Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  Saudi Arabia was one of the last monarchies in the world. The leadership—King and Crown Prince—did what it wanted.

  Bandar invoked the Saudi partnership with your father in the Gulf War and the time your father stopped loan guarantees to Israel when the Israelis broke their promise on settlements. In the past, it had been a balanced policy. The Crown Prince has tried to find many excuses for this administration and we couldn't. The president had allowed Israeli Prime Minister Sharon to determine everything in the Middle East. The Israeli policy of occupation and killing was like Britain with the American colonies in the 18th century, France with Algeria, America with Vietnam, and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. All failures.

  What pained the Crown Prince more is the continuance of American ignorance of Israel upholding policies as if a drop of Jewish blood is equal to thousands of Palestinians' lives.

  Then came the action line: Therefore the Crown Prince will not communicate in any form, type or shape with you, and Saudi Arabia will take all its political, economic and security decisions based on how it sees its own interest in the region without taking into account American interests anymore because it is obvious that the United States has taken a strategic decision adopting Sharon's policy.

  Bush seemed shocked. I want to assure you that the United States did not make any strategic decision, he said.

  Powell cornered Bandar later. What the fuck are you doing? he demanded. You're putting the fear of God in everybody here. You scared the shit out of everybody.

  I don't give a damn what you feel, Bandar shot back. We are scared ourselves.

  Whether this was all careful histrionics, or genuine concern, or a combination of show and sincerity, the Saudi threat worked. Two days later, August 29, Bush sent the Crown Prince a two-page letter: Let me make one thing clear up front: nothing should ever break the relationship between us. There has been no change in the strategic equation.

  I firmly believe the Palestinian people have a right to self-determination and to live peacefully and securely in their own state, in their own homeland, just as the Israelis have the right to live peacefully and safely in their own state. It was a much bigger step than President Clinton had taken. Even as Clinton had tried to fashion a Middle East peace agreement as his legacy, he had never directly supported a separate Palestinian state.

  Bandar immediately flew back to Saudi Arabia with the letter. On September 6, the Crown Prince replied: Mr. President, it was a great relief to me to find in your letter a clear commitment confirming the principle in which the peace process was established. I was particularly pleased with your commitment to the right of the Palestinians to self-determination as well as the right to peace without humiliation, within their independent state. The formal reply added, First it is very essential that you declare your position publicly which was stated in your letter. Such a declaration at this level will eliminate the common impression prevailing in the region of the U.S. bias to Israel.

  Bush agreed to come out publicly for a Palestinian state. A big rollout was planned for the week of September 10, 2001.

  Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the al Qaeda terror attacks on America on September 11, 2001. The details of the attacks and Bush's response are well chronicled. Bush had been in a Florida elementary school when the first planes hit. Within hours after the attacks, as Bush was flying around the southern U.S. on Air Force One, staying away from Washington because of the potential for more attacks, he reached Rumsfeld. It's a day of national tragedy, Bush told him, and we'll clean up the mess and then the ball will be in your court and Dick Myers's court.

  But Rumsfeld and the Pentagon were empty-handed. His efforts at transformation had not taken hold. General Tommy Franks, commander of Central Command (CENTCOM), which includes the Middle East, had no plan to attack Afghanistan, where bin Laden and his network had found sanctuary. He told Rumsfeld it might take months before they could put forces on the ground in the country. At an NSC meeting the day after the attacks, Bush asked what the military could do immediately. Rumsfeld replied, Very little, effectively.

  Later that day, at another NSC meeting, Rumsfeld asked Bush, Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? Rumsfeld was among those who thought Bush's father had failed by not taking out Saddam. One night in 1995, on a trip to Vietnam with his friend Ken Adelman, Rumsfeld kept Adelman up until 3 a.m., giving him an earful on how badly the elder Bush had screwed up. He never should have agreed to a cease-fire that let Saddam survive in power, Rumsfeld said, and he should have destroyed more of the Iraqi military while they still had the cover of war.

  The president put Rumsfeld off, wanting to focus on Afghanistan, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

  The CIA stepped in to fill the void left by the secretary of defense and the uniformed military. Within 48 hours, Tenet and Cofer Black briefed Bush on their plan. They could bring to bear all the resources of the intelligence community, combined with U.S. military power and Special Forces, harness the factional opposition known as the Northern Alliance, defeat the Taliban and close out the al Qaeda sanctuary. As disquieting as Rumsfeld's admission of the Pentagon's impotence was, Black was just as reassuring. Mr. President, we can do this, he said. No doubt in my mind.

  Tenet dispatched the CIA's covert paramilitary team, code-named Jawbreaker, into Afghanistan 15 days after the attacks. Bombing began 11 days later, on October 7, 2001. The campaign represented some of the CIA's finest moments after 9/11, and it was a frustrating time for Rumsfeld. General Franks had only 31 Taliban and al Qaeda targets for the first day of bombing and Rumsfeld was all over target selection, insisting they also destroy some four dozen Taliban airplanes.

  Air Force Lieutenant General Charles F. Wald, the Saudi Arabia-based CENTCOM air component commander, told his boss, General Franks, that they had bombed and destroyed the runways. The Taliban aircraft weren't a threat because they could not conceivably take off.

  I'm going to get fired! Franks told him. The first day of bombing, Franks and his staff appeared on the secure video conference from CENTCOM's Tampa, Florida, headquarters wearing golf shirts. Franks let loose with a torrent of profanity insisting that the fucking airplanes be hit.

  Wald ordered the strikes. Under the military's rules, however, they could not confirm for Franks that the attacks had been successful and the airplanes destroyed until they got satellite pictures of the targets. When it was delayed, Rumsfeld went ballistic. Franks insisted to Wald that he was going to be relieved. Finally, Wald got the validation from the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  Jawbreaker and other CIA paramilitary teams were doing just as Tenet had promised, leading the way in toppling the Taliban from power, and denying bin Laden much of his sanctuary, forcing him into hiding. In all a small team of approximately 110 CIA officers and 316 Special Forces operators, in many ways similar to the more mobile military Rumsfeld desired, combined with massive airpower, were getting the job done.

  And Rumsfeld sat uneasily on the sidelines. At an NSC meeting on October 16, his frustration boiled over. This is the CIA's strategy, he declared. They developed the strategy. We're just executing the strategy.

  CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who was taking Tenet's place that day at the NSC meeting, insisted the agency was just supporting Franks.

  No, Rumsfeld retorted, you guys are in charge.

  Armitage, who was there in place of Powell, stuck it into Rumsfeld. I think what I'm hearing is FUBAR, Armitage said, using an old military term meaning Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. How could they prosecute a war if they couldn't agree who was in charge?

  The president ordered Rice, Get this mess straightened out.

  After the meeting Rice took Rumsfeld aside. Don, this is now a military operation and you really have to be in charge.

  Steve Hadley, Rice's deputy, even weighed in, telling Rumsfeld he needed to design a strategy. It's yours for the taking.

  Later Powell also told Rumsfeld he was in charge whether he wanted to be or
not.

  Rumsfeld had been humiliated by McLaughlin, Armitage, the president, Rice, Hadley and Powell.

  Never again. The next month, when the president ordered him to look seriously at the Iraq war plan, Rumsfeld made it his personal project. This would be his.

  Afterward, Tenet looked back on his July 10, 2001, meeting with Rice, two months before 9/11, as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the 9/11 attacks. It framed his and the CIA's relationships with Rice and the NSC. On paper Tenet reported to Bush, but practically speaking the CIA director works for the national security adviser on a day-to-day basis.

  Tenet had been briefing Bush regularly in the first six months of his presidency, and was developing a personal relationship with him. But it was nothing like Rice's. She lived alone, regularly spent weekends at Camp David with the president and first lady, and traveled often to Bush's Texas ranch. She was almost part of the family.

  Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the bin Laden threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt he had done his job, laid it on the line very directly about the threat, but Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she wasn't organized and didn't push people as he tried to do at the CIA.

  When the multiple 9/11 investigations came in full force, Tenet's CIA was picked apart—failure to do this, failure to do that, failure to connect this dot with that dot. Tenet thought the CIA had been working flat out, and that comparatively the FBI got a free pass. If the FBI had done a simple credit card check on the two 9/11 hijackers who had been identified in the United States before 9/11, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, they would have found that the two men had bought 10 tickets for early morning flights for groups of other Middle Eastern men for September 11, 2001. That was knowledge that might conceivably have stopped the attacks.

  A month after the July 2001 meeting, in a TOP SECRET President's Daily Brief on August 6, 2001, that later became famous, the CIA warned again: Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. Tenet would later say of that period, The system was blinking red. But the pivot point when they might have shifted from all the dire talk to action had been July 10. Rice had perhaps denied him his biggest moment. U.S. intelligence had pieced enough together and had been on the verge of a significant, even a giant, breakthrough. Tenet's initial angst about Rice after the July 2001 meeting turned to distress, and then disdain. If the White House, Bush, the CIA and all the others—including Tenet himself, he acknowledged— had moved, perhaps, just perhaps, the years that followed would have been about success.

  Every intelligence officer, all the way up to the CIA director, wants to be an oracle, to see deeply into the future, dig out the hard data and intelligence, mix it with the voodoo, and predict what will happen. Tenet believed he had done it. His first duty was to avert catastrophe, the bolt-out-of-the-blue event or attack. He had seen it, he believed, and he felt he had sounded the loudest warning he could. But it hadn't been heeded. The July meeting with Rice had been the culmination. As Cofer Black later put it, The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.

  The elder George Bush was concerned about his son after 9/11, and he called Prince Bandar. He's having a bad time, Bush told Bandar. Help him out.

  On September 13, two days after the attacks, Bandar met again with the president at the White House. The two men, with Cheney, Rice and Bandar's aide, Rihab Massoud, gathered on the Truman Balcony off the second floor. In a photograph of the meeting, both Bush and Bandar have cigars.

  The Saudis had arrested and detained some key al Qaeda suspects immediately before and after 9/11. The president told Bandar, If we get somebody and we can't get them to cooperate, we'll hand them over to you.

  With those words, the president casually expressed what became the U.S. government's rendition policy—the shifting of terrorist suspects from country to country for interrogation. The United States Constitution provides rights and protections that prohibit unrestricted interrogations of its citizens. But in countries like Saudi Arabia, there was nothing like the U.S. Constitution. Terrorist suspects in Saudi custody had few rights. Though the Saudis denied it, the CIA believed the Saudis tortured terrorist suspects to make them talk. In the immediate wake of 9/11 Bush wanted answers from those who had been detained.

  After 9/11, Bush's approval rating soared from 55 to 90 percent, an unprecedented surge. The president pretended not to be interested when Rove showed him the numbers, but it was understood that Rove's job was to make sure the broad support was used effectively. In the past, when the public rallied around the president in times of crisis, the boost in popularity lasted seven to 10 months, Rove calculated.

  Bush made it clear that his presidency was now going to be about 9/11. Just like my father's generation was called in World War II, now our generation is being called, he told Rove. Bush's father had enlisted in the Navy in 1942 on his 18th birthday and flown fighters in the Pacific. He'd been shot down and had seen some of his friends killed. It had been a formative experience.

  The younger Bush and Rove had never fought in a war, but now they felt that they were being called, in their 50s.

  I'm here for a reason, Bush told Rove, and this is going to be how we're going to be judged. This was the new plan.

  On November 21, the day before Thanksgiving, 71 days after the 9/11 attacks, Bush asked Rumsfeld to start updating the war plan for Iraq.

  Let's get started on this, Bush recalled saying that day. And get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein if we have to. He also wondered if this planning could be done so it would be kept secret. Rumsfeld said it could, because he was refreshing all the U.S. war plans.

  On this day, Bush formally set in motion the chain of events that would lead to the invasion of Iraq 16 months later. In dozens of meetings, many with the president and the war cabinet, the Iraq war plan went through many changes, which I recounted in Plan of Attack.

  The Iraq war plan was the chessboard on which Rumsfeld would test, develop, expand and modify his ideas about military transformation.

  And the driving concept was less is more —new thinking about a lighter, swifter, smaller force that could do the job better. Rumsfeld's blitzkrieg would vindicate his leadership of the Pentagon.

  He was the main architect, driving the meetings and the changes. His chief implementer was General Franks. General Myers worked from the sidelines, if that. Though Myers believes he was kept abreast and informed of all decisions, he was not a real participant. In Franks's memoir, American Soldier, Myers is mentioned in the Iraq war-planning sessions only as being present several times or taking notes. Franks, 58, a tall, hot-tempered Texan who had a reputation as an officer who screamed at his subordinates when he grew impatient, referred openly to the Joint Chiefs as the Title Ten Motherfuckers. He believed that Myers and the other chiefs were largely irrelevant to the process.

  An important contrast to this process can be found in the record of the war planning for the 1991 Gulf War. My own book, The Commanders, and memoirs by Powell, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and H. Norman Schwarzkopf, who was the CENTCOM commander in that war, illustrate the difference.

  Schwarzkopf describes how Powell as chairman was his intermediary, counselor, regular contact, adviser and psychiatrist. After Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the first President Bush ordered Operation Desert Shield, which involved the deployment of some 250,000 troops to the Middle East to defend Saudi Arabia. By late October 1990, Bush and Cheney, his defense secretary, wanted to know how many troops it would take to provide an offensive option—the capacity to drive Saddam's army out of Kuwait. They did not ask Schwarzkopf; they asked Powell. Powell flew to Saudi Arabia, where Schwarzkopf was headquartered. Schwarzkopf said he needed two more divisions. Powell added two more on top of that. In his memoir, Powell recounted the conversations. Aircraft carriers? Let's send six. The concept was Go in big, and end it quickly. We could not put the United States thr
ough another Vietnam. The plan to use overwhelming force to guarantee victory became known as the Powell Doctrine.

  Powell had then told Bush and Cheney they needed an additional 200,000 troops, which would essentially double the force defending Saudi Arabia. The first President Bush said, If that's what you need, we'll do it.

  In 2001, things were very different. This President Bush wanted an option to invade Iraq and depose Saddam, but he had campaigned promising military transformation. He and Rumsfeld wanted a new way to wage war. The Powell Doctrine was out. Over the next year, the two great Pentagon ideas—a new, refreshed Iraq war plan, as Rumsfeld called it, and military transformation—converged.

  Well into the Afghanistan bombing campaign, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, called an old friend, Christopher DeMuth, the longtime president of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative Washington think tank. Just before coming to the Pentagon, Wolfowitz had been the dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, known as SAIS. AEI and SAIS, just blocks from each other, were the forum for lots of intellectual cross-pollination.

  The U.S. government, especially the Pentagon, is incapable of producing the kinds of ideas and strategy needed to deal with a crisis of the magnitude of 9/11, Wolfowitz told DeMuth. He needed to reach outside to tackle the biggest questions. Who are the terrorists? Where did this come from? How does it relate to Islamic history, the history of the Middle East, and contemporary Middle East tensions? What are we up against here?

  Wolfowitz said he was thinking along the lines of Bletchley Park, the team of mathematicians and cryptologists the British set up during World War II to break the ULTRA German communications code. Could DeMuth quickly put together a skilled group to produce a report for the president, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice and Tenet?