“I know who it is. I *know* who it is. And they know I know.”

Several staffers said Tillerson’s inaccessibility extended to his foreign counterparts. “He is not a proactive seeker of conversations,” an officer in the State Department’s Operations Center, who spent months connecting Tillerson’s calls, told me. When new Secretaries are sworn in, they typically receive a flood of courtesy calls from foreign ministers. More than sixty came into the Operations Center for Tillerson. He declined to take more than three a day. In April of last year, when the United States initiated strikes on Syria, the Administration skipped the conventional step of notifying its nato allies. “When news broke, alarmed allies . . . were calling’” the operations officer told me. It was early on a Sunday afternoon, and Tillerson was in Washington and unoccupied. “We were told that the Secretary had a long weekend so he was going to go home and have dinner with his wife and call it a night.” No calls. “That floored me,” the operations officer recalled…

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“The only person that I have to worry about is the President of the United States,” Tillerson told me. But that relationship was, likewise, fraught. Tillerson’s Texas swagger, the source close to the White House said, irked Trump. “You just can’t be an arrogant alpha male all the time with Trump. You have to do what Mattis does, which is, ‘Mr. President, you’re the President, you’re smarter than me, you won, your instincts are always right, but let me just give you the other view, sir.’ Then you have this guy coming in,” the source said, referring to Tillerson, “going ‘Well, I guess because I worked for so many years in the oil business, I have something to say. You don’t know much about the region, so let me start with that.’ I mean, honestly, condescending.”

When I mentioned the White House’s role in escalating rumors of his demise, Tillerson appeared to have been waiting for the question. “Mm-hmm,” he said, nodding. “When you say ‘the White House,’ who are you talking about?” he asked. “The White House is comprised of how many people?” Hook, the director of policy planning, chimed in that the answer was perhaps in the thousands. Tillerson waved him off. “But people that matter, people that might have an interest in whether I stay or leave, there’s about one hundred and sixty of them.” Tillerson leaned in and, for a moment, I realized that it must be unpleasant to be fired by him. “I know who it is. I know who it is. And they know I know.”

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According to multiple individuals who had heard Tillerson speak of the matter behind closed doors, this was a reference to Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner.

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