• • •
The document Bush approved was just a few pages. But the amount of paper that Stellar Wind required could have filled a library.
Under the standards developed over the next few weeks, a new authorization had to be signed by Bush every forty-five days. Each time, Tenet’s chief of staff directed analysts at the terrorism center to write an appraisal of the current threats, with particular focus on domestic dangers. Specific intelligence had to be provided in support of the evaluation. At first, none of the analysts knew why they were preparing the assessments—they had not been told about the NSA program.
After their handiwork was completed, Tenet’s aides would then add a boilerplate paragraph written by Addington that described the individuals and groups with the capability to launch new terrorist attacks inside the United States.
In the paragraph was a sentence stating that the circumstances “constitute an urgent and compelling government interest.” As such, it said, the CIA director recommended renewing the NSA’s authority to conduct surveillance activities under Stellar Wind. CIA lawyers would then review the document; if they felt it lacked sufficient evidence to present a strong case in support of reauthorizing the program, it would be sent back to the analysts for more details. Once it was completed, Tenet or the deputy director, John McLaughlin, would sign the memo.
From there, the responsibilities were handed off to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department. There, more lawyers would review the material, and another document would be attached to the memo stating that there was “sufficient factual basis demonstrating a threat of terrorist attacks in the United States for it to continue to be reasonable under the Fourth Amendment” for Bush to continue to “authorize the warrantless searches.”
Each of the reauthorizations included a requirement that everyone who knew of Stellar Wind keep mum about it. And, when the program was inaugurated, Bush’s secret written statement specified that the appropriate members of Congress would be notified only “as soon as I judge that it can be done consistently with the national defense needs.”
All of those steps in the approval process fell into place in the program’s early stages. But the first authorization was managed almost offhandedly. Ashcroft was informed about Stellar Wind after Bush had okayed it and was only then asked to attest that the initiative complied with the law.
Ashcroft gave his after-the-fact certification of the program’s legality on the same day he learned of it. He conducted no legal research to verify his conclusion.
• • •
Gonzales and Addington were behind closed doors in the White House counsel’s office. Stellar Wind was in place, and the question now was who else could be told about it.
“Can we get Timmy read in on this?” Gonzales asked. It might be useful if Flanigan knew the secret.
“No,” Addington replied. “The president has been very clear about keeping the circle very, very small on this.”
Gonzales nodded. “Yeah, that’s what he said.” Flanigan would not be told.
Later, Flanigan joined them. While he couldn’t know any details, there was no harm, Addington decided, in letting him know that something was up.
“That idea you had, it’s going to bear fruit,” he said.
Flanigan was puzzled. What did that mean?
“It’s the greatest favor anyone is ever going to do for you that you’re not going to be read into this program,” Addington said.
He smiled. “This is the one they’re going to come and try to chop everybody’s heads off for.”
That was all Flanigan had to hear. Probably this was about granting the NSA more power. Whatever the details, Flanigan was happy to be in the dark.
• • •
A member of NBC security saw Tom Brokaw walking down the hallway and stopped him.
“You know, that white powder that we tested for you, it’s negative.”
“What white powder?” Brokaw asked.
“Your assistant gave us this white powder, and it’s totally negative.”
Brokaw said thanks and headed on his way. He would have to speak to his assistant, O’Connor, to find out what was going on. But she wasn’t feeling well that day. She was experiencing flulike symptoms and had begun to develop a skin rash. And the young assistant who usually opened his mail, Casey Chamberlain, had also called in sick.
Probably just some infection going around.
• • •
The chartered plane from Atlanta touched down on Runway 10R/28L at the Palm Beach International Airport. The pilot taxied toward a hangar where the passengers—a team of pathologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta—climbed down to the tarmac.
It was the morning of October 6, a day after the death of Robert Stevens. One of the doctors involved in the case almost immediately called the CDC with the news, speaking with Sherif Zaki, the chief of infectious disease pathology. Facing a potential case of anthrax—and possibly an epidemic—Zaki and his team decided to fly to Florida right away, then head to the Palm Beach County Medical Examiner’s Office for Stevens’s autopsy.
After arriving, the team members made their way into the autopsy suite in the center of one of the county buildings. Examiners working on two other bodies paused to glance up as the CDC scientists arrived.
“We’re here to assist you,” Zaki said softly.
Stevens’s body was brought out from a morgue refrigerator and lifted onto a metal gurney. The county’s medical examiner, Dr. Lisa Flannagan, would handle the initial incisions, while the CDC would examine the organs.
After everyone donned biohazard suits and masks, the autopsy began. Flannagan sliced the skin over the chest, then peeled it away. Using a large pair of shears, she cut through ribs. Then she slid her fingers under the front of the rib cage and lifted.
A surge of blood-filled liquid burst out of the chest cavity, cascading from the body onto the gurney and from there spilling to the floor. It was unlike anything the pathologists had ever seen before; Zaki had studied photographs of autopsies from an outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union, but had been completely unprepared for the flood of bloody fluid gushing around them.
There had been only eighteen cases involving inhaled anthrax in the past century. The most recent incident had been in 1979, when an accident at a bioweapons facility released anthrax dust, killing sixty-six people. That disaster from more than twenty years before was explainable. This was different. An American had died from the same rare disease, triggered by a microbe of uncertain origin—but one that was known to be coveted by terrorists as a weapon for mass murder.
• • •
About eight hours later, outside of high-security laboratory B-313 at Fort Detrick, a psychologically troubled microbiologist named Bruce Ivins was stripping off his clothes, preparing to enter the “hot suite” where deadly bacteria were stored.
The army base in Frederick, Maryland, was the military’s primary site for studying agents that cause infectious disease. The research institute maintained labs rated at Biosafety Levels 3 and 4, a designation for facilities that handled and examined the most hazardous and exotic bacteria, parasites, and viruses.
Among the dangerous agents maintained in B-313—a Biosafety Level 3 lab—was Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax. And few researchers were more trusted with those spores than Ivins, who had secured a reputation in the scientific community as one of the top experts on the microbe and the vaccines against it. He had created large batches of the microorganisms for research, among them one he labeled RMR-1029, which he kept in a walk-in cold room in his laboratory.
Ivins had worked in B-313 every night that weekend—a highly unusual deviation from his typical Monday-through-Friday schedule of the past three years. He kept no notes in his lab books the previous two nights and would not write any entries this time either—another change from his normal procedure.
He had increased his off-hours over the las
t few weeks, although there were no significant experiments taking place that would account for the change. But it was a period when Ivins was feeling particularly troubled about his work. He had learned recently that the army facility was down to its last approved lot of the anthrax vaccine, meaning that, without new production, the antitoxin would quickly be depleted. That would be devastating for Ivins. He soon wouldn’t have a vaccine to study and would no longer be allowed to enter B-313, since his inoculations would not be up-to-date. His research would be dramatically slowed, if not irreparably damaged.
Ivins did not have the psychological strength to handle that kind of pressure. At times, he feared he was insane. Paranoia, delusions, thoughts of violence—all of these pathologies tortured him during cycles of mental instability. And he seemed to understand how dangerous it was for someone with his mental problems to be working with a biological weapon—he joked with one of his psychiatrists that someday he might be featured on the cover of the National Enquirer, under the headline PARANOID MAN WORKS WITH DEADLY ANTHRAX.
Some of his problems, he told his therapists, stemmed from his own troubled childhood. He suspected that his mother, Mary, was a schizophrenic. She beat her husband, Randall, relentlessly, once to the point that she thought she had killed him. Ivins did not escape the abuse, having often been whipped with a razor strop. Meanwhile, Randall brutalized him emotionally with severe public cruelty. He told his son that he had been unwanted and that both of his parents were disappointed he had not been born a girl. Despite Ivins’s strong academic performance in high school, Randall relentlessly berated him as being doomed to failure. Ivins feared his father had been proved right—he wanted to attend Randall’s alma mater, Princeton University, but was rejected.
By his adulthood, there was no hiding that Ivins suffered from a severe mental illness. One psychiatrist diagnosed manic depression; another said the symptoms were from a paranoid personality disorder. Whatever the cause, Ivins recognized that his thoughts could be psychotic, but his realization came only after the episode passed.
When the mental breaks were at their worst, Ivins would refuse to share his thoughts, sometimes even with the doctors who were supposed to treat him. He had told his counselor the previous year that he planned to travel out of town to watch a young woman play soccer; if her team failed to win the game, Ivins said, he would poison her. The counselor called the police, but no action was taken.
His obsessions with particular women haunted him. As an undergraduate, he asked a young student who had pledged Kappa Kappa Gamma for a date. She turned him down, a rejection that set off a forty-year fixation with the sorority.
In graduate school, he began stalking a female colleague when he learned that she not only had joined Kappa as an undergraduate but still held an advisory role with the sorority. Years after receiving his doctorate, Ivins used directory assistance to track down the address of the woman, a microbiologist, then went to her home and spray-painted KKG on the sidewalk near her car. Many times over the years, he drove three hours or more to visit Kappa sorority houses; after staring at the buildings for about ten minutes, he would then drive back. He had even burglarized two of the sorority’s houses and stole a cipher used to translate the instructions and sayings for the rituals; the document contributed to his fascination with codes.
Ivins’s mania about Kappa drove him to try to damage its reputation. He raged about hazing by sororities, devouring every article and book he could find on the topic. Then in 1983, posing as the Kappa member he had met in graduate school, he sent her local newspaper a letter that strongly defended hazing. The letter was printed along with the woman’s name and address. Three weeks later, he contacted the mother of a college student who had died in a 1978 hazing incident and gave her a copy of the bogus letter. Ivins had first learned of that mother’s loss when she was interviewed by Tom Brokaw, a host of the Today show; in that segment, Brokaw noted that his cohost, Jane Pauley, was an alumnus of Kappa. Brokaw and Pauley became a new focus for him.
His life was an endless series of secrets and oddities. As a boy of five or six, he had developed a strange fascination with blindfolds, wrapping them across the eyes of his stuffed animals and teddy bears. As Ivins matured, that fixation snowballed and took on a sexual focus; scores of images of blindfolded women filled his computer. He used assumed names to open post office boxes, including one he chose as the address for trading letters about sadomasochism and for receiving bondage equipment and magazines. He became fixated on women’s underwear and began cross-dressing.
With Ivins’s mental state deteriorating even more in the fall of 2001, his doctor had doubled his prescribed dosage of the antidepressant Celexa, but little changed. The attacks of 9/11 bothered him, though only because he found it curious that the events anguished his colleagues while stirring no reactions or emotions in him. He felt alone and anxious that he could not reveal the full truth about his spiraling problems. And he believed his colleagues would never find out—Ivins had long before passed a background check that allowed him to work with the deadly bacteria. The investigators hadn’t discovered anything about his psychiatric history.
Just before eight o’clock that night, Ivins finished changing into his lab attire. With the swipe of a security card, the mentally unbalanced and embittered scientist walked into the hot suite, surrounded by the deadly biological agents that caused anthrax infections.
• • •
David Addington’s face hardened in rage.
“What are they doing?” he snapped. “This is the worst of the Clinton administration’s national security apparatus being visited on us.”
The bombing campaign in Afghanistan was set to begin; the targets had been selected and approved at the Pentagon. But Addington had just learned that another set of lawyers had been brought in to review the targeting once again. This time, it was people without any connection to the military: White House lawyers.
Both Gonzales and Bellinger, the principal legal advisor to the National Security Council, had somehow gotten wrapped up in debating about what to bomb. Addington could only shake his head in dismay—lawyers piled on lawyers were all taking turns playing war.
Addington got the news from Flanigan, who had just overheard Gonzales and Bellinger lamenting the moral burden of the task and the complexities of studying photos and charts and maps in reviews of proposed targets.
After recounting what he knew to Addington, Flanigan paid a visit to Gonzales to warn him of the treacherous waters he was treading.
“Al, are you sure you want to get involved in this?” Flanigan asked. “I mean, since when is the counsel to the president an expert on either the laws of war or tactical imperatives?”
Gonzales paused. “Well, I have to be involved in this,” he said, sounding defensive. “This is important.”
Flanigan soon realized that he couldn’t coax his boss into reconsidering his position with soft words. It was time for the sledgehammer. He called in Addington and asked for help. The vice president’s counsel went straight to Gonzales’s office.
“Al, this is stupid,” he said.
Gonzales opened his mouth to protest. Addington spoke first.
“What do you know about this, Al?” he asked. “What makes you an expert in these decisions?”
Gonzales pushed back, but Addington slapped down every argument he mustered. It took a few days, but finally Addington and Flanigan pulled the White House legal team out of the business of targeting missiles and bombs.
4
A three-quarter moon lit up a clear night, casting muted shadows over Kabul. The air was crisp, the city calm and quiet.
There was no warning, no sound of a plane overhead, no screams or combat fire. Tomahawk guided missiles sliced through the air, slamming into the city’s electrical grid. Kabul plunged into darkness as more missiles and then bombs rained down from the sky.
It was just before 9:30 on October 7. The air campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda had begun.
This opening round of attacks involved an array of weaponry, including B-2 “Spirit” Stealth bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base, B-1B and B-52 bombers from Diego Garcia, Navy F-14 and F/A fighters, cruisers, destroyers, and SSGN submarines.
As the assault continued, the skies over Kabul lit up with white flashes and the city shuddered with thunderous explosions. The Taliban raced to their military positions, shooting antiaircraft guns toward bombers they could not see, their tracers streaking up into the night.
About an hour later, the bombing came to Kandahar. Hundreds of armed residents and Taliban soldiers ran into the street, firing weapons haphazardly in an attempt to hold off an imagined attack by ground troops. Deafening explosions ripped apart Kandahar Airport and its radar facilities, the Taliban military headquarters, and a guesthouse used by the Taliban leader, Mohammed Omar.
Despite the appearance of a massive assault, the first night was far from impressive. A modest thirty-one targets were struck; in addition to Kabul and Kandahar, the bombs hit Shindand, Herat, Mazar-e Sharif, and Sheberghan. None of the Taliban frontline positions were destroyed—or even targeted. It dawned on members of the Northern Alliance that the Taliban fighters who most threatened them were, for the most part, unscathed.
This was the best the Americans could do?
• • •
Inside the Treaty Room at the White House, technicians were adjusting lights and checking an audio feed as Bush sat nearby, reviewing his speech. At 1:00 P.M., the camera rolled, showing Bush at a desk.
“Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations in Afghanistan.”
The campaign was carefully targeted, Bush said, designed to disrupt terrorists’ use of that country as a base. He lauded Great Britain for aiding in the attack, and listed allies that were pledging forces for the operation.
“This military action is part of our campaign against terrorism,” he said. “Today we focus on Afghanistan. But the battle is broader.” Other countries that sponsor terrorists would be considered outlaws and murderers. Those nations, he suggested, risked being subjected to the full force and fury of the United States.
500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars Page 15
