Bush At War
BUSH AT WAR
SIMON & SCHUSTER
Bob Woodward
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AUTHOR'S NOTE
Mark Malseed, a 1997 Phi Beta Kappa architecture graduate of Lehigh University, assisted me full-time in the reporting, writing, editing, research - and thinking - for this book. He is one of the brightest, calmest, most remarkable young men I have ever encountered or worked with. He began as my assistant in May 2002, and in just six months mastered the subjects of Bush, his war cabinet, their debates and strategies. Well-read and meticulous, Mark always had superb ideas for improving the structure, substance and language of this story. He has a natural sense of order and was able to juggle a half-dozen tasks and persevere through 12-hour days with grace. He is tough-minded but scrupulously fair. I found I could trust him without question. Every day working with Mark was a joy, and I treasure our friendship. This book is a collaboration - his as much as mine.
To Donald E. Graham, who so brilliantly carries on the legacy of his mother, Katharine Graham: hands off, mind on - a spirit of unfettered, independent inquiry and a willingness to listen
A NOTE TO READERS
This is an account of President George W. Bush at war during the first 100 days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The information I obtained for this book includes contemporaneous notes taken during more than 50 National Security Council and other meetings where the most important decisions were discussed and made. Many direct quotations of the president and the war cabinet members come from these notes. Other personal notes, memos, calendars, written internal chronologies, transcripts and other documents also were the basis for direct quotations and other parts of this story.
In addition, I interviewed more than 100 people involved in the decision making and execution of the war, including President Bush, key war cabinet members, the White House staff, and officials currently serving at various levels of the Defense and State Departments and the CIA. Most sources were interviewed multiple times, several a half-dozen or more times. Most of the interviews were conducted on background - meaning that I could use the information but the sources would not be identified by name in this book. Nearly all allowed me to tape-record our interviews, so the story could be told more fully and with the exact language they used.
I have attributed thoughts, conclusions and feelings to the participants. These come either from the person himself, a colleague with direct knowledge of them, or the written record - both classified and unclassified.
President Bush was interviewed on the record twice - once for 90 minutes by myself and Dan Balz, a colleague at The Washington Post, for a lengthy eight-part series, "Ten Days in September," which was published in the Post in early 2002.1 have drawn on that interview and the series for a portion of this book. I interviewed President Bush a second time on August 20, 2002, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, for two hours and 25 minutes. The transcript shows that I asked questions or made short comments 300 times. The president gave specific answers, often very detailed, about his reactions and reasoning behind the main decisions and turning points in the war.
War planning and war making involve secret information. I have used a good deal of it, trying to provide new specific details without harming sensitive operations or relationships with foreign governments. This is not a sanitized version, and the censors, if we had them in the United States - thank God we don't - would no doubt draw the line at a different, more restrictive place than I have.
This book contains a voluminous amount of new, documented information which I was able to obtain while memories were freshest and notes could be deciphered. It is an inside account, largely the story as the insiders saw it, heard it and lived it. Since it covers events and secret deliberations that began just over a year ago, it is an early version. But I was able to test the information I had for accuracy and context with trusted sources I have known for years and in some cases decades. Criticism, the judgments of history and other information may, over the coming months and years, alter the historical understanding of this era. This is my effort to get the best obtainable version of the truth.
In 1991, I published a book called The Commanders which was about the 1989 invasion of Panama and the lead-up to the Gulf War during the presidency of Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush.
"The decision to go to war is one that defines a nation, both to the world and, perhaps more importantly, to itself," I wrote at the beginning of that book. "There is no more serious business for a national government, no more accurate measure of national leadership." That is truer today than perhaps ever.
Bob Woodward October 11,2002 Washington, D.C.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES George W. Bush
THE PRINCIPALS
Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld
Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Condoleezza Rice
Director of the Central Intelligence Agency George J. Tenet
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard B. Myers, United States Air Force
White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr.
THE DEPUTIES
Chief of Staff to the Vice President I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby /"
Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz
Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs
Stephen J. Hadley
Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John E. McLaughlin
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace, United States Marine Corps
OTHER KEY ADVISERS
Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command General Tommy Franks, United States Army
Attorney General of the United States John D. Ashcroft
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Robert S. Mueller III
Counselor to the President Karen P. Hughes
Senior Adviser to the President Karl Rove
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
Deputy Director for Operations James L. Pavitt
Director of the Counterterrorism Center Gofer Black
Chief of Counterterrorist Special Operations Hank '
Jawbreaker Team Leader Gary
THE NORTHERN ALLIANCE
Lead Commander Mohammed Fahim
Commander of Forces in Northern Afghanistan Abdurrashid Dostum
Commander of Forces in Northern Afghanistan Attah Mohammad
Commander of Forces in Central Afghanistan Karim Khalili
Commander of Forces in Western Afghanistan Ismail Khan
Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah
Chief of Sec
urity Engineer Muhammed Arif Sawari
INTERIM LEADER OF AFGHANISTAN Hamid Karzai
BUSH AT WAR
1
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, began as one of those spectacular pre-fall days on the East Coast, sunny, temperatures in the 70s, light winds, the sky a vivid light blue. With President George W. Bush traveling in Florida that morning promoting his education agenda, his intelligence chief, CIA Director George J. Tenet, didn't have to observe the 8 A.M. ritual of personally briefing the president at the White House on the latest and most important top secret information flowing into America's vast spy empire.
Instead Tenet, 48, a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants, was having a leisurely breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel, three blocks north of the White House, with the man who was most responsible for his rise in the world of secret intelligence - former Oklahoma Democratic Senator David L. Boren. The two had struck up an unusually close friendship going back 13 years when Tenet was a mid-level staffer on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which Boren chaired. Boren had found Tenet to be a gifted briefer and had jumped him over others with more seniority to make him staff director, a post which granted him access to virtually all the nation's intelligence secrets.
Boren then recommended Tenet to President-elect Bill Clinton in 1992, urging that he be appointed to head the administration's transition team on intelligence. The following year, Tenet was named National Security Council staff director for intelligence, responsible for coordinating all intelligence matters for the White House, including covert action. In 1995, Clinton named him deputy CIA director, and two years after that, he appointed him director of central intelligence (DCI), charged with heading the CIA and the vast U.S. intelligence community.
High-strung and a workaholic, Tenet had a heart attack while he was NSC intelligence staff director. He could be volatile. During President Clinton's second term, when he was CIA director, he stormed out of a principals' committee meeting that included the secretaries of state and defense but not the president. He thought the meeting, which was keeping him from attending his son's school Christmas play, was droning on too long. "Fuck you, I'm leaving" had been his parting comment. But Tenet had since learned how to control his temper.
In early 2001, Boren called President-elect Bush, praising Tenet as nonpartisan and urging him to keep him on as CIA director. Ask your father, he suggested. When the younger Bush did, the former President George H.W. Bush said, "From what I hear, he's a good fellow," one of the highest accolades in the Bush family lexicon. Tenet, who has a keen nose for cultivating political alliances, had helped the senior Bush push through the controversial nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991, and later led the effort to rename CIA headquarters for Bush, himself a former DCI.
The former president also told his son, the most important thing you'll do as president every day is get your intelligence briefing.
BEGINNING WITH HIS time heading the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, Tenet had developed an understanding of the importance of human intelligence, HUMINT in spycraft. In an era of dazzling breakthroughs in signals intelligence, SIGINT - phone, teletype and communications intercepts and code breaking - and overhead satellite photography and radar imagery, the CIA had downgraded the role of HUMINT. But Tenet earmarked more money for human intelligence and the training of case officers, the clandestine service operatives who work undercover recruiting and paying spies and agents in foreign governments - called "sources" or "assets."
Without case officers, Tenet knew, there would be no human sources to provide intelligence, no access to governments, opposition groups or other organizations abroad, little inside information, little opportunity for covert action. And covert action to effect change in foreign countries was part of the agency's charter, however controversial, misguided or bungled it may have been over the years.
The case officers were the critical first step. At one point in the 1990s, only 12 were being trained for the future in the year-long intensive program at the CIA facility called "the Farm" in the Virginia countryside. In 2001, Tenet had 10 times as many in training, an incredible jump. It was designed to increase HUMINT and make covert action, if authorized by the president, possible. All this had been done during the Clinton years.
"WHAT ARE YOU worried about these days?" Boren asked Tenet that morning.
"Bin Laden," Tenet replied, referring to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, an exiled Saudi who was living in Afghanistan and had developed the worldwide network al Qaeda, Arabic for "the Base." He was convinced that bin Laden was going to do something big, he said.
"Oh, George!" Boren said. For the last two years he had been listening to his friend's concerns about bin Laden. How could one private person without the resources of a foreign government be such a threat? he asked.
"You don't understand the capabilities and the reach of what they're putting together," Tenet said. Boren was worried that his friend had developed an unhealthy obsession about bin Laden. Nearly two years earlier, just before the 2000 millennium celebration, Tenet had taken the highly unusual and risky step of personally warning Boren not to travel or appear at big public events over New Year's Eve or New Year's Day because he anticipated major attacks.
More recently, Tenet had worried that there would be attacks during the July 4, 2001, celebration. Though he didn't disclose it to Boren, there had been 34 specific communications intercepts among various bin Laden associates that summer making declarations such as "Zero hour is tomorrow" or "Something spectacular is coming." There had been so many of these intercepts - often called chatter - picked up in the intelligence system and so many reports of threats that Tenet had gone to maximum alert. It seemed like an attack of some sort was imminent against U.S. embassies abroad or concentrations of American tourists, but the intelligence never pinpointed when or where or by what method.
Nothing had happened, but Tenet said it was the issue he was losing sleep over.
Suddenly, several of Tenet's security guards approached. They were not strolling. They were bolting toward the table.
Uh-oh, Boren thought.
"Mr. Director," one of them said, "there's a serious problem."
"What is it?" Tenet asked, indicating that it was okay to speak freely.
"The World Trade tower has been attacked."
One of them handed Tenet a cell phone and he called headquarters.
"So they put the plane into the building itself?" Tenet asked incredulously.
He ordered his key people to gather in his conference room at CIA headquarters. He would be there in about 15-20 minutes.
"This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go." He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. "I wonder," Tenet said, "if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training." He was referring to Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent whom the FBI had detained in Minnesota the previous month after he had acted suspiciously at a local flight training school.
Moussaoui's case was very much on his mind. In August, the FBI had asked the CIA and the National Security Agency to run phone traces on any calls Moussaoui had made abroad. He was already the subject of a five-inch-thick file in the bureau. As Tenet hopped in his car to go to the 258-acre CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the past, present and future of his counterterrorism efforts were swirling in his head.
The CIA had been after bin Laden for more than five years, and increasingly so after the devastating 1998 bin Laden-sponsored terrorist bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that had left more than 200 people dead. At that time, President Clinton directed the U.S. military to launch 66 cruise missiles into terrorist training camps in Afghanistan where bin Laden was believed to be in a high-level meeting. But he had apparently left a few hours before the missiles arrived.
In 1999, the CIA commenced a covert operation to tra
in 60 commandos from the Pakistani intelligence agency to enter Afghanistan to capture bin Laden. But the operation was aborted because of a military coup in Pakistan. More ambitious and riskier options had been weighed in seemingly endless meetings with the top Clinton national security officials.
One option that had been considered was a clandestine helicopter-borne night assault on bin Laden with a small, elite U.S. military Special Forces unit of roughly 40 men. It would require aerial refueling, as the helicopters would have to fly some 900 miles. But they were spooked by the 1980 Desert One operation President Carter had ordered to rescue the American hostages held in Iran when several aircraft had crashed in the desert, and the downing of two Blackhawk helicopters in Somalia during a 1993 mission, which had led to 18 American deaths. The military said a raid on bin Laden might fail and could involve substantial U.S. casualties. Intelligence reports also showed that bin Laden had his key lieutenants keep their families with the entourage, and Clinton was opposed to any operation that might kill women and children.
A U.S. Special Forces unit and U.S. submarines capable of firing cruise missiles were put on alert, but they required six to ten hours advance warning about bin Laden's future location.
One of the most guarded secrets in the CIA was the existence of 30 recruited Afghan agents, operating under the codeword GE/ SENIORS, who had been paid to track bin Laden around Afghanistan for the last three years. The group, which was paid $10,000 a month, could move together or break into smaller tracking teams of five men.
The CIA had daily secure communications with the "Seniors" as they were called, and had bought them vehicles and motorcycles. But tracking bin Laden grew increasingly difficult. He moved at irregular times, often departing suddenly at night.
Incredibly, the Seniors seemed to have him located most of the time, but they were never able to provide "actionable" intelligence - to say with any confidence that he would remain there for the time needed to shoot cruise missiles at the location. And the CIA failed to recruit a reliable human spy in bin Laden's circle who could tip them to his plans.