by Dick Cheney
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THE ATTACKS OF 9/11 had a significant impact on the nation’s economy. The airline, tourism, and insurance industries were all badly hit. The stock market remained closed for four trading days—the longest period of time since 1933—and then plunged nearly seven hundred points the first day it was reopened for trading. As we began to plan our response and think broadly about the War on Terror, I sought advice from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan about the likely short-and long-term effects of the attacks. Alan came to the Vice President’s Residence on Saturday, September 22, for one of the periodic discussions we would have throughout my vice presidency. He said that there was no way in an economy as complex as ours to predict accurately the overall impact of an event like 9/11. He talked about the “million equation model,” a paradigm that takes into account the enormous number of factors that have economic impact. All of the million equations that make up our economy had received a huge shock, he said. Citing one example, he talked about the “just in time” inventory system. American manufacturers had moved away from maintaining huge parts inventories and relied instead on a first-rate transportation system, including the airlines, to get them parts when they needed them. The effect of the 9/11 attacks on the airline industry and the disruption in air travel had a big negative impact on this system. He urged that we get the airlines up and running as soon as possible. He also suggested that the government take over airline security, helping to reduce some of the airlines’ costs and, even more important, giving passengers the confidence to fly again.
We knew Congress had been focused on what could be done to stimulate the economy in the wake of the attacks, and Alan told me the Senate Finance Committee had asked for a closed-door hearing with him and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Alan was concerned that Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill hadn’t been included. He asked me to call the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, Chuck Grassley, on O’Neill’s behalf, which I did.
Finally, Alan said it would be important for him to have advance warning, if possible, of any military action. I thought back to Desert Storm. There was only one person I’d briefed outside the national security team in the days before we commenced operations, and that was Greenspan. He had come to my office in the Pentagon, and I had told him about the timing and the nature of what we planned. Based on our years of friendship and work together, I had confidence that Alan would maintain the secrecy of our operation, and I believed that it was important that the chairman of the Federal Reserve, responsible for the health of the nation’s financial institutions, not be surprised. I operated on the same basis now as we prepared to launch military operations in the aftermath of 9/11.
IN A SPEECH TO the nation on the afternoon of October 7, 2001, the president announced the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. “The United States military has begun strikes against al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” he said. CIA covert operations teams had already been dispatched to work with the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces. Special operations forces would soon be entering the country.
At an NSC meeting on October 9, George Tenet raised a concern about the Northern Alliance taking Kabul. The Pashtuns who controlled southern Afghanistan would not react well to being governed by tribes from the north, he said, and the result could be civil war. I thought that any argument for holding back the Northern Alliance was misguided. Our objective was to take out al Qaeda, take down the Taliban, and prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for further operations. The way I saw it, we needed to get these things accomplished fast, before another attack on the homeland. And there was also the weather. After George finished his presentation, I spoke up. As soon as winter hits, I noted, the Northern Alliance is going to be socked in. We need to unleash them soon or accept that we’ll have to wait until spring.
In my estimation, we needed to be encouraging the Northern Alliance to advance. “Are there Taliban targets we can hit that would make it easier for them to move?” I asked. Frankly, I thought Kabul couldn’t fall soon enough, whether at the hands of the Northern Alliance or otherwise. It would be a visible sign of a new day in Afghanistan.
We were also very focused on getting Osama bin Laden. None of us believed that capturing or killing him would end the terrorist threat, but he was the leader of the organization that had launched the 9/11 attacks, and having him in custody—or dead—would be a powerful symbol of our determination. Tracking him down was certainly one of our top priorities. I was gratified that after years of diligent and dedicated work, our nation’s intelligence community and our special operations forces were able on May 1, 2011, to find and kill bin Laden.
AT 1:10 P.M. ON October 18, 2001, Lynne and I boarded Air Force Two for the forty-five-minute flight to New York’s LaGuardia Airport. It would be our first visit to the Ground Zero site of the 9/11 attacks. We had been airborne just a short time when Scooter Libby received a call on the plane. There had been an initial positive test result indicating a botulinum toxin attack on the White House. If the result was confirmed, it could mean the president and I, members of the White House staff, and probably scores of others who had simply been in the vicinity had been exposed to one of the most lethal substances known to man. A single gram of botulinum toxin, evenly dispersed and inhaled, can kill a million people. There is an antitoxin, but it does not reverse the paralysis that botulinum causes, although it does keep it from progressing further.
Biological weapons attacks on the homeland were not just the stuff of science fiction. The first attacks with anthrax mailed in letters had occurred just a month before. The most recent case—anthrax mailed to Senator Tom Daschle’s office on Capitol Hill—had occurred three days earlier. Against that backdrop, the report of a positive hit for botulinum at the White House had to be taken seriously indeed. When we landed at LaGuardia at 1:55 p.m. to board helicopters headed to Ground Zero, I told Scooter Libby to stay on board the plane, keep working the phones, and get as much information as he could.
As our helicopters neared the southern tip of Manhattan, Ground Zero came into sight. I felt the same sense of anger and sadness I’d felt on the night of 9/11 when I’d first seen the wreckage at the Pentagon. Viewed from the air, the devastation was staggering. My resolve needed no strengthening after what we had already lived through, but the destruction below made me hope the time for justice would be soon. As the helicopter banked away from Ground Zero, I caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty in the distance. On a day as brilliantly sunny as 9/11 had been, there she was, tall and proud in the harbor, a reminder of America’s goodness and strength.
I met with Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Governor George Pataki for a briefing on the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, and then we visited the site on foot. A section of the steel frame at the bottom of one of the World Trade towers still stood, wrenched and charred, pointing toward the sky. In front of it, recovery workers from around the country were gathered. They spoke of coming back to the site day after day and working past the point of exhaustion. They spoke of their commitment to continue until the job was done. I walked down the line and thanked each one.
Scooter Libby was waiting for me back at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where I was scheduled to give the keynote address at the annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner in a few hours. He told me there had been two positive hits for botulinum toxin on one of the White House sensors. Tests were being run, he said, and we would have those results by noon the next day.
I put on the white tie and tails required for the evening’s speech while a connection to the president, who was in Shanghai, was set up. Then I sat down in front of my secure video screen and delivered the news to him and his traveling party. “Mr. President, we and many others may well have been exposed.” In eighteen hours, when the tests came back, we would know.
I went downstairs to the dinner and with the possibility of the botulinum attack weighing on
my mind, delivered my remarks. Each of the men and women in the room that night had been touched in some way by the attacks of September 11. The memory was fresh in all our minds, as I talked about the bravery, generosity, and grace Americans had witnessed in New York City in the aftermath of 9/11. I promised that justice would be delivered to those responsible, “methodically, unsparingly, and in full.” Although there would be visible military campaigns, such as the one under way in Afghanistan, there would also be much of this war that would not be so visible. Repeating what I had told Tim Russert that first Sunday after the attacks, I talked about the importance of intelligence:
We are dealing here with evil people who dwell in the shadows, planning unimaginable violence and destruction. We have no alternative but to meet the enemy where he dwells. Sometimes that means doing business with people you would not like to have as your next-door neighbor. We must and we will use every means at our disposal to ensure the freedom and security of the American people.
The response in the room was resounding applause. I have often heard people from other countries comment on American patriotism, not negatively, but in amazement and admiration that our love for our country is so deep and abiding. On that night, thinking of the war under way, I spoke for all when I said, “We love our country only more when she is threatened.”
After my speech I received additional information about the botulinum hits. Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Advisor Tom Ridge reported that if we had been exposed, we would be showing symptoms by now. It had been fifty-eight hours since the last sensor was tripped. We were all feeling well, and so it looked as though we were off the hook.
Leaving the Waldorf by motorcade, we headed back to LaGuardia. Heightened security precautions meant that the NYPD had shut down all the streets along the motorcade route, backing traffic up for miles. I worried there would be a lot of unhappy New Yorkers. But as my long motorcade, led by police motorcycles and squad cars with lights and sirens, drove through the city streets that night, I looked out the window of my limo to see something completely unexpected and very moving—New Yorkers whose cars had been stopped, standing in the street cheering and applauding us.
OUR SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES were delayed getting into Afghanistan, not least by treacherous weather. They confronted rain, snow, and even sandstorms as they tried to fly helicopters over mountains as high as sixteen thousand feet. On October 19, 2001, the first twelve-man team went in near Mazar-e-Sharif in the north, and a unit of two hundred army rangers seized an airfield, code name Rhino, in the south, near Kandahar. Another special operations team raided a compound of Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. I have a brick from his compound that was given to me by some of the special operations forces who seized it. It sits in my office next to a brick from the house where special operators killed Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in June 2006. Both are reminders of the tremendous work America’s armed forces do in making the world a very dangerous place for terrorists.
Once we had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and special operators linking up with the Northern Alliance and other opposition groups, I had expected things would start to move quickly, and I grew concerned when that didn’t happen. On November 2, 2001, the National Security Council had an expanded session with General Franks. I participated via secure videoconference from the office in Laurel Lodge. “If you look at the situation from a purely military standpoint, you would say time is on our side,” I said. “Continuing operations against Taliban targets will weaken them, and the insertion of special forces and resupply efforts will strengthen the Northern Alliance.” But in the larger strategic context, I said, it was just the opposite. “Time is not on our side.” Every day that al Qaeda and its supporters went without major defeat, the danger to the United States grew. I was at that very moment operating from an undisclosed location because another attack was said to be imminent. More attacks were no doubt being planned, and they could be even more devastating. We knew that al Qaeda had been seeking a nuclear weapon, and they might resort to biological or chemical warfare. People had died in the United States from anthrax spores. The Hart Senate Office Building was closed because anthrax had been mailed to senators. “What do you need to speed it up?” I asked General Franks. The president asked Franks to come back to us as quickly as possible to let us know what we could do to help.
General Franks reported on his recent trip to several key countries in the Middle East and Central Asia. Every leader he visited felt under pressure from public opinion, he said. We weren’t getting our story out, but Al Jazeera, the relatively new Arab satellite network, was making sure that al Qaeda’s views were broadcast. We’d continue to have the cooperation we needed from the nations Franks had visited, he said, but a number of them wanted to keep their cooperation secret.
When he turned to Afghanistan, Franks reported success working with the CIA to use Predators and AC-130 Spectre gunships to find and take out al Qaeda targets. He noted that the opposition groups, in particular the Northern Alliance, were doing well but were tired and lacked medical care. They needed more support fast, and he intended to make that a priority.
Franks also reported on the campaign under way to destroy the massive cave complexes in which the Taliban lived and hid. He had about 150 caves on a target list, he said, and estimated the count would go to 1,000. He noted that the humanitarian efforts we had begun to drop food and supplies in were going well and were critically important. Finally, Franks listed his goals for the next seven days. They were tasks on the order of enhancing our surveillance capability, getting cold-weather gear to the Northern Alliance, and talking to regional leaders. In fact, what he would deliver within the week was our first major victory.
It started with the CIA, which had contacts in Afghanistan stretching back to the 1980s and knew some of the players well. CIA officers brought our special operators together with the Northern Alliance and other opposition forces, and soon a group of our special forces was traveling on horseback with General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his men and calling in air support to destroy Taliban positions around Mazar-e-Sharif. As the Taliban fled, American special forces joined in the cavalry charges pursuing them. They called in B-52 strikes to open a crucial pass, and after Mazar-e-Sharif fell on November 9, 2001, they rode with the victorious Northern Alliance into the center of the city. Our special forces gave the first victory of the first war of the twenty-first century a lasting symbol: the man on horseback armed with the ability to call in a five-hundred-pound laser-guided bomb.
After Mazar-e-Sharif, things happened fast. On November 11, 2001, the town of Herat fell to the Northern Alliance. Kabul followed on November 13, and Jalalabad on November 14. The last Taliban stronghold, Kandahar, fell on December 7.
In December the United Nations sponsored a conference in Bonn, Germany, to select an interim leader for liberated Afghanistan. Delegates to the conference chose Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, who had fought against the Taliban in the south. Karzai, who had grown up in Afghanistan and served briefly in the pre-Taliban Afghan government, had reentered Afghanistan on a motorcycle from Pakistan as the bombing campaign began. With support from our forces, Karzai led the Pashtun troops who took Kandahar. He was inaugurated on December 22, 2001, as chairman of the new Interim Afghan Authority.
In a little over three months, working with the Northern Alliance and allies in the south, we had overthrown the Taliban and liberated 25 million people. We had begun to deny al Qaeda bases from which to plot and train for attacks against us. There were difficult days ahead, but at the end of 2001, we had accomplished much. And we had managed to do all we had done with the number of American troops in Afghanistan never exceeding four thousand.
As we had begun the planning for our military operations in Afghanistan, many worried that we were taking on too formidable a task. As the Soviets could testify, Afghanistan was known as the graveyard of empires for good reason. Any power that would prevail there had to t
ake into account not only the rugged, inhospitable terrain, but the fact that the Afghans were among the toughest, most ruthless fighters in the world. When we launched our efforts, however, it was with forces far superior to those the Soviets had deployed in the 1980s, and we enjoyed a tremendous technological advantage. We also had on our side the kind of creative thinking that freedom encourages. Using the CIA and our special operations forces to marry our technology with Afghan fighters brought about the Taliban’s downfall in a remarkably short time. And perhaps the most important distinction was that we were there to liberate, not to occupy; to free, not to oppress the Afghan people.
But, of course, that wasn’t the end of it, and as we find ourselves ten years later with nearly one hundred thousand American troops still fighting in Afghanistan, it’s important to recognize that in the war in which we are currently engaged, sure and swift victories are likely to be rare. To the extent that Desert Storm led us to expect quick triumphs, it taught us the wrong lesson.
Now we are taking on an enemy scattered throughout many parts of the world and committed to launching mass casualty attacks from any base it can find. The key test in this war is not how long it takes us to complete any particular military operation. The crucial test is whether our policies, including our military operations, are effective at defending the nation from further attack. Critical to that effort is recognizing that our ultimate objective must be ensuring that the Afghan security forces are sufficiently trained and equipped to defend their own people and territory. Our mission will not be complete until the Afghan government and armed forces can, on their own, prevent their nation from once again becoming a safe haven for terrorists.
