Dead or Alive - Tom Clancy [85]
“My apologies, Mr. President.” As he was every day except Sunday, McMullen had been in the office since five a.m. Sundays he worked a half day, from nine until three. Such was life in the Kealty administration and the rarefied atmosphere of the executive branch.
It was a Tuesday, the day of Kealty’s biweekly meeting with Director of Central Intelligence Scott Kilborn. Unlike the previous President, Kealty wasn’t hands-on when it came to intelligence, trusting Kilborn to keep him up to speed.
Kilborn, a supporter of Kealty’s since the President’s days in the Senate, had left his post as chairman of the political sciences department at Harvard to serve as Kealty’s foreign affairs adviser before being nominated for the slot at Langley. Kilborn was competent enough, McMullen knew, but the DCI was overcompensating for the previous administration’s foreign policy platform, which both he and Kealty had proclaimed wrong-headed and counterproductive. McMullen agreed, at least marginally, but Kilborn had swung the pendulum too far in the opposite direction, pulling back from some of the CIA’s overseas operational initiatives that had finally started bearing fruit, something that McMullen knew had infuriated the Clandestine Service. Case officers who had been living overseas, away from their families, for six to eight months at a time and risking their lives where a white face was as good as a bull’s-eye had recently been told, “Thanks for all your hard work, but we’ve decided to go in a different direction.” The rumor was that in the next few months Langley was going to be seeing an exodus of retirement-and near-retirement-age case officers putting in their papers. If so, it would set the Clandestine Service back nearly a decade.
Worse still, with Kealty’s tacit approval, Kilborn often sidestepped into the state department’s turf and poached issues that lay in that arguably gray area between diplomacy and intelligence.
As for Ann Reynolds, Kealty’s National Security Adviser, she, too, was smart enough but painfully inexperienced. Plucked by Kealty from the House of Representatives during her first term, Reynolds had little background in security matters, save a junior membership on the House Intelligence Committee. She was, Kealty had told McMullen at the time of the decision, a “demographic necessity.” He had badly mauled his challenger for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Governor Claire Raines, winning the party nod but losing a good chunk of his female base in the process. If he had any hopes of a second term, he had to win it back.
Reynolds was well spoken and had a good academic mind, of that there was no question, but after nearly a year on the job, she was still far, far down the wrong side of the learning curve and realizing, McMullen suspected, that the real world and the world of textbooks had little in common.
And what about you, Wes, old buddy? he thought. A black man, under thirty, a Yale-graduated lawyer with half a dozen years of quasigovernmental think-tank service under his belt. He had no doubt the media and gossip mavens said the same thing about him: He was an affirmative-action choice and in way over his head, which was partially true, at least the last part. He was in over his head but learning to swim quickly. The problem was, the better his backstroke got, the dirtier the pool seemed. Kealty was a decent enough man, but he was too concerned with the big picture—about his “vision” for the country and its place in the world—and less focused on the “how” of making it happen. Worse still, he was so worried about reversing the course his predecessor had set that he, too, like Kilborn, often sent the pendulum swinging dangerously in the other direction, too lenient in his stand against enemies and too forgiving of allies who failed to follow through on their commitments. The economy was warming again, though, and with it the President’s approval ratings were rising, and Kealty took this as a blanket indicator