Information Wars. Richard Stengel
America’s image in the process. According to observers, Obama replied, “Why haven’t we been doing that already?”
That was enough to launch the idea, and Secretary Clinton came up with a plan for a small, nimble entity that could coordinate across the government to counter al-Qaeda’s media in real time. It would live at the State Department but essentially be an interagency group staffed from across the government. Executive Order 13584, issued on September 15, 2011—about a year after that first Situation Room discussion—established the CSCC “to coordinate, orient, and inform government-wide foreign communications activities targeted against terrorism and violent extremism, particular al-Qaida and its affiliates.”3
From the moment of its birth, CSCC was a problem child. It was underfunded, its mission was poorly understood, and it became an orphan within the State Department. The National Security Council sought to manage it. The Department of Defense resented it. And Foreign Service officers avoided it. It was originally seen not as an entity that created content, but one that helped coordinate and inform other entities in government about what al-Qaeda was up to on social media. At the time, there was also a fight about where it would be situated at State. Counterterrorism wanted it, so did R. R won, but it was never a perfect fit.
Within the first year, CSCC had grown to about 40 people, with its most visible part something called the Digital Outreach Team (DOT—another awful acronym), which engaged in online debate about violent extremism. About 20 people worked on the team and created content in three languages: Arabic, Urdu, and Somali. Their motto was “Contest the space,” and the idea was to target so-called fence-sitters, young men who might be considering joining al-Qaeda. The messaging tried to create doubt in these young men by telling them that al-Qaeda was killing Muslims and that if they went to fight, they were likely to be killed themselves.
The head of CSCC was Alberto Fernandez, a former ambassador to Equatorial Guinea who had also been a U.S. spokesperson in Iraq during the Iraq War. Alberto had fluent Arabic, a dark mustache, and a crafty manner. He was an expert in the history of violent extremist organizations and could tell you how al-Qaeda and Jabhat al-Nusra disagreed about toothbrushing hadiths.
I had first met with Alberto before I was confirmed, to better understand CSCC. He walked me through what they were doing. They seemed very focused on the inside baseball of al-Qaeda politics. He proudly showed me examples of how al-Qaeda’s own messengers attacked CSCC online and tried to take down CSCC’s Twitter handle. It was clear he thought that being attacked by al-Qaeda was a sign of CSCC’s effectiveness. I wasn’t so sure.
Alberto mentioned that in spring 2012, they had noticed another organization that had formed in the area, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was fighting Bashar al-Assad. (The Levant was the historical region of Syria and the countries of the eastern Mediterranean.) They noticed that ISIS, as he called it, began to increase its influence in rebel-held areas in 2013 through an interesting mix of charity and intimidation. It helped the poor but brutally punished anyone for violating sharia law and was virulently anti-Shia. In early 2013, he said, this organization began warning its followers that the U.S. State Department was trying to sow dissent among jihadis. ISIS was the coming thing, he said.
Bringing Back Our Girls, Slowly
A week later, on April 14, 2014, I got a sense of just how rapid the rapid-response mechanism of CSCC was. Most Americans had never heard of Boko Haram when news organizations began reporting that the group had kidnapped 276 girls from a secondary school in Chibok, a town in Borno State, Nigeria.4 Boko Haram was an Islamic terrorist group formed in 2002 in northeastern Nigeria. Its aim was to turn Nigeria into an Islamic state under sharia law. According to U.S. intelligence, Boko Haram had formed an alliance with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in 2011. Over the past few years, Boko Haram had been responsible for hundreds of attacks, multiple bombings, and thousands of deaths in northeastern Nigeria, murdering far more people than al-Qaeda.5
Alberto came to me and said this would be a good opportunity for CSCC to branch out a bit and do some counter–Boko Haram social media and show support for the kidnapped girls. He proposed that CSCC do some quick mock-ups. Great. The next day, CSCC showed me some potential banners. They were poorly designed, not very modern-looking, and quite bland, but what the heck, government wasn’t known for its aesthetic sense. I approved them immediately because I didn’t want to delay our efforts.
In the meantime, the story had captured people’s attention. A hashtag started trending on Twitter: #BringBackOurGirls. It turned into a social media supernova when First Lady Michelle Obama posed for a picture holding up a sign with the handwritten hashtag. “In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters,” she said in a video.6
I didn’t think about the banners again and just continued to monitor the situation on the ground. Ten days later, Alberto came to see me and said, I need your help on something. What about? Well, he said sheepishly, the banners had not been able to get through the clearance process. What? The Africa bureau had objected to them. We made some changes, he said, and they were approved, but then the Bureau of Intelligence and Research objected to those changes. It was a bureaucratic standoff, and he wanted to see whether I could fix the problem. This was insane. A ten-day-old tweet might as well not exist.
The clearance process was unmistakable evidence that State was a horizontal culture as well as a vertical one. Almost every memo or note or paper that was going from one level to another, or one bureau to another, was subject to the clearance process. Any bureaus, functional or regional, that had a stake in the paper had to “clear” it before it went to the next level. And since they were so protective of their equities, they wanted to weigh in to make sure someone else wasn’t treading on their turf. This illustrated another axiom at State: many more people could say no than say yes. A deputy assistant secretary or a special assistant could not initiate policy or even commission an anti–Boko Haram tweet, but they could kill it by refusing to clear it.
Even when things did get through, the clearance process made a mockery of deadlines. It optimized for purity over urgency. Things that I originally expected to take hours would take days; things that I thought would take days would take weeks; and things that I thought would take weeks would take months. And I haven’t even mentioned the reclama process. Don’t know that word? I didn’t either. A reclama—from the Latin reclamare, meaning “to cry out in protest”—was a request made through the chain of command to reconsider a decision. So this meant that even after the final decision had been made by a principal and cleared, you could request that it be overturned. To me, it seemed like asking for the referee’s call to be reversed after the game was over. At State, the term was used as a verb, as in “you can reclama it.” And that’s what had happened to the Boko Haram banners—they had been reclama’d again by the Africa bureau.
When Alberto left my office, I picked up the phone and called David Wade, the Secretary’s chief of staff, to explain the situation. He had a one-word response: “Jesus!”
The banners were cleared and posted within two hours.
The Ben Cave
There’s nothing grand about the West Wing. The offices are small and dark, the hallways narrow, the entrance areas unprepossessing. It’s pretty underwhelming. I was there during my first week for my initial meeting with Ben Rhodes. Ben’s office was a grotto, a long, narrow cave with no windows. He was adjacent to the Navy Mess, about a 15-second walk from the Oval Office.
Ben was Obama’s foreign policy boy wonder, his chief speechwriter on foreign policy, and, in some ways, his foreign policy alter ego—though Ben was later criticized in the press for saying that himself. Ben’s official title was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting. Everyone at State told me he was my equivalent at the White House, but that was a disservice to Ben. He would become my closest and most reliable touch point at the White House, and from first to last, he was generous and supportive.
Ben is a cool presence. Pretty much all Obama’s people were. It’s not that he avoids looking you in the