Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  Dressed in a New York Fire Department windbreaker, the zipper pulled all the way up to his neck to cover the Kevlar vest the Secret Service made him wear, Bush greeted the players in the Yankees’ dugout before the game on October 30. In case he did not feel anxious enough, he ran into the star shortstop Derek Jeter.

  “Mr. President, are you going to throw from the base of the mound or are you going to take the rubber?” Jeter asked.

  “From the base of the mound,” Bush answered.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Jeter warned.

  “Why not?”

  “This is New York. If you throw from the base of the mound, they’re going to boo you.”

  “Do you really think they’ll do that?”

  “This is New York. They’ll boo you.”

  Resigned, Bush said, “I guess I’ll take the mound.”

  Then, as Jeter headed off, Bush heard him call out, “If you take the rubber, Mr. President, don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.”

  Bush took the pitcher’s mound amid the cheering crowd and flashing cameras, his adrenaline racing as some 55,820 sets of eyes trained on him. He offered a stiff wave and a stiffer thumbs-up. “USA Fears Nobody, Play Ball,” read a hand-painted banner in the stands. Bush’s eyes looked a little moist as he took in the moment. Then he sent the ball sailing sixty and a half feet cleanly over the plate and right into the glove of the catcher Todd Greene. The crowd roared. Plainly relieved, Bush did not smile but had a look of satisfaction on his face, as if to say, Take that, Jeter. As he headed off the field, the crowd chanted, “U-S-A, U-S-A!”

  THE NEXT MORNING, Bush was brought back to earth when he picked up the New York Times and saw a pessimistic front-page story on Afghanistan by R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., the renowned correspondent who had covered Vietnam before a long career in Washington. “The ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations” about Afghanistan, Apple wrote.

  Bush was aggravated. “They don’t get it,” he vented at his morning meeting with advisers. “How many times do you have to tell them it’s going to be a different kind of war?” He later told a sympathetic biographer, “I mean, we were at this thing for three weeks and all of a sudden there was kind of a breathless condemnation of the strategy.” If it were just the media, that would be one thing. His own team remained beset by doubts despite his earlier pep talk.

  With the outbreak of hostilities in Afghanistan, the administration needed to figure out what to do with Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters captured on the battlefield. An interagency task force had wrestled with the issue for weeks, much to the frustration of Cheney and Addington, who had little patience for foot-dragging. When Brad Berenson, a White House lawyer assigned to the task force, reported back to his bosses, Alberto Gonzales, and his deputy, Tim Flanigan, that good progress was being made but no order would be ready before Thanksgiving, their “jaws dropped.”

  Gonzales was a Bush favorite, one of eight children of a Mexican American construction worker who grew up in a two-room house in a Texas town actually named Humble; he joined the air force, earned his way into Harvard Law School, and became a successful Houston attorney. Bush had brought him into his inner circle in Texas, nicknaming him Fredo and calling him mi abogado in his rough Spanish. But Gonzales was a quiet, unassuming, even passive figure. So as Cheney grew alarmed by the glacial pace of the detention task force, it fell to Flanigan and Addington, who stepped in and “kind of took control of it personally.” The two adapted the military tribunal order signed by Franklin Roosevelt to prosecute Nazi saboteurs in World War II, an order later upheld by the Supreme Court. If it was good enough then, it should be good enough now. But decades of international and domestic law on the subject had been enacted in the interim, most significantly the Geneva Conventions.

  On November 10, Cheney convened a small meeting in the Roosevelt Room with Addington and others. Among those uninvited and unaware were Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and the uniformed leaders of the military. When the order drafted by Flanigan and Addington was presented, John Ashcroft objected, arguing that as attorney general he oversaw prosecutions and it should not be up to a defense secretary to take away suspects. Cheney told him he already had legal concurrence from Ashcroft’s own Justice Department, in the name of John Yoo. Ashcroft erupted. Every time Cheney tried to get in a word, the attorney general talked over him. The vice president saw Ashcroft’s concerns as old-fashioned turf battling, but to assuage him, Cheney had the order tweaked to make clear that the president himself would “reserve the authority” to decide when to transfer suspects to a military commission. For Cheney, the need for swift action was reinforced the next day, November 11, when Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al-Qaeda commander, was captured in Pakistan.

  Cheney showed up at the Oval Office two days later with a four-page order drafted by Addington and Flanigan authorizing military commissions. Bush readily agreed, and Cheney took the order back to Addington, who gave it to Flanigan, who gave it to Berenson and told him to have it formalized for the president’s signature. Berenson, not knowing that Rice and Powell had been bypassed, took the order to the staff secretary, the office that handled presidential paperwork. Stuart Bowen, the deputy staff secretary on duty, insisted on distributing the order around the building for review according to usual procedure. Berenson left and returned with Flanigan. “Don’t worry about it,” Flanigan told Bowen. “The president’s already been briefed by the vice president.” Then he added, “The president’s waiting for it right now.”

  Bowen figured if the president was waiting, then it was not for him to get in the way. He put the order in proper format, and the lawyers headed to the Oval Office, where Bush was preparing to leave for Texas to host Vladimir Putin at his ranch. The rotor blades of Marine One were already spinning on the South Lawn outside the building.

  “This is it?” Bush asked.

  “Yes,” Andy Card said.

  Bush gave the order a quick read, “more like a scan or a skim than a word-for-word read,” Berenson remembered, since he had already looked at it earlier that day. Still standing, he pulled a Sharpie pen out of his pocket, signed it, and handed it back. Then he and Card headed to the helicopter.

  Berenson chased after them to ask about a public announcement. “What do you want us to do by way of the rollout?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Card answered. “Just let it go.”

  In the end, a copy of the order was released without ceremony. But once again, as on climate change, Cheney had outflanked rivals to push through a far-reaching decision. Cheney’s relationship with Bush and understanding of how to work the system had established his office as “a real power center and a place to be feared,” Berenson said. Yet that did not mean Cheney manipulated the president, as some assumed. Bush was sometimes influenced by moderating views when he heard them, but by and large when he went along with Cheney, it was because he agreed with him. “I never got the sense that Cheney was dragging Bush to the right on these issues,” said Berenson. “To me, they always appeared very unified in a two-man scull rowing hard in the same direction.”

  CHENEY WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY engaged in another debate. Powell felt they should keep their Afghan allies, the Northern Alliance, composed mainly of Tajiks and Uzbeks, from taking Kabul for fear of alienating Pashtuns in the south and their patrons in Pakistan, and to avoid absorbing all available manpower. Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld thought that was foolish. They needed a victory, and they should let the Northern Alliance move.

  The debate culminated the same day Bush signed the military commission order. Rumsfeld fired off a testy two-page memo. “Mr. President,” he wrote, “I think it is a mistake for the United States to be saying we are not going to attack Kabul. To do so, tells the Taliban and the Al Qaida that Kabul can be a safe haven for them. The goal in this conflict is to make life complicated for the Taliban and the Al Qaida, not to make it simple.”

  But even as he wrote that, the Northern Alliance was al
ready swarming into Kabul, making the point moot. Whatever commitments were made to stay out of the capital were disregarded when Northern Alliance commanders heard the Taliban had slipped out of the city in the middle of the night to retreat south. Moving into the city, the Northern Alliance commanders explained to their American patrons, was simply a matter of providing security for an abandoned population.

  However it happened, the fall of Kabul capped an extraordinary five-week campaign to topple the Taliban, and Bush and Cheney were struck by the images of cheering Afghan men, raising fists, throwing off turbans, cutting off beards, and shouting, “Long live America!” This was not the end of the war. But the capture of the capital represented the first tangible victory in the emerging war on terror. The sensitivities of the Pashtun population and the Pakistani government would need to be managed, but despite the doubts the war strategy had worked. The challenge now was to pursue the remnants of Taliban forces to finish them off, destroy remaining al-Qaeda bases, and track down Osama bin Laden. It all seemed possible that day.

  For the moment, it looked as though Bush and Cheney had accomplished what Britain and Russia had failed to do. Afghanistan, after all, was the place where empires went to die, as Condoleezza Rice, the Russia scholar, knew well. For the Russians, the disastrous, decade-long war in the twilight years of the Soviet Union was recent enough to remain deeply scarring. So there was some irony that even at this moment of triumph for the United States, Vladimir Putin was at the White House visiting.

  Bush and Putin talked about Afghanistan and the future there. Putin certainly knew that military victories had a way of being ephemeral in the forbidding mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. And he had his own interests in what happened next. In the years since the Soviet withdrawal, Moscow had kept ties to the Afghans who now ran the Northern Alliance, financing their long fight against the Taliban. So while Pakistan resisted the Northern Alliance taking control in the capital, Russia was backing its allies against the Pashtuns. Afghanistan was once again at the center of a great game.

  Bush and Putin had other issues to hash over during a working lunch as well. Bush had made clear since his campaign that he wanted to build a more limited version of Ronald Reagan’s proposed Star Wars antimissile system to guard against rogue states like Iran, and to do so, he was ready to abrogate the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. To Russia, no longer able to keep up with American military advances, throwing out the ABM Treaty seemed inherently destabilizing; no matter what Bush or anyone else said, any American missile defense system seemed certain to be aimed at neutralizing Russia’s strategic nuclear strength.

  But in the two months since the September 11 attacks, Bush and Putin had resolved to redefine the Russian-American relationship for a new era, and they were determined not to let the ABM dispute sour that. To put down a marker on a new partnership, they agreed to dramatically slash their nuclear arsenals, bringing them down to the lowest levels since the early years of the Cold War. In an exchange of unilateral but reciprocal announcements, each side committed to reducing its deployed strategic warheads to between seventeen hundred and twenty-two hundred, down from the six thousand allowed under the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, signed by Bush’s father in 1991.

  The next day, November 14, Bush met again with Putin, this time at his Crawford ranch. Bush was annoyed that a gusty downpour was marring the visit as he drove the Russian leader around the ranch in his pickup truck for forty-five minutes while his staff scrambled to move tables and the cowboy cooks hired for the occasion grilled in the rain. Bush grew more irritated later when Putin arrived an hour early for dinner. Realizing the mistake, Putin retreated back to the guesthouse until the appointed hour, but Bush barked at Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes. “Somebody forgot to tell Vladimir about the time change,” he snapped. Rice knew that was aimed at her but could not help laughing at a former KGB officer flummoxed over something as simple as a time zone.

  When another hour passed, the two leaders, their wives, and their advisers made the most of the intemperate weather, casting aside suits and ties for blue jeans and sweaters and a relaxed dinner of fried catfish and corn bread, followed by mesquite-grilled beef tenderloin and then birthday cake for Rice. The birthday girl entertained by playing piano, and some of the guests danced. Putin’s wife, Lyudmila, wore a sequined vest in red, white, and blue. Bush chatted in broken Spanish with Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, to the consternation of aides from both sides who could not understand them.

  “We are seeing a historic change in relationship between Russia and the United States,” Bush said in his toast. “Usually you only invite friends to your home, and I feel that is the case here.”

  “I’ve never been to the home of another world leader,” Putin responded, “and it’s hugely symbolic to me and my country that it’s the home of the president of the United States.”

  The visit smoothed the way for Bush to formally pull out of the ABM Treaty a few weeks later. Putin told Bush he would publicly oppose the decision but would not let it disrupt their relationship. Still, he wanted something too—a new treaty codifying the nuclear arms cuts they had just announced. To the Russians, treaties ratified their importance on the world stage long after the years of Soviet dominance. Bush, on the other hand, had no taste for drawn-out Geneva negotiations, and Cheney argued strongly against it. But Bush was eager to accommodate Putin and agreed to draft a treaty.

  “MR. VICE PRESIDENT, this is the thing we all feared the most. This changes everything.”

  George Tenet was briefing Bush, Cheney, and Rice on the investigation into the Pakistani scientists accused of helping Osama bin Laden figure out how to build a nuclear device. The situation, he told them, was every bit as chilling as feared when the scientists were arrested a month earlier.

  One of the scientists was Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, a former chairman of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission and an open admirer of the Taliban. Mahmood had met twice with bin Laden, who grilled him on how to build a bomb. Mahmood was an expert in enriching uranium but had no experience creating a weapon, so bin Laden pressed him to connect him with other Pakistani scientists who did. Bin Laden hinted he had already obtained black-market fissile material from the former Soviet Union with the help of an allied radical group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Mahmood told interrogators he had not helped bin Laden, but he failed half a dozen lie detector tests.

  Cheney asked if they thought that meant al-Qaeda did have a nuclear weapon. A CIA analyst accompanying Tenet said no, probably not, but he could not say for certain.

  “If there’s a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al- Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon,” Cheney replied, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”

  He meant not that they should overlook evidence to the contrary but that the consequences of terrorists with a nuclear weapon were so unimaginable that the normal risk calculations did not apply. Judgments like “high confidence” or “low confidence” used by intelligence agencies or legal concepts like “preponderance of the evidence” had no meaning in a world of weapons that could wipe out a city in an instant. With that, he outlined a new way to evaluate the dangers he saw confronting the nation.

  In that context, Cheney believed, it was not enough to simply keep a dangerous figure like Saddam Hussein in a box. The policy of containment over the past dozen years no longer seemed adequate. Hussein had been found after the Gulf War not only to have chemical weapons but to be pursuing nuclear bombs. What if he eventually succeeded? Even if he did not use them himself, what if he gave them to the likes of bin Laden? With the fall of Kabul, Bush and Cheney began thinking more seriously about what to do about Iraq.

  After the National Security Council meeting on November 21, Bush pulled aside Donald Rumsfeld.

  “Where do we stand on the Iraq planning?” he asked.

  Rumsfeld told him he had reviewed the plan and, as expected, it was
just a version of Desert Storm. To revamp it, Rumsfeld said, he needed to bring more people into the loop.

  Fine, Bush said, but keep it in the building.

  Later that day, a fifth and final victim of the anthrax attacks died in Connecticut. Investigators were still years away from cracking the case, but the attacks had subsided. This was, somehow, an isolated case, not the existential threat Cheney feared, not the 1 percent peril. That, he worried, could still come.

  But while attention moved to Iraq, the war in Afghanistan was hardly over. A prison uprising in Mazar-e Sharif left a CIA operative named Johnny Micheal Spann dead on November 25, the first American killed in action in the war on terror. Captured at Mazar was a young American Muslim, John Walker Lindh, who would be brought home to face charges for joining the Taliban. And American Special Forces and their Afghan allies had chased bin Laden and hundreds of his followers to the forbidding mountain stronghold of Tora Bora near the Pakistani border.

  Before them lay the chance to capture or kill the mastermind of the attacks on America. But Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks were sticking to their strategy of using American airpower while relying on Afghan troops on the ground. Fewer than a hundred American special operations troops and CIA operatives were in the area, and while B-52s dropped 700,000 pounds of ordnance, the Afghan warlords recruited by the Americans simply pocketed bags of U.S. cash, then let bin Laden escape.

  Some in Washington pressed Bush and Cheney to send more American troops. The marines had landed near Kandahar the same day as Spann’s death, and Brigadier General James Mattis believed he could swing up to Tora Bora. Hank Crumpton, who was leading the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan, brought his concerns to the White House, imploring Bush to send the marines to block escape routes.

  “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful,” he said.

  “How bad off are these Afghani forces, really?” Bush asked. “Are they up to the job?”