500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

by Kurt Eichenwald

  Then came the terrorist attack that morning in the United States. Shortly after he returned his keys, he saw the news of the second plane crash on a television in the drivers’ lounge. The sight had made El-Maati nauseated, and he wanted to vomit. His emotional turmoil continued all the way back home as he grappled with the images of death that he had just witnessed.

  Now, at his apartment, he was ready to sit down and take a moment to gather his thoughts. Before he could, a knock came at the door. Odd, since no one had buzzed from downstairs to be allowed into the building.

  El-Maati answered. Two men in suits stood in the hallway. Both flipped open leather cases, showing their identification. They were with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service—CSIS.

  One of the men identified himself as Adrian White. “We need to speak with you,” he said.

  “Okay,” El-Maati replied.

  “Can we come in?”

  El-Maati shook his head. “No. Let’s talk outside.”

  He turned toward his mother and saw terror in her face. Then he left, leading the men to the elevator.

  Back in the apartment, his mother reached for the phone and called El-Maati’s father. “Some people came and took Ahmad!” she said.

  • • •

  Downstairs, El-Maati and the two agents crossed the street and sat on a bench. White explained that, given the attacks in the United States, CSIS was visiting people whose names had come up in the past—known as a “knock-and-talk” in the intelligence service.

  “We heard about the map and what happened at the border,” White said. “Tell us about the map.”

  The map! How could he get them to understand that he didn’t know anything about it?

  El-Maati brought out the letter written by Ann Armstrong. He always carried it in his shirt pocket for moments like this.

  The two agents read the letter, then gave it back.

  “Okay,” White said, “let’s talk about your background and about your travels.”

  El-Maati suggested that they continue the conversation at a coffee shop in a nearby plaza. The three men walked there and sat at a table on a patio.

  The questions were boilerplate—where was El-Maati born, where had he gone to school, what had he studied. He answered for a while, but grew increasingly worried.

  “Look, I want to have a lawyer present to make sure nothing I’m saying gets misinterpreted,” he said. “So we can continue this same conversation any way you like and anywhere you like, but with a lawyer present so I can preserve my rights.”

  White looked annoyed. “We’re not a court here. You don’t need a lawyer.”

  El-Maati insisted. White mentioned that CSIS knew that he was trying to sponsor a woman he planned to marry so that she could move to Canada. The file for that type of request went through the intelligence service, which had to give its approval. Maybe, the agent suggested, that application might be stopped if he refused to cooperate.

  “You know, Ahmad, we are mukhabarat,” White said.

  El-Maati recoiled backward as if he had been slapped in the face. In Arabic, mukhabarat generally referred to government units involved in gathering intelligence. Perhaps White was attempting to make clear that he was not part of a criminal prosecution.

  But, El-Maati feared, perhaps not—in the popular parlance of the Middle East, mukhabarat had come to mean something more sinister. It referred to the secret police departments in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Syria that imposed state controls over their citizens; the mukhabarat were renowned for snatching up people and making them disappear into prisons where they were tortured while under interrogation.

  El-Maati wasn’t sure how to respond. “You speak Arabic?” he asked.

  “Well, a little bit.”

  El-Maati let out a breath.

  “You know how the mukhabarat here in Canada deals with its citizens,” White said. “We’re soft on our citizens. There are laws that control what we do. And you know how the mukhabarat deals with people back in the Middle East.”

  Hesitation. El-Maati believed they were telling him that if he didn’t speak now, he would have to deal with the mukhabarat in his home country of Egypt.

  “Are you threatening me?” he said.

  White held up his hands. “No, no. Absolutely not. We just want you to cooperate.”

  No chance. “I think you are threatening me, and I insist that I have a lawyer.”

  White asked something else. I want a lawyer came the response. Then another question. I want a lawyer. Again and again El-Maati responded with the same words; it became almost laughable, with the agents joining El-Maati in saying I want a lawyer after their last query.

  The interview ended. El-Maati asked for the men’s names again. White wrote them on a piece of paper and handed it over.

  As he watched the agents depart, El-Maati took a deep breath. The map. He was terrified.

  Years would pass before El-Maati learned the truth about the map. It was a decade old. The sensitive buildings it depicted had not existed for years before El-Maati crossed the border. It had been drawn not by terrorists, but by the government of Canada, a visitors’ guide printed up by the hundreds.

  But by the time that was discovered, it would be too late to stop the terrible events caused by unfounded suspicions about a meaningless piece of paper.

  • • •

  At Offutt Air Force Base, just outside Omaha, Bush hurried into an underground command post that resembled a Hollywood depiction of a crisis center, a vast room with high-tech wizardry of astonishing diversity. The president took a seat in front of a screen projecting the videoconference; the chair was a particularly comfortable one.

  He listened for several minutes as Cheney, Rice, Hadley, and other officials gave him the latest news. The potential number of casualties was as many as ten thousand, he was told. But for now, it appeared the attacks were over. Government agencies had set up defenses. The FAA had successfully grounded all commercial airliners. A carrier battle group had put to sea. The Coast Guard was boarding ships. Immigration was locking down the border.

  “At this point, Mr. President, I think it’s safe to come back to the White House,” Cheney said. “And that’s probably the wisest course of action.”

  “I agree,” Bush replied. He wanted to speak to the nation again, this time from the Oval Office.

  Deputies from the State Department—the secretary, Colin Powell, was en route home from South America, so couldn’t be on the call himself—gave a rundown of contacts they had received from foreign governments, both to express condolences and to offer help.

  The president jumped in. The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, had already called. “He understands that, if this can happen to us, it can happen to him as well,” Bush said.

  On to the intelligence. Tenet reported that the first indications suggested that al-Qaeda was almost certainly the group behind the strike. Known associates of the terrorist group had turned up on the passenger manifests for American 77. The attacks displayed both al-Qaeda’s trademark meticulousness and its practice of launching multiple, simultaneous strikes against related targets.

  Bush ended the call with the message he had been delivering by phone to his subordinates all day.

  “Somebody has declared war on America,” he said. “We are at war.”

  This would entail a lot of actions and decisions by officials throughout the administrations. It would be demanding and involve taking a lot of risks.

  “And if it comes a cropper,” he said, “I’ll be behind you.”

  • • •

  John Ashcroft had arrived in Washington a few hours earlier aboard a Cessna Citation V. An armored SUV had attempted to drive him away from downtown to a secure classified site but was blocked by a traffic jam. The attorney general told the driver to turn around and take him instead to FBI headquarters, where he could join other top law enforcement officials in the command center.

  By the time Ashcroft arrived, the FBI had c
ulled data on the hijackers and their connections to al-Qaeda. A senior agent briefed Ashcroft; Mueller, the FBI director; Michael Chertoff, the head of the criminal division; and other officials of the findings. As part of the presentation, photographs of the hijackers were shown on a television screen. By the end, no one in the room harbored any lingering doubts that these attacks had been acts of Islamic terrorism.

  Evidence usually led to decisions. But they needed to be coordinated, and a number of Justice officials were across the street at headquarters, so an order from Ashcroft went out: Everyone was to drop whatever he was doing and report to the FBI command center.

  Attorneys from the Office of Legal Counsel walked over to the Hoover Building together and took an elevator upstairs. As the group headed into the complex, John Yoo glanced into an adjoining office. He saw one of Ashcroft’s top aides sitting in a chair and reading a book.

  The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.

  Omigod. That’s not a good sign.

  • • •

  Alberto Gonzales’s mind was racing.

  The White House counsel had flown to Washington by helicopter an hour earlier from Norfolk, Virginia, where he had given a speech to government ethics advisors. His return had taken a little longer than it might have; he overruled his pilot’s suggestion that they land on the White House lawn. That, he said, was the prerogative of the president. Instead, they flew to Andrews Air Force Base, a twenty-minute drive away in good traffic.

  A van picked him up and ferried him straight to the White House, where he was rushed to the PEOC. SWAT teams armed with pistols and machine guns lined the tunnel, the highest level of security at the bunker since the crisis began. The conference room was in an uproar, with phone calls, videoconferences, and individual meetings. Things were bad but not out of control.

  There wasn’t much for him to do at the PEOC, Gonzales decided, but there were certainly legal matters that he and his lieutenants needed to tackle. He called his deputy, Flanigan, who was still in the Situation Room.

  Flanigan saw the caller ID. “Hey, Al.”

  “Timmy,” Gonzales said, “let’s go upstairs.”

  They headed to the west lobby and met in front of the elevator. From there, they hiked upstairs to Gonzales’s office. Flanigan dropped onto a couch beside a coffee table. Gonzales sat in his usual wing chair.

  “Okay, what else needs to be done?” Gonzales asked.

  The two men discussed what were emerging as the key legal issues—Was this a war? How could the country respond?—and decided that they needed to bring in someone with more expertise.

  “I’m going to call John Yoo,” Flanigan said.

  • • •

  Yoo picked up the line at his new work space in the FBI command center.

  “John, Al and I are going through some issues here and were hoping you could help us. We’re not even sure how to phrase the right questions.”

  “Okay,” Yoo said. “Where do you want to start?”

  • • •

  Over the next forty-five minutes, the three men laid out the legal framework for policies that would govern the coming war on terror.

  First, logistics. Bush needed to declare a state of emergency; Gonzales instructed Flanigan to handle that. The markets were reeling and trading had stopped—should there be a bank holiday, to let the financial centers of the country regroup? Then, what about the victims? Could the president throw money to New York, without a specific appropriation by Congress? What was the scope of his power? The answer to that was easy, Yoo assured his colleagues, repeating what he had told other officials throughout the morning: In a time of military conflict, the president’s authority was sweeping.

  In fact, Bush could take just about any action he wished. A war was certain, and legal. But this wasn’t a standard confrontation, they agreed. The combatants were not part of any country; they were not soldiers whose rights were dictated by the rules of war under the Geneva Conventions. These enemies were renegades, Yoo said, like the pirates of the late nineteenth century. Their rights would be far more limited than those of a soldier fighting on behalf of an established government.

  The lawyers recognized they were venturing into areas dealing directly with personal freedoms and rights of individuals. Nothing was clear-cut.

  “These are the scary things,” Flanigan said.

  Could the president block captured terrorists from the courts, suspending habeas corpus? The Constitution allowed for such an action only in cases of rebellion or invasion, but neither word quite fit the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. Still, if the United States declared the terrorist operation an act of war, the president should have that authority, Yoo said.

  Once the United States had terrorists in custody, they had to be locked up someplace. But they couldn’t be taken into American prisons, under the authority of the courts, and then told they had no rights. The combatants, the lawyers agreed, needed to be someplace beyond the reach of the judicial system. They began batting around ideas about possible locations.

  Then, a suggestion. What about Guantanamo Bay?

  • • •

  About an hour later, Karen Hughes hurried through the West Wing. The top communications advisor for Bush, Hughes had heard that the helicopter carrying the president from Andrews Air Force Base was about to land on the South Lawn and wanted to be there to greet him.

  On her way toward the Oval Office, Hughes ran into Gonzales, who had left the planning meeting after receiving a call that Bush was arriving.

  The two walked onto the portico outside the Oval Office, watching the touchdown of Marine One, a twin turbine-engine VH-3D flown by HMX-1, an elite marine squadron. Usually, a crowd would greet Bush, but this time it was only Hughes and Gonzales. Bush stepped out, his face grim as he headed toward the Oval Office. His helicopter had just flown over the Pentagon, and the devastation he saw still haunted him.

  “Welcome back, Mr. President,” Hughes said. “How are you?”

  Bush nodded curtly at his aides and kept walking. The floor of the Oval Office was lined with planks of plywood, set up to hold the camera and other video equipment that would be used for his speech to the nation that night.

  With his two aides in tow, Bush strode past his desk and into a small study. Over the next few minutes, Andy Card and Ari Fleischer, his chief spokesman, came in; both had flown back with Bush on Marine One. Then Rice arrived from the Roosevelt Room.

  The group huddled around a table, reviewing a draft of Bush’s address. Speechwriters had been at work much of the day attempting to massage the thoughts conveyed by Bush into inspiring prose. Their work had been forwarded to Hughes, who did her own rewrite.

  The key position Bush had expressed was that his administration would hold accountable any country that aided terrorists. As he read through the speech, he came upon the words intended to express that point.

  “We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them.”

  Bush didn’t like it. “That’s way too vague,” he said. All those past-tense verbs at the end of the sentence were unnecessary. “Just use the word ‘harbor.’ ”

  The phrase was rewritten. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

  Those few words transformed America’s counterterrorism policy into the most robust in its history. By holding accountable any governments that supported terrorism, Bush was rejecting the notion of launching only targeted strikes against criminal groups and instead was committing his administration to a worldwide campaign to eradicate the apparatus of terror.

  Rice wondered whether the first Oval Office speech, coming at a time when the nation was still reeling from the attacks, was the place to proclaim this aggressive policy.

  “You can say it now, or you’ll have other opportunities to say it,” she said.

  “What do you think?” Bush replied.


  Rice paused. First words matter more than almost anything else.

  “I favor including it.”

  Bush gave her a brisk nod. “We’ve got to get it out there now.”

  • • •

  The head of the television crew in the Oval Office gave the final countdown, dropping a finger with each second. Behind the desk, Bush waited, looking at the teleprompter where his speech was keyed up.

  Just off camera, several of his aides—including Card, Hughes, Gonzales, and Rice—stood in silence. At zero, the director pointed at Bush. His image appeared on millions of screens around the world.

  “Good evening,” he said. “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.”

  The victims were friends and neighbors, moms and dads, businesspeople, secretaries, members of the military—a cross section of America. They had been killed in an evil act of terror, a mass murder that was meant to panic the country. But America would stand strong. Its great people would defend their great nation.

  “I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” Bush said.

  Then, the line in the sand. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

  He spoke for eight minutes. Once the camera was turned off, Gonzales approached him.

  “Good job, Mr. President.”

  Bush looked Gonzales in the eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

  • • •

  Almost two hours later, Bush was in the presidential bunker beneath the White House with a small group of his closest advisors. They had just wrapped up a meeting of the National Security Council, the first Bush had attended in person that day. Now he wanted to restate his new policies.