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“Our eyes have been focused here at home,” he said soberly. “An understandable focus
with the Cold War gone and the specter of nuclear war a fading memory. But we must
never forget that there are forces around the globe that wish us ill and are prepared
to kill as many as they can, with no regard for innocent life.

“Terrorism is the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail against it. America
will remain a target, because we are uniquely present in the world, because we have
taken a tougher stand against terrorism, and because we are the most open society
on earth. But that very openness demands vigilance—the kind of vigilance demonstrated
by a brave, determined customs inspector, Diana Dean, who stopped a man named Ahmed
Ressam as he was on his way, in an auto loaded with explosives, to attack the Los
Angeles airport on Millennium Eve. Diana,” Gore said, gesturing to the gallery, “we
owe you and your colleagues a profound debt of gratitude.” And when the applause died
down, he added, “I want to say to anyone, anywhere in the world, with malevolent intentions
toward our country or any of our friends and allies: We will protect ourselves by
finding you before you can turn your evil intentions into evil deeds. This is not
a threat—it is a promise.”

The applause that greeted this statement was loud but compulsory, reflecting the belief
of the audience that the president was offering up a platitude with all the heft of
cotton candy. But in the packed House chamber, barely half a dozen knew that this
was one promise President Gore fully intended to keep.

It was an imposing office suite, eight floors up in the Executive Office Building,
the wedding-cake structure across from the White House that had once housed the entire
executive branch of the federal government; it featured twenty-two-foot ceilings,
marble fireplaces, and an imposing view of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington
Monument. As he walked in, shortly before 8 a.m., Richard Clarke headed for the long
conference table covered with newspapers and folders, offering perfunctory greetings
as his staff came in with their coffee cups from the White House mess and joined him
as he began looking for needles in a haystack. Somewhere in the mass of data—in the
intel reports that had come in overnight from the NSA, the CIA, the State Department,
and the Defense Department, from embassies and listening posts around the world, in
a paragraph buried in an obscure, casual report of an informal chat from a friendly
ally—might well be a hint of a coming attack on an American company or embassy—or
on the United States itself. And in his mind, there was no question that just such
an attack was coming. Finding it, preventing it, was his job. It also had become an
obsession. And on this day, that obsession was about to bear fruit with the singular
triumph of his life.

For eight years, Clarke had been chairman of the Counterterrorism Security Group—President
Bush had named him to the post, and President Clinton had kept him on, adding to his
portfolio the lofty title of national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection,
and counterterrorism. The post came with a seat on the National Security Council,
and as his tenure grew, so did his conviction that the United States, now the world’s
only superpower, faced a threat unlike any in its history, one that few if any of
his colleagues grasped. That conviction had made Clarke a sure loser in the Miss Congeniality
contest within the national security universe; he was a constant thorn in the side
of the CIA, the FBI, Defense, and State, pushing for more focus on an outfit many
had never heard of or had never taken with even a minimal amount of seriousness, demanding
more resources, more focus, more pressure on America’s alleged allies.

Contrary to the core assumptions of the Bush officials who had left office before
Al Qaeda had emerged, the organization had been a threat that loomed larger with each
passing year of the Clinton-Gore administration. (When Clarke had finished briefing
George W. Bush foreign-policy advisor Condoleezza Rice after Bush’s nomination, he
had remarked to an aide, “I got the distinct impression she had never heard the name
before.”) Gore’s chief national security advisor, Leon Fuerth, was a regular participant
at the “principals meetings” with key cabinet officers and agency leaders, where Osama
bin Laden and Al Qaeda were almost always front and center. And, contrary to his public
image as a risk-averse pedant, Gore had distinctly hawkish impulses. He had strongly
backed the 1991 Gulf War, and as vice president he had relentlessly pressured Clinton
to use force to stop the Serbian slaughter in the Balkans. Gore had been kept abreast
of the endless debates about how to confront bin Laden and the struggles among the
CIA, the Defense Department, the White House National Security team, and the lawyers
about what could and couldn’t be done.

Could bin Laden be killed? Yes, according to a presidential finding, but only if it
were done in the course of attempting to capture him. Could the United States insert
Special Forces or CIA operatives into Afghanistan to go after bin Laden on the ground?
Not without raising serious questions about international law and subjecting the CIA
to the same kind of second-guessing on Capitol Hill that had all but crippled the
agency in 1975. Could he be taken out with a cruise missile? Yes, but only if we had
near absolute certainty as to his location and near absolute certainty that he would
be there for the six hours it would take for that missile to be launched and to reach
its target—and only if there were little risk of “collateral damage,” meaning civilian
casualties.

Now, in the spring of 2001, two new factors had been added to the mix: first, an all
but forgotten piece of machinery that, properly retrofitted, could deliver a deadly
blow against a figure who had declared war on the United States; and second, a new
president who had become convinced that it was time to deliver that blow.

It began out of a growing sense of frustration: how to find out precisely where Osama
bin Laden was. In January 2000, the National Security Council had directed the CIA
to pinpoint his whereabouts, in order to attack and neutralize him. But how? The Defense
Department wanted no part of a military presence; nor would it permit the CIA to put
its counterterrorism personnel into the region. Finally, after abandoning option after
option, a CIA team hit on the idea of an unmanned aerial vehicle—a pilotless drone.
And what they found was a machine, an airframe, that had been very effective in the
Balkans but had been banished to a hangar at an Air Force base.

The weapon was known as the Predator—described by a CIA operations officer as “a simple
machine, sort of like a big glider with two snowmobile engines powering a single propeller.”
It wasn’t particularly big—twenty-seven feet long. It wasn’t terribly fast—top speed,
138 miles an hour. But it could fly for forty hours at 25,000 feet, making it effectively
invisible, and ideal for hovering over an area while sending back crystal-clear images
via satellite to locations thousands of miles away.

By the summer of 2000 a CIA team had built a command center, filled with banks of
computer terminals and video screens high on the walls. The resolution was so powerful
that it was possible to calculate the make and model of vehicles, and the height of
a person on the ground. As it turned out, this feature of the Predator provided jaw-dropping
intelligence to those gathered at the command center one day that summer: As the Predator
aimed its optics at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar, Afghanistan—a known Al Qaeda outpost—it
spotted an exceptionally tall man leaving a vehicle, surrounded by acolytes, unaccompanied
by any women or children. It was bin Laden.

But that only solved half the problem; there was still no way to strike at Al Qaeda’s
leader except with cruise missiles, which were based on Navy ships in the Indian Ocean;
and it would take six hours for those missiles to reach their target.
Well,
the White House asked the analysts watching the live video feed,
can you assure us that bin Laden will be there for six hours? No? Then forget it.
Once again, the brick wall of logistics had saved Osama bin Laden—at least in the
short run. It quickly became obvious to Clarke, CIA director George Tenet, his deputy,
Cofer Black, and others that the only way to attack bin Laden was to use the same
device that had found him in the first place: the Predator. And that idea triggered
yet another bureaucratic tug of war:

Who should have control over an armed Predator? The CIA?
No,
said the Defense Department,
that’s our turf. No,
said one high-ranking CIA official,
that would subject us to potential political disaster if a hit went awry.
Who would bear the financial cost? The White House finally gave the CIA the authority,
and then the technicians took over and found a weapon that fit the Predator to perfection:
the Hellfire, a one-hundred-pound missile, armed with a twenty-pound warhead, that
could fit under each of the Predator’s wings. It had a fifteen-year record of success
against armored vehicles. Within a month of President Gore’s inauguration, the Predator
had twice launched Hellfires with impressive accuracy at mock-ups of a known bin Laden
encampment that had been constructed at a secret U.S. Air Force base somewhere in
the Southwest. Now the United States had the means to locate Osama bin Laden with
absolute certainty, and the means to strike him within minutes of finding him.

The question now was one of political will. With the Defense Department insisting
it must control this new weapon, with elements within the CIA shunning the power to
deploy such a weapon, it would be up to the new president to decide whether to deploy
it, when to deploy it, and who should deploy it.

And on this spring morning, as Richard Clarke sat with his colleagues at that conference
table in Room 302 of the Executive Office Building, he could barely repress his sense
of impending triumph. Later that morning, he would convene a principals meeting, and
that meeting would feature a surprise guest with a very specific agenda.

It was a small room in a sublevel floor of the White House West Wing, with only twenty-two
seats: twelve of them around a table for the principals, ten more along the wood-paneled
walls for the staff. At the head of the table was a “Big Daddy” chair where Richard
Clarke usually sat, with the presidential seal directly behind him, a not-so-subtle
way of reminding the participants that this was the real deal, that the president
himself was right upstairs. The mood in the Situation Room reflected the world outside;
when times were calm, the conversations would begin with casual chats and jocular
remarks. (On one Saturday, when Clarke showed up in shorts and a T-shirt, Attorney
General Janet Reno commented, “You have really muscular legs.”) Other times, as in
December 1999, when fears of an Al Qaeda Millennium plot were high, then–national
security advisor Sandy Berger had braced the gathering, saying in effect, “This is
serious business—everybody pay attention, work your sources, put every scrap of information
out where everyone else can see it.”

Now, on this day, Clarke took a seat just to the left of the big chair.

“Are we expecting a special guest?” asked CIA director Tenet.

“Very special,” Clarke said.

Just then, President Gore walked into the room.

Once before, Al Gore had cut a Gordian knot that had tied up feuding government agencies.
In 1996, as vice president, he had been tasked with the job of coordinating security
policy for the Atlanta Olympics. With federal agencies in the midst of a typical bureaucratic
food fight, Gore had instructed the FBI director to bring the feuding parties to a
briefing room at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Unbeknownst to the director—or to anyone
else except Clarke—Gore had come with a choreographed agenda, spelling out bluntly
what each department would do and what share of the costs each department would bear.

“And Dick,” Gore had said to Clarke, “I want a report on this every week from you.”

Now it was happening again, but on a matter of far greater significance. As President
Gore began to speak, it was clear to everyone in the Situation Room that the president,
National Security Advisor Fuerth, his deputy, Susan Rice, and Clarke had worked out
not just the policy but the details of how the Predator was to be deployed against
Osama bin Laden.

The principals listened with varying degrees of satisfaction, concern, and anger as
Gore began to speak.

“You all heard Dick at that transition meeting tell us that bin Laden and Al Qaeda
would be the biggest threat to our security in the years ahead. Have I got that right?”

Clarke nodded. “By
far
the biggest threat.”

“And I remember all those times we thought we had him in our sights, but between the
time we needed to get those cruise missiles targeted, and the flight time between
launch and hit, there was no way to be sure bin Laden would be where we thought he
was.”

“Yes,” Clarke said with some asperity, “and the lack of certainty that we had in fact
found him,
and
the fear of collateral damage—we took incredible crap from the Pakistanis when we
hit a bunch of their intelligence people in Afghanistan—”

“Which,” Sam Nunn interjected, “raises the question of what they were doing in an
Al Qaeda encampment in the first place … ”

“Well,” the president continued, “I’ve spent a good part of the last week looking
at some fascinating visuals.” He reached down, opened a leather packet, and began
setting out photos on the table like a Las Vegas card dealer.

“Like this one,” Gore said. “It’s Osama bin Laden at Tarnak Farms. You can almost
check out his bicuspids.

“And this one, from that Hellfire test on—when did we test the Hellfire-equipped Predator?”