Book reveals secret Iraq mission and more

All this leaves Bush — and America — with limited options by the summer of 2006. Yesterday Bush and Putin launched the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a small multilateral step in the right direction that seems to augur well for future collaboration. But in other venues, the Russian president’s been busy telling foreign leaders to beware of the American hegemon, a fervent complaint, a challenge, that is drawing an enthusiastic response from countries who feel that they’ve been bullied and from the pride-starved Russian people.

Meanwhile, various uranium-smuggling networks are operating in Russia, and al Qaeda, ever ready to buy, is rapidly reconstituting itself in the lawless tribal regions on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. If Bush had seized upon that early wiretap opportunity, he would have heard Putin’s real voice and been confronted, from the start, with the hard reality that presidential relations were not personal. They were strategic, with Putin and other world leaders, state-based or otherwise. While Bush has spent years relentlessly questioning intelligence briefers about the personality of bin Laden and Zawahiri, wondering, “What makes them tick? What’s driving them?” — trying to make it personal so he can engage forcefully, emotionally — he won’t acknowledge, even at this late date, that these men he hates, these religious fanatics, are executing a fairly elegant strategy that can be countered only with care and dispassion. And with all the setbacks, now well into his second term, the president still won’t admit — even to himself, it seems — that you can’t run the world on instinct from inside a bubble.

The president looks at his watch and then up at the blimp. Yes, he’s been waiting like some kind of idiot in the driveway for five minutes. A reporter from Newsweek approaches gingerly and asks if Putin wears his “dour KGB face” in their private meetings or if he’s more relaxed. Bush points up to the spy balloon and quips, “That’s your phrase, not mine.” Just then, the Russian screeches up in his golf cart and they’re off, with Rice in the backseat, for a day of meetings and press conferences, where, hour after hour, Putin displays his assiduously earned leverage. That night, George and Laura Bush, along with seven other world leaders and their spouses, settle along a vast, spectacularly adorned table inside the Peterhof Palace, built by Peter the Great, as waiters in powdered wigs serve a seven-course meal of lobster and beluga caviar and beef Stroganoff with truffle sauce. Putin looks admiringly across the table. Everything is carefully crafted. All relationships at this level, after all, are strategic and manufactured. This gathering is a moment of triumph for him. Outside the palace, a trained bear in a pink polka-dot tutu had regaled the guests by walking on its hind legs and performing somersaults, and now Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, offers an appropriate story, clearly tested by her aides in advance, about the recent shooting of a rare wild bear in Germany. This prompts a surprising response from Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. In a flight of free association, he begins to search aloud for every English word or phrase he knows that contains the word bear. He must be improvising. How rich.

“Teddy bear,” he says, serenely, as world leaders begin to chuckle. “We must bear criticism.” More gaiety. Yes, go on! He pauses. “Unbearable.” And the room dissolves in laughter.

Back in America, in Northern Virginia, a longtime U.S. intelligence official is puttering through his Saturday afternoon. He’s running errands for his wife, something bosses in the intelligence community haven’t done very much of since 9/11. But there’s less and less to do for those who’ve worked years in America’s clandestine service recruiting sources and running undercover operations. CIA, as America’s primary intelligence agency, doesn’t exist as it once did. It now lies beneath the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, a fast-growing, thousand-plus-employee agency, and is ever more insubstantial beside the growing intelligence division of the Department of Defense, which controls 80 percent of America’s $50 billion annual budget for intelligence. Old agents and intelligence managers in both halves of CIA — operations and analysis — have fled to private contracting firms. New recruits have been hired in a hurry. Half the agency’s workforce now has five years’ experience or less.

The official’s been there for decades and was there, on site, during America’s brief springtime of robust human intelligence — the year or so after 9/11 — which ended with the military campaign in Iraq, as anti-American sentiment became the currency of global opinion and terrorist recruitment skyrocketed. The United States hasn’t caught a top terrorist of any real value in two years. Even if many Muslims hate al Qaeda, they don’t want to help the United States. If someone were to see something pertinent in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or Yemen these days, he’d most likely look the other way. Let America get its comeuppance.

This state of affairs is untenable — a loss of intelligence capability that will end in disaster — and he thinks about why, about how America went from a country that people wanted to help in its time of need to one they’d just as soon see humbled. And each time he goes through this exercise, he comes back to Iraq and the suspicions of so many, in the United States and abroad, that we went to war under false pretenses. He thinks it’s the key reason the United States has lost its moral authority in the world. People — at the agency and around Washington — dismiss it, the whole mess, saying it’s all past tense, let it go. But he knows more than they do — more than all but a dozen people, maybe fewer, inside the U.S. government, with two of them being Bush and Cheney. He knows there was a secret mission a few months before the war — a top-drawer intelligence-gathering mission that the United States was involved in — that found out everything we later learned. That there were no weapons. And we knew in plenty of time.

But what he knows — this troubled public servant — is itself only a glimpse of something much larger, and still submerged. It is a violation of American principle and law that lies, quiet and sure, beneath the country’s misfortunes. And, like a demon, it must be exorcised before dawn.

More from TODAY Makeover! New look gets her a proposal Ho-ho-ho! White House Christmas tree arives Sad development: The last Kodachrome film lab Clickable video: Hottest tech gifts of 2009 Star quality? Get your guy on the TODAY show

MORE FROM TODAY BOOKS: HISTORY POLITICS

What was the greatest moment in sports history?

What was the greatest moment in sports history? ‘A History of Ghosts’ explores paranormal past David Alan Grier: Is beige the new black? Is price gouging in wake of a hurricane wrong? New book places blame for Pat Tillman’s death Blagojevich tells his side of story in ‘Governor’ Geraldo on Hispanics’ new era of prosperity Ousted Ill. governor explains self in new book Michelle Malkin: Obama’s team is corrupt Book: Obama turning slump into socialism   Add Today Books: History Politics headlines to your news reader: