Never Give an Inch, page 49
Wuhan began to lock down on January 23. By the next day, Walters and his team had a plan in motion to send an aircraft with a biocontainment unit to Wuhan to bring home Americans. All we needed was the plane to fly into the Wuhan hotspot—easy, right? Like many remarkably patriotic American private citizens, a man named Ken Griffin was deeply invested in helping us figure out solutions to problems connected to the pandemic. He had a colleague in China as it was locking down; we had diplomats and other Americans stuck, too. Ken agreed to provide a plane to get them out. After much diplomatic wrangling, enormous resistance from US authorities (“Where are you going to bring these exposed people back to?”), and with the help of an amazing group of patriotic medical personnel with significant experience working around infectious outbreaks around the world, we got the first plane into China and then back to March Air Force Base in California. Because we couldn’t carry everyone on that first flight, I went back to Ken and said we needed to return. Without hesitation, Ken said, “Whatever we need to get Americans back home.” It is fair to say that, without his support, we would not have been able to repatriate these people in a timely fashion.
At one point, as American citizens with crying babies were waiting on the tarmac for their departure, the CCP held them up. But our team on the ground negotiated with the CCP, in tight coordination with senior officials back in Washington, and the Americans were eventually allowed to board. We evacuated 800 Americans from Wuhan in just seventy-two hours. Between January 28 and February 16, 2020, the department executed the largest nonmilitary evacuation of US citizens in its history, bringing home 1,174 Americans from Wuhan and the Princess Diamond cruise ship in Japan. Steve Biegun, by this time the deputy secretary, deserves great credit for helping bring home Americans in the early days of the pandemic, too.
This was just the beginning of a Herculean worldwide effort. We immediately set up a Repatriation Task Force under the leadership of Ian Brownlee. Their work will stand as some of the greatest ever undertaken on behalf of the American people. They worked around the clock coordinating flights, negotiating with foreign governments, and ensuring Americans had safe passage wherever they needed to go. Dozens of Americans deep in the Amazon jungle of Peru got to the nearest airport in time. An American double lung transplant recipient in Honduras needed to get home, and we did it. Diplomats starved of sleep in Morocco held a plane for a mother with a baby. And in probably the most complex medical evacuation in history, a COVID-positive individual on a ventilator deep inside the Himalayan nation of Bhutan was medically transported back to the United States, arriving home more than thirty hours after wheels up.
The level of coordination was unbelievable. To bring home sixty-four Americans from Serbia, the Repatriation Task Force once held a call at four in the morning between Embassy Belgrade, Air Serbia, Customs and Border Patrol, and the Transportation Security Administration to secure landing rights at Los Angeles International Airport for a plane full of passengers ready to take off from Belgrade. We received it. Ultimately, in five months, the State Department evacuated more than one hundred thousand Americans from 139 countries. I will be forever proud of how teams on the ground and in Washington put Americans first. Later, Walters and the Operational Medicine team were able to deliver 190,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—which must be kept in deep subzero temperatures—to 256 embassies and consulates worldwide. It’s a great American story of showing up.
A FORCE FOR GOOD IN THE DEPTHS OF THE PANDEMIC
At the outset of the pandemic, our priority was to take care of our own people. But the spread of the virus also created a foreign policy opportunity we couldn’t miss. The CCP was demanding credit for a skillful handling of the pandemic—a ridiculous idea. The good news for America was that the world saw right through China’s laughably poor propaganda pushing this brazen and devious boast. By the late spring and summer of 2020, nations all over the world were calling for an investigation and slamming the Chinese for pushing the world’s foreign ministries to repeat Beijing’s lies on how it deftly handled the outbreak. US Embassy Riyadh reported that social media users in Yemen—Yemen!—ridiculed a Chinese donation of ten thousand N95 masks and trashed China for its role in the pandemic. The cumulative effect of Beijing’s dishonesty was that countries the world over began to restructure their supply chains, reject Chinese censorship and disinformation, and awaken to the true nature of the CCP.
It wasn’t enough for me to watch the party absorb the biggest public-relations blow it had taken in decades. I wanted to deploy a counternarrative of American goodness and generosity. More practically, the world had to see that America would lead to help clean up the mess—and we weren’t interested in doing it as a quid pro quo. It was simply a continuation of the generosity for which Americans are famous. From 2000 to 2020, the United States provided nearly $500 billion in all forms of foreign assistance, by far the greatest level of any country on earth. That’s not to mention billions in contributions from faith groups, NGOs, and private citizens. Our administration sustained this legacy during the pandemic by pledging more than $1.6 billion in State Department and USAID funds through August 2020 to help more than 120 countries fight and recover from the virus. I was fortunate that I got to work with a trusted advisor on the disbursal of humanitarian aid. My former chief of staff on the Hill, Jim Richardson, was then running the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance. If he made a recommendation, I was confident I could accept it. This let us push aid out the door at high speed and show the world that America was showing up in the middle of this catastrophe.
The other major way America blessed the world during the pandemic goes far beyond the normal distribution of humanitarian assistance. Operation Warp Speed will be remembered as one of the most successful scientific undertakings of all time—precisely because it was not designed to operate as anything like a typical government program. When the COVID-19 outbreak began, it was obvious that a vaccine would be the best way to reduce hospitalizations and deaths. The problem was that America and the world could not afford to wait for the federal government to develop a vaccine and move it through the regulatory process on a standard timeline. In normal circumstances, development and approval can take up to ten years. President Trump’s instinct was to go big, move fast, and ditch bureaucracy. The administration partnered with America’s world-leading biotechnology firms to produce the vaccine. As Jared Kushner, Alex Azar, Adam Boehler, and others began to interview candidates to lead the project, only one of them, Dr. Moncef Slaoui, believed it was possible to create a vaccine in less than a year. We did it, and without lowering standards of safety and efficacy. Millions of people are alive today because of this accomplishment.
And in the meantime, the United States kept up our normal humanitarian assistance throughout 2020 as well. We sent life-saving food and medical assistance to Lebanon in the wake of a gigantic explosion at a port warehouse in Beirut. We contributed $25 million to help Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, and Uganda avert famine caused by locusts. And in 2020, we provided 43 percent of the World Food Programme’s budget, while China provided just .06 percent. I was very proud that near the end of the Trump administration, President Trump ordered that all US foreign assistance bear a single logo, thus putting an end to the kaleidoscope of US government insignias that could be found on forms of foreign assistance. A single logo would boost America’s “brand,” so that the world better understood exactly who was showing up to meet their needs.
MISSION COMPLETE
Sadly, there came a day when I could no longer show up as secretary of state. After months of legal wrangling, President Trump failed in his challenge to the outcome of the 2020 election. The fat lady had sung, but I was determined to drive as much good policy as possible over the finish line in those final days. We fired off a bunch of final actions, including sanctions related to Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and the CCP’s abuses in Hong Kong. And on the second to last day of our term we denounced the genocide in Xinjiang as such, as I’ve already described.
I also gave a speech I had been itching to give for some time. It detailed how Tehran had become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda’s senior leaders. The world needed to know that the threat of Iran was so much broader than just nuclear weapons. With Tehran’s permission, Iran had become the home base of al-Qaeda in the years since 9/11. One only needed to look at how al-Qaeda’s number two man, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, whose nom de guerre was Abu Muhammad al-Masri, was living comfortably inside Iran on the day he was gunned down in August 2020. He died on the mean streets of Tehran, not in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan or eastern Afghanistan. I’ll remind the world again: the killers of three thousand Americans are no longer conducting the bulk of their external plotting against America from Afghan soil. They are in Iran.
Just as the media cast suspicion on my claims that America had intelligence indicating Qasem Soleimani was plotting more attacks against Americans, scores of headlines in response to this speech carried the same message. The New York Times? “Pompeo Says Iran Is New Base for Al Qaeda, but Offers Little Proof.” Reuters? “Pompeo Says Iran Gives al Qaeda New ‘Home Base,’ Analysts Skeptical.” Al-Jazeera? “Pompeo Says al-Qaeda’s ‘New Home Base’ Is Iran, with No Evidence.”
I used to assume reporters know how to use Google. They just had to look up the State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism to see I wasn’t bluffing. The edition released in 2020 said, “Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members residing in the country and has refused to publicly identify members in its custody.” The 2021 version released under President Biden had nearly identical language, but for one subtle change: “Iran remained unwilling to bring to justice senior al-Qa’ida (AQ) members residing in the country and has refused to publicly identify members it knows to be living in Iran” (emphasis mine). That small difference didn’t happen because the Biden administration thinks I have my facts wrong. It’s because they can’t admit I was right that Iran is actively sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, probably because the administration wants to get back into the nuclear deal. They are playing politics with counterterrorism.
Another thing I wanted to do was document all the good work that we did, and we lined up a three-week tweetstorm from my official Secretary of State Twitter account. Mary Kissel and a team in the Bureau of Global Public Affairs wrote hundreds of tweets to mark what we had done. True to form, the media whined that I was using the account for political purposes. But by the end, there were so many misperceptions about what our administration stood for and accomplished that this was a good way to draw attention to our record of success.
On the final day of the administration, January 20, 2021, I exited public service the way I came into it—with Ulrich Brechbühl and Brian Bulatao by my side. David Hale had asked if he could walk out with us as well—that meant a lot to me, too. Traditionally, an outgoing secretary of state exits the main lobby to the applause of hundreds of State Department employees. I didn’t want that fanfare, and COVID-19 had limited in-person gatherings inside the State Department, anyway. Instead, I simply asked Ulrich and Brian, my best friends, to walk out the main doors with me. For the final time, I climbed into the back of my usual ride: an armored Cadillac sedan waiting to take me home to Susan. I was exhausted, sad, relieved, and proud. Above all, I was confident I had left it all out on the field for America. We never gave an inch.
Conclusion
Today and Tomorrow
As my time as secretary drew to a close, I received a note from a couple I did not know, Steven and Anna Chu. They are Americans, having both lawfully immigrated from Communist China. I was floored by what they sent along—a copy of their newborn son’s US Social Security card. His name: Tristan Pompeo Chu.
The letter commended what we did to confront the CCP and protect their country, the United States of America. They then added that they would write me in eighteen years to seek my recommendation for Tristan to attend the US Military Academy. Consider it done.
The Chu family understands that we must be prepared to continue fighting for the America we love. They know we can never give an inch in defending its central, constitutional principles. My commitment to this cause was reinforced while leading the best spy agency in the world and, for all its faults, the world’s most important diplomatic corps. I saw from new vantage points how adherence to our constitutional order remains foundational for unrivaled freedoms and prosperity here at home. I saw how adherence to these norms benefits people everywhere. I saw how our bureaucratic institutions, slow and cumbersome as they may be, must operate within the bounds of the law. And I saw what happens when those who call themselves nonpartisan civil servants within these institutions abuse their power and thus threaten the very idea of America.
There are of course times when compromise is not only possible but necessary. But we can never give an inch on America’s main ideas, on the things that really matter: the dignity of every human being made in the image of God, the right to enjoy the fruits of our own labor, the family as the central organizing unit of all great civilizations, and government by the consent of the governed.
We each have a duty to deliver on those founding ideas and to get our nation closer to them every day. A man named Barry Takimoto owned the Baskin-Robbins in Costa Mesa, California, where I rose to the noble rank of assistant manager. While I was still officially a trainee, he once saw me heading out after my shift was over. Barry asked me something that sticks in my mind to this day: “Mike, what’d you do today to make this place better?”
Ever since, I’ve asked myself that question with respect to everything I’ve done, from serving in the Army, to owning a small business, to working in Congress. More recently, I’ve asked it about my service in the Trump administration. We built a sound economy and delivered hope to every American willing to work hard. We built friendships—in some cases more appreciated today than in the moment—with nations prepared to defend Western values and make America a better, safer, and more prosperous place. We led our friends and deterred our adversaries.
We put America first, and I have the scars to prove it: I am sanctioned by three countries—Russia, China, and Iran—and that last one is still trying to kill me. Another country has issued a summons for my testimony about an alleged assassination attempt. I can’t even go buy a quart of milk without my security detail taking me to the store. Perhaps this is proof that our adversaries think I made America stronger. My sense is that these sanctions reflect their views that my work was both principled, not transactional, and stemmed from a deep belief in America, not animus to their people, and that I was strategic, not wild, in charting America’s course.
We also opened eyes to the threats we face in a mean, nasty world. Indeed, I saw a study the other day showing that Americans have a less favorable opinion of China than they do of syphilis (OK, that’s a joke). I’m proud that we led a dramatic shift in American (and global) opinion, because the CCP is far more dangerous than any venereal disease. We’re going to see the Party’s evil on display for many years to come.
It also sank in for me that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the influence of electoral politics on our foreign policy is an asset for our country. Pundits worry that American foreign policy swings dramatically every four to eight years, causing our allies to wonder whether our policies have durability or continuity. There is a quotation, perhaps apocryphal, that is often attributed to the British economist John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind.” When geostrategic realities change, so must America adapt its strategic approach. In 2016, America was done with the Bush-Obama foreign policy. We were done with timidly subordinating American interests within multilateral bodies. We were done with an endless war in Afghanistan. We were done with tolerating Chinese aggression, cheating, and promise breaking. The American people invested us with power to do things differently, and we did, to America’s benefit.
In America, we can fix our mistakes because we have elections. It’s how we hold our leaders accountable. Americans have an amazing capacity for self-renewal. This is yet another reason why, to use a financial concept, I am long on our country.
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I’ve often been asked why I think I had so much ability to drive policy and execution in the Trump administration.
First, it was because my relationship with President Trump was sound. There was no magic formula: I told him the truth, respected the office of the presidency by never leaking our conversations for a personal or even a policy purpose, and executed on what he told me to do. I never returned to State after a meeting at the White House and told my team, “We have to do this because Trump says so.” Even if the idea was not mine or I had a different view, I told the team, “Here is our mission, let’s get after it.” I wasn’t fighting against him, as so many others who purported to be on our team did. I was fighting for America.
Second, I drove good outcomes because I worked my tail off. When I was nominated to be the CIA director, the media, searching for dirt, chased down several of my high school classmates. The world now knows that I participated in school ditch day at Leo Carrillo Elementary (but that I did it with my mom’s permission). Yet the most Pulitzer-worthy reporting turned up a man who was my teammate on the Los Amigos High School basketball team. He was willing to share an important secret. The reporter asked if I was a good player. My old teammate’s response makes my son, Nick, laugh to this day: “He made the most of what he had.”
He was right. Slow and under six feet tall, with a jump shot more likely to break the backboard than find the net, I wasn’t the most talented guy on the team. But even then, I was fearsomely focused on doing everything I could with what the Lord had given me. I’ve never changed. In the Trump administration, I worked like a maniac.
