https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ouncil/679566/
Kash Patel was dangerous. On this both Trump appointees and career officials could agree.
A 40-year-old lawyer with little government experience, he joined the administration in 2019 and rose rapidly. Each new title set off new alarms.
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Who was this man, and why did so many top officials fear him?
It wasn’t a question of ideology. He wasn’t a zealot like Stephen Miller, trying to make the bureaucracy yield to his agenda. Rather, Patel appeared singularly focused on pleasing Trump. Even in an administration full of loyalists, Patel was exceptional in his devotion.
This was what seemed to disturb many of his colleagues the most: Patel was dangerous, several of them told me, not because of a certain plan he would be poised to carry out if given control of the CIA or FBI, but because he appeared to have no plan at all—his priorities today always subject to a mercurial president’s wishes tomorrow. (Patel disputes this characterization.)
What wouldn’t a person like that do, if asked?
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Patel was ultimately denied a role at the pinnacle of the national-security establishment, but Trump has promised to learn from his mistakes. Should he return to the White House, there will be no Milleys, Haspels, or even Barrs to restrain him as he seeks revenge against his political enemies. Instead, there will be Patels—those whose true faith and allegiance belong not to a nation, but to one man.
“Get ready, Kash,” Trump said before a gala of young Republicans this past December. “Get ready.”
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Patel has a talent for casting himself as the ultimate hero or the unjustly persecuted. I have wondered if this is why he chose not to include in his book the events of October 30, 2020—if, in the end, not even he could figure out a way to make himself the martyr of the story.
On that Friday, according to multiple reported accounts, SEAL Team 6 was awaiting the Pentagon’s green light on a rescue mission in West Africa. The day before, the administration had learned where gunmen were holding Philip Walton, a 27-year-old American who had been kidnapped that week from his farm near Niger’s border with Nigeria. As multiple agencies now coordinated on final details for the evening operation, the State Department worked to resolve the last outstanding task—securing airspace permission from Nigerian officials. Around noon, Patel called the Pentagon with an update: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, he said, had gotten the approval. The mission was a go.
The SEALs were close to landing in Nigeria when Defense Secretary Mark Esper discovered that the State Department had not, in fact, secured the overflight clearance, as Patel had claimed. The aircraft were quickly diverted, flying in circles for the next hour as officials scrambled to alert the Nigerian government to their position. With the operation window narrowing, Esper and Pompeo called the Situation Room to put the decision to the president: Either they abort the mission and risk their hostage being killed, or they proceed into foreign airspace and risk their soldiers being shot down.
But then, suddenly, the deputy secretary of state was on the line, Esper later wrote in his memoir: They’d been cleared.
Soon Walton was reunited with his family.
What had happened?
Celebratory feelings gave way to anger as officials tried to make sense of Patel’s bad report. According to Esper, Pompeo claimed that at no point had he even spoken with Patel about the mission, much less told him he’d received the airspace rights. Esper wrote that his team suspected that Patel had simply “made the approval story up.”
Anthony Tata, the Pentagon official and retired Army general to whom Patel had originally given the green light, confronted Patel in a rage. “You could’ve gotten these guys killed!” Tata shouted, according to two people familiar with the exchange. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Patel’s response was: “If nobody got hurt, who the fuck cares?”
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Originally Posted by demagogue
