Against All Enemies (37 page)

After September 11, I thought that the arguments would be over, that finally everyone would see what had to be done and go about doing it. The right war was to fight for the elimination of al Qaeda, to stabilize nations threatened by radical Islamic terrorists, to offer a clear alternative to counter the radical “theology” and ideology of the terrorists, and to reduce our own vulnerabilities at home. It was an obvious agenda.

Roger Cressey, my deputy at the NSC Staff, came to me in early October, after the time that I had intended to switch from the terrorism job to Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Security. The switch had been delayed by September 11. He and I, and the others in our little office, had been working eighteen-hour days and more every day since the attacks. At age thirty-six, Cressey had often been mistaken for a graduate student ten years younger. Not anymore. His worry showed and now his concern was that I would want to stay on in the NSC terrorism job to implement our plans. “You're not gonna move now, are you? Finally, they're paying attention to yah, so you wanna hang around and get your White Whale, huh?” Cressey had grown up near the fish piers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He knew about obsessive fishing boat captains. He had wanted me to move to the new Critical Infrastructure and Cyber job. His frustration with our NSC colleagues and bosses had been getting dangerously high before the attacks.

I was exhausted, from the ten years in the White House, from the marathon since the attacks, from the sleepless nights going over what I might have done to prevent the attacks. I looked at Cressey. “Well, Rog, as I said before: counterterrorism from now on will be a self-licking ice cream cone. It won't need anybody like me running it. Everybody will know what to do now. There won't be disagreements over policy or any need for a ramrod to get things done. It's obvious stuff now. We gave them the game plan. Hell, we gave it to them in January.” Cressey was beginning to smile back at me; he saw where I was going. “Cyber security is a virgin issue where we can make a real impact.” I went on. “It's the next threat, the next vulnerability, but people do not understand that yet. Let's go do that for a year and see what we can get done.”
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A month later, after a six-hour trip from Washington, we walked into a bar in Silicon Valley. I had just become the Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security and was going to spend two weeks getting to know the leaders of the high-tech industry in California. There was a jazz combo playing and I ordered my first alcoholic drink since the night of September 10. People were laughing and having a good time. Cressey and I had spent the weeks since the attacks holed up in a fortresslike White House, going to our homes for a few hours a day, carrying our gas masks, expecting another wave of attacks. In Palo Alto, as in most of America, life was going on. The people trusted, as I did, that the mechanisms of government, now awakened, would deal with the terrorist threat completely and systematically. We were wrong.

Replacing me as the senior NSC counterterrorism official was Wayne Downing, the retired four-star Army general who had led Special Operations Command. Wayne and I had first met twenty-eight years earlier when he was a young Major and I was an even younger Pentagon analyst, thrown together to share a windowless office in the bowels of the Pentagon. As soon as the terrorist attack on Khobar Towers had occurred in 1995, I asked Wayne to lead an investigation of whether there had been lax U.S. security at that Air Force facility. There had been and he said so, much to the Pentagon's chagrin. He was a no-nonsense kind of general, the perfect man for the job of coordinating the post–September 11 response. Within months of replacing me, Wayne Downing quit the White House in frustration at the Administration's continued bureaucratic response to the threat.

Wayne was replaced by two people, John Gordon and Randy Beers. As with Downing, I had known Beers and Gordon for a long time, having started working with them in 1979 and 1981, respectively. Beers was a young Foreign Service officer then and Gordon was an Air Force Major. John Gordon went on to command a wing of nuclear armed missiles in Wyoming, be George Tenet's deputy at CIA, and then be the first Director of the new National Nuclear Security Administration. Randy Beers and I would spend the next twenty-three years working together in the White House and State Department, as Deputy Assistant Secretaries, NSC Directors, Assistant Secretaries of State, and Special Assistants to the President. When Randy Beers went to the terrorism job in the NSC in 2002, he began working for his fourth president in the White House (having previously worked there for Reagan, Bush, and Clinton). Beers had enormous experience working on intelligence policy and operations, terrorism, foreign military operations, and law enforcement. He was the perfect man for the job.

Beers called from the White House months later and asked if he could stop by my house for a drink and some advice. “Randy, since when have you started calling before you dropped by? See you in a few minutes.” We had been giving each other advice and counsel for years, but I sensed that there was something wrong, maybe there was new information about another planned al Qaeda attack. I sat on the stoop of my old Sears catalogue house and thought back to the night twelve years earlier when I had been sitting there drinking Lagavulin and cursing the CIA for saying that Iraq would not invade Kuwait. Older now and off Scotch, I opened a bottle of Pinot Noir from a small winery I had found along the Russian River. When Beers sat down next to me his first words were, “I think I have to quit.”

I thought I knew why, but I asked. His answer flowed like a river at flood: “They still don't get it. Insteada goin' all out against al Qaeda and eliminating our vulnerabilities at home, they wanna fuckin' invade Iraq again. We have a token U.S. military force in Afghanistan, the Taliban are regrouping, we haven't caught bin Laden, or his deputy, or the head of the Taliban. And they aren't going to send more troops to Afghanistan to catch them or to help the government in Kabul secure the country. No, they're holding back, waiting to invade Iraq. Do you know how much it will strengthen al Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq? There's no threat to us now from Iraq, but 70 percent of the American people think Iraq attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. You wanna know why? Because that's what the Administration wants them to think!” I could see that there was some considerable built-up anxiety with the Bush administration. I got another bottle of the Pinot Noir.

Randy continued. “Worse yet, they're using the War on Terror politically. You know that document from Karl Rove's office that someone found in the park? Remember how it said the Republicans should run for election on the war issue? Well, they did. They are doing ‘Wag the Dog'! They ran against Max Cleland, saying he wasn't patriotic because he didn't agree 100 percent with Bush on how to do homeland security. Max Cleland, who lost three of his four limbs for this country in Vietnam!” Beers had lost hearing in one ear in Vietnam, where he had served two tours as a Marine. “I can't work for these people, I'm sorry I just can't.”

Beers resigned. He was right about Karl Rove's strategy against not just Max Cleland, but against all Democrats. From within the White House, a decision had been made that in the 2002 congressional elections and in the 2004 reelection, the Republicans would wrap themselves in the flag, saying a vote for them was a vote against the terrorists. “Run on the war” was the direction in 2002. Then Rove meant the War on Terror, but they also had in mind another war that they would gin up.

The churn of senior counterterrorism officials continued. John Gordon was transferred shortly thereafter to the position vacated by Tom Ridge, as Homeland Security Advisor. Fran Townsend, who had worked for Janet Reno and played such a key role in getting court orders during the Millennium Terrorist Alert, took over the NSC counterterrorism coordinator job in 2003.

Looking at this revolving door in the counterterrorism job after my departure, and thinking back to the ten months that I had served President Bush as his National Coordinator for Counterterrorism and Infrastructure Protection, I am still amazed that I had never been given the chance to talk with him about terrorism until September 11. In fact, during that time I had only three meetings where I developed the agenda and briefed him on issues, but each time on subjects other than terrorism. My proposal to brief the President on terrorism was deferred until “after the Deputies Committee and Principals Committee completed their review.” In this regard the second Bush administration was like his father's: NSC Staff saw the President infrequently and always with a chaperon. That style stood in sharp contrast with two terms of Clinton's presidency in which NSC Staff members regularly interacted with the Chief Executive, often telling him things that his National Security Advisor might not have said.

From the interactions I did have with Bush it was clear that the critique of him as a dumb, lazy rich kid was somewhat off the mark. When he focused, he asked the kind of questions that revealed a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem. Once he had that, he could put energy behind a drive to achieve his goal. The problem was that many of the important issues, like terrorism, like Iraq, were laced with important subtlety and nuance. These issues needed analysis and Bush and his inner circle had no real interest in complicated analyses; on the issues that they cared about, they already knew the answers, it was received wisdom.

Bush was informed by talking with a small set of senior advisors. Early on we were told that “the President is not a big reader” and goes to bed by 10:00. Clinton, by contrast, would be plowing through an inbox filled with staff memos while watching cable television news well after midnight. He would exhaust the White House staff's and departmental staff's expertise and then reach out to university and other sources. More often than not, we would discover he had read the latest book or magazine articles on the subject at hand. Clinton stopped me in the hall one day to say “Good job on that speech in Philadelphia.” Wondering how he knew what I had said, I asked, “How the hell did you see that speech?” The President gave me a sheepish grin and admitted: “I had C-SPAN on while I was reading last night.” Checking the C-SPAN schedule, I discovered that my Philadelphia speech on the Middle East peace process had run at 2:00 a.m. On another occasion Clinton told me he had read a new book by Gabriel García Márquez the night before. When I tried to get a copy of the book, I learned that it had not yet been published. Clinton was reading the galleys.

There were clearly innumerable differences between Clinton and Bush, most of them obvious, but the most telling for me was how the two sought and processed information. Bush wanted to get to the bottom line and move on. Clinton sought to hold every issue before him like a Rubik's Cube, examining it from every angle to the point of total distraction for his staff. Many times since September 11 I have wondered what difference it made that George Bush was President when we were attacked. What if it had happened with Clinton still in office or what if the Florida voting procedures had been otherwise?

Although Bush had heard about al Qaeda in intelligence reports before the attack he had spent little time learning about the sources and nature of the movement. His immediate instinct after the attacks was, naturally, to hit back. His framework, however, was summed up by his famous line “you are either with us or against us” and his early focus on dealing with Iraq as a way of demonstrating America's power. I doubt that anyone ever had the chance to make the case to him that attacking Iraq would actually make America less secure and strengthen the broader radical Islamic terrorist movement. Certainly he did not hear that from the small circle of advisors who alone are the people whose views he respects and trusts.

Any leader whom one can imagine as President on September 11 would have declared a “war on terrorism” and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary by invading. Almost any President would have stepped up domestic security and preparedness measures. Exactly what did George Bush do after September 11 that any other President one can imagine wouldn't have done after such attacks? In the end, what was unique about George Bush's reaction to terrorism was his selection as an object lesson for potential state sponsors of terrorism not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq. It is hard to imagine another President making that choice.

Others (Clinton, the first Bush, Carter, Ford) might have tried to understand the phenomenon of terrorism, what led fifteen Saudis and four others to commit suicide to kill Americans. Others might have tried to build a world consensus to address the root causes, while using the moment to force what had been lethargic or doubting governments to arrest known terrorists and close front organizations. One can imagine Clinton trying one more time to force an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, going to Saudi Arabia and addressing the Muslim people in a moving appeal for religious tolerance, pushing hard for a security arrangement between India and Pakistan to create a nuclear-free zone, and stabilizing Pakistan. Such efforts may or may not have succeeded, but one thing we know they would not have done is inflame Islamic opinion and further radicalize Muslim youth into heightened hatred of America in the way that invading Iraq has done.

It was plainly obvious when four aircraft were hijacked that airline security had to be improved, but Bush resisted calls for making the airport security screeners federal employees. Then, when he lost that battle to Congress, he placed an old family friend, John McGaw, as head of the new agency to run the security screeners. Within months, McGaw had to be replaced under congressional criticism. It was to become a pattern. Bush and his prep school roommate Clay Johnson (the White House Personnel Director) looked first to family loyalists and political cronies to staff key positions. As one Republican columnist told me, “These guys are more inbred, secretive, and vindictive than the Mafia.”