For the first briefing I did following the inauguration, I was accompanied by George Tenet, who had been director of central intelligence since 1997 under President Clinton. After that, Tenet came only sporadically, and I was on my own most of the time. This ended in the second week of February when President Bush, at the end of a briefing, asked me, “Does George understand that I would like to see him here with you every day?”
“He will, as soon as I get back to the Agency,” I responded.
“Good,” said the president. That had never been the practice, but Tenet, as any Agency director would have been, was happy to comply. It was awkward at first, since the Bush team had not told Tenet whether it planned to keep him on or not, a decision it did not make until late February.
I asked Tenet how he wanted to handle the sessions and he quickly decided that I was to continue doing the “play-by-play” and he would jump in periodically to do the “color commentary.” It proved successful. When the president traveled, only I would be with him, but when he was in Washington, I had Tenet as my wingman. It’s a bit odd having your boss watch you do your job every day, like being named starting quarterback and finding your coach in the huddle. But I had been his executive assistant for two years; Tenet and I were close, and he helped my performance by regularly giving me useful tips and critiques.
Tenet and I would meet every morning in his “downtown” office in the Old Executive Office Building at the White House. There we would plan the briefing, with Tenet deciding which pieces he wanted to remark on. Then, at 7:55 a.m., we would walk across West Executive Avenue to be outside the Oval Office at precisely eight a.m. for the briefing. The president was almost never late.
Tenet’s presence in the room was extremely helpful to the president. For almost any national security issue that came up, Tenet was able to explain the history of the issue, how the Clinton administration tried to deal with it, what had worked, and what had not. I was worried at first about Rice’s reaction to Tenet’s talking about policy, but she too seemed appreciative of the background. There was an early tendency on Bush’s part to be leery of any of Clinton’s approaches to issues—investing US credibility in trying to find an accommodation between the Palestinians and the Israelis, for example—but Tenet’s commentary seemed to ease that tendency. Tenet provided a continuity in national security policy that most presidents do not get.
The briefings during those first few months were tough sledding, not because of the president or anyone else in the room, but because the Agency was not producing a sufficiently high-quality product to meet the president’s expectations. Tenet would routinely pull pieces from the book—sometimes at my urging—judging them to be not good enough for the president, either because they told him something he already knew or because the analysis was not insightful enough. Our Middle East analysis was most often the victim—the analysts for that region frequently produced pieces that did not advance the president’s thinking. Occasionally one of these pieces would slip by, and after reading it, the president would look at me and say, “Duh, no shit.” That is customer feedback. But to its credit, the analytic side of the Agency worked hard to improve its game and the number of pieces pulled by Tenet or criticized by Bush declined sharply over time.
There were a number of international incidents during the first few months of the Bush administration that dominated the briefings. The biggest crisis in those early months was when a US Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft had a midair collision with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea and was forced to land at a Chinese military base on Hainan Island. A tense ten-day diplomatic crisis ensued, and I think our analysis proved extremely helpful to the president. One piece that seemed particularly useful was a comparison of China’s public statements about the United States regarding the EP-3 incident with its statements during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996 (when the Chinese moved military assets in response to an independence-minded Taiwanese president and the United States responded by moving an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait). This comparison showed that the Chinese were much less concerned about the EP-3 incident than they had been about Taiwan, and spoke to the need for patience on the part of the United States. Bush was indeed patient and the crisis ended peacefully.
While the briefings were filled with analysis and discussions about serious issues, the sessions were not without their lighter moments. I particularly remember the president’s dog Barney chewing on the tassels on Tenet’s loafers as the CIA director struggled mightily to give Bush the impression he didn’t mind. I also remember the president’s telling a not particularly funny joke one morning in the Oval Office. When no one laughed, the president turned to me and said, “Michael, your job is to laugh at my jokes—even if they are not funny.”
And during a briefing at Camp David as the president, George Tenet, Steve Hadley, and I were sitting around a coffee table discussing a PDB article, Barney got a piece of plastic stuck in his throat. The president was the first to notice. Both the president and I pushed the briefing books from our laps and tried to reach the dog, who was under the table. The president grabbed Barney, and the piece of plastic popped out of his mouth onto the floor. I quickly grabbed it, and when I did, I said proudly, “Mr. President, I got it.” The president responded by saying, “Good job, Michael.” And during this entire time, Tenet and Hadley continued their substantive discussion. The president looked at them with wry irritation.
* * *
When it came to al Qa‘ida and Bin Ladin, the early 2001 briefings focused on two issues. The first surrounded responsibility for the October 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole. President Clinton had left office with no clear intelligence linking the al Qa‘ida leadership with the bombing that had killed seventeen of the ship’s crew and wounded thirty-nine. On January 25 we wrote a piece for the new president outlining our preliminary assessment, that the plot had been directed from Afghanistan by the al Qa‘ida leadership. Because we could not nail down responsibility with certainty and because President Bush believed that the “pinpricks” of cruise missile strikes did not serve any real military objective, there would be no US response to the Cole bombing pending development of a more robust response to al Qa‘ida, which in the spring and summer of 2001 was in the process of being put together.
The second issue with regard to al Qa‘ida in the early months was bringing pieces to the president designed to educate him about the group. We provided the president with analytic pieces on the group’s training camps in Afghanistan, its fund-raising capabilities and networks, its complex relationship with the Taliban, and the Taliban’s multifaceted relationships with some of our allies. In short, I wanted to give the president as much as we could provide about what CIA believed was the leading national security threat facing the United States.
In retrospect, I think it would have been helpful had the intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for the new administration on the threat posed by al Qa‘ida. An NIE is the community’s premier product—the authoritative voice of the analysts throughout the IC on an issue. It is discussed and approved by the leadership of the community. I think such a document would have helped put al Qa‘ida in context for the new administration and helped it understand the seriousness with which intelligence officials took al Qa‘ida.
I should add, however, that during the transition and during those first three months, there was little to no specific threat reporting on what al Qa‘ida was plotting. That changed dramatically in the spring. In fact, starting in the spring and through early summer, the bulk of my time in the Oval Office was taken up with wide-ranging and increasingly frightening reports about terrorist threats from al Qa‘ida. From late April until early July we were picking up very worrisome intelligence, with al Qa‘ida members telling each other of “very good news to come,” and that “significant victories” were on the horizon. None of the reports were specific in terms of location, timing, or method of attack, but all were shared w
ith the president and his entire national security team.
On the morning of April 18, I walked, as I did every morning, into Tenet’s “downtown” office at the Old Executive Office Building. As soon as he saw me, he said, in a tone that I knew meant there would be no debate, “I’m taking over the briefing today.” The night before, at his daily CT update, our officers had briefed Tenet on credible information that Bin Ladin was planning multiple significant attacks. The analysts were writing a piece to put this information together and explain it, but Tenet was not going to wait to tell the president. He switched seats with me to place himself closer to the president and vice president—the only time he did that in my entire year of briefing—and he did both the play-by-play and the color commentary in vintage Tenet style. And there was a lot of color that morning. When Tenet gets rolling it can be an amazing thing to witness. He is an outstanding briefer who speaks with great clarity and with a conviction that commands the room, and that morning he expressed in words, tone, and body language his deep concern that al Qa‘ida was going to hit us. While he had the floor in the Oval Office, I was watching the reactions of the president and his senior advisors. It was not clear to me at the time if the tactic was working, however. I could see that they did not know what to make of Tenet’s passion, which made sense in the context of what the previous administration had been through—the East Africa bombings, the attempted attacks during the pre-millennium period, and the Cole attack. The piece produced by the analysts the next day, on April 19—based on the same information that Tenet had orally presented the previous morning—was titled “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations.” The 9/11 Commission would later title one of the chapters of its report with a quote from Tenet about this period: “The system was blinking red.”
After the one-time event of Tenet leading the briefing, we went back to our usual format. The threat reporting continued—other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks”—but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida—purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response. We were getting the same question from Donald Rumsfeld’s staff at the Defense Department. Steve Cambone, at that time a special assistant to the secretary of defense, visited Tenet in his office to tell him that the Pentagon’s view was that this was all deception. Tenet told Cambone, “I want you to look in my eyes. I want you to hear what I have to say. This is not deception. This is the real deal.” Still, the vice president deserved an answer. So I had CIA analysts consider that possibility, and they came back with a report titled “UBL Threats Are Real.” When I finished briefing that piece—that day on Air Force One—the president jokingly said to me, “OK, Michael. You’ve covered your ass.” I tell this story only to ensure that the history of this period is recorded with accuracy, as word of the president’s comment spread and it was mistakenly referred to as a response to the now-famous August 6 briefing that I will address shortly. Most important, the president said it to me as a joke. It was not a serious comment on the piece or on the warnings that CIA was providing about an al Qa‘ida attack, which he took seriously.
In mid-July the threat reporting suddenly dried up, with some intelligence even suggesting that the major attacks had been delayed. At the time we could not explain the lull, nor can we fully explain it today. We do know that a good bit of the reporting we saw in the late spring and early summer resulted from Bin Ladin’s going from training camp to training camp giving pep talks to his troops. During these talks the Sheikh, as he was known to his followers, would speak of “good news to come” and “preparations to strike the idol of the world.” Not surprisingly, this kind of talk spread and we picked up some of it. Why it stopped in mid-July is hard to say. My best guess is that, as the hijackers were moving into position and lying low, Bin Ladin and his leadership stopped talking about attacks even in general terms. They were practicing operational security. As the time for their strike approached, they went silent in an effort to make sure nothing interfered with their murderous plans. There are two times when you need to worry about terrorists: when you pick up their chatter and when you don’t—which means, of course, that you worry all the time.
In August the president went off on an extended vacation to his ranch in Crawford, and I went with him. Earlier in the summer, I had met with each analytic office in the Agency to discuss what it might want to write during the “summer doldrums”—the weeks of late July and August when it was hard to get the number of good PDB pieces we needed because so many people were on vacation. So we did as much preparation as we could. When I met with the terrorism analysts, I asked them to write the now-famous August 6 PDB titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” I asked for this piece because earlier in the year, whenever Tenet and I would brief the president on the al Qa‘ida threat, the president would directly ask us, “Is there any indication that this threat is aimed here at the United States?” He was clearly very worried about that possibility. My answer to that question—supported by Tenet—was always the same: “Mr. President, while there is no specific information to suggest that these attacks we are hearing about are aimed at the homeland, Bin Ladin would like nothing more than to bring the fight here to our shores.” Given the president’s frequent question, I wanted to have the analysts dig deeper into the subject.
The resulting piece later became the first PDB item ever declassified and released. A casual reading makes clear that we thought the threat from al Qa‘ida to the homeland was very real. The threat was not limited to attacks on US interests abroad. But a careful reading also shows that nothing in the item told the president where, when, or how al Qa‘ida might strike our country—or even that we thought there was a link between the threat reporting of spring and early summer and a catastrophic attack on the homeland. Later some analysts would claim—some of them to the 9/11 Commission—that they had intended the piece to convey such a linkage. However, the words on the piece of paper we read that morning simply did not do so.
The August 6 briefing took place in the living room of the president’s ranch. There was only one other person present, Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, who was filling in for Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, who themselves were taking turns spending time with the president at the ranch that August. I teed up the piece by explaining why we had written it. The president then read it closely. I do not recall any further discussion of the piece; we moved on to the next item. I did not treat it as a “hair on fire” or action-forcing piece, and the president did not read it that way either.
* * *
During this period of heightened threat, CIA was not just collecting the intelligence chatter and passing it on to policy-makers. It was also working to disrupt whatever plotting might be under way. As a briefer, I did not have visibility into these operations, but I later learned they included Tenet’s contacting dozens of his foreign counterparts and urging action. Thanks to these efforts, a number of terrorist suspects were arrested and detained in almost two dozen countries. We helped halt, disrupt, or uncover weapons caches and plans to attack US diplomatic facilities in the Middle East and Europe.
But this level of operational intensity is hard to maintain for a long period, and particularly difficult in the absence of specific threat reporting. So after a period of intense action, we returned to the status quo—still deeply concerned about the next possible attack but no longer on the trigger the way we had been for several months. Without additional intelligence to guide us, there was simply no other place to go.
CHAPTER 3
The Darkest Hours
I slept fitfully in my hotel room in Sarasota in the early-morning hours of September 11, eyeballing the hotel alarm clock as it ticked toward three thirty a.m., the time I would get up to go to work. My recurring nightmare was oversleeping
and standing up the president of the United States.
It was the second week of September, and the president was on a two-day trip to Florida for events focused on his new education policy. As had become standard practice, I had come along to deliver to him the latest intelligence.
As I was stirring in Sarasota, two young men were checking out of the Comfort Inn in Portland, Maine, the same hotel I had stayed in two months earlier when the president spent a long weekend at his father’s ocean-side summer home in Kennebunkport. As I was showering and dressing in Florida, fifteen hundred miles away, these men took a short drive to the Portland International Jetport, where they boarded a six a.m. flight to Boston, connecting to American Airlines Flight 11, bound for Los Angeles. Their names were Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz al-Omari.
Because we were traveling, only one of the other usual senior participants, Chief of Staff Andy Card, was scheduled to sit in on the president’s briefing that morning. Navy Captain Deborah Loewer, the director of the White House Situation Room, was also to be present to receive policy-related questions the president might raise and, more important, to communicate items of interest to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Steve Hadley back in Washington.
At 7:55 a.m., Loewer and I went up the stairs to the presidential suite at the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort. We passed through Secret Service checkpoints and waited in the hallway outside the president’s room. The president had just returned from a four-and-a-half-mile run and was dressing. While we waited and chatted with one of the president’s personal aides, American Airlines Flight 11—a Boeing 767 with ninety-two passengers and crew members aboard—took off from Boston’s Logan Airport. It was the first of the four hijacked flights to take to the air.
A little after eight a.m., Chief of Staff Card opened the door and motioned us in. We found President Bush seated at a table with a cup of coffee and a newspaper. He seemed surrounded by pastries, none of which he had touched. When he saw us, he asked if we had enjoyed our night at the beach. I told the president I had heard some waves but had not actually seen any. “Michael, you need to get a new job,” he joked. He put down the newspaper and asked, “Anything of interest this morning?” On the most important day of President Bush’s tenure, his intelligence briefing was unremarkable, focusing on the most recent developments in the Palestinian uprising against Israel. Contrary to some media reports, there was nothing regarding terrorist threats in the briefing.
The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS Page 5