“That is not enough,” the Speaker says.
“I agree,” Stroud says. She has to back the man. Many of her future senators will come from the most extreme members of the House GOP conference.
Nash glances at his chief of staff, Carr. It always comes down to the Speaker’s conference, his eyes seem to say, the rising anger in the House.
“We’re not done,” says Nash. He looks at Howell.
“Our efforts at intelligence coordination in real time are still inadequate. Same problem as on 9/11,” she says. “We still need to do better. So the CIA, DIA, NSA, and NSC will work with the heads of the intelligence committees in Congress to arrive at a better plan.”
This is mumbo jumbo. The intelligence traffic in Morat that night was deliberately ignored to protect the operation. But this reform will give Congress a role, however symbolic, in developing new rules. They’ve never been satisfied with the Directorate of National Intelligence, set up under George W. Bush. The intelligence community will hate what it sees as more meddling by congressional amateurs, but by the time it is resolved, Rena knows, Nash will be gone. The problem will belong to his successor.
“Congress will also set up new rules for security details to protect visiting high-ranking officials,” Howell says.
More symbolism, but it’s an issue that the Common Sense wing in Congress has cared about—that Roderick had too few people guarding him.
The Senate majority leader is shaking her head. “I need a resignation. Things went wrong. Someone has to pay. We can’t go back up the Hill without that. I apologize if I’m being blunt.”
Stroud stares at Daniel Shane, the moderate, the turncoat who had left the party, then gone to work for a Democrat and who is now thinking of running for president. He stares back at her, his former Senate colleague, with a look that reminds Rena of scorned lovers.
Diane Howell says, “You will have my resignation.”
This catches everyone by surprise.
But obviously it was the other part of what they worked out behind closed doors for the last hour, Rena and Brooks recognize. The Oosay plan hadn’t been Howell’s idea. It was Shane, Roderick, and Arroyo’s. But she was responsible for two fateful mistakes that had animated Nash’s critics. First she had gone on television mischaracterizing the events of the attack the first day. And it was her man, the aide she had sent to help Manion at State with communications, who had written the clumsy memo about how to attack anyone criticizing the administration over Oosay. Those two mistakes, in turn, triggered the congressional investigation.
Then, after guessing most of what happened in Oosay, she had sided with Shane, Webster, and others—the boys—not to tell the president but instead to wait to see how much Rena and Brooks could figure out. Now, in her final act of loyalty, she was agreeing to take the fall for Oosay, both to protect the real secret and the rest of Nash’s team. It might even bring Nash and the rest of his national security team closer in their final months.
Susan Stroud stares at Howell, and Rena catches a glimpse at Brooks. Howell’s resignation will give Nash’s critics someone close to him, but not someone who would ever reveal the secret of Oosay. She is too loyal for that. And she had a life beyond politics, which had proven a rougher game than perhaps she had anticipated.
Fifty-Six
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1:45 P.M.
WASHINGTON TRIBUNE OFFICE
Will Gordon is squinting over his reading glasses, and Jill Bishop wonders how bad the editor’s eyes must be.
“You think the man who killed General Roderick was working for the Americans?” he asks.
She is briefing him on the story, looking at a memo she has written, trying to decide whether they have enough.
“Well, whoever he was, he was in contact with Americans,” she says.
Her voice is toneless. She is cold-eyed when working like this, sorting facts as if they are jigsaw puzzle pieces, assessing the corners and the shapes and seeing which fits into which. She is not rooting for her story. She is trying to find its weak points.
Gordon bends his awkward body over the printout of the memo on his desk. A strange vague smile appears on his face, like a cat’s.
“Connect the dots for me again,” he says. “Explain it to me as if I were a reader, as if I were coming to this fresh.”
Bishop goes through it one more time: Someone with “a particular digital footprint” was in contact with Americans before the Oosay incident. That digital footprint may even have been in contact with General Brian Roderick in the days before he died. Then that same person in Morat, the same digital footprint, was in contact with Americans again before the bombing of the author’s house in Oosay two months later.
“The man who had the same bombing signature as the bomber in the Roderick incident,” Bishop says. “So, yes, there appears to be some contact between Americans and someone who is near the bombings in Oosay.”
“If you’re right, Jill, Dick Bakke’s theory that Americans might have assassinated General Roderick could be true,” Gordon says.
“Maybe,” Bishop answers. She doesn’t want to leap that far yet.
“You think that might have something to do with the death of this private security contractor? O’Dowd? You think maybe he was involved? Or even killed to keep him quiet?”
Jack Hamilton, the national editor, shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Will. You know how many veterans kill themselves every day? The latest estimate is twenty—each day. That’s one every seventy-two minutes.”
Will Gordon likes arguing over stories. He thinks arguments make stories stronger. But he has little patience for what he considers the often-spurious use of data. “And every one of those suicides is unique, even if they form a larger pattern,” he tells Hamilton. “Our problem is this suicide. If it was a suicide.”
Bishop watches Gordon narrow his eyes again in concentration and then speak to Hamilton.
“If we report that on the day O’Dowd died, the Oosay bombers were talking to Americans, readers are going to leap to the conclusion those facts are connected. They’re going to think O’Dowd killed himself—or worse, that someone killed him—so he would not get caught for killing Roderick. True or not, that inference will exist.”
“Are you saying hold the story because people might jump to the wrong conclusion?” Bishop asks.
“No, if there are gaps, we need to point those out to the reader, too.”
“Maybe we should wait? Get more,” says Hamilton.
“We don’t have that luxury,” says Gordon. “Not today. Not with O’Dowd’s death. We need to share with people what we know. And what we don’t.”
Hamilton nods.
“Jill, do you think Roderick was assassinated by American interests? Do you think Dick Bakke could be right?”
Bishop has no interest in speculating.
She is pleased when Gordon’s desk phone rings, but he ignores it and waits for her answer.
“I have no idea,” she says.
Gordon’s secretary is now standing at his door.
“It’s the president.”
“President of what?” Gordon barks.
“The United States.”
Fifty-Seven
In the end, most cases in which government officials persuade journalists to hold stories don’t last. They just buy time. But sometimes years, and that is enough.
The CIA in 1975 convinced some of the biggest news organizations in America, and some of the best reporters, to hold stories about a secret spy ship that had sunk to the bottom of the ocean near Hawaii with nuclear warheads on board. The spy ship was being salvaged by a company owned by reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. The whole thing sounded like fiction. The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and others all agreed, after separate and candid meetings with the CIA, to hold the story.
It bought the Agency roughly a decade. When the full tale of the failed spy ship with secret nuclea
r weapons at the bottom of the sea—“Project Azorian”—finally came out in a book, it was history but no longer news.
In 1961, President Kennedy personally convinced the New York Times not to expose plans to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. After the invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro failed, Kennedy said he wished he’d been less persuasive.
There are dozens of smaller cases—and hundreds more when the Agency failed to persuade journalists to hold back. In every case in which journalists chose to publish, they did so arguing that the public good outweighed any proven harm. And in virtually every case, people in intelligence said the harm was profound—but classified so they couldn’t talk about how much damage the reckless and self-serving press had done to the nation. They just seethed in secret over whether the United States had a free press or a treasonous one.
Yet most of the cases of stories being held, modified, or negotiated came from another time, an era when there were fewer news outlets, and the people working in them mostly operated by a common code. Now anyone with a gripe or a rumor or a fantasy could publish. There is less of a code, and what little there is isn’t held in common.
Rena doesn’t know whether any journalist in the twenty-first century would decline to publish a secret in the name of national security and public good. In the last ten years, more damaging secrets had leaked—especially through offshore hackers and groups tied to the Russians—than Rena ever thought conceivable, leaks so vast it was impossible to comprehend their damage. Henry Arroyo had been right about that.
But one thing that hadn’t changed much was human spying. You blow the identity of a human spy and you get that person killed. The Russian government killed with an impunity these days beyond anything from the Cold War: political opponents, journalists, suspected double agents, even former colleagues who knew too much. The Chinese had recently killed a slew of agents thanks to a mole it had placed in the CIA. It was hard to tell whether much of the American public noticed.
Rena had known Will Gordon briefly long ago. He liked him. So what? As far as Rena could tell, Gordon never protected his friends or anyone else from what he published. That was his ethic, at least as he saw it: truth above all. Chips fall where they may.
Rena considered that simplistic and convenient. But he conceded that at least Gordon had an ethic. And he held to it.
They also had to figure out how to meet with journalists in a way no other journalists would know about. That is a problem—in the presidential mansion in a free country.
The last meeting, with congressional leaders in the Map Room, was on the White House schedule as a meeting with Chief of Staff Spencer Carr. The president had simply “dropped in” unannounced. It wasn’t necessarily going to attract the attention of curious reporters. Meetings with congressional leaders in the White House happen all the time.
But a gathering of people from the Washington Tribune was different, even if it were scheduled with Spencer Carr. It would still attract the attention of other journalists who’d want to know what they were missing.
They needed to meet the Tribune team somewhere else, somewhere off-site. And even then, the president would be accompanied by a press pool, a handful of reporters who expected to be briefed on the president’s activities and who would write a summary about them to be shared with the press corps and posted publicly online.
Secret meetings with the president are harder to manage than most people imagine.
“I have a way we can do this,” Brooks says. “My apartment backs up onto the Myriad Hotel. The president could do a meeting with someone there. You would set up a holding room, right, where the president can wait and prepare with his people in private before the meeting?”
“Of course. There’s always a holding room,” Carr says.
Holding rooms are common for staging these kinds of unseen and unrecorded meetings. There is no list made of who might spontaneously stop by a holding room. Have people join the president in a holding room in private. Then neglect to tell the press about the visit.
“If there can be a way in and out of a holding room that is unseen,” Brooks says, “put the holding room in the back of the hotel on the first floor. My patio backs onto an alley behind the hotel. You can walk from the hotel through the alley to my back gate.”
They would bring most of the same team that had met with congressional leaders—Chief of Staff Carr; White House Counsel Rawls; Defense Secretary Shane; CIA chief Webster; Howell from the NSC; and Rena and Brooks. But the president needed to be there in person, too. On that they all agreed. James Nash needed to look Will Gordon in the eye and do the talking.
“Don’t try to bullshit Gordon,” Rena says, catching a look from Carr for giving the president orders. “He will react instinctively if he feels he’s been lied to or manipulated and will say no.”
“I’ve met the man,” says Nash.
WILL GORDON BRINGS FOUR WITH HIM: two top editors, a lawyer, and Bishop.
Brooks meets them at the door of her apartment and escorts them to the living room, the only space in her home large enough for the group. She’s brought her dining room chairs into the room, arranged alongside a sofa and armchair. It looks like her book group is coming.
The president rises and shakes hands with the people from the newspaper, then everyone sits.
The president stares at the tall, rumpled editor. Then he turns to Bishop, the reporter whose face never gives anything away except the feeling you wouldn’t want to play cards with her.
“I’m going to ask you to do something you won’t want to do,” the president begins. “I’m going to ask you not to publish a story.”
Nash pauses—a familiar, even famous moment of hesitation, a timing trigger he uses to signal: the next sentence I utter will be especially important.
“I am going to be honest with you as to why I am asking you to do this. But I cannot tell you everything. In fact, I’m going to try to tell you as little as I can. But I am going to tell you the truth.”
It’s a good start, Rena thinks from the other side of the room. In encounters such as these, the government often offers journalists a story that is only partly true—to create confusion. It is a time-tested intelligence technique. Make journalists doubt the true story they have by telling them it was wrong and giving them another one, which contains just enough fact mixed with fiction to be plausible. Then, unsure what is true, the journalists will have to run around and re-report. The idea is they will never fully be sure what is true and what is not and will give up. Nash has said he won’t do that.
Rena glances at his partner. She is watching Bishop, not Gordon, knowing it is usually the reporter, the hunter, who is harder to persuade.
“Do you agree that what I am about to tell you is off the record? You cannot use it?”
“It’s a standing rule at the Tribune,” Gordon says, “that the president of the United States can never be off the record.”
“If you like, then, I can ask someone else in this room to say what I am about to tell you—since apparently they can be off the record and I cannot. But that seems ludicrous to me, simply because you insist on what you call a standing rule.”
Gordon is not the type to make decisions democratically. He stares at the president. Then, only half-angrily, he mumbles, “You have manipulated me into having no choice, sir. You are now off the record.” But something in his eyes suggests the gruff editor is a little impressed, even amused, by his president.
“What I’m about to tell you is classified as advance action,” Nash says. “That means knowledge of it is held by only a handful of people in the world. It did not have explicit approval from the president. Advance action is designed to move more swiftly and minimize chances of leaking. I had authorized the secretary of defense to use advance action if he deemed it necessary for the goal we had in mind. Whether you believe this or not, I was unaware of the details we are about to share with you until this morning. This insulation is why we had an outside investigation
of the Oosay matter in the first place.”
Gordon has that squinting look of concentration. The Tribune lawyer, someone named Goffin, crosses his legs in a way that suggests he finds this fascinating. Bishop’s expression could be described, charitably, as suspicious.
Then Nash tells them almost everything. The Oosay bombing was sanctioned and approved by the U.S. government, he explains, as a means of placing an American-sponsored agent into the top ranks of the Islamic State Army. A mistake was made during the operation. Classified materials that could have revealed the existence and identity of this agent and compromised years of intelligence gathering, as well as other secrets, were left in a secure location in the old Manor House, a so-called SCIF. It was such a simple mistake no one had imagined it possible. General Roderick was the only person on scene that night who knew these materials might be contained in the SCIF and was authorized to enter that room. He made the decision in an instant to follow prescribed procedures when such materials are at risk. He destroyed the SCIF and its contents. That decision also meant that the general sacrificed his own life. He did so willingly. He made the decision to do so himself.
“If the Tribune or anyone publishes this story, it would almost certainly result in the death of the most highly placed agent we have ever had in the jihad movement. I cannot imagine what public good would come from this consequence. If you can describe any public good from publication of this information, I will listen. But I can tell you, without any doubt in my mind, that publishing this will result in the loss of innumerable lives that we will save from having this source in place.”
Gordon shifts uncomfortably. Governments regularly ask journalists not to publish information on the grounds that it would “destroy intelligence efforts” and “damage national security.” Journalists believe most of the requests are made to avoid political embarrassment.
Nash adds that he has never made such a request personally to any journalist before. As president. Or at any other time in his public life.
The Good Lie Page 27
