At The Center Of The Storm Part 7

One group stayed behind in headquarters. Cofer Black felt very strongly that the roughly two hundred employees in his Counterterrorism Center needed to maintain their positions both in the Global Reaction Center on the highly exposed sixth floor, where a s.h.i.+ft of eight people routinely worked, and in a safer, windowless facility down low in the building, where the bulk of CTC was located.

"Sir," he said to me after I had issued the evacuation order, "we're going to have to exempt CTC from this [evacuation] because we need to have our people working the computers."

"Well," I responded, "the Global Response Center-they're going to be at risk."

"We're going to have to keep them in place. They have the key function to play in a crisis like this. This is exactly why we have the Global Response Center."

"Well, they could die."

"Well, sir, then they're just going to have to die."

According to Cofer, I paused for a moment, and said, "You're absolutely right."

Now that we were under attack, the Counterterrorism Center, with its vast data banks and sophisticated communications systems, was more vital than ever. Even as we were discussing going or staying, CTC was sending out a global alert to our stations around the world, ordering them to go to their liaison services and agents to collect every shred of information they could lay their hands on. I admired their unwavering courage and dedication. CIA headquarters is pretty much a gla.s.s house. If a plane had targeted it, the people in the Global Response Center could have watched their fate flying right at them.

Inside the printing plant, the initial scene was pretty chaotic. We had only rudimentary capabilities for access to all of our data and communications networks. In the aftermath, we all realized that we needed additional backup communications capabilities if and when a similar situation arose again. People were scrambling to get the phones operational and to get in touch with Mike Morell, the president's briefer, who was with George Bush in Florida when the first plane struck. As Mike would later tell the story, he, Karl Rove, and Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, were riding in a motorcade van when Ari took a call, then turned to Mike and asked if he knew anything about a small plane hitting the World Trade Center. Mike immediately called our Operations Center and was told that the plane wasn't small. Shortly afterward, waiting for the president to finish meeting with elementary school students and their teachers, Mike saw the second tower struck on TV. Later, aboard Air Force One, the president queried Mike about a Palestinian extremist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP, which was taking credit for the attack in the press. Not likely, Mike told him. PFLP simply didn't have the capability for something like this. The president took that in and then told Mike that if we learned anything definitive about the attack, he wanted to be the first to know. Wiry, youthful looking, and extremely bright, Mike speaks in staccato-like bursts that get to the bottom line very quickly. He and George Bush had hit it off almost immediately. In a crisis like this, Mike was the perfect guy for us to have by the commander in chief's side.

Simultaneous with establis.h.i.+ng contact with the president and his traveling party, we were trying to reach our office in New York City, to evaluate whether everybody was present and accounted for there, and trying to get as much data as we possibly could for ourselves. As happens in any crisis, anomalies kept surfacing, odd bleeps that in calm times would probably have meant nothing but in these times could have meant almost anything. One example: Airplanes are tracked via transponders. Every one of them emits a unique signal. At least some of the hijackers that morning had known how to turn off the transponders so that their planes would be harder to track. Now a commercial pa.s.senger jet on its way to Great Britain was emitting all kinds of squawks, with the transponder going off and on. Had al-Qa'ida launched a two-continent attack? Ultimately, the matter was resolved-there was no nefarious intent; the transponder was simply faulty-but in the interim I called Richard Dearlove, my counterpart at MI-6, to tell him what we were hearing and what we knew.

Although in our collective gut we knew al-Qa'ida was behind the attacks, we needed proof, so CTC requested pa.s.senger lists from the planes that had been turned into weapons that morning. Incredibly, I was later told, the initial response from some parts of the bureaucracy (which parts since mercifully forgotten) was that the manifests could not be shared with CIA. There were privacy issues involved. Some gentle reasoning, and a few four-letter words later, the lists were sprung, and an a.n.a.lyst from CTC raced over to the printing plant. "Some of these guys on one of the planes are the ones we've been looking for in the last few weeks." He pointed specifically to two names: Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. That was the first time we had absolute proof of what I had been virtually certain of from the moment I heard about the attacks: we were in the middle of an al-Qa'ida plot.

Around this same time, the vice president called to ask if we could antic.i.p.ate further attacks. By then, a fourth plane, United Flight 93, had gone down in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There was a lull in the action, and to me that was telling. "No," I told him. "My judgment is that they're done for the day." It was a gut call; I had no data to go on. But the pattern of spectacular multiple attacks within a very tight attack window was consistent with what we knew of al-Qa'ida's modus operandi based on the East African emba.s.sy attacks and others. Events happened within a strict timeline, and then they were done.

Like everyone else in America, we were all working through our own personal dramas as the morning progressed. My brother, who happened to be in Was.h.i.+ngton on business, called early on, anxious to get back to New York City, where his wife and family and our mother live. Was any public transportation running? Was it possible, was it safe, to fly? I told him no, and so he rented a car and headed home. My mother was in a panic, as I knew she would be. I called her and told her I was safe. Stephanie, meanwhile, was phoning other family members, a.s.suring them that the CIA building hadn't been hit.

Our son, John Michael, was then starting ninth grade at Gonzaga, a Jesuit Catholic high school not far from Capitol Hill. A CIA security detail found him there, took him under its wing, and transported him out to our house. Everybody in Was.h.i.+ngton in a position like mine fears for his kids in this new, terrorist-driven world we live in. Not to John Michael's liking in the least, this was the beginning of a permanent security detail that would follow him just about everywhere while I remained DCI.

Stephanie had the worst of it that morning, by far. Sometime around midday she got a call from Tom Heidenberger. He and his wife, Michele, were old friends. Our sons had gone to elementary school together and now were cla.s.smates at Gonzaga. Michele was a flight attendant for American Airlines. Tom wasn't certain, but he thought she had been scheduled to work Flight 77 that morning, the plane that had hit the Pentagon. Although Tom was a pilot himself, for USAir, he couldn't get his own employer or American Airlines to tell him if Michele had been on board. Could Stephanie call me, he asked? She did. I asked to see the manifests that had just come into our possession. The names were in alphabetical order. First the pa.s.sengers were listed. Below them were the names of the crew. My heart sank as I read the name Michele Heidenberger.

I called Stephanie with the news, and she drove over to the Heidenbergers' home in Chevy Chase to break it personally to Tom. Michele was fifty-seven years old, the mother of two.

Although I didn't immediately notice his name on the list, one of my high school buddies, Bob Speisman, was also a pa.s.senger on Flight 77.

My staff and I left the printing plant and returned to headquarters about one o'clock that afternoon. The danger was over for the day, in our estimation, and all of us felt isolated at the printing plant. One of my senior staff later told me that not long before we left the printing plant, he said to a colleague that the attacks were going to be viewed as a huge intelligence failure, and the colleague had looked at him incredulously and replied something like, "Why would this be an intelligence failure? These things happen. This is a war. This is a battle." I don't know what I would have said at that moment if the same suggestion had been made to me. The death count was clearly mounting into the thousands. Finger-pointing of any kind, at us or at someone else, was the remotest thing from my mind. But somewhere, I suppose, the blaming had already begun. Maybe that's inevitable. Maybe it's just the way Was.h.i.+ngton works.

That afternoon pa.s.sed mostly in a blur of meetings. The historical record tells me that there was a 3:30 P.M. P.M. teleconference, again over a secure line, with the president, who had touched down at Offutt Air Force Base, in Nebraska, while zigzagging his way back to Was.h.i.+ngton. The president was speaking from the underground headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command. teleconference, again over a secure line, with the president, who had touched down at Offutt Air Force Base, in Nebraska, while zigzagging his way back to Was.h.i.+ngton. The president was speaking from the underground headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Command.

I remember him asking me who I thought had done this. I told him the same thing I had told the vice president several hours earlier: al-Qa'ida. The whole operation looked, smelled, and tasted like Bin Ladin, and the pa.s.senger manifests had all but confirmed our suspicions. When I told the president particularly about al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, he shot Mike Morell one of those "I thought I was supposed to be the first to know" looks. Mike placed an angry call to my executive a.s.sistant, Ted Gistaro, who was in his second day on the job, asking to see the talking points I had prepared for the exchange. "Can't do," Ted told him. "They're embargoed." "Embargoed from the president of the United States?" Mike shot back. It was one of those little flaps that happen when everyone is working under great stress. Before long Mike was able to pa.s.s what information we had to the president through Andy Card. Also in my talking points that afternoon was a warning we had received from French intelligence that said another group of terrorists was within U.S. borders and was preparing a second wave of attacks.

Throughout the teleconference, the president was focused, in control. That evening's face-to-face meeting with him only served to confirm my first impression.

By the time I arrived there, sometime after nine o'clock, the White House was an armed fortress. I was too busy reading briefing papers, though, to notice whatever extra protection had been laid on. My car had no sooner pulled to a stop than the Secret Service escorted me through a long, elaborate pa.s.sageway to the bunker, a place I had never visited before and would never be in again. The president and vice president were both there, along with d.i.c.k Clarke, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton, and a few others, including Lynn Cheney and Laura Bush.

"Bunker," I realize, implies sandbag fortifications and artillery sh.e.l.ls bursting overhead. This wasn't that. The White House bunker is basically a stripped-down and hardened Situation Room-but there was a definite warlike feel to the room and, that day, more raw emotion in one place than I think I've ever experienced in my life: anger that this could have happened, shock that it had, overwhelming sorrow for the dead, a compelling sense of urgency that we had to respond and do so quickly, and a continuing feeling of dread about what might lie ahead. Al-Qa'ida was through for the day, or so we believed, but plenty of intelligence data suggested that this was intended as the opening act of a multi-day sequence. Even at this early point, too, there was a growing fear-one that would spread in the days ahead as fresh reports came in-that the terrorists had somehow secreted a weapon of ma.s.s destruction into the United States and were preparing to detonate it.

At eight thirty that evening, speaking from the Oval Office, the president addressed the nation in terms both stirring and deeply earnest, including the first enunciation of what became known as the Bush Doctrine. "I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice," he told a global audience of some eighty million people. "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them." For us at CIA, the new doctrine meant that the restraints were finally off. We already had on our shelves the game plan for going after both al-Qa'ida and its protectors, the Taliban, in Afghanistan. Now we could begin to implement it. Amid the sorrow of the day, we realized that we were finally going to be given the authorization and the resources to do the job we knew had to be done.

The president followed the Oval Office address with a meeting with the full National Security Council, in this same bunker. Now it was down to what amounted suddenly to a war cabinet. Back only hours earlier from Peru, Colin Powell talked about the problem in diplomatic terms: We had to make it clear to Pakistan as well as to Afghanistan that the time for equivocation was over. I was probably more forward-leaning: Yes, we needed Pakistan's help; it was the country closest to Afghanistan and the one with the most sway over it. But the time for talking with the Taliban had come and gone. To go after Bin Ladin and his shadow army, we had to remove the curtain they hid behind. The president said we had to force countries to choose. The vice president weighed in with several questions about finding targets in Afghanistan worth hitting. But what I remember more than anything else about that meeting was the president's manner, not his words. He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed. He stressed the urgency of the moment, and he made it clear, by word and example, what his expectations were for us in terms of thinking through how we would respond.

No doubt about it, 9/11 was the galvanizing moment of the Bush presidency. It transformed him in ways I don't think any of us could have fully predicted. His leaders.h.i.+p in the months ahead made a huge difference.

My senior staff was waiting for me when I got back to Langley that evening. The official record of my schedule for the day ends at 11:00 P.M. P.M., but I think that just means that Dottie Hanson finally went home then. My own recollection is that I left headquarters closer to one o'clock in the morning, for not much more than a long nap, a shower, and a change of clothes. I was due back at the White House early the next morning. A day like 9/11, though, never really ends, except by the clock.

One evening, several days after 9/11, Stephanie and I took some time to visit Tom Heidenberger to see how he was coping with the death of Michele. It was still so hard to believe. Tom wanted to see for himself where she had died, but at the time it was impossible for civilians to get anywhere near the Pentagon, where efforts to recover remains of those killed in the building were continuing. We got in my SUV and were driven to the Pentagon by my security detail. Flas.h.i.+ng badges at countless roadblocks, we finally reached an area overlooking the twisted ruins at the Pentagon. Tom brought a bouquet of flowers to leave at the site where his wife and so many others had died. Being there with Tom and knowing that thousands of other American families were enduring similar pain was one of the saddest things I have ever experienced.

John McLaughlin, Jim Pavitt, Cofer Black, and I talked often in the first months after the attacks about the emotional toll the attacks were taking on our employees. Everyone was working overtime; everyone was strained. We kept waiting for and preparing for an emotional response, especially on the part of Cofer's people in the Counterterrorism Center. By and large, though, it never came. Somehow along the way, I missed my own emotional buildup. That came to a head on the day after Thanksgiving.

That Friday was the first day I had taken off in well more than two months, since the weekend before the attacks. I had used up whatever reserve of adrenalin I'd been running on. Sometime during my morning of supposed leisure, I went out in front of our house, sat down in my favorite Adirondack chair, and just lost it. Whatever the trigger was, the whole thing came down on me at that moment. I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since. How in G.o.d's name had this happened? I remember asking myself. How in h.e.l.l could I have been on top of all this? What am I doing here? Why me? Why am I living through this? The questions were flying through my head. Stephanie came out about then. I'd been alone up to that moment, except for the security detail watching the house from the street, and thinking who knows what. I recall Stephanie's saying to me, "You're supposed to be here. This is something that you've been working on all your life, and you've got a lot more work to do." And that did it. That snapped me out of it, but it was a black, black time until then.

The one thing that so many people have missed about CIA and 9/11, including the 9/11 Commission so far as I could tell, is that it was personal with us. Fighting terrorism is what we do; it's in our blood. In the months and years leading up to 9/11, we had worked this ground every day. To thwart the terrorists we disrupted attacks, we saved lives. We sacrificed our lives, too, often figuratively and sometimes literally.

If the politicians and press and even the 9/11 Commission often failed to understand this, our global partners in the intelligence business had no doubt. We were still sorting out the details on 9/11 when Avi Dichter, the chief of s.h.i.+n Bet, called from Israel to express his regrets and say that he and his people were with us, no matter what. This wasn't a bureaucratic call. Avi and I had lived through Arafat together and much more, but there was a connection through that phone call that went far beyond anything that had preceded it. Be strong, Avi told me. Lead your people. He didn't have to say that he had seen hundreds of his own countrymen killed by terrorists, on his watch, and I didn't have to add that I now understood what it was like to be the chief of the service when the same thing happened on my soil. All that was implicit, and stronger because it never had to be spoken. Several years later, though, in taping a farewell message for Avi's retirement ceremony, I put into words what I felt so strongly about 9/11: "We all became Israelis on that day," I told Avi.

Despite the constraints on air travel into the United States, the British came over on September 12: Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of MI-6; Eliza Manningham-Buller, the deputy chief of MI-5; and David Manning, Prime Minister Blair's foreign policy advisor. I still don't know how they got flight clearance into the country, but they came on a private plane, just for the night, to express their condolences and to be with us. We had dinner that night at Langley, an affirmation of the special relations.h.i.+p between our two nations and as touching an event as I experienced during my seven years as DCI.

Signs of support kept pouring in. King Abdullah and Queen Rania of Jordan called to express their condolences. Gen. Mohammed Mediene, the Algerian intelligence chief, was in Was.h.i.+ngton when al-Qa'ida struck. Like Avi Dichter, he knew up close the pain and challenge of terrorism, and he, too, could not have conducted himself in a more dignified manner or been more sympathetic to our suffering.

All of these people knew how much 9/11 had struck at the core of each of us at CIA. They'd been there; they'd shared our same fears; they knew that each of the thousands of dead was a personal defeat for us. And I'm sure they would have understood as well as anyone outside CIA the reaction so many of us-at the leaders.h.i.+p level and in the ranks-had in the hours and days immediately after the attack. We're going to run these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds down no matter where they are, we told ourselves. We're going to lead, and everybody else is going to follow. And that's what we set out to do.

CHAPTER 10

"We're at War"

On September 12, the president chaired an NSC meeting and stressed in stronger terms what he had said on television the evening before: he wanted not just to punish those behind the previous day's attacks but to go after terrorists and those around the globe who harbored them.

The next day, in the White House Situation Room, I briefed the president and War Cabinet for the first time on our war plan. "We're prepared to launch in short order an aggressive covert-action program that will carry the fight to the enemy, particularly al-Qa'ida and its Taliban protectors," I said. "To do that, we will deploy a CIA paramilitary team inside Afghanistan to work with opposition forces, most notably the Northern Alliance, and to prepare the way for the introduction of U.S. Special Forces." There were challenges, I told the Cabinet. Ahmed Masood's a.s.sa.s.sination on September 9 had left the Northern Alliance without a powerful and widely respected central figure, but we had technology on our side and an extensive network of sources already in country, and we would succeed.

Cofer Black followed me with a PowerPoint presentation that detailed our covert action capability, projected deployments, and the like. As I had, Cofer made it clear that we would be taking on not just al-Qa'ida but the Taliban as well. The two were inseparable unless the Taliban chose to make the separation itself, and that seemed unlikely, despite our best efforts to drive a wedge between them. We would be undertaking war, in short, not just a search-and-destroy mission for Bin Ladin and his lieutenants-war against an enemy that for the most part would rather blow itself up than be captured. That meant casualties on their side and on ours. Cofer made no effort to predict how many Americans might be killed, but he did make certain the president understood that the mission wouldn't be bloodless. Bush a.s.sured him that he did.

"How quickly could we deploy the CIA teams?" the president asked.

"In short order," Cofer answered.

"How quickly, then, could we defeat the Taliban and al-Qa'ida?"

"A matter of weeks," Cofer told him.

I didn't think that was possible; and in fact it wasn't. The president had been disappointed to learn that the Pentagon had no contingency plan in place for going after al-Qa'ida and the Taliban. George Bush was going a hundred miles an hour by then, completely engaged. If you couldn't keep up, he wasn't interested in you.

The point Cofer and I both wanted to make was that this war would be driven by intelligence, not the pure projection of power. The challenge wasn't to defeat the enemy militarily. The challenge was to find the enemy. Once that was done, defeating him would be easy.

On Friday, September 14, we refined our plan further so that Afghanistan was only the opening act of a comprehensive strategy for combating international terrorism. Then we did a dry run in preparation for my presenting the plan the next day at Camp David. That evening, the NSC sent us stacks of papers to review before we arrived at Camp David, input from what must have been every stakeholder in the intelligence and military sectors of government. I remember thinking as I waded through them that hundreds of trees had been killed for no good reason. The papers were irrelevant, as near as I could tell, to anything I was going to say, and by then I was so confident in the rightness of our approach that I had little use for the half measures and unformed strategies that other agencies were beginning to trot out.

Sat.u.r.day, September 15, accompanied by John McLaughlin and Cofer Black, I briefed the War Cabinet at Camp David. The president was sitting directly opposite me across the big square table in the rustic Camp David conference room, with the vice president and Colin Powell on either side of him. Others present included Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, sitting side by side, Condi Rice, Steve Hadley, Rich Armitage, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the new FBI director, Robert Mueller.

The t.i.tle of the briefing was "Destroying International Terrorism." The heading on the first page read: "The 'Initial Hook': Destroying al-Qa'ida and Closing the Safe Haven." Cofer Black and I launched into the distinct pieces of the plan.

We had to close off Afghanistan by providing immediate a.s.sistance to the Northern Alliance and their remaining leaders, and accelerate our contacts with southern Pashtun leaders, including six senior Taliban military commanders, who appeared willing to remove Mullah Omar from power. This built on work we had begun in early 2001 to engineer a split between the Taliban leaders.h.i.+p and Bin Ladin and his Arab fighters. We had to seal off Afghanistan's borders by directly engaging the Iranians, Turks, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Pakistanis.

We told the president that our only real ally on the Afghan border thus far had been Uzbekistan, where we had established important intelligence-collection capabilities and had trained a special team to launch operations inside Afghanistan. We knew that Uzbekistan would be our most important jumping-off point in aiding the Northern Alliance.

We raised the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qa'ida operatives around the world. We understood that to succeed both inside and outside Afghanistan we would have to use the large infusion of money coming our way to take the activities of our foreign partners to new levels in operating against al-Qa'ida.

Some of our most important regional allies could create a cadre of officers who could blend seamlessly into environments where it would be difficult for us to operate on our own. We told the president that we would be relentless in maximizing the number of human agents reporting on terrorist organizations. We also proposed immediate engagement with the Libyans and Syrians to target Islamic extremists.

We suggested using armed Predator UAVs to kill Bin Ladin's key lieutenants, and using our contacts around the world to pursue al-Qa'ida's sources of funding, through identifying nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals who funded terrorist operations.

We were going to strangle their safe haven in Afghanistan, seal the borders, go after the leaders.h.i.+p, shut off their money, and pursue al-Qa'ida terrorists in ninety-two countries around the world. We were ready to carry out all these actions immediately, because we had been preparing for this moment for years. We were ready to carry out all these actions immediately, because we had been preparing for this moment for years. We were ready because our plan allowed us to be. With the right authorities, policy determination, and great officers, we were confident we could get it done. Others may have seen it as a roll of the dice. But we were ready, and the president was going to take the chance. We were ready because our plan allowed us to be. With the right authorities, policy determination, and great officers, we were confident we could get it done. Others may have seen it as a roll of the dice. But we were ready, and the president was going to take the chance.

Sure, it was a risky proposition when you looked at it from a policy maker's point of view. We were asking for and we would be given as many authorities as CIA had ever had. Things could blow up. People, me among them, could end up spending some of the worst days of our lives justifying before congressional overseers our new freedom to act. But everything we asked for that day at Camp David and in subsequent days was based on the solid knowledge of what we needed. n.o.body knew this target like we knew it. Others hadn't been paying attention to this for years as we had been doing. And n.o.body else had a coordinated plan for expanding out of Afghanistan to combat terrorism across the globe. Operationally, as far as we were concerned, the risk was acceptable. That didn't mean we weren't going to lose people-Cofer had made that crystal clear-but this was the right way to go, and we were the right people to do it.

The morning session at Camp David was freewheeling, all over the place. Sometime around noon, the president suggested we take a break. When we rea.s.sembled that afternoon, the discussion was much more directed, and the president was in full agreement with just about everything we had said during the day. "That's great," he said about our war plan. The whole mood was one of growing optimism.

The next day, September 16, I fired off a memo t.i.tled "We're at War" to top officials at my own shop and throughout the intelligence community, which said in part:

There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success. All the rules have changed. There must be an absolute and full sharing of information, ideas, and capabilities. We do not have time to hold meetings to fix problems-fix them-quickly and smartly. Each person must a.s.sume an unprecedented degree of personal responsibility.

Four days later, on September 20, in an address to the nation before a joint session of Congress, the president said, "Our war on terror begins with al-Qa'ida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated." By then, as I remember, the president had already granted us the broad operational authority I had asked for.

Now that we had been thrown on to a war footing, issues that had seemed intractable just days earlier suddenly seemed far less set in concrete. The Pakistan problem is one such example. On September 13, Rich Armitage invited Pakistani amba.s.sador Maleeha Lodhi and Mahmood Ahmed, the Pakistan intelligence chief, who was still in Was.h.i.+ngton, over to the State Department and dropped the hammer on them. The time for fence-sitting was over. There would be no more games. George Bush had said in his 9/11 address to the nation that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and the nations that protected them.

Pakistan was either with us or against us. Specifically, Armitage demanded that Pakistan begin stopping al-Qa'ida agents at its border, grant the United States blanket overflight and landing rights for all necessary military and intelligence operations, provide territorial access to American and allied intelligence agencies, and cut off all fuel s.h.i.+pments to the Taliban. Armitage is a bull of a man. Mahmood must have felt like he had been run over by a stampede by the time he left Rich's office. I seriously doubt, however, that Rich actually threatened to "bomb Pakistan back to the stone age," as General Mahmood reportedly later told President Musharraf. Meanwhile, I was playing the good cop-or at least a better one-in my meetings with Mahmood. Couldn't he at least meet with Mullah Omar and make it crystal clear to him that the Taliban was going to pay a terrible price if it insisted on continuing to protect al-Qa'ida and Bin Ladin?

The president, too, became engaged in the matter in a way he had never been before the attacks. At the September 13 morning briefing, he asked me for a country-by-country review of the fight against Islamic extremism and Bin Ladin. What had their liaison services done in the past year to help us? What more could we ask of them? Would a call from the president or some other senior government official be useful? As always, Pakistan was at or near the top of the list.

All those factors played a role in edging Mahmood toward our position, but the simple fact that he was in Was.h.i.+ngton when the attacks occurred probably had the greatest influence. He saw the plume of smoke rising from the Pentagon. He watched the reaction all around him, and he understood as he never could have if he had been following events from Islamabad how deep and viscerally Americans felt the attacks. "It was like a wounded animal," is how he put it to us. That didn't stop him from continuing to throw up lots of cautions-even after the attacks, Mahmood was still trying to save the Taliban-but now he knew that if we did not get satisfaction, we were still coming after al-Qa'ida no matter who objected or who tried to stand in the way.

That, I'm sure, is why Mahmood finally did agree to meet with Mullah Omar after he returned home. As a result, Omar called a two-day ulama-a kind of national religious council-to decide what to do about al-Qa'ida and our demand that the Taliban stop sheltering terrorists. Ultimately, of course, that availed us nothing, despite some initial optimism on our part. Bin Ladin wasn't handed over, which a.s.sured that the full might of the U.S. military would come cras.h.i.+ng down on the Taliban's head. But across the border in Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf clearly got the message we were sending him and, I can only a.s.sume, the message Mahmood sent back to Pakistan immediately after the attacks. Within hours of Armitage's delivering his ultimatums, and despite some violent internal opposition, Musharraf agreed to them. In this period, Pakistan had done a complete about-face and become one of our most valuable allies in the war on terrorism. On October 8, as a final measure of his determination to aid America in rooting out al-Qa'ida, Musharraf replaced Mahmood Ahmed as head of the ISI, even though he had been instrumental in Musharraf's rise to power. Like us, Musharraf must have concluded that in the new global reality, his intel chief was just too close to the enemy. Whatever the reason, I've always considered Musharraf's reversal to be the most important post-9/11 strategic development after the takedown of the Afghan sanctuary itself.

Hard on the heels of 9/11, we also ramped up our own intelligence collection procedures. In normal times, princ.i.p.al agents gather information via runners who have penetrated into or near the heart of an organization of interest. Episodically, runners and the agents who control them meet, information gets exchanged, and whatever qualifies even marginally as "intelligence" is pa.s.sed up the chain, either directly to the a.n.a.lysts back at Langley or via the remote chain of command that the princ.i.p.al agents report to. Like all bureaucratic models, this one has its drawbacks, princ.i.p.ally of time-working even fast channels creates enough friction to sometimes turn fresh news stale-but it does provide maximum security for all involved.

If 9/11 had taught us anything, however, it was that we couldn't let the people who were dedicated to our destruction sit comfortably in their safe havens while we followed the usual routines and employed the normal safeguards. We needed real-time reporting from the field, and to get it we threw out the book.

We were beefing up our contingent in Pakistan by the hour. Carpenters hammered and sawed through the middle of the night to create new offices, including one room where we had phones lined up to receive calls, each one marked with an index card so the duty officer would know who was checking in and what language-Farsi, Dari, whatever it was-would be needed to take the message.

We made our own pa.s.s at coopting the Taliban. As Mahmood was preparing for his meeting with Mullah Omar, Bob Grenier, a senior CIA officer in the region, traveled to a hotel in the mountains of Baluchistan, in Pakistan, to meet with Mullah Osmani, the commander of the Taliban's Khandahar Corps, a man then widely acknowledged to be the second-most powerful figure in the movement, next to Mullah Omar. The general and his small entourage had traveled overland from Khandahar. Surrounded by the luxuries of a five-star hotel, and with one of the general's aides taking painstaking notes so that the proceedings could be carried back to Omar, Grenier first explained the obvious: al-Qa'ida was going to pay dearly for what had been done to the United States, and if the Taliban stood in the way, it would suffer equally. Then he proposed multiple solutions. The Taliban could turn Bin Ladin over to the United States for prosecution. If that violated their religious obligation to be good hosts, they could administer justice themselves, in a way that clearly took him off the table. Or if they wanted to save face altogether, they could stand aside and let the Americans find Bin Ladin and extricate him on their own. That night, Bob slept fitfully in a hotel room directly across the hall from Osmani-"a stone-cold killer," as he describes him-and the next morning he departed and filed a report that reads like a chapter from a spy novel.

When I carried it to the White House, President Bush read the report with rapt attention.

Not surprisingly, Omar spurned our suggestions, so in a subsequent October 2 meeting with Osmani at a villa in Baluchistan, Grenier proposed an alternative solution: overthrowing Omar. Osmani could secure Khandahar with his corps, seize the radio station there, and put out a message that the al-Qa'ida Arabs were no friends of the Afghans and had brought nothing but harm to the country and that Bin Ladin must be seized and turned over immediately. That, too, came to nothing, but just to make the proposal to a killer such as Osmani took considerable guts on Grenier's part.

While we were accelerating intelligence-gathering and doing our best to turn the screws on al-Qa'ida and the Taliban, we were also loosening constraints on our own people and their imaginations. In less than a century, warfare had evolved from ma.s.sed armies and trench-to-trench battles to guerrilla confrontations and mutually a.s.sured destruction to the jihadist-terrorist model that dominates our own time. To keep up, we had to toss out old systems and shake loose from outdated stereotypes.

We had worked hard prior to 9/11 to break down the old protocols, to make ourselves less of a top-down organization. CIA has one of the deepest and most varied pools of talent in the world; our field officers have done things that you will not read about in spy novels. To me, it made no sense to bring a deputy director or a.s.sociate director to a meeting with, say, the president, just because rank seemed to demand it. I wanted to take the person closest to the action, the one with hands-on experience, to tell the commander in chief what was really happening. Sometimes I had to drag them along, especially if they had just flown in from some hot spot on the far side of the world and wanted a good shower and a day to sleep, but for the most part, I think, they took it as a sign of respect for what they had done and sacrificed, and for the knowledge they had gained as a result.

Post-9/11, we redoubled that effort. I'd show up at the White House or at Camp David with people with dirt under their nails and in rumpled clothes, their having just gotten off an airplane returning from the war zone. No government bureaucracy can ever be entirely flat, but those of us in the top positions at CIA worked hard to make our bureaucracy as horizontal as it could be.

We did essentially the same thing with our officers in the field-we gave them the go-ahead to make calls on their own at the point of contact with the enemy. Flattening the authority pyramid gave us real-time decision making. In part, we had no choice. Terrorism wasn't just al-Qa'ida. If there was to be war-and that seemed inevitable-it wouldn't be fought only in Afghanistan. We were facing a worldwide threat matrix, and we had to respond globally with a labor pool that was already stretched perilously thin.

As the fall of 2001 went on, we would meet daily at headquarters to review the threat reporting-what we'd heard about over the last day, whether we'd notified those who were threatened, what we were doing about the threats. It was amazing how often we would pick up a lead in, say, South America about someone in Yemen we wanted to take off the street. Terrorists are as interconnected as the rest of us in the borderless cyber world. If the operation was high risk, John McLaughlin or I would have to make the call to go ahead. Far more often than not, though, the call would be made at a lower level or out in the field. We gave our people plenty of running room because they needed it, because we made sure they were fully briefed about what the Agency was trying to achieve and because they were, in the overwhelming majority, incredibly competent. The war in Afghanistan only accelerated that trend. If we had tried to micromanage that roll across the desert from the seventh floor of headquarters, we would still be on the road to Kabul today.

Around midnight on September 12, after a late dinner with the British intelligence chiefs who'd flown over to express their condolences, I was sitting in my office kicking ideas around with Jami Miscik, our second-most senior a.n.a.lyst at the time. I told her that I wanted to create a group within CIA whose sole purpose in life would be to think contrarian thoughts. The cliche in Was.h.i.+ngton is to "think outside the box," but I didn't want us to get just beyond the edge of the ordinary. I wanted people so far out of the box they would be in a different zip code. Jami loved the idea, and within fifteen minutes or so, we had dubbed the group the "Red Cell."

We picked out partic.i.p.ants as we sat there, called them that night despite the late hour, and told them to be in Jami's office at eight the next morning. One of the leaders was Paul Frandano, a Harvard-trained senior a.n.a.lyst with a goatee and a liking for colorful bow ties. Not your typical academic, Paul has a mischievous sense of humor and delights in contrarian thinking. Our goal was to free some of our best people from purely objective considerations. These were men and women steeped in a.n.a.lysis. Their intellectual foundation was built solidly on fact, or as close to "fact" as intelligence work often gets. Now we asked them to take an imaginative leap from that, to try to get inside the mind and imagination of our enemy. Over the months ahead, we gave them a variety of specific topics to write about. Among them: "How Usama Might Try to Sink the U.S. Economy," "Deconstructing the Plots-An Approach to Stopping the Next Attack," and everyone's favorite, "The View from Usama's Cave." The latter-issued on October 27 and number twenty-two in the series-gave Red Cell partic.i.p.ants a chance to speculate on what was going through Usama bin Ladin's mind and what he might be saying to his key lieutenants three weeks into the U.S. attacks on Afghanistan. Among the quotes it imagined for UBL were these: "I see no need to rush out with new strikes against America" and "I will give more operational scope to my lieutenants. I will instruct them to hold to my standards, but they will make their own decisions about when to strike."

Every Red Cell report was accompanied by a statement on the left-hand side of the front page: "In response to the events of 11 September, the Director of Central Intelligence commissioned CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence to create a 'red cell' that would think unconventionally about the full range of relevant a.n.a.lytic issues. The DCI Red Cell is thus charged with taking a p.r.o.nounced 'out-of-the-box' approach and will periodically produce memoranda and reports intended to provoke thought rather than to provide authoritative a.s.sessment." For all I know the other government agencies who received the reports thought we'd gone round the bend, but I believe the reports worked extraordinarily well, in terms of both their imaginative content and the insight they offered into the real world. The events of September 11 weren't business as usual; we couldn't begin to shape our response in the usual way. To my mind, at least, that spirit had a domino effect throughout CIA in the days and weeks after 9/11.

Our December 2000 Blue Sky memo was the template for the war plan against al-Qa'ida that we would set out to follow within hours of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Ever since that template had first been laid out, a group of specialists from our Counterterrorism Center had been ma.s.saging and refining the plan, and by 9/11 they had it as right as anything can be in an undefined and constantly changing war theater. I'll never forget what one of our top Afghan strategists, a much-decorated veteran of the Agency, told me after the war there had been fought and won, because it encapsulates everything I feel about the campaign and the great pride I take in having the opportunity to serve with such people: "What I thought was really remarkable about the Bin Ladin program," he said, "wasn't just the hard work, the people going around the clock, but their intellectual development. They were able to coordinate all these different pieces and work with liaisons and send teams out. It was remarkably complex, and I think they paved the way for the successes we're having today. No one else in the U.S. government had ever done that-this is really the beginning of the evolving global battlefield-and a little team down in CTC basically figured this out and set the course for how we wage counter CIA-centric focus terrorism war on the global battlefield."

I couldn't agree more. Maybe it's my own obsession, but I can't stress this enough. We-CIA, the intelligence community, investigative bodies, the government at large-missed the exact "when and where" of 9/11. We didn't have enough dots to connect, and we'll always have to live with that. But at CIA we knew al-Qa'ida was coming, and afterward we took the fight to them in a way that I feel certain Usama bin Ladin and his lieutenants and protectors never expected in their worst-case scenarios.

On September 27, sixteen days after the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had been hit, we inserted our first covert teams into Afghanistan. Less than two and a half months later, a core group of ninety CIA paramilitary officers, along with a small number of Special Forces units, in combination with Afghan militias and supported by a ma.s.sive aerial bombardment by the U.S. military, had defeated the Taliban and killed or captured one quarter of Usama bin Ladin's top lieutenants, including his military commander, Mohammed Atef, a key player in the 9/11 attacks. Kabul had been liberated, and Hamid Karzai named president by a national council. Afghanistan would be CIA's finest hour.

For years I had been trying to convince two administrations that the terrorist threat was seamless-that what had happened overseas to our East African emba.s.sies and the USS Cole Cole could happen here. Now the seamlessness could no longer be ignored. "There" and "here" had become the same place. The world was one single war theater. could happen here. Now the seamlessness could no longer be ignored. "There" and "here" had become the same place. The world was one single war theater.

John McLaughlin remembers my calling him from the White House sometime shortly after the attacks and saying, "We have to put down on paper what we think al-Qa'ida's targets are. I know we don't know-but place your bets." We got all our top people around the table, ran through all the possibilities, and came up with a potential hit list. High on it were symbols of American culture such as movie studios, amus.e.m.e.nt parks, and sports stadiums, and transportation hubs such as airports, harbors, and bridges. Corporate headquarters and other elements of the economic system were also listed along with military sites; the energy infrastructure, especially targets that would make a visible statement about energy dependence; icons of our national ident.i.ty (the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, the Statue of Liberty, even Mount Rushmore); and the nodes of the global telecommunications central nervous system, including the Internet and electronic bank transactions. We also noted that Bin Ladin often took years to plan his attacks and liked to return to the same targets, as witnessed by the World Trade Center. It would be reckless to provide more details-the last thing I want is to do the terrorists' work for them-but the effect of seeing so many prime targets in one four-or five-page report was galvanizing.

Based on our a.s.sessment, I called Jack Valenti, then head of the Motion Picture a.s.sociation of America, and told him to make sure his industry was b.u.t.toned down. I also met with people such as Michael Eisner from Disney; Gary Bettman, the commissioner of the National Hockey League; and National Basketball a.s.sociation commissioner David Stern; to urge them to step up security at their venues.

Our stark a.s.sessment, I believe, played a large part in the president's conclusion that somebody needed to be paying attention full time to protecting Americans inside our own borders, and in the subsequent decision to establish a Department of Homeland Security. For years, we at CIA had been playing offense against the terrorists overseas, but no one had been playing defense against them at home. It's an old axiom among football coaches: offense alone never wins.

The president asked John McLaughlin in late September, "Why do you think nothing else has happened?" To me, there's no mystery. We'd done what the president had asked: we all were up on our toes. It's hard to prove a proposition by the absence, in this case, of follow-up attacks on American soil, but I can't help but think that somewhere along the way in those first weeks after 9/11, someone who was supposed to do something crucial-buy forged pa.s.sports, say, for a second team of terrorists, or sneak some kind of weapon or explosive over the border-was discouraged or disrupted or otherwise thwarted by what we and the FBI and the border patrol and city police forces and lots of other newly alert Americans were doing. In the battle against terrorism, I truly believe that heroes are everywhere.

CHAPTER 11

Missed Opportunities

Could anything have prevented 9/11? Despite a vast amount of fact-finding by the 9/11 Commission, journalists, authors, and many others, that question continues to haunt all of us involved in U.S. counterterrorism. Both the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry said that stopping the attacks would have been unlikely, but that doesn't prevent all of us from asking-what if? I certainly don't pretend to offer definitive answers here, but I will try to strip away some of the confusion and bl.u.s.ter surrounding two complex and frequently misunderstood missed opportunities: the oddly intersecting matters of "watchlisting" (placing suspected terrorists on lists to prevent their entry into the United States) and the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui.