The Watchers by Shane Harris Read Free Book Online Page A

customarily reviewed by the national security adviser or his deputy. He ensured they comported with the president’s policies and then passed them along to the commander in chief.
    Poindexter turned the CPPG into the clearinghouse for all intelligence findings. Poindexter and his crisis management team reviewed, vetted, and shaped every plan for covert action. Before anything moved forward for the president’s signature, Poindexter saw it first.
    The intimate group of deputies devised new ways to use covert forces in the field. They challenged themselves to think ahead of time about how to strike, especially with elite Special Forces and small commando teams that moved with stealth and agility. The CPPG had a singular focus: prevent crises before they happened. “Horizon scanning,” Poindexter liked to call it.
    Poindexter oversaw the creation of emergency teams at the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI, all of which reported to command centers set up at their own agencies to stand watch during an emergency. The staff forged personal contacts with working-level intelligence officers, the career spy class that knew how to navigate institutional roadblocks. This was new territory for the White House. Before Poindexter’s arrival, it was not in the business of central control.
    In addition to the CPPG, Poindexter chaired yet another subgroup that focused solely on terrorism preplanning. But he left most of its management details to North, his favorite and, he thought, most capable staff officer. North, ten years Poindexter’s junior, had captivated the admiral, who had a history of taking bright, ambitious young officers into his charge and then occasionally giving them the con.
    North had felt overwhelmed when he arrived at the White House, shortly after Poindexter. Other military officers on the NSC staff held advanced degrees in international relations and political science. They were wonks. North was a Marine; his expertise lay in combat training and field operations.
    But he worked like a dog; he was loath to decline an assignment and often the first to volunteer. He became invaluable. A go-to man whom Poindexter gave responsibilities without questioning his capacity to handle them. While his colleagues struggled to keep up, North sailed ahead, and he never missed the chance to remind them of it. Poindexter knew that North exaggerated his own influence on the NSC staff. That he took credit for creating many of the new rules of which Poindexter was the principal author. He was, as Poindexter often conceded to Ollie’s detractors, flamboyant. But he was also indispensable. A man of seemingly infinite capacity who, Poindexter thought, would protect both their interests. If he pissed people off as he passed them by or stepped over them, then that was their problem, Poindexter figured, not Ollie’s.
    As the months rolled on, Poindexter could sense the system coming into alignment. Order and discipline were taking hold. The once ill-tuned layers of committees understood their roles better now. They had focused. Poindexter and his NSC terror fighters were making sense of information, corralling disparate data sources, and coming up with richer and more informative reports for the president than at any time in recent memory. They were, at last, starting to look like a respectable orchestra. All they needed now was a chance to play.

CHAPTER 3
    AND HE SHALL PURIFY
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    Poindexter arrived to a buzzing West Wing on the morning of Monday, October 7, 1985. The CIA’s operations center had received word less than an hour before that an Italian cruise ship had been taken over by Palestinian gunmen. A radio station in Sweden had picked up the distress call. Apart from those bare facts, the White House knew only that the vessel was somewhere in the Mediterranean.
    Hijack a ship? This was a new tactic. Poindexter was actually grateful that whoever these latest