This would not be some criminal case—it was war. Bin Laden and his ilk couldn’t simply be snapped up in Kabul and hustled off to Manhattan for trial. The questions would surface immediately: Could war crimes be charged as civilian offenses? What would the procedures be? What would be the standards of evidence? How could intelligence about al-Qaeda and bin Laden be used without public disclosure? Then there was the danger—the threat of terrorist attacks on judges, jurors, even people living near the courthouse, would be tremendous.
In America’s past wars, enemy troops were captured and held until hostilities ended, then returned to their home countries. But terrorists were not soldiers. They didn’t fight under the authority of any nation. Hostilities might never end. And if they did, there was no place to seal the terrorists off from the civilized world.
There had to be some form of justice system, outside of the criminal courts, for determining whether terrorists could be lawfully held forever, or even executed. Someone just had to figure out what it was.
This was a matter, Gonzales decided, that should involve the best minds from across the administration. He approached Pierre-Richard Prosper, a former war crimes prosecutor with the United Nations who now served as ambassador-at-large with the State Department’s Office of War Crimes Issues. Gonzales had respect for Prosper and considered him a diplomat who would carefully weigh the options in a calm and broad manner. He would be a counterbalance, Gonzales thought, to Addington’s hard-charging approach.
At a meeting with Prosper and Addington, Gonzales laid out the issues. “What we need,” he said, “is to understand our alternatives here.” Would Prosper be willing, he asked, to study the issues and make a recommendation for the president?
Absolutely, Prosper replied.
• • •
Cheney and Addington weren’t about to just wait around for Pierre Prosper. This, they agreed, was not a time for the chin-stroking contemplations of a study group.
The CIA was already heading into Afghanistan; the military would be joining it quickly. Scores, if not hundreds, of terrorists would soon be in American custody. If Washington dawdled, relying on bureaucracies or interagency committees to devise plans for bringing the enemy to justice, the decision might be determined by circumstance. The Justice Department could well start demanding that the Pentagon turn over its captives for criminal prosecution—a disastrous outcome, both men thought.
Addington came up with what he considered the ideal solution. The next morning, he attended a staff meeting with Gonzales, then afterward wandered into Flanigan’s office.
“We ought to take a look at the military commission set up by Roosevelt,” he said.
Addington launched into a history lesson. Franklin Roosevelt convened a commission in 1942. It was charged with trying eight German saboteurs who had sneaked into the United States as part of a Nazi plan to stage attacks on economic targets. The infiltrators were not soldiers, so could not be held as prisoners of war. But criminal courts would be slow and couldn’t guarantee the sentences that Roosevelt and his attorney general wanted—death, or at least life in prison. Plus, since the saboteurs had plotted to attack civilian locations on behalf of the Nazis, they were not criminals. They were, Roosevelt declared, unlawful combatants.
After the military tribunal began its work, the German prisoners filed a brief arguing that their prosecution should be held in civilian court, where they would enjoy constitutional rights. Their case, called Ex Parte Quirin, went to the Supreme Court, which upheld Roosevelt’s order as constitutional. After the ruling, commission hearings were held, convictions handed down, and sentences imposed. Six of the Germans were executed; two were jailed. The whole procedure—including the trip to the Supreme Court—lasted four weeks.
“This may be the perfect solution,” Addington said.
• • •
The terrifying classified information was passed from American intelligence officials to their counterparts in Canada. To avoid a panic, the details could not be publicly released—indeed, they would still be secret more than a decade after 9/11.
Additional weapons had been discovered on commercial airliners—box cutters, knives, and the like. The planes where they had been stashed had been grounded after the attacks began. And blades weren’t just hidden on aircraft in the United States—some had also been found on commercial jets at Canadian airports. But by the time the weaponry had been located, the passengers on each flight were long gone.
On September 18, a Canadian intelligence unit issued a classified report to government officials, warning of the danger.
“Weapons, similar to those identified on the hijacked planes have been found aboard other aircraft in Canada and the United States in the last few days,” the report read. “These weapons may have been intended for additional attacks or were backups in case the other attacks failed.”
Controls on the border between the United States and Canada had been beefed up after the attacks. But, with the knowledge that more hijackers might be lying in wait, both governments tightened the restrictions even more. Then, the desperate search began. Intelligence operatives dug through their files looking for the names of jihadists residing in either country who might be part of the next wave of attacks.
• • •
Just past 8:30 that same night, Abdullah Almalki was in his Ottawa apartment watching television with his family when the doorbell rang. Almalki couldn’t quite decide if he should be annoyed or just surprised—with small children at home, this was awfully late for an unannounced visit.
He opened the door. In the hallway was a man in a suit.
“Mr. Almalki, my name is Alexander Gelvan. I’m with CSIS.”
Gelvan handed over an identity card. Almalki studied it—Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Canada’s CIA.
This wasn’t the first time that CSIS had dropped by. Three years earlier, another agent, Theresa Sullivan, had asked to speak with him. Back then, Almalki saw no reason to refuse. Instead, he gave her his life story. He had moved to Canada from Syria in 1987, when he was sixteen. He had attended Canadian schools and became an electrical engineer. In the summer of 1993, he had traveled to Afghanistan for two months to help on a reconstruction project that had been awarded to a Canadian agency, Human Concern International. Ahmed Said Khadr operated that group, but Almalki hadn’t liked the man’s management style, he had told Sullivan.
Sullivan’s ears had pricked up. Khadr was a name she knew—he was suspected of having close ties to militant mujahideen, as well as to bin Laden himself. She had pressed Almalki for more information. Had he received military training in Afghanistan? Did he know any mujahideen?
Absolutely not, he had responded. He was a businessman, an engineer who had started his own electronics export business, Dawn Services. His company served as a middleman in acquiring, repacking, and selling equipment like handheld radios to Microelectronics International, a Pakistani behemoth that supplied technology to that country’s military. Had he ever sold equipment to the Taliban? Sullivan had asked. Again, no.
In the intervening years, Almalki had heard from Sullivan one more time. Then he noticed some oddities. All of his company’s shipments were being searched by customs. He was stopped at an airport and intensively interrogated about his business dealings. He was asked to meet with other CSIS agents, who questioned him about a trip he had taken to Hong Kong.
Almalki felt harassed and eventually hired a lawyer to keep the intelligence operatives off his back. So on this night, just a week after the 9/11 attacks, he was hardly in the mood to speak with Gelvan, the CSIS agent who had just popped up on his doorstep.
“I want to ask you some questions,” Gelvan said.
“No,” Almalki replied. “If you want to talk to me, I have to have my lawyer present.”
That wasn’t necessary, Gelvan replied. He just wanted to get some information. Almalki had a Muslim friend in Montreal, Ibrahym Adam, who possessed both a pilot’s license and his own
single-engine Cessna airplane. No one had seen Adam for a week, Gelvan said, and CSIS wanted to locate him. Almalki thought he understood what Gelvan was implying—Adam was one of the 9/11 hijackers.
“Ibrahym would never do anything like that,” Almalki said. “If you look at Islamic law, you cannot do such things. Those attacks totally go against the teachings of Islam.”
Gelvan persisted, but Almalki repeated that he did not know where his friend was and had nothing else to say. When the CSIS agent left, Almalki went straight for the telephone and called Adam. His friend was not there, and Almalki left a message.
The next day, Adam called back. Almalki told him about the strange visit from Gelvan, and the CSIS agent’s statement that Adam was missing.
“No, I’m not missing,” Adam responded, sounding perplexed. “And CSIS knows that. They’ve been questioning me, too.”
Almalki put down the phone, his mind racing. He was—scared? Angry? Confused? Whatever his emotions, he knew that he would have to be careful. Somehow, CSIS agents must believe they had suspicious information about him. And he had no idea what it might be.
• • •
It was a morning of threes in the basement of the CIA on September 19. There were three unmarked cardboard boxes, sealed up with tape, looking like something a homeowner might toss into an attic. Inside them, there were three hundred bundles of cash. The money totaled $3 million.
The currency was one of the first, and most important, weapons for seven intelligence agents about to be secretly inserted into Afghanistan, something that would allow them to grease some palms to earn the cooperation of indigenous fighters. Code-named “Jawbreaker,” the group was responsible for laying the groundwork in the war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
Gary Schroen, a thirty-five-year CIA veteran tapped to lead Jawbreaker, arrived about 10:30 at the Counterterrorist Center to take charge of the cash. Cofer Black had asked him just two days after the terrorist attacks to accept the assignment, and Schroen had moved into place quickly—after a matter of days, his team was ready to be deployed. Moving the boxes was not easy; he found that so much cash, in hundred-dollar bills, is awfully heavy. He needed a cart to get the money where it needed to be.
About fifteen minutes later, he caught up with the other team members in a parking area who were standing beside piles of luggage. A Chevy Suburban arrived, and the men loaded it up.
Schroen headed back inside and walked to Black’s office for one last briefing.
Black looked up when Schroen arrived. “Hey!”
The men sat at a table, discussing the travel plans.
“Gary,” he said, “I want to give you your marching orders.”
He had discussed everything he was about to say with Bush, who was in full agreement. Jawbreaker was to project into Afghanistan and meet with the Northern Alliance. Then, the agents would have to determine what the needs of the alliance were in order to facilitate the arrival of the American military, allowing the troops to use the Panjshir Valley as a staging area so that they could engage and destroy al-Qaeda.
“On the battlefield, if you see bin Laden killed, we need DNA evidence of his death, which would require bringing back part of his body,” Cofer said. “We cannot just accept that the target has been taken out.”
And if there was a choice of body parts to bring, Black said, the head would be better than hands. He paused.
“Have I made myself clear?”
• • •
At Rockefeller Center, the New York offices for NBC News were in near chaos, with an army of reporters and producers chasing leads about the 9/11 attacks.
In an outer portion of the newsroom, Casey Chamberlain was sorting through the mail for Tom Brokaw, the anchor of the NBC Nightly News. She came across a hand-printed envelope with no return address—probably another ranting letter of the sort Brokaw received every day.
She opened the envelope, and a brown, granular substance spilled out. She brushed it into the wastebasket, then opened the letter. The paper was cut on some of its sides, as if the author was trying to shape it. Chamberlain read the message. No surprise—typical crackpot fare.
9-11-01
THIS IS NEXT
TAKE PENACILIN NOW
DEATH TO AMERICA
DEATH TO ISRAEL
ALLAH IS GREAT
The misspelling of penicillin and the darkening of some of the As and Ts struck her as odd. That, plus the threatening tone, made her think that someone else needed to see the letter. She sent it on to Erin O’Connor, Brokaw’s assistant.
O’Connor read it but decided not to bother her boss, who had been working almost nonstop since the attacks. This new letter wasn’t much different from other off-the-wall missives that had been arriving since 9/11; it wasn’t even the first one with some sort of substance inside. Weeks before, O’Connor had opened a letter for Brokaw and a white powder had spilled out. Just to be cautious, she had sent that material to NBC security so it could be examined.
This time, O’Connor decided not to alert anyone; Chamberlain had already tossed out most of the material. But she was still a bit suspicious. Rather than just throwing the letter away, O’Connor set it on the side of her desk.
• • •
Brokaw was walking past O’Connor’s desk the next day when he noticed the letter. He picked it up and read it.
“Well,” he said, “you’d think if he’s going to threaten my life, he could at least be grammatical.”
He put down the letter and went back to work.
• • •
Perhaps the American military should strike a country in South America. Or maybe Southeast Asia. Or, of course, Iraq. That, Douglas Feith argued, would surprise terrorists worldwide. None of them would expect it.
Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, crafted the proposal in a memo to Rumsfeld. Bush wanted a global war on terror, but Rumsfeld had been grousing that Afghanistan didn’t offer good bombing targets or suitable terrain for a ground operation. Hitting terrorists in another country, Feith maintained, would put fanatics everywhere on notice that the Bush doctrine had placed them all in America’s crosshairs.
Already, the early rumblings about launching a war against Iraq were strong. But South America? Southeast Asia? Those ideas were shelved.
• • •
The retired four-star general stepped briskly through the halls of the Pentagon, dozens of medals and service ribbons gleaming on his chest. Wesley Clark had left the military a year and a half earlier, but was dropping by to see how his old friends and colleagues were holding up.
After meeting with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, Clark went to visit some officers who were working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He passed the office of a senior general.
The general called out to Clark. “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me for a second.”
“Well,” Clark responded, “you’re too busy.”
No, the general said, ushering Clark into his office.
Once they were alone, the general blurted out the news. “We’re going to war with Iraq.”
Clark was perplexed. Bin Laden, the fundamentalist, was a sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein, the secular leader. What did Iraq have to do with this?
“Did they find more information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” Clark asked.
No, the general replied. “There’s nothing new that way,” he said. “They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.”
The whole idea seemed to have been born of uncertainty, he said. “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments,” the general said.
Remember that old cliché, he said. “If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to look like a nail.”
• • •
A tuxedo-clad butler stepped into the president’s private dining room. Without a word, he placed a white china plate on an octagonal place mat. Then he walked around the ta
ble and served the president’s guest, Tony Blair.
It was the evening of September 20; the British prime minister had come to Washington to meet Bush face-to-face for the first time since the attacks. The president was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress at nine o’clock that night and had asked Blair to attend in a show of solidarity.
Blair and his aides met earlier that day with Bush, Rice, and Powell in the upstairs residence. There, Blair and Bush had huddled together in a corner for a few minutes. The attacks, Bush had said, had been horrendous, but he now believed that something good would come out of them.
“When I speak to Congress tonight, the focus is going to be on bin Laden and the Taliban,” Bush had said. “I’m going to deliver the ultimatum.”
Blair was concerned about how far Bush would push his threat to the Taliban if they spurned his demand to hand over bin Laden; he counseled a measured response.
From there, it was on to dinner—a gourmet meal of salad, veal, and scallops. Bush directed the conversation.
“I’m grateful for your support,” he said to Blair. “Britain is a true friend and we are going to win.”
He leaned his arms on the table. “Anyone can join our coalition, provided they understand the doctrine,” Bush said. “We are going after terrorists and all those who harbor them. Obviously, the broader the coalition the better, but either way, we’re going after them.”
Blair gave a tight smile. Bush’s ambitions were so broad—hunting down all terrorists wherever they might be found and going after any country, organization, or person supporting those criminals—that they risked collapsing in humiliating failure. He was going to have to keep trying to rein Bush in.
The waiter returned and set a plate in front of the president—scallops, with a ring of pastry on top. Bush looked down at the ring and made a face.
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