Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

The Air Force One fleet had undergone a $50 million upgrade since 9/11 to enable the president to rule the United States from the air. The chaos surrounding his movements after the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was a painful reminder of communications shortcomings.

Dr. Rice’s aircraft had a mobile command center with encrypted communication links with all of the national security networks in the United States. The state-of-the-art telephone system had a total of eighty-five separate lines and scrambled handsets. Plasma screens positioned around the aircraft showed, in real time, the live satellite news channels. The plane’s extensive defense system was intended to detect and deflect any missile attacks. Secretary of State Rice had an executive suite behind the flight deck that included a stateroom, which was a duplicate of her Washington office. Behind it was a dressing room, toilet, and shower that only she was allowed to use. Her own bedroom was wood paneled with a queen-sized bed. The suite also had a dining room. On board were two galleys, each capable of providing meals for two hundred passengers; the larders stocked with enough supplies for two thousand meals. The non-stop flight from Washington had cost $40,243 an hour. At the back of the plane sat her officials and carefully vetted members of the press.

Known as the “Warrior Princess” to her staff, but never to her face, Dr. Rice brought with her an alarm clock that played the opening bars of a Mozart symphony and she kept her watch on Eastern Standard Time. The two pieces were gifts from President Bush, visible signs of the esteem in which he held her. At 5 A.M. EST she awoke and spent the next hour working out on the weights and a rowing machine installed in the suite at her request. Physical fitness was an important part of her life; it had given Dr. Rice the figure of a catwalk model and the stride of an athlete. At some time during the flight she had used her phone—code-named POTUS (for President of the United States)—to call President Bush; they spoke several times each day. Fifty-two years old, Dr. Rice was the most powerful person in his administration. Its other members knew she was perhaps one step away from her ultimate ambition of becoming the first woman to be President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office.

The Mossad profile revealed that if Dr. Rice had a weakness, “it is shoes. She is known to have splashed out on eight pairs of Ferragamos and regularly sends her personal shopper into Washington fashion boutiques to see what’s new from Paris, Milan, or London.” The profile had contained other personal details—how as a student she had her hair curls ironed out and “has taken to wearing her hair in a style that suggests a headmistress at a Swiss finishing school.” It described her upbringing in the mid-fifties in the then still segregated deep South, how her parents had christened her after the Italian musical term Condoleezza—“ with sweetness.” How she had taken piano lessons at the age of three and learned Spanish and French until she became fluent. When she was eight years old, her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, was torn apart by Civil Rights agitation and a bomb planted by a white extremist had exploded in her local Baptist school, killing four black girls, one of whom was her closest friend. Her father, John, patrolled the city streets with a shotgun to keep white racists at bay.

Afterward the family moved to Colorado where Condoleezza was enrolled in an integrated Catholic school. In her teens she learned Russian and at college wrote her dissertation on the Czechoslovak Army. Her most notable achievement came when she became provost of one of America’s top universities, Stanford. She was the youngest to do so at the age of thirty-eight and the first African American to hold the post. Her next climb up the ladder came when the then secretary of state, George Shultz, nominated her to the board of the oil giant, Chevron. One of its million-barrel oil tankers was first named after her. That tanker still sails the high seas even in the most turbulent weather. "

The Mossad profile pointed out that “turbulence has continued to surround Dr. Rice”—not least because of the surprise caused when George Bush asked her to join his presidential campaign in 1998. They quickly bonded through their common zeal for physical fitness. “She gave him a pedometer to check how many steps he took during his coast-to-coast campaign. Their faith also plays an important role in their association; both are devout Sunday church-goers.” Bush made no secret of his dependency on her. “She explains the subtleties of foreign policy in a way I understand,” he once said. When Bush took over the presidency in January 2001, he made her his national security adviser. Dick Cheney tried to block the appointment. She dealt with his opposition in a closed-door meeting. Since then the “Warrior Princess”—a nickname given to her by Donald Rumsfeld—has translated the president’s impulses into foreign policy. Never married, she relaxes by “playing her Steinway grand piano and watching American football on television,” revealed the profile.

It also explained why she had two mirrors in her offices to check the back of her hair was in place down to the last brush stroke. “If she is having a ‘bad hair day,’ it is like a weather vane warning.” There had been many of those times: her confrontation with Germany and France over the war with Iraq; her determination to maintain Spain’s resolve to support the war. All this made her an admired figure in Israel.

Now, on that July day in 2006, as the giant aircraft made its long journey to Israel, Mossad’s station chief in Washington had sent Meir Dagan the latest denials by both Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice that they intended to run in the 2008 presidential campaign. Of more immediate interest to the Mossad chief were the details of a most secret plan Dr. Rice had reluctantly helped to create with President Bush and Vice President Cheney. The plan was the underlying reason for her visit. On the surface it was to once more explore the prospects of a ceasefire. In reality it was to discover if the Israeli Air Force attacks on Hezbollah had been so successful they could serve as a blueprint for an attack on Iran. Dr. Rice had initially been nervous about launching such an assault. Did she now feel the same? Meir Dagan had become convinced—and told Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as much—that the secretary of state was not merely nervous, but had started, according to the Mossad station chief in Washington, to “agitate inside the administration” to be allowed to go to Syria to try and persuade President Bashar al-Assad to order Hezbollah to stop its onslaught. But a Mossad agent in Damascus had, shortly before the 747 aircraft touched down at Ben Gurion airport, discovered that President al-Assad refused to meet her.

A further indication of President Bush’s hard-line thinking had come from Richard Armitage, who had been deputy secretary of state in Bush’s first term. Armitage had described Hezbollah as “maybe the A-team of terrorists. Israel’s campaign on Lebanon, which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran. If the most dominant military force in the region, the Israeli Defense Force, cannot pacify a country like Lebanon, you should think carefully about taking the template to Iran with its population of seventy million. The only effect that the Israeli bombing has achieved is to unite the Muslim world against the Israelis.”

Condoleezza Rice had come to explore again what she thought, according to one source, “could be a solution. It was to form a Sunni-Arab coalition with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt that would win the support of Britain and Europe to unite and bring pressure on the Shia mullahs in Iran.” But to achieve that, the source acknowledged, would require the removal of Hezbollah as a threat to Israel. Dr. Rice knew the hope of such plan for a coalition of what she called “like-minded Arab states” had been dented when the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saudi al-Faisal, had come to Washington early in the war and told President Bush to “intervene immediately to end this conflict.” Predictably, Bush had demurred.