an official’s troubles. I remember that evening receiving a phone call from a member of Congress who purported to be my friend. We were supposed to have dinner in a few days. “It wouldn’t be good for us to be seen together,” this person said. “I have to maintain my objectivity.” Washington is a lonely place when the wolves turn on you.

Eventually my personal trials would abate, but the problems for the administration were just beginning. The weapons hunt continued, but no stockpiles were found. David Kay, the chief inspector, came to the White House and met with the President on July 27. Kay told the President that it was likely that Saddam had a latent capability that he could have mobilized when the pressure from the international community lessened. There was still an infrastructure: scientists, laboratories, and front companies. Too, the air assault on Iraq’s WMD in 1998 had been more successful than we had known, and serious damage had been done to Saddam’s capabilities at the time.

After closed-door briefings to select Senate committees four days later, Kay publicly cautioned that the hunt for WMD was “going to take time” but that his team was making “solid progress” and that every day he was “surprised by new advances.” To the critics on Capitol Hill who were anxious to find weapons, he said, “The Iraqis had over two decades to develop these weapons. And hiding them was an essential part of their program. So it’s not an easy task, and we’re not close to a final conclusion yet.” But by the beginning of the next year, Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “We were almost all wrong.” In saying so he would become one of the administration’s harshest critics.

I’ve replayed all of this over and over through the years. What could we have done differently? Where did I fail? Clearly, we had allowed the argument concerning WMD to get disconnected from the broader strategic case against Saddam. I should never have sanctioned the use of bits of intelligence, particularly by the President. The intelligence agencies were indeed wrong about the extent of the WMD threat from Saddam but not in saying that there was evidence of a threat. There were competing views in the intelligence community, but the Agency thought that he’d reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons capability and all but the State Department thought that he was doing so on the nuclear side. That assessment was shared by several foreign intelligence agencies too. I bristled as I listened to congressional critics accuse us of inflating the threat while forgetting their own prior statements of the impending doom posed by Saddam’s WMD.

Ultimately the fallout took a toll on all of us. Colin has described the presentation at the United Nations on February 5 as a stain on his career. I am sorry that he feels that way, and it pains me to know that that is the moment that is often called up in reviewing the long and stellar record of service of this American hero and my friend. But Colin didn’t seek to deceive anyone. None of us did. In retrospect, I wish I’d said over and over again that intelligence always carries uncertainties; that is the nature of the beast.

After 9/11, Saddam in possession of WMD in the world’s most volatile region was a terrifying prospect; the Middle East would be a less frightening place without him. I still believe that the latter is true. I have many regrets about the run-up to the war, but I’m not sorry that we overthrew Saddam. And I’m grateful that today’s concern is not an impending nuclear arms race between Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

THE INTELLIGENCE FAILURE was unfolding simultaneously with the worsening security situation on the ground. Throughout the spring and early summer, the insurgency seemed to be gaining steam, and harrowing incidents were becoming commonplace. Tommy Franks stepped down in May 2003. I thought the world of Franks, but Don told several of us that the general was tired and wanted to retire. General John Abizaid was nominated to replace Franks on June 18 and assumed command July 7. I cannot be sure that the turnover in leadership mattered in the final analysis, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre to change command in the middle of a war. Ricardo Sanchez, then a two-star general, was quickly promoted to lieutenant general to serve as the top commander in Iraq. Nonetheless, his staff lacked sufficient and experienced personnel to carry out the increasingly complex mission in Iraq during the early months of his command. John Abizaid would prove to be an exceptionally able commander of United States Central Command (CENTCOM), but the continuous shifting of military leadership in the field still strikes me as having been the wrong approach.

The CPA was also experiencing difficulty. Insurgents had begun to attack its incipient reconstruction projects, and Jerry Bremer was clearly struggling to reconcile the existing power structures and institutions with the political demands of the new Iraq. One of the first steps he’d taken was to issue CPA orders that removed full members of the Baath Party from government posts and, more consequentially, dissolved the Iraq army, air force, navy, and other regular military services.

There has been a good deal of retrospective examination of whether the order to disband the Iraqi army was adequately reviewed by and coordinated with Washington. A postmortem conducted by the late Peter Rodman, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, shows that the Pentagon was aware of Jerry’s intentions to issue an order dissolving Iraqi security organizations, including the army, as a part of the de-Baathification effort. Don received a memorandum to this effect on May 19, but he did not bring it to my attention or that of the President. Jerry has said that he raised the issue at the NSC on May 22. Several participants remember that it was brought up only in general terms during a discussion of de-Baathification. It was certainly not a request for permission to issue the order.

By that point the army had largely melted away, and there was little left of a formal structure. But surely the decision to dissolve it explicitly ran counter to the earlier plans to retain as many as three to five divisions to form the nucleus of a new Iraqi army. We all knew that it was one of the pillars of Iraqi society and a source of pride. There were concerns, which I shared, that it was rife with Baathists and needed to be reformed. But I was surprised when I read in the newspaper on May 24 that the Iraqi military had been dissolved by order of the U.S. envoy.

I resolved at that moment to get a better handle on what was going on in Baghdad. The President had made clear that he wanted Jerry to have flexibility in dealing with conditions on the ground. But something was wrong when a decision of that magnitude could be made without Washington’s full and considered deliberation.

Moreover, by June there were almost daily protests outside the CPA headquarters calling for elections to form a national government. The strong U.S. hand was already wearing on the population’s nationalistic pride, and in response Jerry approved the formation of a twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council (IGC). Making clear that the Council was advisory, we hoped that it would begin to give the Iraqis more of a say in the development of their country. But it was a delicate balancing act because the IGC was a raucously divided group reflecting the political fissures of the country. The leaders decided to rotate the presidency of the IGC every month, adding to the chaos. More than a few times, Jerry had trouble even getting the Council to meet since some of its members greatly enjoyed traveling the world’s capitals on behalf of the new Iraq.

Then, on August 20, the situation on the ground took a stunning turn for the worse. We’d long overcome our aversion to a UN role in Iraq. The President had come to the conclusion that Colin was right: we needed a substantial UN presence to help legitimize the steps we were taking toward the establishment of postwar order in Iraq.

I cannot say enough about the help that we received from UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in this regard. Though he was clearly opposed to the war, he moved more quickly than I could have imagined to forge a good relationship between the United Nations and the United States concerning Iraq. He sought and received the UN Security Council’s authorization for the appointment of a special representative of the secretary-general to carry out the difficult mission in Iraq. He chose a remarkable man, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian with long experience in conflict resolution. When Vieira de Mello at first refused the assignment, Kofi asked me to meet with him. We met in my office on March 5, and then I walked with him down the hall to the Oval Office to see the President. He returned to New York and agreed to take the job. That afternoon, Colin and I talked about the big leap forward that we had just achieved. Vieira de Mello would be a steady hand and bring international legitimacy as we pushed forward the transition to a new Iraqi government.

I’D DECIDED to take a short vacation in August at the Greenbrier in West Virginia. The lovely resort had become my quiet getaway every summer because it was a short drive home if I was needed in Washington. Colin and I once joked that a vacation spot is where you go to pay a lot of money, look out at the beautiful scenery, and take phone calls from the White House. But despite that, I still felt refreshed whenever I returned home from White Sulphur Springs.

On my last vacation day, I was playing tennis with a pro, Terry Deremer, and Missy Weiss, a woman who also vacationed at the Greenbrier every year. Missy had played number one for Ohio State and had been on tour. I was no match for her on the court but loved to rally with her. Once in a while I even won a point or two.

Literally midserve, one of my security agents sprinted onto the court. The Situation Room was on the phone. I yelled apologies while running toward the waiting cell phone and soon learned that the UN headquarters in Baghdad had been bombed. Initial reports indicated that there were many casualties, and the fate of Vieira de Mello was unknown. I rushed back to my room and packed, telling my aunt, cousin, and friends who were accompanying me that we were heading back to Washington immediately. A few minutes later I got a reassuring update concerning Vieira de Mello, who’d reportedly spoken with Kofi on the phone after the bombing. But by the time we drove away and onto Interstate 81, I got word that Vieira de Mello had perished along with twenty-one other people, including UN workers. I was devastated and felt personally responsible for having talked him into taking the job.

My friends and family were talking in the back of the van. “I can’t hear,” I said somewhat rudely as I listened to an update from the Situation Room. The chatter ceased. We drove home in silence, interrupted only by reports from the White House and a call from the President, whom I assured that I was headed home.

THE SITUATION would spiral downward after that terrible August attack. Coalition forces couldn’t get a handle on the insurgency, which was gaining strength almost daily. The political situation wasn’t stabilizing either, as Iraqis were becoming more insistent about retaking control of their country. We started to hear the word “occupiers” with greater frequency. I did not expect, as the Vice President and others naively suggested, that the Iraqis would joyfully greet us as liberators. I reckoned that the only place where soldiers had flowers thrown at their feet was in old movies about World War II. The Iraqi people are gritty and tough and have a reputation for being fiercely independent. “I know you want to bring democracy to the Middle East,” Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak had told Steve Hadley. “But why did you start with the Iraqis? They are the worst.”

But I didn’t expect the United States to be thought of as an occupier, either. We’d gone to great lengths to avoid having a heavy military footprint in the country. A larger force would have given us much-needed manpower to deal with multiple contingencies—but there was also a downside to a big foreign presence.

At the time Tommy Franks sent a draft of his initial address to the Iraqi people to us for review, I remember turning to Anna Perez. “This sounds like a Roman emperor,” I told her. We modified the address to make it sound friendlier. The British had no such qualms. They knew that for all intents and purposes we were occupying the country and constantly said so. It turned out that the Iraqis, even those who supported us, thought so too.

Obviously, we had to help the Iraqis find a path to sovereignty. Jerry understood this very well and proposed a road map that he published in the Washington Post on September 8, 2003. The problem was that he did so without fully consulting Washington. The seven-point plan he presented in the paper’s op-ed pages touched off a firestorm in Iraq and consternation in the White House and State Department. Jerry had suggested that a new constitution be written through a process organized by the Iraqi Governing Council, with elections to follow. That drew a rebuke from perhaps the most powerful man in Iraq, the Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who objected to the sequence Jerry had outlined. Sistani believed that Iraq’s new constitution had to be written by representatives elected by the Iraqi people, not through a process devised by an organization that emanated from the CPA.

The seventy-something Sistani was among the most revered clerics in the Shia faith. He’d been kept under house arrest during Saddam’s reign but was now free to speak to his following. Sistani turned out to be a remarkable man. Insisting on “quietism” for clerics, he believed that religious men should eschew formal roles in politics. That, of course, stood in stark contrast to the ruling ayatollahs in Iran. When Sistani, sitting in Najaf, the holiest of Shia cities, was prohibited from speaking publicly, the Iranian mullahs in Qom had become the voice of the Shia people. But among the Arabs of Iraq, the Persian Iranians had long been viewed with suspicion, even hatred. And Najaf, not Qom, was the religious heart of the Shia sect, a kind of Vatican for that part of the Islamic faith.

So when Sistani spoke, it mattered. Ironically, he would not meet with nonmembers of the faith, particularly foreigners, so we had no direct contact with him. His son acted as a conduit for his views, which we came to regard as crucial to progress in Iraq. Yet this mysterious man always seemed to be on the right side of the issues; he was a voice for democracy and for the separation of religion from matters of the state. In private we called him Iraq’s Benjamin Franklin—a wise man who never held or wished to hold elected office.

Within days it was clear that the road map that Jerry had outlined was untenable. The NSC met to consider the next steps, and there was a lot of talk around the table about whether Sistani was right about the sequence. The President cut through the debate. “How did I get on the wrong side of a demand for elections?” he asked. That shut everyone up, and we resolved to find a new path that would give the Iraqis a chance to elect the leaders who would draft their constitution.

INCIDENTS LIKE THOSE convinced me that we had to have better connectivity between Jerry and Washington. Colin and I had talked to Don about the problem of pronouncements popping out of Baghdad without due consideration in the NSC. I learned through Frank Miller that Jerry felt disconnected too, having only intermittent contact with Don. Jerry recruited Reuben Jeffery, a highly capable man who’d been a managing partner of Goldman Sachs, to run a Washington office for him and facilitate better contact with the Pentagon. But we just kept getting surprised by decisions—some small but some very large indeed.

I went to the President in late September and told him that I wanted to form a new steering group to bridge the divide between the CPA and Washington. He agreed. I drafted a memo, which I shared with Colin and Don, establishing the Iraq Stabilization Group (ISG). Robert Blackwill, with whom I had previously served in government, would lead the effort. Bob had just returned from a stint as ambassador to India, but it was his black belt in bureaucratic politics that made him the right person for the job. He was like a bull in a china shop, and I knew that there would be tensions with others. I could tolerate the turbulence, though, because Bob would make sure that the NSC had a voice.

A few days after the memo to Don and Colin, Anna called to say that David Sanger of the New York Times had caught wind of the formation of the group. She thought that we should give him the story so that it would be accurate. I know, too, that Anna thought it would make me look good—in control of what was a deteriorating situation in Iraq.

The story that emerged caused a sensation. My effort to explain that the Pentagon retained direct supervision and responsibility for the CPA was swept away by the perception that I’d shoved Don aside and taken operational control of the civilian effort in Iraq. The problem was exacerbated by the Defense Department, which conveyed the impression that Don had been caught off guard by the group’s creation. This happened despite the fact that Larry Di Rita, Don’s spokesman, had agreed to talk to Sanger so that it would be clear that we were all on the same page. I had talked to Larry personally about this issue.

The state visit of President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya took place the morning that Sanger’s article appeared. As usual, I’d seen the President first thing that day, and he didn’t seem too concerned by the press coverage. But an hour or so later, Andy Card found me as we waited to start the arrival ceremony and said that the President had heard screams of indignation from the Pentagon. “You need to talk to him,” he said.

That afternoon I went to see the President. “You need to make it right with Don,” he said. “The Pentagon is really spun up.” I said that I hadn’t intended to cause a problem and understood that the coverage was pretty sensational. “See if the Vice President can help,” he said.

I went to see the Vice President right away, who said he would indeed talk to Don. The next morning at the NSC the President reaffirmed Don’s role in overseeing the CPA and Jerry. It was the right thing to do under the circumstances, but I felt undermined and knew that it would be even more difficult to manage the situation in Iraq. Outside the Situation Room after the meeting, Don said, “What you did really hurt the President.” I held my tongue, resisting the temptation to say, “You don’t think that mess in Iraq is hurting the President?”

Much to my surprise, though, rather than doubling down on his authority over the CPA, Don took the opportunity to wash his hands of the political situation. In an earlier conversation, Don had told Colin and me that Jerry Bremer did not report to him but to the White House. “That isn’t right, Don,” I insisted. But he didn’t back down. “Look at the President’s directive,” I said. He let the issue drop. Then, after the ISG flap, he told everyone that Bremer now reported to me. This was a ludicrous statement. We needed better communication, but I couldn’t be a substitute for the secretary of defense in overseeing the execution of policy.

I hadn’t realized how much Don bristled at what he thought to be White House interference in the chain of command. He was unhappy that the President had met with Jerry alone at the time of his appointment. And he was furious that I called Jerry periodically to check in on developments in Iraq. I had no choice, because the difficult relationship between the two men became one of benign neglect by Don. Jerry and I started to talk every day as we began to map out a strategy to return sovereignty to the Iraqi people. Bob Blackwill deployed to Iraq, and the United Nations would soon appoint Lakhdar Brahimi, a seasoned diplomat, to help with that work.

Frankly, the situation was uncomfortable. I felt stuck with the Iraqi political transition and far deeper into operational matters than I believed wise for a national security advisor. Yet when Bob Blackwill called me in early November to say that Jerry was about to deliver another, revised schedule for the transition, I was very glad I’d intervened.

ON SUNDAY, November 9, 2003, I decided to attend a Redskins football game with my good friend Gene Washington. The team I liked to root for, the Cleveland Browns, was, as usual, already out of the playoff hunt, and I couldn’t have cared less about the Redskins or the Seahawks. But I did look forward to a relaxing afternoon enjoying my favorite pastime—football.

A few minutes before halftime, my Secret Service agent said that Bob Blackwill was on the secure phone (we always carried one) from Baghdad. I thought to myself that it was pretty late on a Sunday evening in Iraq, so I was immediately concerned that something was really wrong. “Jerry is about to issue a new set of political guidelines tomorrow,” Bob said.

“What?” I asked. After the “seven points” debacle, I couldn’t believe my ears. “You have to tell him that the President has to see what he’s going to say,” I said.

“You’d better tell him,” Bob replied.

I immediately put in a call to Jerry and said that I thought the President might have a view about the next steps in Iraq. Jerry agreed and said that he’d call him in the morning. “Jerry,” I said, “maybe you’d better get on a plane and come to Washington.” Again he agreed and said that he could arrive by Wednesday.

The next morning I went to the Oval and told the President about the conversation. “Why did you do that?” the President barked, perhaps still smarting from the ISG flap. “Does Don agree?”

“Mr. President,” I said, “I wanted to tell you first, and I will call Don. And if you want me to tell Jerry not to come I’ll do that too. But don’t be surprised when the United States has a new plan for Iraq’s political transition that you haven’t seen.” I immediately thought that this might have sounded insubordinate. But the President and I could speak frankly when we were alone.

He kind of smiled. “Okay, when is he coming?” he asked.

“Wednesday,” I replied.

Jerry did come on Wednesday, and the NSC met with him. We agreed to develop a new plan that would satisfy Sistani’s criteria. Eventually it would lead to the negotiation of the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL), which would provide direction for the country in preparation for elections. We would move toward the establishment of an interim government to oversee the transition. Elections would be held in 2005.

Through the ups and downs of that work, Jerry gently guided the Iraqis to write a political document that became the basis of the Iraqi Constitution. I was at a seder at the home of the Israeli ambassador on the night the TAL was completed. Jerry called me, I called the President, and we all celebrated that important step on the road to Iraqi self-rule. A grand ceremony was planned to launch the TAL on Friday, March 5, 2004. Jerry called that morning, saying that the Iraqis had turned out in droves for the event. Most of the leaders were there with their wives and children, he told me. “Some with several of their wives,” he quipped. But by the time the children’s choir had run out of songs to sing, the Shia leaders still had not arrived. It turned out there had been a last-minute disagreement about the document’s language. Fortunately, the glitch was resolved over the weekend, and the TAL went into force on March 8, 2004.

This political progress came against a backdrop of increasing violence and a worsening security situation. The insurgents were able to disrupt the reconstruction effort seriously, exploiting vulnerabilities in the electrical grid that we were trying to rebuild. Bob Blackwill had sent a memo to me in September 2003 suggesting that the President deploy 40,000 more troops. I hadn’t discussed it with the President at the time, but I went to him in November to suggest that he raise the possibility with the Pentagon again. He did and received the same answer: we had enough troops on the ground.

In part everyone was counting on the rebuilt Iraqi security forces to take on some of the burden. But the effort to establish a new Iraqi army was proceeding slowly. Reconstruction of the police forces was even more challenging. The problem was hardly unique to Iraq; the hardest job in a post-conflict environment is to build a reliable police force, free of corruption and competent to handle the full range of security threats from insurgencies to everyday crimes. We had seen the problem in places as different as the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Liberia.

Under Frank Miller’s leadership, the defense policy arm of the ISG did its best to focus the Pentagon on the security problem but always received the same answer: the security situation will improve when the politics improve. But it’s hard to win the hearts and minds of people when you can’t protect them.

Still, a lot had been accomplished, and the President wanted to visit the troops in Baghdad to offer our men and women in uniform his gratitude and support. Joe Hagin, the deputy chief of staff, was put in charge of finding a way to get the President safely into and out of Baghdad. The feat Joe managed to pull off was extraordinary.

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the President went to the ranch for what all but a few aides thought would be a well-deserved holiday weekend. That evening, the President and I climbed into an unmarked wine-colored van and left the ranch. We wore baseball caps, prompting the President to say later that we looked like a couple on the way to shop at Wal-mart. Only First Lady Laura Bush and the head of the President’s Secret Service detail knew where we were headed.

Because the Secret Service couldn’t use the usual motorcade procedures, our driver was forced to cope with heavy traffic on Interstate 35. “What is this?” the President asked.

“A traffic jam,” I answered, thinking that he probably hadn’t seen one in a while. Nonetheless, we made our way to the airstrip in Waco and flew to Andrews Air Force Base, where we’d board Air Force One.

The flight to Baghdad was surreal. Andy Card, Joe Hagin, and I sat with Dan Bartlett, the President’s communications director, in the staff cabin. There were only four press representatives on board. As we approached Baghdad, Colonel Tillman, Air Force One’s pilot, began to take evasive maneuvers that we could all feel. Then he lowered the lights so that the cabin was dark with the exception of the blue digital time display. It came to me that we should go up to the President’s cabin and offer to pray with him. He is a religious man, and at times like that, religious people pray. There in the darkness on the presidential aircraft, we each offered a short prayer. When we returned to the cabin about ten minutes before landing, I closed my eyes to pray again. In my head I heard a voice say, “and keep them safe from hurt, harm or danger.” They were words that I hadn’t heard since my father died—the words of a prayer that he’d always uttered when someone was leaving on a trip. “Thank you, Daddy,” I said softly to myself.

We landed at the airport and walked up the stairs to a makeshift dining hall. As we waited outside, I marveled at standing in Saddam Hussein’s airport. Those thoughts were short-lived, though, as the President burst into a room filled with six hundred U.S. soldiers. The place went wild. George W. Bush had a way with the troops. Though the soldiers hadn’t known he was coming, cameras started flying out of pockets all over the place. It was pandemonium.

I sat with several enlisted personnel and a couple of officers. We talked about their hometowns, how they had come to join the military, and a little about football. When I thanked them for their service, they returned the sentiment. It was a wonderful, reaffirming time for me—for all of us.

After two hours or so, we boarded Air Force One again and took off. About that time, news stations started reporting that the President of the United States had made a surprise visit to Baghdad.

DESPITE THE TRIALS and tribulations in Iraq, we registered some gains. For instance, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was beginning to have a salutary effect on other parts of the non-proliferation agenda.

We’d been trying for some time to get the Chinese to play a more active role in reining in the North Korean nuclear program. The President had been right that only Beijing had enough leverage to convince Kim Jong-il to abandon his aggressive stance toward the international community. Much of the problem with the Agreed Framework was that it had left the United States negotiating bilaterally with the North Koreans, allowing Pyongyang to play the South Koreans, the Europeans, and the Chinese off of us by seeking concessions from each party individually.

Now we had a different idea. Rather than the bilateral negotiations with the North that were being urged on us by our allies, we proposed a six-party framework with China in the chair. Beijing had initially resisted the idea when Colin proposed it in March 2003. President Bush had been so frustrated with the Chinese that he’d raised the ante in a phone call with Chinese President Ziang Jemin. Before getting on the call, he had asked what more he could say to move Beijing. I suggested that he raise the specter, ever so gently, of a military option against North Korea. He liked the idea, and when Ziang began to recite the timeworn mantra about the need for the United States to show more flexibility with the North, the President stopped him. A bit more directly than I’d expected, he told Ziang that he was under a lot of pressure from hard-liners to use military force and added, on his own, that one also couldn’t rule out a nuclear Japan if the North remained unconstrained.

We’ll probably never know what role that conversation—or the action in Iraq—played in the obvious redirection of Chinese strategy toward the North Korean nuclear problem. By the summer Beijing had agreed to the establishment of the Six-Party Talks. That allowed us to unify our policy approach with our allies Japan and South Korea and put pressure on China to take an active role in solving the problem. We invited Russia to join as well, given its proximity to North Korea and its long-standing ties with Pyongyang. The forum met for the first time in Beijing in late August 2003.

Even more startling developments were emerging in Libya. In the spring of 2003 we heard through the British that Muammar Qaddafi wanted to open negotiations with the United States and the United Kingdom, with the carrot being an end to Libya’s WMD programs. At first we didn’t put much faith in the overture but we ultimately decided to send a joint CIA/MI5 team to assess the situation. It returned with a positive report: Qaddafi was serious.

The negotiations had to be conducted in absolute secrecy; any breach might lead the Libyan dictator to abandon the effort. So without the knowledge of most of the government, Bob Joseph from the NSC and William Ehrman and David Landsman from the United Kingdom, together with representatives from the intelligence agencies, led the negotiations with the Libyans. Bob is as tough and skeptical a conservative as one can imagine. So when he told me that we could get the deal done, I realized that we were going to achieve an incredible breakthrough. Nigel Sheinwald, who’d replaced David Manning in Tony Blair’s office, and I oversaw the effort on behalf of our bosses.

As we were getting close to agreement, though, the Libyans started to balk at certain demands for transparency in the destruction of their WMD. It looked as if the whole effort was unraveling as Tripoli started to deny the existence of programs to which it had already admitted. Then we got a break: a ship from Malaysia carrying a suspicious cargo bound for Libya was stopped by German and Italian authorities and diverted for inspection. On board were five large shipping containers labeled “used machine parts” later determined to have been carrying thousands of centrifuge components—including some emanating from the A. Q. Kahn network. Exposed in the midst of negotiations, the Libyans retreated from their hard-line stance and an agreement was back within reach.

The successful interdiction had been the result of the President’s Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI). Announced the previous May in Poland, the PSI created a network of countries that shared intelligence information concerning suspicious air, sea, and land shipments. If the intelligence was strong enough, a country might agree to inspect the cargo in question or even deny overflight rights to a suspected trafficker. The PSI had no secretariat, no building, and no bureaucracy. It was a virtual institution and had been an unsung example of cooperation in the assault on proliferation worldwide. It was also an example of a coalition of the willing. The UN might have debated the details of such an arrangement for years. But the informality and flexibility of the PSI made it possible for countries as disparate as Russia and Japan, Australia and Saudi Arabia, to be members.

The Libyan affair also helped us understand better how the shadowy networks of proliferation were interacting with rogue regimes. The A. Q. Khan ring, about which we’d learned in 2001, was a big part of the story. The CIA, with the cooperation of several countries, would soon arrest key members of the network, and in 2004 A. Q. Khan himself would be put under house arrest in Pakistan. Though there would be many ups and downs with Musharraf about the nuclear scientist’s fate, we were pretty certain that he was no longer plying his wares to rogue regimes. (In fact, he would be released in 2009.)

On December 19 we were set finally to tell the world about Libya’s disarmament. That would show that dictators could be persuaded or perhaps coerced to give up their weapons of mass destruction. The announcement would be made by the Libyan foreign minister and Colonel Qaddafi, and then welcomed by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.

As the day dragged on, Nigel and I had to manage the anxiety of our respective bosses, who were waiting to tell the world what had transpired. It was getting quite late in Britain, so we decided to have the prime minister go first. The President would still have time to catch the evening news feed in the United States. Nigel had an open line to U.K. sources in Libya, but there was nothing to report. As it turned out, there was an important soccer match underway in Libya that night and the “Brother Leader” was taking his time. Finally, the U.K. source read the Libyan statements to Nigel, who was on the phone with me.

“Well?” I asked.

“Good enough,” he replied. Though Qaddafi’s statement rambled on about a green revolution (Islamic, not environmental), the Libyan foreign minister’s statement satisfied the explicit demands of the agreement and we had what we needed. Muammar Qaddafi would give up his WMD and seek to end Libya’s isolation from the international community. These dangerous weapons would travel over 5,000 miles from Tripoli to Tennessee, where they would be dismantled at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The Saturday before the Libyan announcement, I’d called in Dan Bartlett to tell him about the coming good news. I was surprised when he looked disappointed. “I thought you were going to tell me that we had found Saddam,” he said. “That will be next week,” I said in jest. The truth is, I was more than a little annoyed that Dan did not seem to understand the importance of what we’d achieved.

ONE WEEK after that comment, I was preparing for the thirty or so friends who were coming to my house for a Christmas party and carol singing on Sunday, December 12. Just before the revelers were to arrive, I got a call from the President. “Don just called,” he said. “The military thinks they’ve got Saddam.”

Don and Steve were among the guests, and we huddled for a moment in the kitchen out of earshot of the others. Don said that he didn’t want to say anything until they could get some more positive identification of the man, who’d been found hiding in a spider hole at a farmhouse outside Tikrit. We carried on singing, but I certainly had a hard time concentrating on the Christmas cheer. I’m sure the others did too.

The next morning at about 3:00 my phone rang. “We got him,” Jerry Bremer said, waking me from a not-too-sound sleep. I called the President and woke him up. He called Don. It was true. The men of Task Force 121, assisted by troops from the First Brigade Combat Team of the army’s 4th Infantry Division, had captured the dictator of Iraq. The man who’d launched wars against his neighbors and brutalized his people for more than twenty years was in our hands. “My name is Saddam Hussein,” he’d said as he was captured. “I am the president of Iraq. And I want to negotiate.”

I got up and dressed quickly to make my way to the office. There was a lot to do to prepare for Jerry’s announcement, which would come in a matter of hours. I called the startled Dan Bartlett. This time he was excited by the news. Jerry went to the podium surrounded by members of the Iraqi Governing Council to tell the assembled press of Saddam’s capture. “We got him,” he said, repeating what he’d said to me hours earlier. The Iraqi press erupted in jubilation. It was a very satisfying moment, but I remember thinking that we’d made a mistake. An Iraqi should have made that announcement, I thought. But it was too late to make the capture of Saddam an Iraqi moment, not an American one.

AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, I was tired and ready for a break. So much had transpired, and most of it was of enormous historic significance, with all of the tension and stress that brought. But I was also enjoying experiences that had an almost fairy-tale quality. The most extraordinary of them had been the royal state visit to England in November 2003 and the chance to stay in Buckingham Palace. When we arrived, I was escorted to my room, where my own personal maid waited to unpack my belongings. I instinctively started to help her. Seeing that, Colin Powell, who, with his wife, Alma, was staying in the next room, said, “You’re in her way. They’ve been doing this for three hundred years.”

That night Colin, Alma, and I had a drink in the sitting room. What would our parents think? I thought. Then Alma and I drank a toast to her father and mine. Two little black girls from Birmingham had come a long way. Then, as Prince Charles escorted me into the elaborate dinner as the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” I once again wished that I could tell my parents about this incredible experience. And so I did in a little prayer just before going to sleep.

I left a few days before Christmas for my aunt’s house in Norfolk, but work followed me, relentlessly triggered by a daily barrage of news—some good, some bad—from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. Yet with the capture of Saddam, our year ended on a high note. Certainly, we believed, the news from Tikrit would soon bring an end to the insurgency. Earlier in the year, on the very day when Steve Hadley had met the press concerning the Niger controversy, Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, had been killed in a violent shoot-out in Mosul. Surely the now-headless horsemen of the Baath Party would soon give up the fight.

We were also prepared for elections in Afghanistan and believed that we were about to put that country on a sound political footing. The Bonn process, which had set the country on a path toward representative government, was not yet showing the wear and incoherence that would soon become evident. In fact, the NATO allies were stepping forward to join us in the effort. New members from East-Central Europe were enthusiastically fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan; the wisdom of extending NATO membership to the former Communist states had become increasingly clear.

The war on terror was progressing too, as we captured more and more important al Qaeda field generals. In Southeast Asia we were seeing results from counterinsurgency cooperation in the region. In 2002 new fronts in the war on terror had emerged as evidence linked al Qaeda to the Abu Sayyaf insurgency in the southern Philippines. Additionally, suspected al Qaeda affiliates threatened the stability of a struggling new democratic government in Indonesia by bombing a Bali nightclub. But by 2004 those threats would recede with the capture of terrorist mastermind Hambali and the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as president of Indonesia, which ushered in a new era of democratic stability in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.

The redesign of our national security structures was continuing too, with all of the growing pains that accompany major institutional change. In that regard, I’d made what would prove to be one of my most important and effective personnel changes. Wayne Downing, the first counterterrorism chief, had stepped down to be replaced by General John Gordon, with whom I’d worked in the administration of George H. W. Bush. They’d done good work in establishing the post-9/11 role. But when I met Fran Townsend, a tough-talking former prosecutor from New York, who also happened to be female, I knew I’d found the right person to take hold of all that was required in that position. Fran had won a conviction against the notorious Gambino crime family; she could handle al Qaeda and Washington, I reasoned. But Fran had also served in the Clinton Justice Department, leading some in the conservative punditry to question her loyalty to the President. Karl Rove gave me cover on this one, tamping down a brewing conflict with some of our friends on the Hill and in the press.

The country was not yet safe, but it was most certainly safer than it had been on September 11, 2001. We entered the election fray of 2004 ready to keep up the fight abroad and gearing up to defend the President’s record at home.