Mike Pompeo, who was CIA director and secretary of state in former President Donald Trump’s administration, portrays himself in his new memoir as a pugnacious and uncompromising fighter. Someone who, with God’s help, worked to ensure “America’s future security, prosperity, and liberty against the designs of evil actors.”
“My task, for four years, was to listen to President Trump and what the American people had asked us to do, then to translate those demands into sound intelligence and diplomatic plans,” he writes in the introduction to his book Never Give an Inch.
WHITE HOUSE SAYS TRUMP AND POMPEO FAILED ON KHASHOGGI ACCOUNTABILITY
It’s a mantra that is not only the book’s title but also a leitmotif that appears in more than 30 mentions. Pompeo, a Kansas congressman for six years who was first in his class at West Point and is a Harvard Law School graduate, describes his decidedly undiplomatic approach to serving as America’s top diplomat. That is, taking no prisoners, suffering no fools, never, ever backing down — hence the title.
“I was vicious, relentless, manic, determined — you pick the adjective — on the highest priorities,” he boasts.
The book’s dust jacket shows Pompeo in fighting trim, with the subtitle “Fighting for the America I Love.” And between the covers is what amounts to a manifesto for leading the nation, should he run for president in 2024 or beyond, which he obliquely hints he may do.
The memoir is a lively read, covering Pompeo’s 1,000 days as Trump’s first among not-so-equal Cabinet members, from a self-described “just the facts” intelligence leader, to the breakout star and sole survivor of Trump’s original national security team.
“In the end, I was the only member of the president’s core national security team who made it through four years without resigning or getting fired. I may also have just been lucky,” he muses.
The book’s 400-plus pages are liberally sprinkled with insider anecdotes in which, in his telling, Pompeo bests friend and foe alike with his dogged resolve. Along with more than a few examples of his deep disdain for the press — “even the ‘most respected’ names” — as well as the senior leaders who leak to them.
When Trump asks Pompeo to meet with Bob Woodward for his forthcoming book, Pompeo grudgingly grants Woodward a scant 15-minute early morning session but doesn’t allow the conversation to be recorded and stonewalls Woodward.
“I did my best [to] comply with the president’s direction, but I didn’t provide anything of value to a reporter who was writing a book with the singular purpose of destroying all that I was working to achieve.”
Pompeo believes with his help, Trump got just about everything right, while former President Barack Obama and his vice president, future commander in chief Joe Biden, got everything wrong. Beginning with, but not limited to, the Iran nuclear deal, which he calls “the most imbecilic foreign policy decision of our time.”
The one exception was the infamous 2018 post-summit press conference in Helsinki, where standing next to Vladimir Putin, Trump said he believed the Russian president over U.S. intelligence agencies when Putin denied interfering in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The answer, admits Pompeo, “was very Trumpian. It was also a mistake. … For Trump, every question about Russia and the elections was poisoned by the narrative of the Russia Hoax.”
Pompeo admits his own contentious relationship with the foreign policy press has soured over what he perceives as a constant effort to drive a wedge between him and Trump.
On Fox News, then-host Chris Wallace grilled him about Trump’s mental fitness and in particular his description of himself as a “very stable genius.”
“He was trying to get me to trash President Trump,” Pompeo grumbles.
When Andrea Mitchell, NBC’s chief foreign affairs correspondent, asks about Trump’s threat to attack Iran’s cultural sites, Pompeo again bristled and refused to be “baited” into echoing what Defense Secretary Mark Esper had already said publicly, namely that such an attack would be a war crime.
“You’re not really wondering, Andrea. … I was unambiguous on Sunday,” he lectured Mitchell testily.
“I had gone on TV the previous Sunday and said that anything we did would be completely lawful,” Pompeo writes. “She wanted me to do what Secretary Esper had done: contradict the president. Her question was childish and petulant.”
Esper, a classmate of Pompeo’s at West Point, is described as “a friend, a good man, and a tirelessly hard worker.” But Pompeo faults him for not unreservedly defending the president’s agenda.
“He said that he’d resign if he was ever ordered to do anything unlawful, but then says he was not ordered to do so,” Pompeo complains about Esper.
Esper’s concerns were not exactly unfounded, given that Trump proposed several ideas of questionable legality, such as attacking Mexican drug cartels with Patriot missiles or ordering active-duty military troops to conduct law enforcement.
Pompeo argues that when it comes to Trump, ignorance of the law is an excuse.
“Floating an idea when you’re unfamiliar with the law is different from issuing an order that you know to be illegal,” Pompeo explains. “Heck, I had lawyers pushing back on my ideas at State and CIA all the time. ‘Mr. Secretary, you can’t do what you’ve proposed,’ they would say.”
While Pompeo considers himself the ultimate team player — “Never giving an inch did not require me to make enemies of my colleagues” — he dishes out backhanded compliments and harsh judgments left and right.
Rex Tillerson, his predecessor, was “hated” by the team of then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — now a prospective rival for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Tillerson, Pompeo says, left the State Department “badly damaged” due to poor personnel decisions.
As for Haley, she “gave fine remarks supporting Israel, but didn’t do much else,” he writes. “She abandoned the governorship of the great people of South Carolina for this ‘important’ role and quit it after just months on the job. Was it simply to join Boeing’s board of directors, or did she leave to protect her reputation from the inevitable so-called Trump taint the media inevitably slaps on people?”
Then there’s John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser for a year and a half. Bolton teamed up with Pompeo to convince Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal. Pompeo effectively labels Bolton as a criminal for his “treasonous” book, The Room Where It Happened, which recounts his time as national security adviser — and Trump’s at times erratic behavior.
“John Bolton should be in jail for spilling classified information. I hope I can one day testify at a criminal trial as a witness for the prosecution,” Pompeo writes.
Retired Gen. Jim Mattis was an “unquestioned patriot and a brilliant man” but a flawed defense secretary and a bad fit. “He didn’t buy into America First, and he fought so much of what President Trump was seeking to accomplish.”
As for Trump’s first-term national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who blames Pompeo for signing the 2020 deal with the Taliban that McMaster called tantamount to a “surrender agreement,” Pompeo writes, “He surrendered any objectivity on the prospects for progress in Afghanistan.”
Aside from Pompeo’s deeply held Christian faith, which at one point leads him to conclude he is the “earthly manifestation of God’s will,” there is little introspection in the book, and even setbacks are deemed successes.
When Trump and Pompeo are blindsided by Kim Jong Un in Hanoi in 2019, thinking they were about to wrest a major concession from the North Korean leader, it wasn’t a failure to nail down the deal before the president traveled halfway around the world. Rather, it was a triumph of hard-nosed resolve.
“We thought the North Koreans were ready to make a deal. … We were wrong,” Pompeo writes. “I was confident that we did the right thing that day. We made no bad concessions, no bad compromises, and no bad deals. … I was satisfied that the Trump administration didn’t give an inch.”
Readers will find much more detail on the failed efforts to denuclearize North Korea, the behind-the-scenes pressure on Trump from France and Japan to remain in the Iran deal, as well as an account of perhaps the crowning diplomatic achievement of the Trump administration, the historic Abraham Accords, which normalized relation between Israel, Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.
But regrets? Pompeo has only one.
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“My only regret about the time I put in over four years is that I didn’t have long enough in either role,” Pompeo concludes. “My whole life had prepared me for what I did in the administration. It was a grueling test of endurance, but I loved every second of it.”
“People ask me all the time if I ever came close to quitting during my Trump administration years. Easy answer. Not once,” he writes. “On the things that mattered most, I never gave an inch. I’d do it all again with no second thoughts. And I may.”
