The Apprentice. Greg Miller
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that slur was acute. The CIA’s lineage traced to World War II and the creation of a spy service whose mission was to help Allied forces defeat the same Nazis that Trump now invoked. The agency’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, was disbanded after the war, but a statue of its founding director, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, still stands in the agency lobby. Trump likely knew little of that history—or for that matter of the record of CIA abuses and corresponding reforms that had transpired during the intervening decades—and would never retract the insult. Many presidents had clashed with the CIA, but the relationship had never taken such an ugly turn before a commander in chief had even taken office.
No one knew what Trump would say when he addressed the crowd that awaited him, but one thing was certain: he would not be brought into Russia House.
THE TRIP TO LANGLEY HAD BEEN PLACED ON THE PRESIDENT’S CALENDAR weeks earlier by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff. Priebus, a political operative grounded in the Republican Party establishment, had mapped out the new president’s first days down to the hour, a detailed schedule that was to set a breathtaking pace and serve as an example of the urgency and ambition of the new administration. The CIA was the first government agency on Trump’s itinerary, a decision designed in part to assure the GOP establishment that Trump would settle into office and be “presidential,” which for Republicans entailed being a staunch defender of the country’s national security institutions. More important, the Trump team hoped that the visit could avert an unnecessary rift with an agency whose unique aura and authority had proven seductive to previous presidents but was also capable of fierce bureaucratic combat—even against occupants of the Oval Office.
Trump stepped out of his armored car at 2:06 P.M. in an underground parking garage and was greeted by a CIA leadership team in flux. Now-former director John Brennan and his deputy had resigned once Trump took office, so Meroe Park, who had served for more than three years in the number three role, was officially in charge of the agency and its 20,000 employees. Park (the first woman to hold the reins as director, albeit in an acting capacity) held the job for just three days—long enough for Trump’s pick as CIA chief, Republican congressman Mike Pompeo, to be confirmed.
Park escorted the president into the Original Headquarters building, an H-shaped structure that opened when John F. Kennedy was president. Trump was then taken by golf cart—an accommodation he required even for short distances—to a futuristic command post that operatives of Kennedy’s era could hardly have imagined.
The CIA’s Predator operations floor is a dazzling theater of high-tech warfare. Concentric rows of computer terminals face a wall of high-definition video screens. The ambient lighting is darkened to allow analysts to focus on footage transmitted halfway around the world from aircraft (the early Predators now largely replaced with larger, more powerful Reapers) equipped with cameras and missiles but no cockpits. The number of CIA drone strikes had plunged since the early years of the Obama administration, the peak of the covert war against Al-Qaeda, but the use of unmanned aircraft was still significant. The viewing can be monotonous—countless hours of surveillance over dusty patches of remote terrain in places including Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria. But moments of engagement are dramatic.
The sight of missiles streaming toward a target is particularly adrenaline-inducing to the newly initiated, and the agency often brings those it most wants to impress to the Predator display, with highlights of successful strikes cued up. Trump appeared suitably enthused, though puzzled by what he regarded as undue restraint. When told that the CIA flew surveillance flights over Syria, but that only the military conducted strikes—an Obama policy meant to return the agency’s focus to its core espionage mission—Trump made clear he disagreed. When the agency’s head of drone operations explained how the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed nonplussed. Shown a strike on a Taliban compound, Trump noticed that the militants had scattered seconds before the explosion. “Can they hear the bombs coming?” Trump said. “We should make the bombs silent so they can’t get away.”
Agency officials had been given just three days’ notice that Trump had planned to visit CIA and would deliver remarks; they had scrambled to make preparations that typically take weeks. An email to the workforce had offered tickets to the first four hundred employees to respond, a move that helped to ensure the new president would encounter a friendly crowd since the event was being held on a weekend. The agency readied a teleprompter, hoping the president would work from a prepared text. But the White House sent word at the last minute to scrap the screens—Trump would speak off the cuff.
THERE ARE NUMEROUS LOCATIONS AT CIA HEADQUARTERS SUITABLE for a speech, among them a cavernous hallway lined with past directors’ portraits and a semi-spherical auditorium known as the Bubble. But the risers for Trump’s visit were placed before the agency’s most hallowed backdrop: a marble wall on the north side of the main lobby marked by six rows of hand-carved stars, 117 in total at that time, each representing an agency officer killed in the line of duty. The number had grown by at least forty since the September 11 attacks, reflecting the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The constellation had gained three new hand-chiseled stars just months before Trump’s visit, commemorating a trio of paramilitary officers killed in eastern Afghanistan in 2016. The names of many of the dead are entered in a grim ledger that rests beneath the field of stars, protected by an inch-thick plate of glass; the goatskin-bound volume also contains blank spaces for those whose identities and CIA missions remain classified.
The wall is, to the CIA, Arlington National Cemetery in miniature, a sacred space. In addition to somber memorial services when new stars are unveiled, the setting has been used for ceremonies marking momentous agency events, including the culmination of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. It has also been a backdrop for presidents. In 2009, Obama stood before the stars for a first visit that was also uncomfortable. As a presidential candidate, he had called the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation methods torture. Once in office, he ordered the agency’s secret prisons dismantled, and directed that the legal memos used to justify their operation be made public. Obama defended those decisions to a wary audience that he acknowledged viewed him with “understandable anxiety and concern.” But he also spoke of employees’ sacrifice and courage, describing the stars behind him—eighty-nine at the time—as “a testament to both the men and women of the CIA who gave their lives in service to their country.” Even those who considered Obama hostile to the agency (and there were many) respected his recognition of so many lives lost.
As the ceremony for Trump got under way, Park was first to the podium, telling the new president that “hundreds more” agency employees wished to attend but were turned away for lack of space. “It means a great deal that you chose to come to CIA on your first full day as president,” she said.
Vice President Mike Pence was next to speak, and hit all the politically expedient notes. It was “deeply humbling,” he said, to appear before “men and women of character who have sacrificed greatly and to stand before this hallowed wall, this memorial wall, where we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom.” He then set the table for Trump, saying he knew the new president was “going to make America safe again,” and that he had “never met anyone with a greater heart for those who every day, in diverse ways, protect the people of this nation through their character and their service and their sacrifice.”
Trump took the stage in a striped blue tie and, though indoors, a topcoat that fell below his knees. “There is nobody that feels stronger about the intelligence community and the CIA than Donald Trump,” he said as he stood facing the bronze gaze of Donovan’s statue. The agency would get so much support under his administration, he said, that “maybe you’re going to say, ‘Please don’t give us so much backing.’” He vowed to rid the world of terrorist groups and assured employees that their new director, Pompeo, was a “total star.”
The speech to that point seemed on track. Park and other agency officials appeared to exhale, gaining confidence that their fears—a confrontation, an attack on the Russia analysts, another Nazi slur—would not materialize. Then midway through his fifteen-minute appearance, without any pause or outward sign, Trump changed course. Abandoning discussion of anything relevant to the agency, he set off on a riff about how youthful he felt—“thirty,