Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House

by Peter Baker

  For Bush, this was his new mission. Until September 11, “Bush lacked a big organizing idea,” observed David Frum, his speechwriter. Now this war on terrorism would define his tenure. His domestic agenda, compassionate conservatism, all of it would take a backseat. “Nine-eleven blew him away, like it blew all of us away,” said Joe O’Neill, his friend. “All of a sudden, that overrode everything, getting reelected, everything. We were attacked, and so he was going to go after them.” And with his approval rating hitting 90 percent, the highest of any president ever recorded, he had considerable latitude.

  For Cheney, this was not so much a new mission as the mission for which he had long prepared. All those years focusing on continuity of government and homeland security seemed validated. “I think he has a certain level of fatalism and a feeling that the world is not a safe place,” said Anne Womack, who served as his press secretary, “and when 9/11 happened, my guess is that it confirmed a lot of things that he had felt for a long time.” From then on, nothing else would matter as much. “How are the bad guys going to get us?” said Kevin Kellems, another press secretary. “He woke up every morning with that first thing on his mind.” Pete Williams, his friend and former aide, said the vice president concluded that “the country was fundamentally unprepared” and “it was really kind of up to him.”

  Despite the surreal physical separation, Bush turned to Cheney in a way he had not before. Bush had let the vice president handle the transition during the recount, manage legislative strategy on Capitol Hill, and drive decisions on issues like energy. But as a former governor, Bush had command of most of the issues that dominated the national conversation until Septem- ber 11. Now he was heading into unfamiliar territory and happy to have Cheney as his guide. “In the period after that,” recalled Neil Patel, the Cheney aide, “they were almost closer than ever.”

  THE DAYS THAT followed the address to Congress were a blur of meetings and decisions, many of them improvisational as Bush and Cheney cobbled together a war plan that combined traditional military action, special forces, diplomacy, law enforcement, financial tools, and intelligence operations.

  On September 21, the day after the speech, Bush invited Cheney and the military team to the study on the second floor of his living quarters to talk about attacking Afghanistan, assuming the Taliban did not comply with his ultimatum. He cleared two hours from his schedule, an unusually long stretch in any president’s day, and seemed in no rush even when the discussion went long. “We’re okay, Don,” he assured Rumsfeld when the defense secretary hurried the generals briefing him. “This is important information.”

  General Tommy Franks, head of Central Command, which had responsibility for the region, presented a four-phase plan of attack on Afghanistan. Franks was from Midland, Texas, like Bush, and had gone to school with Laura. He bonded with the president in Lone Star fashion. Once, when Bush asked how he was doing, Franks answered, “I’m sharper than a frog hair split four ways.” Shucking his jacket and lighting up a cigar, Bush listened intently as the general outlined the succession of actions and basing rights he would need. The president’s dog Barney wandered around the room. Bush struck aides as focused but more relaxed than he had been since the attack.

  Rumsfeld warned that the plan was crude and quickly assembled. “You are not going to find this plan completely fulfilling,” he said. “We don’t.” General Hugh Shelton, the Joint Chiefs chairman appointed by Bill Clinton, thought that Bush, like his predecessor, “had a solid grasp of the tactical, operational specifics as well as the overall strategic concerns.” Bush wanted the operation to demonstrate an enduring commitment. He wanted a sense of progression, not just a single strike.

  Bush asked Franks how soon he could begin.

  “Mr. President, in about two weeks,” he said.

  “I understand,” Bush said. “Two weeks.”

  Franks noted that they could begin an air campaign sooner but wanted to launch Special Forces operations simultaneously and that would require negotiations for basing and transit rights with neighbors like Uzbekistan.

  “I understand,” Bush said. “A large air operation would make a statement.”

  He paused for a moment and then added, “On the other hand, I’m willing to wait. When we do this, we’ll do it right. My message to the American people is to be patient.”

  But patience was difficult with Americans itching for action. Bush worried that the longer it took to respond, the harder it would be to keep the public behind him. So when he heard that weekend that Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill was planning to announce moves to freeze assets of people and groups linked to terrorism, the president tracked down Karen Hughes at Sunday school.

  “This financial action is the first battle of the war,” he said. “Why am I not announcing this?”

  The next morning, September 24, Bush appeared in the Rose Garden with O’Neill and Colin Powell to announce the order. “Money is the lifeblood of terrorist operations,” he declared. “Today, we’re asking the world to stop payment.”

  FOR YEARS, BUSH had started each day reading the Bible, and in the days following September 11 he sought comfort from the holy book. One morning shortly after the attacks, he read Proverbs 21:15: When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers.

  The phrase may have stuck in Bush’s head. On September 25, he took a short motorcade ride over to FBI headquarters, which served as a venue for a speech urging Congress to pass the new law enforcement powers he was seeking. “I see things this way,” Bush said. “The people who did this act on America, and who may be planning further acts, are evil people. They don’t represent an ideology. They don’t represent a legitimate political group of people. They’re flat evil. That’s all they can think about, is evil.” He later used the word “evildoers” twice to describe terrorists.

  The speech bothered Ari Fleischer, who worried it might sound unsophisticated. In the car back to the White House, Fleischer advised Bush to go easy on the word “evil,” suggesting it was too simple.

  “If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?” Bush countered. He reminded Fleischer that Ronald Reagan had not gone to Berlin to say “put a gate in this wall” or “take down a few bricks.” He said “tear down this wall,” all of it. Sometimes simple was best.

  Bush was getting second-guessed at every turn. Not much later, Hughes broached his use of the word “folks” to describe the attackers.

  “Mr. President, I’m not sure you ought to be calling the terrorists ‘folks.’ It sounds like the nice people next door.”

  “Folks aren’t all good,” he said. “There are a lot of bad folks in the world.”

  “But it just sounds too familiar, too folksy,” she said. “These are trained killers and it just doesn’t sound right to call them folks.”

  Bush, irritated, turned to Andy Card, Condoleezza Rice, and Karl Rove. “Anybody else not like anything else I say?”

  On September 26, Bush and Cheney got word that the first CIA paramilitary operatives had arrived in Afghanistan. Fifteen days after Septem- ber 11, the United States was ready to take the fight to the enemy, implementing a strategy to dislodge the Taliban by using local Afghan forces on the ground aided by the power of American munitions from the air. Arriving in a Russian-made helicopter with a suitcase filled with $3 million in $100 bills, the CIA operatives were to hook up with the Northern Alliance, the ragtag collection of mainly Tajik and Uzbek fighters who had been waging a largely ineffective rebellion against the Taliban government since its inception but now had the world’s only superpower behind them.

  But as war in Afghanistan loomed, Bush also had his mind on something else. Even though he had shut down Paul Wolfowitz at Camp David, he had been pondering what to do about Iraq. After the National Security Council meeting that morning, Bush asked Rumsfeld to stay behind. The two talked alone in the Oval Office.

  “I want you to develop a plan to invade Iraq,” Bush said. “Do it outside the
normal channels. Do it creatively so we don’t have to take so much over.”

  Rumsfeld was surprised. The Pentagon’s on-the-shelf plan for Iraq was basically just Desert Storm redux. But since he was already reviewing all of the military’s stock war plans anyway, he told Bush, he could have Tommy Franks update the Iraq plan without drawing too much attention.

  The meeting, which would remain secret until Rumsfeld revealed it in his memoir in 2011, was the first time Bush set in motion the action that would ultimately shape his presidency. How intent he was at that point to go all the way was uncertain. Iraq had been a preoccupation of Bush and Cheney’s from the start, but that did not mean they always intended to invade. There was little public appetite for war with Iraq, and Bush had done nothing in his first eight months in office to build a case for it. “No one in the discussions at that time was pushing for an invasion of Iraq,” said Zalmay Khalilzad, a national security aide who would later go on to become ambassador to Baghdad. When Rumsfeld urged a high-level meeting to craft a new Iraq strategy in July, Bush did not follow up. It is possible he might have found cause for war eventually anyway, but it is also possible he would have simply waged a more aggressive version of the shadow campaign that had been going on since his father’s time, with covert operations to undermine Hussein and aid to opposition groups seeking regime change, everything short of troops on the ground.

  Either way, the experience of September 11 changed the dynamics. Even if Iraq did not have a relationship with al-Qaeda, as Cheney suspected, Hussein now looked more dangerous in a world where the United States could no longer afford to let threats fester. If Hussein once seemed manageable in the box Washington had constructed for him, it no longer seemed reasonable to Bush or Cheney to leave in power an openly hostile enemy of the United States who might have chemical, biological, or even possibly nuclear weapons that he could use himself or potentially pass along to terrorists.

  In years to come, that calculation would look different, but at that moment it seemed logical. Bush gave Rumsfeld his marching orders.

  But before letting him leave, Bush raised a personal matter.

  “Dick told me about your son,” Bush said. Rumsfeld’s grown son, Nick, had been struggling with drug addiction and just checked into a treatment facility.

  Rumsfeld, the tough man, unexpectedly broke down and cried. He could not even speak. Finally, recovering a bit of composure, he said, “I love him so much.”

  Bush was struck by the unusual display of emotion. “I can’t imagine the burden you are carrying for the country and your son,” he told Rumsfeld.

  Then Bush stood up, came from around his desk, and hugged him.

  Rumsfeld later jotted down notes in his day calendar about the meeting with the president. “Amazing day,” he wrote. “He is a fine human being.” And then at the bottom of the page, he scribbled, “Joyce says I have to let Nick go.”

  WHILE CIA OPERATIVES went to work, Bush and Cheney braced for more attacks at home. Every night when Bush went to bed, he felt a moment of relief that another day had passed without incident. Al-Qaeda had America on its heels, and now was surely the time it would press that advantage. It would take weeks, months, and even years to tighten security for a country as large and open as the United States, and it seemed implausible that terrorists would not mount follow-up attacks. “There was a pervasive feeling that 9/11 itself was not the end of the story,” remembered John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director.

  On September 28, McLaughlin sat in for Tenet to deliver the daily intelligence briefing to Bush and Cheney. They went through the various threats and tidbits of information picked up in the previous twenty-four hours.

  Finally, the president, anxious and edgy, asked, “Why do you think nothing else has happened?”

  McLaughlin did not have a certain answer. “Tighter security matters,” he offered. What they were doing made a difference. Their aggressive efforts to disrupt al-Qaeda, he theorized, might have militants scattered and in hiding.

  Bush hoped so. But he soon had reason to doubt it. On the morning of October 4, Bush got word of an attack in Florida using anthrax, a deadly biological agent. A photo editor at the Sun, the supermarket tabloid, had been hospitalized after opening an envelope containing the spores that had been mailed to the newspaper. No one knew if it was the work of terrorists, but Bush was anxious that this was the beginning of something much worse. Tightening security at airports was one thing. How could they stop a weapon they could not even see?

  Bush was heading to the State Department for a speech, but his mind was elsewhere. He looked haggard and worried, his shoulders slouched as he stared out the window of his car. “When Bush got the first information about Florida, nobody knew what the facts were yet,” remembered Ari Fleischer, who accompanied him. “That was the lowest I ever saw Bush.”

  Bush picked up the phone and called Karen Hughes, who was at home working on a statement. “I’m here with Ari,” Bush said. “Are you on a secure line?”

  No, she said.

  He went ahead anyway. “Well, we may have a case of anthrax in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We don’t know the source, it appears to be a high concentration in one person. This is a critical moment. We’ll need to calm people. I may need to make a statement.”

  In the end, they decided not to have the White House issue a statement but to have it come from the Department of Health and Human Services to avoid a panic. The statement emphasized that “so far this appears to be an isolated case.” At least they hoped it was. The Florida photo editor, Bob Stevens, died the next day, the first anthrax death in the United States in twenty-five years. The question was who was next. “There was a real, almost fatalistic concern that we were going to get hit again,” remembered Dean McGrath, Cheney’s deputy chief of staff. “In that atmosphere, the anthrax attack threw people for a loop.”

  AMID THE FEARS of a second wave, Bush and Cheney cast about for any advantage they could find, pressing intelligence agencies to push further. The National Security Agency, which operated spy satellites and tapped telephones and e-mail servers overseas, lifted some of its self-imposed restrictions. For years, in the interest of protecting civil liberties, it had employed a practice called “minimization”; if American citizens not under suspicion turned up in overseas eavesdropping, names and identifying information were generally omitted from reports. But after September 11, Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the agency director, removed those safeguards on communications out of Afghanistan.

  All of this was deemed legal by government lawyers. But when George Tenet mentioned the move to Bush and Cheney during a morning briefing, he made light of longtime sensitivities about the agency’s activities.

  Oh, by the way, Tenet said, Hayden is going to jail.

  Tell him we will bail him out, Cheney replied dryly.

  Turning serious, Tenet explained the process. Bush and Cheney had no objection and wondered if Hayden was going far enough.

  Is there anything else he could do? Cheney asked.

  Tenet said he would find out.

  After the meeting, Tenet called Hayden. “Is there anything else you could do?”

  “Not with my current authorities,” Hayden said.

  “That is not what I asked you,” Tenet said. “Is there anything else you could do?”

  Hayden said he would call back. After huddling with his staff, he came up with a plan to vastly widen the net. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the NSA could target communications involving someone inside the United States only with a warrant from a secret court. But with so many foreign telephone calls and e-mail now coming through American communications trunks, it was impractical, Hayden and his team concluded, to seek individual warrants. The average wait when the NSA asked the Justice Department to obtain covert permission was four to six weeks. Even using emergency authorization under the current law usually involved a delay of a day or so.

  A plan was devised to bypass the FISA law
by citing the president’s inherent power under Article II of the Constitution to defend the nation. The NSA would be authorized to collect the data and content of telephone calls and e-mail when there was probable cause to believe one person in the communication was in Afghanistan or preparing for terrorist acts.

  “Mr. Vice President,” Hayden said, “we can do this, but you know, we really have to be careful. Ever since the Church Committee, my agency up there, NSA, we have been at bat with a one-ball, two-strike count on us, you know. We aren’t taking close pitches.”

  “Okay,” Cheney said. “I understand.”

  The reference to the Church Committee touched directly on Cheney’s long-standing concern about limits placed on executive power. Named for Senator Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, the committee exposed abuses by the CIA, FBI and NSA in the 1970s, leading to reforms, including the FISA law. The committee was a thorn in the side of the Ford White House run by Cheney, who considered its queries an intrusion into executive activities.

  Bush summoned Hayden to the Oval Office to hear about his plan. Clearly Cheney had already briefed him.

  “Mike, thank you for coming,” the president began. “I understand your concerns, but you know, if there are things we could be doing, we ought to be doing them.”

  With the World Trade Center still smoldering and body parts still being recovered, the imperative was to do anything conceivable to avoid another attack. If the government had the ability to track communications of terror cells, Bush and Cheney reasoned, they had to do it. No legal niceties should stand in the way of that. If there were another attack, how could they explain not doing everything in their power to prevent it? Whatever it takes, the men at Ground Zero had told Bush.

  Hayden went home that evening and took a walk with his wife. “I have some choices here,” he told her. Without disclosing details, he said, “I can’t not do what I am being asked, but this is not without risk.”