HRC by Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes

Author:Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Retail, Political, Nonfiction, Hilliary Clinton
ISBN: 9780804136761
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2014-02-11T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

Below the Waterline

Leon Panetta had a secret. And it was time for the CIA director to let Hillary in on it. During a Situation Room meeting at the White House, he told her he needed to talk to her one-on-one. So, on March 7, 2011, Panetta paid a visit to Hillary at the State Department to inform her of an operation so delicate and highly charged that she didn’t feel comfortable sharing it even with her husband. Panetta had a long history with Hillary, dating back to his days as a first-term chief of staff to Bill Clinton, when he had tried to keep her out of the decisions being made in the West Wing. Within Obama’s no-drama Situation Room, the pair stood out as characters because they often behaved as old siblings—kindred spirits who could antagonize each other like no one else.

The kindred spirit part mattered most to Panetta as the two veteran policy makers settled into eagle-carved armchairs in the cozy James Madison Dining Room on the top floor of the State Department. The only other eyes and ears in the room belonged to a $70,000 marble bust of Daniel Webster. Over lunch, Panetta told Hillary that intelligence operatives thought they had located Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The president had been informed, and only a handful of his top military and intelligence advisers were in the loop. Panetta was telling Hillary because he needed her to make the case for action. There were doubters at the White House and the Pentagon—and the CIA couldn’t say for sure that Bin Laden was actually at the compound.

But Panetta had become convinced that the opportunity was real, and he needed a strong partner in arguing that it was time to strike. “It was becoming increasingly clear,” a senior intelligence official said, “that we were going to have to move on the intelligence, and any operation would require approval by NSC principals, and since it was in Pakistan, obviously, it would require buy-in from her. Second, I think he just thought that she would have a very good sense of how to finish the job against Bin Laden.” Hillary and Panetta both believed that Obama could be too deliberative, too hesitant, too risk-averse. On the other hand, the official said, Hillary harbored a “huge bias for action.”

As much as any top official in the Obama administration, Hillary had been personally invested in laying the groundwork for the moment when Bin Laden finally appeared again in American crosshairs. As the person responsible for direct negotiations with the Pakistanis on diplomatic and development matters, she was the velvet glove on the fist of American force in Pakistan. She brought to the debate the unique perspective of a senator who had represented New York when Bin Laden killed nearly three thousand of her constituents; a loyal Democrat who knew the risk the president would take if he let Bin Laden slip away; and a diplomat who had pulled every possible lever to ensure that the CIA, or Pakistani intelligence, would find Bin Laden.

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