Margaret Slattery is associate editor of Politico Magazine. Blake Hounshell is deputy editor of Politico Magazine.

Bob Gates roiled Washington this week with Duty, his unvarnished memoir of his tenure as secretary of defense for George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The book doesn’t come out until Jan. 14, but many newsworthy bits have already made headlines, from Gates’s voluminous complaints about President Obama’s wartime leadership to his bitter criticisms of Congress, which he rips as “uncivil, incompetent in fulfilling basic constitutional responsibilities, micro-managerial, parochial, hypocritical, egotistical, thin-skinned, often putting self (and reelection) before country.” Here are 10 Gates gripes that haven’t made the rounds yet.

On bombing Syria’s nuclear reactor:


Beginning in April 2007, when the Israelis presented the Bush administration with evidence that the Syrian regime was building a nuclear reactor, a debate broke out over whether the United States should take it out, as Israeli officials urged. At one point, Gates relays, President Bush pulled him aside and said he appreciated the secretary’s concerns about an unprovoked U.S. strike: “He knew that [national security adviser Stephen] Hadley, [Secretary of State Condoleezza] Rice, and I had discussed the ‘Tojo option’—referring to the Japanese prime minister who ordered the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—earlier that morning and simply said, ‘I’m not going to do that.’” Gates also complains about the Israeli government’s influence in the White House, especially through Vice President Dick Cheney. “The United States was being held hostage to Israeli decision making,” he writes.

On meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia:

When Gates visited Riyadh in August 2007, he got an earful from Saudi King Abdullah, who urged “a full-scale military attack on Iranian military targets, not just the nuclear sites.” The chain-smoking Saudi monarch warned that if the United States refused to attack, “the Saudis ‘must go our own way to protect our interests.’” The conversation made Gates, who firmly opposed military action, livid: “As far as I was concerned, he was asking the United States to send its sons and daughters into a war with Iran in order to protect the Saudi position in the Gulf and the region, as if we were mercenaries.”

On the Iran National Intelligence Estimate:

In the fall of 2007, the intelligence community undercut the Bush administration’s efforts to ramp up diplomatic pressure on Iran, Gates writes, when it concluded in a report that Iran had shuttered its nuclear weapons program in 2003. “In my entire career in intelligence, I believe no single estimate ever did more harm to U.S. security interests and diplomatic efforts,” Gates says.

On CIA director Leon Panetta:

The Obama administration surprised many in Washington when it brought in Leon Panetta, a longtime congressman and a top budget official in the Clinton administration, to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Gates found Panetta “smart and tough”—and says his political experience was valuable. “Occasionally, Leon would doff his CIA hat and offer the president some hardheaded political advice on contentious national security issues,” he writes. “I thought he had more insight into the political realities in Washington than anyone at the table, including Obama and Biden.”

On the firing of Gen. Stanley McChrystal:

In June 2010, Gates got his hands on an advanced copy of a Rolling Stone article that quoted Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s top commander in Afghanistan, mocking administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden. Before a pre-scheduled meeting with Obama the next day, Gates says he got a call from Biden, who insisted to the defense secretary, “I didn’t rile him [Obama] up last night, I just asked him if he’d seen the article.” When Gates stepped into his meeting with the president, the first thing Obama said was that he was “leaning toward” firing McChrystal, Gates writes, adding, “He went on to say, ‘Joe [Biden] is over the top about this.’ (So much for Biden’s credibility.)”

On Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak:

During the Arab uprisings in early 2011, Obama’s national security staff met to discuss the president’s plan to call Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, with whom the United States had a three-decade relationship—and whose immediate ouster Gates cautioned against. Despite the fact that he and others advised Obama not to reveal the contents of the call publicly, “The president overrode the unanimous advice of his senior-most national security advisers, siding with the junior staffers in terms of what he would tell Mubarak and in what he would say publicly”—including telling Mubarak that “change had to begin ‘now.’”

At lunch with then-White House chief of staff Bill Daley:

After the Mubarak incident, Gates grew even more frustrated with the president’s more junior staff, who he believed were not sufficiently experienced in matters of foreign policy. Over sandwiches with Gates one day, Daley admitted that in media appearances he had been “‘pontificating’ about Egypt when he thought to himself, What the fuck do I know about Egypt?” According to Gates, Daley said the same thought had occurred to him the day before at a National Security Council meeting while he was looking at Ben Rhodes, the Obama speechwriter and adviser whom Gates calls “oblivious” to certain risks in Egypt.

On doing the Sunday talk shows:

After Obama announced the 2011 NATO intervention in Libya, the “White House communications gurus” urged Gates to go on all three network shows to defend the decision. Gates, who had opposed striking Libya, agreed to do two but then got a call from Bill Daley pushing him to do the third. Gates made Daley a deal: He would do the third show if he could get the Office of Management and Budget to ante up for the Libya operation. “I said, ‘I’ll do Jake Tapper if you’ll do OMB,’” Gates writes. “Daley whined, ‘I thought it would cost me a bottle of vodka.’ I shot back, ‘Bullshit. It’s going to cost you $1 billion.’”

On the Libya intervention:

On the day the NATO campaign began, White House national security adviser Tom Donilon and Bill Daley started questioning Gates about the “targeting of Libyan ground forces.” Gates writes that he “angrily shot back, ‘You are the biggest micromanagers I have ever worked with. You can’t use a screwdriver reaching from D.C. to Libya on our military operations. The president has given us his strategic direction. For God’s sake, now let us [the Defense Department] run it.’ My well of patience had gone dry.”

On the Osama bin Laden raid:

Although Gates elsewhere describes Obama’s crackdown on leaks, he also explicitly blames the White House and CIA for revealing details about the “techniques, tactics, and procedures the SEALs had used in the Bin Laden operation,” despite his warning not to release them. “Everybody in that room agreed to keep mum on details. That commitment lasted about five hours,” Gates writes of the night of the raid, adding that the White House and CIA “just couldn’t wait to brag and to claim credit. The facts were often wrong, including details in the first press briefing. Nonetheless the information just kept pouring out. I was outraged and, at one point, told Donilon, ‘Why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up?’ To no avail.”