Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack has caused a seismic shift in the tectonic plates around Washington DC
IMAGINE a journalist romancing Pervez Musharraf, meeting him in secret at the Army House in his private quarters? Make-believe for a moment the President handing the journalist sensitive dossiers on national security and, in the process, laying bare his heart over a doleful 210-minute Q&A session? Segueing in would be more hot stuff — too spicy to digest — from the general-in-chief at the ISI headquarters, who on presidential command would meet the journalist many times in stealth and give him the wink to crunch classified state secrets xeroxing for revelation in a book bound for stardom.
Consider the truckload of gabfest this stellar would vomit for TV talking heads and newspaper scribes? A field day for all. Alas, you and I know this is but wishful thinking as no leader in Pakistan worth his/her salt will ever allow the truth to be revealed, heaven forbid, that too to a note-taker, tape-recorder hack! Still, while Islamabad waits with expectant breath for a Bob Woodward-type to investigate a cascade of conspirators from Iskander Mirza to Pervez Musharraf, and why they love to spike sitting prime ministers, Bob’s Plan of Attack has already caused a seismic shift in the tectonic plates round Washington DC.
Drooling over his book — five million copies sold in one week — are the chattering classes and the TV channels. Believe me, there is no chat show where Bob has not shown up with his bobby face and a taxingly slow nasal drawl, to parrot the ‘he said and he said’ story repeatedly. The White House, heady with Bush using Bob as his mouthpiece before the presidential elections, has mandated the book to its minions as a “must read.”
“He is terrific. He’s a great journalist. He’s fantastic” — gushed Condi Rice, the national security chief before even reading the book where she is described by Bush as being “territorial ... she’s a woman.”
Who then is this Bob Woodward?
Before Robert Redford, the blond heartthrob, immortalized him in All the President’s Men by playing the lead role of the investigative journalist plumbing the Watergate scandal and nailing Nixon into impeachment, Bob was an obscure reporter at the Washington Post few knew and cared about.
He has a past wrapped in mystique. While at Yale, he was handpicked to join the university’s secret society, Book and Snake which was “a cut below the more infamous Skull and Bones” which had George W. Bush, another Yalie, as a member (you can draw your own conclusions).
CIA, as is well known, always recruits Ivy Leaguers, better if they belong to secret societies. Some believe that Bob may have been approached by the Agency, or by a military intelligence unit. Why get shocked? Don’t we have our journalists back in Pakistan on intelligence agencies’ payroll? Geez, anyone can smell them a mile away.
Whether Woodward became a ‘double-wallet guy’, as CIA agents are known, no one will ever know except a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, J. Anthony Lukas, who mentioned in 1989 that he was “temperamentally secretive and loathes to volunteer information about himself.
“It would also explain the role Woodward wittingly or unwittingly played in keeping the CIA’s nose clean while making sure the world saw the President’s (Richard Nixon’s) nose was dirty.”
Today, Bob continues to work for the same paper that catapulted him to dizzying heights uncharted by hacks before. But more significantly, his reputation as the official stenographer to the stars now stands unchallenged. Romancing the wolves, he alone is the gatekeeper to their secrets. Since Nixon’s fall from grace, the spy-master has churned out nine non-fiction bestsellers on powerful players and their politics inside the Beltway, aided and abetted of course by the characters themselves, including president George Bush.
The latest ‘wolves’ Bob is romancing are Bush’s sullen secretary of state and ‘Mr Smoothie’, the Saudi ambassador in Washington. While Colin Powell has poured out his dark thoughts over several interviews, he acceded to Bob about madcap Cheney and his ‘fever’ to invade Iraq, Prince Bandar bin Sultan has woken up Woodward in the middle of the night to say “wink, wink”!
Wait a minute! What’s this ‘wink, wink’ jazz? Why would the dean of the diplomatic corps — who has under his Arab torso tucked away 20 Capitol years and embedded in his ample chest secrets of five American presidents — deem to demean himself as a Wee Willie Winkie waking up the sleeping Woodward? Bob, by the way, has lost no time to blabber this to the world.
Kind of a deformed joke, is it not?
“I think when you wake up somebody at midnight they might hear things or see things,” riposted the prince of palace intrigues, hinting that Woodward is hallucinating.
Bandar, born to a Saudi prince and a concubine, lived as a pariah with his mother. “It taught me patience and a defence mechanism, if you want, to not expect anything,” he says of his father, who only accepted him when he turned eleven.
Famous for vodka and gin bashes at his palatial home on the banks of the Potomac, shared by his wife Princess Haifa, daughter of King Faisal, the royal couple lead a champagne life, courted by the gilded in Washington, with the two Bushes as constants.
“For some reason, Bandar wants to fuzz this up,” says a wooden Woodward, who has in his book asserted that Bandar was briefed as early as January 2003 by Dick Cheney and secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, on war plans while Powell was kept out of the loop.
Bob says Bandar’s nocturnal phone call basically was to say that the writer was correct but his raffish ‘wink, wink’ implied that Bob should let the matter go.
Saudis are the top oil producers so the oil-thirsty Americans are forever kowtowing to them, and holding the controls is the cunning Bandar. According to Bob’s take, Bandar is rooting for Bush, planning to turn on the taps nearer the US elections, sending gas prices down and Bush’s popularity up.
The Washington Post gave Woodward a year off for the book. Assume if some kind-hearted editor in Pakistan were to give his reporter/editor a year off to gather from “low level, mid-level people, higher up”, and send a 21-page memo to Musharraf (as Bob did to Bush) outlining the spine of the story he intended exposing?
“I think they (the White House) looked at the memo and said, ‘You have the story. You’re going to write it anyway. Let’s get the President’s point of view in’,” says Bob, content as a Cheshire cat.
Suppose if our mythical writer became the captive of self-serving recollections by generals, including President Musharraf? The result would be a dead bore. And the Army House would have to buy up all the books to save the publisher from going belly up.
Oh, here’s a sample of disclosures or something to that effect we still would get to read just as the Americans are now reading in Plan of Attack: Jamali, the Prime Minister, dozing off during an army briefing as it happened to Dick Cheney who Woodward writes “fell asleep”; or foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri saying “What the hell! What are these guys thinking about? Can’t you get these guys back in the box?” as his American counterpart said; or someone of Gen Tommy Franks’ rank in Pakistan telling his lethargic commanders, “This is @*# serious. You know, if you guys think this is not going to happen, you’re wrong. You need to get off your ass,” and using four-letter words at his joint chiefs (as Franks did); or GHQ’s (Pentagon’s) undersecretary for policy saying: “I have to deal with the @*# stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day!”
Or imagine foreign secretary Riaz Khokar worrying about Kasuri’s image in the media, because the “two are best friends, they talk on the phone so many times each day that aides think of them as teenagers joined at the hip, committed to sharing absolutely everything,” as Powell and his deputy Armitage are described; or on a middle-east trip, Sehba Musharraf “lunches with an emir’s wife. “When do the children here in Bahrain begin school?” she asks. The emir’s wife reminds Pakistan’s First Lady that she’s in Qatar! This happened to Lynne Cheney.
The exercise of reading Woodward, says Christopher Hitchens, the British writer living in the US, is an exercise in decoding, it is a preferred Washington indoor sport: Who gave him what and why? And at what price?”
Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack has caused a seismic shift in the tectonic plates around Washington DC
