by Bob Woodward
Harvey, a soft-spoken, driven legend, approached intelligence like a homicide detective—sifting through thousands of pages of interrogation reports, communications intercepts, battle reports, enemy documents, raw intelligence data and nontraditional sources such as tribal leaders.
The result was at times unorthodox thinking. In some circles he was referred to as “The Grenade” because of his ability and willingness to explode conventional wisdom.
Before the 9/11 terrorist attacks Harvey had written a paper concluding that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network posed a strategic threat to the United States. He was almost alone in forecasting the persistence and power of the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded. His argument was often that certain aggressive, ambitious ideas were “doable but not sellable,” meaning the political system would not provide or sustain them, such as maintaining tens of thousands of U.S. troops in Afghanistan for years.
Harvey went to see Jared Kushner, who had a small office adjacent to the Oval Office.
Kushner sat back, crossed his legs and listened to Harvey’s case.
Harvey’s number-one worry in the Middle East was Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported terrorist organization. The sensitive intelligence showed that Hezbollah had more than 48,000 full-time military in Lebanon, where they presented an existential threat to the Jewish state. They had 8,000 expeditionary forces in Syria, Yemen and region-wide commando units. In addition, they had people worldwide—30 to 50 each in Colombia, Venezuela, South Africa, Mozambique and Kenya.
Hezbollah had a stunning 150,000 rockets. In the 2006 war with Israel they’d had only 4,500.
Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders were integrated into the Hezbollah structure. Iran was paying Hezbollah’s bills—at a staggering $1 billion a year. That did not include what Hezbollah made from money laundering, human trafficking, the cocaine and opium trades, and selling ivory tusks from Mozambique.
Hezbollah dominated in Lebanon, a state within a state, with a willingness to use violence. Nothing of import happened in Lebanon without Hezbollah’s acquiescence. It was committed to destroy Israel.
Hezbollah was a perfect proxy for Iran to use to pressure and attack Israel, whose air bases could be pummeled with rockets. Israel’s defenses of Iron Dome, David’s Sling and Arrow missiles would be inadequate.
Harvey argued there was potential for a catastrophic war, with immense humanitarian, economic and strategic consequences. An Iranian-Israeli conflict would draw in the United States and unhinge efforts to bring regional stability.
Trump was given a Reader’s Digest version of the Hezbollah briefing. DNI Dan Coats and CIA Director Mike Pompeo supported the case in morning Oval Office PDB briefings. Mattis, McMaster and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supported it in a matter-of-fact way.
Harvey felt the others did not appreciate the degree to which the fundamental balance of power had shifted. Another Arab-Israeli war would come home to Israel as no attack ever had. A full-scale assault could impact their ability to actually fight.
Harvey underscored this to Kushner strongly: The new Trump administration was unprepared for what could happen. He pushed to follow up on Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s agreements from their meeting in February—the importance of a strategic dialogue to take a fresh look and confront the new realities on the ground. He wanted to enhance the relationship that he believed had deteriorated over eight years under the Obama administration.
In the summer, the Israeli ambassador to Washington and its national security adviser wanted Harvey to come to Israel.
McMaster said Harvey couldn’t go, though he gave no reason.
In early July, Harvey arranged to meet with senior intelligence officials from Mossad, military intelligence, and representatives from the Israeli Air Force and Army. McMaster, angry with Harvey, would not let him move forward.
The big question: Had Harvey uncovered the next ticking time bomb—Hezbollah—in the array of foreign policy problems facing the United States and Trump?
* * *
Soon Harvey was back to see Kushner.
“What do you think about the president going to Riyadh as our first presidential trip?” Kushner asked.
“It fits perfectly with what we’re trying to do,” Harvey said, “to reaffirm our support for the Saudis, our strategic objectives in the region. Our position has deteriorated so much during the Obama years.”
Harvey believed that Obama had spent too much time on mollifying Iran with the nuclear deal and neglecting, even scorning, relations with the Saudis and Israel. Making Saudi Arabia the first presidential trip could go a long way to signaling that the Trump administration had new priorities. It was also very attractive to Harvey that the president’s first trip might be to his region because all the other senior NSC staffers would be clamoring to have the first trip in theirs.
A summit in Saudi Arabia would also benefit Israel. The Saudis and Israelis, both longtime foes of Iran, had both open and important backchannel relations.
Harvey knew to focus rigorously on such a suggestion from Kushner, who was obviously not just another senior presidential adviser. The son-in-law was speaking with at least the president’s knowledge if not his encouragement.
Harvey was as well connected as any intelligence officer to Israeli intelligence and knew that Kushner had established his own connections there. Netanyahu was a longtime Kushner family friend.
Kushner told Harvey he had important and reliable intelligence that the key to Saudi Arabia was the deputy crown prince, the charismatic 31-year-old Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. The son of the Saudi king, MBS was also the defense minister, a key position and launching pad for influence in the Kingdom. MBS had vision, energy. He was charming and spoke of bold, modernizing reforms.
When McMaster learned of Kushner’s Saudi summit idea, he asked Harvey nervously, “Who’s pushing this? Where’s it coming from?”
Harvey was not sure what role the president might or might not have.
McMaster clearly disliked the out-of-channel approach but there was not much he could do about it.
Harvey held a series of meetings with the intelligence agencies including the CIA. The message from them was that Kushner better be careful. The real solid guy was the current crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef, 57, who was known as MBN. He was the king’s nephew credited with dismantling al Qaeda in the Kingdom as head of the Interior Ministry. Showing favoritism to the younger MBS would cause friction in the royal family.
From decades of intelligence contacts in the Middle East, Harvey believed that Kushner was right—MBS was the future. MBS saw that transformative change in Saudi Arabia was the only path to survival for the Kingdom. With Kushner as his patron, Harvey had unusual authority to begin planning. Harvey reached out to Defense, Treasury and the White House National Economic Council. The risks, Harvey believed, were substantial, but he saw high, high upsides.
In March, McMaster chaired a principals meeting on the possibility of a Saudi summit.
“From my experience at Exxon,” said Secretary of State Tillerson, waving his hand dismissively, “the Saudis always talk a big game. You go through the dance with them on the negotiations. When it comes time to putting the signature on the page, you can’t get there.” Engagement with MBS should be taken with a grain of salt. The U.S. could work hard on a summit, and in the end have nothing.
“It’s a bridge too far,” Mattis said. Arranging arms sales and other projects beneficial to the United States economy, the necessary deliverables for such a summit, would take a long time. “We’re better off waiting until next year. A new administration should be more careful and prudent.”
Secretary of Energy Rick Perry said there was too much to do in too short a time.
No one supported the idea of a summit in two months as Kushner was now proposing.
Kushner sat at the opposite end of the table from McMaster.
“I understand this is
very ambitious,” the president’s son-in-law said. He stood. “I understand the concerns. But I think we have a real opportunity here. We have to recognize it. I understand we have to be careful. We need to work this diligently, as if it’s going to happen. And if it looks like we can’t get there, we’ll have plenty of time to shift gears. But this is an opportunity that is there for the seizing.”
No one said no. Harvey knew they really couldn’t, and he continued to plan as if it were going to happen. He set some thresholds, deciding that they would have to have over $100 billion in military contracts agreed on beforehand.
Execution fell to Harvey. MBS sent a team of 30 to Washington and Harvey arranged multiple conference rooms in the Eisenhower Office Building. Working groups of Americans and Saudis were set up on terrorism, terrorism financing, violent extremism and information campaigns. The Pentagon held meetings on contracts and security partnerships.
Harvey did not want to ask too much of the Saudis, who he knew did not have as deep pocketbooks as generally thought. Oil prices had dropped, cutting into Saudi revenue.
McMaster was still not enthusiastic. Because Kushner wants it, he told Harvey, we need to keep working it. But there’s not a lot of support for it. We’ll go through the motions, and then we’ll kill it at some point.
Kushner said that if the United States was going to stay engaged in the region, they needed to help the Saudis and Israelis succeed. The president was not going to continue paying the bills for U.S. defense in the Middle East when the primary beneficiaries were the countries in the region, according to Kushner.
His worry was increased Iranian influence and subversive operations in the region, especially Hezbollah, which threatened Israel.
Get the Saudis to buy more, Kushner said. If they bought weapons systems, it would help the U.S. economy and job creation. They would buy large stockpiles of munitions, 10-year maintenance and support contracts.
The Saudi team came back to Washington for a second visit. For at least four days straight they all had meetings that went to 1 a.m.
Kushner held daily interagency meetings of the key U.S. players in his office where a dozen people crowded in.
At times the Saudis were not delivering enough on contracts or arms purchases.
“I’ll make a phone call,” Kushner said to Harvey. He phoned MBS directly and the Saudis increased their arms purchases.
When it looked like they were close, Kushner invited MBS to the United States and brought him to the White House where he had lunch March 14 in the State Dining Room with Trump. Attending were Pence, Priebus, Bannon, McMaster and Kushner. This violated protocol, unsettling officials at State and the CIA. Lunch at the White House with the president for a middle-rank deputy crown prince was just not supposed to be done.
Tillerson and Mattis continued to express their doubts. This is too hard, too much work to do, too many questions about the contracts.
Trump finally gave the go-ahead and the trip to both Saudi Arabia and Israel was announced on Thursday, May 4.
Trump went to Saudi Arabia from May 20 to 21 and was lavishly welcomed. He announced $110 billion in Saudi-funded defense purchases and a grab bag of several hundred billion in other contracts—certainly an exaggerated number.
Harvey believed the summit had reset the relationships in a dramatic way, a home run—sending a strategic message to Iran, the principal adversary. The Saudis, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia) and Israel were united. The Obama approach of straddling was over.
The next month Saudi king Salman at age 81 appointed MBS, age 31, the new crown prince and next in line to lead the Kingdom perhaps for decades to come.
CHAPTER
15
Trump was one of the most outspoken foes of the 16-year-old Afghanistan War, now the longest in American history. To the extent Trump had a bedrock principle, it was opposition, even ridicule, of the war. Beginning in 2011, four years before his formal entry into the presidential race, he launched a drumbeat of Twitter attacks.
In March 2012, he tweeted, “Afghanistan is a total disaster. We don’t know what we are doing. They are, in addition to everything else, robbing us blind.”
In 2013, the tweets picked up. In January, it was, “Let’s get out of Afghanistan. Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis we train and we waste billions there. Nonsense! Rebuild the USA.” In March, “We should leave Afghanistan immediately. No more wasted lives. If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first.” In April, “Our gov’t is so pathetic that some of the billions being wasted in Afghanistan are ending up with terrorists.” And in November, “Do not allow our very stupid leaders to sign a deal that keeps us in Afghanistan through 2024-with all costs by U.S.A. MAKE AMERICA GREAT!”
And in December 2015, Trump tweeted, “A suicide bomber has just killed U.S. troops in Afghanistan. When will our leaders get tough and smart. We are being led to slaughter!”
Like all presidents, Trump was living with the unfinished business of his predecessors. In the 21st-century presidency, nothing illustrated this more clearly than Afghanistan. The war, begun after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Afghanistan had been the sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, was a thicket of high expectations, setbacks, misunderstandings and massive commitments of money, troops and lives.
Under Presidents Bush and Obama, debates and discussions of troop numbers had dominated internal NSC and public discussion and generated expectations of progress or resolution. Media coverage focused on the troop number and timetable story lines. The number of U.S. troops engaged in the war had become a proxy for progress.
During the Obama presidency, troop numbers were a roller coaster, peaking at 100,000 and dropping to 8,400 with heady expectations, later abandoned, that the combat mission against the insurgent Taliban could end. But internally the experts knew it was futile.
White House coordinator Lieutenant General Douglas Lute labeled the war “a house of cards” in a 2010 meeting soon after Obama added another 30,000 troops.
Dr. Peter Lavoy, Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian and Pacific security affairs, later in charge of South Asia for the Obama NSC staff, was a soft-spoken authority on South Asia—Pakistan and Afghanistan. Lavoy was largely unknown to the public but critical to the functioning of the defense and intelligence world. He was both academic and practitioner. He believed the obsession with U.S. troop numbers had been the Achilles’ heel of the Obama administration policy in Afghanistan.
“There are literally thousands of sub-tribes in Afghanistan,” Lavoy said. “Each has a grievance. If the Taliban ceased to exist you would still have an insurgency in Afghanistan.” Victory was far-fetched. Winning had not been defined.
* * *
H. R. McMaster saw he would have a major confrontation with President Trump on the Afghanistan War. He knew Afghanistan. From 2010 to 2012 he had served as the deputy to the commander for planning (J5) at the Afghanistan war commander’s headquarters in Kabul.
During the Gulf War in 1991 in Operation Desert Storm, just seven years out of West Point as an Army captain, McMaster led nine tanks in a battle that destroyed 28 Iraqi Republican Guard tanks. Captain McMaster suffered no losses and the battle lasted 23 minutes. He was awarded a Silver Star for valor.
In the Iraq War as a colonel he led 5,300 soldiers of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, successfully using protect-the-population counterinsurgency tactics to reclaim the city of Tal Afar in 2005. President Bush had publicly cited it as a model operation to give “reason for hope for a free Iraq.”
In McMaster’s 1997 book Dereliction of Duty, he called the Joint Chiefs who oversaw the Vietnam War “five silent men” who had failed to establish the essential personal rapport with civilian leaders so they could speak their minds. Dereliction of Duty was a field manual for avoiding another Vietnam.
The irony was that Trump was now saying that Afghanis
tan was Vietnam, a quagmire with no clear national security purpose, the latest example of the incoherence of American policy. McMaster’s job was to align the military’s recommendations for Afghanistan with the president’s goals, but this president’s only goal was to get out.
Staff work at the NSC ground on. On March 1 and 10, 2017, Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Lujan, the National Security Council staffer for Afghanistan, chaired the first middle-level meetings of the interagency in the Trump administration. It included representatives from the State Department, Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.
Lujan, a holdover from the Obama administration, knew the Afghanistan policy under Obama had been simple in practice: Avoid catastrophe. There was lots of uncertainty, and the possibilities of calamity were immense. He gave the Afghan police, for example, key to long-term stability, a D minus or F.
At the first meeting, a State Department official teed up the discussion with a series of fundamental questions: Why do we think we need a counterterrorist base in Afghanistan to prevent another attack? What’s the justification for it? What do we think the terrorist threat emanating from Afghanistan really is? Why do we think thousands of U.S. troops and intelligence specialists are needed to combat that when we have drones and everything else? Our enduring presence, he noted, can cause further instability from not only insurgents but also regional players, such as Pakistan.
The State official said the United States maintained it did not want to establish a permanent presence when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. So how do we square that now, after 16 years?
No, no, no, said the military representative. The U.S. presence was not to be permanent.
This led to the question, When might it all end? Was a political settlement possible? Would a political settlement be the ends or the means? How could a political settlement be possible if the insurgent Taliban did not want the United States to have any kind of a presence in Afghanistan? Could a possible political settlement be a way to sell continued engagement?
