500 Days (61 page)

Three Yemeni men emerged from a five-story building in a Karachi housing project and walked across the street toward an outdoor food stall.

A detachment of paramilitaries rushed out from behind cars and doorways, pointing AK-47s and handguns at the men. Without a word, the squad of Pakistani soldiers tackled the Yemenis, yanking back their arms and pushing their faces into the concrete.

It was shortly after seven o’clock on the morning of September 11, 2002. Since the previous afternoon, a group of Army Rangers, police officers, and operatives from the ISI—Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency—had been conducting surveillance of the building. Just fifteen days before, American intelligence had informed the ISI that it had intercepted a call from Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top al-Qaeda terrorist and 9/11 plotter. The CIA determined that the call came from Karachi but couldn’t narrow down the location. The ISI took over the hunt, but without more information, the chances that its agents would locate bin al-Shibh were slim.

Then, a breakthrough. Police and ISI agents had raided an apartment in the suburb of Bahadurabad, where they believed a group of Arab terrorists was hiding out. The suspects had already fled, but the gatekeeper at the complex knew where they had gone and led authorities to Building 63C in a project called Commercial Area Phase 2.

Now, thirty-six hours later, the appearance of the three Yemenis on the street was the first confirmation that the ISI had found a terrorist safe house. After cuffing the men’s hands, the soldiers pulled them off the ground, dragging them away from 63C.

Fighting his captors, one of the men turned his head, looking up to the building’s fifth floor. “Brothers!” he screamed. “Arm yourselves!”

The paramilitaries subdued the man, but it was too late. They had lost the element of surprise. They had to launch the raid immediately.

Rangers and ISI officers fanned out, surrounding the building. Without warning, machine-gun fire sprayed from the fifth-floor windows. As some soldiers and officers took cover, another team blitzed the building, rushing up its single stairwell. Just as the officers passed the third floor, they saw two Arabs and grabbed them. The men shouted to their compatriots, who threw grenades down the stairs. Withering gunfire chopped at the ground as police struggled to pull two injured officers out of harm’s way.

A pitched battle had begun, and despite their superior numbers, the authorities were heavily outgunned; rifles and pistols were no match for automatic weapons. The Pakistanis needed heavily armed reinforcements.

More than two thousand Rangers and local police flooded the area. The authorities cordoned off a square kilometer around the building, evacuating residents and shopkeepers from what had become a war zone.

As the hours passed, the air was thick with the smell of cordite. Bullet holes pockmarked the building. Some of the men inside the apartment climbed up to the roof, shielding themselves under a low cement barrier as they fired at the authorities. The police tried to root them out with tear gas; the canisters bounced off the walls and landed on the officers below.

Rangers in full body armor rushed toward the building under the cover from smoke grenades, then took up positions beneath an overhang on the ground floor. Before they moved again, there was a lull in the gunfire.

“You cannot get away!” someone yelled.

“Allahu Akbar!”
came the response. God is great.

Inside the apartment, one of the militants had been badly wounded and was bleeding profusely. He made his way to the kitchen wall and smeared a message in his own blood:
There is no God but Allah, Mohammed is his messenger.

About noon, five Rangers stormed the building, praying as they ran. They bolted up the stairs and into the apartment, where they found survivors crouching in a windowless kitchen, armed only with a rifle.

“Surrender!” a soldier called out.

“Bastard! Bastard!”

One of the extremists leaped to his feet and darted out; he was shot dead.
The man with the rifle took aim at a Ranger and pulled the trigger. A click, then nothing—the gun had jammed. He and a surviving companion grabbed whatever they could—forks, bottles, pans—and hurled them at the soldiers. Then the men held knives to their own throats, threatening to kill themselves rather than be taken into custody. The Rangers fired tear gas and the two men stumbled out of the kitchen, gasping, their hands raised.

Suddenly one of them lunged for a Ranger’s gun, and the paramilitaries jumped on them. Both men struggled as the soldiers physically pinned them down.

“You’re going to hell!” one screamed. “You’re going to hell!”

•  •  •  

It was all over by one o’clock. Shell casings and chunks of concrete littered the street; the building’s roof was smeared with blood. Seven of the terrorists survived; two were dead.

The men were blindfolded with rags and led outside. Bin al-Shibh, one of the survivors, thrust his hand in the air just before he was thrown into a waiting vehicle.

Searching the apartment, the police found more than twenty remote radio detonators, documents belonging to members of the bin Laden family, laptop computers, mobile phones, and records of terrorist plots, including an attack planned for that very day—killing Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s president, by shooting rockets at him as he attended a defense exhibition in Karachi.

•  •  •  

Later that day, a sheaf of papers arrived at Number 10 Downing Street from the White House. It was a draft of the Iraq speech that Bush was preparing to deliver the following morning at the U.N. General Assembly Hall. And Blair was alarmed as he read it.

There was no call for a new U.N. resolution. The draft read as though it had been written by Cheney and Rumsfeld—bursting with bluster and saber rattling, and not much else. This
had
to be a mistake. The president had made a commitment to Blair that he was going to seek diplomatic action through the U.N. And Bush had never gone back on his word before.

With less than twenty-four hours to go, Blair decided to inject himself into the administration’s debate once again. If White House policy makers and speechwriters couldn’t figure out what to say, then Blair would do it.

He handwrote a short passage for insertion into the speech and gave it to
David Manning, his foreign policy advisor. Manning transmitted it to Condoleezza Rice and then telephoned her. She told him that the words would be included, but later British officials heard disturbing rumblings that called her assurances into question. Cheney had launched a last-ditch offensive urging Bush to ignore the calls for a new U.N. resolution, and Colin Powell had joined the fray, challenging the vice president’s advice as dangerously misguided.

By day’s end, the battle within the administration seemed to have been resolved. Manning was told that there was no doubt: Bush would be calling for the resolution.

•  •  •  

At 10:35 the next morning, Bush ascended the green marble podium in the vast U.N. General Assembly Hall and walked to the large wooden lectern. He looked out on the applauding crowd of delegates seated in the auditorium. On each side of the podium, semitransparent mirrors reflected the teleprompter screen below. The words from the speech scrolled forward.

“Mr. Secretary General, Mr. President, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen,” Bush began, “We meet one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country and brought grief to many citizens of our world.”

He paid homage to the mission of the U.N. and its commitment to human dignity and collective security. He called for peace in the Middle East, reaffirming his support for an independent Palestine.

“Above all,” he said, “our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions.”

Terrorists were lurking within many nations, he said. The threat that rogue regimes could provide them with weapons to kill on a massive scale was a dreadful reality.

“In one place—in one regime—we find all of these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms,” he said.

•  •  •  

In London, Tony Blair watched the speech on television. So far, everything was going as planned. Bush was describing the history of the efforts by U.N. weapons inspectors and Saddam’s flouting of the body’s resolutions.

“We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even
when inspectors were in his country,” Bush said. “Are we to assume that he stopped when they left?”

That’s good,
Blair thought. The public reaction to this would almost certainly be favorable.

•  •  •  

The words continued to scroll by on the teleprompter mirrors. Bush was reaching the critical point, where he would declare his commitment to a renewed U.N. diplomatic effort to disarm Iraq.

“My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge,” Bush said. “If Iraq’s regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account.”

He glanced at the teleprompter, looking for the phrase calling for a new resolution.

It wasn’t there.

The purposes of the United States should not be doubted
. . .

That
was the next sentence on the teleprompter—an attestation to the country’s might and willpower. There was nothing about diplomacy. The words that had been the subject of such great debate had simply disappeared.

Bush took a breath. And then he winged it.

“We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions . . .” he began.

•  •  •  

Resolutions? That’s odd.

Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador, was flummoxed by Bush’s use of the plural. Blair had been pushing for two resolutions, of course, but Bush had always demurred. Now, after all the fighting over whether to accept even one, the president announced he would go for two? Without warning?

It was almost as if Bush had reached his decision at the last second. Meyer had no way of knowing that he had just witnessed the president of the United States announce what seemed to be a major international initiative by mistake, owing to a technical flub.

•  •  •  

Slips of the tongue don’t establish national security policy, and so the calls went out quickly to inform allies that the president had misspoken. He wanted one resolution, not two.

Rice delivered the message to the Blair government in a phone call to David
Manning. There had been a slipup, she explained, and Bush had gone further in his statements than he had intended.

“We gave the president the wrong text,” she said. “He was ad-libbing.”

•  •  •  

Early on September 15, a bespectacled, balding man arrived at the thirty-nine-story Secretariat Building at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. He was Hans Blix, head of the international body’s commission in charge of disarming Iraq and monitoring the country’s compliance.

The group—the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known universally as UNMOVIC—had been unable to check Iraq’s activities since its formation in 1999; Saddam had thrown out a group of weapons inspectors the previous year.

Blix—a Swedish diplomat with a long pedigree promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy—had come out of retirement in 2000 to become the new head of UNMOVIC at the request of the U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan. If weapons inspectors went back into Iraq, it would be Blix who led them. Now, just days after the Bush speech, Annan had summoned Blix to his office for an urgent Sunday meeting. The news was breathtaking—Saddam had blinked.

“The Iraqis are going to declare that they accept the return of inspectors,” Annan said. “They want early discussions in Baghdad or Vienna about practical arrangements.”

“Great,” Blix replied. “But I want the talks to be in Vienna.”

If Blix and other members of UNMOVIC rushed to Baghdad, the world might see it as a sign that Saddam had capitulated. But the Iraqis might then turn around and reject the conditions for moving forward—it could be made to look as though the U.N. team had fumbled in the negotiations.

“We should go to Baghdad and offer Iraq the benefit of inspection only when they accept the practical arrangements we need,” Blix said.

The effort would be worthwhile, Blix said, only if Saddam allowed full and free access to suspected weapons sites and accepted other terms that would ensure the credibility of UNMOVIC’s work. Annan agreed.

•  •  •  

The letter from Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri, was delivered to Annan the next afternoon. In it, Sabri declared that Iraq had decided to allow the weapons inspectors back, with no conditions.

This, the letter said, was the first step toward assuring the world that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.

•  •  •  

The first inklings of a planned terrorist attack in Indonesia were picked up in mid-September by MI5, Britain’s Security Service. Based on electronic intercepts and reports from informants, the intelligence agency determined that the plot included a weekend bombing of nightclubs frequented by American, British, and other Western tourists. Most likely, the strike would take place in Bali.

Word of the threat was passed on to Britain’s diplomatic service, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was responsible for issuing travel advisories. But MI5 didn’t inform Britain’s government outposts or other interests in Indonesia of the growing danger.

•  •  •  

The Gulfstream jet taxied toward the hangar at Guantanamo Bay. A delegation of administration lawyers in business suits stepped out and was greeted by General Dunlavey.

It was September 26. The group—including Addington, Haynes, Rizzo, and several other attorneys—was making a quick stop at the detention center to review its operations. They were taken by ferry to the windward side of the base and then boarded a bus to Camp Delta. After a short briefing, they were escorted through a building that held two dozen detainees clad in orange jumpsuits. Some of the men studied the lawyers with vacant expressions. Others glared, their eyes flashing in anger. Afterward, the group observed the questioning of a detainee; the interrogators used the relationship-building tactics of law enforcement.