When the United States bombed its own former air base in Baghdad to kill Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s revered Middle East paramilitary commander, just before Friday prayers last week, the pretext was that he was about to kill a bunch of Americans. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was quick to praise the “decision to eliminate Soleimani in response to imminent threats to American lives.” What threat? It wasn’t clear, and officials in government, as well as politicians on Capitol Hill briefed after the attack, were quick to say the “imminent threat” argument sounded thin based on what they’d seen.

We now know it wasn’t thin; it was a damned lie. The Washington Post revealed yesterday that President Trump had long been lobbied to kill Soleimani, by none other than Pompeo himself. “Pompeo,” the paper’s national security team reported, “first spoke with Trump about killing Soleimani months ago, said a senior U.S. official, but neither the president nor Pentagon officials were willing to countenance such an operation.”

That changed after a U.S. contractor was killed on December 27 in an attack on a base in northern Iraq, allegedly by a Soleimani-connected Iraqi Shiite militia. It was then that Pompeo and Defense Secretary Mark Esper—Pompeo’s West Point classmate, and a former defense contractor who largely owes his position to the secretary of state—traveled to Mar-a-Lago and lobbied Trump hard to bomb Soleimani, a provocative, destabilizing move that officials told the Post “would not have happened under [Jim] Mattis,” the former secretary of defense. (Esper, according to new reporting by Foreign Policy, also cut key Pentagon officials out of the strike decision, likely because it would have faced resistance from them.)

Pompeo’s lies didn’t stop there. He also denied that Trump threatened to commit war crimes against Iranian cultural sites, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He continues to make the rounds on television, arguing that the Soleimani assassination has made Americans safer, even as his own underlings at Foggy Bottom warn U.S. citizens to “depart Iraq immediately,” without the State Department’s help, since, “Due to Iranian-backed militia attacks at the U.S. Embassy compound, all public consular operations are suspended until further notice.”

But it’s not just that Pompeo has proven unfathomably mendacious: It’s that he’s acting more like a viceroy in charge of the American security establishment than a top diplomat. For more than a year now, he has systematically led Trump and the Pentagon onto a war footing with Iran with shocking, unprecedented moves. These include designating a foreign government arm as a terrorist group; taking trips without his Pentagon counterpart to consult with America’s Mideast combatant commanders; defying Congress to arm the Saudis and other Iranian antagonists in the region; and publicly blaming regional attacks on Tehran with little evidence but heavily edited, ambiguous videos. If there’s mounting evidence for anything, it’s that Pompeo may currently be the most dangerous man in the world not named Trump.