EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — About a week before being interviewed by Richard Bruce Cheney about whether I would be the right person to serve as his national security briefer, I broke a bone in my left foot. While bounding down the stairs at home in a rush not to be late to a meeting at the National Security Council, I missed a step. So, rather than spending the morning at The White House, I spent it at a doctor’s office getting a big, goofy, purple cast on my left leg. Fantastic. How better to exude to the Vice President of the United States that I would be competent as his President’s Daily Brief (PDB) briefer, than hobbling into the interview with a cast? Somehow, I got the job.
During the presidency of George W. Bush, the President and Vice President’s PDB briefers met and traveled with them six days a week, sometimes seven. We would awaken every morning around 1:00am to prepare what is known as the “Book” and accompanying material. The Book was the President’s Daily Brief itself, a brutally concise, relatively short collection of intelligence analyses produced at that time, by just the CIA; it went to a short list of designated policymakers. All who received it also got morning briefers to accompany and expand on the content as needed and to take taskings, but only those for the President and Vice President routinely traveled with them. In addition to the PDB, there was “behind-the-tab” material for all recipients except the President. In Cheney’s case, I decided—with zero supervision or coordination—what he also needed to see, per my judgement. Raw intel, press pieces, book summaries, graphics, and anything else that I thought could be useful.
I generally briefed the then-Vice President at the Naval Observatory, the official residence for U.S. vice presidents. But just a week into the job, I accompanied him on Marine Two to Camp David, where he would attend some meetings. Thus began a rapid, daily learning curve into who this man was - starting with how he treated others.
“Others” fell generally into two categories with little gray area between—those he respected and those he did not. People in both categories usually knew where they stood, and Cheney didn’t manifest different orientations toward people based on their societal stations in life. This was a man whose default setting was to show courtesy and respect toward others unless they convinced him otherwise. Every one of his ushers, central members of the residence staff, told me individually - with zero nudging from me - that they liked the Cheneys much more than they liked their predecessors. Why, I asked. Because the Cheneys always showed respect to them, their time demands, they told me. As for those in the other category? Many of us recall Cheney telling Senator Patrick Leahy to “go f*** yourself” on the Senate floor in 2004. He also bluntly expressed his opinions on a wide range of actors and even nations to me during our time together. Few if any fell into gray area.
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Cheney consistently hosted the longest of the PDB sessions across all PDB recipients of that Administration, a reflection of his intellectual curiosity, the endless stacks of books and other things he read, his many years of navigating the U.S. Government and geopolitics, and the fact that on most mornings, he went from his briefings with me to attending PDB sessions with his boss. I always had at least 30 minutes with him, and on mornings when events or travel altered the President’s schedule, my sessions could stretch beyond 90 minutes.
Something that was reflected in his time commitment to those PDB sessions was that, among being many things, Dick Cheney was an overachiever of the world-class order. Whatever task, duty, mission, strategic pursuit that might be in his cross hairs, he would be utterly prepared. This part of him of course helped land his stint as the youngest White House Chief of Staff in history, under President Gerald Ford.
Much has been written about Cheney’s role and actions in the immediate wake of 9-11; I came after, during the run up to and consequences following America’s second invasion of Iraq. Because of when I briefed him and the job I took immediately afterward in July 2003 - Chief of CIA’s Iraq enterprise covering military, political, leadership, and economic analysis - I draw from a unique combination of perspectives to offer context on the Iraq, Dick Cheney story. Some will be surprised by what I saw including during NSC meetings chaired by President Bush and attended by Cheney when I sat in as the 'plus-one' for the CIA Director or for the Director of National Intelligence.
On March 16, 2002, Dick Cheney said on NBC’s Meet the Press, “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators . . . I think it [the invasion] will go relatively quickly . . . weeks rather than months.” As we now know, he - and other seniors in the Bush Administration - could not have been more wrong.
Not long after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003, violence there began to swell up, and soon thereafter the CIA enterprise I headed gave President Bush and Cheney - their first and highly unwelcome dose of the “I” word: insurgency. Early on, Bush and other Administration seniors explained the sources of the violence as “criminals, regime dead-enders, or trouble-makers” pushed into the country by Iraq and Syria as operatives. But in the summer of 2003, we put a PDB into the Oval Office arguing that an organized and indigenous insurgency was quickly developing. Feedback from Bush’s PDB briefer that morning was “The President was so angry he came off his chair. He wants a memo tomorrow morning recounting when we warned him this was coming.” A lot people worked overnight to produce that 4.5-page piece, which delivered what was asked.
At some point between that initial shock and late summer, fall of 2003, Cheney - whom we had briefed in more detail on the insurgency, told us “The President needs to hear this.” Consider that one of the Administration’s most vocal and influential advocates of invading Iraq, who had been on record saying the effort would be easy and short, had now turned to persuading Bush and his entire NSC that we faced an insurgency in Iraq. Cheney knew that this information, once it entered the public arena, would likely get himself as well as President Bush eviscerated by the media and by critics. But that seemed to matter little to him; the United States was underestimating what it was now facing in Iraq, and Cheney’s focus became aligning policy with reality.
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A few days before Veterans Day in 2003, someone in the CIA Director’s office told me there would be a briefing that day for Bush’s NSC on Iraq that I would lead. Cheney had facilitated this. I also was told I could take one analyst of my choice, but I knew some on the NSC would push back hard and would expect "in the weeds" details of our analysis, so I subbed myself out and sent two senior analysts who knew the weeds - a superlative military expert and a political-analyst counterpart.
It was a PhD and former Marine CIA military analyst in my Iraq enterprise who forced then Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and others to accept that an insurgency was emerging in Iraq. The analyst’s most persuasive moment came when Rumsfeld argued forcefully that there were several and differing definitions of insurgency, making use of the word confusing at best and inaccurate at worst. That military analyst calmly but firmly summarized the two most widely accepted definitions and illustrated that the CIA’s conclusion was based on the one observed by Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense. The analyst also laid out premises needed to justify that definition, all of which all in the room were seeing. Bush declared acceptance, noted that NSC members had to be square with this reality among themselves, and requested all to avoid the word insurgency in public.
Let me close with an insight that sheds light on Cheney’s near obsession with going into Iraq to find WMD and then showing a level of comfort with enhanced interrogation techniques that many find appalling.
One morning after a PDB briefing with me, Cheney sat back and recounted some history following the Gulf War, during which he was Secretary of Defense. He reminded me with some energy that during interrogations of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who defected temporarily, we learned that Iraq’s nuclear-weapons program was further along than we had assessed. Rather than a form of scolding for off-the-mark CIA analysis back then, this perspective he was sharing signaled an acknowledgement that I knew the weight of his role in persuading Bush ’43 to invade Iraq—and in his mind, he had good reason. If we were underestimating Saddam’s WMD program again and Osama bin Laden gained access to any part of it, the consequences for Americans would be catastrophic.
The Economist Magazine recently summarized the unwavering sense of duty to nation felt by Cheney. In the closing words of its obituary in reference to criticism about his posture toward countering terrorism, and on being wrong about WMD in Iraq, The Economist wrote: “He was unmoved . . . He was, as always, just doing his job. Trying to protect America.”
All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
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