3 Hours From Alert to Attacks: Inside the Race to Protect U.S. Forces From Iran Strikes

With sandwiches piled on a sideboard in the room, the group that advised the president in the Situation Room at different times throughout the day included a handful of seasoned national security officials, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, an Army veteran of nearly 40 years; Keith Kellogg, a retired Army lieutenant general who serves as national security adviser to Mr. Pence; and Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence.

It also included Mr. Pompeo, who has become a driving force in the Trump administration’s Iran policy and an advocate of what he often calls “restoring deterrence” against Tehran’s aggression in the Middle East. As a forceful proponent of the Jan. 3 strike that killed General Suleimani, Mr. Pompeo had played an instrumental role in bringing Mr. Trump to the crisis point.

But others around the long, rectangular table in the Situation Room had only modest foreign policy experience — including Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff and a former congressman from South Carolina; and Mr. O’Brien, who was a Los Angeles lawyer before spending two and a half years as Mr. Trump’s chief hostage negotiator and assumed the post of national security adviser in September.

Appearing on a video screen was Gina Haspel, the C.I.A. director, who was monitoring the crisis from the agency’s headquarters in Northern Virginia. In the days before General Suleimani’s death, Ms. Haspel had advised Mr. Trump that the threat the Iranian general presented was greater than the threat of Iran’s response if he was killed, according to current and former American officials. Indeed, Ms. Haspel had predicted the most likely response would be a missile strike from Iran to bases where American troops were deployed, the very situation that appeared to be playing out on Tuesday afternoon.

Though Ms. Haspel took no formal position about whether to kill General Suleimani, officials who listened to her analysis came away with the clear view that the C.I.A. believed that killing him would improve — not weaken — security in the Middle East.

But at that moment days after his death, the president and his aides were confronting a flurry of conflicting information. Around 4 p.m., reports came in that a training camp north of Baghdad might have been hit. Officials at the White House and the State Department waited anxiously for the Pentagon to provide damage reports about the camp, Taji air base, where American troops are stationed. It was a false alarm, though American officials said on Wednesday that they believed that several missiles fired in the barrage a day earlier were intended for the base.

As the reports about Taji came in, loudspeakers at the American Embassy in Baghdad announced that an attack could be imminent. As they had in the previous days, American and Iraqi personnel inside the compound raced toward bomb shelters.

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