Chapter 142: Intelligence

Monday, September 24, 2001

The funeral was finished by Thursday afternoon. Laura and the girls officially moved out on Friday. I needed to take a few days off myself. Marilyn and I flew back to Hereford on Thursday for a long weekend. In the meantime, the White House Chief Usher, the head of the residence staff, would coordinate getting the Bush’s belongings out of the place and out of Camp David, and getting our stuff moved over from the Naval Observatory. We would officially move in Monday morning.

When I was elected as Vice President, we had moved our clothing and my office from the house on 30^th over to the Naval Observatory, though we left the furniture. I had debated putting the home on the market, but quickly realized that it might be useful to keep it around as a backup residence. If I had somebody visiting that I either couldn’t put up in an official residence, or didn’t want to, or didn’t have the room for, I could let them stay there. It wasn’t like I had to sell it to pay the new mortgage.

We were both exhausted by the time we got back to the house, but there was no rest for the weary. Almost immediately I was asked where I wanted the commo bunker installed. “Excuse me?” I asked the Secret Service agent.

“The communications trailers. There are two of them, plus antennas. We didn’t think you wanted them out on the front lawn, so to speak.”

I looked at my wife and muttered, “Good grief!” She looked distressed so I dragged the fellow outside and pointed to a place out in the field on the other side of the landing pad. Then I looked in the other direction and saw a clearing in the woods I owned on the other side of the street, a clearing that hadn’t been there before. “What’s going over there?”

“A security trailer.”

“Just how permanent are you making these things?” I asked.

He shook his head and said, “Not too crazy. No basements or anything. They’ll be self-contained units on slab foundations. The day you leave the White House, we can just unbolt everything and haul it away.”

Leaving me with new concrete lawn ornaments. I sighed in acceptance. “I assume you’ll be doing this at Hougomont, too?”

“Where’s that? I know we have to do it in the Bahamas.”

“Hougomont is the name of our place in the Bahamas,” I told him.

“Oh. Yes, sir, there too. That’s a different team, though.”

“God help the Bahamas! They’ll probably declare me an undesirable by the time this is done!” I wandered back inside and told Marilyn what was going on.

To be fair, they kept the disruption to a minimum. Ever since that first day after the election, when I managed to get a really obnoxious and arrogant agent packed off to Nome, Alaska, or somewhere north of there, the Secret Service was generally a lot politer to me. Okay, there had been the asshole on Air Force Two, but that was a pretty odd day to begin with. Some of the changes we were getting were simply upgrades of various things that had been put in when I became the Vice President. They had replaced our phone system and Internet and cable connections then, and increased security also. Now, as the President, I just got more.

I couldn’t wait until they brought in the anti-aircraft missiles! That was no joke, either. I heard somebody mentioning an I-HAWK battery, but they couldn’t figure out how to camouflage it, and were debating using Stingers instead. Joy!

I had twenty-five acres around the house and about ten across the road. I wondered if it would be sufficient!

One thing I had to deal with over the weekend was a ridiculous case of racism. It had been simmering all week, but what with the memorial services, I was prevented from dealing with it appropriately. It all dated from Monday, at the funeral for Harlan, when during the eulogy I had said that in basic, ‘I was on the top bunk and Harlan was beneath me.’ Reverend Al Sharpton had been taking me to task ever since then about my obvious racism and how black people were beneath me!

When Ari Fleischer told me this, I simply stared at him in disbelief. Finally, I got my brain to working and asked, “Are you kidding me?”

“I am dead serious, Mister President!”

“Ari, we were assigned our bunks. I never chose, or I’d have chosen the bottom bunk! Are you shitting me?”

“He is also claiming that your position carrying the coffin meant something demeaning. That one I don’t understand myself.”

I gave him another odd look. “There were six of us, and I was in the center on the left. I’ve got a bad knee, and if I bobbled the thing, the guys in front and behind could catch it. This is nuts.”

“Al Sharpton doesn’t have to make sense. All he wants to do is keep his name out there. He thinks he’s the next Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King, Jr., all rolled into one.”

“Shit! Okay, if you have to put out something, simply say that the bunks were assigned and that is all that means. Jesus Christ! I have to bury a President and this asshole thinks it’s a good time to grandstand!” I told him.

Ari put out an appropriate statement, but that didn’t shut Sharpton up. He loved the sound of his own voice, and facts never swayed him. It came to a head that Sunday morning on Meet the Press. Tim Russert, who I had known for years, had Sharpton on in an early segment, and as a counterpoint, had on retired Major General Jonathan Buller. It took me a second to recognize him, but then it dawned on me that General Buller had been my battalion commander when I had Bravo Battery. The interesting thing, though, was that Buller, who had been a fine battalion commander and who had continued rising through the ranks, was as black as the ace of spades. That had never been important to me when he had been Lieutenant Colonel Buller and I had been First Lieutenant Buckman. He said ‘Jump!’ and I said, ‘How high?’ How they ever dug him up I will never fathom.

Sharpton was being broadcast from a studio in New York City, and Buller was in the studio with Russert. Sharpton started off with a litany of woes about the racism of the Buckman administration, which had only been in office about twelve days at that point. As proof, he cited my long personal history of racism, starting with my statement about Harlan being beneath me. When Tim stated that I had explicitly stated that I was in the top bunk and Harlan was in the bottom bunk, Sharpton replied, “That’s what Mister Buckman says, of course, but that doesn’t mean it’s true!”

Tim looked over at General Buller. “General? You used to command the President. Is he a racist?”

“Absolutely not! This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard of! Lieutenant Buckman was one of the finest officers I ever had the privilege of commanding, and I never saw a trace of racism in his words or his actions. I recommended him for early promotion twice, and if he had stayed in the army, he would have had an outstanding career. He was an excellent officer.”

“Then what about the significance of which bunk he was in? Or is there a significance?”

Buller snorted. “This happened when he was in cadet training, which for an officer is the same thing as boot camp. They start at one end of the barracks and a sergeant assigns each boy a bunk alphabetically. It’s a bunch of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old kids, and the sergeant just goes you ... you ... you ... right down the line. Buckman ... Buckminster ... next! They sleep where they are told, they march where they are told, they do what they are told, and they do it with whoever they are told to do it with! That’s all it is. Every soldier and every officer goes through it. It’s basic training and that’s how it works. If Al Sharpton had ever served the country like he serves his mouth, he’d know better!”

It only got better from there! I watched with vast amusement as my old friend had to put up with Sharpton and Buller trading insults. Sharpton called my former commander a ‘Tom’ and a ‘house boy around the plantation’ and Buller called Sharpton a ‘damn fool’ and a lying sack of [bleeped]!’ I was laughing my ass off at that point, and Russert pulled the plug on the pair of them. I told Marilyn we would have to invite General Buller to dinner some night, maybe to speak to the NAACP, at which point she told me to ‘Behave!’ and gave me a finger wagging. Somehow, I suspected the problem was going to go away at that point. I dreaded to think of what Harlan’s family thought of it all.

Monday morning, I took Marine One back to Washington while Marilyn stayed home with the girls. This was their senior year in high school. We needed to somehow make a two-home family work, just until they graduated. This was going to be tricky, since Marilyn was now the First Lady, and needed to be in Washington with me. It wouldn’t be easy.

I left the house early and got to my office about 8:00 and went directly to the Oval Office. First things first - I received a Presidential Daily Briefing without any attitude now. The official intelligence was still that everything pointed towards Iraq. The intel I was getting from the Three Amigos was pointing towards Al Qaeda and Afghanistan.

Priority Number One - Sort this shit out! My first call was to Collins Barnwell and tell him I wanted the three of them to be here at 11:00 with the latest info. Barnwell was the titular head of the investigation, and an Executive Assistant Director of the FBI. The other two, Secret Service Assistant Director William Basham and CIA Deputy Director of Analysis Winston Creedmore, were to come along with him.

Until then I puttered around doing odds and ends. That’s not saying I was goofing off, but at the Presidential level, even the odds and ends are important. The secretaries try to keep things straight, but there are never enough hours in a day. Even going to the bathroom seems to be on a schedule. Forget about goofing off and reading a magazine or playing Solitaire on the computer. You are already booked for that time. Meanwhile, something is bound to come up that throws everything out of whack. By the way, everything that lands on your desk can literally involve life and death decisions.

Nobody has yet come up with a way to determine if somebody will be up to the job of being President. Some business executives ran based on their ability to run big operations and multi-task. These are useful skills and are also found in a number of governors who had held the job. Then again, over the years we’ve had some governors who didn’t do as well as others (Carter and Bush 43, not great; Clinton, better than average) and Senators without executive experience that had done okay (Kennedy) and others who hadn’t (Obama). All the scholars could do was make wild ass guesses about what it took. From what I could see you needed to be a world class juggler and as flexible as a contortionist. Maybe they needed to start recruiting at the circus.

Barnwell gave the presentation on what they had discovered so far, and it was impressive. The FBI technique is to throw a zillion agents at a problem, with each one assigned to a specific task, and that agent becomes an expert on that task. So, the simple answer was to take the passenger and crew lists from each airplane and assign an agent to each passenger or family of passengers, and to each crew member and investigate them thoroughly. Could they have been involved? Where were they sitting? Who were they sitting next to? What was that person doing? What was their background and history? If they were clean, that agent got assigned to something else.

In short order they were able to write off ninety-plus percent of the crew and passengers. Joe Schmoe, a stockbroker from Milwaukee, flying home from Boston, on the way to see his blonde wife and 2.3 children, was not the guy who did this. Instead, let’s look closer at this swarthy fellow, Mohammed Mohammed, who paid for his trip in cash, one way, is on an expired visa from Saudi Arabia, and who got a pilot license in the States. Yeah, let’s look at him, especially after an interview with his flight instructor reports that Mohammed Mohammed wasn’t paying any attention to the ‘landing’ portion of the lessons. At that point, they start tearing this guy’s life apart. Where was he living? What was his itinerary like? Where did he get his money from? Where were his bank accounts? Can we tie him to anything overseas, with info from the CIA? Did he show up on Secret Service lists?

Nineteen foreign born men, most of them from Saudi Arabia, were tagged and investigated. They all had ties to the terrorist group Al Qaeda and had some history in Afghanistan. None of them had anything to do with Iraq.

“Okay, gentlemen, you’ve told me the good news, such as it is. We know who it and we knew how they did it. How did they slip through? Or did we catch them and ignore them?” I asked. At that point I started getting some hemming and hawing, and guilty looks from both Barnwell and Creedmore, with Basham having the good taste to try and look sympathetic. I eyed them and said, “Let me put it another way. Just how bad did your departments fuck up?”

Barnwell answered first. “Bad enough, sir. We are still digging through our own files on this, but it is obvious that we had some early reports on at least some of these men, something that twigged various local agents, and that got buried by higher ranking agents.”

“Great! You?” I asked Creedmore.

“Not like that. We don’t investigate inside the U.S. That being said, if something was sent to us, it would have been buried. As a general rule, we don’t share with anybody else unless we have to.” He saw the look on my face and held his hands up. “Hey, I am just telling it like it is. It’s the way we’ve operated for years. I am not saying it’s right or wrong.”

“Wonderful.” I turned my head to Basham and raised my eyebrows at him.

He shook his head. “We had nothing on these guys. They simply didn’t pop up. Then again, we never got a heads up from anybody else, either.”

“Okay. It’s obvious that we need to really overhaul the intelligence system in this country. Keep working on this. I don’t care how crazy it gets, but we need to be comprehensive. You three are my point men on this. When Congress decides to hold hearings on this, I am going to personally haul you down there and nail you to the seats. They are going to have a field day with this, and we have no choice but to be clear and comprehensive. We can’t hide it any longer. We will need names of anybody at any rank who withheld information or buried reports. Heads are going to roll.”

Creedmore looked at the other two for a second and then turned back to me. “Mister President, the FBI and the CIA aren’t the only intelligence agencies in town. Have you looked at any other sources?”

“Specifically?”

“Well, there’s the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is run by Defense, and the State Department has some sources. Most of the military branches have their own intelligence system,” he explained. “Even Treasury has intelligence related to moving money around. These mutts had to get their money somewhere.”

Good luck getting anything out of State! That was locked down tight by Cheney and Libby. Defense was another matter, however, with Colin Powell running it. I knew enough about moving money around that Paul O’Neill and his troops would need names before they could track things. I gave them orders to get a list of names to O’Neill and Treasury. Basham could handle that since the Secret Service worked for Treasury. I would call Colin Powell.

I called Colin Powell right after lunch. I told him what I had been told, that maybe Defense had some assets in the DIA who might know something. Colin’s response was unusual. He paused for a second, and then said, “Are you reading my mind or something?”

“Not that I was aware of. Why?”

“Something came up this morning. I need to see you about it.”

I looked down the schedule on my desk. I was already booked solid but decided to delay some things until after dinner. I had already planned to stay the night in the White House. “Can you be here by four?”

“Yes, sir.”

I hung up and called in Josh and Mindy to go over the schedule and changes. At 4:00 Secretary Powell was announced and was ushered in, along with an officer in an Army uniform with a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaves on his epaulets. I hadn’t been expecting anybody else, but I didn’t envision a problem. I stood and shook hands with the Secretary and the newcomer, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, and invited them both to sit down.

“Mister President, when you called me earlier today, I had just spoken to Colonel Shaffer here, and I think it is important that you hear what he has to say. I have to say, I had never heard any of this before.”

I turned to Shaffer and said, “I’m all ears, Colonel.”

“Sir, have you ever heard of Project Able Danger?” he asked.

“Project Able Danger? Can’t say as I have.” I turned to Powell and asked, “Where do you guys come up with these names? You keep them in a barrel in the basement or something?”

“This isn’t all that funny, Mister President.”

“Okay, fair enough. Continue, Colonel.”

Shaffer nodded and said, “Project Able Danger was started two years ago in the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was in charge of the project, though not the only person assigned to it. General Shelton authorized the program, which was to use database mining techniques to determine if open source and non-classified information could be used to target potential terrorists operating inside the United States.”

Despite my technical background, I wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about. “This started in 1999? What is database mining? My technical background is in information theory and topology.”

He blinked at that, expecting me to say law or something. “Yes, sir, 1999. Data mining involves looking for relationships in massive databases. It needs really massive computer power. It starts getting into artificial intelligence and statistical analysis...”

I held my hands up. “Okay, while part of me would love to go into this, a bigger part of me doesn’t have the time. You are obviously here for a reason. What is it?” Before he could answer, I looked at Colin. “How did you get involved in this? You’re the Secretary of Defense. I don’t mean to belittle the Colonel here, but whatever this is it’s way below your horizon.”

“Colonel, you want to explain that, please?” answered Colin Powell.

“Yes, sir.” He turned to face me. “Earlier today, I was ordered to shut down Able Danger and destroy all the records involved. I felt this was very unusual, so instead I made secure backup copies of what I could, and delayed implementation of the orders.”

“Who gave you these orders, and why do I care?”

“The orders were given to me in the office of the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. I was called into his office this morning and received them verbally from somebody in the State Department,” he said.

“State? Why?” That made no sense at all. What would State have to do with whatever this was?

“Yes, sir. I was called into my boss’ office, and he was talking to a man. Then he ordered me to obey any orders I was given, and he left. The fellow who was there never introduced himself, but he had a nametag on, an ID badge, saying he was Jonathan Radziwill, State Department. He ordered me to shut it down. Afterwards, he left, my boss came back in, and I was sent on my merry way.”

I glanced over at Powell, who simply said, “Deniability.”

I nodded and asked, “He ordered it shut down? Why?”

“That was not explained, sir. I was simply told to shut it down and destroy all records of it. As I said, I found that very unusual, so I went outside of channels and got in touch with the Secretary.”

“I like proper channels, Colonel. Who did you speak to?”

He took a deep breath and admitted, “I called General Shinseki. I had met him once or twice before. He’s retired now, but he told me he could reach the Secretary. I simply stated I needed to speak to the Secretary. I did not speak of Able Danger.”

I looked at Powell. “Shinseki called you?”

“And I called Shaffer here.”

“What the hell is this all about, Colonel? What did this Able Danger do?”

“Sir, we found the names of some of the 9-11 hijackers. We reported them to the CIA.”

I stared at him for a moment. “You knew who was going to attack those airplanes?”

“No, sir, not really. We figured that out afterwards,” he replied.

I looked over at Powell. He looked back at me in dead seriousness. Colin Powell had bought into whatever this was. I turned back to Shaffer. “Okay, you’re going to need to explain that, like you’re teaching a really stupid politician.”

“What we determined was that there were groups of individuals who fit the profiles of possible terrorists, organized into groups, a cell organization it’s called. We passed this information along to the CIA, since these were foreign nationals, so they could track down anything about them.”

“I’m with you so far. So how do you know these men were the 9-11 guys? Those names haven’t been released yet. The information is still being developed, in fact.”

He nodded. “Yes, sir. Well, we had these names, and we were tracking them, sort of, just to see if our algorithms were working. Then we noticed that none of the names had any changes or movement after 9-11. They had completely dropped from sight. That was when we started querying the CIA again.”

“And that was when the State Department ordered it shut down and disbanded? How did they get involved? What does the State Department have to do with the Defense Intelligence Agency? None of this makes sense.” I looked at Shaffer. “This program of yours, is it - was it - operational?”

“No, sir, it was just a pilot program, to see if we could develop information. We were still figuring it out.”

“Colonel, I’m going to ask you to step outside for a few minutes.” I escorted him to the door and showed him out, with instructions to stick around, but feel free to get coffee for himself. Then I went back and sat down with the Secretary of Defense. “Colin, why the hell do I feel like we’re playing a game and I not only don’t know the rules, I don’t know the game.”

“Carl, I am getting a very bad feeling about this.”

“Some unknown light bird at the DIA finds some names and crossdecks them to the CIA, but it’s the State Department which shuts him down. How did they get involved?”

“How would they even have heard?” commented Powell.

I was getting a bad feeling about this. “Who is this Radziker or whatever his name is?”

“Radziwill, Jonathan Radziwill. I asked about that. He’s a personal assistant to Scooter Libby,” he replied. “He also knew Wolfowitz, at least that’s what I’ve heard.”

That made me raise my eyebrows. Wolfowitz had previous history at State and knew Scooter and Cheney. Scooter was the Deputy Secretary of State, the number two man over there, and Cheney’s longtime assistant. “Scooter doesn’t go to the bathroom without permission from Cheney. So, why does Cheney want it shut down?” I thought for a second longer and said, “Okay, so Cheney orders the evidence that we knew about 9-11 ahead of time buried, but we didn’t know about 9-11 ahead of time. They just had some names of possible bad guys. Cheney might be the Antichrist, but even he wouldn’t allow these guys to kill George Bush,” I argued.

“It’s not about 9-11,” Powell rebutted. “It’s about Iraq. All year long State and the CIA have been arguing that Saddam Hussein is the threat to the country, and after the attack, they’ve been saying he sent the terrorists. Now Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer pops up to throw sand into the gears. Here’s a question for you. What happens if these names get sent to the CIA or the FBI? The CIA buries it in the vaults because they don’t talk to anybody. The FBI, however, puts some agents on these guys, maybe hauls them in for questioning, maybe figures it out and we don’t get 9-11.”

A chill ran up my spine! I had condemned thousands of Americans to die, when we already knew the bad guys were in the country and up to something. What if we had grabbed them? What if 9-11 hadn’t happened? I didn’t know whether to cry or throw up.

“I get the impression that Cheney is trying to cover this all up, but what’s he covering up? That it was Al Qaeda, not Hussein? Is this even a cover-up? Is this even illegal? Or are they trying to cover up the fact that they wanted a war with Iraq, no matter what the facts are? Or are they trying to cover up the fact that they failed to act on the info, even though the CIA isn’t allowed to act inside the U.S,” I replied.

“Have your Three Amigos heard about any of this?”

“Nobody has said anything to me, and I think they would have said something. By all accounts this is looking like George was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing they are finding says that he was being targeted.” I shrugged for a second, and said, “I’m not even sure this is illegal, just sneaky and underhanded. Well, we need to figure this out, and neither you nor I are going to be able to do that. We need to get a lawyer involved. Will you ask the colonel to come back in? By the way, when all this is over with, we need to come up with a way to say thank you to Eric Shinseki. This is the second time he has helped me out.”

Colin stood and went to the door, and summoned Shaffer back in. I stood and said, “Colonel, I’m not really sure where this is going, but I think we need to find out. I hereby order you to make backup copies of the project and ignore any orders to destroy it. I also am ordering you to cooperate with any investigation from the Justice Department. Colin, I want you to get in touch with John Ashcroft, and take the colonel over there.”

Both men replied, “Yes, sir,” and I sent them away. The whole thing was disgusting. Did Cheney and Wolfowitz and Libby and the rest of the neocons they surrounded themselves with want war with Iraq so badly they would bury evidence that it wasn’t Iraq who did this? But I wasn’t buying that and wasn’t claiming it anyway, so who were they trying to bury the evidence from? Bush? He was the least of their worries! The moderates? Was that even illegal? Or is this simply hiding the incredibly embarrassing, but not necessarily illegal, way they ignored something that led to the deaths of over three thousand people?

One thing I was sure of was that it was going to come out. The biggest problem with cover-ups is that they don’t work. Every scandal I had ever heard of, going all the way back to Watergate and before, it wasn’t the crime that landed people in jail, it was the cover-up. The only way this was going to be at all something we could work through was if we could control the release of the information.

I could foresee two possible outcomes. First, we could try to bury it. We tell Shaffer to dismantle the program and send him to Nome for the rest of his life. Sooner or later, though, somebody would talk, it would hit the papers, and some Congressman would demand hearings. It would take months of time, and somebody would end up fired or in jail.

The other option wasn’t vastly more palatable but was better. We announce we discovered a problem. No, we didn’t know what was going to happen, but we did discover some of the names involved. We discovered a cover-up and called in the Justice Department and have been cooperating. It still ends up in the papers and in front of Congress, but we can control the exposure and look like we are doing something about the problem. It takes less time, and you can control who goes to jail.

Another thing to add to the to-do list, completely revamping intelligence gathering and reporting!

Meanwhile, I had a war to plan. I had told Powell I wanted to meet this week to discuss our military response, so I called a meeting of the National Security Council for Wednesday morning with this in mind. Present were Cheney, Powell, Condi Rice as the National Security Adviser, the new temporary head of the CIA, and the Chairman of the JCS, Myers, and Josh Bolten. Once we were all present in the conference room, I turned it over to Colin Powell, who promptly turned it over to Myers for a dog and pony show.

I was presented three options for Operation Enduring Freedom, a name picked more for symbolism than anything else. If it was up to me, I’d have called it Operation You Asked For It. Option Able was restricted to Al Qaeda targets and was the minimum recommendation; it consisted mainly of bombing training camps. Option Baker ratcheted things up a notch, by adding in some Afghan military assets like Army bases, and Option Charlie added a ground component. Special Forces teams would be dropped in to link up with anti-Taliban forces in the northern part of the country and do joint combat and training missions with them. From what I remembered of history on my first go, we had gone with Option Charlie, which had worked fine, but then decided we could run the country better than the locals, so we sent in 100,000 troops later on.

I listened to Myers’ spiel and looked at the computerized map he had on the giant wall screen. At the end, I had a few questions. “General, in which of these options are we attacking the Taliban itself. I don’t mean their military assets. I mean their government.”