Peril, page 1
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Always for the parents:
Alfred E. Woodward and Jane Barnes
Tom and Dillon Costa
“We have much to do in this winter of peril.”
President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his inaugural address, January 20, 2021, at the United States Capitol
Authors’ Personal Note
Claire McMullen, 27, a lawyer and writer from Australia, worked as our assistant on this book. She was our full collaborator on the investigative reporting and the research, pushing us to dig deeper, ask further questions, and to be more precise. At every stage, she was focused, resourceful and steady, even during challenging moments, and determined to execute each step with meticulous care.
Claire’s creative devotion to hard work cannot be required. She chose to give it every day, every hour. She readily came in early, stayed late at night, and worked countless weekends with us. She also brought to this project her brilliant insights on human rights, foreign policy, and human nature. Her career is limitless in its promise. She is the best.
We will always appreciate her friendship and dedication.
PROLOGUE
Two days after the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of President Donald Trump, General Mark Milley, the nation’s senior military officer and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, placed an urgent call on a top secret, back-channel line at 7:03 a.m. to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zuocheng, chief of the Joint Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.
Milley knew from extensive reports that Li and the Chinese leadership were stunned and disoriented by the televised images of the unprecedented attack on the American legislature.
Li fired off questions to Milley. Was the American superpower unstable? Collapsing? What was going on? Was the U.S. military going to do something?
“Things may look unsteady,” Milley said, trying to calm Li, whom he had known for five years. “But that’s the nature of democracy, General Li. We are 100 percent steady. Everything’s fine. But democracy can be sloppy sometimes.”
It took an hour and a half—45 minutes of substance due to the necessary use of interpreters—to try to assure him.
When Milley hung up, he was convinced the situation was grave. Li remained unusually rattled, putting the two nations on the knife-edge of disaster.
* * *
The Chinese already were on high alert about U.S. intentions. On October 30, four days before the presidential election, sensitive intelligence showed that the Chinese believed the U.S. was plotting to secretly attack them. The Chinese thought that Trump in desperation would create a crisis, present himself as the savior, and use the gambit to win reelection.
Milley knew the Chinese assertion that the U.S. was planning a secret strike was preposterous. He had then called General Li on the same back channel to persuade the Chinese to cool down. He invoked their long-standing relationship and insisted the U.S. was not planning an attack. At the time, he believed he had been successful in placating Li, who would pass the message to Chinese president Xi Jinping.
But now, two months later, on January 8, it was evident China’s fears had only been intensified by the insurrection.
“We don’t understand the Chinese,” Milley told senior staff, “and the Chinese don’t understand us.” That was dangerous in itself. But there was more.
Milley had witnessed up close how Trump was routinely impulsive and unpredictable. Making matters even more dire, Milley was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.
The scenes of a screaming Trump in the Oval Office resembled Full Metal Jacket, the 1987 movie featuring a Marine gunnery sergeant who viciously rages at recruits with dehumanizing obscenities.
“You never know what a president’s trigger point is,” Milley told senior staff. When might events and pressures come together to cause a president to order military action?
In making the president the commander in chief of the military, a tremendous concentration of power in one person, the Constitution gave the president the authority single-handedly to employ the armed forces as he chose.
Milley believed that Trump did not want a war, but he certainly was willing to launch military strikes as he had done in Iran, Somalia, Yemen and Syria.
“I continually reminded him,” Milley said, “depending on where and what you strike, you could find yourself in a war.”
While the public’s attention was on the domestic political fallout from the Capitol riot, Milley privately recognized the U.S. had been thrust into a new period of extraordinary risk internationally. It was precisely the kind of hair-trigger environment where an accident or misinterpretation could escalate catastrophically.
It was all unfolding fast and out of public view, which in some ways resembled the tensions during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 when the U.S. and the Soviet Union almost went to war.
Milley, 62, a former Princeton hockey player, burly and ramrod straight at 5-foot-9, did not know what China would do next. But he did know, after 39 years in the Army and many bloody combat tours, that an adversary was the most dangerous when they were frightened and believed they might be attacked.
If an adversary like China ever desired, he said, “They could choose to do what’s called a ‘first-move advantage’ or a ‘Pearl Harbor,’ and conduct a strike.”
* * *
The Chinese were investing in a sweeping expansion of their military to almost superpower status.
Just 16 months earlier at a stunning military parade in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, President Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, had said there is “no force that can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead.” The Chinese also revealed their latest “game changing” weapon, a hypersonic missile that could travel at five times the speed of sound.
Milley told senior staff, “There are capabilities in cyber or in space where you could do some really significant damage to a large, industrial complex society like the United States and you could do that very, very quickly through some very powerful tools that are out there. China is building all of these capabilities.”
China was also aggressively staging war games and sending military planes daily toward the island of Taiwan, the independent offshore nation that China considered theirs and the U.S. had pledged to protect. The previous year, General Li had announced that China would “resolutely smash” Taiwan if necessary. Taiwan alone was a powder keg.
In the South China Sea, China was on the march like never before, placing military bases on man-made islands, aggressively and, at times with breathtaking risk, challenging U.S. naval ships in important global shipping lanes.
Upcoming U.S. Navy Freedom of Navigation exercises around Taiwan and the South China Sea, and a U.S. Air Force bomber exercise, deeply worried Milley.
Such simulated attacks duplicated war conditions as much as possible and were often macho, goading endeavors, with U.S. naval ships deliberately, at high speeds, challenging China’s claims on internationally recognized territorial waters.
Infuriated, Chinese captains frequently tried to push the U.S. ships off course by closely following or darting in front of them. Due to the size of the ships, any quick turns were inherently dangerous—accidents waiting to happen that could precipitate a disastrous chain reaction.
* * *
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the highest-ranking military officer in the armed forces and principal military adviser to the president. By law, the chairman’s role is one of oversight and adviser. The chairman is not in the chain of command. But in practice, the post is one of enormous power and influence held by some of the most iconic figures in military history, including Generals Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor and Colin Powell.
Shortly after speaking with General Li on January 8, Milley called Admiral Philip Davidson, the U.S. commander of the Indo-Pacific Command that oversees China, on a secure line.
Phil, Milley said, reminding him that as chairman he was not a commander. “I can’t tell you what to do. But you might reconsider those exercises right now. Given what’s going on in the United States, that could be considered provocative by the Chinese.”
Davidson immediately postponed the exercises.
The planned operations potentially had echoes of a similar 1980s incident when leaders in the then-Soviet Union believed the U.S. and the United Kingdom were going to launch a preemptive nuclear strike. A NATO military exercise called ABLE ARCHER greatly magnified those Soviet suspicions. Robert Gates, later the CIA director and defense secretary, said, “the most terrifying thing about ABLE ARCHER was that we may have been at the brink of nuclear war.”
It was that brink that worried Milley. He was living in it.
* * *
China was, by far, the most sensitive and dangerous relationship in American foreign policy. But U.S. intelligence showed the January 6 riot had not only stirred
“Half the world was friggin nervous,” Milley said. Many countries were ramping up their military operating tempo and cueing spy satellites. The Chinese already had their Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) satellites looking intently to see if the U.S. was doing anything erratic or unusual or preparing to conduct any kind of military operation.
Milley was now on full alert every waking moment, monitoring space, cyber operations, missile firings, ship, air and ground movements, and intelligence operations. He had secure phones in nearly every room of Quarters 6, the chairman’s residence at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, Virginia, that would connect him instantly to the Pentagon war room, the White House, or combatant commanders throughout the world.
Milley told his service chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—the Joint Chiefs—to watch everything “all the time.”
He called National Security Agency (NSA) director Paul Nakasone and described his call with Li. NSA monitors worldwide communications.
“Needles up,” Milley said, “keep watching, scan.” Focus on China, but make sure the Russians are not exploiting the situation to “make an opportunistic move.”
“We’re watching our lanes,” Nakasone confirmed.
Milley called CIA director Gina Haspel and gave her a readout on the call with Li.
“Aggressively watch everything, 360,” Milley said to Haspel. “Take nothing for granted right now. I just want to get through to the 20th at noon”—the inauguration of Joe Biden as president.
Whatever happened, Milley was overseeing the mobilization of America’s national security state without the knowledge of the American people or the rest of the world.
* * *
Milley had misled General Li when he claimed that the United States was “100 percent steady” and the January 6 riot was just an example of a “sloppy” democracy.
To the contrary, Milley believed January 6 was a planned, coordinated, synchronized attack on the very heart of American democracy, designed to overthrow the government to prevent the constitutional certification of a legitimate election won by Joe Biden.
It was indeed a coup attempt and nothing less than “treason,” he said, and Trump might still be looking for what Milley called a “Reichstag moment.” In 1933, Adolf Hitler had cemented absolute power for himself and the Nazi Party amid street terror and the burning of the Reichstag parliamentary building.
Milley could not rule out that the January 6 assault, so unimagined and savage, could be a dress rehearsal for something larger as Trump publicly and privately clung to his belief that the election had been rigged for Biden and stolen from him.
Milley was focused on the constitutional countdown: 12 more days of the Trump presidency. He was determined to do everything to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.
* * *
Unexpectedly, Milley’s executive officer came into the office and passed him a handwritten note: “Speaker Pelosi would like to speak to you ASAP. Topic: Succession. Twenty-fifth amendment.”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, was second in line to succeed the president after the vice president and received detailed briefings on the command and control of U.S. nuclear weapons. The 34-year House veteran was steeped in all national security, military and intelligence matters.
Milley picked up the Pelosi call on his personal cell phone, an unclassified line, and put it on speakerphone so one of his advisers could also listen.
What follows is a transcript of the call obtained by the authors.
“What precautions are available,” Pelosi asked, “to prevent an unstable president from initiating military hostilities or from accessing the launch codes and ordering a nuclear strike?
“This situation of this unhinged president could not be more dangerous. We must do everything that we can to protect the American people from his unbalanced assault on our country and our democracy.”
Pelosi said she was calling Milley as the senior military officer because Christopher Miller, recently installed by Trump as acting secretary of defense, had not been confirmed by the Senate.
“I can tell you that we have a lot of checks in the system,” Milley said. “And I can guarantee you, you can take it to the bank, that there’ll be, that the nuclear triggers are secure and we’re not going to do—we’re not going to allow anything crazy, illegal, immoral or unethical to happen.”
“And how are you going to do that? Going to take the football away from him or whatever it is?” she asked.
She well knew that the football is the briefcase carried by a senior military aide to the president containing the sealed authentication launch codes for using nuclear weapons and a so-called black book that lists attack and target options.
“Well,” Milley said, “we have procedures. There are launch codes and procedures that are required to do that. And I can assure you, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I can assure you that will not happen.”
“So if you had some concern that it could, what would be the step you would take?”
“If I thought even for a nanosecond that—I have no direct authority,” he said, “but I have a lot of ability to prevent bad things from happening in my own little…”
Pelosi interrupted, “The American people need some reassurance on this, General. What are you prepared to say publicly about this?”
“I don’t, candidly, Madam Speaker. Publicly, I don’t think I should say anything right now. I think that anything that I would say as an individual, I think would be misconstrued in ten different ways.”
“Well, let’s just talk about it objectively and not about any particular president,” Pelosi said. “With all the power that is invested into the president to have that power—to use the word twice—what are the precautions here?”
“The precautions are procedures that we have in place,” he said, “which require authentication, certification, and any instructions have to come from a competent authority and they have to be legal. And there has to be a logical rationale for any kind of use of nuclear weapon. Not just nuclear weapons, use of force.
“So I can assure you that we have rock solid systems in place. That there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell this president, or any president can launch nuclear weapons illegally, immorally, unethically without proper certification from…”
“And you said not only nuclear, but also use of force?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” Milley said. “A lot of people are concerned about, and rightly so, concerned about a potential incident in say Iran. I’m watching that as close as a hawk. Every single hour watching things overseas. The same thing domestically, with things like martial law stuff, the Insurrection Act.
“This is one of those moments, Madam Speaker, where you’re going to have to trust me on this. I guarantee it. I’m giving you my word. I can’t say any of this publicly because I really don’t have the authorities and it would be misconstrued in 50 different directions, but I can assure you that the United States military is steady as a rock and we’re not going to do anything illegal, immoral or unethical with the use of force. We will not do it.”
Pelosi interjected. “But he just did something illegal, immoral and unethical and nobody stopped him. Nobody. Nobody at the White House. This escalated in the way it did because of the intent of the president. The president incited it and nobody in the White House did anything about it. Nobody in the White House did anything to stop him.”
“I’m not going to disagree with you,” Milley replied.
“So you’re saying you’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen?” the speaker asked. “It already did happen. An assault on our democracy happened and nobody said, you can’t do that. Nobody.”
“Well, Madam Speaker, the launching of nuclear weapons and the incitement of a riot…”
“I know they’re different. Thank you very much. What I’m saying to you is that if they couldn’t even stop him from an assault on the Capitol, who even knows what else he may do? And is there anybody in charge at the White House who was doing anything but kissing his fat butt all over this?”
