No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  The next morning at about 3:00 my phone rang. “We got him,” Jerry Bremer said, waking me from a not-too-sound sleep. I called the President and woke him up. He called Don. It was true. The men of Task Force 121, assisted by troops from the First Brigade Combat Team of the army’s 4th Infantry Division, had captured the dictator of Iraq. The man who’d launched wars against his neighbors and brutalized his people for more than twenty years was in our hands. “My name is Saddam Hussein,” he’d said as he was captured. “I am the president of Iraq. And I want to negotiate.”

  I got up and dressed quickly to make my way to the office. There was a lot to do to prepare for Jerry’s announcement, which would come in a matter of hours. I called the startled Dan Bartlett. This time he was excited by the news. Jerry went to the podium surrounded by members of the Iraqi Governing Council to tell the assembled press of Saddam’s capture. “We got him,” he said, repeating what he’d said to me hours earlier. The Iraqi press erupted in jubilation. It was a very satisfying moment, but I remember thinking that we’d made a mistake. An Iraqi should have made that announcement, I thought. But it was too late to make the capture of Saddam an Iraqi moment, not an American one.

  AS CHRISTMAS APPROACHED, I was tired and ready for a break. So much had transpired, and most of it was of enormous historic significance, with all of the tension and stress that brought. But I was also enjoying experiences that had an almost fairy-tale quality. The most extraordinary of them had been the royal state visit to England in November 2003 and the chance to stay in Buckingham Palace. When we arrived, I was escorted to my room, where my own personal maid waited to unpack my belongings. I instinctively started to help her. Seeing that, Colin Powell, who, with his wife, Alma, was staying in the next room, said, “You’re in her way. They’ve been doing this for three hundred years.”

  That night Colin, Alma, and I had a drink in the sitting room. What would our parents think? I thought. Then Alma and I drank a toast to her father and mine. Two little black girls from Birmingham had come a long way. Then, as Prince Charles escorted me into the elaborate dinner as the orchestra played “God Save the Queen,” I once again wished that I could tell my parents about this incredible experience. And so I did in a little prayer just before going to sleep.

  I left a few days before Christmas for my aunt’s house in Norfolk, but work followed me, relentlessly triggered by a daily barrage of news—some good, some bad—from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. Yet with the capture of Saddam, our year ended on a high note. Certainly, we believed, the news from Tikrit would soon bring an end to the insurgency. Earlier in the year, on the very day when Steve Hadley had met the press concerning the Niger controversy, Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, had been killed in a violent shoot-out in Mosul. Surely the now-headless horsemen of the Baath Party would soon give up the fight.

  We were also prepared for elections in Afghanistan and believed that we were about to put that country on a sound political footing. The Bonn process, which had set the country on a path toward representative government, was not yet showing the wear and incoherence that would soon become evident. In fact, the NATO allies were stepping forward to join us in the effort. New members from East-Central Europe were enthusiastically fighting in both Iraq and Afghanistan; the wisdom of extending NATO membership to the former Communist states had become increasingly clear.

  The war on terror was progressing too, as we captured more and more important al Qaeda field generals. In Southeast Asia we were seeing results from counterinsurgency cooperation in the region. In 2002 new fronts in the war on terror had emerged as evidence linked al Qaeda to the Abu Sayyaf insurgency in the southern Philippines. Additionally, suspected al Qaeda affiliates threatened the stability of a struggling new democratic government in Indonesia by bombing a Bali nightclub. But by 2004 those threats would recede with the capture of terrorist mastermind Hambali and the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as president of Indonesia, which ushered in a new era of democratic stability in the country with the world’s largest Muslim population.

  The redesign of our national security structures was continuing too, with all of the growing pains that accompany major institutional change. In that regard, I’d made what would prove to be one of my most important and effective personnel changes. Wayne Downing, the first counterterrorism chief, had stepped down to be replaced by General John Gordon, with whom I’d worked in the administration of George H. W. Bush. They’d done good work in establishing the post-9/11 role. But when I met Fran Townsend, a tough-talking former prosecutor from New York, who also happened to be female, I knew I’d found the right person to take hold of all that was required in that position. Fran had won a conviction against the notorious Gambino crime family; she could handle al Qaeda and Washington, I reasoned. But Fran had also served in the Clinton Justice Department, leading some in the conservative punditry to question her loyalty to the President. Karl Rove gave me cover on this one, tamping down a brewing conflict with some of our friends on the Hill and in the press.

  The country was not yet safe, but it was most certainly safer than it had been on September 11, 2001. We entered the election fray of 2004 ready to keep up the fight abroad and gearing up to defend the President’s record at home.

  17

  2004

  MY LAST YEAR as national security advisor began as my first year had: with a visit to Mexico. Yet, sitting in Monterrey at a special Summit of the Americas, it was obvious that the agenda that we’d so hoped to pursue in the hemisphere had slipped considerably.

  Our relations with Mexico weren’t bad, but they weren’t good either. The high point had been the state visit of President Vicente Fox in September 2001 shortly before 9/11. The arrival ceremony and dinner had signaled a new day in U.S.-Mexican relations. But the literal downpour that had threatened the fireworks display may have been a small sign that not all would be as we had hoped. It wasn’t long before the agenda with Mexico came to be dominated by important but seemingly intractable issues such as Mexican water deliveries to Texas and border modernization and safety. We formed a Cabinet-level commission to oversee the work, but frankly I came to refer to the interactions as “home owner’s association meetings.” We shared the same continent, and that was the basis of our cooperation. Somehow the once much-anticipated plans for hemispheric cooperation on the big issues of immigration, trade, and democratization faded.

  The agenda of the Summit of the Americas, which had showed great promise in 2001, when the mostly center-right governments had united to support a Free Trade Area of the Americas, was stalling as well. At that time Hugo Chávez had seemed a quite isolated figure, but now three years later, Latin American leaders who castigated him in private lined up to hug him in public.

  The Venezuelan had survived a coup attempt in April 2002, and at the time there had been lots of speculation about the role of the United States. We hadn’t backed the coup plotters, as some alleged. In fact, we’d warned that the United States would not support extra-constitutional efforts against Chavez. The crisis had been managed largely by the State Department and the embassy in Caracas. They had done so effectively.

  The jobs of the national security advisor and the secretary of state are very different in that regard. With a small staff and the daily demands of the President’s schedule, I couldn’t focus on every issue—even every important issue. The Venezuelan crisis was one of many that never quite got to the level that would produce intense White House involvement—phone calls with heads of state, for instance. I was certainly kept informed and in turn briefed the President. Colin talked with him about it as well. But as I would learn later, as secretary of state, there were many, many crises that Colin had spared us and handled ably himself. Yet when the coup failed, the Venezuelan dictator was left stronger at home and more active in the region.

  Though our hemisphere-wide agenda was stalling, we successfully negotiated a free-trade agreement with five Central American countries and the Dominican Repu
blic, as well as another one with Chile. We also made progress on the bilateral agendas with Brazil and Colombia. The President was able to develop close personal ties to the leaders of these two countries that served us well.

  In the case of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, the bond was forged around a common agenda against terrorism. When Uribe was elected, Colombia was very nearly a failed state. The Colombians told us that the army and police were unable to safely enter approximately 30 percent of the country. A decades-long struggle against the Communist-inspired FARC had left the country plagued by militants, and the paramilitaries that had emerged had left the Colombian state vulnerable and weak. FARC was holding numerous hostages, including three Americans. Uribe’s predecessor, Andrés Pastrana, was an honorable man, but his effort to make a peace deal with the FARC had backfired when FARC had used the pause in military action to strengthen its grip on large parts of the country. Over the years, the FARC insurgency had produced a counterreaction and the development of paramilitary groups, the most powerful of which was the AUC. At times, the paramilitaries had been closely aligned with the security forces and even some members of the government. By the time of Uribe’s election, they too had become a huge part of the problem.

  The United States had trained and equipped Colombian security forces through Plan Colombia. The Clinton administration had begun a massive and comprehensive program to augment security aspects of the “war on drugs” with development assistance for Colombia and its neighbors. The idea was to help all of the Andean states so that the defeat of the druglords in one country wouldn’t simply drive them to establish operations on the territory of a vulnerable neighbor.

  Uribe wanted not only to continue this effort but to change its character. He came to power speaking of “democratic security,” by which FARC would be defeated and power returned to the security forces of the state. He made clear that he’d go after the paramilitaries too, even though some of them had been associated with his political party. When he met with President Bush for the first time, he described the challenge and his commitment to confronting it. The President was immediately attracted to him and his toughness. “Do you really mean it?” the President asked. “Because if you do, you have to be prepared for really tough action. Kill their leadership, and they will start to fold.” Uribe assured the President that he intended to do exactly that. Over the next years, Uribe would become one of our closest allies, and, more important, he’d deliver on his promise. Colombia is now widely recognized as a success, a state that was brought back from the brink of failure and chaos.

  The President developed a somewhat different but also close relationship with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. Uribe was a man of center-right politics, and there was a natural fit with George W. Bush. Lula was a leftist, a former labor organizer who’d won a landslide victory to lead Brazil. Though the early signs were that he’d keep in place the market-oriented reforms of his predecessors, Lula was viewed with suspicion in global business communities—and in the White House.

  When Lula first walked into the Oval Office as president-elect of Brazil on December 10, 2002, the President was, as always, warm and welcoming. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the pin that Lula was wearing—the symbol of his party and one that displayed a decidedly socialist motif. The President would later say that Lula should have been wearing a Brazilian flag. Nonetheless, the chemistry between the two was immediately good. Lula has an easy manner and a twinkle in his eye that is endearing. I noticed too that he was missing a finger on his hand—he’d lost it in a lathe accident as a factory worker. There was an authentic feel to him, and unlike Chávez, a military officer turned ruling thug, Lula seemed to be someone we could work with.

  With the outreach we’d done to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and the countries of Central America, we had a good basis for a successful policy in Latin America. But sitting there in Monterrey at the Summit of the Americas, I recognized that, owing to the diversions of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we’d done too little to help our friends. As a result of our inattention, our adversaries were gaining steam. The time would come later to do something about it—should the President get a second term.

  “Strategery”

  BEGINNING IN 2003, Karl Rove had begun convening the senior White House staff biweekly to review the totality of the President’s agenda. Over cookies, cheese, fruit, and chips and dip, these early-evening meetings—dubbed “strategery,” for a well-known malapropism uttered by then Governor Bush—were held to keep everyone on the same page. I found them extremely enlightening, learning, for instance, what Margaret Spellings, the domestic policy advisor, was doing to promote the No Child Left Behind program or how we were progressing on the economic agenda or in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The meetings added to the genuine comity that Andy Card successfully maintained in the White House. It was not unheard of in the annals of Washington, but it was unusual to be able to say that some of your best friends were other White House staffers. I simply never worried about what someone was doing behind my back. Margaret, Larry Lindsey, and later Steve Friedman at the NEC, Mitchell Daniels and his deputy Clay Johnson at OMB, Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett, Karl, Josh, Ari, and most especially Andy were honest folk, and we supported one another in good times and bad. Al Gonzales and I repaired our relationship after he had allowed the presidential directive on military commissions to be signed without my knowledge. He too became and still is a good friend.

  As the campaign approached, the “strategery” sessions became naturally intertwined with the politics of reelection. Karl and the domestic side of the White House wanted to reserve as sufficient a portion of the President’s time as possible for the necessary work of seeking a second term. But the Bush presidency was a wartime one, and everyone understood that national security would continue to dominate his agenda.

  The President’s approval numbers had dropped but had not been disastrously affected by the course of the Iraq war despite the increasing difficulty there. But the controversy over the sixteen words and the suggestion by some in the media that the administration had been dishonest about prewar intelligence was clearly taking a toll. I found appalling, for instance, a Time magazine cover titled “Untruth & Consequences: How Flawed Was the Case for Going to War Against Saddam?” As amnesia set in on Capitol Hill among the many legislators who’d given fiery speeches about the threat of Saddam’s WMD, we were suddenly very much alone in defending the premise for war. Clearly we had a credibility problem, but we also had a responsibility to examine what had gone wrong.

  In February the President appointed a commission, led by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Democratic Senator Charles Robb, to examine the intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction as well as the capabilities of the intelligence community. Although it concluded that many of the judgments of the intelligence community were flawed, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission was sympathetic to those who supported the Washington consensus around Saddam’s WMD. “Iraq’s decision to abandon its unconventional weapons programs while simultaneously hiding this decision was, at the very least, a counterintuitive one,” the report concluded. “And given the nature of the regime, the Intelligence Community can hardly be blamed for not penetrating Saddam’s decision-making process. In this light, it is worth noting that Saddam’s fellow Arabs (including, evidently his senior military leadership as well as many of the rest of the world’s intelligence agencies and most inspectors) also thought he had retained his weapons programs.” The intelligence failure was to some degree understandable, but there were still reforms we could implement.

  THE SCRUTINY WE FACED on Iraq was intensified by the 9/11 Commission’s inquiry into the September 11 terrorist attacks. In November 2002 President Bush and Congress had authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, which would explore how the September 11 attacks had happened and issue recommendations on how to avoid futur
e tragedies. Under the direction of former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean and former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the commission reviewed more than 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed more than 1,200 individuals as part of its investigation.

  As the commission did its work in the spring of 2004, those who had been in positions of responsibility on September 11 did what people do: they sought to put their own actions in the best light. So too did Clinton administration officials, since the eight-month tenure of the Bush administration was arguably too short to merit full blame for what had happened.

  Yet the attacks had happened on our watch, and a narrative of negligence began to develop. In those accounts, the Bush administration had come to office focused on Iraq and missile defense but not on terrorism. We had thus been slow to respond to “unmistakable” signals that an attack was coming. In hindsight, every e-mail, memo, or phone call that even mentioned, no matter how vaguely, the al Qaeda threat became evidence of negligence.

  At the commission hearings, Clinton administration officials took some heat, particularly concerning their inaction against al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. But Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, had been able to give a thorough, well-rounded, and generally persuasive account of their fight against al Qaeda. On the other hand, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage clearly had only pieces of the story from the perspective of individual departments, not the Bush administration as a whole. Only the national security advisor had that perspective.

  I’d already given “testimony” to the commission in private, answering the commissioners’ questions over a period of four hours. But there was no public record, and the interview was not under oath. The commission hearings were now a television event. My behind-closed-doors answers in the White House Situation Room were no match for critics seeking to show that the administration—now increasingly unpopular due to the Iraq war—had been asleep at the switch on September 11.