At The Center Of The Storm Part 5

My frustration with the quality and depth of our intelligence regarding al-Qa'ida and Bin Ladin continued to grow. I was tired of relying on one tribal group without much corroborating data to make decisions as to whether we should launch capture operations, or cruise missiles, within narrow windows of time. Our entire intelligence community and our foreign partners needed to be challenged to do better in gathering data from where it mattered most-inside Afghanistan. We needed to get over the threshold of confidence that policy makers needed and wanted. So, on December 3, 1998, I sat at home and furiously drafted in longhand the memo I t.i.tled, "We Are at War." In it I told my staff that I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al-Qa'ida. The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but that no one showed up. They were wrong.

While many people were focused exclusively on one man, al-Qa'ida had a leaders.h.i.+p structure, with training facilities, all residing in Afghanistan. Our strategic objective was to get more intelligence-human, signals, and imagery-not just to target Usama bin Ladin but also to deal with a movement that was operating in sixty countries. The hub of the enterprise was Afghanistan, and from that hub spoked sanctuaries and, farther afield, other countries where significant operational capability existed.

By the fall of 1999 several things came together. First was CTC's operational plan, and second, the work of forty-year veteran Charlie Allen, the a.s.sociate deputy director of central intelligence for collection. The most important paragraph in my December 1998 memo was not about holding more meetings and killing more trees, but rather my direction to Charlie Allen to immediately push the rest of the intelligence community to make Bin Ladin and his infrastructure a top priority:

I want Charlie Allen to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA [our imagery agency], CITO [our clandestine information technology operation] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC's requirements.

Allen wrote me back a week later:

Senior collection managers a.s.sess that overall the Community's capabilities against UBL and his infrastructure are sharply focused. Collectors have not only taken an extraordinary range of steps since the East African Emba.s.sy bombing to enhance the capacities but they continue to develop additional measures where all elements of the community were involved.

Through 2000, Allen would provide formal detailed updates five more times-we would also have almost daily interaction. Once Cofer Black had finalized his operational plan in the fall of 1999 to go after al-Qa'ida, Allen created a dedicated al-Qa'ida cell with officers from across the intelligence community. This cell met daily, brought focus to penetrating the Afghan sanctuary, and ensured that collection initiatives were synchronized with operational plans. Allen met with me on a weekly basis to review initiatives under way. His efforts were enabling operations and pursuing longer-range, innovative initiatives around the world against al-Qa'ida. In terrorism, the tactical and strategic blur-operational success on the tactical level yields strategic results, new leads, more data, and better a.n.a.lysis.

You had to destroy terror cells that were trying to kill you, disrupt them, render them to justice, take the data generated, and drive on. The amount of data we collected exploded-CTC's walls were covered with the faces of known terrorists and their connections, their linkages to people on the other side of the world. Cofer understood the imperative. He knew we had disrupted attacks, "that we had damaged UBL's infrastructure, and created doubt inside al-Qa'ida about the security of his operations and operatives." But he intuitively understood something else as well-that we were fighting a worthy opponent and we had no on-the-ground presence in Afghanistan. He knew that without penetrations of Usama bin Ladin's organization, without access to Afghanistan, we were fighting a losing battle.

Allen and Black sat side by side at scores of briefings with me and other senior CIA and FBI officers in the run-up to 9/11. As a result of the intelligence community's efforts, in concert with our foreign partners, by September 11, Afghanistan was covered in human and technical operations.

We were working with eight separate Afghan tribal networks, and by September 11 we had more than one hundred recruited sources inside Afghanistan. Satellites were repositioned. The imagery community had systematically mapped al-Qa'ida camps. We engaged the Special Operations Command and used conventional and innovative collection methods to penetrate al-Qa'ida in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. We expanded our open source coverage (spy-speak for reviewing open media, such as newspapers and radio) of al-Qa'ida. Leaders.h.i.+p of the FBI was given full transparency into our efforts.

Some countries allowed their soil to be used to train capture teams and deploy major collection facilities on their borders with Afghanistan. In other sanctuaries and around the world where al-Qa'ida had significant capability, operations and collection initiatives were pursued that allowed us to stop attacks and generate more data. Allen implemented other significant long-term technical enhancements that had nothing to do with day-to-day operations, involving multiple countries and services to target al-Qa'ida leaders and infrastructure. There was nothing tactical or ad hoc about any of this. It was opportunistic and strategic in the same breath.

We identified foreign strategic relations.h.i.+ps that would extend our operational reach, services that could infiltrate their own officers into terrorist sanctuaries. Prior to 9/11, we identified nine worldwide hubs where we provided technical a.s.sistance, and a.n.a.lytic training-the ability to fuse data essential to rapid operational turnaround. These were places where we knew we would get a huge bang for our buck against al-Qa'ida, strategic investments that would dramatically grow around the world after 9/11.

To scores of other intelligence services, we provided as much a.s.sistance as possible, so that when I or my senior colleagues made calls to seek a.s.sistance, we had willing partners. In this way we had capital in the bank at the other end when we wanted to make a withdrawal. Amazingly, the 9/11 Commission would later say that my idea of a management strategy for a war on terrorism was simply to rebuild CIA. The commission failed to recognize the sustained comprehensive efforts conducted by the intelligence community prior to 9/11 to penetrate the al-Qa'ida organization. How could a community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qa'ida in ninety-two countries around the world?

It was during this same period that I decided that the usual intelligence reporting in the form of Presidential Briefs, finished intelligence reports, National Intelligence Estimates, and the like was insufficient for conveying the seriousness of the threat. So I began sending personal letters to the president and virtually the entire national security community, explicitly laying out why I was concerned about the looming terrorist attacks. I knew that all senior officials had full in-boxes-only something out of the ordinary would get their attention.

Even one such letter would have been an unusual step. During my tenure, I wrote eight of them. My intention was not to cry wolf, and certainly not to scare the recipients out of their wits, although a careful reading of the letters would certainly have accomplished that. I believed the only way to get their attention was to tell them what I knew and what concerned me, and to do so over and over and over again. I am confident that officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations understood the seriousness of the threat.

In the first letter, dated December 18, 1998, I wrote:

I am greatly concerned by recent intelligence reporting indicating that Usama Bin Ladin is planning to conduct another attack against US personnel or facilities soon...possibly over the next few days. One of Bin Ladin's deputies has used code words we a.s.sociated with terrorist operations to order colleagues in East Africa to complete their work.

In the letter, I noted that Bin Ladin's organization had a presence in more than sixty countries and had forged ties with Sunni extremists around the world. The letter went on to say that UBL was interested in conducting attacks inside the United States or within the territory of allies such as the United Kingdom, France, and Israel.

Ten days later I wrote again, updating the previous letter and quoting a Middle Eastern service as saying that they agreed with our a.s.sessment that UBL sought to strike in the near term against at least one U.S. target. I reported that Bin Ladin had purchased ten surface-to-air missiles from Afghan warlords to defend his terrorist camps but noted that the same missiles could be used to attack aircraft on U.S. territory. I wrote again on December 30 and then on January 14, 1999, with additional details picked up from a variety of sources.

My public warnings continued, too. In my annual worldwide threat testimony on February 2, 1999, I told the Senate that "there is not the slightest doubt that Usama Bin Ladin, his worldwide allies, and his sympathizers are planning further attacks against us...despite progress against his networks, Bin Ladin's organization has contacts virtually worldwide, including in the United States.... He has stated unequivocally that all Americans are targets.... I must tell you we are concerned that one or more of Bin Ladin's attacks could occur at any time."

A few days later we received intelligence that told us Bin Ladin was at a hunting camp in southern Afghanistan in the company of a number of sheikhs from the United Arab Emirates. Once again there were those, including some in Alec Station, who were anxious for the United States to obliterate the place in the hopes of getting UBL. If a bunch of Arab princes were killed, too-well, that would be the price they paid for the company they kept. Before a decision could be made as to whether to launch a strike, we got word UBL had moved on.

In hindsight, these on-again, off-again attacks should have been leading policy makers to a serious discussion over the use of force against the al-Qa'ida leader. Instead of considering alternative approaches to the less-than-ideal cruise missile attacks, policy makers seemed to want to have things both ways: they wanted to hit Bin Ladin but without endangering U.S. troops or putting at significant risk our diplomatic relations. As a result, we were constantly ginning up attack plans and making last-minute decisions about whether some snippet of information we had just obtained was good enough to launch missiles and whether UBL might stay put for a few hours so we could get him. I remember one weekend when I was summoned away from my son's lacrosse game to the security vehicle accompanying me so I could take a call. UBL might have been spotted again, and I had to make a recommendation on the spot-do we launch or not? That's no way to do business.

Throughout the fall of 1999, the threat situation was bad. And then it got worse. A steady drumbeat of reports leading up to the millennium told us that al-Qa'ida had entered into the execution phase of numerous planned attacks, although we couldn't say with certainty where or when.

It wasn't just al-Qa'ida and Bin Ladin's millennial ambitions we were worried about. We ran a quiet but effective sweep in East Asia, leading to the arrest or detention of forty-five members of the Hizbollah terrorist network.

We also mounted a disruption campaign against Hezbollah's chief backer, MOIS, the Iranian intelligence service. (The acronym stands for Ministry of Intelligence and Security.) Agency officers approached MOIS officers on the street or wherever we could get close to them and asked them if they would like to come to work for us or sell us information.

In one memorable example, John Brennan, our liaison to the Saudis, handled the local MOIS head himself. John walked up to his car, knocked on the window, and said, "h.e.l.lo, I'm from the U.S. emba.s.sy, and I've got something to tell you." As John tells the story, the guy got out of the car, claimed that Iran was a peace-loving country, then jumped back in the car and sped away. Just being seen with some of our people might cause MOIS officers to fall under suspicion by their own agency. The cold pitches undoubtedly ruined some careers, and maybe even lives, but also occasionally paid off in actual intelligence dividends. It couldn't happen to a nastier bunch of people.

There were scores of operations going on around the world simultaneously. One of them, the surveillance of a suspicious meeting in Kuala Lumpur, ended up being much more significant than we knew at the time. (That meeting, which involved some future 9/11 hijackers, is described in chapter 11.) On December 6, 1999, Jordanian authorities arrested a sixteen-man team of terrorists who planned New Year's Eve attacks on pilgrims at John the Baptist's shrine on the Jordan River, and on tourists at the SAS Radisson hotel in Amman. The terrorists planned to use poisons and improvised devices to maximize Jordanian, Israeli, and U.S. casualties. We later learned they intended to disperse hydrogen cyanide in a downtown Amman movie theater. The Jordanian intelligence service, through its able chief, Samih Battikhi, told us that individuals on the team had direct links to Usama bin Ladin.

All the alarm bells were going off at CTC, especially since the millennium period overlapped Ramadan. Jihadists believed the Islamic holy month a propitious time to wage warfare against nonbelievers. In addition, they viewed the millennium as a symbolic deadline for the return of Jerusalem to Muslims. From Cofer Black's perspective, what we saw in Jordan matched Bin Ladin's preference for softer targets, his focus on non-Muslim casualties, and his growing interest in the use of chemical agents. CTC's and Cofer's view was that the next attack would likely be bigger than East Africa. We told President Clinton that Usama bin Ladin was planning between five and fifteen attacks around the world during the millennium and that some of these might be inside the United States. This set off a frenzy of activity. CIA launched operations in fifty-five countries against thirty-eight separate targets. I must have talked to Sandy Berger, Louis Freeh, and Janet Reno three times a day during this period. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrants were being processed by Fran Townsend at the Department of Justice at a record pace. I made countless phone calls to my counterparts around the world trying to get them to share our anxiety and our efforts.

We alerted our colleagues to the north about the presence of an Algerian terrorist cell in Canada. At about the same time an alert customs official in Port Angeles, Was.h.i.+ngton, spotted Ahmad Ressam nervously trying to enter the United States. The thirty-two-year-old Algerian panicked and tried to flee but was arrested. A quant.i.ty of nitroglycerin and four timing devices were found hidden in his car. He later admitted to being part of a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. In looking back, much more should have been made about the significance of this event. While Ressam's plot was foiled, his arrest signaled that al-Qa'ida was coming here.

The government was exhausted-our northern border vulnerable, the United States did not have a comprehensive and integrated system of homeland security in place. Borders, visas, airline c.o.c.kpits, watchlists-all were managed haphazardly. We would pay the price in two years, when the lack of a coherent system of protection would be exploited by terrorists.

d.i.c.k Clarke, the national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, writes in his memoir that at three o'clock on the morning of January 1, 2000, he walked out on the roof of the White House and popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate the fact that the New Year had arrived on the West Coast without a single terrorist a.s.sault on the contiguous United States. In his memoir, Louis Freeh says that when the millennium finally pa.s.sed that early morning, he was too tired to do anything other than go home and fall in bed. I don't remember the moment arriving or pa.s.sing, or my celebrating anything. To be sure, the millennium represented a spike in terrorist activity and a serious threat to American interests, but at CIA, the threat was part and parcel of a seamless terrorist onslaught. We had watched this, worried about it, and combated it for years, and we knew we would continue doing so after public attention had waned, the computers had all survived the flip over to a fresh millennium, and the news cameras had deserted Y2K and moved on in search of other stories.

After the millennium, threat reporting mostly settled down to its usual dull roar. Then, in the late summer of 2000, it began to soar once more. Again with the help of liaison services, the fruit of all the bridge building we had been doing over the last several years, we were able to break up terrorist cells planning attacks against civilian targets in the Gulf region. These operations netted anti-aircraft missiles and hundreds of pounds of explosives and brought a Bin Ladin facilitator to justice.

Our technological capacity increased dramatically in 2000 when CIA teams deployed to Central Asia and began operating on an experimental basis a new prototype of the Predator unmanned aerial vehicle. This small, remotely controlled aircraft started flying over Afghanistan and sending back truly remarkable real-time reconnaissance video. Sitting in a command center in Was.h.i.+ngton, Tampa, or anywhere in the world, you could see with great clarity what was going on in a terrorist compound half a world away.

In the Predator's very first trial run, on September 28, 2000, we observed a tall man in flowing white robes walking around surrounded by a security detail. While the resolution was not sufficient to make out the man's face, I don't know of any a.n.a.lyst who didn't subsequently conclude that we were looking at UBL. Finally, we now had a real-time capability and did not have to rely solely on secondhand information relayed by our tribal a.s.sets or picked up in signals intelligence and a.n.a.lyzed days later. What we were looking at, however fuzzy, could have been the shape of evil. Yet, as technologically dazzling as that was, it was frustrating in almost equal measure. Yes, we might have been looking at UBL, but we were not in a position to do anything about it. Later, after much testing and adjustment, the Predator would carry its own weapons load, but for now about the best the military could do was spin up some more cruise missiles and hope that UBL didn't move on.

Then, on October 12, 2000, the undeclared war we were fighting with al-Qa'ida got ratcheted up to a whole new level. Sitting at anchor in port at Aden, in Yemen, the Navy destroyer USS Cole Cole was attacked by a small explosive-laden suicide boat. The ensuing explosion ripped a huge hole in the side of the was attacked by a small explosive-laden suicide boat. The ensuing explosion ripped a huge hole in the side of the Cole Cole, rolling it up like the lid of a tin can and killing seventeen American sailors. Only by heroic effort was the crew able to save their s.h.i.+p from sinking.

In the aftermath of the attack, it was clear that known al-Qa'ida operatives were involved, but neither our intelligence nor the FBI's criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leaders.h.i.+p had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross. The ultimate question policy makers have to determine is what standard of proof should be used before the United States decides to deploy force? It must always be a standard set by policy makers because ultimately it is they who bear the responsibility for actions taken. What's important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.

During the 9/11 Commission's investigation, much was made of the fact that the United States did not immediately retaliate for the attack on the Cole Cole. The country was in the middle of the 2000 presidential election, which then turned into a const.i.tutional crisis when no clear winner emerged. Perhaps it would have been difficult to launch new military ventures while the country was fixated on counting chads and Supreme Court votes. Equally important was the fact that we didn't have any inviting targets. By then we didn't need any additional excuses to go after UBL or his organization. But simply firing more cruise missiles into the desert wasn't going to accomplish anything. We needed to get inside the Afghan sanctuary.

On December 18, 2000, with a month left in the administration, I again wrote to the president and representatives of virtually the entire national security bureaucracy:

The next several weeks will bring an increased risk of attacks on our country's interests from one or more Middle Eastern terrorist groups...The volume of credible threat reporting has grown significantly in the past few months, particularly concerning plans by Usama bin Ladin's organization for new attacks in Europe and the Middle East....Our most credible information on bin Ladin activity suggests his organization is looking at US facilities in the Middle East especially the Arabian peninsula, in Turkey and Western Europe. Bin Ladin's network is global however and capable of attacks in other regions, including the United States.Iran and Hezbollah also maintain a worldwide terrorism presence and have an extensive array of off-the-shelf contingency plans for terrorist attacks, beyond their recent focus in Israel and the Palestinian areas.We have the most success where local authorities share our concern-such cooperative efforts often produce valuable information about other terrorist plans as happened after the Millennium plot in London.Not every government and liaison service shares our concern or is willing to work closely with us, and such resistance often denies us good intelligence we could use to predict attacks or disrupt an operation. As a result, pockets exist where terrorists can establish a foothold, plan attacks and carry them out with little warning.

A new administration would soon arrive, but the old situation awaited it. Al-Qa'ida were still coming at us. There was not a meeting held with a foreign partner or leader where either I or our officers did not register al-Qa'ida as our top priority. Many thought we had become obsessed. Others failed to understand fully how terrorists in their countries might be planning for attacks within ours. There is one important moral to the story: you cannot fight terrorism alone. There were clear limitations to what we could do without the help of like-minded governments.

The 9/11 Commission suggested that in the run-up to 9/11 policy makers across two administrations did not fully understand the magnitude of the terrorist threat. This is nonsense.

In authorizing several covert-action authorities, the princ.i.p.al policy makers of the Clinton administration understood fully the nature of the threat we were facing. These doc.u.ments spelled out in detail why it was necessary to continually ratchet up the pressure against Bin Ladin. These written authorities made clear that Bin Ladin posed a serious, continuing, and imminent threat of violence to U.S. interests throughout the world. They said that CIA considered the threat unprecedented in geographic scope. They took note of the fact that twenty-nine Americans had died during the East African and Cole Cole bombings; that Bin Ladin had a presence in at least sixty countries and had forged ties with Sunni extremists worldwide; that the intelligence community had strong indicators that Bin Ladin intended to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States. The doc.u.ments also made clear that Usama bin Ladin's organization was aggressively seeking chemical and biological weapons and that he would use them against American official and civilian targets. I know that the most senior decision makers in the Clinton administration understood the magnitude of what we were facing. bombings; that Bin Ladin had a presence in at least sixty countries and had forged ties with Sunni extremists worldwide; that the intelligence community had strong indicators that Bin Ladin intended to conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States. The doc.u.ments also made clear that Usama bin Ladin's organization was aggressively seeking chemical and biological weapons and that he would use them against American official and civilian targets. I know that the most senior decision makers in the Clinton administration understood the magnitude of what we were facing.

As the new guard arrived, Steve Hadley and Condi Rice also understood the threat as well when they were briefed on the covert authorities they were inheriting as they a.s.sumed their jobs.

Terrorism throughout the 1990s fully engaged the highest levels of our government, and while people can argue about what was or was not done, to me, the knowledge and concern of senior officials was indisputable.

Very late in the Clinton administration, Sandy Berger asked me, if I were unconstrained by resources and policies, how I would go after Bin Ladin and al-Qa'ida. I asked Cofer Black and his team in CTC to put together a paper that we might present to the new administration-whoever it turned out to be. We called this the "Blue Sky" paper. It was designed to include our best ideas for how the war on terror might proceed if we were free from resource limitations or past policy decisions that had hampered our progress. We sent the paper to d.i.c.k Clarke on December 29. Among other things, it called for a significant effort to disrupt al-Qa'ida in its Afghan sanctuary. The paper also recommended major support for the Northern Alliance so that they could take on the Taliban, and it also sought to provide a.s.sistance to neighboring states such as Uzbekistan to help them drive the terrorists out of their backyard. There was "no single silver bullet" available to deal with the problem, we wrote. Instead, a multifaceted strategy was needed to produce change.

To my mind the Blue Sky memo was a compelling blueprint for the future. It was br.i.m.m.i.n.g with good ideas-plans and strategies we would roll out less than ten months later, days after 9/11-but the timing of it meant that, for now, most of those good ideas would simply sit in d.i.c.k Clarke's safe and await the new administration.

CHAPTER 8

"They're Coming Here"

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in effect, by a vote of 54, that George Bush would be the next president of the United States. If you believe some of my critics, I knew the outcome nearly two years earlier, when CIA headquarters was renamed the "George Bush Center for Intelligence," after George W.'s father.

I was pleased to preside at the ceremony on April 26, 1999, honoring the headquarter's new namesake and one of my predecessors, George H. W. Bush. He is a man still fondly remembered for helping the Agency through a very rough patch when he was DCI two decades previously. But I can't claim clairvoyance. An act of Congress directed the name change, not me. At the ceremony, I quoted from President Bush's farewell remarks when he left the Agency in 1977: "I take with me many happy memories," he said then. "I am leaving, but I am not forgetting. I hope I can find some ways in the years ahead to make the American people understand more fully the greatness that is CIA."

Although he served as Director for less than a year, George Bush, with his wife, Barbara, provided Agency employees with a sense of caring and family. They also maintained their connections after his time as DCI ended. As vice president, George Bush chaired a commission looking into the threat of terrorism-and his findings led to the creation of CIA's Counterterrorist Center. As president he was committed to leveraging the power of intelligence to help him handle the burdens of his office, and he insisted on being personally briefed on the latest intelligence six days a week, just as his son would later do.

During that visit to the Agency, he and his wife were greeted like rock stars. They were extraordinarily generous with their time, shaking hands, signing autographs, and reconnecting with a CIA workforce that was genuinely fond of both of them. Barbara Bush spoke at an event hosted by our family advisory board in the Agency's auditorium. The two of them that day left us with a powerful leaders.h.i.+p message: Take care of people and they will take care of you. During my tenure as director, 41 (as the first President Bush is known) frequently checked in with me with an encouraging note or phone call. He was always our staunchest public defender.

That spring day in 1999, I was not worrying about who might occupy the Oval Office almost two years hence. At CIA we pay attention to who might win foreign elections, but we have no special insights on U.S. politics. True, whoever the new president might be, it would have a significant impact on my life.

Either candidate was likely to want his own DCI, but if the party in power changed along with the president, the odds of my going were greater still. Intellectually, I accepted that fact, but in my heart I wanted to stay because I felt the job was unfinished. Once the Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush, I figured the odds of my being gone by January 20 had increased.

David Boren, the former Oklahoma senator and now president of the University of Oklahoma-and one of my closest and most valued mentors-advised me that, if given the opportunity, I should stay on for the first half-year of the new administration, then tender my resignation. That way, he said, I would have worked under presidents of both political persuasions. I also felt that by sticking around I could ease the transition for both the new administration and CIA. Back when he was DCI, the first president Bush offered to stay on at CIA similarly at the start of the Carter administration. Jimmy Carter said, "No, thanks." Had Carter said yes, it is questionable whether George H. W. Bush would ever have reached the presidency.

I was in downtown D.C. in late December, racing to some meeting, when I got a call from Dottie, my invaluable special a.s.sistant, the "Miss Moneypenny" of CIA. Dottie said that Rich Haver, who was handling the intelligence transition for d.i.c.k Cheney, had just come by my office and was all but measuring the place for new drapes. Donald H. Rumsfeld, Cheney's own esteemed mentor, was going to be the new DCI, Haver gleefully hinted. How soon could I move out? Because the election had been so heavily contested in the courts, the Bush people had gotten a delayed start in filling senior positions. Any day, I expected a call informing me of the name of my successor.

I remember taking time off at the end of the month so that Stephanie, John Michael, and I could spend Christmas with my brother in New York City, and then head off to Boston to celebrate New Year's Eve with our closest personal friends, Steve and Jeryl. Just before we left New York, the media was filled with the Rumsfeld story-the announcement that he was to be the new director was due any hour. Rather than wait around for what amounted to a deathwatch for my tenure, we decided to get an early start to Boston. We were on the interstate-John Michael and I in the lead car, and Stephanie in the follow car-when word came in from the headquarters command post that Rumsfeld had indeed been appointed, but to be secretary of defense, not DCI.

This didn't mean that my job was safe-far from it. At any moment I might get a call that would tell me to start cleaning out my desk. But for the time being, the most frequently rumored candidate to replace me was going elsewhere.

We had started giving George W. Bush intelligence briefings even before he was officially designated president-elect. The administration had authorized us to give him access to the same kinds of data that was being provided to Bill Clinton in his final month in office. Al Gore, of course, continued to be briefed as the sitting vice president.

We sent some of our top a.n.a.lysts down to Austin in late November to establish contact and start bringing the governor up to speed in case he were about to become commander in chief. The governor scared our briefers one morning when he said after one session, "Well, I a.s.sume I will start seeing the good stuff when I become president." We were not sure what his expectations were, but he was already seeing "the good stuff." As a result, though, we redoubled our efforts to upgrade the PDBs. It was clear that if he were certified the winner, this son of a former president and DCI was going to pay very close attention to our business.

A little more than a week before a.s.suming office, the president-elect came to Was.h.i.+ngton and took up residence at Blair House, across the street from the White House, on Pennsylvania Avenue. On January 13, I went to see him there, to brief him on the state of the world and what we were most worried about. John McLaughlin and the deputy director for operations, Jim Pavitt, were with me. The president was joined by the vice presidentelect and Andy Card. We told them that our biggest concerns were terrorism, proliferation, and China. I don't recall Iraq coming up at all. At the end of the briefing the president asked to have a word with me alone. Uh, oh, here it comes, I thought.

"Why don't we just let things go along for a while," I remember him saying, "and we'll see how things work out." I gathered from that I was neither on the team nor off it. I was on probation. As would be expected, there were some adjustments to make.

Under President Clinton, I was a Cabinet member-a legacy of John Deutch's requirement when he took the job as DCI-but my contacts with the president, while always interesting, were sporadic. I could see him as often as I wanted but was not on a regular schedule. Under President Bush, the DCI post lost its Cabinet-level status. But I soon found out that I was to have extraordinary access nonetheless.

The transition team made it clear to us that they wanted the president to receive a regular in-person intelligence briefing six days a week, just as his father had. We selected one of my former executive a.s.sistants, Mike Morell, to be the president's personal briefer. I sat in on the first post-inauguration briefing but fully expected to let Morell be our sole daily point of contact. After a couple of briefings without me present, the president pulled Morell aside and asked, "Does George understand that I would like to see him here with you every day?" I hadn't wanted to show up every day for fear that it would look like I was campaigning to keep my job. Making an appearance every now and then would suffice, I figured. But now I got the message loud and clear. My schedule and my life were never the same. That was the downside. My work hours stretched out even longer. My home time shrank again. But the upside was undeniable. Being in regular, direct contact with the president is an incredible boon to a CIA director's ability to do his job.

There were lots of other differences to adjust to. Gore versus Cheney? Both brought very different perspectives to the vice president's office. Gore had served on the House Intelligence Committee many years before. True to his interests, he had a fascination for wonkish issues. He asked lots of questions about the impact on national security of water shortages, disease, and environmental concerns. "Bugs and bunnies," some people called it. But I learned a lot from him on these matters. And he was right. Those kinds of issues can have a profound effect on population flow, migration, civil wars, ethnic strife, and the like. Cheney had a more traditional view and knew a h.e.l.l of a lot about our business. Both were avid consumers of intelligence and provided considerable a.s.sistance to us.

Back in 1999, one of the many times I was scrambling for more resources for CIA, I sent Gore a handwritten note briefly arguing our case and citing what I thought was a necessary supplemental appropriation. "We could use your help here," I concluded. He replied in short order, "You've sold me. Is this enough?" That was music to my ears. Cheney, too, was often extraordinarily helpful. He was always willing to use his personal clout on our behalf-calling world leaders, for example, and leaning on them to give us information or access or whatever we needed. I never failed to get his aid when I asked for it.

The one big difference between the two was that Gore had his national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, represent him at Princ.i.p.als' meetings, while Cheney generally sat in on them himself. That was his privilege, obviously, but having one of the ultimate decision makers actually partic.i.p.ating in the debate made it more difficult for Condi Rice, the president's national security advisor, who chaired the meetings. The vice president's presence may also have had an unintended chilling effect on the free flow of views as important policy matters were debated.

For a DCI, the most important relations.h.i.+p with any administration official is generally with the national security advisor-the person who digests everything the intelligence community and State and Defense departments have to say, carries it to the president, and renders counsel. Sandy Berger had performed that job with obvious zeal, although his street-tough manner occasionally rubbed against the more delicate sensibilities in government. His successor, Condoleezza Rice, had served in the Bush 41 NSC under Brent Scowcroft, a man who had twice performed that job and who did it as well as anyone ever had. From the outset, it was obvious that Condi was very disciplined, tough, and smart, but she brought a much different approach to the job than her predecessor. Sandy not only didn't mind rolling up his sleeves and wading into the thick of things; he seemed to relish it. Condi, by contrast, was more remote. She knew the president's mind well but tended to stay out of policy fights that Sandy would have come brawling into.

All of the above falls generally under the category of atmospherics. Administrations change. People are different. You have to get along with a new group, with new ideas. Every new administration wants to evaluate things once they get the offices for which they have been campaigning. And every administration starts out slowly-feeling their way along. The Bush crowd had an especially late start anyway because of the electoral stalemate, and they carried a heavy load of aversion to any policy the Clinton administration had favored. Doing things differently from their predecessors seemed almost an imperative with them.

The slow-motion changeover and the full agenda, domestically and internationally, that the new administration brought with it had the greatest impact, in my estimation, on the war on terror. It wasn't that they didn't care about Usama bin Ladin or al-Qa'ida, or that they got rid of people who did. Below the top level of the new government virtually the entire counterterrorism team stayed in place. But at the top tier, there was a loss of urgency. Unless you have experienced terrorism on your watch-unless you have been on the receiving end of a 4:00 A.M. A.M. phone call telling you that one of your emba.s.sies or one of your s.h.i.+ps has just been attacked, it is hard to fully fathom the impact of such a loss. I know that you should be able to understand intellectually the significance of the threat, but there is nothing like being there when the bomb goes off to get your undivided attention. phone call telling you that one of your emba.s.sies or one of your s.h.i.+ps has just been attacked, it is hard to fully fathom the impact of such a loss. I know that you should be able to understand intellectually the significance of the threat, but there is nothing like being there when the bomb goes off to get your undivided attention.

The simple fact is that the terrorism challenge was not an easy one to tackle. It wasn't just a matter of going out and getting the bad guys. Policy had to be decided. Diplomacy had to be factored in. These things require time for an administration to wrap its mind around. Take one of the toughest terrorism issues of all-what we thought of as the Pakistan problem.

For years, it had been obvious that without the cooperation of the Pakistanis, it would be almost impossible to root out al-Qa'ida from behind its Taliban protectors. The Pakistanis always knew more than they were telling us, and they had been singularly uncooperative in helping us run these guys down. My own belief, one shared widely within CIA, was that what the Pakistanis really feared was a two-front conflict, with the Indians seeking to reclaim Pakistan and the Taliban mullahs trying to export their radical brand of Islam across the border from Afghanistan. A war with India also posed the grim specter of a nuclear confrontation, but from the ruling generals' point of view, the best way to avoid having their nation Taliban-ized was to keep their enemy close. That meant not cooperating with us in hunting down Bin Ladin and his organization.

The relations.h.i.+p was complicated further by mistrust and resentment. The dominant thinking within the Pakistani officer corps was that the United States had unstated ulterior motives in Afghanistan, specifically the desire to keep the nation unstable and chaotic to discourage construction of oil and gas pipelines through both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The goodwill we had won in Pakistan by helping to drive the Russians out of neighboring Afghanistan had also evaporated over the last dozen years. The Pakistani leaders.h.i.+p for the most part felt that the United States had abandoned them, especially when we imposed economic sanctions on both Pakistan and India in the wake of their nuclear tests. Simultaneously, the military-to-military relations.h.i.+p that had once been so strong between our two nations had been allowed to wane over the years. Once, senior Pakistani officers had been trained almost exclusively in the United States. That wasn't true with the younger generation. From an intelligence perspective, we had precious few leverage points on which to build.

Until 9/11, the Bush administration found itself in the same box with regard to Pakistan that had plagued the Clinton years. Even though thousands of terrorists had been trained in al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan, policy makers had become consumed with Pakistan's internal stability, the command and control of their nuclear weapons, and the likelihood of a nuclear conflict with India. Obviously, these were legitimate concerns, but terrorism was a serious issue, too. Yet, because of this policy tension, we were never able to get a green light from our government to aid in any serious way Ahmed Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance in their efforts to reclaim Afghanistan from the Taliban.

Even within CIA there was debate over how to proceed with Pakistan, the Taliban, and al-Qa'ida. If you sat in the Counterterrorism Center with Cofer Black and his team, the choice was clear: immediate action was required to support the Northern Alliance. Policy makers who were fixated on whether we could produce enough actionable intelligence to spin up a missile to take out Bin Ladin and his top lieutenants had totally missed the point. Getting only Bin Ladin was never going to solve the problem. To do that, you had to destroy al-Qa'ida's sanctuary and disrupt the infrastructure that guided and funded operations around the world. That meant action on the ground.

If you sat in Islamabad, however, the world looked very different. For starters, the Northern Alliance had been nurtured for years by Pakistan's mortal enemies, the Indians and the Russians. Aligning ourselves with Masood and his fighters would put us in league with the devil, for potentially little or no gain. Absent significant U.S. military involvement, the Northern Alliance would never defeat the Taliban. If we just made the Alliance a greater threat to the Taliban, we would end up reinforcing the Taliban's need for al-Qa'ida support and thereby strengthen rather than weaken Bin Ladin's position in Afghanistan.

Gen. Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistani intelligence chief who was in Was.h.i.+ngton when the 9/11 attacks went down, was emblematic of the problem. I'd met with him over lunch on September 9, 2001, and tried to press him about Mullah Omar, Bin Ladin's most ardent protector within the Taliban regime. Mahmood a.s.sured us that Omar was a man who wanted only the best for the Afghan people. Fine, we told him, but he's also harboring a guy who has created a sanctuary for training terrorists who murder American emba.s.sy workers and sailors. In fact, his defense of Mullah Omar was typical of Mahmood. As gracious as he could be over the lunch table, the guy was immovable when it came to the Taliban and al-Qa'ida. And bloodless, too. After the USS Cole Cole was attacked by Bin Ladin's suicide bombers, Mahmood sent our senior officer in Islamabad a very precisely worded message that managed to convey his condolences for the loss of life without offering a single word of support for our going after al-Qa'ida in its Afghan lair. was attacked by Bin Ladin's suicide bombers, Mahmood sent our senior officer in Islamabad a very precisely worded message that managed to convey his condolences for the loss of life without offering a single word of support for our going after al-Qa'ida in its Afghan lair.

What's more, we had to a.s.sume that he was an accurate proxy for his boss, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. We knew that Mahmood had been instrumental in rallying critical elements of the Pakistani army to support Musharraf during the 1999 coup against President Nawaz Sharif. In effect, Mahmood had ensured that Musharraf would succeed. Some thought the best we could hope from either of them was that the Pakistani intelligence service might turn a blind eye to whatever actions we undertook in Afghanistan to go after the Arab presence there. Failing that, there was always the chance that the Afghans and perhaps even some Taliban officials might mount a jihad against the predominantly Arab al-Qa'ida, but that, too, seemed a long shot. The Arabs and Bin Ladin had become inst.i.tutionalized in Afghanistan through their property acquisitions and their largesse to the Taliban leaders.h.i.+p. Mahmood's sole suggestion in the first days of his Was.h.i.+ngton visit was that we try bribing key Taliban officials to get them to turn over Bin Ladin, but even then he made it clear that neither he nor his service would have anything to do with the effort, not even to the extent of advising us whom we might approach.

The events of 9/11 changed that calculus entirely. Until then, the new Bush team had to sort through this incredibly complicated and delicate set of issues, and decide where they stood on the questions and what actions to take and postures to a.s.sume. And in truth, for all that they wanted to put daylight between themselves and the Clinton administration, they weren't any more successful at resolving difficult and competing issues in their opening months than their predecessors had been.

At CIA we obviously had a more acute sense of urgency. Lt. Gen. John "Soup" Campbell, the senior active-duty military officer on my staff and one of the finest officers I've ever worked with, was running a series of tabletop exercises regarding Predator operations. Soup wanted to be prepared for the day when the UAV would be able to carry a warhead. Who would operate the aircraft? Who would make the decision as to if and when to fire? How would the U.S. government explain it, if Arab terrorists in Afghanistan suddenly started being blown up? I raised some of these same questions in my first weekly meeting with the new national security advisor, on January 29, 2001, and I kept raising them again and again.

Like me, d.i.c.k Clarke had been retained at the start of the administration in his old job and was equally anxious to restore attention to the war on terror. To that end, he took our Blue Sky memo and crafted his own recommendations for jump-starting U.S. efforts against al-Qa'ida. Clarke's memo was called "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects." He proposed "rolling back" al-Qa'ida over a period of three to five years, talked about using military action to attack al-Qa'ida command-and-control targets and Taliban infrastructure, and even expressed concern that there might be al-Qa'ida operatives in the United States.

I later learned that on January 25, 2001, Clarke sent this memo to Condi Rice saying there was an urgent need for an NSC princ.i.p.als meeting to review his proposed strategy against al-Qa'ida. But this meeting was never held.

One thing was glaringly apparent. If we were going to proceed with anything like what we had in mind-that is, if we were going to switch from a defensive to an offensive posture against the terrorists-we needed new covert-action authorities. Again, let me stress one very important fact: CIA is a policy implementer, not a policy maker. Those entrusted with making policy, beginning with the president, decide what we are allowed to do in pursuit of ends they deem important.

Early in March, I went by to see Stephen J. Hadley, Condi's deputy at the National Security Council, and handed him the list of the expanded authorities we were seeking to go after Bin Ladin. These authorities would place us much more on the offensive, rather than have us reacting defensively to the terrorist threat. I thought they were critical, but I also knew they required a discussion among policy makers that was long overdue. My hope was that the authorities we were seeking would kick off that discussion.

"I'm giving you this draft now," I told Steve, "but first, you guys need to figure out what your policy is."

The authorities in the draft were very broad and would have explicitly authorized CIA or its partners to plan and carry out operations to kill UBL without first trying to capture him. We believe these authorities were unprecedented in scope.

The next day, Mary McCarthy, a CIA officer then serving as NSC senior director, called John Moseman, my chief of staff, and said basically, "We need you to take back the draft covert-action finding back. If you formally transmit these to the NSC, the clock will be ticking, and we don't want the clock to tick just now."

In other words, the new administration needed more time to figure out what their new policies were, and thus didn't want to be in a position someday to be criticized for not moving quickly enough on a critical intelligence community proposal.