Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Quinn popped into Fry's office before 7 a.m. Fry was in a meeting. His executive assistant, a Navy captain and stickler for the chain of command, looked kind of funny at Quinn when he asked about the message from Admiral Blair. Apparently Blair had addressed the message the old way—only to Shelton and the JCS, not to Rumsfeld.

  Fry's executive assistant said that since it was addressed only to the JCS, his hands were tied. I can't give it to you.

  When Fry returned, his executive assistant held up a copy of Blair's message. Oh, by the way, the captain said, I'm telling J. J. Quinn that the secretary can't see this until the chairman has seen it.

  Quinn remembers also asking Fry for the message and maintains that Fry also refused to hand over a copy of the message. Fry places the responsibility on his executive assistant.

  Whatever the case, Quinn returned to Rumsfeld's office to report. Mr. Secretary, the message is in the Joint Staff director's office and they refuse to give it to me.

  Rumsfeld picked up the phone. Shelton was still traveling, so he summoned Vice Chairman Myers.

  Myers came rushing up to Rumsfeld's office. What's the problem, Mr. Secretary?

  What the hell are you guys thinking down there? Rumsfeld exploded. I can't believe this.

  Quinn was standing on the other side of the room. Rumsfeld was about as furious as he had ever seen a human being.

  Where is the loyalty here? Rumsfeld shouted, and proceeded to give Myers a royal ass chewing. It had been months of being tangled in the anchor chain. Frustration came pouring out. In his own quarter of a century in the Navy, Quinn had never seen anything quite like it as he froze in place.

  Myers insisted they were not trying to keep anything from the secretary. That would be absurd. They had both been on the conference call with Blair. Obviously, there had been some routing mistake. Yes, clearly Rumsfeld was the boss. He tried to defend the Joint Staff.

  Rumsfeld would not hear of it, as he continued to rip Myers up one side and down the other. Quinn looked at the clock and recalls it registered 7:02 a.m. The Powell-Rumsfeld-Rice conference call was coming up in 13 minutes.

  When it was over, Myers walked out and turned to Quinn. What the hell is going on?

  Quinn filled him in, and Myers flew down to get a copy of the message, which he brought back to Rumsfeld's office in time for the conference call.

  After the call, Rumsfeld came on the squawk box in Quinn's office. Can you come in?

  Quinn went in and Rumsfeld asked his opinion about what had happened.

  Mr. Secretary, next time you have to dress down a four-star officer like that, I think I'll make myself disappear.

  No, you won't. I want you there as a witness. He asked Quinn to get the Pentagon general counsel. He wanted to inquire about his legal authority over the Joint Staff and his power to fire people.

  Rumsfeld was beside himself. Most of his key civilian appointees had not yet been confirmed. He complained that he felt like he was running the Pentagon alone. He didn't have his team. I'm here and I don't have anybody working for me, he said. Edgy and fed up after weeks of feeling that the chain of command was not being enforced, he leaned on his consultant Steve Herbits.

  I want to talk to the combatant commanders, Rumsfeld told Herbits.

  They report to me. That's what the law says. He told Herbits he was learning things too late from the Joint Staff time and time again. He was furious with Shelton and Fry.

  You've got to fire somebody, Herbits proposed. You've got to let people know who's boss here. Here's a perfect example. Fry seemed incompetent. Fire Fry.

  Word soon reached Shelton, who was back, that Rumsfeld was planning to do precisely that. Shelton and Myers thought they had explained the screwup about the message from Admiral Blair, and had promised it would not happen again. Shelton wasn't sure if it was that or if it was a new problem, so he stopped by Fry's office to see what snowflake answers might be due Rumsfeld.

  Steve Cambone had issued an edict that all snowflakes would get a response within 24 hours, and Fry explained that he was trying to keep up. At times he felt that he had most of the Joint Staff working on Rumsfeld's queries. There aren't enough people in the Pentagon to respond to all the snowflakes that are coming down from the third deck —the third floor, where Rumsfeld had his office.

  Shelton could see that Fry, a tireless worker with a real leadership future ahead of him, was exhausted, working weekends and staying up half the night trying to answer snowflakes.

  Shelton bolted up to Rumsfeld's office and barged in, forcing a confrontation.

  If you're not happy with Scott Fry, the chairman said, he works for me, and if you're not happy with him, it means you're unhappy with me. You can have two for the price of one, Shelton said.

  Rumsfeld seemed to jump back and heatedly denied that he had any plan to fire Fry.

  Shelton went back down to Fry's office.

  You've never had any leave, Shelton said. You've never had a day off. You've been here every day that I've been here. Why don't you take a couple of days off?

  Ah, bullshit, Fry responded. We're doing fine.

  Take a couple of days off, Shelton ordered. I'll see you Thursday.

  Fry's day began about 6 a.m. when he would go to the National Military Command Center to get briefed on overnight developments, review messages, and make phone calls around the world to get updated. At 7 a.m. he briefed Shelton for the chairman's own 8:30 a.m. meeting with Rumsfeld. Fry then represented the Joint Staff at a larger meeting Rumsfeld had later in the morning. At that meeting, Rumsfeld went around the table and asked if anyone had something to offer. Nothing this morning, Mr. Secretary was Fry's usual refrain because everything he knew of significance that morning he had passed to Shelton, who had already informed Rumsfeld.

  Fry comes to my meeting, Rumsfeld told his staff. He never has a goddamn thing to say.

  On April 25, 2001, ABC television ran an interview with Bush about his first 100 days. The interviewer, Charles Gibson, asked Bush whether the U.S. had an obligation to defend Taiwan.

  Yes, we do. And the Chinese must understand that, Bush replied.

  And you would...

  Yes, 1 would.

  With the full force of the American military?

  Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself.

  It was one of the strongest statements the U.S. had made about the delicate issue of Taiwan. The Chinese were very upset.

  Condoleezza Rice called Brent Scowcroft, who had had her job under Bush's father, and asked him to come see the president. Scowcroft met privately with Bush and Rice.

  How do I get out of this? Bush essentially asked.

  After listening to Scowcroft, Bush asked him to go on a secret mission to China to meet with President Jiang Zemin and explain U.S. policy. Scowcroft, who was going to China on private business, agreed to talk with Jiang on the president's behalf. He told the Chinese leader that Bush's policy was to defend Taiwan if the island was attacked unprovoked, but if the Taiwanese took action to change the status quo on their own, the United States would not defend them. Jiang and Bush seemed satisfied, and Scowcroft's secret mission never became public.

  Scowcroft was delighted to see the administration recover from its misstep. Getting off on a balanced, moderate footing was the key ingredient, in Scowcroft's and Bush senior's view, of a strong and sensible foreign policy. It was good news.

  Rumsfeld's daily 7:15 a.m. secure phone call with Powell and Rice was causing trouble. With all his contacts from his 35 years of previous military service, as Reagan's national security adviser, and now as Bush's chief diplomat, Powell gathered more intelligence than perhaps any single other individual in the U.S. government. His best friend, Richard Armitage, now the deputy secretary of state, conducted an aggressive daily sweep during his meetings and phone calls— Feed the Beast, he would say. He wanted something good to pass to Powell. Give, he often said emphatically.

  In the morning Rice-Powell-Rumsfeld phone ca
lls, Powell often had something new from abroad or the Washington information chain. He relished these moments when he could drop a little item involving the military that Rumsfeld had not heard about. At the later morning meeting with Shelton, a frequent Rumsfeld question was Why is it that Powell knew this and I didn't? This often led to reconstructions of the information flow. How was it that someone out there in the vast U.S. military enterprise knew something potentially or obviously important and it didn't make its way to the secretary of defense? One of Rumsfeld's favorite questions for Shelton was: How come the combatant commanders talk to you, when they work for me?

  The snowflakes came fast and furious. At one point Fry realized he couldn't create a tracking system that could adequately monitor all that impacted the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff. This was because Rumsfeld sent snowflakes to almost everyone, whatever their rank or position in the Pentagon. Snowflakes sent to others often got rerouted to Fry in whole or in part, and suddenly there would be a massive request and only hours to answer. Rumsfeld, however, had his own tracking system, which led to more queries and follow-on snowflakes about what had happened to the unanswered snowflakes.

  One day Cambone got chewed out by Rumsfeld and came whimpering into Quinn's office. 'Am I doing that badly? he asked.

  Another day, Quinn approached Vice President Cheney at a Pentagon reception and asked for any advice. Here's what I can tell you about Don Rumsfeld, Cheney said. You're never going to get any credit. And you'll only know how well you're doing if he gives you more work. If that happens, you're doing fine.

  As Quinn saw it, Rumsfeld was on a necessary and noble mission. For eight years under Clinton the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff had taken control of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld was trying to wrest the power back from them and put it under proper civilian control. Quinn's relations with Fry and the other senior flag officers on the Joint Staff were awful. They wore their superior rank, and Quinn found he was not able to transmit Rumsfeld's requests and orders with the authority and urgency with which they had been issued. One day Fry complained to Quinn that Rumsfeld and his civilians were not cooperating with them—the Joint Staff—as if they were in charge.

  Quinn's wife and two young daughters were living about an hour and a half away in Maryland where the Naval Space Command was located, so Quinn got home for only part of each weekend. He tried to arrange for housing at one of the local bases closer to the Pentagon, and got in a horrendous fight with the Army. Cambone intervened, but it seemed to be a little harassment campaign, and Quinn never got local base housing. Fry thought it was consuming an inordinate amount of Quinn's time and emotional energy, and began complaining that Quinn was underperforming.

  For Quinn, the housing issue was incidental. He felt he couldn't do his job, so he took matters into his own hands and went to Rumsfeld.

  You've got to make a change here in your military assistant, he said. I am a one-star. The three- and four-stars won't listen to me. They go around me. They go through me. The culture doesn't allow me to pass on orders.

  No, Rumsfeld said. Our chemistry is good. We'll work through this.

  But Rumsfeld complained to Herbits about the disorder in his own office. Everything moved too slowly and he didn't like the way the uniformed military was responding to him. So Herbits packed up his things from the transition offices downstairs in the Pentagon and moved up to Rumsfeld's suite, so he could keep an eye on the traffic of people and paper. He took over a desk between Admiral Quinn and Rumsfeld's civilian special assistant, Steve Cambone.

  After several weeks of watching Quinn's performance, Herbits walked into Rumsfeld's office.

  This isn't going to work, he said, echoing Quinn's self-evaluation.

  Why? Rumsfeld inquired.

  Quinn was a competent, decent officer, but in the rank-conscious military, his single star gave him insufficient clout. He was just one step above a Navy captain or Army colonel, and he couldn't really pass on orders or talk as a peer with the three-stars on the Joint Staff and elsewhere. Quinn was being ignored by Fry and the others. The link between the secretary's military assistant and the director of the Joint Staff was critical to the functioning of the Pentagon, Herbits said. It was one of the most important relationships in the building. In some respects it was the most important, and it wasn't working.

  That spring the Navy announced that it was going to resume bombing exercises on a small island off Puerto Rico called Vieques. There was a long history of controversy. Two years earlier a civilian security guard had been killed during one bombing run; protesters occupied the range and in 2000 the successful candidate for governor of Puerto Rico made expelling the Navy from Vieques the centerpiece of her campaign.

  I need to get smart about Vieques, Rumsfeld told Quinn. Call down to the Navy. Tell them I want a briefing. No more than five to 10 charts. He hated the 60-slide, show-and-tell, death-by-PowerPoint briefings renowned in the Pentagon. A 10-minute briefing and then 20 minutes of discussion, he ordered.

  Quinn passed the instructions to the senior Navy operations admirals in the Pentagon and to the four-star admiral in charge of the Atlantic Fleet. He was explicit—no more than five or 10 slides, 10 minutes of briefing followed by a serious 20-minute discussion of the issues. The discussion was always the part Rumsfeld's active mind liked.

  The Atlantic Fleet four-star soon showed up in Rumsfeld's office with eight people and 60 slides. The admiral got through 15 slides in the allotted half hour with Rumsfeld rolling his eyes and jumping in his seat.

  I'm going to have to stop this briefing, Rumsfeld said, made some excuse and shooed everyone out.

  Didn't you tell them what I wanted done? he later complained to Quinn.

  It had all been repeated and repeated—everything but an engraved invitation, Quinn said.

  They don't listen, do they? Rumsfeld said.

  The culture doesn't allow a one-star to do this, Quinn repeated.

  On the Vieques problem, Rumsfeld told Quinn, We'll give them the island back and buy another one. It's a political and media nightmare. But Rumsfeld was deeply concerned about the Navy, his old service. During his first days back at the Pentagon, a Navy submarine, the USS Greeneville, was practicing an emergency surfacing off the coast of Hawaii and struck a Japanese fishing boat, killing nine, including some Japanese students. Then there was the EP-3 spy plane incident, and now Vieques.

  At 7:51 a.m. on April 27, Rumsfeld dictated a snowflake summarizing his own thoughts and feelings.

  Subject: Navy

  The problems in the Navy may be systemic. It is one thing if you make mistakes when you are pushing the envelope. It's another thing if you make mistakes walking to work.

  5

  Shelton was growing despondent. Rumsfeld was suggesting that Shelton should give his military advice to the president through Rumsfeld. Shelton reiterated that since Title X made him the principal military adviser to the president, he didn't see how that could work. He had to give his advice directly.

  You are not providing added value, Rumsfeld said once during a visit to the Tank, the Joint Chiefs' conference room.

  Admiral Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, 56, bespectacled and studious, pushed back. We can't even get copies of all the studies your consultants are doing, Clark said. There was one document in particular he hadn't been allowed to see. How can you ask us to comment on this when we have never even seen the document?

  Rumsfeld hotly disputed this. Well, that's not true. That document's wide open for all of you.

  Mr. Secretary, Clark said, I called your office myself 30 minutes ago to get a copy of that document and I was told by your office that I was not authorized to see it.

  Rumsfeld said he had the studies done because the Joint Staff was essentially useless. They specialized in thick studies that took months or more, didn't cut to the essential issues, and were basically unreadable. I can't get a product out of these guys, he said.

  Clark disagreed. He had b
een director of the Joint Staff earlier in his career, and he said they did some great work. Rumsfeld ought to appreciate it, Clark said; if he didn't yet, he'd learn to.

  Rumsfeld scoffed. Afterward, he went back to his office with Quinn. Did you see your CNO down there? Rumsfeld asked.

  Yes sir, Quinn replied. First time I ever saw a four-star throw some mud back at you.

  Quinn made another run at getting himself relieved. Mr. Secretary, you need to find the biggest, baddest three-star in the building and make him your senior military assistant. And somehow you need to signal that this is your guy, that this is the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Then the other admirals and generals will take him seriously.

  All Rumsfeld did was smile.

  In interviews later, Quinn said that the uniformed military believed that Rumsfeld was engaged in a hostile takeover. I was considered a traitor, Quinn said.

  Herbits discovered that probably the best candidate to replace Quinn was the deputy chief of naval operations for resources, warfare requirements and assessments, Vice Admiral Edmund R Giambastiani, a nuclear power submariner. Often called Admiral G because many people had trouble pronouncing his name, Giambastiani was a 1970 Naval Academy graduate. He had skippered the Navy's only nuclear-powered, deep-sea research submarine, NR-1, and later commanded a fast-attack nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Russell, that conducted some of the most sensitive and high-risk covert Cold War missions, spying on the Soviet Union. He'd been a special assistant to the deputy CIA director in the 1980s, and had most recently commanded the Navy's entire Atlantic submarine fleet.

  Vern Clark, the Navy CNO, was on the third hole of a golf course at Nags Head, North Carolina, soon afterward, when he received a call telling him to phone Secretary Rumsfeld at a specific time that would be right about when he would finish the first nine holes. Clark was one of the most improbable men to head the Navy. Unlike 25 of his 26 predecessors, he was not a ring-knocker, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. A person of deep Christian faith, Clark had graduated from Evangel College, a small church-affiliated school in Missouri. He had gone to officer candidate school in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War. He had quit in 1972 after his first tour of duty because he did not respect most of the officers who were making the Navy a career, but rejoined the following year, believing the Navy was something he should do for a while.