The conventional wisdom on the firing of Rex Tillerson congealed quickly: He was an ineffective secretary of state who played a crucial role in constraining the president’s reckless foreign policy instincts.
This is not just logically impossible, it’s also wrong. From the earliest days of his tenure, Trump didn’t listen to his diplomat in chief. Tillerson was an adviser whose advice was rarely sought and even more rarely followed. His disputes with the president were widely known—often because Trump took them public—and they made it clear that Tillerson couldn’t effectively perform the most elemental part of his job: speaking for the president in public at home and in private abroad.
This is a problem that Tillerson’s successor will not have. In the 15 months he’s run the Central Intelligence Agency, Mike Pompeo accomplished something few thought possible: He earned both the respect of the CIA workforce and the trust of Donald Trump.
In November 2016, after extending feelers to California representative Devin Nunes, Donald Trump picked Pompeo, a three-term member of the House from Kansas, to be the CIA director. He arrived at Langley facing formidable challenges. He was an elected official, a conservative Republican, a sometime critic of the agency, and, most challenging of all, the appointee of a president with little interest in the kinds of detailed analyses the CIA exists to furnish and a habit of attacking the intel community as a whole.
One of Pompeo’s first moves was to call Gina Haspel and ask her to be his deputy. He didn’t know her well but their interactions had always been positive.
In July 2015, Pompeo had traveled to Vienna with Arkansas senator Tom Cotton to investigate reports of secret side agreements to the Iran nuclear deal. On the way, they stopped in London, where they took in a briefing by Haspel, a senior CIA official. Pompeo was impressed and made it a point to remember her name.
When Pompeo called 16 months later, Haspel expressed reservations, not because she didn’t want the job but because she was concerned about the unwelcome political baggage she would bring along. Haspel had been involved in the CIA’s enhanced-interrogation program under George W. Bush—a fact sure to make her the object of criticism if she were picked as the CIA’s number two. She offered Pompeo names of two possible alternatives. He wasn’t interested. He made clear that he wanted Haspel to serve as his deputy and that he was willing to deal with any political blowback.
The pick sent an unmistakable message to the agency’s rank and file. Pompeo was willing to absorb political attacks in order to elevate a career intelligence professional maligned solely for doing her job.
Pompeo also quickly built a strong relationship with Trump. He briefed the president almost daily in a no-nonsense manner, keeping the information simple and straightforward, according to officials familiar with the relationship. More importantly, he managed to avoid the condescension, however understandable, evident from some of Trump’s other advisers, including Rex Tillerson.
Mindful of his role, Pompeo tried to limit the briefings to questions of intelligence and analysis. But Trump pushed his CIA director to weigh in on matters of national security policy, and he listened carefully to Pompeo’s view of America’s role in the world.
“I’ve seen a dozen times when Pompeo has talked the president out of one of his crazy ideas,” says a senior administration official involved in the national security debates.
Pompeo helped shape the administration’s approach to thorny national security issues in significant and sometimes surprising ways. Trump brought an instinctive isolationism to his office, particularly about the war in Afghanistan. But in many conversations with Trump, over many months, Pompeo made clear the security risks of simply getting out. When Trump then sought to limit the American presence to a small CIA-led paramilitary force—an idea the president brought up again and again over many weeks—Pompeo patiently disabused him of the fantasy that such a plan would work.
More recently, Pompeo has been urging Trump to explore toughening up the Iran nuclear deal rather than simply tearing it up. Pompeo, a strong and vocal opponent of the deal while he was in Congress, has urged the president to push France, Britain, and Germany to revisit it and demand inspector access to military sites and snapback sanctions for violations. This is a smart response to Iranian violations. Tillerson rankled Trump with his insistence that the United States remain a party to the deal no matter what.
Where Tillerson simply opposed Trump’s views, Pompeo helped to shape them. And he’s managed to do so in a way that Trump doesn’t find annoying or disloyal. “Tremendous energy, tremendous intellect,” Trump said of Pompeo shortly after tweeting the announcement. “We are always on the same wavelength.”
They’re not. And that’s good. So long as Trump listens.
