Authors: Peter L. Bergen
Over the course of the coming weeks and months the Bush administration would set the course of policies that would have unforeseen consequences for many years into the future: a “light footprint” operation in Afghanistan, which would succeed brilliantly at toppling the Taliban but leave many of the top leaders of al-Qaeda at liberty following the failure to capture or kill them at the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, and would also fail to secure Afghanistan for the long term. Bush also launched the nation on an ambiguous and open-ended conflict against a tactic, termed the “war on terror,” which would warp U.S. foreign policy and distort key American ideals about the rule of law, while his administration’s obsession with Iraq would lead the United States into fighting two wars in the Muslim world simultaneously, seeming to confirm one of bin Laden’s key claims—that the West, led by America, was at war with Islam.
The idea that Iraq was behind 9/11 gripped senior members of the Bush administration within hours of the attacks. At 2:40 that afternoon Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld considered whether “to hit S. H. [Saddam Hussein] same time—
not only UBL
[bin Laden],” according to contemporaneous notes made by one of his top deputies. Douglas Feith, the number-three official at the Pentagon and a longtime neoconservative advocate of overthrowing the Iraqi dictator, was flying back from Europe the day of the attacks with a group of senior Pentagon officials. On the flight Feith broached the idea of overthrowing Saddam. General John Abizaid, the Arabic-speaking four-star general who two years later would assume responsibility for U.S. military operations in the Middle East, interrupted him, saying, “
Not Iraq
. There is not a connection with al-Qaeda.”
A day later, Bush pulled Richard Clarke aside and asked him to look into the evidence to
see if Saddam was involved
. Clarke said, “But al-Qaeda did this,” to which Bush replied, “I know, I know … but see if Saddam was involved.” Clarke’s deputy Roger Cressey remembers that this exchange with the president “struck us as odd, only because we knew there was no state sponsorship of al-Qaeda to do this type of thing. But it clearly reflected what
their frontal lobe issue
was. And they viewed Iraq as something that was an existential threat to the United States.” In response, Clarke and Cressey’s office
worked up a memo
that was sent to Condoleezza Rice a week after 9/11; titled “Survey of Intelligence Information of Any Iraqi Involvement in the September 11 Attacks,” it concluded that there was “no compelling case” that Iraq was involved.
On September 14, Bush for the first time visited “Ground Zero,” the smoking pile of what remained of the World Trade Center and the more than 2,700 people who had perished there. Three days earlier, when he had first spoken to the nation shortly after the attacks, Bush had appeared hesitant. On this day he was a man transformed. Standing on top of a wrecked fire truck, Bush grabbed a bullhorn to address the rescue crews working feverishly to find any survivors. When one of the workers said he couldn’t hear what the president was saying, Bush made one of the most memorable remarks of his presidency, “
I can hear you
. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon.” Bush’s robust response to the attacks drove his
poll ratings
from 55 percent favorable before 9/11 to 90 percent favorable in the days after, the highest ever recorded for a president.
The plan to bring some justice to those who had knocked down the Trade Center buildings was first laid out to Bush by Cofer Black, the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. Black briefed the National Security Council on September 13 in the White House Situation Room, a subterranean, wood-paneled conference room that sits behind a well-insulated door next to the White House Mess. Black had something of a
personal interest
in al-Qaeda; while he was the CIA station chief in Sudan, during the mid-1990s, the terrorist group had tried to assassinate him. Black handled the episode with admirable sangfroid, deciding to consider the attempt an exercise to see how al-Qaeda was running its operations. Black, given to a certain bombastic brand of deadpan theatrics, assured the president that the CIA-led operation to destroy al-Qaeda and the Taliban would take only
a matter of weeks
and that they would shortly have “
flies walking across their eyeballs
.”
During this meeting, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Iraq was a threat, supported terrorists, and might give them weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld also pointed out that Iraq had far more military targets than the scant and rudimentary infrastructure in Afghanistan and that the United States could inflict on Iraq the kind of damage that would cause other terrorist-supporting regimes to take note. Bush replied that any U.S. military action in Iraq would have to go beyond simply making a statement and would have to bring about regime change. Only two days after 9/11,
several of the key arguments
for the Iraq War were discussed by Bush and his national security team. The discussions of military action against Iraq were more than merely academic. On September 13,
Rumsfeld sent a directive
to Third Army
headquarters in Atlanta to draw up a plan within three days setting forth what it would take to seize Iraq’s southern oilfields.
Early the following morning, in his office at CIA headquarters, a modernist glass and concrete box surrounded by woodlands in suburban Virginia, Cofer Black met with Gary Schroen, a fifty-nine-year-old CIA officer who had recently started the weeks-long process of retiring from the Agency. Schroen’s three-decade career had taken him on
many assignments around South Asia
, including a clandestine trip into Afghanistan in 1996 to meet with Ahmad Shah Massoud to discuss efforts to capture bin Laden. Schroen had a good rapport with Massoud and his key aides and he also spoke Dari, the language of the Tajik ethnic group that dominated the Northern Alliance.
Black got straight to the point: “Gary, I want you to
take a small team
of CIA officers into Afghanistan. You will link up with the Northern Alliance and convince them to cooperate with the CIA and U.S. military as we go after al-Qaeda.” Putting his retirement plans on hold, Schroen accepted the assignment and began packing the various necessities for his mission, which included millions of dollars in cash to sweeten the coming negotiations with the various commanders of the Northern Alliance.
The next day, on Saturday, September 15, Bush again met with his national security team, this time
at Camp David
, the presidential retreat in the Maryland hills. Seated around the retreat’s large conference room table were the president, the vice president, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director Robert Mueller, CIA director George Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin. Bush, as was his custom, offered a prayer to begin the meeting and then the members of what was now effectively his war cabinet, casually dressed in windbreakers, khakis, and jeans, began to discuss
the future outlines
of the American response to 9/11.
The mood at the
meeting was somber
. The president went around the room and asked for everyone’s assessment about what had just happened, after which he said, “Let’s have lunch, and then everyone take an hour, take a walk or something, get your thoughts together, and then we’re going to come back and talk about what we’re going to do about this,” recalls John McLaughlin.
Bizarrely, the Department of Defense had almost nothing to offer in the way of a plan for attacking the Taliban. General Tommy Franks, the head of
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), whose area of operations covered the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, recalled that the Pentagon did not have an
“off-the-shelf” plan
for attacking the militants in Afghanistan. Douglas Feith, the number-three official in the Pentagon, also remembers that there was
no military plan ready
for attacking al-Qaeda or overthrowing the Taliban. Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley says that the plan the military did present at Camp David “was heavily weighted toward an
airpower-based approach
. And the president said, ‘We’re not going to do it that way. We need to send a whole new message, that we are serious about this.’”
But the CIA and its cigar-chomping, back-slapping director Tenet did have a plan, because from the time that the Taliban had first seized Kabul five years earlier, the Agency had remained in touch with the Northern Alliance. From February 1999 to March 2001, the CIA had inserted five teams successively into Massoud’s Panjshir Valley stronghold to build up relations with the commanders of the Northern Alliance. Those relationships were supplemented by a rich CIA intelligence collection program inside Afghanistan that included tips and information flowing in from tribal leaders, criminals, low-level members of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda support staff such as drivers and cooks. On 9/11 the Agency had a total of some
one hundred sources and subsources
inside Afghanistan.
While
the plan that Tenet presented to Bush’s
war cabinet was seemingly a somewhat risky one—inserting Agency officers into Afghanistan with the various warlords of the Northern Alliance armed with suitcases of cash to buy loyalty and fighters—it was the only plan on offer. Once on the ground in Afghanistan, CIA officers would coordinate the insertion of U.S. Special Forces teams who would then guide American bombing strikes on Taliban positions.
Rice remembers that when a map of Afghanistan was rolled out on the conference room table at Camp David, “
the color drained
from everybody’s faces.” Surrounding Afghanistan were potentially unstable Pakistan, hostile Iran, and autocratic states like Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Rice says, “I think everybody thought: Of all the places to have a fight a war, Afghanistan would not be our choice.”
At the Camp David meeting, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, long an advocate of overthrowing Saddam Hussein, interjected that he estimated there was a
10 to 50 percent
chance that the Iraqi dictator was involved in 9/11. There was no evidence at all for this assertion, but Wolfowitz
seemed to have internalized his boss Donald Rumsfeld’s well-known dictum that “the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” This phrase, which posed as deep thinking about the real world, will no doubt serve as an ironic epitaph for the Bush administration, which again and again after 9/11 took the position that
the lack of hard evidence
for its assertions in no way undercut their truthfulness.
Wolfowitz, whose bookish manner belied his ultrahawkish views, also made the case for striking Iraq in “
this round
” of the war on terror. John McLaughlin, the CIA deputy director, who spoke in the measured tones of the college professor he would later become, argued that this was “not the right conclusion to draw at this point. … We had been
projecting a spectacular attack
by al-Qaeda. Here it was. We had the names of some of the people involved that we recognized: They were al-Qaeda.” The cabinet then
voted to go to war
against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, although Rumsfeld abstained. At the end of the meeting Bush said, “I believe
Iraq was involved
, but I’m not going to strike them now.”
Later that evening, Attorney General Ashcroft, a talented amateur musician, gathered the war cabinet around a piano for
a sing-along
of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” and “America the Beautiful.”
On Monday morning, September 17, in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Bush started barking instructions to his assembled national security team. “I want
the CIA in there first
,” the president demanded.
Bush also signed
a top-secret directive about the war plan for Afghanistan, which also instructed the Pentagon to begin planning for an invasion of Iraq, one of many indicators that the march to war there began immediately after 9/11. That same day Wolfowitz wrote Rumsfeld a memo arguing that the odds were
better than one in ten
that Saddam was involved in 9/11, citing his praise for the attacks and (long-discredited) theories that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center attack in 1993. Wolfowitz argued that eliminating Saddam needed to be a top priority. He met little resistance from Rumsfeld, who on September 29 instructed his incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Richard Myers, to begin preparing
military options for Iraq
, including plans for an invasion with a much smaller force than the army of five hundred thousand that had taken Kuwait back from Saddam following his 1990 invasion of the country.
Gary Schroen and his team of CIA officers left Washington on September 19 for the long trip to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the north, where an Agency-owned helicopter was waiting to fly them over the border
and insert them into the small patch of northeastern Afghanistan where the Northern Alliance continued to hold out against the Taliban. Before they left they met with Cofer Black at Agency headquarters for their final marching orders. They were unambiguous. Black told them, “
I want bin Laden
’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the president.” This appears to have been the first time in decades that a CIA officer had been directly ordered to kill an enemy of the United States.
The next day President Bush gave the speech that would define his presidency. On September 20, nine days after 9/11, he addressed both houses of Congress and laid out the strategic doctrines of what for the first time he publicly referred to as the “war on terror.” The doctrines laid out in the speech would set the course of the foreign policy of the United States for the next decade and would reshape the Middle East in then-unforeseen ways.
Before a packed congressional chamber and watched on TV live by
eighty million Americans
, Bush explained, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been defeated.” This war then would extend not only to the perpetrators of 9/11 but to other groups that might potentially threaten the United States, and the war could theoretically last for decades: “Americans should not expect one battle, but
a lengthy campaign
.”