by Peter Baker
Bush signed an order on October 4 authorizing the new program. He built safeguards into it, requiring it be recertified roughly every thirty or forty-five days. But in the rush to start, Attorney General John Ashcroft was asked to certify the program on the same day he was told about it, and the first formal Office of Legal Counsel opinion supporting its legality by a young lawyer named John Yoo was not drafted until a month later, on November 2.
There was discussion about whether Congress should be told. Bush agreed to inform only the leadership. Cheney invited the Gang of Eight—leaders of both parties from both houses, plus chairmen and ranking minority members of the Intelligence Committees. Cheney and Hayden explained the program and what it could do.
“Do we need legislation?” Cheney asked.
Speaker Dennis Hastert said later that “everybody looked around the room and said no, I don’t think we need to.”
The lawmakers were forbidden to discuss the program with colleagues or aides, so they had no way to research more rigorously its legality. Indeed, virtually no one else would know about the program for years, not even some of Bush’s closest advisers. David Addington personally drafted the reauthorization orders and delivered them to the NSA himself. When NSA lawyers asked to see the Justice Department memo outlining the program’s legal basis, Addington refused. Even Donald Rumsfeld was not informed at first, although the NSA reported to him. This would remain for four years one of the most protected secrets of Bush and Cheney’s war on terror.
10
“We’re going to lose our prey”
President Bush was on the couch in his office in the Laurel Lodge at Camp David the following weekend as Michael Gerson sat at the desk typing a statement. The military was ready to begin operations in Afghanistan. Bush did not want a piece of rhetoric, just a straightforward message describing what was happening in firm tones.
While Gerson composed, Bush worked the phones notifying Senator Trent Lott and other congressional leaders. The secure lines kept cutting out, aggravating Bush.
At one point, Bush put his hand over the phone. “Are you cleared for any of this?” he asked Gerson.
“I don’t think so,” Gerson answered.
“You are now,” Bush said.
Events were moving so quickly that much was happening on the fly. Bush had canceled a visit from friends the previous weekend because of reported threats, but this weekend Michael and Nancy Weiss from Texas were with him at Camp David along with Gerson, Karen Hughes, Andy Card, and Condoleezza Rice. He went through the motions without giving away to his friends what was about to happen. Laura Bush had comfort food made for dinner that night, October 6: chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and banana pudding for dessert. During the meal, friends noticed, an aide would bring notes to Bush and Rice, and they would scribble on them and send them back. The next morning Bush took his friends with him by helicopter to Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he marked the twentieth annual tribute to fallen firefighters. When they boarded the helicopters again, Bush began practicing his statement. “You can surmise that we started bombing Afghanistan,” he told the Weisses.
Back at the White House, the red light on the camera in the Treaty Room went on at 1:00 p.m. “Good afternoon,” Bush said. “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against al-Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” He had given the Taliban a chance. “And now the Taliban will pay a price.”
He recognized others would pay a price too. “I recently received a touching letter that says a lot about the state of America in these difficult times—a letter from a 4th-grade girl, with a father in the military. ‘As much as I don’t want my Dad to fight,’ she wrote, ‘I’m willing to give him to you.’ ” He wrapped up in seven minutes, closing with the line from his address to Congress. “The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver. We will not tire. We will not falter. And we will not fail.”
The bombs that rained down on Kabul brought into vivid relief the anger and retribution of a superpower, but days would pass without substantial movement as twenty-first-century technology met fifteenth-century battleground. In relying on Northern Alliance fighters clad in plastic sandals and flowing robes rather than inserting a large American ground force, Bush and Cheney were hostage to some extent to a primitive army they could not control. And as Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz predicted, the bombing quickly took out the few legitimate targets from the air.
At the same time, the home front felt increasingly vulnerable. On October 15, Bush was told that Tom Daschle’s Senate office had received a letter with anthrax powder in it. Since the first attack in Florida, anthrax had also been found in a letter sent to the NBC News anchorman Tom Brokaw. Like the Florida letter, the Daschle and Brokaw letters were marked by hand “09–11–01” and mailed from Trenton, New Jersey. Mail rooms were shut down and bags of mail deposited in the vice president’s office on Capitol Hill since it was not used as regularly as other space; antibiotics were snapped up all over town. Bush and Cheney wanted to know who was behind it, and suspicions turned to al-Qaeda and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, the new form of warfare was bound to foster territorial tension and command confusion. The CIA had taken the lead in organizing the Northern Alliance on the ground, while the military would stick to a “light footprint” and concentrate its energies on bombing targets identified by the agency’s operatives and allies. Sure enough, the unprecedented arrangement boiled over at a National Security Council meeting the next day, October 16.
Rumsfeld complained this was the CIA’s strategy and “we’re just executing the strategy.”
John McLaughlin, the deputy CIA director sitting in for George Tenet, said the agency was simply supporting the regional military commander, Tommy Franks, and had made clear that once Afghanistan became a war zone, he would have the final word.
“No,” Rumsfeld shot back, “you guys are in charge.”
Bush noticed Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state sitting in for Colin Powell, shaking his head and asked what he thought.
“Well, sir, I think it’s all FUBAR,” he said, an old-fashioned acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition.”
Bush, frustrated, turned to Condoleezza Rice. “Condi, fix it,” he ordered.
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY was about to die. Or so he was told.
More than five weeks after the September 11 attacks, he was finally going to New York to view the damage for the first time. He had accepted an invitation to address the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, an annual white-tie dinner benefiting Catholic charities.
But as Air Force Two raced north to New York on October 18, Cheney got word of another possible threat. Scooter Libby told him that biological sensors at the White House had detected the possibility of botulinum toxin, an agent so powerful and lethal that, Cheney was told, as little as a single gram could theoretically kill one million people. Anyone who had been in the White House could have been exposed—including the president and the vice president. Bush had just arrived for a summit in Shanghai, where it was the middle of the night, so Cheney decided not to wake him until there was more information.
When his jet landed, Cheney instructed Libby to stay on board and learn more while the vice president flew by helicopter to Ground Zero. The site was as horrific as it had been the day it happened. If mere box cutters were enough to cause this, Cheney could only imagine the swath of death and destruction that terrorists with biological weapons like botulinum toxin could wreak. By the time he got to the Waldorf Astoria hotel to get ready for the dinner, he found Libby waiting to update him. There had indeed been two positive hits on a White House detector. Further tests were being conducted that would provide more definitive results by noon the next day.
Cheney alrea
dy had a secure videoconference scheduled with Bush for when he woke in Shanghai.
Bush strode into a specially designed blue tent set up inside the Ritz-Carlton to block Chinese eavesdropping.
“Good morning, Dick,” Bush said.
Gazing at the video screen, he saw Cheney in white tie and tails for the speech, but the vice president seemed stricken. Bush asked if everything was all right.
“Mr. President,” Cheney started soberly, “the White House biological detectors have registered the presence of botulinum toxin and there is no reliable antidote. Those of us who have been exposed to it could die.”
Bush, taken aback, sought to understand what he had just heard. “What was that, Dick?” he asked.
Colin Powell jumped in. “What is the exposure time?” he asked.
Bush and Condoleezza Rice assumed he was calculating his last time in the White House, trying to figure out whether he had been exposed too. It turned out he had been there within the possible exposure window.
Since all they could do was wait for tests, the discussion soon moved on to Afghanistan, but the possible biological outbreak remained on everyone’s mind. After the conference, Bush asked Rice to find out when they would know. It turned out mice were being injected, and if there was a presence of the agent, they would die. So, Rice told Bush, conveying Stephen Hadley’s explanation, if the mice’s feet were up, they were all exposed; if they were feet down, they were fine.
Cheney learned separately from John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge that fifty-eight hours had passed since the last sensor went off, meaning they would probably be showing symptoms by now if they had been exposed. He went ahead with his speech at the charity dinner, joking that “it’s nice, for a change, to be at a disclosed location.” He went on to vow a relentless war on terrorists that will “only end with their complete and permanent destruction.” But in China, the hours stretched on agonizingly slowly as Bush, Rice, and Powell waited to learn their fate. Finally, Rice got word from Washington. “Feet down, not up,” she told Bush. It was a false alarm; there was no botulinum toxin.
The fear inside the West Wing grew on October 23, when Bush and Cheney were told that Pakistan had arrested two nuclear scientists who had been in contact with Osama bin Laden, possibly to help al-Qaeda build a bomb. It was heart-stopping news, everything Cheney had feared since the moment the planes hit the Twin Towers. The Pakistanis had picked up the two scientists in response to a tip from American intelligence agencies. When Bush and Cheney sat down with the rest of the National Security Council in the Situation Room that morning, they presented the most alarming variant of what they had been told.
Bin Laden “may have a nuclear device” that could destroy half of Washington, Bush told the team, and there was enough unaccounted-for Russian-made weapons-grade fissile material to produce a bomb.
Cheney looked pale, thought General Richard Myers, who had succeeded Hugh Shelton as chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
“We have to intensify the hunt for Osama bin Laden,” the vice president insisted.
Later that day, Bush learned that two U.S. Postal Service workers in Washington had died from anthrax poisoning. They had evidently handled poisoned letters coming through their facility. Since the tainted letter arrived in Daschle’s office a week before, several other exposures had been reported as well. But Bush and Cheney still had no answer about who was behind it.
Bush was “deeply affected” by the anthrax attacks, his aide Scott McClellan observed. It was an unsettling time—the botulinum scare, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientists, and the anthrax. When Bush’s cousin John Ellis came to visit, the two went out to the South Lawn after dinner to walk the dog. The president noticed a plane approaching Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. If it turned left and headed toward the White House, he observed, they would have less than a minute before being killed.
To Cheney, the latest events confirmed what he already felt. “The threat going forward wasn’t just another 9/11-style attack,” he observed later. “It was, and remains, the possibility that the next one could be far deadlier and more devastating than anything we have ever seen.”
BUSH HAD JUST finished his workout on the evening of October 25 when Rice came to see him in the White House residence. He was still in his gym shorts and socks. She said she was worried about the mood among his war cabinet advisers, who were nervous about a quagmire in Afghanistan, a prospect that increasingly flavored media accounts.
“You know, Mr. President,” she said, “the mood isn’t very good among the principals and people are concerned about what’s going on. And I want to know if you’re concerned about the fact that things are not moving.”
“Of course I’m concerned about the fact that things aren’t moving.”
“Well, do you want to start looking at alternative strategies?”
“Well, what alternative strategies would we be looking at?” he asked.
“Well, you know, there always is the thought that you could use more Americans in this. You could Americanize this up front.”
“You know,” Bush said, “it hasn’t been that long.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think it’s working?”
She ducked but suggested he address the matter with his team.
He agreed. But before he did, he asked Cheney’s advice. “Is there any qualm in your mind about this strategy we’ve developed?” Bush asked.
Cheney answered flatly, “No, Mr. President.”
At the National Security Council meeting the next morning, October 26, Bush let the participants make their routine presentations before raising the point.
“I just want to make sure that all of us did agree on this plan, right?”
He went around the table, asking the cabinet secretaries one by one, and then their deputies on the back wall. Everyone agreed; they had embraced the strategy.
“Anybody have any ideas they want to put on the table?” he asked.
No one did.
Fine, Bush said, then they should stick with the plan and not let the press panic them. It had only been nineteen days. “We’re going to stay confident and patient, cool and steady,” he said.
Bush and Rice thought they sensed relief. Perhaps that had defused the tension.
The same day, Bush signed legislation providing the kinds of expanded powers John Ashcroft had first broached at Camp David. The measure allowed the government to obtain “roving wiretaps” targeting individuals regardless of which telephone they used. It empowered federal agents to obtain orders allowing them to seize “any tangible things” related to a security investigation, including business customer records. It expanded the power to seize assets and deport suspects while lengthening the statute of limitations and sentences for terrorism-related crimes. Terrorism investigators would gain powers already available in drug and racketeering prosecutions. But the language was expansive enough that the government would have vast new abilities to peer into the lives of citizens it suspected of extremist ties. Congress set some provisions to expire unless renewed after several years but otherwise brushed off objections that the measure violated civil liberties. The Senate passed it with just one no vote and the House with just sixty-six.
Lawmakers were in a rush to bolster the nation’s defenses and to show how tough they were at the same time. “Hardly able to restrain themselves, the Committee labeled the bill the ‘PATRIOT Act,’ ” a White House memo noted after it cleared its first hurdle. Bush never retreated from the measure, but he did regret the name because it implied that its opponents “were unpatriotic.” After leaving office, he concluded, “I should have pushed Congress to change the name of the bill before I signed it.”
The drumbeat of security threats reached a crescendo a few days later when intercepted conversations of al-Qaeda operatives indicated something big on the way, possibly a radiological attack that would be more devastating than September 11. At the National Security Council meeting on October 29, Bu
sh was in a defiant mood.
“Those bastards are going to find me exactly here,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere. And if they get me, they’re going to get me right here.”
Cheney pushed back gently. “This isn’t about you,” the vice president told him. “This is about our Constitution.”
The Constitution, though, sometimes seemed to depend on the eye of the beholder. It was around this time that the NSA warrantless surveillance program came up for reauthorization for the first time. Michael Hayden, the agency director, believed the program was producing results. But as he discussed the reauthorization with David Addington, he learned something he did not know.
“Now, you know the order allows you to do domestic to domestic?” Addington asked. The order had been written so broadly that it authorized the NSA to tap not just calls or e-mails with at least one person overseas without warrants but even communications entirely within the United States.
Hayden was surprised. “No, I didn’t know that, David,” he said. Then he asked that it be taken out. “My personal view, number one, we are a foreign intelligence agency. It is not what we do. Number two, my personal metric for doing that is if we are doing domestic to domestic, I am going to court. Okay?”
“Okay,” Addington said, and then swung around in his chair back to his computer to rewrite the order. Bush signed it November 2.
OF ALL THE duties in those first weeks of the war, one that took an inordinate toll on Bush’s stress level was the prospect of throwing out the first pitch at the third game of the World Series in New York. It was meant to be a powerful display of resolve during a time of crisis, and what better place than the city that had borne the brunt of the attacks. But Bush was nervous. The first time he threw out a pitch as president, way back in April at the opening of Miller Park in Milwaukee, the ball hit the dirt. Not many were paying attention then. Now the eyes of the world would be on him.