Bush At War Part 4

Let's make it up, Powell said to Armitage. What do we want out of these guys?

They started a list: First: "Stop al Qaeda operatives at your border, intercept arms shipments through Pakistan and end ALL logistical support for bin Laden."

Second: "Blanket overflight and landing rights."

Third: Access to Pakistan, naval bases, air bases and borders.

Fourth: Immediate intelligence and immigration information.

Fifth: Condemn the September 11 attacks and "curb all domestic expressions of support for terrorism against the [United States], its friends or allies." Powell and Armitage knew that was something they couldn't even do in the United States.

Sixth: Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop Pakistani volunteers from going into Afghanistan to join the Taliban.

The seventh demand was the one that Powell thought would trip up the Pakistanis or cause Musharraf to balk: "Should the evidence strongly implicate Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan AND should Afghanistan and the Taliban continue to harbor him and this network, Pakistan will break diplomatic relations with the Taliban government, end support for the Taliban and a.s.sist us in the aforementioned ways to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network."

In so many words, Powell and Armitage would be asking Pakistan to help destroy what its intelligence service had helped create and maintain: the Taliban.

Armitage called the Pakistani intelligence chief, General Mahmoud, with whom he had met the previous day, and invited him to the State Department.

This is not negotiable, Armitage told the general, handing him a single sheet of paper with the seven demands. You must accept all seven parts.

At 1:30 P.M. Powell called Musharraf. "As one general to another," he said, "we need someone on our flank fighting with us. Speaking candidly, the American people would not understand if Pakistan was not in this fight with the United States."

Musharraf to Powell's surprise said that Pakistan would support the United States with each of the seven actions.

THE PENTAGON PRESS briefing that day was conducted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who had been a senior defense official under Cheney during the first Bush administration. Wolfowitz often voiced the views of an outspoken group of national security conservatives in Washington, many of them veterans of the Reagan and senior Bush administrations. These were men who believed that there was no greater menace in the world than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and they argued that if the president was serious about going after those who harbor terrorists, he had to put Hussein at the top of that list.

Iraq posed nearly as serious a problem for the president and his team as Afghanistan, they held. If Saddam, a wily and unpredictable survivor, decided to launch a terrorist attack or even a limited military strike on U.S. facilities after September 11 and the president had failed to move against him, the recriminations might never end.

Rumsfeld had raised Iraq during the previous day's national security meetings with the president. Now Wolfowitz wanted to issue a public warning to terrorist states. It was another effort to prod the president to include Iraq in his first round of targets.

"It's not just simply a matter of capturing people," he said, "and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism.

"It will be a campaign, not a single action. And we're going to keep after these people and the people who support them until it stops."

In a benign reading, this was merely a more provocative restatement of the Bush Doctrine from the night of September 11. Wolfowitz wasn't really innovating but he did get his tongue twisted. His comment would be big headlines and certain to alarm many U.S. allies. "Ending states who sponsor terrorism" - regime change - was implied in what Bush had said, but not explicitly stated.

Powell publicly distanced himself. "Ending terrorism is where I would like to leave it, and let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself," he said.

Army General Hugh Shelton, who would be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for another two weeks before Myers took over, firmly opposed bringing Iraq into the military equation at this early stage. In his a.n.a.lysis, the only justification for going after Iraq would be clear evidence linking the Iraqis to the September 11 attacks. Short of that, targeting Iraq was not worth the risk of angering moderate Arab states whose support was crucial not only to any campaign in Afghanistan, but to reviving the Middle East peace process.

Earlier in the week, Powell had approached Shelton and rolled his eyes after Rumsfeld had raised Iraq as a potential target.

"What the h.e.l.l, what are these guys thinking about?" asked Powell, who had held Shelton's job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "Can't you get these guys back in the box?"

Shelton could not have agreed more. He had been trying, arguing practicalities and priorities, but Wolfowitz was fiercely determined and committed.

AT THE NATIONAL Security Council meeting that afternoon in the Situation Room, the president said he was going to approve the CIA proposal for an expanded covert operation to give paramilitary and financial support to the Northern Alliance.

"I'd like to tell you what we told the Pakistanis today," Powell said, getting out a copy of the seven demands he had presented to them. He knew the president didn't like to sit still for long readings, but he was proud of what they had done unenc.u.mbered by a long interagency debate. So he read the seven demands aloud. When he finished, Powell reported that Musharraf had already accepted them.

"It looks like you got it all," the president said. He thought it was the State Department at its best, no striped-pants formality.

"Can I have a copy of that?" some of the others asked.

Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill reported on the effort to draft an executive order to allow Treasury to go after the finances of the terrorists. In pre-September 11 deliberations about what to do with bin Laden during the spring and summer, Treasury officials had resisted efforts to go after terrorists' financial a.s.sets, and there was continuing inst.i.tutional resistance to imposing sanctions. The chief problem was that many terrorist groups used private charitable organizations as cover, and the effort to freeze their a.s.sets could make the United States look punitive, bring loud protests and the threat of lawsuits.

Bush noted that some bureaucrats were nervous about this new authority but he dismissed concerns that the moves might be unsettling to the international financial order. "This is war, this isn't peace. Do it. [Bin Laden] needs money and we need to know whoever is giving him money and deal with them."

Shelton offered a pessimistic a.s.sessment of the immediate military options. The contingency plans on the shelf were only cruise missiles against training camps. "It's just digging holes," he said.

Rumsfeld said they needed new tasks for the military if they wanted to go after states harboring bin Laden. "We've never done that before."

Bush was concerned that the war cabinet had not had sufficient time to really debate and evaluate their course of action, consider the options and plans. The NSC meetings were too rushed and short, sometimes lasting 60 to 90 minutes, sometimes much less. His time was being chopped into small pieces to accommodate the demands of both his private and public roles in the crisis. They had not had time to chew on the issue the way he wanted, so he asked his advisers to come to Camp David with their spouses that weekend.

"This is a new world," Bush said insistently. "General Shelton should go back to the generals for new targets. Start the clock. This is an opportunity. I want a plan - costs, time. I need options on the table. I want Afghan options by Camp David. I want decisions quick."

Rumsfeld was trying to push the Pentagon, and he applauded Bush's decisiveness and sense of urgency, but he reminded the president of the embarra.s.sments of some earlier attacks - the bombing of the Chinese Emba.s.sy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the missile attack on the Sudan chemical plant in 1998 that was part of an unsuccessful operation on bin Laden.

"We owe you what can go wrong," Rumsfeld said, "things that can take wind out of our sails. For example, hitting camps with no people."

"Tell the Afghans to round up al Qaeda," Bush said. "Let's see them, or we'll hit them hard. We're going to hurt them bad so that everyone in the world sees, don't deal with bin Laden. I don't want to put a million-dollar missile on a five-dollar tent."

A note-taker at the meeting wrote down s.n.a.t.c.hes of dialogue that captured the sense of urgency and the lack of focus, a blizzard of random ideas.

"We need new options," Rumsfeld said at one point. "This is a new mission."

The president seemed to agree. "Everything is on the table," Bush said. "Look at the options." He also said that the British really wanted to partic.i.p.ate. "Give them a role. Time is of the essence. By the time we get to Camp David, we need a clear timetable for action - but I want to do something effective."

IT WAS ABOUT midnight that third night of the crisis when Rice finally returned home to her apartment at the Watergate. She had spent the first night of the crisis at the White House in fitful sleep. Wednesday night's sleep had been no better. She had been operating, like everyone, on adrenaline. Now she had a few moments at home to unwind. She flipped on her television for the first time since the crisis began, and the screen showed a familiar scene the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London. But it was the music that caught her attention. In a gesture of solidarity and sympathy with the United States, the band of the Coldstream Guards was playing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Rice listened for a few seconds, and then she started to weep.

EARLY THE MORNING of Friday, September 14, a mid-level officer at the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon war room, called the White House to confirm that the president did not want a fighter escort accompanying Air Force One when he flew to New York that afternoon.

Rice, her deputy, Steve Hadley, and White House Chief of Staff Card conferred. It had to be Rumsfeld's decision, they all agreed. The threat conditions were still off the charts, and no one knew what might be out there. If something happened because there was no fighter escort, it would be Rumsfeld who would have to explain to the country, and the world.

One of Rice's deputies called the Pentagon and the issue was presented to Rumsfeld that the NMCC had called the White House to ask about fighter escort.

Rumsfeld went nuts. Somebody in my building is talking to the White House without my knowledge or permission, he vented. "I will not have that!" Rumsfeld was under immense pressure. He had no military plans and the president was going to war. A search was immediately launched to identify the officer who had called the White House. In the meantime, Rumsfeld refused to address the question of whether he was going to put a fighter escort on Air Force One.

THAT MORNING THE full cabinet, meeting at the White House for the first time since the terrorist attacks, stood and applauded when the president entered the room. Caught by surprise, Bush choked up for a moment, the second time in two days he had lost his composure in front of others.

Bush liked to open every cabinet meeting with a prayer, and he had asked Rumsfeld to prepare one for this gathering. Among the things Rumsfeld prayed for was the "patience to measure our l.u.s.t for action."

Powell was worried about Bush's show of emotion. In a few hours, the president would be speaking at Washington National Cathedral, and Powell thought the country and the world needed to see a strong president. Sitting by tradition as senior member of the cabinet next to the president, he jotted a note. Dear Mr. President, what I do when I have to give a speech like this, I avoid those words I know will cause me to well up such as Mom and Pop. Then, with some trepidation, he slid the note along the table.

Bush picked up the piece of paper, read it, and smiled. "Let me tell you what the secretary of state told me," Bush said, holding up the note. "Dear Mr. President, don't break down!" The room erupted in laughter, shared by both Powell and the president.

"Don't worry, I've got it out of my system," Bush said. He a.s.sured them that he and the war cabinet were developing plans for a military response that would be effective, and then went around the table asking for updates.

Powell described the diplomatic offensive. Like the president, Powell saw the attacks as an opportunity to reshape relationships throughout the world. But, he told the cabinet, this was coalition building with clear definitions of what was expected from the partners, including sharing intelligence, freezing the terrorists' finances and a.s.sistance in the military campaign.

"This is not just an attack against America, this is an attack against civilization and an attack against democracy," Powell said, sounding presidential. "This is a long war, and it's a war we have to win. We are engaging with the world. We want to make this a longstanding coalition."

By that morning, Powell had made 35 calls to world leaders, with another 12 ahead of him that day. "I have been so multilateral the last few days, I'm getting seasick," he joked.

There was laughter.

Rumsfeld updated the group on the damage to the Pentagon and announced that the military alert status had been reduced one notch, to DefCon 4. On September 11, the Pentagon had moved to DefCon 3 for the first time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The highest possible alert status, DefCon 1, is used in time of all-out war.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said air travel was resuming that day but at just 16 percent the normal rate, a measure of the impact of the attacks.

Bush concluded with a reminder that while the focus of the administration now was the war on terrorism, they should not ignore domestic priorities such as an education bill, a patients' bill of rights and legislation giving him greater authority to negotiate trade agreements.

AROUND LUNCHTIME, THE presidential motorcade left the White House in a driving rain for a ride of about 12 minutes north to the National Cathedral.

An extraordinary group waited at the cathedral for the service. The speakers included a Protestant minister, a rabbi, a Catholic cardinal, a Muslim cleric and the Reverend Billy Graham. Former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were there, as was former Vice President Al Gore. The audience included the cabinet, much of the Senate, many members of the House, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and many other top officials. Seated next to the president and his wife were his mother and father.

Condi Rice thought the trip to the cathedral had been like a funeral procession. When opera singer Denyce Graves led the congregation in singing the Lord's Prayer, she wondered, How is he going to hold together after that?

"We are here in the middle hour of our grief," Bush began. So many suffered so great a loss from the attacks, he said, and the nation would linger over them and learn their stories and weep. "But our responsibility to history is already clear: To answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." The president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of G.o.d's master plan.

"It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves." He spoke of the acts of bravery and sacrifice that showed Americans' commitment to one another and love for their country. "Today we feel what Franklin Roosevelt called the warm courage of national unity," a unity that was a "kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies."

There was much in the speech intended to comfort, but the most memorable line - which had originated with his team of speechwriters and was quickly adopted by the president - came when Bush spoke confidently about what was to come. "This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others," he said. "It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing."

A war speech in a cathedral was jarring, even risky, but it delivered the message Bush wanted. When he returned to his seat in the front row, his father reached across Laura Bush and squeezed his son's hand.

At the end of the service, the congregation stood and sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Rice felt the whole church stiffen with determination.

When the presidential party walked out of the cathedral, the grayness and rain of the morning had lifted, replaced by brilliant sunshine and blue skies.

Bush would recall the speech as less a pivot point toward war than a religious expression. "I saw it as a moment to make sure that I helped comfort and helped get through the mourning process," he said. "I also really looked at it from a spiritual perspective, that it was important for the nation to pray." He agreed that some of the language was "very tough," and said it "reflected my mood." But he added, "To me, the moment was more, it really was a prayer. I didn't view it as an opportunity to set the stage for a future speech. I believed that the nation needed to be in prayer."

THE PENTAGON WAS still waiting for Rumsfeld's decision about whether to send a fighter escort with the president, who was going to leave soon for New York City. The secretary was stewing. He saw it as an issue that went right to the heart of the chain of command and his legal authority. Information regularly flows between the Pentagon and the White House, but the decision to deploy forces, even a fighter escort, is his alone by law. "The national command authority is the president to me," Rumsfeld said later. "And to the extent you get people down below sending instructions into the building that people then act off of, then the president can't be sure that, that the actions are going to be consonant with what he's wanted me to do.

"And to the extent people talk to other people and someone then says, 'Oh, let's send up an escort or let's send up a CAP [Combat Air Patrol] or let's not/ it may very well be completely opposite of what the president wants or of what I want.. .. This is something you do not want to mess around with."

About 15 minutes before Air Force One left, the secretary gave his order. There would be an escort.

He then turned to editing the draft of the TOP SECRET intelligence order that the CIA wanted the president to sign. In his view, it was sloppy and carelessly done. The language was vague and open-ended, the authority too broad and sweeping. He marked up his copy with proposed revisions, cuts and clarifications. Authority that ought to be reserved for the president or the CIA director was being given to subordinates.

"DO YOU SMELL something?" Hughes asked as a helicopter carrying White House staff members approached New York on the final leg of the trip. They were 20 or 25 miles from Lower Manhattan.

The others nodded. Press secretary Ari Fleischer thought it /must be from the helicopter. But looking out their windows to one side, they saw a giant plume of smoke. What they smelled was the burning rubble of the World Trade Center.

The helicopters put down at the Wall Street heliport, and an enormous motorcade - 55 vehicles, the largest motorcade that anybody on the presidential advance team had ever seen - was formed. The president drove past cheering, flag-waving crowds to Ground Zero.

For Bush, the sight of the enormous, dark wasteland of wreckage left an indelible impression, one that he would recall as "very, very, very eerie." Though he had talked with many others about the devastation, he still was not prepared for what he found. It was "a nightmare, a living nightmare." Along with destruction far worse than anything he had seen on television or heard about from his advisers, he encountered a crowd of rescue workers hungry for revenge. It was an "unbelievably emotional" crowd demanding justice, he recalled.

As he walked through the area, the president faced a wild scene. "I cannot describe to you how emotional" the workers were. "Whatever it takes," they shouted.

One pointed to him as he walked by and yelled out: "Don't let me down." Bush was stunned. He thought that the words and look on the man's face would perhaps stay with him forever - "Don't let me down." This was so personal, he thought. It was as if he were in some ancient arena. The rescue workers began chanting "U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A."

"They want to hear him," Nina Bishop, a member of the advance team, shouted at Karl Rove as the president was working his way through the crowd. "They want to hear their president!"

For once, the ever-ready White House communications team was totally unprepared. Since there was no plan for Bush to address the group, there was no sound system. Could she find a bullhorn, Rove asked.

Nearby, Bob Beckwith, a somewhat frail-looking 69-year-old retired New York firefighter, stood on a charred fire truck that had been pulled from the rubble. A Bush aide asked him if the president could use it as a platform and if Beckwith, a gas mask dangling around his neck, could bounce up and down on it a few times to make certain it was stable. At the base of the fire truck was a large slab of paving or concrete. Some in the advance team thought they should move it, until rescue workers told them there might be human remains underneath.

At 4:40 P.M., someone placed a white bullhorn in the president's hands and helped him up on the wreckage. Beckwith wanted to step down but Bush asked that he stay by his side. Another round of chants began: "U-S-A, U-S-A."

"Thank you all," Bush began. "I want you all to know ..." and the gigantic canyon of rubble and humanity seemed to swallow up the words from his tinny bullhorn.

"Can't hear you," a rescue worker shouted.

"I can't go any louder," Bush said with a laugh. "America today is on bended knee in prayer for the people whose lives were lost here. . .." Another voice erupted from the crowd: "I can't hear you." Bush paused for an instant, then with his arm around Beckwith's shoulder, shouted back: "I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!"

Hughes, off to the side, was absolutely beaming. This was an amazing moment, she thought - eloquent, simple, the perfect backdrop, a moment for the news magazine covers, the communications hall of fame and for history. And she had had nothing to do with it.

AFTER A BRIEF stop to allow the president to thank teams of workers, the motorcade rolled up the West Side Highway to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, which was being used as a staging ground for the rescue efforts. The president's schedule called for him to spend 30 to 45 minutes with families of the victims. It was to be private - no press, no photographers, not even members of the congressional delegation that accompanied Bush.

The organizers had used draperies to turn a cavernous room into a more intimate area, and Bush's aides set up a human wall to give the group even more privacy. About 250 people awaited the president, many carrying photographs of missing relatives. Children now without a parent clutched teddy bears and other mementos.

The families applauded the arrival of the president, then suddenly it was so silent that only the ventilation system could be heard whirring. It was a potentially awkward moment for Bush, who wasn't sure how to approach the families. Finally, he waded into the crowd. "Tell me about yourself," he said to one person, and then another and another. Each time he heard the same story. It was a crushing realization. Each of them, he recalled, "believed that their loved one was still alive."

They wanted autographs and Bush began to sign his name to photos or pieces of paper or treasured items. He would say to the families, he recalled, " I'm going to tell you something, I'm going to sign this, and when you see Jim, or you see Bill, you tell them this is truly my autograph, that you didn't make this up.' And that's the only way I knew how to help, just use that moment to be able to say, 'I share your hope too, and we pray Jim comes out.'"

Many in the room were weeping. The president was teary-eyed as he made his way from one family to the next. One man, cradling a child in his arms, was carrying a picture of his brother, a firefighter who had been killed. The child pointed at the photograph and said simply, "My uncle." An hour or so into the session, Bush seemed to regain some of his buoyancy. There were bursts of laughter from some of the relatives as he continued, for two hours, to move among them. He spoke with every family. Toward the end of his visit, Bush met Arlene Howard, the mother of George Howard, an off-duty Port Authority policeman who was killed attempting to save others. She was carrying her son's police shield and she offered it to the president, asking him to take it in her son's honor. The president accepted the shield.

On the way back to the heliport, Bush's motorcade drove through Times Square, which was filled with people holding candles and American flags and applauding as the cars pa.s.sed by. Back at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey, a spent Bush parted with his staff who were returning to Washington.

If it was possible to live a whole life in a single day, this was the day.

INSTEAD OF BOARDING Air Force One, Bush climbed aboard a C-20 aircraft small enough to land in Hagerstown, Maryland. From there he would head for Camp David. The video of the president emerging from his helicopter shows him dead tired, drained, almost staggering.

The president had asked his most senior national security advisers - Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice - to go to Camp David ahead of him to prepare for the next day's meeting. They gathered in the vice president's cabin to eat a dinner of buffalo.

The dinner gave them the chance to compare notes in a more relaxed setting, to update each other and tee up the issues for the meetings the next day. They talked about the continuing pressure for speedy action, about the length of the struggle ahead and the differences between the coming conflict and the Persian Gulf War, when there was a long buildup and a relatively short military campaign - 38 days of ma.s.sive bombing and a four-day ground war. This would be the opposite, they thought, and the more they talked, the more they realized how much harder this war would be and how enormous the consequences would be if they got it wrong.

Powell thought it was like a rehearsal dinner the night before a wedding, but one that concealed some serious differences within the family.

When Bush got to his cabin, he checked in with Rice, who reported that there were no significant new developments. After a day in the public spotlight as mourner in chief, he was about to begin the most critical discussions he would have with his war cabinet. In his own mind, he had already come to some conclusions.

"What was decided was that this is the primary focus of this administration," he recalled later. "What was decided is, it doesn't matter to me how long it takes, we're going to rout out terror wherever it may exist. What was decided was, the doctrine is, if you harbor them, feed them, house them, you're just as guilty, and you will be held to account. What was decided was that. . . this war will be fought on many fronts, including the intelligence side, the financial side, the diplomatic side, as well as the military side. What was decided is, is that we're going to hit them with all we've got in a smart way."

Bush knew there was much still to be addressed. "What wasn't decided was, was the team st.i.tched up to the same strategy, did the team sign off on it? Because one of the things I know that can happen is, if everybody is not on the same page, then you're going to have people peeling off and second-guessing and the process will not, will really not unfold the way it should, there won't be honest discussion."

These were the team management problems, but far more than that was before the president. He had been swimming in a sea of broad concepts and rhetoric, fueled by the rawness, the surprise and the carnage of the terrorist attacks and by his own instincts. The real gut calls in the presidency get down to when and where and how to use force - both covert action and military strikes, putting ordnance on target. There would be times the next day when Bush's advisers wondered if they would ever find a way to end the talking - to emerge from the sea of words and pull the trigger.