Bush At War

by Bob Woodward

  About 15 minutes before Air Force One left, the secretary gave his order. There would be an escort.

  He then turned to editing the draft of the TOP SECRET intelligence order that the CIA wanted the president to sign. In his view, it was sloppy and carelessly done. The language was vague and open-ended, the authority too broad and sweeping. He marked up his copy with proposed revisions, cuts and clarifications. Authority that ought to be reserved for the president or the CIA director was being given to subordinates.

  "DO YOU SMELL something?" Hughes asked as a helicopter carrying White House staff members approached New York on the final leg of the trip. They were 20 or 25 miles from Lower Manhattan.

  The others nodded. Press secretary Ari Fleischer thought it /must be from the helicopter. But looking out their windows to one side, they saw a giant plume of smoke. What they smelled was the burning rubble of the World Trade Center.

  The helicopters put down at the Wall Street heliport, and an enormous motorcade - 55 vehicles, the largest motorcade that anybody on the presidential advance team had ever seen - was formed. The president drove past cheering, flag-waving crowds to Ground Zero.

  For Bush, the sight of the enormous, dark wasteland of wreckage left an indelible impression, one that he would recall as "very, very, very eerie." Though he had talked with many others about the devastation, he still was not prepared for what he found. It was "a nightmare, a living nightmare." Along with destruction far worse than anything he had seen on television or heard about from his advisers, he encountered a crowd of rescue workers hungry for revenge. It was an "unbelievably emotional" crowd demanding justice, he recalled.

  As he walked through the area, the president faced a wild scene. "I cannot describe to you how emotional" the workers were. "Whatever it takes," they shouted.

  One pointed to him as he walked by and yelled out: "Don't let me down." Bush was stunned. He thought that the words and look on the man's face would perhaps stay with him forever - "Don't let me down." This was so personal, he thought. It was as if he were in some ancient arena. The rescue workers began chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A."

  "They want to hear him," Nina Bishop, a member of the advance team, shouted at Karl Rove as the president was working his way through the crowd. "They want to hear their president!"

  For once, the ever-ready White House communications team was totally unprepared. Since there was no plan for Bush to address the group, there was no sound system. Could she find a bullhorn, Rove asked.

  Nearby, Bob Beckwith, a somewhat frail-looking 69-year-old retired New York firefighter, stood on a charred fire truck that had been pulled from the rubble. A Bush aide asked him if the president could use it as a platform and if Beckwith, a gas mask dangling around his neck, could bounce up and down on it a few times to make certain it was stable. At the base of the fire truck was a large slab of paving or concrete. Some in the advance team thought they should move it, until rescue workers told them there might be human remains underneath.

  At 4:40 P.M., someone placed a white bullhorn in the president's hands and helped him up on the wreckage. Beckwith wanted to step down but Bush asked that he stay by his side. Another round of chants began: "U-S-A, U-S-A."

  "Thank you all," Bush began. "I want you all to know ..." and the gigantic canyon of rubble and humanity seemed to swallow up the words from his tinny bullhorn.

  "Can't hear you," a rescue worker shouted.

  "I can't go any louder," Bush said with a laugh. "America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here. . .." Another voice erupted from the crowd: "I can't hear you." Bush paused for an instant, then with his arm around Beckwith's shoulder, shouted back: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

  Hughes, off to the side, was absolutely beaming. This was an amazing moment, she thought - eloquent, simple, the perfect backdrop, a moment for the news magazine covers, the communications hall of fame and for history. And she had had nothing to do with it.

  AFTER A BRIEF stop to allow the president to thank teams of workers, the motorcade rolled up the West Side Highway to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which was being used as a staging ground for the rescue efforts. The president's schedule called for him to spend 30 to 45 minutes with families of the victims. It was to be private - no press, no photographers, not even members of the congressional delegation that accompanied Bush.

  The organizers had used draperies to turn a cavernous room into a more intimate area, and Bush's aides set up a human wall to give the group even more privacy. About 250 people awaited the president, many carrying photographs of missing relatives. Children now without a parent clutched teddy bears and other mementos.

  The families applauded the arrival of the president, then suddenly it was so silent that only the ventilation system could be heard whirring. It was a potentially awkward moment for Bush, who wasn't sure how to approach the families. Finally, he waded into the crowd. "Tell me about yourself," he said to one person, and then another and another. Each time he heard the same story. It was a crushing realization. Each of them, he recalled, "believed that their loved one was still alive."

  They wanted autographs and Bush began to sign his name to photos or pieces of paper or treasured items. He would say to the families, he recalled, " I'm going to tell you something, I'm going to sign this, and when you see Jim, or you see Bill, you tell them this is truly my autograph, that you didn't make this up.' And that's the only way I knew how to help, just use that moment to be able to say, 'I share your hope too, and we pray Jim comes out.'"

  Many in the room were weeping. The president was teary-eyed as he made his way from one family to the next. One man, cradling a child in his arms, was carrying a picture of his brother, a firefighter who had been killed. The child pointed at the photograph and said simply, "My uncle." An hour or so into the session, Bush seemed to regain some of his buoyancy. There were bursts of laughter from some of the relatives as he continued, for two hours, to

  move among them. He spoke with every family. Toward the end of his visit, Bush met Arlene Howard, the mother of George Howard, an off-duty Port Authority policeman who was killed attempting to save others. She was carrying her son's police shield and she offered it to the president, asking him to take it in her son's honor. The president accepted the shield.

  On the way back to the heliport, Bush's motorcade drove through Times Square, which was filled with people holding candles and American flags and applauding as the cars passed by. Back at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, a spent Bush parted with his staff who were returning to Washington.

  If it was possible to live a whole life in a single day, this was the day.

  INSTEAD OF BOARDING Air Force One, Bush climbed aboard a C-20 aircraft small enough to land in Hagerstown, Maryland. From there he would head for Camp David. The video of the president emerging from his helicopter shows him dead tired, drained, almost staggering.

  The president had asked his most senior national security advisers - Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice - to go to Camp David ahead of him to prepare for the next day's meeting. They gathered in the vice president's cabin to eat a dinner of buffalo.

  The dinner gave them the chance to compare notes in a more relaxed setting, to update each other and tee up the issues for the meetings the next day. They talked about the continuing pressure for speedy action, about the length of the struggle ahead and the differences between the coming conflict and the Persian Gulf War, when there was a long buildup and a relatively short military campaign - 38 days of massive bombing and a four-day ground war. This would be the opposite, they thought, and the more they talked, the more they realized how much harder this war would be and how enormous the consequences would be if they got it wrong.

  Powell thought it was like a rehearsal dinner the night before a wedding, but one that concealed some serious differences within the family.

  W
hen Bush got to his cabin, he checked in with Rice, who reported that there were no significant new developments. After a day in the public spotlight as mourner in chief, he was about to begin the most critical discussions he would have with his war cabinet. In his own mind, he had already come to some conclusions.

  "What was decided was that this is the primary focus of this administration," he recalled later. "What was decided is, it doesn't matter to me how long it takes, we're going to rout out terror wherever it may exist. What was decided was, the doctrine is, if you harbor them, feed them, house them, you're just as guilty, and you will be held to account. What was decided was that. . . this war will be fought on many fronts, including the intelligence side, the financial side, the diplomatic side, as well as the military side. What was decided is, is that we're going to hit them with all we've got in a smart way."

  Bush knew there was much still to be addressed. "What wasn't decided was, was the team stitched up to the same strategy, did the team sign off on it? Because one of the things I know that can happen is, if everybody is not on the same page, then you're going to have people peeling off and second-guessing and the process will not, will really not unfold the way it should, there won't be honest discussion."

  These were the team management problems, but far more than that was before the president. He had been swimming in a sea of broad concepts and rhetoric, fueled by the rawness, the surprise and the carnage of the terrorist attacks and by his own instincts. The real gut calls in the presidency get down to when and where and how to use force - both covert action and military strikes, putting ordnance on target. There would be times the next day when Bush's advisers wondered if they would ever find a way to end the talking - to emerge from the sea of words and pull the trigger.

  HE PRESIDENT WAS on a war footing when he walked into Camp David's Laurel Lodge early Saturday morning, September 15, but first he was going to have to listen and make sure he was decisive without being rash.

  "One way you're not impulsive," he explained later, "is to make sure you listen to an experienced group of national security advisers." He saw his advisers as a useful check on his own inclinations. "If I have any genius or smarts, it's the ability to recognize talent, ask them to serve and work with them as a team." By conservative count, the team together had close to 100 years of full-time experience dealing with national security. The president had not even a year.

  "When they give advice," he said, "I trust their judgment. Now sometimes the advice isn't always the same, in which case my job - the job is to grind through these problems, and grind through scenarios, and hopefully reach a consensus of six or seven smart people, which makes my job easy."

  He was about to find out that, indeed, the advice might not only be different, but that it could come dressed in language that was not always straightforward. He also was going to see that grinding through was not always easy.

  He had been up about four hours, when at 9:19 A.M., he invited reporters into the conference room to tell them how little he would have to say in public. "This is an administration that will not talk about how we gather intelligence, how we know what we're going to do, nor what our plans are."

  The war cabinet filed into the wood-paneled conference room and took their seats around the large table that accommodates about two dozen people. Tenet had brought his deputy, John E. McLaughlin, and counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black. Rumsfeld had brought his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Powell had understood it was supposed to be principals only so he did not have Armitage with him. All were dressed informally, many wearing jackets because of the chilly temperature. Bush, in a blue shirt and green bomber jacket, sat front and center, flanked on his right by Cheney and his left by Powell. Rumsfeld sat next to Powell.

  They began with a prayer, and routine updates from Powell and Treasury Secretary O'Neill.

  Tenet spoke next. The CIA director had come to Camp David carrying a briefcase stuffed with TOP SECRET documents and plans, more than four years of work on bin Laden, al Qaeda and worldwide terrorism. He distributed a briefing packet with the attention-grabbing title "Going to War." In the upper-left-hand corner was a picture of bin Laden inside a red circle with a slash superimposed over his face, the CIA's adaptation of the universal symbol of prohibition.

  Tenet flipped open to the first page, "Initial Hook: Destroying al Qaeda, Closing the Safe Haven" - Afghanistan, bin Laden's operating base and home. CIA paramilitary teams would be deployed with the Northern Alliance. They could eventually link up with U.S. military Special Forces units, bringing firepower and technology to the opposition fighters in Afghanistan to create a northern front.

  The plan called for a full-scale covert attack on the financial underpinnings of the terrorist network, including clandestine computer surveillance and electronic eavesdropping to locate the assets of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that were hidden and laundered among various charitable fronts and so-called nongovernmental organizations, NGOs.

  Another component was titled "CIA, FBI Focus on the Large Afghan Community in the U.S." The CIA and FBI would coordinate to track down and smoke out bin Laden supporters - a clear, glaring weakness before the attacks.

  Tenet referred to propaganda efforts, mentioning that they had some mullahs on the payroll.

  At the heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give what Tenet labeled "exceptional authorities" to the CIA to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. He wanted a broad intelligence order permitting the CIA to conduct covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation. The current process involved too much time, lawyering, reviews and debate. The CIA needed new, robust authority to operate without restraint. Tenet also wanted encouragement from the president to take risks.

  Another key component, he said, was to "use exceptional authorities to detain al Qaeda operatives worldwide." That meant the CIA could use foreign intelligence services or other paid assets. Tenet and his senior deputies would be authorized to approve "snatch" operations abroad, truly exceptional power.

  Tenet had brought a draft of a presidential intelligence order, called a finding, that would give the CIA power to use the full range of covert instruments, including deadly force. For more than two decades, the CIA had simply modified previous presidential findings to obtain its formal authority for counterterrorism. His new proposal, technically called a Memorandum of Notification, was presented as a modification to the worldwide counterterrorism intelligence finding signed by President Reagan in 1986. As if symbolically erasing the recent past, it superseded five such memoranda signed by President Clinton.

  The CIA chief came to a page headed "Heavily Subsidize Arab Liaison Services." He explained that with the additional hundreds of millions of dollars for new covert action, the CIA would "buy" key intelligence services, providing training, new equipment, money for their agent networks, whatever they might need. Several intelligence services were listed: Egypt, Jordan, Algeria. Acting as surrogates for the United States, these services could triple or quadruple the CIA's resources, an extended mercenary force of intelligence operatives. Like much in the world of covert activity, such arrangements carried risks. It would put the United States in league with questionable intelligence services, some of them with dreadful human rights records. Some had reputations for ruthlessness and using torture to obtain confessions. Tenet acknowledged that these were not people you were likely to be sitting next to in church on Sunday. Look, I don't control these guys all the time, he said. Bush said he understood the risks.

  Tenet added that the United States already had a "large asset base" in the region, given the work the CIA had been doing in countries near Afghanistan. The agency had been operating unmanned aerial vehicles - the so-called Predator drones - on surveillance missions out of Uzbekistan for more than a year to provide real-time video of Afghanistan. The Predator could be equipped with remotely controlled Hellfire missiles and used for lethal missions too, to take
out bin Laden or his top lieutenants for example. The United States should seek to work closely with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, Tenet said, to stop the travel of al Qaeda leaders and "close all border crossings" to them. He called for initiating intelligence contact with some rogue states such as Libya and Syria that he said might be helpful in trying to destroy al Qaeda. For the CIA to obtain helpful information against the terrorists, they might have to get their hands dirty.

  Tenet turned to operations within Afghanistan. He described a role for the opposition tribes in the southern part of Afghanistan, groups hostile to the Northern Alliance but crucial to a campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The CIA had begun working with about a dozen tribal leaders in the south the previous year. Some would try to play both sides, he said, but once the war began, they could be enticed by money, food, ammunition and supplies to join the U.S. led campaign.

  Tenet then expanded on his earlier briefing to the president about how they could effectively employ the Northern Alliance, which the CIA believed was potentially a powerful force but which was desperate for money, weapons and intelligence.

  The CIA director turned then to another TOP SECRET document, the "Worldwide Attack Matrix," which described covert operations in 80 countries either underway or that he was now recommending. Actions ranged from routine propaganda to lethal covert action in preparation for military attacks. Included were efforts to disrupt terrorist plots or attacks in countries in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. In some countries, CIA teams would break into facilities to obtain information. What he was proposing represented a striking departure for U.S. policy. It would give the CIA the broadest and most lethal authority in its history. He referred to this as the "outside piece," beyond Afghanistan. He walked the group rapidly through the 80 countries - here's where we are, here's what we could do, here's what we want to do. It was stunning in its sweep - a secret global war on terror.