The Saudi GID, said since 9/11 to have fed information on the future hijackers to its counterparts in Washington, had long been regarded by the CIA’s bin Laden specialists as a “hostile service.” If the GID did share information, was it genuine? Or was it, by design, bogus and misleading?
The Saudi factor is one of the wild cards in the 9/11 investigation. Suspicion that Saudi Arabia had supported the hijack operation was rife for a while after 9/11, then faded—not so much because there was no evidence but because the suspicion was snuffed out. The possibility of Saudi involvement, a vital issue, will be a major focus in the closing chapters of this book.
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, only those in the inner councils of government and the intelligence services were mulling the deeper questions. The loud public call was for hitting back, striking those believed to have been the organizers, those who had been in direct command, hard and swiftly.
SIXTEEN
ON SEPTEMBER 14, 2001, THREE DAYS AFTER THE ATTACKS, THE words marching across the great, glittering signboard in Times Square had read: “BUSH CALLS UP 50,000 RESERVISTS.” President Bush’s motorcade drove past the sign that evening at the end of a day of prolonged high emotion—a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, a visit to the pulverized ruins of the World Trade Center in New York, and a gut-wrenching two hours talking with relatives of the hundreds of firefighters and police who were missing and believed dead.
“After all the sadness and the hugging and the love and the families,” the President’s aide Ari Fleischer recalled thinking as the White House motorcade rolled down 42nd Street, “you could just feel the winds of war were blowing.”
The way America would react to the al Qaeda assault had rapidly become clear. Evident within forty-five minutes of the first strike on the World Trade Center, when Bush spoke to the nation from the schoolroom in Florida, promising to “hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.” Evident two hours later at an Air Force base in Louisiana, away from the microphones, when he told aides, “We’re gonna get the bastards.” Evident in everything he said thereafter, in private or in public.
The vast majority of the American people agreed that there must be severe retribution. The symbol of their resolve appeared within eight hours of 9/11, when a firefighter named Dan McWilliams took a national flag from a yacht moored in the Hudson nearby and—helped by fellow firemen—raised it high in the rubble at Ground Zero. The photographer who snapped them doing it realized instantly how the image would resonate. Right down to the angle of the flag as it went up, it resembled the raising of the Stars and Stripes by U.S. Marines during the battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.
At a memorial service on the 14th, with four U.S. presidents in the congregation, the National Cathedral reverberated to the roar of almost a thousand people singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword … the watch fires of a hundred circling camps … the trumpet that shall never call retreat … Let us die to make men free.”
The September 11 onslaught had been an act of war, and the response was to be war. Many tens of thousands—the vast majority of them not Americans—were to die or be wounded in what Bush described as the coming “monumental struggle between good and evil.” He made clear from the start that bin Laden and his followers would not be the only targets. Speechwriter Michael Gerson, briefed on the message the President wanted to convey in his address to the nation on the night of 9/11, has recalled writing in a draft that the United States would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them.”
Bush insisted that the language be clearer. In the final, amended version, he said the U.S. would “make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who
In Afghanistan, by contrast, Taliban foreign minister Wakil Muttawakil had been asked whether he was certain bin Laden had not been involved in the attacks. “Naturally,” he said. Were his government’s restrictions on bin Laden’s military activity on Afghan soil still in force? “Naturally,” he said, and played down the likelihood of U.S. retaliation against Afghanistan.
Seven thousand miles away, though, the talk in the Situation Room at the White House was uncompromising. The Taliban were soon to propose trying bin Laden in Afghanistan or handing him over for trial in another Muslim country, but America was to turn a deaf ear. “We’re not only going to strike the rattlesnake,” Bush said at this time. “We’re going to strike the rancher.”
The administration never even considered negotiating with the Taliban, Rice said later. Washington would eventually issue a formal ultimatum—promptly rejected—demanding that Afghanistan hand over the Saudi exile, or “share in his fate.”
The posture of Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan—with its schizophrenic mix of ties to the Taliban, dependence on Washington, and divided religious and tribal loyalties—would now be pivotal. As Secretary of State Powell would recall it, Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, “had to be told in no uncertain terms that it was time to choose sides.” The way Musharraf remembered it being reported to him, those terms included being told that “if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age.” He bent to almost all the American demands for cooperation.
There were voices in Washington raising the notion of retaliation against nations other than Afghanistan. “Need to move swiftly,” Rumsfeld’s aide Stephen Cambone, noting the defense secretary’s comments on the afternoon of 9/11, had jotted: “Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up … need to do so to get anything useful … thing[s] related or not.” “I know a lot,” Rumsfeld would say publicly within days, “and what I have said, as clearly as I know how, is that states are supporting these people.”
That first night at Bush’s war council, the 9/11 Commission determined, Rumsfeld had “urged the President and the principals to think broadly about who might have harbored the attackers, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, and Iran.” Though bin Laden was a Saudi and most of the hijackers Saudis, the possibility of that country’s involvement was apparently not raised.
It was then, though, that Rumsfeld jumped at what he saw as the need to “do Iraq.” “Everyone looked at him,” Richard Clarke recalled. “At least I looked at him and Powell looked at him, like, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ And he said—I’ll never forget this—‘There just aren’t enough targets in Afghanistan. We need to bomb something else to prove that we’re, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks.’ And I made the point certainly that night, and I think Powell acknowledged it, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
“That didn’t seem to faze Rumsfeld.… It shouldn’t have come as a surprise. It really didn’t, because from the first weeks of the administration they were talking about Iraq. I just found it a little disgusting that they were talking about it while the bodies were still burning in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.”
President Bush kept the immediate focus on bin Laden and Afghanistan, but he did not ignore Rumsfeld. On the evening of the 12th, Clarke recalled, Bush quietly took aside his counterterrorism coordinator and a few colleagues to say, “Look … I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way … Just look. I want to know any shred.”
“Absolutely, we will look … again,” Clarke responded. “But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.”
Bush looked irritated. He replied, “Look into Iraq, Saddam,” and walked away. Clarke’s people would report that there was no evidence of cooperation between al Qaeda and Iraq. Pressure on the President to act against Iraq, however, continued. His formal order for military action against terrorism, a week after 9/11, would include an instruction to the Defense Department to prepare a contingency plan for strikes against Iraq—and perhaps the occupation of its oilfields.
THE WEEKEND FOLLOWING the attacks, after the frenzy of the first fearful days, Bush flew his war council to the presidential retreat at Camp David. Their deliberations began, as always during his presidency, with a moment
