With sandwiches piled on a sideboard within the room, the group that suggested the president within the Scenario Room at completely different occas
With sandwiches piled on a sideboard within the room, the group that suggested the president within the Scenario Room at completely different occasions all through the day included a handful of seasoned nationwide safety officers, together with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Workers, Basic Mark A. Milley, an Military veteran of almost 40 years; Keith Kellogg, a retired Military lieutenant normal who serves as nationwide safety adviser to Mr. Pence; and Joseph Maguire, the performing director of nationwide intelligence.
It additionally included Mr. Pompeo, who has grow to be a driving pressure within the Trump administration’s Iran coverage and an advocate of what he typically calls “restoring deterrence” in opposition to Tehran’s aggression within the Center East. As a forceful proponent of the Jan. three strike that killed Basic Suleimani, Mr. Pompeo had performed an instrumental position in bringing Mr. Trump to the disaster level.
However others across the lengthy, rectangular desk within the Scenario Room had solely modest international coverage expertise — together with Mick Mulvaney, the White Home chief of employees and a former congressman from South Carolina; and Mr. O’Brien, who was a Los Angeles lawyer earlier than spending two and a half years as Mr. Trump’s chief hostage negotiator and assumed the put up of nationwide safety adviser in September.
Showing on a video display screen was Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, who was monitoring the disaster from the company’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. Within the days earlier than Basic Suleimani’s loss of life, Ms. Haspel had suggested Mr. Trump that the risk the Iranian normal offered was higher than the specter of Iran’s response if he was killed, in keeping with present and former American officers. Certainly, Ms. Haspel had predicted the most probably response can be a missile strike from Iran to bases the place American troops have been deployed, the very state of affairs that gave the impression to be taking part in out on Tuesday afternoon.
Although Ms. Haspel took no formal place about whether or not to kill Basic Suleimani, officers who listened to her evaluation got here away with the clear view that the C.I.A. believed that killing him would enhance — not weaken — safety within the Center East.
However at that second days after his loss of life, the president and his aides have been confronting a flurry of conflicting info. Round four p.m., studies got here in {that a} coaching camp north of Baghdad may need been hit. Officers on the White Home and the State Division waited anxiously for the Pentagon to offer injury studies concerning the camp, Taji air base, the place American troops are stationed. It was a false alarm, although American officers mentioned on Wednesday that they believed that a number of missiles fired within the barrage a day earlier have been supposed for the bottom.
Because the studies about Taji got here in, loudspeakers on the American Embassy in Baghdad introduced that an assault might be imminent. As they’d within the earlier days, American and Iraqi personnel contained in the compound raced towards bomb shelters.