500 Days (17 page)

•  •  •  

Brokaw was walking past O’Connor’s desk the next day when he noticed the letter. He picked it up and read it.

“Well,” he said, “you’d think if he’s going to threaten my life, he could at least be grammatical.”

He put down the letter and went back to work.

•  •  •  

Perhaps the American military should strike a country in South America. Or maybe Southeast Asia. Or, of course, Iraq. That, Douglas Feith argued, would surprise terrorists worldwide. None of them would expect it.

Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy, crafted the proposal in a memo to Rumsfeld. Bush wanted a global war on terror, but Rumsfeld had been grousing that Afghanistan didn’t offer good bombing targets or suitable terrain for a ground operation. Hitting terrorists in another country, Feith maintained, would put fanatics everywhere on notice that the Bush doctrine had placed them all in America’s crosshairs.

Already, the early rumblings about launching a war against Iraq were strong. But South America? Southeast Asia? Those ideas were shelved.

•  •  •  

The retired four-star general stepped briskly through the halls of the Pentagon, dozens of medals and service ribbons gleaming on his chest. Wesley Clark had left the military a year and a half earlier, but was dropping by to see how his old friends and colleagues were holding up.

After meeting with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, Clark went to visit some officers who were working with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He passed the office of a senior general.

The general called out to Clark. “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me for a second.”

“Well,” Clark responded, “you’re too busy.”

No, the general said, ushering Clark into his office.

Once they were alone, the general blurted out the news. “We’re going to war with Iraq.”

Clark was perplexed. Bin Laden, the fundamentalist, was a sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein, the secular leader.
What did Iraq have to do with this?

“Did they find more information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” Clark asked.

No, the general replied. “There’s nothing new that way,” he said. “They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.”

The whole idea seemed to have been born of uncertainty, he said. “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments,” the general said.

Remember that old cliché, he said. “If the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to look like a nail.”

•  •  •  

A tuxedo-clad butler stepped into the president’s private dining room. Without a word, he placed a white china plate on an octagonal place mat. Then he walked around the table and served the president’s guest, Tony Blair.

It was the evening of September 20; the British prime minister had come to Washington to meet Bush face-to-face for the first time since the attacks. The president was scheduled to address a joint session of Congress at nine o’clock that night and had asked Blair to attend in a show of solidarity.

Blair and his aides met earlier that day with Bush, Rice, and Powell in the upstairs residence. There, Blair and Bush had huddled together in a corner for a few minutes. The attacks, Bush had said, had been horrendous, but he now believed that something good would come out of them.

“When I speak to Congress tonight, the focus is going to be on bin Laden and the Taliban,” Bush had said. “I’m going to deliver the ultimatum.”

Blair was concerned about how far Bush would push his threat to the Taliban if they spurned his demand to hand over bin Laden; he counseled a measured response.

From there, it was on to dinner—a gourmet meal of salad, veal, and scallops. Bush directed the conversation.

“I’m grateful for your support,” he said to Blair. “Britain is a true friend and we are going to win.”

He leaned his arms on the table. “Anyone can join our coalition, provided they understand the doctrine,” Bush said. “We are going after terrorists and all those who harbor them. Obviously, the broader the coalition the better, but either way, we’re going after them.”

Blair gave a tight smile. Bush’s ambitions were so broad—hunting down all terrorists wherever they might be found
and
going after any country, organization, or person supporting those criminals—that they risked collapsing in humiliating failure. He was going to have to keep trying to rein Bush in.

The waiter returned and set a plate in front of the president—scallops, with a ring of pastry on top. Bush looked down at the ring and made a face.

“God dang,” he said. “What on earth is that?”

“It’s a scallop, Mr. President,” the waiter replied.

Bush smiled. “Well, it looks like a halo and you’re the angel.”

Everyone at the table laughed. No one quite got the joke.

The conversation veered into an assessment of how other world leaders were behaving.

“It was interesting that Putin himself made sure the Russians didn’t react that week,” Bush said. “That’s a clear sign the Cold War is over.”

Then there was Pakistan. While Musharraf had shown some signs of cooperation, neither Bush nor Powell had a clear idea of how he would handle future American demands. The president asked Blair if he would provide recommendations for how the United States would deal with the Pakistanis; the prime minister agreed to do so.

“We’re going for the Taliban after the ultimatum,” Bush said. “They’re a bunch of nuts, and we need to get a new government in there.”

That was going to require keeping all allies on the same page about the goal of the American campaigns, something that was already raising hackles among other world leaders. His conversations with Ariel Sharon, the recently elected Israeli prime minister, had been particularly tense, Bush said.

“I had to really beat up on him. Sharon was clearly trying to use this to go after Arafat. I said, ‘Arafat is not bin Laden, and you do nothing.’ ”

There could be no distractions in the effort to cripple al-Qaeda, Bush continued, because the group was already putting together its new round of deadly plans. His administration feared that Hollywood would be the next target, he said, not only because of its high profile, but also because of the terrorists’ perception that it was decadent and controlled by Jews. It also possessed intelligence, he said, that the terrorists had targeted
Air Force One.

Blair saw an opening to push for caution.

“You need to be sure of your ground,” he said. “We have to have public opinion with us at all times.”

“Yes,” Bush replied. “But when I’m speaking tough, I’m speaking to Middle America.”

Most ordinary citizens had never heard of bin Laden before, he said. All they knew was that he and his al-Qaeda followers were behind the attack that killed thousands of their fellow citizens.

“And they’re saying, ‘Hey, Mr. President, go get someone. And why ain’t you done it the day before yesterday?’ ”

•  •  •  

The next day at a Long Island church, a wedding ceremony dragged on. In one pew, Johanna Huden, an editorial assistant at the
New York Post,
looked at her hand, where a blister had appeared the day before on her right middle finger. At first she figured it was a bug bite, and now it was starting to itch.

She rubbed it against the coarse linen of her dress. A white liquid bubbled
across the cloth. “Ee-yew,” Huden said to herself quietly. “That is just really bizarre.”

Weeks would pass before Huden would learn that she was the first victim of the anthrax attack.

•  •  •  

That night, stage lights cast sparkles across a painted lake on the stage at the Kennedy Center Opera House. The soprano Ainhoa Arteta, playing a saucer-eyed Fiordiligi in Mozart’s
Così fan tutte,
walked past an archway as her voice soared in the perilous aria “Per pietà.”

Sitting beside his wife amid oceans of red velvet that decorated the auditorium, Bradford Berenson, a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, felt awed by the music’s splendor. It was September 22, a Saturday, and Berenson could finally relax on one of his first nights off since 9/11.

He had been working almost nonstop on an initiative to freeze the assets of individuals and groups that had been sending money to terrorists, a new topic for him. Just after he was assigned to the job, he had been escorted to a secure room so that he could review classified information. He had been astonished to see folder after folder containing names linked to terrorism by volumes of intelligence, from powerful Middle Easterners to little-known charities. The data had been collected over many years and apparently were just left in filing cabinets gathering dust.

The immersion into that ugly world had given him a new perspective about the terrorists, their philosophies, and their goals. Now, as the orchestra played and the music soared, Berenson began to see connections between this magnificent moment and the emerging battle of cultures.

Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban—they wanted to remake the world based on their beliefs, to purge the beauty of Mozart, Shakespeare, Picasso, everything that exalted human civilization. The Taliban had already destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan, two giant statues from the sixth century that had been carved into the side of a cliff near Kabul. This heritage of incalculable beauty and grandeur had survived 1,500 years, only to be demolished in a matter of weeks by fanatics who declared the statues to be anti-Islamic. Taliban members rejoiced as they tore down the historic works of art with hammers, spades, and explosives; they used dynamite to blow off the face of the smaller statue and then fired rockets into its groin.

Berenson glanced around the opera house. These mindless extremists would gleefully demolish everything his eyes and ears devoured. Without a second’s
thought, they would reduce the architectural treasures of America’s capital to rubble; they would outlaw dance and music and paintings and sculpture. They were monsters, really, who cared for nothing that didn’t fall into the orbit of their beliefs—not the lives of the innocent, not the beauty of artistic creation, not the accomplishments of man.

And Middle Easterners supported them, quietly sending money to finance their atrocities. This battle was about more than the security of American citizens, Berenson realized. It was about the protection of civilization itself.

•  •  •  

The conference room on the second floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building was tinted in red, white, and blue from sunlight pouring through a giant flag outside the window. The table was crowded with officials from the CIA, the White House, the State Department, and the Treasury, all working on the plans to block asset transfers by individuals and organizations connected to bin Laden’s financial network.

Gary Edson, the reedy, professorial, and ruthlessly efficient White House deputy assistant for international economic affairs, chaired the meeting. The officials sifted through the intelligence establishing the connection of each entity to terrorists, then reviewed drafts of the executive order that would freeze its bank accounts.

On one list of names were people close to the Saudi royal family. A rumpled State Department official spoke up.

“Whatever we do has to be handled with great delicacy and care,” he said. “We don’t want to upset the royal family.”

The official continued speaking for a few more moments, laying out details of the problems that the State Department feared would unfold if the administration alienated the Saudis. Edson listened in silence, waiting for the presentation to end. Then he nodded his head and paused for a moment.

“I understand,” he said, a friendly expression on his face. “But everybody knows you guys are a bunch of weenies anyway.”

No one in the room spoke or moved. With a smile, Edson had just cut the legs out from under the official. He spoke for the president, and his message was brutally clear: Bush didn’t care if diplomats came down with a case of the vapors. All those aiding al-Qaeda, regardless of who they were, would be crushed—if not militarily, then financially.

The discussion resumed. One Treasury official mentioned that, under normal circumstances, it would have taken ten months for his department to assemble
and vet the names on the list. Now the same thing would be accomplished in about thirteen days.

Part of the reason the effort usually took so long was banal: Arabic names were complicated. Transliterating them into the Roman alphabet was an inexact process, resulting in the same name being spelled different ways. That increased the chance that the wrong person might turn up on the asset freeze order.

As the group struggled with a particular name shared by many people, one official chuckled.

“Well,” he said, laughing, “How many Osamas can there be?”

From one end of the table, Buzzy Krongard, the executive director of the CIA, spoke. The number was huge, he said—and the CIA had already counted them up. He tossed out the answer, one that shocked the assembled group.

“And you want to know the scary thing?” Krongard said.

He paused.

“Most of them are under the age of five.”

Everyone understood—to their horror. Arabic children had been named to honor Osama bin Laden. The magnitude of the challenge in defeating al-Qaeda suddenly loomed much larger.

•  •  •  

The correspondent from
Ummat,
an Urdu-language newspaper based in Karachi, sat beside bin Laden, a tape recorder rolling.

“You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington,” the reporter said. “What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?”

Bin Laden gave praise to God and thanked
Ummat
for speaking with him. “I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks,” he said. “As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie.”

He had no knowledge of the strikes before they occurred, he said. “Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people,” he said. “Such a practice is forbidden even in the course of battle.”