As Bush listened to Shelton expound the military plans, he felt a rising sense of disappointment. None of this seemed imaginative—it was as unimpressive as the CIA strategy had been electrifying. He was in a hurry for a strategy, and it was growing increasingly clear that the military couldn’t put a viable one together quickly.
The discussions became free-floating, almost unmoored. Officials brought up old ideas and new challenges—a report by the United States Agency for International Development was raised, showing that the northern part of Afghanistan was on the cusp of a drought-induced famine. Unless specific attention was given to that threat, any war effort could lead to mass starvation.
As the talks wore on throughout the day, the core strategic elements of the war against terrorism crystallized. The path ahead was clear. But before the meeting ended, Cheney raised a question.
“Suppose this doesn’t work?” he asked. “Then what do we do?”
• • •
Just past 4:30 on the next afternoon, Donald Henderson, called “D.A.” by everyone who knew him, was sitting in an easy chair in the den of his Baltimore home. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, and Henderson was taking in the calming view of his nearby Japanese garden.
A renowned epidemiologist, Henderson in the 1960s had led an international team of scientists in what eventually proved to be a successful effort to eradicate smallpox. Following thirteen years as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Henderson had served as a senior government advisor with expertise in communicable disease. While he had returned to academia in 1995, he was still seen by senior government officials as one of the country’s best minds on the use of microbes to create biological weapons. Now, at seventy-three years old, Henderson was planning to retire, to slow down, to travel, and to enjoy life with his wife, Nana.
As Henderson lounged in his upholstered chair, his home telephone rang. On the line was an aide to Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services with the Bush administration.
“Can you come to a meeting in Washington?” the aide asked.
“When?”
“Tonight at seven. We’re asking ‘What’s next?’ We’d like you to be there.”
Henderson understood. Administration officials weren’t just wrestling over how to deal with the September 11 attacks, but were preparing for future strikes, including those that might involve bioterrorism.
After telling his wife about the call, Henderson climbed into his silver Volvo and drove off for Washington.
• • •
Inside the Roosevelt Room at the White House, the topic was smallpox.
Bush, Cheney, and the war cabinet were sitting at the conference table as Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, briefed them on the horrendous power of biological weapons. The meeting had been called at the vice president’s request and a number of the country’s top epidemiological experts had been invited to attend. As the secretary of defense during the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the vice president knew about the stores of anthrax, botulism toxins, and VX nerve agents that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled. Deadly in even small quantities, any of these substances could be transported across national borders with little risk of detection; at this very moment one of them might be in the hands of terrorists somewhere.
Bush and Cheney both fervently believed another wave of attacks was imminent—most likely involving a biological weapon, with anthrax or smallpox the prime candidates. The Secret Service had already begun monitoring the air inside and outside the White House for contaminants, and Cheney had taken to traveling with a full biohazard suit at the ready. As for Bush, he still could not shake what he had learned in his first intelligence briefing almost a year before, when Ben Bonk of the CIA had sneaked a functional biological bomb into a meeting; anyone in the country, the president understood, was in danger of being killed by such a weapon. Al-Qaeda, Saddam, any terrorist group could launch an attack with viruses and bacteria. The smallpox virus made an almost perfect weapon, Bush and his aides were told. The incubation period for the illness was long—about twelve days, enough time for the pathogen to spread widely before anyone showed symptoms. Smallpox attacks skin cells, causing lesions to erupt on the faces and bodies of the infected. In its most malignant form, it can trigger severe bleeding in the skin, mucous membranes, and stomach, leading to an agonizing death for one of every three victims.
While a decades-long global campaign led by Donald Henderson had eradicated the disease by the late 1970s, the virus itself still existed. But nobody knew how much of it there was or where, exactly, it was stored. About a decade before, a Russian defector had confirmed to American officials that, over many years, Moscow had overseen the production of as much as twenty tons of weaponized smallpox. In 1997, the Russians confirmed that they possessed a smallpox repository and promised to move it to a virology research center in Koltsovo. But there were reasons to fear that some of it had escaped the custody of Russian officials. The breakup of the Soviet Union had left many biological weapons experts looking for work. Conceivably, terrorists could have exploited the economic turbulence in Russia and bribed their way into obtaining the virus, the technology, and the know-how they would need to launch a biological attack anywhere in the world.
The president listened quietly. Most of the questions came from Cheney and Rice.
The presentation ended. Bush, looking shaken, stood as the other officials gathered their notes. Before he reached the door, he stopped and turned, facing his advisors.
“God help us all,” he said.
• • •
Nassau Street, the central spine of downtown Princeton, New Jersey, was alive with its usual assortment of cars and pedestrians. Outside the Coldwell Banker office at the intersection of Bank Street, people ambled past an unremarkable blue postal service mailbox, one of four on the town’s main thoroughfare.
A man, largely unnoticed, walked near a grouping of small bank branches that served students at Princeton University across the street. He approached the mailbox, which had been set up sixty feet from a building that housed offices for Kappa Kappa Gamma, the national sorority. He carried several envelopes, each prestamped with postage of thirty-four cents and addressed to members of the news media. Multiple pieces of tape had been applied across the back, an attempt to seal small openings where the edges of the paper had been glued together.
Inside, the letters had been irregularly cut, allowing for them to be wrapped in a “pharmaceutical fold,” used for centuries to dispense small quantities of medicinal powder. This time, the fold was not holding medication, but a small amount of a brown granular substance—the bacteria that cause anthrax. The biological agent was called RMR-1029, which had been created in laboratory B-313 at the Army Research Facility at Fort Detrick. Only researchers trusted by the government to work with the lethal spores could gain access to them.
The man reached for the handle on the mailbox and pulled it open, placing the envelopes inside. The tray slammed shut, dropping the letters on top of other mail set for pickup at eleven o’clock on the morning of September 18.
The anthrax attacks had begun.
3
“It starts today.”
As he spoke the words, Bush glanced around the table at the members of his National Security Council. The days of planning and discussion were over. Now, early on the morning of September 17, the first pieces of the plans for the American attack on worldwide terrorism were ready.
He ordered Ashcroft to develop a legislative package that would grant expanded powers to federal law enforcement for combating terrorists. Tenet was instructed to act on the CIA plan to destroy al-Qaeda that had been presented two days before. The State Department, he told Powell, was to issue an ultimatum to the Taliban—either turn over bin Laden or face the consequences. The Treasury Department was to launch an immediate assault on terrorist financial networks. Finally, the Pentagon was directed to develop military plans for a massive attack, us
ing missiles, bombers, and troops, including Special Forces.
“I want to signal a change from the past,” Bush said. “I want to cause countries like Iran and Syria to get scared and change their views.”
“It will take about four days to establish an air bridge,” said General Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. No large-scale military deployment could occur without first setting up a route and the means of delivering equipment and supplies. That would entail bringing in the support of other nations.
“That’s fine,” Bush said. “I want you to explore the possibility of getting some Muslim nations involved.”
A document describing the broad directives of the new strategy was ready for Bush’s signature; Rice had remained at Camp David after the strategy session two days before and had composed a short memo. That was then compiled into a Memorandum of Notification, which would be used to inform congressional intelligence committees of changes in counterterrorism policies.
The memorandum included no new presidential findings about the threat posed by al-Qaeda, but sharply toughened the operational authority and resources available for the CIA and other agencies. Among the powers assigned under the memorandum, the agency could now, without seeking prior approval, use lethal force against terrorists or render them to countries that had not requested their extradition. To spell out the new mission in detail, administration officials immediately began work on a more specific, twelve-page authorization—called National Security Presidential Directive number nine, “Combating Terrorism”—that listed the new duties of every agency and department playing a role in the country’s national security system.
Attached to the directive were annexes, dividing up the strategy by region. In Annex A was Afghanistan. In Annex B, Iraq.
• • •
At 11:45 that morning, Bush had just finished being briefed at the Pentagon about plans to call up military reserves. He stepped into the Joint Staff corridor, where reporters awaited him. He gave a short statement, then invited questions.
The journalists asked about the prospects for war, whether the administration could keep the country out of a recession in the event of armed conflict, and the health of the airline industry.
“Do you want bin Laden dead?” a reporter asked.
Bush paused. “I want him held—I want justice,” he said. “There’s an old poster out west, as I recall, that said ‘Wanted: Dead or Alive.’ ”
• • •
Wanted: Dead or Alive.
As he heard the president’s words, John Bellinger almost fell out of his chair. As senior associate counsel to the president and advisor to the National Security Council, Bellinger was responsible for helping Bush and his administration wade through the legal thickets of international affairs. With his new statement, Bellinger feared, the president may have gone too far.
He composed an e-mail to Gonzales. The lawyers needed to warn Bush not to say things like “dead or alive.” Such a reckless remark could be interpreted as an instigation for assassination, and that would cross the legal line. Bellinger finished composing his e-mail and hit the send button.
• • •
David Addington fumed as he met with Gonzales and Flanigan.
“Al, you’ve got to get control of Bellinger,” he said. “You’ve got to rein him in. Is he working for you? Because he’s going to be trouble eventually.”
The three men had seen Bellinger’s e-mail and had been astonished. He was criticizing a statement that the president had already made and suggesting that Bush might have violated the law. Hell, Flanigan said, some political opponent could argue that Bellinger was accusing the president of essentially committing a war crime. Maybe he thought he was simply making a lawyerly point intended to warn Bush about potential land mines, but the way he said it—in writing—infuriated the attorneys.
Flanigan shot an e-mail back to Bellinger stating that he should not create White House records defining a statute and applying it to Bush’s comments, since clearly any claim of illegality would be based solely on a misinterpretation of what the president meant. There was no response.
For Addington, Bellinger’s e-mail was the last straw. The man, he declared, could not be trusted.
• • •
The planned aerial assault against Taliban targets in Afghanistan was hitting some snags.
Efforts to secure regional bases for the military campaign were faltering. President Musharraf of Pakistan had immediately, and quietly, offered the United States use of several airfields—including the strategically important Shahbaz Air Base in Jacobabad—which could be used as a staging site for the air force, Special Operations Forces, and Combat Search and Rescue units. But Shahbaz and the other fields were too far from the European bases where air force cargo planes loaded equipment for the military operation. The planners at Central Command needed to find a base closer to Europe, but still within Central Asia.
They turned to Uzbekistan, a country on Afghanistan’s northern border that had been helping American intelligence efforts for a year. Quickly, the Uzbeks signaled a willingness to cooperate in the full military assault. There were several former Soviet air bases available, the most suitable at Samarkand, but the Uzbeks refused to allow the Americans to set up there. Instead, they offered a dilapidated base at Karshi-Khanabad, a name that military planners shortened to K2.
Problems abounded there. The crumbling Soviet-built runways were too short to handle the air force’s C-5 Galaxy transport planes. Few buildings were intact. Old jet fuel had seeped through the ground, emitting dangerous vapors. Worst of all, after making a show of cooperation, the Uzbeks began dragging their feet on reaching a final agreement.
A more daunting challenge to the emerging war raised its head back in Washington: micromanagement. Before the first missiles could be fired, someone needed to select the targets. That meant each option had to be examined in excruciating detail by Central Command, the Combined Air Operations Center, and commanders on navy aircraft carriers. Then their proposals went to the Pentagon and the White House, to be picked over by the lawyers.
• • •
In the Kremlin, teams of American and Russian officials gathered around a large conference table as they discussed the destruction of al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
For some time, relations between Washington and Moscow had been chilly at best; Kremlin officials had felt marginalized by the United States and Europe in recent years, and in response had turned eastward, bolstering their ties with China as a counterweight. President Vladimir Putin had also been long frustrated with Western criticism of his war against Islamic separatists in Chechnya, whom he had labeled terrorists. But with the 9/11 attacks, the Russians believed that Washington was finally coming to understand the brutality and danger of Muslim extremists. Now they could work together against a common enemy.
The officials at the meeting were part of a standing partnership, the U.S.-Russia Working Group on Counterterrorism, but this time, the Americans were controlling the agenda. The head of the delegation, Richard Armitage, was the number two at the State Department and led the discussion. The longest presentation, however, was given by Cofer Black of the CIA, who shared intelligence obtained about the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaeda and then discussed the American plans to strike back hard. The Russians were slack-jawed by the information they received and had not anticipated its detail or fervor. The United States, they were shocked to find, had come full tilt.
At a break, the officials stood and chatted among themselves. Some Russian military officers walked around the table to where Black was still sitting, gathering his papers.
“We just wanted to say hello, wanted to talk to you,” one of the officers said.
There was a pause.
“Mr. Black,” the officer said. “Finally the Americans are acting like a superpower.”
Black smiled. Apparently, the Russians had been waiting a long time for America to get tough. This, he thought, was great.
•
• •
A group of Pentagon lawyers studied the piles of charts and photographs showing strategic bombing targets in Kabul and Kandahar. Each option had its own page complete with a classified photograph—some taken by satellite, some from the air, and a few from the ground. Superimposed on each image was a group of concentric ovals along with a color chart and a series of numbers. The ovals showed possible blast effects, with the range based on different assumptions—what time of day the attack might occur, whether there was a stone wall nearby—so that calculations could be made to limit collateral damage.
Bush had indirectly compelled the extensive review when he publicly stated that this was not a war against religion; if, he said, any of the bombs or missiles struck a mosque—or even damaged one from a distance—Muslims might believe they were witnessing an attack on their faith. So any potential bombing sites that smacked of having a religious connection received extra scrutiny.
Some appropriate targets were equally troublesome. Antiaircraft placements could normally be destroyed without hesitation, but the Taliban had placed some in centuries-old forts, the types of historic locations that the president had declared could not be bombed.
Rumsfeld grumbled about the legal somersaults, comparing them to his experience in 1975 when the Khmer Rouge government seized an American container ship, the SS Mayaguez. A decision was made to use F-111As to sink some of the Cambodian gunships near the Mayaguez. As White House chief of staff for President Ford, Rumsfeld watched as a group of men in the Oval Office gave orders to navy pilots flying in Southeast Asia. He reviled the exercise now unfolding in Washington as a horrible repetition of that absurd event.
500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars Page 11