No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

5 VLADIMIR PUTIN

IN 2001 IT WAS still the case that nothing in international politics was as newsworthy as the first meeting between the new president of the United States and the president of Russia. To a certain extent this was a holdover from the days of U.S.-Soviet summits, when the President and the general secretary of the Communist Party would meet. Kennedy-Khrushchev, Nixon-Brezhnev, Carter-Brezhnev, Reagan-Gorbachev, and the last one, Bush-Gorbachev: the very recounting of the names brings back vividly the drama associated with those encounters. At that time the meetings were valued, in part, for the signal that the conflict between the superpowers was under control. Since Moscow and Washington were talking, they could not possibly be contemplating nuclear war. Yet even without the tensions of the Cold War, the meetings retained their salience. And the President’s first encounter with Vladimir Putin was highly anticipated.

The meeting was to be held in Slovenia prior to the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy. It was intended to allow the two men to get acquainted and to address, face-to-face for the first time, the issue of missile defense. One of Governor Bush’s key campaign initiatives, laid out in a speech at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, in September 1999, was to transform U.S. military forces, both conventional and nuclear. The conventional side of military transformation was largely driven by the belief that the United States should exploit its technological sophistication to build more agile, lethal, and readily deployable forces. The Cold War was over, but the U.S. military still looked as if it were waiting to engage Soviet forces across the north German plain. The then governor called for its modernization by leveraging innovations in stealth, precision weaponry, and information gathering and analysis. He said that as president he would direct the secretary of defense to improve the integration of the military and intelligence communities to enhance the military’s special operations forces and long-strike capabilities. He also pledged to commit $20 billion to the research and development of new military technologies to replace outdated weapons programs.

A problem arose when we were asked what military systems we would actually cancel, a discussion bound to anger constituents in some states. We settled on the hapless Crusader, a much-maligned artillery system, and moved on to more fertile ground, such as advocating for greater readiness and for improvements in military housing. Don Rumsfeld would eventually embark on a campaign to fundamentally restructure U.S. conventional forces.

The nuclear side of the equation represented an even more dramatic break. The arcane nuclear strategy of the Cold War rested on the premise that the Soviet Union and the United States had to be vulnerable to each other to prevent nuclear war. “Mutually assured destruction” would deny the advantage in a conflict to both sides; it would not be possible to launch a first strike with offensive forces and then protect against a counterattack with missile defenses given the sheer size of the arsenals. Each side had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads adding up to tens of thousands of times the force of the bombs that had destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, making it difficult to see how either country could have survived in any event. Nonetheless, the two sides entered into a web of arms control agreements aimed at maintaining this equilibrium, including the Anti–Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972, which limited defenses to negligible levels.

In 1983 Ronald Reagan challenged the premise of this strategy. He couldn’t understand why defenses were bad and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), aimed at making nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” But among the high priests of arms control, SDI was a threat to strategic stability.

Even those who weren’t wedded to the mutually assured destruction theology found the prospects for the success of Reagan’s approach fairly dim. The U.S. defenses would have to literally knock down thousands of nuclear warheads. The science, they said, did not work, and even if it did, if even a few missiles leaked through, the destruction would be devastating. Reagan nevertheless pursued the initiative, which resulted in important breakthroughs in command and control that ironically improved U.S. conventional war-fighting capabilities. But the dream of a national shield to protect the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons died with the end of the Cold War. Reagan and Gorbachev went on to sign important arms control agreements, and the Anti–Ballistic Missile Treaty remained intact. The same approach—new agreements and maintenance of the treaty—remained true for George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

For George W. Bush, however, the landscape had changed dramatically and brought a new set of urgent challenges and a reason to remake nuclear strategy. It had always been difficult to imagine a nuclear exchange between Moscow and Washington. The “bolt out of the blue,” where one side launched an unprovoked attack, would have been suicidal. The slightly more plausible scenario was a nuclear exchange rising out of a conventional conflict in the center of Europe. After all, throughout the Cold War the most highly trained forces of the two alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, had faced off across the line that divided Germany. The Soviet and U.S. militaries were thus prepared for the eventuality of a nuclear clash, and every president (and general secretary) had to be ready to think the unthinkable. I spent a good deal of my early career doing precisely that and served in 1986–1987 as a staff officer in the Nuclear and Chemical Division (NUCHEM, pronounced “nuke ’em”) of the Joint Staff.

By 2001 this nightmare scenario was no longer imaginable. The Soviet Union had collapsed and the Red Army was out of Europe, withdrawn deep into Russian territory. Germany was unified, and the frontline states—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary—were members of NATO. There was no Warsaw Pact. What possible scenario existed for nuclear conflict between the United States and Russia, which were no longer even enemies?

That question led President Bush to propose radical reductions in nuclear arsenals without the extensive and laborious negotiations of the Cold War period. The President was prepared to unilaterally reduce U.S.-deployed warheads to a reasonable level and let the Russians simply follow suit. That was to be accompanied by a revision to the ABM Treaty or, better still, mutual abrogation, allowing the development of small-scale defenses to be used against the growing and very real missile threat from rogue nations such as North Korea and Iran.

That was too much for the national security establishment. Prior to the meeting with Putin, the hottest topic in Washington seemed to be whether to preserve the thirty-year-old ABM Treaty from an era long past. The arms control debates of years gone by were suddenly reborn in Moscow, Washington, and Europe. The discussion centered on “strategic stability,” but I’ve come to believe that that was not the real issue for the Russians.

I do not mean to suggest that Moscow, particularly the Russian general staff, was unconcerned about the military balance. But in a larger sense, an end to arms control as we had come to know it also meant an end to the equality between the Kremlin and the White House that it had come to symbolize. The Russians liked the big, years-long negotiations, which then produced treaty signings and grand summits. The arms control regimes, dating back to the Nixon administration, had been accompanied by the Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a document that had essentially written the rules of the road for the two superpowers to “manage” international affairs.

Russia, the Soviet successor state, was a great power but not a superpower in the Cold War sense of the term. Only in terms of nuclear weapons was Russia by any stretch of the imagination equal to the United States. The Russian national security elite said all of the right things about cooperation in the post–Cold War era and even acted that way much of the time. But deep inside there was a nostalgia for the time when Moscow had stood astride the international system, challenging Washington and its allies with an alternative view of how human history would evolve. Arms control and the ABM Treaty were integral to that reality and thus talismans against decline.

It was against this backdrop that we arrived at the sixteenth-century castle of Brdo outside Ljubljana, Slovenia, quite a bit earlier than the Russian delegation did. George W. Bush had a well-deserved reputation for being on time, even early, for meetings. In fact, I once told the President that he would be able to end his term six months sooner because he was so early for every engagement.

When the protocol chief announced that the Russians had arrived, the President walked out of the room and into the courtyard in order to meet them halfway. As Putin started toward him, I was struck by his physical bearing. He was not very tall, maybe five feet, eight inches, but had broad shoulders and an athlete’s gait. He seemed a bit shy, even nervous. When I shook his hand and gave the customary Russian greeting, “Ochen priyatno” (Good to meet you), it suddenly occurred to me that we had met before.

In 1992 I had gone to St. Petersburg to meet with the reformist mayor, the late Anatoly Sobchak, who was seeking the advice of several Stanford professors about the creation of a new European University to be located in the grand former capital of the Russian Empire. That evening, Sobchak hosted a reception for our delegation. Sobchak and his wife were royalists who loved the aura of the nineteenth century and were doing all they could to channel the glorious past of St. Petersburg into modern Russia. The room was filled with people dressed in all black (as continental intelligentsia often did at the turn of the twentieth century). Many of them seemed to be named Tolstoy or Pushkin, having either real or appropriated familial connections to the great literary and artistic figures of the past. There was also one man who looked quite out of place, dressed in a suit befitting a high-ranking Soviet bureaucrat; he was introduced to me as the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin.

I didn’t say anything about that first encounter, focusing instead on the business at hand. The two presidents went into a room for a one-on-one session. Rarely are such sessions truly “under four eyes,” and in that case I accompanied President Bush while Vladimir Rushailo attended with Putin. The Russian national security advisor was a former interior minister and general, who, like me, had only recently been appointed to the national security post. He looked like a wrestler, but his most noticeable characteristic was his eyebrows—or rather what seemed to be a single eyebrow that stretched across his forehead.

The two leaders started with pleasantries, but it did not take long for them to get down to business. President Bush said to Putin, “I have to know whom you trust. Who is the person we should turn to if there are sensitive matters between us?”

“Sergei Ivanov, the minister of defense,” Putin answered.

The President nodded and said, “For me it will be Condi.” I wondered if anyone else had noticed the asymmetry. I was the President’s “go-to person”; Rushailo was apparently just along for the ride.

That was how my relationship with Sergei Ivanov began. Ivanov was, like Putin, a former KGB officer with extraordinary linguistic capability. He looked a little like Putin, blond and blue-eyed, but with more delicate features than his boss. He spoke English perfectly and with only the slightest accent, having, he said, listened to rock music to hone his skills. Sergei was tough and somewhat suspicious of the United States, but he was dependable. He never told me that he would do something that he did not do. He was an unfailing conduit to Putin on the most sensitive matters through changes in positions and titles. (He would later become first deputy prime minister and an unsuccessful candidate for Putin’s endorsement for the Russian presidency, and I, of course, became secretary of state.) Our channel remained the most important and discreet one between the White House and the Kremlin.

During the meeting, Putin and the President talked about a variety of issues. The President said that he intended to get out of the ABM Treaty and would prefer to do so mutually. Calmly, Putin said that he could never agree to that but did not threaten any retaliation. They agreed to see if they could find a nonconfrontational way forward.

After touching on some other issues, Putin suddenly raised the problem of Pakistan. He excoriated the Pervez Musharraf regime for its support of extremists and for the connections of the Pakistani army and intelligence services to the Taliban and al Qaeda. Those extremists were all being funded by Saudi Arabia, he said, and it was only a matter of time until it resulted in a major catastrophe. We, of course, knew of the connections between Pakistan and the Taliban and had been hammering Islamabad, as the Clinton administration had, to break its ties with extremists. But I was taken aback by Putin’s alarm and vehemence and chalked it up to Russian bitterness toward Pakistan for supporting the Afghan mujahideen, who had defeated the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Putin, though, was right: the Taliban and al Qaeda were time bombs that would explode on September 11, 2001. Pakistan’s relationship with the extremists would become one of our gravest problems. Putin never let us forget it, recalling that conversation time and time again.

During the meeting, Putin shared a rather syrupy story about a cross that his mother had given him; to be fair, the President was looking for a way to establish a more personal connection and asked about the cross that the Russian was wearing, so Putin did not initiate the story. It seems that a fire had consumed his dacha but workmen had retrieved the cross and returned it to Putin. I never really knew what to make of the story, because to this day it’s hard for me to imagine Putin, this former servant of atheistic communism, as a religious man.

At the press conference afterward, President Bush was asked if he trusted Putin. The thought flashed through my mind that we hadn’t covered that question in our preparation. It was a question fraught with pitfalls. The President answered, “Yes.” That might have been okay, because “no” would have put the relationship on a pretty bad footing from the start. But then the President added, “I looked the man in the eye … I was able to get a sense of his soul.” I visibly stiffened. It was an awkward way to get out of the predicament. We were never able to escape the perception that the President had naively trusted Putin and then been betrayed. There was little room to convince critics that the circumstances of 2001 and the relationship with Vladimir Putin then were very different from what would later come to pass.

IN FACT, Putin’s warnings came as terrorism and al Qaeda were beginning to make their presence felt more acutely during the months of June and July.

When we first arrived in Washington after the election, we began a series of meetings with the outgoing Clinton national security team. I met Sandy Berger at the White House, and we talked about a variety of issues. He was very focused on the Middle East and the last throes of the Camp David process and on a possible presidential visit to North Korea.

Sandy and I talked about the functioning of the NSC and of the various departments. During one of our conversations, he said something that was often repeated after 9/11: he noted that I would spend far more time dealing with terrorism than I expected, recalling the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Not much more was said.

Sandy also offered to have Dick Clarke, the NSC’s counterterrorism advisor, brief me separately. Sandy dropped by at the beginning of that meeting and then departed. I suspect that Clarke had wanted to have Sandy’s imprimatur so that I would listen attentively to his concerns. He needn’t have worried. I knew that there was a serious threat. I’d made that clear in a radio station interview in Detroit during the campaign, stating, “There needs to be better cooperation [among U.S. intelligence agencies] because we don’t want to wake up one day and find that Osama bin Laden has been successful on our territory.”

Nonetheless, I thought that Clarke’s presentation was impressive, though short on operational content. There was a lot that described al Qaeda but not very much about what to do. He made the point that al Qaeda was a network dedicated to the destruction of the United States. There were numerous slides with the faces of al Qaeda operatives and a discussion of their safe haven in Afghanistan. There was very little discussion of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. At the end I asked Clarke and his team whether we were doing all we could to counter al Qaeda. He made mention of some covert activities and said that he would later brief me on some other efforts.

That encounter solidified my view, shared by Steve Hadley, that we ought to keep the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism team in place despite Dick Clarke’s awful reputation with many who’d worked with him. In my first staff meeting, I asked the senior directors (the heads of the regional and functional directorates within the NSC) to give me their most urgent priorities. Dick Clarke sent such a memorandum to me on January 25, laying out the case for stepped-up efforts against al Qaeda. Ironically, only one paragraph, in an attachment to the memorandum, addressed al Qaeda and the homeland threat. It included a line that suggested that the FBI was following sleeper cells inside the United States. Most of the memo was devoted to two options: arming the Northern Alliance, the organized resistance to the Taliban, and increasing counterterrorism cooperation with Uzbekistan, the strategically located country from which many military and intelligence activities had to be carried out. Dick also favored the development of an “armed Predator,” an intelligence drone that could locate a target and fire on it.

I called Clarke to my office on January 31 and essentially told him that he had a green light to develop a strategy. There was no need for a Principals Committee meeting because Don, Colin, and the Vice President had all been briefed on al Qaeda. I said that George Tenet had briefed the President during the transition. What was needed now was a strategy not to “roll back” al Qaeda but to eliminate the threat.

The President had made clear that he didn’t want his administration to be put into the position of the Clinton administration after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998 and the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The only real option then had been a “standoff”—one in which cruise missiles or maybe bombers could be used from international waters or U.S. military bases, but nothing more because there was no regional support. In fact, our administration did not respond militarily to the Cole incident because we didn’t want to launch a feckless cruise missile attack and leave al Qaeda intact, allowing Osama bin Laden to crow that he had survived the United States’ military response. We needed a more comprehensive approach.

Steve and I discussed the need for a companion to the strategy Dick was developing that would address the problem of regional support for counterterrorism and the special role of Pakistan. Without a way to get Pakistan to shift from supporting the Taliban, any strategy would fail. We brought in Zalmay Khalilzad, who’d been born and educated in Afghanistan and who was a true South Asia expert, to lead that effort.

We were also concerned that we had too little contact with the south of the country. The warlords who composed the Northern Alliance were largely Uzbek and Tajik and occupied less than 10 percent of the territory of Afghanistan. The cultural, political, and geographic weight of the country was in the southern Pashtun belt in the strategic areas of Helmand and Kandahar. Though the CIA had well-developed relationships in the north, there was far less contact with opposition leaders in the Taliban’s southern stronghold. Khalilzad and the CIA were told to develop a strategy for the south.

The work proceeded throughout the spring of 2001. There was an increased effort to pressure the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden to a country where he could face appropriate justice. The CIA also began developing a presidential finding to implement large-scale programs of covert aid to the Taliban’s adversaries. Findings are authorized by the President and briefed to key members of Congress and members of the intelligence committees. It was important to get the work started, but we knew that nothing in the strategy was likely to have a short-term impact on al Qaeda. I told the President that the idea was to seriously damage al Qaeda in a period of three to five years. Any terrorist threat in the short term would have to be dealt with in the context of the existing strategy and operational structures.

Thus, when George Tenet told the President toward the end of May that he was worried about “chatter” among the terrorists concerning a coming attack, the existing counterterrorism machinery was mobilized.

The threat was assumed to be an overseas one. We were concerned about potential attacks in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Genoa, Italy, the site of the 2001 G8 summit. The period between late May and mid-July was intense as we tried to counter a maddeningly nebulous threat. Don and Colin and I discussed the situation almost daily during our morning phone call, and the two secretaries acted to secure U.S. assets and interests abroad. The State Department, for example, initiated a program in Saudi Arabia to issue express visas as a security measure to keep long lines of foreigners from forming at the embassy. By June 21, the U.S. Embassy in Yemen was closed and the U.S. Central Command had raised the force protection condition level for U.S. troops in six countries to the highest level in anticipation of an imminent attack. Special arrangements were made concerning Genoa, including shutting down the airspace over and around the city, since some of the potential plots involved airplanes.

George Tenet was in the Oval Office every morning and briefed the President about the threat situation. He and I met several times a week and reviewed what was being done. George contends in his book, At the Center of the Storm, that he called me on July 10 to sound the alarm about an impending attack, specifically claiming that increased numbers of Islamic extremists were traveling to Afghanistan. I do remember receiving a call from George in which he said, “I’m worried about the chatter.” I asked what he wanted to do, and he suggested that he come over immediately. I readily agreed.

My recollection of the meeting is not very crisp because we were discussing the threat every day. There was a presentation that compiled the threat information that we had been reviewing daily along with some new intelligence. I remember asking George if there was more that the CIA could do to capture Abu Zubaydah, whom we believed to be al Qaeda’s chief facilitator and who might therefore know the plot details. The Vice President made calls to Jordan and Saudi Arabia to solicit their help in finding him and to emphasize our concern for their security. Together with the raised levels of alert for State and Defense, I thought we were doing what needed to be done.

At the same time, Dick Clarke convened the Counter-terrorism Security Group (CSG) daily, sometimes twice in one day. The group was made up of senior counterterrorism experts from the counterterrorist departments of the CIA, the FBI, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Departments of Defense, Justice, and State. It was their responsibility to sort through the intelligence and to make certain that all relevant agencies were taking steps to counter the threat.

Later, one of the accusations leveled at us was that we did not pay “high-level” attention to the terrorism threat in June and July. In 1999, as the millennium approached, there had been a spike in threat reporting, and indeed a plot had been disrupted before it could materialize. At that time, Sandy Berger had held daily Principals meetings. The theory post-9/11 was that had the Principals met every day and “shaken the trees,” something might have fallen out to give us a clue that a homeland attack was coming.

The problem, however, was not the absence of effort to counter the threat; the weakness in our effort was systemic. One of its primary causes was the seam that existed between “domestic” and “foreign” intelligence. For example, electronic surveillance was artificially divided between the National Security Agency, which was responsible for monitoring the communications of terrorists outside the United States, and the FBI, which was supposed to conduct surveillance of suspected terrorists on U.S. soil. This split meant that no agency was responsible for collecting information transmitted between U.S.-based operatives and foreign terrorist cells.

The same foreign/domestic split kept the CIA and FBI from working well together. The FBI treated the internal terrorism problem as a law enforcement matter, not an intelligence mission. And the deliberations about internal threats were not well informed by information that the CIA was getting from foreign sources. Prevention was secondary to punishing terrorists after they were caught committing a crime. Agents had to be careful not to gather evidence in ways that might get a case thrown out of U.S. courts: think Law and Order. This law enforcement orientation led to a wall between criminal and intelligence investigations within the Bureau itself. And the FBI was very decentralized, with less-than-optimal communication between the powerful field offices and national-level officials. It is not surprising, therefore, that FBI headquarters did not act on recommendations from an agent in Phoenix who warned about Osama bin Laden sending students to the United States for flight lessons and failed to connect this alert with an investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, who was himself taking flight lessons in Minnesota.

I found it particularly offensive during the 9/11 hearings that the former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, Jamie Gorelick, whom I otherwise admired, questioned the Bush administration’s attention to terrorism. She had been the author of a famous memorandum that had had the effect of reinforcing the wall between criminal and intelligence investigations in 1995. The wall might have been put into place for good reasons (principally civil liberties), but it kept the FBI from moving quickly to follow the leads from Moussaoui before 9/11 and it undermined our ability to deal with transnational terrorist threats more generally.

The homeland threat was simply not sufficiently on anyone’s radar screen at the national level before 9/11. The threat reporting pointed squarely to an attack on U.S. interests abroad. Nevertheless, it occurred to me that perhaps we should inform the domestic agencies about these reports just in case an attack might be launched against the American homeland. I asked to have the attorney general briefed after my meeting with George Tenet, since he oversaw the FBI. Moreover, I called Dick Clarke in on July 5, asking Andy Card to join us. I told Dick to convene the domestic agencies. The chief of staff was there to tell Dick that he would intervene with domestic agencies if necessary. Dick called a meeting and reported that the FBI, FAA, and other agencies were aware of the threat information and acting on it.

Several days after 9/11, Dick Clarke would send me an e-mail, unsolicited, reassuring me that the White House had supplied information to domestic law-enforcement and other authorities, including the FAA, and that we did ask that special measures be taken. That, of course, is not the impression he conveyed to 60 Minutes when he suggested that we were somehow not focused enough on terrorism. Moreover, I learned on September 16 that there had been an after-action report on the homeland threat in the spring of 2000 in the wake of the breakup of the millennium plot. Ironically, given all the paper that he passed to the Bush administration, Clarke did not think this report on securing the homeland to be worthy of our attention.

The threat reporting spiked at the end of July and then receded. The President finally got an answer to his question about bin Laden and the homeland threat in the famous August 6 memo. Yes, everyone knew that bin Laden was determined to attack the United States. We were not told how he might carry out such an attack, only that he had been impressed by the partially successful attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

That memo was the only PDB item that addressed the homeland threat in the 192 PDBs that the President had seen since assuming office. On August 6 the President was in Crawford and George Tenet was, as he put it to me in 2003, “on a beach in New Jersey.” A homeland threat was simply not the focus of the myriad intelligence briefings the President received.

The fact is that the United States was poorly prepared for September 11, 2001, for systemic and psychological reasons. Our homeland had been spared a major foreign attack since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812. Yes, there had been the devastating attack on a military base in Pearl Harbor and there had been fears of a homeland threat during World War II. But the homeland had not been hit. No one was prepared for what happened on that awful day.

Ironically, the al Qaeda strategy was finally ready for the Principals’ review on September 4. The meeting was fruitful. We were able to agree on a strategy of implementing an ambitious covert-action program in Afghanistan and launching the Predator drone for reconnaissance missions. Because its armed capabilities were not ready, the Predator, the Principals agreed, could provide us with actionable intelligence to target the locations of key al Qaeda leaders. I forwarded the strategy to the President for his approval on September 10.