Known and Unknown (41 page)

In our initial discussions with the President that day, Myers and I recommended that he order a partial call-up of the Air Force reserves to ease the strain on our pilots, since round-the-clock patrols in the skies above our country would be needed. Bush agreed and asked me to convey his thanks to the Pentagon employees who were still at their posts. He made clear that he would like to act quickly against the perpetrators of the attacks. I said we would get to work on how best to do that. “The ball will soon be in your court,” he added.

As I got off the phone, I thought again of the Beirut bombing. Ever since then, a small circle of national security experts, including George Shultz, had worried that it was only a matter of time before Muslim extremists found their way to our shores. “Terrorism is a form of warfare, and must be treated as such,” I had said back in 1984, in the aftermath of the U.S. withdrawal. “As with other forms of conflict, weakness invites aggression. Simply standing in a defensive position, absorbing blows, is not enough. Terrorism must be deterred.”
²⁸
We could not stop all acts of terrorism or eliminate all casualties. But we could send a message to terrorists and to regimes that sponsored and harbored terrorists that if they continued to do so it would be at a price.

I remember observing to those with me early that afternoon that America's prior history in responding to terrorism had not been effective. I considered our responses to provocations and attacks by our adversaries over the last decade hesitant and, in some cases, feckless, including: letting Libya's Muammar Gaddafi off for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103; the first World Trade Center attack of 1993; the plotted assassination of George H. W. Bush by Iraqi agents the same year; America's retreat under fire in Mogadishu in 1993; the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996; the East African embassies bombings in 1998; and the 2000 attack on the USS
Cole
. Actions and inactions by previous administrations had left the impression that the United States was leaning back, not forward.
²⁹

“We can't bluster,” I said to my staff. “If you cock your fist, you'd better be ready to throw it.”
³⁰

Time also was important. I remembered that after the terrorist massacre of Marines in Beirut, American support for the Lebanese government and for action against the terrorists waned quickly.

“One week from now,” I remarked to Myers, “the willingness to act will be half of what it is now.”

Myers thought differently. “I think the country's attention span will last longer this time,” he said. If we didn't take the right steps to engage the American people and prepare them for the length of the war ahead, I wasn't so sure.
³¹

 

A
t 3:30 p.m., President Bush convened his first National Security Council meeting following the attacks. Joining us via secure video teleconference (SVTC) from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, he began by echoing some of the comments he had made to me on the phone earlier in the day. “No thugs are going to diminish the spirit of the United States,” he told us. “No coward is going to hold this government at bay. We're going to find out who did this. We're going to destroy them and their resources.” The President discussed what the terrorist attacks might mean for the American people. He speculated about how people would react, especially in the cities struck by the terrorists: Would they go to their jobs the next day? Would children go to school?

During the meeting, a fresh report came in of still another suspicious plane—this one coming from Madrid and scheduled to land in Philadelphia. Over the secure video, the President authorized the use of force if necessary to bring down the airliner.
³²

The President insisted that the government rebound quickly after the attack. I reported that I would have the Pentagon open the following day. Not only did the Department have a great deal of work to do, I felt it was important that the terrorists not be seen as successful in shutting down the U.S. Department of Defense.

Tenet reported that the intelligence community now believed with some confidence that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network was responsible for the attacks. The CIA had discovered that two of the hijackers were suspected al-Qaida operatives—including one who had been linked to the 2000 bombing of the USS
Cole
.
³³
One month before 9/11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a senior al-Qaida lieutenant in close contact with bin Ladin, had discussed the details of the operation with Muhammed Atta, the lead hijacker. Their conversations were in a code in which they pretended to be students talking about various academic fields. What they actually talked about were which targets to hit: “architecture” meant the World Trade Center; “arts” referred to the Pentagon; “law,” the Capitol building; and “politics,” the White House. As he related this chilling information, Tenet warned of the possibility of additional, copycat attacks.

The State Department reported that it had placed all U.S. embassies on heightened alert. The President said he saw the attacks not as a problem for the United States alone but as a challenge to free nations, and that it was necessary to organize a global campaign against terrorism by enlisting as many countries as possible into a large coalition. He expected help not just from our traditional allies—Britain, Germany, and France had offered immediate assistance—but from new partners. We discussed the fact that our reaction to the attack would need to have many parts, and that some of our partners might want to participate in only some of them.

Later that afternoon I spoke with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov. He sounded sad as we discussed the casualties. He pledged Russia's cooperation. As it happened, I already had a request to make. The Russian military was conducting an aircraft exercise near Alaska, and our forces were understandably sensitive now about any intrusions into American airspace. I didn't want problems to arise inadvertently between our two countries. So I asked Ivanov if he would have his military stand down. He promptly agreed to halt the exercise.

That evening also offered an opportunity for political rivals in the United States to come together, at least for a time. At the Pentagon, I met with Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and John Warner, the ranking Republican. They wanted to come to the Department to express their support.

“We're foursquare with you,” Warner said.

“We will be totally arm in arm,” Levin seconded, saying he looked forward to my leadership.
³⁴

I was heading to a press briefing in the Pentagon and the two senators asked to attend to show their support. So at 6:42 p.m., I appeared before the Pentagon press corps with Levin, Warner, and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Hugh Shelton, who had just arrived from South America. As the Pentagon burned—it would continue to burn for several days—I told reporters that the Defense Department would be open in the morning, fulfilling its responsibilities. “The Pentagon's functioning,” I said. “It will be in business tomorrow.”
³⁵
Asked about how many might have perished in the building, I replied, “It will not be a few.”

Senator Levin vowed to support efforts to “track down, root out, and relentlessly pursue terrorists, [and] states that support them and harbor them.”
³⁶
When Levin was asked a question about Democratic opposition to increasing the defense budget, he replied that he and the Armed Services Committee now were united in support of the President's defense increase.
³⁷

On the evening of the attack, nations around the world were voicing support for a robust response. The German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called the attacks “a declaration of war against the entire civilized world.” The French newspaper
Le Monde
declared, “We are all Americans.”
³⁸

In the Middle East, friendly and unfriendly regimes were shaken by the attack, unsure of what they should say or, more to the point, unsure about what we might do. The leaders of Iran and Saudi Arabia expressed condolences.
³⁹
Of course, we had yet to test if those nations would be with us when we acted against the terrorists.

Only one regime openly gloated about the attack. “The United States reaps the thorns its rulers have planted in the world,” Saddam Hussein declared from Baghdad.
⁴⁰
Iraq's state-controlled newspaper charged: “The real perpetrators [of 9/11] are within the collapsed buildings.”
⁴¹
This was truly remarkable. Even the Iranian government sensed that it was bad form to poke the Great Satan in the eye as thousands of American bodies were being recovered from the rubble.

In the aftermath of the attacks, I was sensitive to comments made by foreign leaders. When President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt made a poorly chosen comment about 9/11, for example, I was not happy.
⁴²
I asked my staff to let me know what a government had said about the attacks whenever I met with foreign leaders. If their comments were supportive, I wanted to thank them, but, I added, “If they were harmful, I will remember that, too.”
⁴³
From the Oval Office at 8:30 that evening, President Bush delivered his first formal remarks after the attack to the nation. The presence of the President in Washington was reassuring. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” he announced, setting out a new declaratory policy. This was a crucial element of our strategy to do everything we reasonably could to prevent follow-on attacks. Though the President wanted to strike directly at the terrorist groups that had organized the attack, actionable intelligence was scarce. But we did know the location of the states that were instrumental in supporting the international terrorist network—and we also had the means to impose costs on those regimes. Afghanistan's Taliban regime, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and the clerical rulers of Iran were now on notice: Bush had announced that the costs for state support of terrorism had just gone up.

After the speech, President Bush convened a meeting of the National Security Council in the shelter underneath the White House. He reiterated his determination to end the distinction between terrorist groups and their state sponsors. Nations would have to choose, he said, and not try to live in some middle ground between terrorist warfare and respectable state sovereignty. Powell, back from Peru, said that Afghanistan and Pakistan would have to stop providing terrorists sanctuary.

As secretary of defense it was my job to advise the President, but also to interpret his guidance and ensure that it was implemented. I told the President and the NSC that, for the moment at least, the American military was not prepared to take on terrorists. A major military effort, I said, could take as many as several months to assemble. President Bush said he was eager to respond, but he wanted to ensure that our response, when it came, was appropriate and effective.

I also mulled the President's words about attacking terrorists and the territory from which they planned and plotted attacks. Did that mean we should be planning to strike terrorist targets in nations with whom we had friendly relations? I suggested that we think about the problem more broadly. We needed to consider other nations, including Sudan, Libya, Iraq, and Iran, where terrorists had found safe haven over the years and where they might seek refuge if we were to attack al-Qaida's hub in Afghanistan.

We had little specific intelligence to support targeting terrorist operatives themselves, I noted, so we should take action against those parts of the network that we could locate, such as the terrorists' bank accounts and their state sponsors. If we put enough pressure on those states—and this didn't necessarily mean military pressure—they might feel compelled to rein in the terrorist groups they supported. This might enable us to constrain groups that our intelligence agencies couldn't locate.

Much has been written about the Bush administration's focus on Iraq after 9/11. Commentators have suggested that it was strange or obsessive for the President and his advisers to have raised questions about whether Saddam Hussein was somehow behind the attack. I have never understood the controversy. Early on, I had no idea if Iraq was or was not involved, but it would have been irresponsible for any administration not to have asked the question.

The hopes I had when I was serving as President Reagan's Middle East envoy for a more positive relationship between Iraq and the United States obviously had not been realized. It had been many years since I met with Saddam Hussein, and I knew he had not mellowed with age. America had gone to war against Iraq to liberate Kuwait from Saddam's 1990 invasion. Iraqi forces fired at American and British pilots patrolling northern and southern UN no-fly zones almost daily. From 1990 on, Iraq had been on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. Since I had worked with Paul Wolfowitz in 1998 on the Ballistic Missile Threat Commission, I knew that he had been concerned about the relationships of terrorists with regimes hostile to the United States. His knowledge of the subject of Iraq was encyclopedic. He had pressed intelligence officials about possible links between the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and various state sponsors of terror, including the Iraqi government. Though American intelligence analysts in the 1990s generally said that the Islamic terrorists who committed the first World Trade Center bombing were probably working without state involvement, Wolfowitz was not convinced.

I remember one commission briefing in particular, when the name first came up that would become familiar to all Americans after 9/11: a Saudi millionaire named Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden had declared a holy war against the United States, listing what he characterized as a number of “crimes and sins” committed by the U.S. government against Muslims.