Against All Enemies (7 page)

Kurtz reached out for the market makers. In 1993 when the World Trade Center was bombed, President Clinton was called directly by Wall Street firm CEOs who had been prevented from reentering the towers. Unable to close their transaction accounts for the day, billions of dollars were up in the air, unassigned. That day eight years earlier, at the President's direction, I had called the Fire Commissioner and gotten agreement to let key staffers back into the towers. That wasn't an option now; both towers had dropped. Kurtz called the people on Wall Street we had met earlier in the year. He learned that they had off-site backup and had avoided the 1993 problem. He also learned that it would be hard to reopen the markets because of the infrastructure damage.

I walked back into the Video Conferencing Center and took the chair. “FEMA, FEMA go.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency was responsible for disasters and there had never been one as big as this. Mike Brown, the Deputy Director, appeared on-screen.

“The Mayor has called for the evacuation of Manhattan south of Canal Street. Governor Pataki has called up the National Guard. We have eight FEMA-sponsored teams en route to Manhattan and four rolling to Arlington. Both New York and D.C. have declared a state of emergency.”

“How many dead?” I asked.

“They have no idea, thousands,” he said, shaking his head.

Cressey had been preparing a PowerPoint briefing for Bush's arrival in Omaha and Kurtz had done a timeline on what had happened when, and what we had done. The deck looked good, simple, straightforward. I asked Kurtz to walk it over to the PEOC. Then, remembering the difficulty I had in getting in, I asked my Secret Service liaison officer, Agent Pete McCauley, to escort and vouch for Kurtz.

Kurtz and McCauley walked incredulously through the empty White House, past the abandoned interior guard posts. Pete gave the documents to an agent he knew at the vault door in the East Wing for handoff to the Vice President. Together they climbed back up, into the open air of the Colonnade along the Rose Garden. Halfway to the West Wing, they heard a sudden crashing roar and looked up to see two F-15 Eagles screech across the South Lawn at three hundred feet, shaking the two-hundred-year-old Executive Mansion. McCauley pressed his back against the wall, “Holy Mary, Mother of God!”

Kurtz, a Holy Cross graduate, completed the prayer: “Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.” The Combat Air Patrol had arrived. The White House was a war zone.

Back in the Situation Room, I was looking for Breshnahan. “POTUS is inbound Offutt. I need video connectivity to STRATCOM and I need them to have this PowerPoint.” Gary indicated that would not be a problem, but he would need to disconnect the Coast Guard. Just before 3:00 p.m., we saw Bush stride into the underground bunker at Strategic Command, Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Everyone stepped out of the West Wing Video Conferencing Center, except Frank Miller and me.

The last item on the agenda was supposed to be where the President should be. Instead, we began there. “I'm coming back to the White House as soon as the plane is fueled,” the President said. “No discussion. Item two, briefing by Dick Clarke.”

I walked through “What Happened,” from 08:50 to 10:06, four aircraft impacting the earth. Next, the “Response Actions,” the nationwide grounding of aircraft, the borders closed, the ports sealed, the forces on DEFCON 3, the government moved to caves, FEMA mortuary units en route to Manhattan.

Next was “Issues for the Next 24–48 hours.” Given that the President had decided to return to the White House, I suggested that a constitutional successor be deployed with a support team outside the city. (Commerce Secretary Don Evans was found and moved to a secret location outside the city.) We would need another public statement by the President, from the Oval Office, after his return. Also to be decided was the continued grounding of the air transportation system, military deployments to guard critical infrastructure here and abroad, and the schedule for reopening the markets. We needed to order the federal workforce to stay home. Basically, we needed the country to go on hold for a day or two until we learned whether there were more attacks coming, until we organized improved security, until we began to pick up the pieces.

CIA Director George Tenet was up next. He left no doubt that al Qaeda had committed these atrocities. He had already been on the telephone to key counterparts around the world, lining up the forces for the counterstrike.

Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld briefed on the status of forces. The Atlantic Fleet had departed Norfolk and was steaming with aircraft carriers and cruisers toward New York. He omitted the fact that no one had ordered the Atlantic Commander to do that. At times like these, initiative was a good thing. About 120 fighters were finally circling America's metropolitan areas. Forces worldwide were on battle status.

FEMA talked of the Urban Search and Rescue Teams driving up the turnpike to Manhattan. A blood drive was under way. Emergencies were in effect in New York State, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Then the President was up, out, and in the air, escorted by F-15s and racing for Andrews Air Force Base. His was the only passenger aircraft in the air over America. The skies were clear. Somehow FAA had landed over four thousand aircraft, diverting flights from Europe to tiny Canadian fields with few if any hotels. Canadian citizens were opening their homes to strangers, who were slowly piecing together what had happened to them, what had happened to America.

After Bush left Omaha, World Trade Center tower Number 7 collapsed and with it the mayor's command post and the Secret Service field office.

In the Situation Room, the talk turned to next steps. “Okay,” I began, “we all know this was al Qaeda. FBI and CIA will develop the case and see if I'm right. We want the truth, but, in the meantime, let's go with the assumption it's al Qaeda. What's next?” I asked the video conference.

“Look,” Rich Armitage responded, “we told the Taliban in no uncertain terms that if this happened, it's their ass. No difference between the Taliban and al Qaeda now. They both go down.” The Taliban was the radical Muslim group controlling Afghanistan.

“And Pakistan?” I asked.

“Tell them to get out of the way. We have to eliminate the sanctuary.” Armitage was on a roll. If Pakistan did not cooperate, we would have a major problem with a nuclear-armed Islamic state.

“We'll need presidential pressure on Yemen and Saudi Arabia too,” said John McLaughlin, Tenet's deputy. “And a major covert action program for three to five years, support to the Northern Alliance.” It was too late, however, for Massoud, the leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance. He had been assassinated by al Qaeda twenty-four hours earlier.

“There are forty-two major Taliban bombing targets,” General Myers said, reviewing a briefing handed to him.

Just before 7:00, the 747 known as Air Force One touched down at Andrews AFB and the President moved quickly to Marine One, which was parked close by. The helicopter, accompanied by two decoys, took a circuitous path over the city before diving onto the South Lawn of the White House. Above them, AWACS watched the skies and vectored F-15s and F-16s on Combat Air Patrol. They were tracking a smaller USAF aircraft with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Upon his landing at Andrews, a heavily armed convoy whisked him directly to the White House.

At 8:30 the President addressed the nation from the Oval Office. Karen Hughes had built the consensus of the video conference into the message. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” Immediately following the address, the President met with us in the PEOC, a place he had never seen. Unlike in his three television appearances that day, Bush was confident, determined, forceful.

“I want you all to understand that we are at war and we will stay at war until this is done. Nothing else matters. Everything is available for the pursuit of this war. Any barriers in your way, they're gone. Any money you need, you have it. This is our only agenda.” The President asked me to focus on identifying what the next attack might be and preventing it.

When, later in the discussion, Secretary Rumsfeld noted that international law allowed the use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution, Bush nearly bit his head off. “No,” the President yelled in the narrow conference room, “I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.”

Bush had already learned that some of the hijackers were people that the CIA had known were al Qaeda and were in the United States. Now he wanted to know when the CIA had told the FBI and what the FBI had done about it. The answers were imprecise, but it became clear that CIA had taken months to tell FBI that the terrorists were in the country. When FBI did learn, they failed to find them. Had FBI put them on the television show
America's Most Wanted
or alerted the FAA about them, perhaps the entire cell could have been rounded up. Bush's look said he would want to come back to this issue later.

For now, however, the President shifted to the economic damage. Somehow he had learned that four shopping malls in Omaha had closed after the attacks. “I want the economy back, open for business right away, banks, the stock market, everything tomorrow.” Ken Dam, the Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, filling in for the traveling Paul O'Neill, pointed out that there was physical damage to the Wall Street infrastructure. “As soon as we get the rescue operations done up there, shift everything to fixing that damage so we can reopen,” Bush urged. Turning to Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta, he pressed for resumption of air travel. Mineta suggested that flights could begin at noon the next day.

Brian Stafford urged the President to spend the night in the bunker, but he would have none of it. Following the meeting, he went to the Oval Office and began working the telephones. I returned to the Situation Room and found my team hard at it.

Cressey was on the telephone to New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's chief of staff. “Anything he wants, troops, equipment. And if FEMA or any agency is slow, call us directly.”

Kurtz was talking to Verizon about the Stock Exchange. I asked him to put them on hold for a minute so I could give him what in the White House we called guidance: “From the President for you…two priorities. First, search and rescue. Second, reopen the markets. Let me know what you need to do that.” Paul looked up, a bit of fatigue appearing for the first time. “How about five miles of fiber optic cable and a dozen switches and routers…installed?”

“That should not be a problem. We can get that.” I pressed him, remembering the President's determination. “So you can have the markets open Thursday?” I knew as soon as I said it that was too ambitious, even though we were already getting calls from CEOs at Cisco, AT&T, and others offering personnel and equipment no questions asked. “Try Monday,” Kurtz shot back and went on with the call.

Lisa was in dialogue with Governor George Pataki. “Well, don't you have even an estimate of the dead?”

I took her aside. “You know those chemical and bio detectors you're developing? I want some, now, here and at the Capitol.”

“Well, there are only three small problems with that, Dick,” Lisa began. “A) they're experimental, and B) they're in California, and C) nothing is flying.”

“Right, so here at the White House, Wednesday, up and running…?” I asked.

“Okay, okay,” she said, adding it to her list.

The Navy staff of the White House Mess had reappeared and were distributing sandwiches. “We're going to stay open all night.” I realized I hadn't eaten since the night before when I had gone to a new seafood restaurant near the White House with Rich Bonin of
60 Minutes.
Bonin was obsessed with al Qaeda, had done a story about terrorism with me and Lesley Stahl in October. They had taped three hours of interviews with me for a seventeen-minute segment. Now, without my knowing it, CBS was running much of the unused interview, including me explaining the concept of Continuity of Government.

The night before, Bonin had asked if it was true that I had asked for a transfer. As of October 1, I would be starting a new national program on cyber security. Bonin wanted to run the story that I was quitting the terrorism job in frustration with the new administration's lack of focus on al Qaeda. I asked him not to, but admitted that I had sought the transfer. It seemed like ages ago.

I grabbed a sandwich from the Mess and walked outside with Cressey to the parking lot that had once been a public street known as West Executive Avenue. My car was still parked askew in front of the West Wing. It was the only vehicle left. The night was clear and quiet. We were in the middle of Washington and there was hardly a sound. I debriefed Roger on the Principals meeting with the President.

I realized then that until today I had not ever briefed the President on terrorism, only Cheney, Rice, and Powell. We had finally had our first Principals meeting on terrorism only a week earlier. The next step was to have been a briefing to walk the President through our proposed National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). The
Washington Post
later reported (January 20, 2002) that the NSPD had as its goal to “eliminate al Qaeda.” The plan called for arming the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to go on the offensive against the Taliban, pressing CIA to use the lethal authorities it had been given to go after bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. Bush had never seen the plan, the pieces of which had first been briefed to Cheney, Rice, Powell, and others on his team in January. I had not been allowed to brief the President on terrorism in January or since, not until today, September 11. It had taken since January to get the Cabinet-level meeting that I had requested “urgently” within days of the inauguration to approve an aggressive plan to go after al Qaeda. The meeting had finally happened exactly one week earlier, on September 4. Now, as I was telling Cressey, I thought the aggressive plan would be implemented.