In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  We needed a new way forward, one based on the recognition that we were at war. We needed to go after the terrorists where they lived, rooting them out before they could attack. And we needed to hold those who gave them sanctuary and support responsible. As the president had said in his address to the nation on the night of September 11, “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

  In the PEOC on 9/11 with Josh Bolten, Tucker Eskew, Karen Hughes, Nick Calio, Mary Matalin, Eric Edelman, Scooter Libby, Condoleezza Rice, and Larry Lindsay. (Official White House Photo/David Bohrer)

  In this new kind of war, intelligence would be crucial. We had to find the terrorists so we could take down their networks. We had to stop others from supporting them. And we needed to place high priority on identifying networks and states that were trafficking in weapons of mass destruction so that we could shut down their efforts and prevent terrorists from acquiring those weapons. Terrible as 9/11 had been, the next attack, if it involved nuclear or biological weapons, would be exponentially worse.

  In the morning meeting of the National Security Council, we discussed crisis management tasks, figuring out when commercial airline operations should begin again, when the military alert status would return to DefCon 4 from its current elevated level of DefCon 3. We agreed that combat air patrol flights would continue to fly over Washington and New York, and we discussed briefing Congress on the continuing threat.

  The NSC meeting that afternoon concentrated more on our military response. The president was determined to use every tool of our national power to defeat the new kind of enemy we faced and to hold those who supported them responsible. I stressed the importance of going after state sponsors of terrorism. By holding them accountable for the acts of the terrorists, we would begin to deny terrorists safe haven and bases from which to operate—two elements they needed to plot, plan, and execute attacks.

  We were confident that we would have help in the effort ahead. NATO announced that for the first time in its history, it was prepared to invoke Article V of the NATO Charter, which declares that an attack against one is an attack against all. Other nations would be with us as we responded to 9/11, but it was important, I said, that we not allow our mission to be determined by others. We had an obligation to do whatever it took to defend America, and we needed coalition partners who would sign on for that. The mission should define the coalition, not the other way around. The president made clear that he’d prefer to have allies with us, but we were at war, and if America had to stand alone, she would.

  The next day, September 13, we were told that another attack on Washington, D.C., appeared imminent, and the Secret Service recommended that I go to Camp David. Thus Lynne and I missed the prayer service the next day at Washington National Cathedral and the president’s eloquent words about grief and justice. Instead on Friday, September 14, we attended a small memorial service at Camp David’s Evergreen Chapel. As light from an overcast sky came through the windows, we joined members of the military serving at Camp David in prayers for the lost and those who were suffering and for guidance in the way ahead.

  Later that afternoon, members of the National Security Council began arriving at the camp for a series of meetings that the president had called. Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and I met for dinner that evening in Holly Lodge, which had been the main cabin at the presidential retreat for many years before the newer Laurel Lodge was built. Holly was the place where meetings were held the first time I had visited Camp David as a young Rumsfeld staffer in 1970. As the four of us gathered on the evening of September 14, we talked about the significant challenges ahead.

  We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy. We were not simply going to go after the individuals or cells of terrorists responsible for 9/11. We were going to bring down their networks and go after the organizations, nations, and people who lent them support. In 2011 this is a familiar notion, but in 2001 it was all new, and as Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, and I talked in Holly Lodge on that cool September night, we understood that this would be a long war. There would be no easy, quick victory followed by an enemy surrender. I thought it probable that this was a conflict in which our nation would be engaged for the rest of my lifetime.

  WHEN THE NSC CONVENED the next morning, the subject was primarily Afghanistan, where al Qaeda’s leadership had plotted the attacks on the United States and trained those who carried them out. Since 1996, Afghanistan had been under the control of the Taliban, who had imposed an extreme form of Islam on the country, closing schools for girls, forbidding music, and carrying out grisly executions. The Taliban had gotten the world’s attention earlier in 2001 by blowing up two monumental sixth-century Buddhas at Bamiyan in central Afghanistan on the grounds that they were idols.

  George Tenet described what the CIA could accomplish in Afghanistan with increased authority and expanded covert operations, working with the Northern Alliance, a group of fierce fighters opposed to the Taliban. Their leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by al Qaeda a few days before 9/11 in an effort to diminish the Northern Alliance’s fighting capability.

  Outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, also spoke, laying out a military plan that was not yet fully formed. It gave the president three options: a series of cruise missile strikes, cruise missile strikes plus a bombing campaign, or cruise missile strikes, a bombing campaign, and American forces on the ground in Afghanistan. None of the options was good. It wasn’t clear, for example, what mission the troops on the ground would have.

  At around noon, the president declared a break for a few hours. I headed back to my cabin and asked the Camp David operator to connect me to Lyzbeth Glick, wife of Jeremy Glick, one of the heroes of United Flight 93. Glick, who had just turned thirty-one, had called his wife from the plane. He told her that hijackers had taken over the aircraft and already killed one passenger. Jeremy wasn’t going down without a fight, and he hatched a plot with some of his fellow passengers to try to take the plane back. He spoke final words to his wife, told her to take care of their three-month-old daughter, and then said, “We’re going to rush the hijackers.” In the battle that followed, the brave passengers aboard Flight 93 gave their lives and saved the lives of so many others. The plane they were on might well have been intended by the hijackers to crash into the Capitol or the White House. Although nothing could provide comfort for her in these terrible days, I wanted Lyzbeth Glick to know that her husband’s last act had been one of tremendous bravery and heroism, for which the nation was deeply grateful.

  It was only later that we would learn fully of all the acts of heroism that took place on September 11, from the passengers on Flight 93, to the rescue workers who rushed into the burning World Trade Center, to the federal workers who pulled their colleagues out of the rubble of the Pentagon. Out of a day that caused many to wonder at the evil in the world came innumerable acts of goodness and selfless courage.

  Meeting with some of the brave recovery workers at Ground Zero on October 18, 2001. (Official White House Photo/David Bohre)

  THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL convened again that afternoon, and the president went around the table, asking each of us for our thoughts on the road ahead. I spoke last. I stressed that preventing the next attack had to be our top priority. We had to make sure we were leaving no stone unturned in that effort. Improvements in visa procedures, border control, and immigration security were critical, and we had to think more broadly. We had to do everything we could to keep those who would harm us from arming themselves with weapons of mass destruction.

  We also had to realize that defending the homeland would require going on the offense. Relying only on defense was insufficient. The terrorists had to break through our defenses only one time to have devastating consequences. We needed to go after them where they lived in order to prevent attacks before they were launched.

  Although we had discussed Iraq earlier in the day, I also t
ook time now to say that Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists had trained and plotted, should be first. I believed it was important to deal with the threat Iraq posed, but not until we had an effective plan for taking down the Taliban and denying al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan.

  During my years as secretary of defense, I’d seen what our special operations forces were capable of. Paul Wolfowitz made the point that any use of American force in Afghanistan should take advantage of our special operators, and I joined him in urging that we use them extensively. They were a natural choice for rooting out the enemy in some of the harshest terrain in the world.

  THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, September 16, I left Camp David before 9:00 a.m. for the short trip to Camp Greentop, a National Park Service facility not far from the presidential retreat. Tim Russert of NBC News was waiting in the dining hall to interview me for that morning’s Meet the Press. I had done Russert’s show a number of times over the years, but never under circumstances remotely approaching the ones that prevailed now. The nation was still reeling. People wanted to know how we were going to respond to the attacks and how we would prevent further ones. Nearly nine million viewers tuned in to Meet the Press that morning, more than ever before or since.

  Tim asked me about the deliberations he knew had been under way at Camp David for the last thirty-six hours. The president had said publicly that Osama bin Laden was the prime suspect, and I talked about al Qaeda, the breadth of its reach, and other terrorist organizations, such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with which al Qaeda shared common ideologies. Tim wanted to know what options the president was considering for response. I couldn’t talk about specifics, but I did note that nations such as Afghanistan should understand “that if you provide sanctuary to terrorists, you face the full wrath of the United States.”

  I emphasized how important intelligence would be in this new kind of war. We could not hope to learn about and prevent attacks, to disrupt networks, to defend the nation, without robust intelligence programs. I told Tim we would have to work “the dark side, if you will”:

  We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.

  And, yes, I said, when Tim asked, this would mean working with some less than savory characters. Penetrating terrorist networks would require that. “If you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing,” I said. “We need to make certain we have not tied our hands.”

  My comments about the “dark side” have been used by critics over the years to suggest something sinister. I don’t see it that way. Only five days earlier we had lost nearly three thousand Americans. It was true then and remains true today that defending this nation and preventing another attack require efforts that have to be kept secret and work that goes on in the shadows, sometimes with less than upstanding individuals, in order to save American lives.

  Tim and I also talked that morning about the likely duration of the war. I told him that this would be a long-term struggle, one that would take years. We talked about the importance of vigilance and the power of this great nation to face this challenge and prevail.

  Tim closed the interview with a remembrance of Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the New York City Fire Department. Father Mike was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11 by falling debris as he administered last rites to a first responder. Tim told of the firefighters who carried Father Mike’s body to their firehouse and who together with Father Mike’s fellow Franciscans sang the prayer of St. Francis. “May the Lord bless and keep you and show his face to you and have mercy on you.” “That,” Tim said, “is the way of New York. That is the spirit of America.” The Meet the Press crew members stood and applauded at the interview’s end.

  ON TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, the president signed a joint resolution that had been passed by Congress authorizing the use of military force “against those responsible for recent attacks launched against the United States.” That Friday, I joined the president and Secretary Rumsfeld to discuss what that military force might look like. We met in the Treaty Room on the second floor of the White House residence, the same room where the president’s father and I had met to discuss my becoming secretary of defense twelve years earlier. General Shelton, the outgoing chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and his successor, General Dick Myers, were both there, as was General Tommy Franks, the CENTCOM commander, and General Dell Dailey, commander of the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The Defense Department team had been working since our meetings at Camp David to improve their war plan, and they presented an innovative idea: linking our special operations forces with forces from the Afghan Northern Alliance in a way that would take maximum advantage of our communications and technological capabilities. Our forces would be able, fighting side by side with the Afghans, to call in air strikes on precise targets they’d located together. This approach would effectively utilize our precision-guided munitions. We’d hit the targets identified on the ground with deadly accuracy.

  The president asked General Franks and General Dailey when they could begin to operate. They told the president they could go whenever he wanted, displaying an impressive can-do attitude. But I knew from my time at the Pentagon that various factors play into selecting an optimal start date. I also thought that sitting with the president in a room where Abraham Lincoln had held cabinet meetings might not be the situation most likely to elicit that kind of information, so I tried to help out. I knew, for example, that we have a tremendous advantage fighting at night. “Given our night-vision capabilities,” I asked, “wouldn’t it be better to go during a moonless period?” Yes, said General Dailey, “our advantage is always best when the nights are darkest. General Franks then explained the advantage he hoped to gain from putting special forces into Afghanistan simultaneously with the beginning of air operations. This would take more time, he explained. We couldn’t begin within days as we could if we launched air attacks alone. It would be two weeks before special operations forces were staged in Uzbekistan, ready to enter Afghanistan, Franks said. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, two weeks seemed a long time, but the president went with the best judgment of his military leaders.

  THROUGHOUT MUCH OF THIS period, and for a good period of time thereafter, I was often in “undisclosed locations.” I was surprised by the intensity of the media interest in this fact. I suppose it was partly the result of presidents and vice presidents never having operated on the assumption that being in the same place was a risk, and the fact that we did operate that way spoke to the concerns of the time. It also became a kind of game to imagine what my undisclosed locations were. One cartoonist imagined an abandoned missile silo, fitted out with a bed, a sink, and a line for my laundry. Saturday Night Live featured Darrell Hammond as me in a cave outside Kandahar, Afghanistan. In the skit, I declared myself a “one-man Afghani wrecking crew,” then lifted up my shirt to show the audience my “bionic heart,” which made me invisible to radar and brewed coffee—a pretty useful combination, I have to admit.

  In fact, my undisclosed location was sometimes the Vice President’s Residence—we just didn’t tell anyone I was there. At other times, it was a city other than Washington where I had an event scheduled. Sometimes the staff and I would work from my home in Wyoming for extended periods. I stayed involved in policy deliberations while I was out of Washington by means of secure video teleconferencing, or SVTS, technology. I could set up a machine that looked like a very large laptop just about anyplace and be wired into meetings going on in the White House Situation Room or anywhere else around the world where the other participants had the same technology.

  My most frequent undisclosed location was Camp David. Lynne and I spent many a day there, and sometimes children and grandchildren came, too. During a period of increased threat around Halloween
2001, our granddaughters brought their Halloween costumes, and my staff—Mary Matalin, David Addington, and Scooter Libby—handed out candy at their cabins, as did Lynne’s assistant, Laura Chadwick, and the Secret Service agents manning the command posts.

  From the beginning, we brought our dog Dave, a hundred-pound yellow Lab, to Camp David. He loved roaming the paths and the woods, and I quickly got used to taking him everywhere with me. One weekend when the president had scheduled a National Security Council meeting at Camp David, I drove with Dave in one of the Camp David golf carts over to Laurel for breakfast. I parked the golf cart, and Dave and I walked down the path toward the big wooden doors of Laurel. I had briefing materials for the day’s meetings and the morning newspapers under one arm and opened the door with the other. No sooner had we walked inside than Dave caught sight of the president’s dog, Barney, a Scottie, and set off in hot pursuit. I couldn’t really blame him. Barney was only slightly larger than the squirrels Dave so much loved chasing, but we didn’t want any permanent harm to happen here. I dropped my papers so I could get hold of Dave, who by now had rounded the corner into the dining room. I rounded the same corner to encounter some of the cabinet spouses who had also been invited to Camp David for the weekend. Joyce Rumsfeld, Alma Powell, and Stephanie Tenet, all seated for breakfast, were watching aghast as Dave bounded around the dining table after a furiously scurrying Barney. At about that moment the president appeared. “What’s going on here?” he demanded. It was not an unreasonable question. I saw a tray of pastries on the breakfast buffet, grabbed one, and hollered, “Dave, treat!” He stopped in his tracks, then I grabbed him and took him back to Dogwood, the cabin in which Lynne and I were staying. I hadn’t been there long when there was a knock at the door. It was the camp commander. “Mr. Vice President,” he said, “your dog has been banned from Laurel.”