Book reveals secret Iraq mission and more

The United States, mind you, has never been very good at espionage, and it still isn’t. America has developed only three spies inside the al Qaeda terrorist network since 9/11. One, codenamed Lovebug — a Kurd and an associate of Iraq’s al Qaeda chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — signed on in 2002 and worked hard, offering contextualized intelligence worth terabytes of electronic surveillance. He left, vanished, and then returned to the fold just a few months before he was killed in early 2004. Rolf helped manage Lovebug, and he thinks often about why Lovebug came back. What was going through his head, and how do we find his successors? The world is too big, destructive materials are too widely available, and the footprint of a terror cell — maybe only a few guys in some apartment — is just too small. Without another Lovebug, several of them, telling us what’s being planned, a nuclear event in a major U.S. city is not a matter of if. It’s a matter of when. If you want to walk in Rolf’s shoes, you’re going to hear a lot about walking in the shoes of his top-priority “other” — namely young Muslim men whose decisions, one by one, are driving global events. Sitting in his office, he tries to connect a few dots about what the terrorists may be planning. He flips through an array of classified dispatches of electronic intelligence. He looks over interrogation transcripts from Guantánamo Bay. He knows, more surely with each passing minute, that we are blind without moles, that al Qaeda is looking for uranium and there’s plenty of it out there. With as little as thirty-five pounds, a sophisticated group could build a Hiroshima-size bomb. We’d never see it coming.

That’s why he can’t sleep. He calls his wife. Tells her he’ll be home late, asks what his teenage girls are up to this Saturday night, and just hearing her voice — a woman, God bless her, who’s traveled at his side through five foreign CIA tours — reminds him of what he hopes. He hopes he’s Chicken Little.

Halfway around the world, George W. Bush walks to the end of the driveway of his villa and looks up at a blimp, full of electronic equipment, floating a few hundred feet overhead. It’s Saturday, July 15. He stands there silently on the blacktop, waiting for Putin to pick him up in a golf cart and drive him to the day’s events. Both of these things irritate him. Bush doesn’t like waiting and he hates when other people insist on being in the driver’s seat, which is where Putin has been throughout their relationship. He knows now that it might not have been that way. He was warned, and he didn’t heed the warnings. In fact, they came months before his famous meeting in June 2001 where he said he felt that he was looking into Putin’s “soul.” He had talked to Putin several times before that, even during the presidential campaign, and he felt the man was his friend. Once Bush arrived in office, various Russian experts at the NSC tried to warn otherwise.

They said that Putin was a trained KGB agent, and a good one. He wants you to think he’s your friend, they said. That’s his skill. Soon enough, they had a remedy. Putin was going to a meeting in Vienna in February 2001. He’d be staying in the presidential suite at the Hotel Imperial. CIA had an old listening device implanted in the wall of the suite. All they needed to do was replace the battery. Bush is a guy who needs to make things personal — it’s how he’s always organized a complex world — and he felt that he’d developed a bond with Putin. When CIA made its offer, his response was that you don’t wiretap a friend. Condoleezza Rice said it was “too risky, it might be discovered.” CIA said that if it was, it would probably heighten Putin’s respect for Bush. Bush settled it — it was a gut decision. No dice.

This was an early sign of an extraordinary dilemma, one that would come to define America’s posture in the world: Bush’s powerful confidence in his instinct. It might be called a compensatory strength, making up for other areas of deficit. He’s not particularly reflective, doesn’t think in large strategic terms, and he’s never had much taste for the basic analytical rigors embraced by the modern professional class. What he does is size up people, swiftly — he trusts his eyes, his ears, his touch — and acts. While he has an affinity for stepping inside the shoes of others, his métier is often brutally transactional rather than investigatory or empathetic: he is looking for ways to get someone to do what he wants, and quickly. This headlong, impatient energy fueled his rise, as anyone knows after watching him strong-arm a big-money contributor, parse friend from foe, or toss a script and preach, heart to heart, to supporters in the Republican base. It’s how Bush — like many bullies who’ve risen to great heights — became the president. Once he landed in the Oval Office, however, he discovered that every relationship is altered, corrupted by the gravitational incongruities between the leader of the free world and everyone else. Everything you touch is velvety, deferential, and flattering. To fight this, presidents have been known to search furiously for the real, for the unfiltered, secretly eavesdropping on focus group sessions far from Washington, arranging Oval Office arguments between top aides — a Gerald Ford trick — or ordering policy advisers, as Nixon often did, to tell them something the advisers were sure they didn’t want to hear. These men, even with their overweening confidence, embraced a unique kind of humility, recognizing they were in a bubble and fearing they would make historic mistakes.

Bush, with his distaste for analysis and those who contradict him, didn’t go down those paths, and he seemed unconcerned, unlike other presidents, that isolation would prompt errors in judgment. Instead, he began taking policy advice from old cajoling friends whose relationships predated his ascendancy or from visiting pastors speaking frankly in their everyman voices of faith. A man who trusts only what he can touch placed in a realm where nothing he touches is authentic.

It’s a diabolical twist worthy of Sophocles or Shakespeare. Either would have written it as a tragedy. Because, over the years, the bullying presence of Bush — making things personal without hesitation or limits — became the face of America. It was an effect caused by much more than his confrontational public pronouncements. Despite his advisers’ admonitions that his relationships with other world leaders were, like so much else around him, manufactured, he felt that they were real and easily managed; that foreign leaders would submit to his persuasive charms and persistence and do what he wanted, even if it was against the interests of their countries. Blair was “a good man, a friend, who got it”; Saddam was “the guy who’d tried to kill my Dad”; as for Putin, “I was able to get a sense of his soul,” Bush said. He’s “straightforward” and “trustworthy.” When each man defied the will of the president — in small ways or large — Bush saw it as disloyalty, and responded in unproductive, gut-driven ways. After eventful years and Bush’s re-election, the nation and its leader became inseparable, as America, itself, was viewed as angry, reckless, petulant and insecure, spoiled and careless, with a false smile that concealed boiling hostility.

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