Bush At War

by Bob Woodward

  Tenet was still scrambling in the south of Afghanistan. One setback in the south was that the Taliban had just captured and killed Abdul Haq, a 43-year-old Pashtun leader who had successfully fought the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989. In 1987, Haq, then 29, lost his right foot in a land mine. The Taliban had later killed his wife and son.

  He had returned to Afghanistan with a group of 19 to consolidate support among Pashtuns in the south against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Haq was not a CIA asset who took direction but the agency had had contact with him. They had urged him to have a fallback plan and had offered communications gear. Haq said he thought the communications equipment would enable the CIA to spy on him. He refused.

  Haq was captured by the Taliban, tortured and executed. At the last minute the CIA had dispatched one of its Predators, which fired on some Taliban forces who were surrounding him, but it was too late. The Taliban intelligence chief was publicly gloating.

  Tenet, with a dozen secret paid assets in the south, was still not making headway in the crucial region.

  Powell reported that he had talked to Musharraf, who said he needed more economic assistance. The demonstrations in two Pakistani cities were the largest so far. Musharraf was continuing one of the all-time political balancing acts.

  On the military operation, Rumsfeld said that "70 percent of our effort today will be in support of the opposition." Rumsfeld said one focus continued to be the Tora Bora area outside Jalalabad, believed to be a refuge for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

  The secretary also reported that the humanitarian drops and the information drops were continuing.

  Tenet said, "We're going to move ahead without waiting for Fahim." It was a dramatic decision since Fahim was the overall leader of the loose affiliation of warlord forces in the Northern Alliance.

  No one objected.

  "We're sending a message to the Northern Alliance," Rumsfeld said, "that we want them to do more." Bypassing their leader was not a subtle message.

  Cheney said there had been press reports that the Northern Alliance might shut down for Ramadan.

  Tenet said the agency would have to assess that likelihood.

  The news got worse. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the sprawling service created by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to integrate Pentagon intelligence efforts, had been asked to come up with an alternative assessment about the prospects on the ground. In a highly classified memo, the DIA suggested that neither Mazar nor Kabul would be taken by winter.

  The memo in large part blamed General Fahim, essentially calling him a wimp who would talk and talk, then not show up for battle. Fahim was never quite ready, always declaring his need for more money, more bullets.

  It was alarming - a weak Fahim and no prospects for taking a city by winter. With discussion of a quagmire already in the media after three weeks of bombing, it was hard to imagine what would be said after months of apparent stalemate.

  Referring to the DIA memo, Cheney said, "It raises two questions. Are we doing everything we can to get something done before Ramadan?" The holiday started in three weeks.

  "And secondly," he continued, "what military operations could be done during the winter?" They had to get very concrete, not just to obtain a specific objective for obvious military reasons but for psychological reasons. "We want to create a feeling of inevitability so that people will come over to our side." Alternatively, imagine the Taliban sitting in Afghanistan for months, continuing to provide bin Laden and his terrorists with sanctuary. Cheney didn't have to say anything about the likely impact of that.

  He worried also that if they didn't do something before winter, would the Taliban be able to regroup? Would they be emboldened now that they had not been defeated rapidly?

  "Is there anything that the U.S. can do between now and winter, such as set up a U.S. operating base in the north?" Cheney asked. At least that would be something up on the board. "I'm worried that we won't have anything concrete to point to by way of accomplishment." When the snow and bitter cold came next month, the Northern Alliance force would be malpositioned, meaning they would not be able to move for months.

  "What is our objective for accomplishment before the snow?"

  They went through some sensitive, fresh intelligence which was even more depressing. The Northern Alliance was still not moving, further supporting the notion that there was no chance of getting to Mazar or Kabul very soon.

  Rice knew the principals didn't like to argue in front of the president, who had said very little. "Principals need to review this on Tuesday," she said, referring to an upcoming meeting without the president when they could thrash it out.

  "We need to look at some limited objectives," Tenet said, picking up on Cheney's point, "such as Mazar-e Sharif which are achievable and where we should concentrate our effort,"

  No one seemed to know for sure.

  The next day, October 28, Rumsfeld hit the Sunday talk shows.

  "Is the war just not going as well as you had hoped it would at this point?" Cokie Roberts asked him on the ABC television show This Week.

  "No, quite the contrary," Rumsfeld said. "It's going very much the way we expected when it began... . And the progress has been measurable. We feel that the air - air campaign has been effective."

  THE TOP SECRET/CODEWORD Threat Matrix for Monday morning, October 29, was filled with dozens of threats, many new and credible, suggesting an attack in the next week. All kinds of signals intelligence, SIGINT, showed that many known al Qaeda lieutenants or operatives were saying that something big would happen soon.

  It was quite a list. Some said that good news would be coming, perhaps within a week, or that good news would be bigger and better than September 11. Some of the intercepts revealed discussion of a radiological device - the use of conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material. Other intercepted discussions mentioned making lots of people sick.

  A nongovernmental organization in Pakistan called Umma Tameer-e-Nau, or UTN, could be putting a structure in place linking senior al Qaeda members and several Pakistani nuclear scientists who had been involved in developing their bomb, according to other intelligence.

  Taken together, it was evident that something was going on at least with a radiological device. The intercepts indicated that there was going to be another attack, and since al Qaeda tended to come back to targets it might have missed, Washington and the White House were particularly vulnerable.

  The bottom line was a consistent though uncorroborated worry about a radiological weapon, and some concern that it might be headed for Washington or New York. It might be another try to decapitate the government.

  All this was presented to the president in the Monday morning intelligence briefing.

  "Those bastards are going to find me exactly here," the president said. "And if they get me, they're going to get me right here."

  Whoa! Rice thought.

  "This isn't about you," Cheney told the president. "This is about our Constitution." He was focused on their responsibility to ensure continuity of government if something happened to Bush. "And that's why I'm going to a secure, undisclosed location," he said. He was not asking permission. He was going.

  Card found it sobering. Cheney was right.

  "We began to get serious indications that nuclear plans, material and know-how were being moved out of Pakistan," the president would recall. "It was the vibrations coming out of everybody reviewing the evidence."

  Rice asked Bush, "Do you think you need to leave too?"

  He refused. "Had the president decided he is going too," Bush recalled, "you would have had the vice president going one direction and the president going another, people are going to say, 'What about me?' I wasn't going to leave. I guess I could have, but I wasn't."

  The most dramatic action was kept secret. Four special covert monitoring teams who operated out of vehicles capable of detecting the presence of nuclear material were dispatched. Said one of the most seni
or administration officials, "We had teams roaming around the city" - Washington, D.C. "We had a team in New York. That was a time of great anxiousness." Haifa dozen special teams that could detect biological and chemical warfare agents were also sent to six other cities.

  IN TENET'S VIEW, a terrorist could wreak havoc on the United States at this point with any attack. The impact of a second large strike was almost unfathomable - with a radiological or nuclear weapon, truly unimaginable. Since neither the CIA nor the FBI were "inside the plot," as Tenet liked to say, he believed a good form of deterrence was to try to give the terrorists the idea that the U.S. was aware of things being planned. Since the terrorists didn't know what the U.S. knew and didn't know, it was a potential deterrent to find a way basically to "tell them we know." This might force them to worry and certainly would make the operational environment rougher for them.

  On that morning, Monday, October 29, Tenet told Mueller that it was so serious - and the potential benefits of causing a stir so great - that a second global alert should be issued to the public.

  Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft began preparations to make the announcement later that day.

  The NSC met at 9:15 A.M. Tenet said he was going to meet with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and the new director of homeland security, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. The topic: "How to change our security posture." That meant doing things differently at airports and elsewhere so potential terrorists would encounter different procedures, mix up what they might see. Tenet said he wanted to make sure they were coordinated on "how to try and disrupt and deter whatever might be coming."

  Tenet summarized the threat reporting. Intelligence showed that al Qaeda was planning to use a hijacked aircraft to attack a nuclear facility - either a nuclear power plant, or worse, storage sites of nuclear weapons or other nuclear weapons facilities.

  With the vivid images of the World Trade Center towers in flames not even seven weeks old, the prospect of a nuclear equivalent silenced the group.

  "Dick Cheney's going to stay gone for a while," the president said. The vice president was already off at a secure location many miles away.

  Referring to the intelligence, Tenet said, "It suggests to me there's a worldwide threat. We should button up our embassies and our military facilities overseas, and we should all be implementing continuity of government things." That meant each of the principals should make sure as much as possible that they were not with their deputies in the same place.

  "Our coalition is holding together pretty well," Powell said. "They are not as hysterical as the press suggests. But there is a level of nervousness that's reflected on the Arab street." The day before, militants had killed 16 people in a Roman Catholic church in Pakistan,

  The headlines about collateral damage from the bombing campaign were harder to stomach. Saturday's New York Times front page said, "U.S. PLANES BOMB A RED CROSS SITE," a mistake the U.S. had now made twice. No one was killed, but warehouses full of much needed humanitarian supplies were destroyed. Powell spoke with restraint: "To the extent we have collateral damage as a result of the U.S. operations, it inflames the situation." But then he took a direct shot at the Pentagon. "It's a problem, and we need to redouble our efforts to avoid collateral damage."

  Rumsfeld felt he had already maximized efforts to avoid such damage, issuing unprecedented, even draconian orders not to shoot or drop bombs unless there was specific intelligence about the targets, preferably U.S. eyes also having verified the target.

  Bush sprang to the defense. "Well, we also need to highlight the fact that the Taliban are killing people and conducting their own terror operations, so get a little bit more balance here about what the situation is." He jumped ahead to add that they needed to focus on Afghanistan after the Taliban, make sure the tribes in the south "see themselves in the post-Taliban Afghanistan," as he put it.

  "We also need a public relations campaign focused around the Taliban. We need a donors' conference," he continued, meaning all the countries who were making humanitarian donations to Afghanistan, "someone who will organize it as an offset to Ramadan. We need - how to get the coalition something to hang its hat on when we continue the bombing during Ramadan. We need to have humanitarian help during Ramadan, the likes of which Afghanistan has never seen. We also need a political initiative in this time period."

  "The president's calls to Crown Prince Abdullah were very helpful," Rumsfeld said, referring to the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. Bush was continuing to make calls to Arab leaders to prepare them for his decision that bombing would not stop during Ramadan. Many of the Arab leaders had privately told the president that while they would have to criticize the decision publicly, they understood his position.

  "Franks needs to push the Afghan people on the need to choose - freedom for themselves or to continue under the illegitimate Taliban regime," Rumsfeld said. He wanted the general to assist in the political task of motivating the Afghans. Rumsfeld said that 70 percent of the strikes would be in support of the opposition today. Fahim was still not moving, but he said he had received the message to focus on supporting the opposition. "We're going to re-supply Dostum today, Khalili tomorrow. And we're going to try to get stuff to Karzai tomorrow. And we're still getting in our teams.

  "We're dividing our air campaign 60-40 between Mazar-e Sharif and the Shamali Plains for later this week. That's the plan." Despite the suggestions from Powell and others that they mass at one point, the secretary said, "We cannot concentrate in any one place. There are just not enough targets." He liked preplanned targeting, but the truly important targets were going to be identified :r. the battlefield by the CIA and his Special Forces teams.

  The president had a question. "How do we make sure our teams are strong enough to avoid getting run over by the Taliban?"

  The CIA and Special Forces teams of several dozen men were out in some pretty rough places, and alone. They could be attacked, run over, slaughtered or kidnapped and held hostage. It was not for the meek. Suppose one of the teams met the fate of Abdul Haq?

  Rumsfeld and Tenet had exfiltration plans if a team got into extremis.

  "Are they robust enough to be able to defend themselves?" Bush asked.

  The answer was yes and no.

  "They could be hit by the enemy or by friendly fire," Rumsfeld said.

  "People get bought off," Tenet reminded. "Our people are at risk. We need to look at our extraction capability. We need to make sure we can protect our people."

  The biggest protection were the teams' radios that could be used to call in precision strikes on an attacking enemy.

  It was getting very gloomy.

  RICE CALLED HADLEY to her office and they closed the big, heavy, dark door.

  Was he all right working at a potential and likely Ground Zero?

  Yes, he said, but he hoped that if anything happened, it wouldn't be something that would get his family, just him. Was she comfortable?

  "Yes, you know," she said, "I'm a minister's daughter. I made peace about that a long time ago."

  They agreed they should talk to the NSC staff, and made arrangements to do so one night. The staff, made up mostly of foreign service and military officers who had served in dangerous parts of the world, did not want to be moved.

  AT THE PRINCIPALS' meeting Monday night, without the president, there was lots of jousting about what to do. If they were going to try to take Mazar, then what were they doing bombing the Shamali Plains? Rumsfeld continued to insist that there just were not enough targets unless they went beyond the Mazar targets.

  Powell worried again that it was bombing for bombing's sake, unconnected to a military objective. He had been a junior infantry officer in Vietnam and knew personally the limits of airpower. He also worried that the United States was playing superpower bully, trying to move the opposition forces, the Northern Alliance and the various warlords, around on the chessboard as if they did not have a stake in this war. At one point, he asked, "
Do they have any ideas about what they want to do, as opposed to what we think they ought to do?"

  The question of the political objective lingered. Who would rule Afghanistan if the Taliban were deposed? How? What was the mechanism for some kind of democracy in a country dominated by tribal factions? The experts pretty much agreed that after the Soviets had been thrown out in 1989, the mistake was that the United States walked away. How did the political objective, whatever it was, relate to the military objective? Were they married up?

  "We can't afford to lose," Rice said. "The Taliban proved tougher than we thought."

  Tenet said they had dropped supplies to Dostum and Attah, but in the south the only person doing much - and that wasn't a whole lot - was Karzai, who had 400 to 500 fighters.

  Rumsfeld lamented that in Mazar the Taliban had at least double and perhaps triple the forces of the Northern Alliance.

  Powell took the floor to argue against Americanizing the war. "I'd rule out the United States going after the Afghans, who have been there 5,000 years." It could take all the airlift capacity of the American military to move the necessary force. Unless it was possible to intercept the Taliban's communications, they would be elusive. "They will not be there when you get there," he said. "It's a glitch in our thinking. We expected too much of the opposition. I don't know that the opposition can take Mazar, much less Kabul. What we have is First World airpower matched up with a Fourth World army." It would be better to build the Northern Alliance opposition up over the winter to at least a Third World capability to use later with U.S. airpower.

  Rice returned to the immediate military problem on the ground and suggested they go back and try to examine three options: 1. Go for Mazar. 2. Go for Kabul. 3. What if they could do neither?

  THE NEXT EVENING, Tuesday, October 30, the president flew up to New York to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Game 3 of the World Series between the Yankees and the Arizona Diamondbacks. At the stadium, he went to the bullpen area to warm up. It was difficult to throw in the bulletproof vest he had agreed to wear, and he wanted to keep his arm loose.