Bush At War Part 13

Gary saw it differently. He believed that ma.s.sive, heavy bombing of the Taliban front lines - "really good stuff," as he called it - would cause the Taliban to break and would change the picture. On October 1, he sent a SECRET appraisal to headquarters. "In this case," he wrote, "a Taliban collapse could be rapid, with the enemy shrinking to a small number of hard-core Mullah Omar supporters in the early days or weeks of a military campaign."

That's horses.h.i.+t!" could almost be heard off the Directorate of Operations walls as the old hands and experts openly disparaged the appraisal. But Tenet took the cable to Bush.

"I want more of this," said the president.

AT 9:30 A.M., Monday, October 1, Bush met with the NSC.

Tenet reported that Jawbreaker was on the ground with the Northern Alliance and he hoped to have a second team in soon. "In the south they're not going well, they're not doing that much." The south was still a bridge too far. The Afghan strategy was still in limbo.

It was General Myers's first day as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He gave a detailed status report on the airfield in Uzbekistan. "They can do five flights a day, only in daylight, only in C-17s. Think they can handle two aircraft at once but they can't do C-5s. It'll be 12 days before we're fully ready up there in Uzbekistan. It would be six to eight days if we could go 12 hours a day. But you'd get further if we go 24 hours a day. And we're taking in a deployable staff to try and make it 24-hour-capable. We need 67 flights in order to have enough flights giving us a CSAR capability."

It would take 67 deliveries from the C-17s to ferry in the personnel, equipment and helicopters to get up and fully ready with the search and rescue.

"So that's going to delay our special operations?" the president asked.

Yes, and it could delay bombing in the north because they would have no search and rescue.

"In the south we're ready to go with bombers and cruise missiles," Myers said. "We'll do special operations later in the month. "We'll do lily pads with carriers as our operating base, but we need Oman as a base to load up the carrier."

The British exercise in Oman was still crowding out U.S. basing Powell said he would see if they could encourage Oman to rearrange things. Maybe the British would be willing to cut short their exercise and allow us to get in there earlier, he said.

The president said he would talk to Tony Blair.

"But if we get the British exercise out of the way, we still need Omani approval," Powell noted. That did not figure to be a major hurdle, since the U.S. military had staged activities from Oman for over two decades, going back to the aborted 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran. But each extra step took precious time.

"Look," Bush said, "we need to look at alternative ways to do this thing. Couldn't we load up a carrier with our Special Operations Forces someplace else? Why does it have to be Oman?"

"We'll look at that," Myers promised.

"Your people think we need to do something militarily at this point?" Bush asked Tenet.

"Yes. We can work the south, look at B-52s heading up to the north. It would complement the guerrilla war."

"We're going to review it every day," the president said. "I think we need something by the weekend or shortly thereafter. The targets in the north could be a second phase." There was a discussion of how far up north into Afghanistan they could bomb without the CSAR. The answer was that some targets would not be covered.

"It's not perfect," he said, "but it's time to get moving. Are we going to talk to Tommy today?"

Rice said General Franks would be coming Wednesday afternoon.

"We're going to do it by video on Wednesday," Rumsfeld corrected her.

"It is impossible in war to get everything perfect," the president later recalled, "and therefore you try to get as much perfect as possible." He felt they should have been bombing already. "The moment had been there as far as I was concerned. I was fully prepared to tell the nation through body language, and if need be, word, that our troops will be as protected as they can be, but it is time to take the action to the enemy."

THAT AFTERNOON TENET and his special operations chief for counterterrorism, Hank, went to the Pentagon to meet with Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Myers. Tenet's chief of station in Islamabad, Bob, was going to come up on the secure video.

Bob said he expected that the shock and awe of bombing would open up negotiations with moderate Taliban. A bombing pause might be desirable for such negotiations. He was concerned about civil war between the north and south. Hard bombing in the north might allow the Northern Alliance, General Fahim and the others, the ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks, to make a lot of progress. In the south, the Pashtuns would look on this unfavorably. The Pashtuns would eventually see progress in the north as an attack against them. Again, a bombing pause might give the Pashtun tribes in the south some time to gain traction on the ground.

Rumsfeld said that as far as he was concerned there were not going to be any bombing pauses - especially for some kind of negotiations. Period. Bombing pauses smacked of Vietnam. No way.

"GOT ANYTHING YOU'RE doing today?" Rumsfeld said to Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke in a phone call to her home at about 6 A.M., Tuesday, October 2. Later that day, he said, they - she included - were going to the Middle East and South Asia to visit Saudi Arabia, Oman, Uzbekistan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Qatar. They would be back Friday night or Sat.u.r.day morning.

That morning at the NSC meeting, Rumsfeld said, "I want to give the final briefing at 2:30 P.M. today, and then I want to b.u.t.ton it up." He meant it literally. No one else was supposed to speak publicly.

The president asked, "Is CSAR going to be ready in the south?"

"It will be ready," Myers answered.

Rumsfeld said they had a solution to bomb in the north. "We can hit targets in the north without CSAR using B-2s and cruise missiles." The B-2s are Stealth bombers that cannot be picked up by any Taliban radar so they could not be attacked. The pilots and crew would only be in jeopardy if their bombers had an accident or malfunctioned - a risk he was willing to take. The unmanned cruise missiles were not a problem.

"It's going after it without the optimal weapon," he said, "but if we do that we can get all the targets over the first five days."

Tactical bombers would be the optimal weapons because they flew lower and could visually sight targets. Without laser target designators from Special Forces on the ground, the high-flying bombers would be at a disadvantage.

The plan had just ever so much a ring of how Clinton might do it - safe, less than optimal, a compromise. No one raised the point, but there was some discomfort.

"We'll use the cruise missiles, B-1s, B-2s, B-52s, TAG Air in the south," Rumsfeld said. And, just to be clear, he added, "All targets will get the preferred weapons in the south. North, we'll get all targets but without the preferred weapons.

"We're not going to be able to do Special Forces in the north. In the south it's a question mark on special operations. The issue is with Oman, and we'll have to work it out."

The president liked the idea of using the USS Kitty Hawk as a platform for special operations. "Psychologically it shows it's a different kind of war, and we're going to be doing things differently."

"Once we get an okay on Oman for the special operations," Rumsfeld told them, "it'll still take 10 days. But you know the targets are not impressive for special ops at this point. But it's still unfortunate that we can't be doing special operations contemporaneous with the air operations."

He planned to keep such a clamp on operational details that the press and the public would not have to know what was less than optimal, not preferred, even unfortunate.

Tenet said the CIA was expanding in the north and looking for ways in the south.

"We have sent Special Forces in from the north, they'll arrive today. We're looking for ways to get them into the south," Rumsfeld said. His Special Forces teams were at staging areas outside Afghanistan, not yet in-country. It was a source of mounting frustration.

"The first targets will be air defense, some military targets and camps. We'll hope to have emerging targets in the days after the first couple of days. The first day there'll be humanitarian airdrops, all of them in the south, C-17s. They'll be from about 18,000 feet." That could put them out of the reach of any Taliban air defense that survived the first strike, though there seemed to remain some worry a plane could be shot down.

The president, focused as always on the public relations component, asked Defense to work with Hughes on the "themes" that were going to be used in the announcement of military action.

RUMSFELD DISPATCHED A 15-page TOP SECRET order that day to the service chiefs, the combatant commands and the undersecretaries: "Campaign Against Terrorism: Strategic Guidance for the U.S. Department of Defense."

If there was waffling in other departments about what the president wanted, he was going to make sure there was none in his. The guidance paper, which had the force of an order, said that the president had ordered a global war on terrorism. That meant just that, not only the al Qaeda network or Afghanistan. In a section on "means," Rumsfeld said "All tools of national power" would be utilized in the war on global terrorism. The department should antic.i.p.ate multiple military operations in multiple theaters.

The focus was terrorist organizations, state sponsors of terrorism and nonstate sponsors including terrorist funding organizations. Another focus was directed at weapons of ma.s.s destruction.

It said specifically that the department would be targeting "organizations, states that harbor, sponsor, finance, sanction, or otherwise support those organizations or their state supporters to acquire or produce weapons of ma.s.s destruction."

ARMITAGE, POWELL'S DEPUTY, had little interest in appearing on television talk shows. When the White House called early that week asking him to make the rounds, he politely declined. They pressed.

The White House wanted to counter charges that the U.S. was not getting everything it wanted from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan because of political pressures in those countries.

Armitage went to Powell and explained about the White House request. "Look, that's not my deal," he told his boss.

"Nah, I'm in the icebox again," Powell replied. Maybe because he was pus.h.i.+ng to release a white paper detailing evidence against bin Laden. "We've got to get the story out, so go do it," he told Armitage.

On October 3, Armitage appeared on ABC's Good Morning America and CNN's Live This Morning. Asked on CNN if there was a degree of disagreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia, he said, "Well, every nation has a home political audience, but I'm unaware of any major difficulties with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia." He told ABC that the administration was "quite heartened that the anti-American activity in Pakistan has been relatively low."

The message had been dutifully delivered: the Saudis were cooperating, Pakistan was under control.

ON WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, inside Afghanistan, Gary went in search of an airfield to bring supplies into Northern Alliance territory. The team found one airfield in an area called Golbahar that had been used by the British in 1919. He asked the Alliance's intelligence chief Arif to grade out an area and turn it into an airstrip, and handed out another $200,000. He bought three jeeps for $19,000 and forked over another $22,000 for a tanker truck and helicopter fuel. Arif promised they would buy the truck in Dushanbe and drive it over the mountains to the CIA team, but it never arrived.

Gary's team did front line surveys of the Taliban and al Qaeda forces, getting exact geographic coordinates - precise GPS (Global Positioning System) readings. Many Pakistani fundamentalists had come over and joined the Taliban. Gary got exact GPS readings on their locations.

U.S. bombing with precision weapons would be coming. He was confident, but he had lived through the five-and-a-half-month buildup for the Gulf War, and he knew careful preparation took a long time. Bombing seemed a long way off, maybe months, and no advance warning had come in on their secure communications system from CIA headquarters. So his cables began asking for humanitarian supplies for the Afghan people - food, blankets, medicine.

THE PRINc.i.p.aLS MET at 9:30 A.M. on Wednesday.

Wolfowitz, sitting in for Rumsfeld, said, "We've got permission to do CSAR, search and rescue, from the Uzbeks today and it could be up in time."

General Myers reported that they were still trying to find a role for the key allies.

Powell said there had to be leaders.h.i.+p in Kabul after a Taliban defeat that represented all the Afghan people. Richard Haa.s.s, his policy planning director, would go to Rome to visit with the former king, who said he would help the transition to a post-Taliban government but wanted no formal role in a new regime.

"Even Musharraf wants to talk about post-Taliban Afghanistan," Rice said. "We need to exploit that."

"In the short term it would be useful to be obscure on the future of the Taliban," Cheney suggested, "to exploit fissures in the Taliban." There was, at this point, still hope of winning over some moderate Taliban. "But the long term - we need the Taliban to be gone."

Tenet was pleased. Since September 11 he had held that the Taliban and al Qaeda were bound together, that they had to be treated as one enemy and eliminated. The United States was embarked on regime change in Afghanistan. The transition to that policy - or their realization of it - had occurred at this meeting. Las.h.i.+ng the leaders.h.i.+p in the north to the south would be essential to future stability. The problem was that he hadn't yet figured out how to do it.

"The president won't want to use troops to rebuild Afghanistan," Card cautioned. Bush had said repeatedly during the presidential campaign: No combat troops for nation building, the American military did not exist for that purpose. In the second of the three presidential debates, he had declared, "Absolutely not. Our military is meant to fight and win war." He had eased off slightly in the third debate, "There may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not often."

Everyone in the room knew they were entering a phase of peacekeeping and nation building. The overriding lesson from the 1990s in Afghanistan was: Don't leave a vacuum. The abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviets were ousted in 1989 had created the conditions for the rise of the Taliban and the virtual takeover of the country by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

Now it looked like the main U.S. presence in Afghanistan if and when the Taliban was ousted was going to be thousands of combat troops, perhaps most of them American. Rumsfeld knew it. Powell knew it. On this issue, they had at times been almost glaring at each other across the table. Rumsfeld wanted to minimize it, Powell wanted them to face the reality of it.

THE DEPUTIES MET later that day. The focus was post-Taliban reconstruction. They agreed that the United States should lead the efforts to stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan, including helping with food production, health, education for women, small-scale infrastructure projects and clearing the country of land mines. What about the political structure? What about a security plan? What about a plan to explain it to the public?

Hadley's to-do list included: action plan for the G-7 world economic powers, the World Bank and other international financial groups; find some countries to make multibillion-dollar commitments and announce them publicly; need to announce publicly an international conference on the political future; find some donors to pony up to the United Nations for Afghanistan; cables to be sent out making the requests of allies; find key allies who will quietly agree to help with post-Taliban security.

In other words, nation building on a huge scale.

THAT DAY, HANK, the counterterrorism special operations chief, met with General Franks in Tampa, Florida, for the first time. Using maps of Afghanistan, Hank laid out how CIA paramilitary teams working with the various opposition forces could get them moving. The opposition forces, chiefly the Northern Alliance, would do most of the ground fighting. If the U.S. repeated the mistakes of the Soviets by invading with a large land force, they would be doomed.

Franks's Special Forces teams could follow on into Afghanistan and pinpoint targets that could be hit hard in U.S. bombing runs. On-the-ground human intelligence designating targets would allow extraordinarily specific and exact information for the precision bombs.

Hank, under instructions from Tenet, made it clear that the paramilitary teams would be working for Franks, and in that spirit and somewhat contrary to recent practice, the CIA would give Franks and his Special Forces commanders the ident.i.ties of all CIA a.s.sets in Afghanistan, their capabilities, their locations and the CIA's a.s.sessment of them. The military and the CIA were to work as partners.

Franks basically agreed with the plan. He disclosed that the bombing campaign was scheduled to begin any time from October 6 on - three days away.

Money talked in Afghanistan, Hank said, and they had millions in covert action money. On one level, the CIA could supply money to buy food, blankets, cold weather gear and medicine that could be air-dropped. The fighters on both sides, and their families who often traveled with the fighters, would be cold and starving. The humanitarian aid would work to the U.S. advantage.

Warlords or sub-commanders with dozens or hundreds of fighters could be bought off for as little as $50,000 in cash, Hank said. If we do this right, we can buy off a lot more of the Taliban than we have to kill.

Good, the general said.

BUSH WENT TO New York City that morning for a rally near Ground Zero and a private meeting with business leaders about rebuilding the city. "I truly believe," he told the executives, "that out of this will come more order in the world - real progress to peace in the Middle East, stability with oil-producing regions."

He was less optimistic about the threat of more attacks. "I can't tell you whether the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds will strike again."

THE NSC meeting on Thursday, October 4, General Myers had some good news. "CSAR in the north will be stood up by Monday in Uzbekistan" - meaning ready to go. "Special Forces are beginning to flow into Oman. The Kitty Hawk will be in place October 13, which will allow things to go forward in the south. I wouldn't preclude SOF in the north." Within days of the initial bombing, ground operations by the Special Operations Forces would be possible.

As for post-Taliban Afghanistan, Wolfowitz and Rice talked about getting other countries to put up money for rebuilding.

"Who will run the country?" Bush asked.

We should have addressed that, Rice thought. Her most awful moments were when the president thought of something that the princ.i.p.als, particularly she, should have antic.i.p.ated.

No one had a real answer, but Rice was beginning to understand that that was the critical question. Where were they headed?

to thank the staff members. Near the end of his remarks he teared up. Why today? Ari Fleischer wondered from the front row.

Back at the White House, Bush motioned Fleischer to the Oval Office. "We got a report this morning of a case of anthrax in Florida," he said. "We don't know how widespread it is. We don't know if it's more than one. We don't know a whole lot."

It was the first time Fleischer had seen worry in his eyes.

Bob Stevens, a 63-year-old photo editor for The Sun tabloid in Florida, was very ill with inhalation anthrax, a deadly disease long a.s.sociated with possible biological warfare. The first announcements said it was an isolated case and probably arose from natural causes, and the news stories ran in the middle pages of the newspaper.

The news about anthrax was about to build.

In a private meeting with the emir of Qatar, Bush showed how much he was following the signals intelligence, especially on bin Laden. "We know Osama bin Laden called his mother," Bush told the emir. "One of these days, he'll make the mistake, and we'll get him."

APPEARING BEFORE PARLIAMENT on Thursday, Prime Minister Blair presented evidence that Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was responsible for the September 11 attacks. His office released a 16-page uncla.s.sified doc.u.ment on the Internet which laid out the most detailed case yet but did not disclose extremely specific and sensitive intelligence.

The release of the British report came 12 days after Secretary of State Powell had promised a public presentation of evidence amid calls from allies and foreign leaders. Also on Thursday, Pakistan's Foreign Ministry announced that the U.S. had supplied sufficient evidence of bin Laden's complicity in September 11 that they could bring an indictment in court. The clear endors.e.m.e.nt of the American case by a Muslim state was a boon.

In a day, the issue of a white paper that had put Powell and Rumsfeld at loggerheads had floated away.

ON PAGE SEVEN of the 11-page TOP SECRET/CODEWORD Threat Matrix for Friday, October 5, was a report from a Defense Intelligence Agency source with the codename "Dragonfire," who had said terrorists might have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union stockpile. It might be headed for New York City, the source had alleged. Detonation of even a small nuclear device in a city could kill tens of thousands and create unimaginable panic. It was the nightmare scenario everyone worried about most.

The Threat Matrix, however, deemed Dragonfire's report "non-credible" because it had technical details wrong. It turned out the source was a U.S. citizen who said he had overheard some unidentified people discussing the possibility of a nuclear weapon in a Las Vegas casino. It was totally bogus, but the atmosphere was such that reports like the Dragonfire claim regularly filled the Threat Matrix. No one wanted to leave any threat unmentioned.

THE PRESIDENT WAS in the Oval Office later that day reviewing a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharon had suggested that the United States was on the road to repeating the mistakes of Munich in 1938 when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had abandoned Czechoslovakia to Hitler.

"Do not try to appease the Arabs at our expense," Sharon said, addressing the American president. "Israel will not be Czechoslovakia."

"We're going to respond to that, yes?" Rice asked Bush.

"Of course I'm going to respond to that."

They discussed a forceful blast back. Someone cautioned, "You're going to get a headline that says: 'BUSH RAPS SHARON.' "

"Mr. President," Rice said, "he just called you Neville Chamberlain. I think it's time to say something pretty strong."

Fleischer later called Sharon's comment "unacceptable," as Israeli tanks, helicopter guns.h.i.+ps, bulldozers and ground troops moved into Palestinian-controlled West Bank territory.