Bob Woodward

by State of Denial (lit)

  On June 16, Bush was in Slovenia for a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, part of his first major overseas presidential trip. The president stood waiting for Putin's arrival with Donald B. Ensenat, an old fraternity buddy who had been sworn in just 10 days before as the chief of protocol at the State Department. Both men were members of the Yale Class of 1968, and had been members of Delta Kappa Epsilon, known as Deke. Bush's first mention in The New York Times, in November 1967, had been as a former Deke president defending the practice of branding new fraternity pledges with a hot coat hanger.

  In an interview in 2002, Bush gave me the following account of his conversation with Ensenat as they waited in the 16th-century Slovenian castle for a foreign head of state.

  It's amazing, isn't it, Enzo? Bush said, calling Ensenat by his fraternity nickname.

  Yes, Mr. President.

  It's a long way from Deke House at Yale.

  Yes, Mr. President.

  6

  on July 10, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terror organization. Black laid out the case, comprised of communications intercepts and other TOP SECRET intelligence, showing the increasing likelihood that al Qaeda would soon attack the U.S. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided that he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice from the car, and said he needed to see her now. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.

  For months Tenet had been pressing Rice to set a clear counterterrorism policy, including specific presidential orders called findings that would give the CIA stronger authority to conduct covert action against bin Laden. Perhaps a dramatic appearance—Black called it an out of cycle session, beyond Tenet's regular weekly meeting with Rice— would get her attention.

  Tenet had been losing sleep over the recent intelligence he'd seen. There was no conclusive, smoking-gun intelligence, but there was such a huge volume of data that an intelligence officer's instinct strongly suggested that something was coming. He and Black hoped to convey the depth of their anxiety and get Rice to kick-start the government into immediate action.

  Tenet, 48, the husky, gregarious son of Greek immigrants, had been head of the CIA for four years. He was the only Clinton administration holdover to serve on George W. Bush's National Security Council, and thus the only NSC member who had been serving in November and December 1999, just before the Millennium, when a series of worldwide al Qaeda plots had been disrupted. The current situation seemed reminiscent to Tenet.

  Back in 1999, the National Security Agency had intercepted a phone call by a bin Laden ally saying, The time for training is over. The intercept had led to the breakup of attacks in Jordan and Israel. A 32-year-old Algerian jihadist, Ahmed Ressam, had been caught trying to enter the United States from Canada before Christmas 1999 with explosives for an attack on Los Angeles International Airport. Tenet had called the CIA to battle stations. The American people are counting on you and me to take every appropriate step to protect them during this period, he said in a cable before the turn of the Millennium. There could be 15 or 20 attacks, he warned President Clinton. He spoke with the chiefs of 20 key friendly foreign intelligence services, triggering anti-terrorist operations and arrests in eight countries.

  Now, Tenet thought he was seeing something similar, possibly much worse. The NSA was intercepting ominous conversations among bin Laden's people—more than 34 in all—in which they made foreboding declarations about an approaching Zero Hour, and a pronouncement that Something spectacular is coming. Ten days earlier, on June 30, Tenet had ordered all his station chiefs to share al Qaeda intelligence with friendly local governments abroad and argue that their intelligence services should disrupt suspected terrorist cells in their countries. As he'd done in 1999, Tenet followed up on July 3 with personal calls or contacts with the chiefs of the same 20 friendly foreign intelligence services, asking them to detain named al Qaeda suspects in their countries and harass members of other terrorist cells affiliated with al Qaeda.

  They did not know when, where or how, but Tenet felt there was too much noise in the intelligence systems. Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the NSC counterterrorism director, It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.

  But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Rumsfeld had questioned all the NSA intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses. Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts. They concluded they were genuine al Qaeda communications. On June 30, a TOP SECRET senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined, Bin Laden Threats Are Real.

  Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, 52, a veteran covert operator with thinning hair and an improbably soft voice and manner who resembled a taller version of Karl Rove, had two main points when they met with her. First, al Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly within the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to act right now, that very moment, to undertake some action—covert, military, whatever—to thwart bin Laden.

  The U.S. has human and technical sources, and all our intelligence is consistent, the two men told Rice. Black acknowledged that some of it was uncertain voodoo, but said it was often this voodoo that was the best indicator.

  They both felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies. As they all knew, a coherent plan for covert action against bin Laden was in the pipeline, but it would take some time. In recent closed-door meetings the entire National Security Council apparatus had been considering action against bin Laden, including the use of a new secret weapon: the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, that could fire Hellfire missiles to kill him or his lieutenants. It looked like a possible solution, but there was a raging debate between the CIA and the Pentagon about who would pay for it and who would have authority to shoot. Besides, Rice had seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place.

  Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk. Black felt the decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long. Adults should not have a system like this, he said later.

  Black calculated that if they had given him $500 million of covert action funds right then and reasonable authorizations from the president to go kill bin Laden, he would have been able to make great strides if not do away with him. Bin Laden operated from an unusual sanctuary in Afghanistan, which was ruled by the extremist Taliban. Possible covert action was no mere abstraction. Over the last two years—and as recently as March 2001—the CIA had deployed paramilitary teams five times into Afghanistan to work with the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, a loose federation of militias and tribes in the north. The CIA had about 100 sources and subsources operating throughout Afghanistan. Just give him the money and the authority and he might be able to bring bin Laden's head back in a box.

  The July 10, 2001, meeting with Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, but it stood out in the minds of both Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al Qaeda. Though the investigators had access to all the paperwork about the
meeting, Black felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about. It was what happened in investigations. There were questions they wanted to ask, and questions they didn't want to ask.

  Philip Zelikow, the aggressive executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which investigated the terrorist attacks, and a University of Virginia professor who had co-authored a book with Rice on Germany, knew something about the July 10 meeting. Indeed, Tenet and Black had demanded action that day, but it was not clear to Zelikow what immediate action really would have meant. The strategic warning Tenet and Black gave lacked details. When? Where? How?

  Besides, Zelikow concluded, the planning for covert action to go after bin Laden in his sanctuary in Afghanistan actually did go forward at a pretty fast clip—quite fast for a national security bureaucracy, he felt, although the plan was not approved before the September 11 attacks. In fact, Rice had a National Security Presidential Directive to launch a new covert war against bin Laden set to go to Bush on September 10, 2001. It was NSPD-9, meaning eight other foreign policy matters had been formally debated, agreed on and signed by the president as administration policy before the plan to go after bin Laden.

  Rumsfeld worked weekends. One Saturday in early August 2001 he summoned Shelton, the operations director, and all the section chiefs involved in the 68 war plans on the shelf, including the major war plans for Iraq and North Korea. It was a grueling session. Rumsfeld wanted to examine the assumptions. I sat there and these people couldn't believe it, he told me in an interview. It took most of the day. And then one colonel would pop up and he'd go through the assumptions and I'd discuss them and talk about them. And then the next guy would come up and we went through one after another after another. The formal guidance for these plans from the secretary of defense and the president was in some cases four or five years old. Yet it had never been even discussed here, in the secretary's office, Rumsfeld recalled with disdain.

  We are going to be here for about a week if we keep up this pace, Admiral Giambastiani told Rumsfeld during the Saturday session.

  Rumsfeld was not going to give up. The plans seemed to be stymied by the technical problem of matching objectives with force levels. This was the grunt work, in his opinion, that the colonels solved just by throwing more and more troops into the war plans. They were risk-averse. He wasn't. He was willing, even eager, to assume risk.

  Shelton had been chairman since 1997. His four-year term would be up in the fall. Rumsfeld assigned the sensitive task of helping find a successor to Staser Holcomb, the kitchen cabinet consultant and retired vice admiral who had been his military assistant 25 years earlier. Holcomb started with a staggering list of 150 officers. He interviewed half himself, culled the list and consulted about 40 active and retired military and civilians—people he called trusted old hands. The list included some retired officers and some three-stars who were technically not eligible. He listed a dozen characteristics the new chairman should have, including candor and forthrightness—willingness to disagree, then effectively support the decisions reached.

  The prospect that a three-star or a retired officer might jump to the chairmanship sent shock waves through the senior, four-star ranks of the active military.

  Holcomb had been asking to see Marine Commandant General James L. Jones, a tough, 6-foot-5 Marine who had a cosmopolitan side. Jones, who had grown up in Paris and was fluent in French, had graduated from Georgetown University in 1966 with a degree in international relations. He had joined the Marines through officer candidate school the next year and served as a platoon leader in combat in Vietnam. He'd had all the right assignments—chief aide to the Marine commandant, Marine division commander and then, in 1997, military aide to Secretary of Defense William Cohen. Cohen and Jones were close friends, going back nearly two decades when Cohen was a U.S. senator from Maine and Jones, then a major, had been the Marine liaison in the Senate. Cohen had seen that Jones was appointed commandant, the senior Marine and member of the Joint Chiefs. Jones knew that the Cohen connection made him suspect in the Rumsfeld Pentagon.

  When Holcomb went to see Jones, he said part of his work for Rumsfeld was to identify bright two- and three-stars who thought the right way on transformation. Holcomb said he was going to be there only six weeks.

  Admiral, Jones said, everyone who has been in here has said that.

  Jones thought that was part of the problem with the Rumsfeld model. The U.S. military was not a think tank where consultants, moving in and out with big, new, bold ideas, could really help.

  Still, Jones was on Holcomb's list as a possible chairman. He was called with no advance warning on a Saturday morning for an interview with Rumsfeld about the JCS chairmanship. During Rumsfeld's first months back at the Pentagon, Jones had found himself largely in the dark about what the secretary was doing. As the top Marine—counterpart to Vern Clark at the Navy—he also couldn't get copies of some of the studies Rumsfeld assigned to his civilian staff and consultants.

  Jones always had time and showed respect for anyone, whatever their rank or station in life, and he was surprised by Rumsfeld's curt manner. The secretary at times didn't even say hello. Jones felt that Rumsfeld was mostly concerned with his own ideas. He gave the appearance of being deliberate and thoughtful but he often shot from the hip. Rumsfeld's self-importance and arrogance infected everything, Jones concluded. Who would want to be his chairman and senior military adviser, given that it appeared Rumsfeld didn't really want military advice? He wanted voluminous information and detail from others, but then he would only follow his own advice.

  Jones took the unusual step of declining the interview, saying he wanted to remain Marine commandant.

  Shelton, an Army man, had concluded that the best person to succeed him was the chief of naval operations, Admiral Clark. Though Clark had only been the CNO for about a year, his performance as Joint Staff operations director and overall staff director meant he knew the system. In Shelton's view, Clark was unusual: a team player with fierce independence. If Clark disagreed, he said so. But his style was straightforward and not threatening. Clark was the one officer who might survive Rumsfeld and preserve some sense of dignity and independence for the uniformed military. This had to be done before Rumsfeld changed the system forever.

  With an MBA from the University of Arkansas, Clark tried to keep up with best-selling business books. One favorite was Jim Collins's bestseller, Good to Great, about businesses with average performances that suddenly experience high growth. Collins's book stresses the importance of humility, discipline and how an individual's core beliefs help define a corporate culture. It had a lasting impact on Clark.

  What does this person really believe? became Clark's frequently asked question as he evaluated the Navy's senior officers. It created problems when an individual's beliefs did not align with the culture and values of an organization.

  As the sweepstakes to replace Shelton opened in the summer of 2001, Clark received a message that he was to see President Bush in several days.

  Clark called his former deputy, Admiral G, in Rumsfeld's office.

  What is this all about?

  This is about you interviewing to be the chairman, Giambastiani said.

  Well, bullshit, I'm not going to be interviewed to be chairman without at least talking to Don Rumsfeld. Nobody's talked to me about that.

  Sir, you're kidding! Giambastiani replied. Rumsfeld and Clark had met recently. What did you do in there the other day?

  We talked about all the candidates and who the players were and who the leaders were in the department and their qualities.

  You never talked about you?

  No.

  You're on the short list, Giambastiani said.

  Clark felt that preferably the next chairman should not come from among the current heads of the four individual military services. Ideally the new chairman should be selected from the combatant commanders—the CINCs, short for commanders in chief—who cont
rolled operational forces, such as Admiral Blair in the Pacific or Army General Tommy Franks in the Middle East.

  Under the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, power had shifted from the service chiefs to the CINCs. Service chiefs, himself included, were too parochial. They simply recruited, equipped and trained their individual services. The CINCs, on the other hand, used the forces and fought the wars. These were joint commanders—a Navy admiral or Air Force general might lead Army and Marine ground forces—and the future of the military was in jointness, the services working together. In Clark's view they needed a sitting CINC who had done it, practiced jointness, to move up to the chairmanship. Clark had been a CINC—head of the Atlantic Command, but only for five months before becoming the CNO. As CNO he had no real operational role, but he had an important job as the top Navy admiral. And Clark believed he was on the road to improving the Navy.

  I'm not going to see the president, Clark told Giambastiani, until I've at least talked to Don Rumsfeld about this.

  7

  admiral Giambastiani squeezed in an appointment for Clark to see Rumsfeld at 6:45 p.m. on a Friday. Rumsfeld was in a hurry that night, and they agreed to meet on Sunday after church.

  Clark opened strong. I'm not going over there to talk about this. You and I have never even had the discussion about this. Clark told Rumsfeld they needed to discuss all the issues to see what their priorities and goals and beliefs were. Were they the same? What did Rumsfeld want? They needed an understanding. There was lots of confusion about the chairman's role. Clark believed in setting priorities; in the Navy, he focused on five top priorities. If you had 100 priorities, nothing got done. What were Rumsfeld's priorities for the entire United States military?

  Rumsfeld waved away the questions.

  You don't trust us, Clark said, going to the heart of the matter, realizing that it was the first time he had a chance to get his true feelings about Rumsfeld off his chest.