The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Howell has only received notice to come back to the White House; no details. She has told her staff to avoid saying anything of substance electronically.

  “I thought it was some kind of protest outside the compound,” she says, having seen that much in an early news report.

  “Apparently it’s escalated,” says Webster. Shane’s expression tells her it’s more than that.

  “You have something going on in Oosay, Dan?” she asks Shane.

  “Brian Roderick is there.”

  Howell feels a rising, liquid anger mixed with suspicion.

  General Brian Roderick is a brash, articulate, and ambitious military reformer famous for putting himself in danger. Howell considered some of Roderick’s theories about the war on terror unorthodox, possibly brilliant and perhaps a little mad. The last thing the administration needs is a general in danger.

  Shane’s government phone rings. He answers and keeps repeating the word yes into it, his eyes fixed on Howell. His car pulls up and he tells the other two, “I’ll be at the Pentagon. I’ll talk to you when I know more.”

  Webster’s car arrives a moment later. “I’ll be in touch, Diane.”

  Neither will call, she thinks, though they don’t mean to lie.

  She checks her watch. A little before 8:30 P.M. Saturday, just after 3:30 A.M. in North Africa, on December 7, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Six

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 3:16 A.M.

  OOSAY, MORAT

  Every war creates its own vocabulary.

  The word that pops into General Brian Roderick’s mind now, as he glances out the window of the Manor House into the fire zone, is kinetic.

  It was coined by soldiers in Iraq to mean a whole lot of ordnance being fired at once.

  It is getting pretty damn kinetic out there.

  He must have seen a half dozen pickups as he came across, all of them cherried up with mounted machine guns welded to the beds. ISA tanks. Welcome to the Toyota War.

  Breathe, General, he tells himself. Stay low.

  Even if the men in the pickups aren’t experienced, Roderick thinks, this old Manor House is a fixed target. And the hajji in those pickups have brought a lot of rounds.

  It’s a regular OK Corral out there.

  The analogy has been in his head all night. He’d read a book about Wyatt Earp not long ago. The real shoot-out at the OK Corral lasted just thirty seconds, yet in that half minute, Earps, Clantons, and Doc Holliday still fired off thirty rounds. With just revolvers and shotguns. In 1881, that was pretty goddamn kinetic.

  The mounted machine guns on those pickups outside are probably NSVs, Roderick figures, a weapon that can by itself shoot nearly six hundred rounds in thirty seconds. Each Toyota its own fucking OK Corral. There look to be six of them. And this thing has gone on a lot longer than half a minute.

  Breathe, he tells himself. He looks for the stairs.

  It is the sounds that get his attention. The rounds that miss the building sound like firecrackers—but with a little more boom than crack, the telltale sound of high-caliber rounds fired from automatic weapons.

  The ones that worry him make a different sound. They’re more a pew than a boom. Those are the ones hitting the building, coming inside and ricocheting around like popcorn. Tearing holes in the air and looking for your heart.

  When is the last time a freaking brigadier had heard that sound in combat, he wonders? Not lately. None of his brethren is that stupid.

  He finds the stairwell and pauses. The first few steps, he thinks, will expose him. He has at least a dozen to go till he is out of view.

  Dash, boy.

  He smells something burning downstairs. The kitchen. Something on fire? How much time does he have?

  Down the hall, racing, head low, under the windows. To the bedroom at the end. He enters the room. There it is.

  Goddamn it. Untouched. The mother FUBAR of all fucking FUBARs.

  He wonders if he is thinking out loud.

  Breathe. Keep your heart rate down. And do what you need to. He says a prayer.

  The blast throws him against the opposite wall. His head hits the ceiling and his legs the wall. I just bounced off the ceiling, he thinks. I was flying.

  He doesn’t notice the sound of bullets now. They may have stopped. He hears something else instead. A goddamn song.

  When I fall in love, it will be forever

  Nat King Cole. Sappy fucking song. But he likes it.

  Where is it coming from?

  He is on the first floor. Has he fallen down the stairs? Then he thinks, no. There are no more stairs.

  He sees lights. Truck headlights. In the distance. He hears the music. “In a restless world.” Nat Cole. Man has a voice that warms you up and takes you in its arms.

  I have no legs, he thinks. Or they don’t go all the way down anymore.

  There is no more gunfire. No trucks. No light. No sound. Just the song. Nat, here, with him.

  He thinks of Clara.

  Then of nothing at all.

  Seven

  SUNDAY, DECEMBER 8, 7:01 A.M.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  The Situation Room, located in the basement of the West Wing, is actually many rooms, a five-thousand-square-foot intelligence-gathering nerve center. John Kennedy ordered the facility built in 1961 after deciding he lacked real-time information during the Bay of Pigs. The soul of the place is a network of five rotating watch teams, thirty people each, that monitor events worldwide twenty-four hours a day.

  What people see in Hollywood movies, and the occasional White House staff photo, is usually “the Woodshed,” the main conference room with a dark mahogany oval table and the banks of video screens on one wall.

  This morning the Principals Committee of the National Security Council is gathered in one of the small rooms down the hall. Away from prying eyes. No aides and no notes. Notes are discoverable. And if anything more goes wrong today, someone will come looking for them.

  At the small round table Secretary of Defense Daniel Shane is so bone tired he is struggling to remain in touch with his better self. He’s been up all night at the Pentagon, changed out of his tuxedo an hour ago, showered, donned a sweater and slacks, gone to his daily mass, and come to the White House.

  Next to him, Secretary of State Arthur Manion looks dapper and fresh in a three-piece gray herringbone, custom made from the same Jermyn Street tailor favored by the British prime minister; the courtly old man, a veteran of perhaps too many crises, has clearly had a good night’s sleep.

  Next to Manion, National Security Advisor Diane Howell is dressed in the same formal gown she wore to last night’s correspondents’ dinner, and, in an instant of uncharitable rivalry, Shane wonders if the outfit might be calculated, a signal intended to convey to the president that she has not left the Situation Room all night. Then Shane, who takes seriously the Bible’s teaching about how people should treat each other, admonishes himself for the thought.

  CIA Director Owen Webster is harder to read. The old spy and veteran bureaucrat, now nearly three hundred pounds, is a sphinx.

  Shane knows about the other two in the room. He has been in regular contact much of the night with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John Hollenbeck, and the recently appointed director of national intelligence, Stan Tollenson, a former congressman and CIA agent, just three weeks into the job.

  The door opens and President Nash enters, followed by Chief of Staff Spencer Carr. Everyone stands. The president instructs them to sit down and joins them at the table.

  “I know most of you have been up all night,” Nash begins. “And may not sleep again until this evening.”

  Even at this early hour, just after 7 A.M., the president looks impeccable in a blue suit and crisp white shirt.

  “This is what I know,” Nash says. “Approximately ten hours ago, in the city of Oosay in Morat, North Africa, Brigadier General Brian Roderick was killed in an explosion at a U.S. facility there, along with
three other Americans in his security detail, his aide-de-camp, and two U.S. contractors. The U.S. facility in Oosay, I’m told, is now safe, under protection of both U.S. and local guards, and the attackers have fled.

  “Now, tell me what I don’t know.”

  James Nash is famous for his dislike of being “briefed” in the conventional sense. He thinks formal presentations waste too much time and invite aides to gloss over difficult details. Nash likes to ask questions and get answers.

  Diane Howell starts. “Oosay, sir, is the third-largest city in Morat. It’s one hundred fifty miles northeast of the capital city of Yul, and is the country’s most unstable region. The revolution that overthrew Moratian dictator Ali Nori four years ago began in Oosay. Since then, various Islamist radical groups have gained stronger footholds there—ISIS, Borku Hora, and the Islamic State Army, or ISA. The city has gained the nickname the ‘African Mortar-itaville.’”

  Nash’s expression is grim. As the United States and its allies have defeated ISIS in Iraq, the war on Islamist radicalism has become a kind of grotesque, blood-filled balloon, bulging in new places whenever the U.S. and its allies shift their pressure, changing shape but never shrinking.

  Oosay is one of those new places on the map where the United States is secretly operating, another possible war zone most citizens have scarcely heard of.

  “Tell me about General Roderick,” Nash says.

  Howell looks at Shane to answer. What should he say? How much would the president recall about Brian Roderick? Assume nothing.

  “General Brian Roderick, you may remember, Mr. President, is something of a legendary figure,” Shane says and then recognizes he has used the wrong tense. Roderick, he explains, was a prominent character in two different books on the war on terror, and a controversial iconoclast at the Pentagon. “Rod often challenged those of us making policy, including the Joint Chiefs”—a glance at Admiral Hollenbeck.

  But for all that he ruffled feathers, Shane explains, Roderick was recognized as one of the bravest officers in the army—a front-line leader who had done seven tours in forward areas—more than any U.S. uniformed officer of his rank. He was beloved by both his troops and scores of local native people, often everyday people, whom he befriended.

  “What were these controversial theories?” Nash asks.

  Shane scans the room. Then, delicately, he tries to explain Rod’s maverick “four principles” for waging a new kind of war. Rebuild war-torn nations by working intensely to reestablish civil infrastructure, working one city at a time. Make it a civilian-led program—ending what now seems a military occupation. Commit to remaining more than a decade at least; the Islamist radicals are winning because they are waiting us out.

  And lastly, develop more aggressive covert special operations plans to systematically destroy the terrorist networks at the top—and to accomplish it, cultivate a much larger network of agents and informants on the ground.

  “Roderick came from that world, special operations,” Shane adds. “But he spent more time on the ground with civilians than almost any other American, military or diplomatic. He believed in both, winning hearts and minds and cutting off the heads of the enemy with black ops.”

  The president’s eyes widen.

  “I assume black ops also means advance action?”

  “Yes, Mr. President, Rod was an advocate of advance action.”

  Black ops means highly classified special operations, but advance action is a newer term, one that implies higher risk. It refers to a policy that dramatically restricts how many people know about an operation, allowing commanders in the field more discretion. Developed in response to the growing number of damaging leaks of CIA and NSA data, advance actions are kept removed from even the most secure digital communications. Sometimes knowledge doesn’t go all the way to the West Wing.

  Nash nods, and Shane glances at the other faces around the room.

  No part of Nash’s cabinet is more internally competitive than national security. There are seventeen different intelligence agencies in all—too many to coordinate or reform. The whole redundant jealous mess, Shane thinks, needs reorganizing. Or starting over.

  “What was Roderick doing in Oosay?” Nash asks.

  A deep breath. “Meeting with moderates, trying to strengthen our network there,” Shane says.

  “Mr. President, I might add that in the State Department’s view, General Roderick, while no doubt an innovative leader, would have been wiser to work in closer coordination with the embassy in Yul,” says Secretary of State Arthur Manion.

  People in town tended to mock Manion. The oldest member of Nash’s cabinet, the seventy-three-year-old attorney didn’t use email and didn’t carry a cell phone. But Manion was a true public servant, and President Nash liked experienced advisors who harbored no further ambition beyond this administration.

  “Tell me what happened yesterday,” Nash says.

  The CIA director now takes over. “The details are still confused,” Owen Webster answers.

  “So tell me what you know so far, Director,” the president says tartly.

  The CIA director and the president are not close. Webster rose through the ranks of the spy agency, and, though Nash made him director, Webster has a poor feel for his sponsor. He was accustomed to politicians who surrounded themselves with clonelike loyalists. Nash, however, has filled his senior ranks with subject experts he doesn’t know well, in some cases adversaries. There had been a good deal of publicity about a Lincoln-esque team of rivals and robust Kennedy-esque debates. To Webster, everything in the Nash administration gets chewed over till it becomes a mushy, unhappy compromise.

  He begins to tell the story of last night.

  Four days ago, a cartoon had surfaced in Amsterdam that depicted the prophet Muhammad as unhappy about Islamic extremism. The cartoon had sparked protests outside Western embassies in Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers, Sana’a, and Nairobi. These protests were often accompanied by more violent planned attacks—but the Americans, French, Dutch, British, and Belgians had all thwarted incidents through listening to traffic online and interceding in advance, making last week one of intelligence triumphs.

  “What happened in Oosay last night was part of this pattern of protests and attacks,” Webster says. “It began just before midnight their time. The crowds grew for about an hour outside a U.S. compound there and at some point the gates were breached.”

  “What was this compound?”

  There were two main buildings, Webster explains, moving to a whiteboard and offering a crude sketch.

  “One was an old colonial mansion, well known locally, called the Manor House. The other building, about one hundred yards away, is new, only finished a few weeks ago, called the Barracks. It’s a sophisticated listening post,” Webster adds.

  Technically, the compound is maintained by the State Department. But the Barracks is a classified intelligence facility, Webster explains. Both buildings are surrounded by a perimeter fence. The Barracks has its own bigger, higher perimeter around it, which made it impenetrable.

  “How’d Roderick and the other three die?” the president asks.

  “From what we have now,” Webster says, “the vehicles that entered the compound had weapons mounted on the back. There was a firefight. General Roderick and his security detail were highly outnumbered.”

  “How many people did we have in the compound?” Chief of Staff Carr asks.

  “Eleven total. Roderick’s detail counted six, including the general. A base staff of five in the facility. Apparently Roderick’s detail was trapped in the Manor House. Around two thirty A.M., the old house appeared to be hit. We assume mortars. It went up like a matchbox.”

  Webster is trying to read Nash but failing.

  “Roderick may have been in a separate room from his security detail, which ironically was closer to the impact. The other three survived the explosion, but they were killed trying to make it back to the Barracks. A fourth man was also wounded.”
>
  The president’s concerned expression confirms what everyone in the room knows: a brigadier general killed in an attack in a country where we are not supposed to be engaged in military activity is a shit show, a fiasco. It could end the careers of several of the people in this room. Not to mention cripple whatever foreign policy hopes the Nash administration had in its remaining months in office. An incident like this, late in a presidency, echoes Carter and the failed Iran hostage rescue or the Iran-Contra scandal, which paralyzed Reagan’s final two years.

  “What about the local guard?” Nash asks.

  “In Oosay, it can be difficult to side with Americans over your own countrymen,” Webster says.

  “The status now?”

  “The facility is secure,” Manion says. “The soldiers and contractors who were in the bunker have been flown to Germany. New men are stationed in the Barracks.

  “By law, Mr. President, the FBI has authority to formally investigate what happened,” Manion says. “That will take some time. We will begin that formal process tomorrow.”

  “I think there is precedent for an interagency investigation here,” CIA Director Webster adds. Interagency is code meaning Roderick was involved in some kind of special operation, something classified, something State did not know about. “That’s how we approached investigating the attack on the embassy in Yemen in 2008. The FBI can be rather slow. There were issues with that in Benghazi in 2012.”

  Nash doesn’t hide his irritation. His team cannot even agree how to investigate this.

  “And Mr. President, the Sunday shows are asking for an administration voice,” Chief of Staff Carr says. “They go on the air in two and a half hours, before our next meeting.”

  “We need to get in front of this,” Howell says.

  Shane nods.

  Nash looks at Manion. “I concur, sir,” the secretary says. “It does not serve you to allow a vacuum to exist.”

  “Diane and Dan, you do the Sunday shows,” Nash says, referring to his national security advisor and his secretary of defense. “Roderick was a general, so Dan, you have to represent. But I want it made clear he was not involved in a military action when he died.”