by Bob Woodward
Kushner disputes all of this and recalled that the president’s reaction to the tape was much calmer.
“Now,” Trump said finally to Abbas, “we’re going to go outside, because they’ve got all the press out there. I’m going to say some nice things about you, and you’re going to say some nice things about me. But now you know how I feel.”
Abbas went first before the press and played his part.
“Your Excellency, Mr. President and dear friend, Donald Trump,” Abbas said, “it’s my pleasure to welcome you here in Palestine and receive you as a great guest of our people here in Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus.
“I would like to reiterate, Your Excellency, Mr. President, our commitment to cooperate with you in order to make peace and forge a historic peace deal with the Israelis.”
When his turn came, Trump said, “I want to offer my deep appreciation to the Palestinians and President Abbas for hosting me today.”
Trump eventually ordered the closure of the Palestinian Liberation Organization office in Washington, D.C. in September 2018 and canceled nearly all U.S. aid to the West Bank and Gaza, as well as $360 million in annual aid previously given to the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees.
TEN
Dan Coats promised his wife, Marsha, he would reclaim control over his life. “I’ll shape up,” he promised her.
At DNI headquarters in Virginia, he called in his senior staff about three months into his tenure.
“I’m not going to be able to go the long haul here unless we can do three things,” Coats said. “One, I’ve got to get a good night’s sleep.” Trump’s tweeting was continuing to keep him up at night. The job was never leaving him. “Number two, I can’t just scarf down a McDonald’s at 3:00 in the afternoon because I’m scheduled to do stuff. I’ve got to have a time when I can have a decent meal. Third, I’ve got to have exercise.” He knew it was a stress reliever. “You’ve got to build that into my schedule—45 minutes at least three times a week. I need a trainer, someone to really push me.
“Finally, it’s an impossible job. One person cannot do all of this.” Certainly he couldn’t. He was going to hire a principal deputy to handle all the inside, technical and managerial nuts and bolts. He selected Sue Gordon, who had 37 years in the intelligence world as a former CIA analyst, cyber expert, and deputy director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
“Sue, I can’t handle all this. I give you the leash. You run this. I’ll be Mr. Outside”—meaning he would deal with the White House, the National Security Council, State and Defense. He would be the man on the Hill, briefing and taking soundings in the House and Senate. And his number-one priority would be deepening relationships with the foreign intelligence services: the British, the Israelis, the Saudis, the Germans. The foreign services were great collectors of intelligence in their areas of the world, had some fantastic human sources and could put events in historical context.
“You’re Mrs. Inside,” he said to Sue Gordon.
* * *
Mattis hadn’t known Coats but looked him up on Wikipedia to get some of the basics and asked a few people about him. The two had lunch. Mattis was immediately taken with Coats’s gentlemanly demeanor, soft on the outside but with a spine of steel on the inside—what Mattis called “vertebrate.” Mattis and Coats soon began lingering after NSC meetings when Trump had left.
“What the hell is going on?” Coats asked in a private sidebar conversation with Mattis after one session. In just one example, Trump wanted to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and South Korea. There was a rush. Instantly. “Get them out!” Trump had commanded.
“That’s crazy,” Mattis said to Coats. “That’s dangerous.”
Coats was troubled by the absence of a plan or a consideration of the human dimension—the impact on the troops, the allies, the world—or a sense of the weight of the office.
“The president has no moral compass,” Mattis replied. The bluntness should have shocked Coats, but he’d arrived at his own hard truths about the most powerful man in the world.
“True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
They found themselves often looking across the table at each other in the Situation Room with concern. They had to deal not only with America’s adversaries but with the failure of the administration to work together and define its strategy.
Mattis concluded that Coats would not waver. Whenever the president would challenge the intelligence findings, Coats firmly stuck to the facts. Mattis knew that Coats was carrying a burden, but was sure he could stand the strain. Still waters ran deep in Dan Coats. He was cool and not defensive, unintimidated by complexity. Mattis found himself often thinking that Coats was a model of what was needed in government service—although maybe he was too decent.
* * *
As Coats’s relationship with Mattis grew closer, his friendship with Pence grew more distant. “Once he became vice president,” Coats said, “he built that kind of cocoon around him that basically said, this is the role of the vice president.” In Coats’s eyes, his old friend had become passive, subservient and obedient.
Marsha Coats was more charitable. “Mike Pence,” she told others, “no doubt, he believes God put him where he is and his job is to be a good VP. A loyal and supportive—even though he doesn’t agree with so much of it.”
Of Pence, Marsha said, “One time, we had dinner with him. We didn’t want to put him on the spot. Something outrageous had happened. We were at the White House, at some dinner. And he came over to say goodbye. And I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” Marsha Coats added, “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood.
“And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”
At the same dinner, Dan Coats said that was exactly what Pence had said to him: “Stay the course.”
ELEVEN
One day after work at the Pentagon in late 2017 Defense Secretary Mattis slipped quietly, unnoticed, into the cavernous National Cathedral in Washington.
Mattis directed his security detail to allow him to enter alone so he could pray and reflect. He was growing increasingly alarmed about the possibility of a war that could kill millions.
For the first year of the Trump presidency, Mattis had been living on permanent alert. North Korean chairman Kim Jong Un now had, for the first time, both nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that could carry a nuclear warhead to the United States homeland.
Kim had been shooting off missiles at an alarming rate. Mattis had monitored these in real time about half a dozen times through a Top Secret National Event Conference, an emergency meeting of the military and national security team over secure voice communications. The conference put the senior leaders in direct communication so they were poised to respond immediately.
President Trump had delegated authority to Mattis to use a conventional interceptor missile to shoot down any North Korean missile that might be headed for the United States.
“If the word had come that it was inbound for Seattle, we were already launching interceptors,” Mattis privately told others.
If the North Koreans realized the United States had shot down their missile, or had even tried to, they would likely prepare to fire more missiles. “The potential we’d have to shoot to prevent a second launch was real,” according to Mattis.
That would require approval from President Trump, and the United States and North Korea might soon be in the nightmare of nuclear war.
North Korea had several dozen nuclear weapons on Mobile Erector Launchers (MELs) so they could be moved around and hidden. Mattis was surprised that the North had done such a remarkable job of hardening, dispersing and concealing their nuclear weapons and missiles.
President Trump’s detachment compounded the problem for Mattis. “I never cared much what T
rump said,” Mattis said privately, because Trump’s orders were so random, impulsive and unthoughtful. “I ran the Department of Defense. I kept him informed in my private meetings. I wouldn’t do it in public, because he would have to play a role then. But I didn’t get any guidance from him, generally, other than an occasional tweet.”
Only the president could authorize the use of nuclear weapons but Mattis believed the decision would rest on his recommendation.
“What do you do if you’ve got to do it?” Mattis asked himself. “You’re going to incinerate a couple million people.
“No person has the right to kill a million people as far as I’m concerned, yet that’s what I have to confront.”
Trump’s policy of maximum pressure on North Korea included not only draconian economic sanctions but also an unprecedented personal rhetorical assault on Kim, threatening “fire and fury” and nuclear obliteration in scores of tweets and public remarks. The third element was military pressure.
Here Mattis was walking a narrow line. He had wide latitude to pressure Kim militarily, though the defense secretary understood that one person’s perceived pressure could be somebody else’s provocation.
A longtime student of history, Mattis knew from memory one of President Abraham Lincoln’s codes of war from the midst of the Civil War in 1863: “Men who take up arms against one another in public war do not cease on this account to be moral beings responsible to one another and to God.”
War could not be divorced from moral responsibility. Mattis often said he had seen too many boys die in his 40 years in the Marines.
President Lincoln also had said, Mattis knew, “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”
The majestic, gray-stone cathedral, with its 300-foot tower, is a spiritual home of the nation and slows time for anyone who enters. It seemed the right place for Mattis to go. He felt a solemn hush and walked the several hundred feet to the small War Memorial Chapel hidden from view at the rear of the cathedral.
A few rows of chairs faced a modest altar and an oversized sculpture of the head of the crucified Jesus Christ, crowned by a halo of brass meant to suggest cannon shells. To Mattis, it looked like a bursting bomb.
Inside the War Memorial Chapel stood a screen given by the 28th Marine Regiment on the 20th anniversary of Iwo Jima, the bloodiest and most vicious World War II battle, where the Corps had 26,000 casualties, including 6,800 dead.
Mattis sat quietly in the candle-lit War Memorial alcove. He had been in enough fights to know what one on the Korean Peninsula would entail. Chaos, blood, death, uncertainty, the drive to live on. Yet the question he needed to ask himself was how to carry out his assigned role knowing his decisions might have epic consequences? If the country were in peril, he would have to stop an escalation by Kim. Nuclear weapons existed as a deterrent, not to be used. Use would be madness, he knew, but he really had to think the unthinkable to defend the United States.
These awful thoughts had been in the back of his mind for months, and it was now time to bring them out front.
He did not think that President Trump would launch a preemptive strike on North Korea, although plans for such a war were on the shelf. The Strategic Command in Omaha had carefully reviewed and studied OPLAN 5027 for regime change in North Korea—the U.S. response to an attack that could include the use of 80 nuclear weapons. A plan for a leadership strike, OPLAN 5015, had also been updated.
Mattis stayed in the chapel for ten minutes, unburdening himself as much as possible.
He returned to the National Cathedral several more times that year around the close of business, when few people were there. No one ever seemed to recognize him. Sometimes on these other visits he walked across the nave through tall iron gates to the Holy Spirit Chapel, a small, wood-paneled alcove with depictions of the Holy Spirit as a dove.
A small sign said: Quiet Please.
He considered his reflections and prayer deeply personal. With each visit, he’d spend just enough time to feel a little stronger. There was never a point of complete comfort.
“This weighed heavily on me every day. I had to consider every day this could happen. This was not a theoretical concern.”
Should there be a sudden military confrontation requiring a decision, he did not want, as he often said, to be Hamlet debating with himself, wringing his hands, indecisive and melancholic. He did not want to discover a hollow pit in his stomach saying, “Oh, my God, I’m not ready!” He had to find peace before the moment came.
“I was focused completely on how to prevent this or stop it as quickly as possible. Recognizing that the worst possible situation might dictate the use of nuclear weapons, with all that means in terms—not just that war, but the way it would change the shape of the world. That now nuclear weapons can be used again.” He could not shake the moral or strategic implications. “And there just comes a point where you have to settle that in your own mind with your own conscience.”
* * *
For months Mattis had witnessed a maddening whirlwind of uncertainty, provocations, pressures and the search for a diplomatic solution with North Korea, all the while carrying out the policy of maximum military pressure.
After months of apprehension, on July 3, 2017, North Korea had launched its first ICBM capable of reaching the United States. On a trajectory to maximize distance, the Hwasong-14 could have traveled between 4,000 and 5,000 miles to Alaska, Hawaii and perhaps even the West Coast. This was a genuine crisis. President Trump had publicly promised North Korea would not achieve this capability.
With approval from Mattis, General Vincent Brooks, the commander of the U.S. and South Korean alliance, ordered a U.S. Army tactical missile fired as a demonstration and warning. The missile was launched from the beach along a path running parallel to the North-South border and traveled 186 miles into the East Sea. That was the exact distance between the launching point of the U.S. missile and the North Korean missile test site, as well as a tent where satellite photos showed Kim Jong Un was watching the missile launch.
The meaning was meant to be clear: Kim Jong Un needed to worry about his personal safety. But no intelligence was picked up that indicated the North Koreans realized the U.S. missile could have easily been aimed north at the test site or at Kim. Western news coverage of the U.S. and South Korean demonstration was sparse.
General Brooks said in a provocative public statement, “Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war.”
The South Korean military conducted its own live-fire exercise missile into the East Sea and said, “We may make resolute decisions any time.”
Three weeks later, on July 28, North Korea fired a more powerful ICBM. It could have traveled 6,200 miles and hit much of the continental United States. General Brooks ordered more demonstration missiles. In case anyone missed the message, he said in a statement that the alliance tactical missile test “provides deep-strike precision capability, enabling the Republic of Korea/United States alliance to engage a full array of time-critical targets under all weather conditions.”
Again, there was no evidence in public or in the intelligence that North Korea understood. This demonstrated the limitations of trying to send messages with missile tests.
* * *
At 5:57 a.m. on Tuesday, August 29, sensitive intelligence showed North Korea was about to launch another missile. Mattis signed on to the Top Secret National Event Conference.
He could join in from the SCIF in his residence on Potomac Hill, a government-owned compound near the State Department. The Pentagon had also created the capability for Mattis to sign on from anywhere in the world. When he was out of Washington in the United States or overseas, a communications team would be in an adjacent hotel or embassy room where they erected a secure SCIF in a tentlike structure. He could vividly remember an aide desperately shaking him awake from restless sleep for a conference. Wherever he was, he regularly slept in his g
ym clothes so he could get to the National Event Conference as fast as possible.
Even if he was being driven down a street, a second vehicle always accompanied his car. That was the communications team, not security.
His communications equipment included a geospatial map with a small icon that would track the missile’s anticipated flight path.
From his location Mattis could issue an order to shoot if the missile appeared to threaten South Korea, Japan or the United States.
Mattis had a light in his bathroom at his quarters in Washington that would flash if he was in the shower when the National Event Conference alert came.
A bell would also ring in the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen announcing that the conference was standing up because a North Korean missile had been launched or was ready on the launching pad.
It was a nonstop crucible, personal and hellish. There were no holidays or weekends off, no dead time.
On this Tuesday morning, U.S. military bases and ships with interceptor missiles had checked into the National Event Conference. Alaska was up and ready to shoot, Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was up, the Navy Seventh Fleet. SBX—short for the sea-based X-band, self-propelled mobile radar floats that formed part of the U.S. ballistic missile defense system—signed on.
Mattis watched silently as information came in rapidly. Uncertainty and dread mounted. Was this it?
NorthCom, the Defense Department regional command covering North America, quickly assessed that the missile was medium range and not a threat to the United States. But Mattis watched the icon for the North Korean missile arc up and out, over the Home Islands, a World War II era term for the Japanese archipelago, and drop into the sea. If North Korea had a malfunction or a miscalculation, the missile could have dropped on the Japanese homeland, triggering a major international crisis. Flying directly over Japan was a clear escalation, and changed the character of the threat.
