“God dang,” he said. “What on earth is that?”
“It’s a scallop, Mr. President,” the waiter replied.
Bush smiled. “Well, it looks like a halo and you’re the angel.”
Everyone at the table laughed. No one quite got the joke.
The conversation veered into an assessment of how other world leaders were behaving.
“It was interesting that Putin himself made sure the Russians didn’t react that week,” Bush said. “That’s a clear sign the Cold War is over.”
Then there was Pakistan. While Musharraf had shown some signs of cooperation, neither Bush nor Powell had a clear idea of how he would handle future American demands. The president asked Blair if he would provide recommendations for how the United States would deal with the Pakistanis; the prime minister agreed to do so.
“We’re going for the Taliban after the ultimatum,” Bush said. “They’re a bunch of nuts, and we need to get a new government in there.”
That was going to require keeping all allies on the same page about the goal of the American campaigns, something that was already raising hackles among other world leaders. His conversations with Ariel Sharon, the recently elected Israeli prime minister, had been particularly tense, Bush said.
“I had to really beat up on him. Sharon was clearly trying to use this to go after Arafat. I said, ‘Arafat is not bin Laden, and you do nothing.’ ”
There could be no distractions in the effort to cripple al-Qaeda, Bush continued, because the group was already putting together its new round of deadly plans. His administration feared that Hollywood would be the next target, he said, not only because of its high profile, but also because of the terrorists’ perception that it was decadent and controlled by Jews. It also possessed intelligence, he said, that the terrorists had targeted Air Force One.
Blair saw an opening to push for caution.
“You need to be sure of your ground,” he said. “We have to have public opinion with us at all times.”
“Yes,” Bush replied. “But when I’m speaking tough, I’m speaking to Middle America.”
Most ordinary citizens had never heard of bin Laden before, he said. All they knew was that he and his al-Qaeda followers were behind the attack that killed thousands of their fellow citizens.
“And they’re saying, ‘Hey, Mr. President, go get someone. And why ain’t you done it the day before yesterday?’ ”
• • •
The next day at a Long Island church, a wedding ceremony dragged on. In one pew, Johanna Huden, an editorial assistant at the New York Post, looked at her hand, where a blister had appeared the day before on her right middle finger. At first she figured it was a bug bite, and now it was starting to itch.
She rubbed it against the coarse linen of her dress. A white liquid bubbled across the cloth. “Ee-yew,” Huden said to herself quietly. “That is just really bizarre.”
Weeks would pass before Huden would learn that she was the first victim of the anthrax attack.
• • •
That night, stage lights cast sparkles across a painted lake on the stage at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The soprano Ainhoa Arteta, playing a saucer-eyed Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, walked past an archway as her voice soared in the perilous aria “Per pietà.”
Sitting beside his wife amid oceans of red velvet that decorated the auditorium, Bradford Berenson, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, felt awed by the music’s splendor. It was September 22, a Saturday, and Berenson could finally relax on one of his first nights off since 9/11.
He had been working almost nonstop on an initiative to freeze the assets of individuals and groups that had been sending money to terrorists, a new topic for him. Just after he was assigned to the job, he had been escorted to a secure room so that he could review classified information. He had been astonished to see folder after folder containing names linked to terrorism by volumes of intelligence, from powerful Middle Easterners to little-known charities. The data had been collected over many years and apparently were just left in filing cabinets gathering dust.
The immersion into that ugly world had given him a new perspective about the terrorists, their philosophies, and their goals. Now, as the orchestra played and the music soared, Berenson began to see connections between this magnificent moment and the emerging battle of cultures.
Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban—they wanted to remake the world based on their beliefs, to purge the beauty of Mozart, Shakespeare, Picasso, everything that exalted human civilization. The Taliban had already destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two giant statues from the sixth century that had been carved into the side of a cliff near Kabul. This heritage of incalculable beauty and grandeur had survived 1,500 years, only to be demolished in a matter of weeks by fanatics who declared the statues to be anti-Islamic. Taliban members rejoiced as they tore down the historic works of art with hammers, spades, and explosives; they used dynamite to blow off the face of the smaller statue and then fired rockets into its groin.
Berenson glanced around the opera house. These mindless extremists would gleefully demolish everything his eyes and ears devoured. Without a second’s thought, they would reduce the architectural treasures of America’s capital to rubble; they would outlaw dance and music and paintings and sculpture. They were monsters, really, who cared for nothing that didn’t fall into the orbit of their beliefs—not the lives of the innocent, not the beauty of artistic creation, not the accomplishments of man.
And Middle Easterners supported them, quietly sending money to finance their atrocities. This battle was about more than the security of American citizens, Berenson realized. It was about the protection of civilization itself.
• • •
The conference room on the second floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was tinted in red, white, and blue from sunlight pouring through a giant flag outside the window. The table was crowded with officials from the CIA, the White House, the State Department, and the Treasury, all working on the plans to block asset transfers by individuals and organizations connected to bin Laden’s financial network.
Gary Edson, the reedy, professorial, and ruthlessly efficient White House deputy assistant for international economic affairs, chaired the meeting. The officials sifted through the intelligence establishing the connection of each entity to terrorists, then reviewed drafts of the executive order that would freeze its bank accounts.
On one list of names were people close to the Saudi royal family. A rumpled State Department official spoke up.
“Whatever we do has to be handled with great delicacy and care,” he said. “We don’t want to upset the royal family.”
The official continued speaking for a few more moments, laying out details of the problems that the State Department feared would unfold if the administration alienated the Saudis. Edson listened in silence, waiting for the presentation to end. Then he nodded his head and paused for a moment.
“I understand,” he said, a friendly expression on his face. “But everybody knows you guys are a bunch of weenies anyway.”
No one in the room spoke or moved. With a smile, Edson had just cut the legs out from under the official. He spoke for the president, and his message was brutally clear: Bush didn’t care if diplomats came down with a case of the vapors. All those aiding al-Qaeda, regardless of who they were, would be crushed—if not militarily, then financially.
The discussion resumed. One Treasury official mentioned that, under normal circumstances, it would have taken ten months for his department to assemble and vet the names on the list. Now the same thing would be accomplished in about thirteen days.
Part of the reason the effort usually took so long was banal: Arabic names were complicated. Transliterating them into the Roman alphabet was an inexact process, resulting in the same name being spelled different ways. That increased the chance that the wrong person might turn up on the asset freeze order.
As the gro
up struggled with a particular name shared by many people, one official chuckled.
“Well,” he said, laughing, “How many Osamas can there be?”
From one end of the table, Buzzy Krongard, the executive director of the CIA, spoke. The number was huge, he said—and the CIA had already counted them up. He tossed out the answer, one that shocked the assembled group.
“And you want to know the scary thing?” Krongard said.
He paused.
“Most of them are under the age of five.”
Everyone understood—to their horror. Arabic children had been named to honor Osama bin Laden. The magnitude of the challenge in defeating al-Qaeda suddenly loomed much larger.
• • •
The correspondent from Ummat, an Urdu-language newspaper based in Karachi, sat beside bin Laden, a tape recorder rolling.
“You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington,” the reporter said. “What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?”
Bin Laden gave praise to God and thanked Ummat for speaking with him. “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks,” he said. “As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie.”
He had no knowledge of the strikes before they occurred, he said. “Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people,” he said. “Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle.”
While he was uninvolved, he added, he had learned secrets that the United States was trying to keep hidden. “According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the U.S. government has stated, but the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread.”
To identify the perpetrators, the Americans needed to look inside its own country at the scores of armed groups capable of the operation. Or at Russia. Or Israel. Or India. Or Serbia.
“Then you cannot forget the American Jews,” he said, “who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want revenge.”
Of course, he went on, the attacks could also have been launched by the country’s own intelligence agencies, which had been seeking new adversaries since the fall of the Soviet Union. Orchestrating such murderous violence would help them get more money from the administration.
Whoever the culprit might be, he said, it wasn’t al-Qaeda.
“We are not hostile to the United States,” he said. “We are against the system.”
The reporter asked about the efforts to block al-Qaeda’s bank accounts.
“Freezing of accounts will not make any difference,” bin Laden replied. “With the grace of Allah, al Qaeda has more than three such alternative financial systems, which are all separate and totally independent from each other.”
• • •
Once the Ummat interview with bin Laden was published, a unit at the CIA obtained and rapidly translated it. The statements were bizarre. Bin Laden says that he has access to secret information about the death toll from the strike? That al-Qaeda was not hostile to the United States? And most astonishing, that Islam would have forbidden the 9/11 operation? Bin Laden had orchestrated this assault; at some point, probably soon, he would have to confess al-Qaeda’s role, if only to demonstrate the group’s power. After proclaiming that the Koran forbade the attack? What would he say then?
There could be no doubt. Bin Laden did not just have a psychopathic personality. He was insane.
• • •
A group of lawyers gathered for a briefing from the Pentagon in the sitting area of Alberto Gonzalez’s office. Jim Haynes, the Defense Department’s general counsel, described elements of the military’s capabilities that would be available for the coming war.
Haynes looked across the coffee table, where Gonzales sat in silence in his wing chair. It was a Gonzales trademark—listening sphinxlike to a presentation and voicing his opinion only after the speaker finished. On either side of Haynes were Addington and Flanigan, who had emerged as the key team in dealing with the legal issues of the administration’s antiterror strategy.
There were complexities limiting the NSA’s ability to intercept and report communications among radical Islamists, including rules involving mobile phones and calls into the United States, Haynes said. That was serious, since the intelligence agencies already knew that sleeper cells were inside the country, even if all of them could not yet be identified.
For several minutes, Addington and Flanigan quizzed Haynes about the technical abilities for electronic surveillance.
“If we know these conversations are taking place, why can’t we just listen to them?” Flanigan asked. “Why can’t the NSA ‘big ear’ be turned to follow the individuals we can identify as al-Qaeda operatives, regardless of where they are, regardless of whether these conversations are occurring within the U.S. or across international borders?”
These people were the enemy, Flanigan said, and they were hiding among the country’s own citizens. There was intelligence that a second wave of attacks was coming. Why couldn’t the government use every resource at its disposal to hunt them down, rather than just waiting for the next bloodletting?
Neither Haynes nor Gonzales responded. Addington sat back in his chair, a faraway look on his face. After months of working together, his colleagues knew that this was Addington’s body language signaling he was deep in thought.
Finally, Addington looked at Flanigan.
“You may have hit on something that’s worth thinking about,” he said.
• • •
The idea rocketed through Washington’s corridors of power.
Addington approached Cheney with the concept—the NSA’s authority had to be beefed up to help find terrorists in the United States. Sure, under the present rules, applications for electronic surveillance could be filed to secret courts that handled national security issues, set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—FISA.
But that law was from 1978, long before cell and satellite phones, the Internet, and e-mail. Al-Qaeda operatives were using those technologies, Addington said, in ways that moved faster than FISA could keep up.
The terrorists purchased disposable cell phones, made calls, then tossed them out. They signed up for e-mail services with Web-based providers like Yahoo! and Hotmail, sent a few messages, then deleted the accounts. The calls and e-mails flowed into the United States unimpeded and, too often, unknown. There was no wire to tap—killers were exploiting a virtual world of communications, and the government wasn’t using its best resources to stop them. FISA was not flexible or nimble enough to deal with the change. The law, Addington argued, had become a suicide pact.
It struck Cheney as inconceivable that al-Qaeda had not already placed other terrorists inside the country to launch a second—and perhaps a third or fourth—wave of attacks. He had recently heard about the al-Qaeda operative named Moussaoui who had been arrested in Minnesota. Was he supposed to join in the 9/11 hijackings, or was he part of the next strike?
Cheney contacted Tenet. Could the NSA, he asked, do more against terrorism? Tenet said he would run the question by Michael Hayden, director of the intelligence agency.
Hayden’s reply was brief: Under current law, the NSA’s hands were tied. The agency was doing all it could.
“What might you do with more authority?” Tenet asked.
“Let me put together some information on what would be operationally useful and technologically feasible,” Hayden said.
The security agency assembled the material, and Hayden shared it with Tenet. Then they traveled to the White House to present Cheney with the new, classified proposals.
• • •
The NSA plan was elegant in its theoretical simplicity, awesome in its technological cunning, and terrifying in its potential for abuse. At its essence, the ambitious new blueprint would give the agency unprecedented surveillance powers in the hunt for terrorists.
Already, enormous volumes of dat
a about al-Qaeda were sprinkled throughout the government—names of operatives and sympathizers plus their relatives and friends, locations where they hid, phone numbers they called, as well as contributors and organizations in the group’s financial network. Webs of interconnections—some obvious, some almost undetectable—linked these bits of data in ways that allowed intelligence analysts to perceive the skeletal framework of al-Qaeda’s operations. That was how American intelligence had learned about a terrorist summit in Kuala Lumpur the previous year, by listening in on a phone in Sana’a that had been monitored since 1998. The tiniest morsel of information—records of just two calls, placed from East Africa to a number in Yemen before and after the embassy bombings—had been culled from a flood of data flowing through the NSA, establishing a slender but unmistakable tie between the phone and al-Qaeda.
Sometimes, though, the effort to pursue those leads hit legal roadblocks. The NSA was barred from domestic spying; it could not use its technology to track down someone inside the country who was known to be preparing to bomb Los Angeles. Even if the agency was listening to bin Laden himself in Canada, it had to shut down its monitoring if he crossed the bridge into Buffalo. At that point, the FBI took over. To continue electronic surveillance inside the United States, the bureau had to obtain a FISA warrant from a special national security court and could do so only for intelligence-gathering purposes. Investigators also had to establish in their warrant application that the people to be monitored were agents of a foreign power, a term that had been traditionally interpreted as another government. Members of the administration were painfully aware that none of those standards would have applied to the hijackers—or most other al-Qaeda members.
The new plan could change everything, constituting the most dramatic expansion of the NSA’s power and authority in the agency’s forty-nine-year history.
Tracking calls from what NSA analysts called “dirty numbers” could be conducted without triggering a warrant requirement, regardless of whether they were placed to people in the United States. The agency, the CIA, and the FBI had obtained an array of such numbers, both independently and from foreign intelligence services, including those of Middle Eastern countries such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and even Yemen. All of those were entered into one massive data set at NSA.
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