HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton (33 page)

The small-circle discussion in Washington revolved around two central questions: Should Obama order an attack even if intelligence officials weren’t sure that Bin Laden was at the compound? And if he did order an attack, should it be carried out by bomb, raid, or perhaps an unproven small drone that could narrowly target Bin Laden?

Hillary typically left herself room to maneuver during Situation Room meetings. But it was clear from the first days of discussion that she favored a strike, whether by plane, drone, or SEAL team, according to Pentagon and intelligence officials involved in, and briefed on, the deliberations.

“Secretary Clinton was very focused on the fact that we had to move sooner rather than later,” said a senior intelligence official, “that this was the best case we had against Bin Laden since Tora Bora, that we shouldn’t in any way involve other countries, including the Pakistanis, or worry about them in any way, and that we had to get the job done. Initially the weight of the discussion was around an air strike, and my recollection is that it was something she was comfortable with.”

Over the course of six weeks, various officials raised a litany of concerns and red flags, the most serious of which was that they still couldn’t be certain that Bin Laden was actually in the compound in Abbottabad. In one of the meetings, Obama’s advisers discussed whether to try to collaborate with the Pakistanis on a mission. The idea was dismissed pretty quickly because of the risk that the plans could leak—or that the Pakistanis could warn Bin Laden.

A question was then raised, rather harmlessly according to a source in the room, about whether the Pakistanis’ honor would be offended by a unilateral strike. “What about our honor?!” Hillary exclaimed.

Another concern briefly preoccupied the small set of leaders who knew what was in the offing. As one official noted, the Bin
Laden raid was scheduled to go down the same night—Saturday—as the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a high-cachet black-tie affair that draws Washington’s media elite, government bigwigs, and even a handful of Hollywood celebrities. There was a discussion of whether it would draw attention if the entire intelligence community skipped the dinner or if it would be worse if they all attended and the raid failed.

“Her view was that we had to do whatever we needed to do to preserve the discretion of the mission,” said a source in the room.

When she’d heard enough of the back-and-forth about the optics, Clinton stated her position plainly: “Fuck the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

She had a more pressing concern. She believed that the circle of officials who had been “read in” to the plan had grown too large to keep it secret for much longer. If it leaked, Bin Laden could slip through American fingers, just as he had at Tora Bora in the aftermath of the American invasion of Afghanistan.

Over time the discussion had moved away from an air strike, which would have required too much ordnance to be certain of killing Bin Laden, and toward a special forces raid. Hillary supported either option, and she was persuaded that, as one aide put it, it was better to get Bin Laden up close than to have to “just peel DNA off some rock” after a bombing run.

Admiral Bill McRaven, the commander on the ground, was persuasive in bringing Hillary to the conclusion that a SEAL-team raid was the best option.

“Look, we know how to do this,” McRaven said. “We’ve done so many in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are good at this now.”

“But you’re going deep into Pakistani territory,” Hillary replied. “You’ve got to plan for everything.”

They discussed every conceivable contingency, including the possibility that the Pakistani military might intercede in the middle of the raid. In the end, Hillary thought McRaven’s planning was impeccable.

Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates,
two of the most powerful voices in the small set of presidential advisers, disagreed. Biden wasn’t at all convinced that Bin Laden was at the compound. Gates worried about the wisdom of a raid. He remembered Operation Eagle Claw, the colossal 1980 disaster that had killed American servicemen who were trying to rescue Iranian hostages, and the Black Hawk Down loss of a chopper and American troops in Somalia during the Clinton administration.

That made Hillary’s support all the more critical. Obama might go against the counsel of his vice president and his defense secretary, but all three of the highest-ranking members of his cabinet? If all three advised him not to do it and then he failed, it could irreversibly damage his credibility on national security matters heading into his reelection campaign.

The final meeting on the matter, held on April 28, was a “no plus-ones” gathering, meaning the national security principals were not allowed to bring aides with them. It has been reported that when it was Hillary’s turn to speak, she did what top officials do in the Situation Room: she laid out the upside and the risk from her department’s point of view, including the possibility of damage to the American relationship with Pakistan. But everyone knew where she stood. She would stand with Obama on this, come hell, high water, or political attack. She voted yes on the raid.

For the second consecutive time, following the decision to launch an assault on Muammar Qaddafi, Hillary broke with Gates—the defense secretary with whom she now had less of a strategic imperative to align—recommending again that Obama take military action. Her hawkishness also contrasted again with the dovish tendencies of Biden, who had argued against the Afghanistan surge, the Libya mission, and now the Bin Laden raid. In all three cases, Hillary and Obama were in agreement.

People in Clinton’s inner circle say it was the president’s call all along and that while Hillary was on the side that prevailed, her role was one of support for the view that he took. “When you’re the president and you’ve got your senior military person [saying] that they are not comfortable, that makes it a pretty tough call,” said one of
Hillary’s closest advisers. “And I think her being on the side of ‘Let’s do it, let’s do it this way’ helped Obama and others in the room. I don’t think the president needed her per se, but I do know other people in the room were either swayed or comforted by her confidence and her certainty.”

That Thursday NSC meeting broke without a decision from Obama. The next day Gates called Tom Donilon with a message for the president. Two senior Pentagon officials involved in the planning, Mike Vickers and Michèle Flournoy, had helped persuade him that the raid was strategically sound. Tell the president I’m with him, Gates said. Obama had already given the order to go, Donilon told him. The raid was planned for Saturday, the day of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Obama’s aides gathered in the Oval Office that Saturday evening, April 30, to go over his jokes one last time before the gala. They had to wait because he was on the phone with a general in Afghanistan. They didn’t know that it was McRaven, the special operations commander who had been planning the Bin Laden raid, and that Obama was calling to wish him luck. When he hung up, Obama told his aides he wanted to revise his remarks.

“I think Bin Laden’s played out and we don’t need to talk about him,” Obama said, referring to a line in the speech that joked about his potential 2012 rivals, including “Tim ‘Osama bin’ Pawlenty.” Jon Favreau, Obama’s top wordsmith, thought little of changing Pawlenty’s nickname to “Hosni.”

Obama asked him to add a “God bless the troops” line.

Hillary, who had made clear her assessment of the value of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during the discussion of the raid,
skipped the gala to attend the wedding of one of Chelsea’s close friends. There, over casual dinner table discussion and in the company of familiar faces, a coincidental question was raised. “Do you think we’ll ever get Bin Laden?” one guest asked her. At that moment, Clinton knew what was soon to take place halfway around the world. She knew that Obama had already delivered the order to attack Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan and that the SEAL team
was preparing to execute it. She looked at the guest, smiled softly, and said, “I don’t know, I have no way of knowing, but I can tell you this, we’ll keep trying.” She crossed her fingers behind her back, as she later told NBC. The next day, Hillary reported to the Situation Room to monitor the raid with Obama and his team.

“
Those were thirty-eight of the most intense moments,” Hillary later said of the raid. She had been photographed during the operation with her hand over her mouth but declined to say whether the picture was snapped when a helicopter went down in the midst of the raid. “I have no idea what any of us were looking at at that particular millisecond. When the picture was taken, I’m somewhat sheepishly concerned that it was my preventing one of my early spring allergic coughs. So it may have no great meaning whatsoever.”

The truth is, she was awestruck. “We’re all crowded in the little Sit Room,” she said. “I’m sitting, holding my breath.”

After the operation, Obama called Bill, who was at home in Chappaqua. “Hillary probably told you,” the president started, according to a Hillary aide.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bill replied. Hillary hadn’t mentioned it.

Hillary’s campaign fix kicked in, if ever so briefly, on May 25, just a few weeks after the Bin Laden raid. It was early morning in London, and she had just been to a state dinner at Buckingham Palace, where she sat at the head table with Obama and Queen Elizabeth. The rest of the room was dotted with celebrities, including Virgin Group founder Richard Branson and Hollywood actors Tom Hanks and Kevin Spacey. Despite having spent much of her adult life in the salons of world power, there were still moments, like this one, that wowed Hillary. With footmen tending to her, and sleeping in a room near the royal family’s famous balcony, Hillary felt like a princess, she later told her staff.

As night turned to morning, Hillary’s attention shifted away from the bluebloods and movie stars at Buckingham Palace to Erie County, New York, and a Buffalo-born county clerk whom she just had to call. Kathy Hochul had run a surprisingly competitive race in the special election to succeed Representative Chris Lee in a solidly Republican district in upstate New York. The only reason a Democrat had a chance was that Lee, who was married, had abruptly resigned after having sent a shirtless picture of himself to a woman he met on the Internet. Scandal, as it often does, had presented a political opportunity.

The campaign quickly became a referendum on Obamacare and House GOP plans to cut Medicare. Hochul’s success or failure would influence how Democrats, all the way up to Obama, handled
the issue of health care in their 2012 campaigns. But Hillary had more than just a basic partisan rooting interest in seeing Hochul win. As county clerk, Hochul had endorsed Hillary in 2008. And on the eve of the March 24 special election, Bill Clinton had returned that favor by recording a robocall for Hochul in which he reinforced her health care attack on the GOP. “
You can count on Kathy to say no to partisan politics that would end Medicare as we know it to pay for more tax cuts for multimillionaires,” Bill said in a message that was dialed out across the district to some Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. With a lift from onetime Democratic congressional hopeful Jack Davis, who was running as a Tea Party candidate—and took more than ten thousand votes—
Hochul defeated Republican Jane Corwin by 5,526 votes, likely less than the number that Davis siphoned from Corwin.

After celebrating her victory in upstate New York, Hochul checked her messages and heard Hillary’s unmistakable voice. “I’m in London with the president,” she said. “We are watching the results of your race, and we are so excited. I look forward to working with you.”

It was a small gesture, one of thousands of similar calls, cards, and tokens of affection that friends and acquaintances of Hillary and Bill Clinton receive every year. That extra touch was the most glaring difference between the Clintons and Obama, who seemed cold and indifferent even to some of his biggest supporters. The Clintons know how to work a rope line, how to soften adversaries, and how much a personal contact means to a friend. They connect.

“I saved it. I treasured it,” Hochul said of Hillary’s voicemail. “Here she is with the president of the United States in London, obviously conducting business, and she takes the time to call me in Buffalo very late at night. She didn’t have to do that. It wasn’t expected. She made the extra effort, and it meant the world to me.”

The Clintons go much further for the small circle of aides and friends closest to them. One aide after another can recount emotional stories of one of the Clintons intervening to help them during times of trouble, whether to arrange medical care, check in on a sick relative, or even attend a funeral.

So in June 2011, when a pregnant Huma Abedin found herself on the cover of all the tabloids because of her sext-prone husband, Anthony Weiner, the Clintons—especially Hillary—grew ultraprotective of her. Hillary, who had logged her own share of sleepless nights during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, counseled Huma and provided hugs and words of wisdom while the Weiner imbroglio metastasized.

More broadly, the Clintons are exceptional retail politicians, and Obama needed help with his common touch, particularly if he hoped to paint his likely 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, as a mansion-bound elitist. The Clintons had survived and thrived in the wake of Hillary’s 2008 defeat.
Her approval rating was at 66 percent, and Bill’s had moved back above the 60 percent mark a year earlier. Obama, stuck around 50 percent that spring, very much stood to benefit from standing next to the most popular power couple in Democratic politics.

Hillary’s draw was so strong that she was rumored, throughout her four years at State, to be on the short list for a series of high-profile jobs, from Supreme Court justice to defense secretary to World Bank president. By the time Obama named Jim Yong Kim to head the World Bank in March 2012, many months after the rumor first surfaced in print, Hillary press aide Nick Merrill forwarded the
Politico
breaking-news alert to Philippe Reines, adding a prank sentence indicating that Kim would serve in the job only until January 2013, which Merrill expected Reines to read as an inside joke about the prospect of having to knock down a new set of Hillary-to-World-Bank stories in just a few months’ time. Instead, a credulous Reines told Mills, who relayed to Hillary that Kim would be in the job only for several months, and Hillary mentioned it to the president in the Oval Office that day, touching off momentary confusion over Kim’s intentions. “Who was the genius who did it to you?” Huma e-mailed Reines.