Free Treason by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley Page A

intercepts had gone home sick on the Saturday afternoon when the intercept had been delivered. If necessary, he could mention that complication as a possible explanation for why the CIA had failed to alert the U.S. embassy about the pending attack.
    But Grainger also realized that if Stanton looked beyond those red herrings, he would find an ugly truth. Grainger had not been
transparent
—a euphemism that he preferred to lying—when he’d last been questioned by the Chairman. The CIA had been warned of the impending embassy attack four hours before it had happened. One of Grainger’s subordinates had alerted Gunter Conner, the CIA station chief, and had ordered him to rush the ambassador and his staff to the Mogadishu airport for an emergency flight out of the Somali capital before they could be taken hostage. But Conner had ignored that direct command, then the embassy had been overrun, hostages had been taken, Americans had been killed, and Payton Grainger, who had built his government career on honesty, had engaged in a cover-up. He
had
lied to the Chairman to protect the agency, to protect himself, and to protect President Allworth, who had been in the midst of a too-close-to-call reelection campaign. Had the public learned that the CIA had allowed Al-Shabaab to attack its embassy, which is what Conner had knowingly done, President Allworth would have lost the election.
    Until today’s meeting, Grainger had thought he’d covered up the scandal, especially after Gunter Conner had been murdered in Germany. But somehow the Chairman had unearthed a copy of the damning NSA intercept, and he was on the verge of pulling a string that would bring Grainger’s career to a disgraceful end, embarrass the agency, and undoubtedly humiliate President Allworth.
    â€œI’m not interested in excuses,” the Chairman snapped. “Just answer my question. Did you or your agency know in advance that our embassy was about to be attacked?”
    Grainger was formulating his reply when White House Chief of Staff Harper finally decided to join their conversation. She had not asked Grainger if the CIA had known in advance that the embassy was about to be attacked. She didn’t want to know. Her job was to protect the president from a scandal and, in this instance
not
asking or knowing gave her plausible deniability and seemed the prudent course. There might come a time when the White House might need to toss Grainger to the wolves, but Harper wasn’t prepared to do that, at least not yet.
    â€œChairman Stanton,” she said, “we’ve heard you’re planning on holding investigative hearings into the Somali affair.”
    â€œAffair?” Stanton repeated, shifting his piercing stare from Grainger to the forty-something Harper. “What happened at our embassy was a bit more than an affair, wouldn’t you agree? The words ‘colossal disaster’ and ‘Benghazi’ come to mind.”
    Up until this moment, Stanton had respected and admired Grainger. But the Chairman had never respected nor admired Harper. He thought she was pushy and arrogant, and while those traits were not uncommon in Washington, she was a political newcomer and hadn’t yet earned the right to be either. The president had recruited Harper from one of the nation’s most profitable Internet software companies. Coming from the corporate world, she wasn’t used to having her decisions questioned or criticized. Since taking charge at the White House, she had earned a well-deserved reputation for being brash, blunt, and dismissive. Stanton had another reason for not liking her. He’d learned that opening an embassy in Mogadishu had been her bonehead idea. He also suspected that she had urged the president to open that embassy for purely political reasons, making the president’s reelection a higher priority than national security.
    Stanton glanced down at a stack of papers on his desk