by Bob Woodward
Another general, perhaps? Bannon believed the media was Trump’s main concern. Everything was through the eyes of, “Does he look the part?” Everything was movies. Dunford and Mattis struck him as Marines because they were men of few words. They got to the point.
High on the list was Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster—5-foot-9, bald, green-eyed, barrel-chested, ramrod-straight posture—who was the rare combination of war hero and scholar. He had written Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam. It was a groundbreaking work that indicted military leaders for failing to confront their civilian leaders. McMaster was considered a renegade and an outsider in the Army club, but no one doubted his bona fides.
General McMaster was going to get two hours with Trump. Bannon met with him at Mar-a-Lago and offered his usual advice: Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that’s good enough. He’s going to be a billionaire.”
Final advice: “Show up in your uniform.”
McMaster wore a suit.
“Told you to show up in your uniform,” Bannon said.
“I called around,” McMaster replied, “and they said it wouldn’t be appropriate because I’ve got my retirement papers in.” If he was selected, he would retire and serve as national security adviser as a civilian.
“I got you up here because you’re an active duty general,” Bannon reminded him.
The meeting with Trump did not go well. McMaster talked too much and the interview was short.
Bannon, who sat in on it, later reported, “McMaster ran his fucking mouth for all of 20 minutes giving his theories of the world. A fucking Petraeus book guy.” In 2007, McMaster had been part of a “Baghdad brains trust” advising General David Petraeus on the Iraq War.
After McMaster left, Trump asked, “Who was that guy? He wrote a book didn’t he? It said bad things about people. I thought you told me he was in the Army.”
“He is in the Army.”
“He’s dressed like a beer salesman,” the president said.
Bannon, noted for his terrible wardrobe, agreed. He thought McMaster’s suit looked like it cost only $200, or maybe only $100.
Next to be interviewed was John Bolton, a far-right former U.N. ambassador. He was a summa cum laude graduate from Yale who supported the Iraq War and promoted regime change in Iran and North Korea. He was a regular on Fox News—he reported an income of $567,000 in 2017, just from Fox. His answers were fine, but Trump did not like his big, bushy mustache. He didn’t look the part.
* * *
Lieutenant General Robert Caslen, the superintendent of West Point, was next up.
Before he entered, Trump turned to General Kellogg, the NSC chief of staff, who was sitting in on the interviews.
“General, what do you think of this guy?”
“Bobby Caslen’s the best gunfighter in the Army,” Kellogg said.
Caslen, who had big ears and wore medals on his uniform up to the top of his shoulder, gave short answers, mostly “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” He was like Clint Eastwood. Trump started pitching him, telling him stories from the campaign.
Bannon thought Trump was selling this guy. He thought Caslen was in.
That night Kushner said that all the media loved McMaster—combat veteran, thinker, author.
“But Trump’s got no chemistry with this guy,” Bannon reminded him. The chemistry had been there with Caslen, but he was a field general with no Washington experience except a short tour on the Joint Staff in a junior position. “We’ll get lit up,” Bannon noted.
They agreed that McMaster and Bolton should have another round the next day, and to invite Caslen to the White House later for a one-on-one lunch.
* * *
The next day Bolton came in. He was fine, the same, but still had the mustache.
McMaster arrived in his uniform. He looked better—high and tight. There was better chemistry, though not great.
Bannon and Kushner told Bolton and McMaster to wait; there would be a decision in the next couple of days. McMaster hung around Mar-a-Lago.
“You know, we’re getting killed with bad stories on the Flynn thing,” Trump said. “Let’s just make a decision.”
“I don’t think we can just make a decision,” Bannon said. “Caslen and McMaster are two serving Army officers. I don’t think they’ve run the traps on this.” They had to inform their Army superiors. The Army chief of staff, General Mark Milley, said that Caslen would be the best possible pick. “They’ve got jobs. So there’s a process.”
“No, no, no,” Trump said. “We’re getting killed. Bad stories.”
“The media loves McMaster,” Jared said.
“Because he’s a fucking liberal,” Bannon said. “No offense, he has not been that impressive in this thing. You guys don’t have great chemistry.”
“Yeah, but you know,” the president said. “Get him over here.”
Bannon retrieved McMaster. “The president wants to talk to you. Come on over.”
What do you think is going to happen? McMaster asked.
“I think the president may offer you the job.”
“I’ve got to tell some people. I can’t tell the president that I can take it. I’ve got to tell the Army.”
“Just play it by ear,” Bannon said. “We’ll figure it out.” That was the Trump way. Playing by ear, acting on impulse. Pure Trump.
“Do you want this job?” the president asked McMaster.
“Yes, sir.”
“You got it,” Trump said and shook McMaster’s hand. “Get the media. Get the cameras in here.” He wanted a picture with his latest general who looked out of Central Casting.
McMaster sat awkwardly on a gold brocade sofa beside the president. A large gold vase holding roses was on the table behind them.
“I just wanted to announce, we’ve been working all weekend very diligently, that General H. R. McMaster will become the national security adviser,” Trump told reporters. “He’s a man of tremendous talent and tremendous experience.”
“I’m grateful to you for that opportunity,” McMaster said. “I look forward to joining the national security team and doing everything that I can to advance and protect the interests of the American people.”
McMaster’s shell shock was plain on camera as he shook Trump’s hand.
“I’ve got to call the Army chief of staff,” McMaster said to Bannon.
“Do it,” Bannon said. “But you’ve already taken the job.”
Trump’s choice played well. The media saw McMaster was an adult. There would be no more crazies. The president basked in the positive stories.
CHAPTER
12
McMaster knew the biggest national security challenge would be North Korea. It had been on the most difficult list for years.
Six months earlier, on September 9, 2016, President Obama had received unsettling news as he entered the final months of his eight years. North Korea had detonated a nuclear weapon in an underground test, the fifth in a decade, and the largest.
Seismic monitors had instantly revealed that the vibrations recorded were not caused by an earthquake. The 5.3 magnitude tremor had been instantaneous and had originated less than a mile within the earth, measured precisely at the Punggye-ri test site of the four previous nuclear detonations. The estimated yield was equivalent to 10 kilotons of TNT—approaching the 15 kilotons of the 1945 Hiroshima bomb.
Dispelling any doubt, North Korea’s 73-year-old female version of Walter Cronkite, Ri Chun-hee, appeared on state-controlled television to announce the test. She almost always appeared for the big moments. Wearing pink, and speaking in a gleef
ul, soaring voice, she told viewers that the regime had built a better, bigger and more versatile bomb.
The North’s nuclear weapons center said the new nuclear bomb could be mounted on a ballistic missile, a disturbing claim, although seriously doubted by U.S. intelligence.
To compound the potential North Korean threat, four days earlier the North had launched three medium-range ballistic missiles that had flown 1,000 kilometers before dropping in the Sea of Japan, making South Korea and Japan reachable targets. These tests matched an earlier single 1,000-kilometer launch the month before. Three was not a fluke.
Even with his intense desire to avoid a war, Obama decided the time had come to consider whether the North Korean nuclear threat could be eliminated in a surgical military strike. As he prepared to hand over the presidency, he knew he needed to address the North Korea mess head-on.
That successor, of course, would almost certainly be Hillary Clinton. He assured his aides in so many words that the American people would do the right thing and elect her.
From the outset President Obama had authorized several Special Access Programs (SAP), the most classified and compartmented operations conducted by the military and intelligence, to deter North Korean missiles. One program pinpointed cyber attacks on the command, control, telemetry and guidance systems before or during a North Korean missile test launch. These high-risk cyber attacks had begun in his first year as president. Their success rate was mixed.
Another highly secret operation focused on obtaining North Korean missiles. And a third enabled the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds. Officials have asked that I not describe the details in order to protect national security operations deemed vital to the interests to the United States.
The North Korean threat had not been diminished, and in September 2016 Obama posed a sensitive question to his National Security Council: Was it possible to launch a preemptive military strike, supported by cyber attacks, on North Korea to take out their nuclear and missile programs?
This unfinished business was particularly gnawing for Obama. His predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, had addressed but not solved problems that had been mounting for decades. And now the United States had run out of road. The Hermit Kingdom was creating a force that could extend an arc of potential devastating nuclear destruction to the homeland.
* * *
James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, had begun his career commanding a signals intelligence listening post in Thailand during the Vietnam War. Now 75 years old, bald and bearded with a wide, expressive face, he was the granddaddy of American intelligence—gruff, direct, outspoken, seasoned.
Clapper rang the bell loud and clear with Obama: The reporting showed that the new North Korean weapon systems would work in some form. But what threat did they pose? To South Korea? Japan? The United States? How immediate? Was the North just looking for a bargaining chip?
The intelligence assessment showed an increasing level of effort, strongly suggesting that Kim Jong Un was building a fighting force of nuclear weapons, or at least he wanted to make it appear that way.
Despite the public cartoon that cast him as an unstable madman, sensitive intelligence reporting showed that Kim, now age 34, was a much more effective leader of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs than his father, Kim Jong Il, who had ruled for 17 years from 1994 to 2011.
The elder Kim had dealt with weapons test failures by ordering the death of the responsible scientists and officials. They were shot. The younger Kim accepted failures in tests, apparently absorbing the practical lesson: Failure is inevitable on the road to success. Under Kim Jong Un, the scientists lived to learn from their mistakes, and the weapons programs improved.
Obama tasked the Pentagon and intelligence agencies with examining whether it would be possible to take out all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related facilities. Could they effectively target all of this? They would need to update the satellite, signals and human intelligence. So much was not known or certain.
Pakistan, which had nuclear weapons since 1998, had miniaturized their nukes and put them in mines and artillery shells. Did North Korea have that capability? Current intelligence assessments could not answer definitively.
The intelligence assessment also showed that a U.S. attack could not wipe out everything the North had. There would be lost targets because they did not know about them, and partial destruction of other targets.
The greater Seoul megalopolis was home to approximately 10 million people and went right up to the 2.5-mile-wide Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing North and South Korea. North Korea had thousands of artillery pieces near the DMZ in caves. In exercises the North Koreans wheeled the artillery out, practiced shooting and went back into the caves. This was called “shoot and scoot.” Could a U.S. attack deal with so many weapons?
After a month of study, U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon formally reported to Obama that perhaps 85 percent of all known nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons facilities could be attacked and destroyed and that was only the identified ones. Clapper believed the projected success rate would have to be perfect. A single North Korean nuclear weapon detonated in response could mean tens of thousands of casualties in South Korea.
Any U.S. attack could also trigger the North’s potentially devastating artillery, other conventional weapons and a ground army of at least 200,000 and many more volunteers.
The Pentagon reported that the only way “to locate and destroy—with complete certainty—all components of North Korea’s nuclear program” was through a ground invasion. A ground invasion would trigger a North Korean response, likely with a nuclear weapon.
That was unthinkable to Obama. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 he said, “War promises human tragedy,” and “War at some level is an expression of human folly.”
Frustrated and exasperated, he rejected a preemptive strike. It was folly.
* * *
Informal, backchannel diplomacy between the United States and North Korea continued. Former U.S. government officials met with current North Korean officials to keep a dialogue open. These were most often called Track 1.5 meetings. Government-to-government meetings were called Track 1. If both sides were nongovernment or former officials these meetings were called Track 2.
“We’re has-beens, but they’re not,” in the words of one former U.S. official deeply involved in the Track 1.5 meetings. One meeting had been held recently in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with the vice foreign minister of North Korea. Former U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci said the North Koreans warned him at this meeting, “they will always be a nuclear weapons state.”
A second Track 1.5 meeting with the head of North Korea’s American affairs division followed the 2016 election and took place in Geneva. “The North Koreans don’t take it seriously,” said one former U.S. official, because they know the U.S. representatives can’t propose anything new. “But they’re probably better than not having” the meetings.
Trump had a history of public statements about North Korea, dating back to an October 1999 Meet the Press appearance. “I would negotiate like crazy,” Trump said. In a 2016 campaign speech, he said, “President Obama watches helplessly as North Korea increases its aggression and expands even further with its nuclear reach.” In May of 2016, he told Reuters, “I would have no problem speaking to” Kim Jong Un. As president, in 2017, he called Kim a “smart cookie.”
* * *
Without a tenable military option, DNI Clapper thought the U.S. needed to be more realistic. In November 2014, he had gone to North Korea to retrieve two U.S. citizens who had been taken prisoner. From his discussions with North Korean officials he was convinced that North Korea would not give up their nuclear weapons. Why would they? In exchange for what? North Korea had effectively bought a deterrent. It was real and powerful in its ambiguity. U.S. intelligence was not certain of the capability. He had argued to Obama and the NSC t
hat for the United States to say that denuclearization was a condition for negotiations was not working, and would not work.
Also, Clapper said, he understood the North Korean desire for a peace treaty to end the Korean War, which had been formally resolved with an armistice in 1953—a truce between the commanders of the militaries involved, not the nations at war.
The United States needed to understand how North Korea looked at the situation: The U.S. and South Korea seemed permanently poised, dramatically at times, to attack and to do away with the Kim regime.
There was a single argument he made, Clapper said, that the North Koreans had not pushed back on during his 2014 visit. The United States, he had argued, has no permanent enemies. Look, he said, we had a war with Japan and Germany but now are friends with both. We had a war with Vietnam but now we are friends. Clapper had recently visited Vietnam. Even after a full-scale war, peaceful coexistence was possible.
Clapper wanted the U.S. to set up an interest section in Pyongyang. This would be an informal channel in which another government with an embassy in the North Korean capital would act as intermediary. It would be less than full diplomatic relations, but it would give the U.S. a base, a place in the capital where they could obtain information and also get information into North Korea.
Clapper was a voice in the wilderness. No one agreed. Obama was hard-line: North Korea would have to agree to give up its nuclear weapons. Obama, a determined advocate for reducing nuclear weapons worldwide, wanted to turn the clock back. He condemned the North’s September 9 nuclear test in a long public statement, repeating U.S. policy: “To be clear the United States does not, and never will accept North Korea as a nuclear state.”
The overriding fact, Clapper argued, was that no one really understood what drove Kim Jong Un. “No one knows his ignition point,” he said. That was the assessment they needed and didn’t have. Instead the analysts debated whether Kim Jung Un was a brilliant, strategic genius manipulating other countries, including the U.S., or an inexperienced, impulsive fool.
