500 Days (87 page)

As he has for my last two books, Brent Bowers read over the manuscript and provided unparalleled editing and all-around guidance. His magic has dusted every page. Diane Obara served as my invaluable transcriber, proving herself, as always, to be irreplaceable.

The folks at the Wylie Agency once again were invaluable. On top of everything else he has done for me, Andrew Wylie was the idea man: he was the one who suggested that I write a national security book, a new direction for me, and took a stand as my fiercest advocate. Jeff Posternak was my hand-holder and all-around powerhouse who helped fight off the demons when they needed to be slayed.

The documents that Jordan and I collected for this book proved to be quite overwhelming, filling up two offices, a spare bedroom, and ultimately, rooms
in someone else’s house. Margie and Terry Tippen became the document wranglers, organizing thousands of pages of records with such precision that I was actually able to find the information I needed from the mountain of paper. Tim Perkins offered me badly needed office space, as well as his insights about the manuscript. And I would be remiss not to recognize the contributions of Errington Thompson.

One of the biggest thrills for me with this book is that I was once again able to work with one of the finest editors in the business, Stacy Creamer. She showed me almost every day the delight of working with a top-notch publisher. Megan Reid was my endlessly cheerful guide through Touchstone who was willing to jump into the mix whenever I needed help; at times, she also served as my desperately needed taskmaster, pushing me back on track whenever I began to wander. Lisa Healy, the production editor, and George Turianski, the production manager, treated me with patience as I missed deadline after deadline—sorry, guys. Martin P. Karlow, the copy editor, and W. Anne Jones, the proofreader, saved me from myself more than a few times. And Ruth Lee-Mui, the designer, gave a crisp appearance to the whole book.

Finally, as always, my family played the most important role, giving me back my smile when I felt frustrated and encouraging me to keep going when I felt stuck. My wife, Theresa, was there for me every step of the way as both my editor and my best friend. My three boys—Adam, Ryan, and Sam—brought me delight every day and were endlessly patient and supportive when things got rough. Adam also took a direct role in the work by assuming the unenviable job of printing out thousands of pages of e-mails and other records that I had obtained in digital format. The four of you have made my life an endless delight. I cannot find the words to express how much I love you all.

On the other hand, perhaps those are the words.

ALSO BY KURT EICHENWALD
Conspiracy of Fools
The Informant
Serpent on the Rock

This book is based on more than six hundred hours of interviews, many of which were tape-recorded, with more than one hundred people involved in these events, as well as thousands of pages of documents.

The documents include notes of interviews and interrogations from the United States and other countries, secret government Teletypes and e-mails, medical records, scheduling books, travel documents, personal memos, diaries, recordings and transcripts, formal written statements provided to government investigators and in court trials, sworn testimony from criminal and civil trials and hearings, and an array of other records.

Most of the interviews were conducted on condition of anonymity. However, none of the participants in these interviews will be named. That is because I have found that, in a book, identifying those who spoke on the record makes it far easier to discern the names of others who asked me not to disclose their cooperation. A message, also, to those who sat for lengthy interviews with me but whose information did not make the book—I apologize. The direction of these large projects is often hard to predict in the early going, and the result has been that multiple story lines I pursued in my reporting hit the cutting room floor.

At times, recollections and documents conflicted. In most of those instances, I relied on the documents. However, if those records were unsworn statements, I gave them the same weight as the interviews and set out to resolve the conflict. If I could not reach a resolution, I did not use the information.

Some of the dialogue comes directly from recordings or direct transcripts of the conversation. The majority of those recorded discussions, however, were not in English. There were also a good number of documents and transcripts of wiretaps in foreign languages. As a result, I hired translators to interpret Arabic, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Bosnian (much in the Shtokavian dialect), Balinese, and Polish. I located several of those translators through Link Translations in New York; others I hired were independent, or I located them in the relevant country.

Most of the dialogue was reconstructed with the help of participants or witnesses to the conversations or documents that describe the discussion. In a few, rare instances, secondary sources were informed of events or conversations with a participant. If the secondary sources agreed on what they were told, or they were corroborated by documents, the dialogue was used. However, the dialogue reconstructed by this method never amounted to more than three sentences in a single scene and was never incriminating.

Of course, I am not claiming that the dialogue in these pages is a perfect transcript of incidents that occurred years ago. It does, however, represent the best recollection of these events and conversations by participants. In my books, I have invariably found that these renditions more accurately reflect reality than mere paraphrase would. Indeed, I have had sources summarize a conversation for me, after which I forced them to go back and try to reconstruct the dialogue. In a number of instances, when pushed to dig into their memories—or when aided by documents I placed before them—these sources frequently came to realize that their general recollection was incomplete or even incorrect compared to the dialogue they reconstructed.

In some cases, I was unable to determine the precise date when an event occurred. In those cases I have presented the relevant scene at the point in the narrative that is most consistent with the information contained in the relevant documents and interviews. In those instances, I give no indication of the event’s date. For ease of reading, there were also times when a particular event was moved a few days out of order, to allow for a theme in one chapter to be completed. These movements never had any impact on the story, and the scenes had no relationship to any surrounding information.

Descriptions of individual settings come from direct observation, interviews, and documents. Most details of weather conditions come from records of the National Climactic Data Center or Weather Underground at
www.wunderground.com
.

Every history builds off the work of others, and I was fortunate to be standing on the shoulders of giants. Lawrence Wright, in his astonishing work
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11,
Knopf, 2006, provides an invaluable depiction of the formation of al-Qaeda and the events leading to 9/11, as does Steve Coll in his seminal work
Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,
Penguin, 2004. Bob Woodward detailed the weeks leading up to the invasion of Afghanistan in
Bush at War,
Simon & Schuster, 2002, and then turned his expert eye toward Iraq in
Plan of Attack,
Simon & Schuster, 2004. Jane Mayer provided an invaluable analysis and depiction of the events and implications of the war on terror in her book
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,
Doubleday, 2008.

1
: The date of the briefing and a confirmation of the Bush attendees from “CIA Briefs Bush on National Security; Aides Rice, Wolfowitz Participate in Session at Texas Ranch,”
Washington Post,
September 3, 2000.

2
: Bush’s appearance at the briefing from photographs of the event.

2
: Background on the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo from T. R. Reid, “Tokyo Police Link Sect to Nerve Gas,”
Washington Post,
March 22, 1995.

2
–
3
: The briefing for Bush remains classified. However, a senior CIA official directed me to open-source materials about the threat of CBRN and terrorists that contain the same information. They include Richard A. Falkenrath et al.,
America’s Achilles’ Heel: Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Terrorism and Covert Attack,
MIT Press, 1998; and George Tenet’s testimony of February 2, 2000, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Global Realities of Our National Security.” Other documents I obtained provided statistical and historical references that I was assured were reflected in the Bonk presentation. They include Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), “Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Terrorism,” December 18, 1999; Falkenrath et al.,
America’s Achilles’ Heel
; National Defense University, Center for Counterproliferation Research, “Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism: The Threat According to the Current Unclassified Literature,” May 31, 2002; and Central Intelligence Agency, “Terrorist CBRN: Materials and Effects, CTC-2003-40058, May 2003. Historic statistical information referenced in the
Bonk briefing is also reported in Kate Ivanova and Todd Sandler, “CBRN Attack Perpetrators: An Empirical Study,”
Foreign Policy Analysis,
2007 (3).