Senior Turkish officials on Thursday called former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a liar, branding his new book misinformation in an attempt to propel him to the presidency.
Pompeo, who is laying the groundwork for a 2024 presidential campaign, wrote that in 2019 he tried to “break through” a locked door in Ankara’s presidential complex to reach then-vice president Mike Pence, who was having a longer-than-expected tete-a-tete with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In his memoir Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, released on Tuesday, Pompeo says the Trump administration in October 2019 convinced Erdogan to sign a ceasefire deal in northern Syria following a Turkish military operation to seize areas formerly controlled by the US military.
In the memoir of his time as Donald Trump’s top diplomat and earlier CIA chief, Pompeo rewrites the history of how he met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and negotiated the USA’s surrender, which led to the release of 5,000 Taliban prisoners as the prelude to the debacle in Afghanistan that Republicans blamed on President Joe Biden.
Pompeo claimed that India and Pakistan came close to nuclear war in 2019 and that US intervention prevented escalation.
“I do not think the world properly knows just how close the India-Pakistan rivalry came to spilling over into a nuclear conflagration in February 2019,” said Pompeo, of the incident that allegedly took place while he was on a visit to Hanoi for the US-North Korea summit.
The Indian government conducted a surgical strike against 200 to 300 insurgents at a militant training center housing after Jaish-e-Mohammed, a jihadist group, claimed responsibility for a suicide attack that killed more than 40 police personnel at Pulwama in the Indian-administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir on February 14, 2019.
The Indian aircraft that flew into Pakistan, crossing the Line of Control, for the first time after the 1971 war, carried precision-guided munition. In a counter-attack, one Indian fighter jet was downed, and the pilot was taken alive but Pakistan returned him to India.
Kashmir is a disputed territory, claimed both by India and Pakistan with both countries administering part of the region.
While Trump and Mike Pence always insisted they had a great relationship, Pompeo confirmed rumors that the former Vice President could have lost his spot on the 2020 ticket.
Trump’s America First approach to foreign policy marked a profound departure from U.S. leadership in areas such as trade and diplomacy, weakening the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and dropping American participation in efforts to stop global warming.
The status of more than a dozen United States citizens held by foreign governments gets a short shift in Pompeo’s book, while they languish imprisoned in Iran, Russia, Syria, and elsewhere around the globe.
While Pompeo pledged, “The United States will not rest until all Americans wrongfully detained abroad are returned home” his record of gaining release for wrongfully detained citizens was weak.
Pompeo dismissed the furor over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi as “faux outrage” – and says the Washington Post columnist – who was killed by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018 – was not “a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family” if he was a genuine journalist at all. Instead, Pompeo argues, Khashoggi was “an activist who had supported the losing team.”
An independent watchdog investigation, published in April 2021, found that Pompeo and his wife misused agency resources and violated federal ethics rules by making more than 100 such requests to political appointees and other employees at the State Department.
Pompeo accused Rep. Adam Schiff of leaking classified information during his time as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, but consistent with his pattern of lying, the former secretary did not provide any proof or explanation as to what was in the allegedly-leaked documents.