Obama's Drone-Master

❧ John Brennan, the CIA director and the man largely responsible for the U.S.'s drone strategy, is so influential that some Pentagon officials have taken to calling him the "Deputy President." In an exclusive interview, GQ's Reid Cherlin talks to Brennan about the ethics of targeted killing, the next global arms race (get ready for everybody to have their own drones), and what it feels like to be the guy the president turns to when he wants a bad guy blown away

June 17, 2013
By Reid Cherlin

"I'm going up to Jersey tomorrow, to try to escape." John O. Brennan, President Obama's top counterterrorism advisor and his soon-to-be new CIA director, leans back in his chair. Brennan is a proud son of Hudson County, a baseball player at his Catholic high school, a commuter student at Fordham. It's a common-touch backstory that, a tad predictably, Brennan's fans bring up all the time, and that he himself seems to cling to. He points to a photograph on the wall behind my head, a black and white shot of George H.W. Bush, surrounded by aides.

"The guy walking through the door actually is me, with hair," he says. "That was the first time I went into the Oval Office. I remember almost pinching myself, saying, 'What's a guy from Jersey doing in here? And why does the president really care about what I say?' Now, since then, I've been in the Oval Office I guess hundreds of times, and there are still a lot of times I say to myself, 'What's a guy from Jersey—you know, doing in this?'"

Brennan is 57, his broad, creased face framed by a cropped fringe of gray hair. He's wearing a blue dress shirt and a red tie; there are two pens clipped into his breast pocket. He seems to be thinking for a moment. Bolted to the ceiling above us, a flat-screen TV loops Al Jazeera, on mute...

Read on at GQ ➝