Against All Enemies (27 page)

But could we deter Iraq? If we did not, there were few decent options for an American response. We had no biological weapons; our own chemical weapons left over from the 1960s and 1970s were immobile, leaky, and a risk to anyone who went near them. Using nuclear weapons seemed out of the question and, in any event, what would we use them on? Iraqis who had been forced to fight for Saddam Hussein?

We took the issue to the “inner cabinet” of Principals chaired by Brent Scowcroft. Seated around Scowcroft's coffee table on a couch and in wing-back chairs were Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell, and a few others. It was one of those problems Principals hate, one with no solution. Scowcroft, cracking open some peanuts, turned to Cheney. “Mr. Secretary, what would you recommend?”

Cheney then looked at Powell in a way that said they had talked and disagreed. “Go on, Colin, say what you think,” Cheney urged.

Powell shrugged and, with a sheepish look on his face, said, “I just think chemical weapons are goofy.”

Amused, Scowcroft, a retired Air Force general, looked at Powell. “Goofy? Is that some Army terminology?”

Growing more serious, Powell explained. “Chemical weapons will just slow us down a little. We will batten up the tanks and drive through. I don't think Saddam will use biological weapons because they are not really suited for the battlefield. They take too long. Besides all of this shit can literally blow back on you. And nuclear, I don't think he has nuclear.”

Cheney jumped in, now agreeing with Powell. “Besides, we're already planning to throw the kitchen sink at them. There is not a lot more we could do, except give priority to taking out ammunition piles that may have chem or bio.” He paused. “What we should do is just tell Saddam that if he uses any of this stuff, we'll go to Baghdad and hang him.”

In the end, Secretary Baker carried a letter from President Bush to Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz at a meeting in Switzerland. There has been some controversy about the exact wording of the U.S. threat in that letter. Whatever it said, Tariq Aziz handed it back after reading it. He later noted that if he had given Saddam anything that said that, Saddam would have had him shot. As far as we know, Saddam did not use chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons in the First Gulf War.

These experiences led me to worry greatly about the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on such weapons. President Clinton's concern about the same issue, however, had less to do with me than with his own reading. Clinton's reading habits had always amazed me. He was an eclectic reader, who apparently stayed up very late almost every night devouring a book. After the Tokyo attack, he began reading fictional accounts like
Rainbow Six
and
The Cobra Event
in which terrorists wield chemical and biological weapons. Some books he sent to us for our comments. Some he discussed directly with experts outside the government. The books just reinforced what he had already decided: we needed to do more to prevent terrorists from getting their hands on these weapons and we needed to be ready if they did.

Despite the 1995 Presidential Decision Directive on the subject, only the Defense Department was taking the chem-bio threat seriously, and the Pentagon's concern seemed limited to the safety of their troops from such weapons. No one took responsibility for the safety of all the other Americans who might be hit with chemical or biological, or even nuclear, weapons. The other departments were not taking my hints that they should put some serious money in their budgets for this purpose.

Sandy Berger had moved up from Deputy to become the National Security Advisor in 1997. I wanted him to have the President insert funds for the programs into what was, after all, called the President's Budget Request to Congress. Berger advised against it. “If the departments don't want the money, they'll just go around our backs to the Congress and tell them to shift the funds back to the departments' own pet rocks.” It was a disappointingly realistic assessment of White House power. “What you have to do, Dick, is scare the shit out of the Cabinet members the way you have scared me with this stuff. Make them want to do something about it. Make it their idea.”

That seemed like an invitation. “You assemble them. I'll scare them,” I responded.

They assembled in the oddly prim and proper Blair House, a series of connected townhouses opposite the Executive Office Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Blair House is owned by the Protocol Office of the State Department and is meant to house visiting heads of state, not to host Cabinet meetings. Nonetheless, in March 1998 the Cabinet members and other senior officials showed up, from State, Defense, CIA, Justice, FBI, Health and Human Services, FEMA, Energy, OMB, and other White House offices. Attendance was mandatory. Berger had told everyone that the President wanted them there, but he had never said the President would join them. When they showed up, Berger made me the chairman of the meeting, to the surprise of Cabinet members who might have thought that it would be the President. It was to be a “tabletop exercise,” a simulation of a Cabinet meeting during which certain events would unfold.

They assembled around a large U-shaped series of tables in a ballroom. At the open end of the table was a large screen on which we projected “facts” as the events began to happen. I stood in the middle of the U with a cordless microphone, feeling like the host of a daytime television talk show. Within the CSG, we held exercises like this for years to smoke out operational difficulties, coordination problems, and practical shortcomings. The Cabinet had never done one before.

We began with a report on the big screen of a spreading infection in the Southwest. It could be a natural outbreak, which sometimes happened in New Mexico (what one scientist called the “land of the flea and the home of the plague”). Then another report: the infected patients were diagnosed with Marburg or Ebola, which was incurable and contagious. I walked over to Secretary Donna Shalala of Health and Human Services and asked, “This would seem to be your problem. What are you going to do? Will you quarantine the area? Do you have that authority? Who goes in to help?”

While those questions hung in the air, I moved in front of Attorney General Reno. She had never cared what anyone's rank was and had taken to calling me directly on my private line whenever she had a problem or idea that she thought was in my portfolio. I asked her, “Let's say for the sake of argument that we can quarantine the area. How can we stop people who want to leave the quarantine zone? Do you order them to be shot if they resist?” No Cabinet member knew the answer. While they had views, which differed, it was clear that there was no plan.

The second scenario described a chemical weapon released in a U.S. city. The group dealt better with that, but still realized that most cities had neither the training nor the equipment to deal with such an event.

The third scenario hit close to home, literally. In that scenario a terrorist group called the FBI and announced that it had a nuclear weapon in Washington. The report went on to state that the joint Energy-Defense search team, acting on a tip from the Coast Guard, located the weapon on a cabin cruiser tied up in a yacht club less than two miles from the White House. The blast radius would take out most of downtown Washington. “FBI, do you hit the boat with a SWAT team?” I asked. They wanted to, but were then told that only the Defense Department commando team was trained in what to do with a nuclear weapon and that team was not stationed in Washington. “Do we wait?” I then asked. We agreed to wait and to call for the commando unit. Then the slide on the screen asked the question that provoked the most debate: “Do we tell the citizens of Washington?” If we told the citizens to evacuate, the terrorists might immediately explode the weapon. If we did not tell them and the weapon went off two hours later, people would needlessly die.

In the evolving scenario, the special Army commandos with nuclear weapons training arrived and set up near the boat. Then, suddenly, the commandos attacked the terrorists and soon thereafter shot the nuclear weapon to disable it. “Wasn't there some risk in that?” I asked. “What if the shot had caused the bomb to go off?” The Pentagon participants were quick to reassure everyone that no special Army commando unit would ever disobey orders in that way. “Ah, but they didn't,” I contended. “We ordered them to deploy near the boat. When we did that, we gave them implicit authority to act if they saw things happening that led them to believe that the terrorists were going to detonate the weapon. And when they got on the boat and saw a timer clicking down, they had the implicit authority to take whatever action they judged best to stop it from going off. If they believe that they do not have time to ask for permission in order to save several hundred thousand lives, shouldn't they act?” Another debate ensued. I asked, “If the bomb did go off, FEMA, what would you guys do? Do you have units trained in recovery operations in radioactive environments?”

At the end of the half day, a collection of black Cadillacs fanned out from Blair House carrying appropriately frightened senior officials back to their offices. Most were calling ahead to their headquarters to convene meetings. They knew now these programs would need more money, but most of all they knew their departments would need some plans.

In a few weeks it was time for more, this time with the President attending in the White House Cabinet Room. When the Cabinet members arrived, they found their natural places at the table taken by strangers. Instead, the name tags for the Cabinet were in the row of seats along the wall seats that were typically reserved for their staff, the people known as “back benchers.” The strangers at the table had been assembled, at my request, by Admiral Frank Young, who had just retired from the Public Health Service. They included a Nobel Prize–winning biochemist, several other scientists and researchers on antidotes for biological weapons, and the New York City emergency services director. Together they had drafted a budget proposal for an aggressive plan for responding to a biological weapons attack. They briefed the President. Their plan would do in one year what I hoped to fund over five years. Clinton looked over to the OMB officials attending. “I think we really have to do this stuff. Let's see if we can find the money.”

It had become pretty clear to Sandy Berger that terrorism and domestic preparedness were major problems, presidential priorities, and should be among the very few growing budgets in Washington. These issues could not continue to be handled by only one of the dozen Special Assistants to the President who made up the senior level of the NSC Staff. Nor could we continue to point to presidential speeches as official guidance to the departments and agencies. Berger thought we needed a “terrorism czar,” and he wanted it to be me. We already had one job in Washington with the unfortunate nickname of “czar,” the head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. With a title that long, it was little wonder the press called him “the Drug Czar.” The few people who had held that job had not acquitted themselves well. In fact, I had urged that there be a personnel switch in 1996 and argued that Army General Barry McCaffrey should be given the job. By 1998 McCaffrey was doing better than anyone had before, but there were still huge coordination and bureaucratic rivalry problems in the U.S. counter-narcotics program. I did not want to repeat that in counterterrorism and feared that the departments would see a czar as a challenge to their authority.

Nonetheless, Berger floated the idea of a “National Coordinator” for counterterrorism and proposed that we codify it with a new Presidential Decision Directive. We did need new, more detailed Presidential policy guidance. I drafted three new directives and circulated them under the tentative draft titles of PDD-X, Y, and Z.

Z updated our Continuity of Government program, which had been allowed to fall apart when the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack had gone away. If terrorists could attack Washington, particularly with weapons of mass destruction, we needed to have a robust system of command and control, with plans to devolve authority and capabilities to officials outside Washington.

Y addressed something with the clumsy name of “critical infrastructure protection and cyber security.” After the Oklahoma City bombing, the President had asked the Attorney General and her Deputy, Jamie Gorelick, to conduct a quick review of the vulnerabilities of key domestic facilities. One of their conclusions surprised us: the nation was increasingly dependent on networked computers that were vulnerable to nonexplosive attack—hacking. To address that weakness, the President had appointed a large Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection under former Air Force General Tom Marsh. The Commission had come back with a meticulously researched and lengthy report that could be boiled down to one sentence: all over the United States we have begun to rely upon vulnerable computer networks to run transportation, banking, power systems, and other “critical infrastructures.” In classified documents accompanying the report, the commissioners pointed out that the U.S. intelligence and military communities could do some real damage if we faced a foe as dependent upon computers as we were. If the U.S. could do it to others, others could do it to us. PDD-Y created a program to address this new problem.

X was the overall policy document. Although most of the text detailed policies on counterterrorism, X also set up an overall management structure. There would be ten components to the U.S. policy and programs for counterterrorism and security. For each program, there would be clarity about responsibility, which department or agencies were in charge. The CSG would officially become not just a crisis response committee, but a policy formulation body with a budget and programmatic role. Moreover, the CSG would have to oversee how the ten programs were run, the same way that a congressional committee had oversight of an Administration program. The ten programs were: