Mission Compromised Read online

  Tuesday, 29 November 1994

  1000 Hours, Local

  Major Peter J. Newman, U.S. Marines, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  You don't have to call me, ‘sir,’ Major. I'm a civilian,” replied the President's National Security Advisor seemingly absorbed by the papers on his desk. For more than a minute he never looked up.

  Major Peter Newman was a startling contrast to the bloated and disheveled man in the two-thousand-dollar Armani suit seated before him. The Marine stood just over six feet and was trim and muscular. He was thirty-eight but looked much younger. His only “blemishes” were a broken nose that he'd earned during the second round of a Naval Academy boxing match and a two-inch scar above his left eyebrow made from a piece of hot shrapnel during the Gulf War. Major Newman stood at rigid attention in front of the desk.

  Dr. Simon Harrod looked up at the ramrod-straight Marine standing in front of him, eyes fixed at the wall in the space above Harrod's head. Harrod was annoyed. Apparently letting this military martinet cool his well-polished heels for two hours in the West Wing reception lobby hadn't done much to instill timidity. He decided to put this Marine in his place right away.

  “Look at me when I'm talking to you, not the wall! In this administration, we don't go for all that military mumbo jumbo!” Harrod barked.

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  It wasn't that Simon Harrod, Ph.D., disliked military men. Like the President, he loathed them. He'd had his fill of these close-cropped, cleanly shaven boneheads when he had been a professor of international studies at Harvard's Kennedy School. Now the grossly overweight, rumpled, former antiwar activist had a dozen high-ranking Army, Navy, and Air Force officers toiling for him on the National Security Council staff. And he knew that behind his back, they contemptuously referred to him as “Jabba the Hutt.” He didn't care. He was content that now they had to dance to the beat of his drum or their careers were finished.

  “Sit down.” The Marine did as ordered, and Harrod went back to perusing the Officer's Qualification Record and Confidential Personnel Summary before him in the disarray of his desk. Newman's “short” bio ran seven pages, and the National Security Advisor took his time with it even though he already knew everything he needed to know about the officer now sitting as stiffly as he'd been standing. Without looking up, Harrod ticked off the high points: “You're a regular military machine aren't you, Newman? Father is a retired Army brigadier… mother was an Army nurse… born at the post hospital at Fort Drum, New York… graduate of the Naval Academy… served in Grenada, Beirut, Panama, Desert Storm.” Newman said nothing as Harrod continued reading.

  “It says here that you didn't want this assignment, Major Newman. Why?”

  “I'd rather be commanding Marines, sir.”

  “I told you not to call me ‘sir.’ I thought Marines were capable of following a simple order.”

  “What do you want me to call you—Mr. Harrod?”

  “Dr. Harrod will do,” said Jabba the Hutt.

  Newman nodded but said nothing, so Harrod went back to the file and the Personnel Summary and started asking questions to which he already had the answers.

  “You're married. What does your wife do?” asked Harrod in a more conciliatory tone.

  “She's a flight attendant.”

  “Children?”

  “No.”

  “You talk to your wife about your work?”

  “Not if I'm not supposed to,” replied the Marine.

  “Well, here you're not supposed to. You got it?”

  Newman nodded, knowing as he did so that he and his wife were barely speaking about anything of significance anyway, so this directive hardly mattered.

  “What year did you graduate from Annapolis, Newman?”

  “Class of '78.”

  “What was your class standing?”

  “Number 143, top 15 percent.”

  “It says here you were ‘deep selected for captain and major.’ What's ‘deep selected’ mean?”

  “I was promoted early, as they say, ‘ahead of my peers.’”

  “Is that because you have the Navy Cross and a Purple Heart from Desert Storm?” Harrod asked with a thinly disguised sneer.

  “I don't know.”

  “Well, I'm not impressed. If you guys had done the job right, we wouldn't have this mess on our hands with Saddam Hussein.”

  Once more Newman didn't reply, so Harrod again buried himself in the officer's paperwork for a full five minutes. The Marine looked around the well-appointed office. Thick carpet. Nice furniture. Three phones. Large mahogany desk covered with piles of paper, many bearing classified cover sheets labeled TOP SECRET. Several bore the additional admonition EYES ONLY FOR THE PRESIDENT. On the walls, an eclectic collection of what appeared to Newman's unschooled eye to be original artwork: he recognized some of them—a Wyeth nude, a Remington landscape, and several modern pieces that he didn't recognize. Behind the cluttered desk was a watercolor of uncertain origin, depicting what could only be the grisly violence of General George Armstrong Custer's final moments at the Little Big Horn.

  The National Security Advisor looked up to see Newman staring at the painting. “It's by a Native American artist. I got the idea from Hafez al Assad. In his presidential palace in Damascus, he has a painting of Saladin and the Saracens butchering crusaders. It reminds his visitors whom they are dealing with. I put this one here to remind all you green- and blue-suit types how stupid and costly military operations can be.”

  Harrod glanced down at the file and then back at Newman. “Now, it says here that up until yesterday you were assigned to the Operations and Plans Division at the Marine headquarters here in Washington. Is that right?”

  “At the Navy Annex, yes.”

  “What did they tell you when they ordered you to report to the Secretary of the Navy and SecDef? Did any of them tell you what your assignment here on the NSC staff was to be?”

  “No, I was only told that I should report to you for a two-year assignment.”

  “You may not last two years if you don't lighten up. You probably know this already, but I want to reiterate—you're the only Marine on the White House staff besides the captain who's assigned as one of the President's military aides.”

  “That's what I understand.”

  “Do you also understand that as long as you are assigned here you are to have nothing to do with the White House military office or your Marine Corps, and that after today you are not to wear a uniform here, ever, and that as the head of the NSC's Special Projects Office, you report only to me?”

  “I do now.”

  “Good. I want you to go now and take care of the necessary paperwork to keep the paper shufflers happy. After you've done that, go home and get out of that monkey suit with all those ribbons, bells, and whistles. Medals and ribbons don't impress me or anyone else around here. Put on some civilian attire. You do have real clothes, don't you?”

  “Yes,” Newman said to the bloated figure behind the desk.

  “Good. After you take care of filling out all the forms and get changed, come back here at 3:00 P.M. sharp. Tell my secretary to take care of getting you a White House ID badge. And tell her I said to get you a staff-parking pass to hang on your rearview mirror so you can park inside ‘the fence.’ That's a big perk around here. And as fast as you can, grow some hair on your head. That GI haircut looks ridiculous. Go.”

  Major Newman stood, did an about-face, and left. It felt good to get a final military dig at his new boss.

  Notwithstanding rumors Newman had heard to the contrary about this White House administration, the National Security Council's administrative and security office in the Old Executive Office Building was a hub of efficiency. The people who worked in the third-floor office of this gray stone building next door to the White House were older. He surmised that these were professionals, not political appointees. Unlike others he had seen that morning in the West Wing, the men were wearing coats and ties instead of
jeans, and the women had on dresses and skirts. He noted, as any U.S. Marine would, that the men in this office had what he considered to be decent haircuts, and here, at least, it was the women who wore ponytails and earrings.

  A woman who introduced herself as Carol Dayton, and identified herself as the NSC's administrative and security officer, handed Newman a checklist of offices to visit, forms to fill out, and documents to sign. In less than two hours, the Marine major had taken care of all the obligatory paperwork, been photographed for the treasured blue White House pass, had his retinas scanned, had his fingers printed, had signed reams of nondisclosure agreements for classified security “compartments” he had never known existed, been issued access codes for the White House Situation Room cipher locks, and been taken on a quick, cursory tour of the old structure so he wouldn't get lost on his way to work. He still didn't have an office, a desk, or a phone, and each time he asked one of the otherwise helpful and amiable administrative clerks where the Special Projects Office was, they shrugged or replied, “I dunno. Guess that's up to Dr. Harrod.”

  It was, all in all, relatively painless—even the stop at the small medical clinic on the second floor, where a Navy corpsman drew three vials of his blood. He asked why, given that the Marine Corps already maintained his medical records, but the young man only shrugged and said, “Got me, Major Newman. Guess they just want to have your blood type on hand in case you get a paper cut.”

  The corpsman thought this line was hilariously funny. But Newman made a mental note to keep one of his military dog tags, with his blood type stamped into it, on a chain around his neck, even if he wasn't allowed to wear his uniform.

  By the time he had finished crossing all the t's, dotting all the i's, and all but signing his life away, it was shortly after noon. Newman decided he had just enough time to race out to his house in Falls Church—where he and his wife sometimes lived together—for a change of clothes.

  As he strode out of the towering gray granite structure, a cold autumn rain was being wind-whipped up West Executive Avenue between the West Wing of the White House and the Old Executive Office Building. He turned right, toward the South West Gate, the wind and rain lashing his gray, military-issue raincoat, the drops darkening it as he walked. By the time he reached the Ellipse, where he had left his six-year-old Chevy Tahoe, Newman was soaked.

  He found his car and a ticket citing him for parking without a White House sticker. Newman got in, backed out, and wheeled around the circle, south of the white mansion he had already come to dislike, and headed west on Constitution Avenue, across the Roosevelt Bridge, and onto Route 50 into Virginia and toward his home, five miles away, in Falls Church.

  Newman and his wife Rachel had bought the three-bedroom, brick split-level on Creswell Drive nine years earlier—when they were still in love with each other instead of their separate careers. Newman had met Rachel on a blind date arranged by his sister Nancy. She and Rachel had been roommates at the University of Virginia, and they had driven up from Charlottesville on a lark to “meet some Marines” while Peter was attending the Officer's Basic Course at Quantico in September '78, after he'd graduated from the Naval Academy.

  Despite their differences, Newman was smitten by his sister's friend. Like Newman's sister, Rachel was a nursing student, but Rachel didn't want to work in a hospital—she wanted to fly. “Didn't you know that the first flight attendants all had to be nurses?” she asked him one day. Besides, she said with her ravishing smile, “Flying is more romantic.”

  Rachel really was a romantic. She had grown up on a comfortable farm in Culpepper, Virginia, riding horses and searching for wildflowers in the meadows. Often she'd ride horseback into the countryside with a picnic lunch and spread a blanket to read sonnets or write poetry. He, on the other hand, was both a military man and a sports nut. Many of their early dates consisted of football games at UVA and Annapolis, parades at Quantico and Washington, and visits to the many Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields that dot the Virginia countryside.

  After graduating from the Officer's Basic Course, Newman had been ordered to take command of a rifle platoon in the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. And until he deployed to the Mediterranean with the Third Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment later that year, he spent every weekend when he wasn't on duty somewhere between Camp Lejeune and Charlottesville, trying to be near Rachel while she finished up her last year at “Mr. Jefferson's University.”

  When Rachel graduated in June of '79, she did what she said she was going to do: she got hired by TWA and went off to their flight attendant training school. By the time she finished the TWA training course in Saint Louis, Missouri, Newman was deployed with his infantry company in the Mediterranean aboard the USS Fairfax County. He wrote to her every day and proposed to her over the phone from Athens, Greece, while the ship was in port for repairs.

  They married in the chapel at Camp Lejeune soon after Newman returned from his first deployment, which coincided with his promotion to first lieutenant. By then TWA had decided that Rachel should be based at Dulles Airport in Virginia—meaning that her flights would originate and terminate there, even though she was trying to make a home for herself with her new husband on the coast of North Carolina.

  Rachel had a difficult time adjusting to military life. In fact, she never quite did, though to be fair, she did her best. She watched how many other new service wives reacted to their husbands' line of work, but she never felt like she fit in. No matter how hard she tried, Rachel couldn't tell a corporal from a colonel and wasn't about to surrender her life to simply become an extension of her husband's career. And with deployment following deployment, she figured out why her husband's friends would joke, “If the Marine Corps had wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.” Stuck miles from her family and exhausted from racing up and down Interstate 95 for her flight assignments, Rachel was heartsick and terribly lonely. When he was home, her husband seemed totally unaware of the problem.

  Newman wasn't quite as oblivious as he seemed. He just didn't know what to do about his wife's growing unhappiness. He had confided to one or two of his comrades that his wife “wasn't really happy.” One of them had suggested that he might want to try marriage counseling. But to a self-made man like Peter Newman, that implied weakness, and besides, he thought, real men don't need outsiders to solve their marital problems.

  By 1985, Newman was a captain—already decorated for service in Grenada, Beirut, and Central America—and on the fast track to future promotions. He was assigned as a tactics instructor back at the “Basic School” in Quantico, where he and Rachel had met seven years earlier. He decided that if they bought a house, she'd feel like she had more ties to him and it might give them a place of their own from which to build a relationship.

  They found a place in Falls Church, Virginia. Newman knew it would be a long daily commute for him, but Rachel had loved the place at first sight—it was convenient to Dulles and she'd simply had enough of living in the cramped, run-down quarters on sprawling bases like Lejeune and Quantico.

  When they first saw the house on Creswell Drive, surrounded by towering oaks and maples, complete with a fenced backyard and quiet neighborhood, Rachel had excitedly said, “It's perfect for raising a family! We can put a sandbox over there, and you can hang a swing from that branch right there and give our kids lots of rides!” Rachel, the romantic, dreamed about how she could turn a house into a home.

  Now, almost a decade later, there was no swing, no sandbox, and no kids. And every time Newman looked at that inviting branch on the maple tree in the backyard, he would think of Rachel's two miscarriages and hate the tree for mocking his virility and his wife's infertility.

  After completing his three-year stint teaching tactics to new officers at the Basic School, Newman had been rewarded with a year as a student at Quantico's Amphibious Warfare School. While there, he was deep-selected for major, and after graduation, he was assigned to command the
Second Force Reconnaissance Company at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. He and Rachel rented what they called “the house on Creswell” to a Navy commander assigned to the Pentagon. When Newman and his wife moved back into the house in 1992, he'd insisted on repainting the entire interior. The Navy commander and his family had decorated one of the upstairs bedrooms as a nursery. Newman now used it as his home office.

  As Newman made the turn off Sleepy Hollow Drive, he noticed for the first time a dark-blue, late-model Chrysler sedan making the turn behind him. It hung back about a block, but he saw it as it followed him onto Creswell. And as he turned into his driveway, the Chrysler cruised past, two men in suits sitting in the front seat. Newman memorized the license plate number, make, and model, for later, in case it was something to warrant his suspicion. His first thought was that this was Harrod's way of keeping tabs on him, and he resented it.

  He let himself in from the attached garage, shut off the security alarm, ran upstairs to the bedroom that he occasionally shared with his wife, and began changing clothes. He figured that Dr. Harrod wouldn't be hard to please—he'd be happy with anything that wasn't a uniform. He chose a dark blue pinstripe suit and a white shirt. As he was putting a half-Windsor knot in his best blue-and-gold regimental-striped tie, he saw the note on his dresser.

  Dear P. J.—I drew this afternoon's flight to Chicago. Tomorrow I fly to San Diego and then back here. I'll stay at the airport and nap. My next assignment is to fly to London from Dulles and the turnaround back here. I should be back Friday night. I left a salad for your dinner. Love, R.

  “Great. More rabbit food,” Newman mumbled to himself. For whatever reason, the Rachel who had once loved a good steak had suddenly become a vegetarian. On those rare evenings when they actually sat down to eat together, she would serve him up a big plate of green stuff with the admonition, “If you eat this you'll live longer.”