The President's Book of Secrets: The Untold Story of Intelligence Briefings to America's Presidents From Kennedy to Obama by David Priess

Author:David Priess
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: American Government, Intelligence & Espionage, Political Science, Executive Branch
ISBN: 9781610395960
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2016-03-01T21:05:45.501000+00:00

President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore reading the PDB in the Oval Office on September 21, 1994, joined by CIA PDB briefer John Brennan. Courtesy William J. Clinton Presidential Library

Old habits, however, die hard. Before long, the president’s inability to hold to a firm schedule again precluded regular intelligence sessions. The CIA officer sent every day to the White House would manage to get in to brief Clinton every few days, then once a week, and eventually only a few times a month. “I used to sit, and I did a lot of reading. I tried to write a lot of notes there to make good use of the time,” the briefer says. He still did what he could in the West Wing, meeting with Lake or Berger almost every morning and seeing Gore’s top aide, Leon Fuerth, each day. And this enabled something from the CIA briefer to get into the Oval Office via Lake or Berger.

“I DIDN’T HAVE A bad relationship with President Clinton,” CIA director Jim Woolsey says. “I just didn’t have one at all.”

As Clinton approached his third year in office, Woolsey rarely came to the White House. He recalls meeting with the president alone only once—before his nomination to lead the intelligence community—and afterward seeing him two-on-two only twice, once at the Agency and once in the Oval Office. “Tony Lake was basically my boss. The PDB daily briefing didn’t exist, so the way I was to get information in to Clinton was through Tony. I lived with that for two years.” He cannot recall a single case where the PDB prompted a call from Clinton, the secretary of state, or the defense secretary. His face time with principals, including the president, remained limited to larger settings, such as meetings of the NSC, which historically have begun with intelligence briefings to ensure that the president and his foreign policy team debated policy based on objective assessments of the situation on the ground.

The presence at these meetings of White House press and public relations officials, often lacking Top Secret clearances, frustrated Woolsey. He recalls being invited to deliver an intelligence overview to kick off an NSC meeting about Somalia that had been designated as highly sensitive—meaning he should come alone, without staff backup. When he arrived, the Cabinet Room overflowed with not only the usual NSC principals but also about a dozen others, including PR staffers. The assembled officials shocked him by skipping the intelligence briefing, cutting right to their plan to send someone over to Somalia to set up a coalition government.

George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers, sitting at the far end of the table across from each another, started going back and forth about who would background the Washington Post and the New York Times and who would go on the Sunday talk shows. That went on, without interruption, for several minutes. Everybody else watched them blurt out ideas for media appearances, from one to the other like a table tennis match.

“Mr.

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