Read Online Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda by Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker - Free Book Online Page B

have various incentive structures and it is not like they don’t value anything—they value something.”
    One of Pavel’s subordinates in the Pentagon policy shop was a summer intern from Berkeley, Matthew Kroenig, a graduate student with the credentials to be one of Pavel’s counterterrorist Jedi trainees. A native of St. Louis and the son of an environmental engineer and a stay-at-home mom, Kroenig had spent a semester during his junior year at the University of Missouri aboard a research vessel at sea, traveling to twelve countries over four months. The experience sparked an intense interest in foreign affairs. Kroenig had gone on to study the proliferation of nuclear weapons and Cold War nuclear-deterrence theory while pursuing his doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. He is Hollywood handsome, which runs in the family. His younger brother has been ranked as one of the world’s top models and his sister is a regional TV news anchor. Later, during a stint as an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Kroenig would rate a “chili pepper” at ratemyprofessors.com not for his lecture style but for being a “hot” teacher, as voted by the university’s students.
    Atop the Pentagon policy organization was Feith, in his role as undersecretary of defense. A self-proclaimed hard-core neoconservative, Feith was placed in the Pentagon’s senior policy spot by the Bush administration as a favor to Richard Perle, a Reagan-era hawk who was one of the first—and continually most vocal—advocates of war with Iraq well before 9/11. Feith began pushing like Perle for an Iraq-first strategy in the early hours after the 9/11 attacks and soon was put in charge of the Office of Special Plans, a shadowy Pentagon-within-the-Pentagon to begin war planning even before invading Iraq became official U.S. policy. Feith and his boss, Paul Wolfowitz, also created a small intelligence unit deeper within the Pentagon policy shop to search for bits of information on Iraq’s links to terrorists, which antagonized the main intelligence agencies. Wolfowitz and Feith defended the team’s work data mining for raw files—in other words, reports completely without analysis or evaluation—that they suspected held leads to Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda that the intelligence community had missed or deliberately ignored. But any suggestions of Saddam’s close ties to Al Qaeda were proved spurious or inconsequential at best. The Feith team’s effort was denounced by intelligence professionals as “politicization” and “cherry picking.” Rumsfeld, according to his senior aides, was embarrassed by the disclosure.
    While Feith was criticized by his foes within the national security establishment and within the military’s top ranks for being doctrinaire, in his leadership of the large policy directorate at the Pentagon he encouraged nondoctrinaire thinkers. He created a number of working groups to analyze the terrorist threat and to seek new methods for combating those who might attack the United States with unconventional weapons. The groups’ papers, full of ideas and recommendations, were adopted throughout the Bush administration and in time would be sustained by the Obama administration despite their parentage.
    Pavel’s thinking during the summer of 2005 about whether Cold War deterrence could be applied to twenty-first-century threats appealed to Feith: If deterrence had kept the Kremlin leadership in line and eventually helped topple the Soviet giant, might there be tools from the Cold War arsenal of threat, bluff, and guaranteed nuclear punishment that similarly could be used to corner, combat, and conquer America’s present-day adversaries? Early in the summer of 2005, Feith had ordered one group to tackle how to deter peer competitors like China from attempting nuclear blackmail—let alone nuclear attack—against the United States. Another group would address how