A spokesman for Tillerson said he had not been planning to leave and wasn't sure why he was being ousted now.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday he is removing Rex Tillerson after a rocky tenure and nominating CIA Director Mike Pompeo in his place, a shake-up that appeared to take the secretary of state by surprise.
"I've worked with Mike Pompeo now for quite some time," Trump told reporters outside the White House. "Tremendous energy. Tremendous intellect. We're always on the same wavelength. The relationship has been very good, and that's what I need as secretary of state."
Trump said he and Tillerson did not see eye-to-eye on major foreign policy issues, naming as an example the Iran nuclear deal. The president said he thought it was a bad agreement, but he said Tillerson supported it.
"I wish Rex Tillerson well," the president said. "I'm really at a point where we're getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things that I want."
"I think Rex will be much happier now," he said.
Trump and Tillerson have been frequently at odds since the former ExxonMobil CEO took over at Foggy Bottom. But a spokesman for Tillerson said Tuesday he had not been planning to leave and wasn't sure why he was being ousted now.
"The secretary had every intention of remaining because of the tangible progress made on critical national security issues," said Steve Goldstein, under secretary of state for public affairs. "The secretary did not speak to the president this morning and is unaware of the reason, but he is grateful for the opportunity to serve, and still believes strongly that public service is a noble calling and not to be regretted."
Later on Tuesday, the State Department said Goldstein, too, would leave.
Tillerson, in farewell remarks from the State Department briefing room, said he would hand off his responsibilities to Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan but remain officially in his post through the remainder of the month.
"What is most important is to ensure an orderly and smooth transition during a time that the country continues to face significant policy and national security challenges," a visibly emotional Tillerson, who did not take questions, told reporters.
Tillerson said he would encourage other State Department officials to remain in their jobs. He touted the administration's campaign to increase pressure on North Korea and warned that Russia's current trajectory is likely to lead to greater isolation on their part, a situation which is not in anyone's interests."
Tillerson's exit removes a source of frustration to Trump and elevates an official, Pompeo, who more closely shares his worldview. A senior White House official said Trump wanted Tillerson out so he could have his new team in place before upcoming talks with North Korea. The president agreed last week to sit down with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Tillerson had said just hours before Trump's announcement that such negotiations were a long way off.
“I don’t think they see eye-to-eye on anything,” said one senior administration official.
The strength of the secretary’s relationship with Trump has been a regular source of speculation. Tillerson reportedly referred to the president as a "moron" last year, and while the secretary held an impromptu press conference in the wake of that report, he did not outright deny having used the term.
Tillerson also went further than the president in condemning the Russian government for its alleged role in the attempted assassination of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom earlier this month. Tillerson said Monday that the attempted murder “clearly came from Russia” and “certainly will trigger a response." White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to explicitly blame Russia at her briefing that day, though Trump on Tuesday said, "It sounds to me like they believe it was Russia, and I would certainly take that finding as fact."
Trump has fired aides without warning before. Then-chief of staff Reince Priebus found out last summer that he had been replaced when Trump announced that John Kelly would be his new chief. Former FBI Director James Comey was alerted to his own firing last year by media reports, since he was not in Washington when a White House aide delivered Comey's termination letter to the bureau's Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters.
Pompeo's favored status in the West Wing for months led administration officials to view him as Tillerson's likely replacement. Trump was at one point expected to tap Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to run the CIA, but the White House hesitated to put another Senate seat on the table ahead of the 2018 midterms, according to a person close to Cotton. The potential offer also became less attractive to the senator, who would have been giving up a safe Senate seat to run the CIA for just two and a half years if Trump loses reelection.
"I respect his intellect. I respect the process that we've all gone through together. We have a very good relationship, for whatever reason," Trump said of Pompeo. "I actually got along well with Rex, but really, it was a different mind set. It was a different thinking."
"I am deeply grateful to President Trump for permitting me to serve as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and for this opportunity to serve as Secretary of State," Pompeo said in a statement. "His leadership has made America safer and I look forward to representing him and the American people to the rest of the world to further America's prosperity."
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Tuesday it expects to hold a hearing on Pompeo's nomination in April.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned that instability at the State Department would create challenges for U.S. foreign policy, especially amid preparations for Trump's announced meeting with North Korea's leader.
"The problem is not the question of having talks," Menendez said. "The problem is the preparation that has to go into it in order to try to have a successful result in such talks."
Senate Armed Services Committee member Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) cautioned that "being impulsive might work in a real estate deal. I'm not sure it works in foreign policy." She conceded though that she had "not thought about Pompeo seriously in the context of being secretary of state, and that's the work I need to do now."
Tillerson's ouster and the president's selection of Pompeo to replace him earned mixed reviews from Obama administration veterans who, as a group, have been widely critical of Tillerson's leadership at the State Department. Tommy Vietor, a former National Security Council spokesman under Obama who now co-hosts a popular anti-Trump podcast, wrote on Twitter that Tillerson was "probably the worst Secretary of State in modern history. He gutted and demoralized the department and delivered nothing for this country."
He cautioned that he fears "what comes next but am glad he's finally gone."
Inside Tillerson's State Department, rank-and-file opinion of the secretary was reportedly not much better. Current and former department officials said last November, amid a swirl of rumors that Tillerson might have been on his way out, that a shift to Pompeo would be welcomed in the hopes that his closer relationship to Trump might enliven the department's role in the government. Brett Bruen, a former State Department official, said Tuesday that “there is strong sense of relief at State. The last year has been traumatic to put it mildly."
Before being nominated by Trump to run the CIA, Pompeo was a three-term Republican congressman from Kansas. He has degrees from Harvard's law school and the U.S. Military Academy, from which he graduated first in his class.
Pompeo has previously expressed skepticism towards climate change science, remarking in 2013 that “there are scientists that think lots of different things about climate change. There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling.” That stance has raised red flags among some climate advocates.
Gina Haspel, who Trump said would replace Pompeo and who was named the CIA’s deputy director last year, is an agency veteran who in 2002 ran one of its detention sites in Thailand, where she oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects, according to a New York Times report. Tapes of those interrogations, which included waterboarding and smashing one suspect’s head into a wall, were ordered destroyed in 2005, the Times reported.
While the CIA’s tactics in the initial years of the war on terrorism have been widely controversial, Trump himself has expressed support for such techniques. On the 2016 campaign trail, Trump said he supported the use of waterboarding, a technique by which a subject is made to feel like they are drowning, and said he would resurrect its use. After his inauguration, the president said he would defer on the question of waterboarding to Pompeo and Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Eliana Johnson, Matthew Nussbaum, Emily Holden, Connor O'Brien and Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.