This series, by Post reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz, is based on               interviews with President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other key officials.       Interviews were supplemented by notes of National Security Council            meetings made available, along with notes taken by several participants.
For a complete multimedia photo gallery which accompanies this series please click here

Part I: September 11 - A Chaotic Road to War
Part II: September 12 - We Will Rally the World
Part III: September 13 - The Blueprint Emerges
Part IV: September 14 - A Day to Speak of Anger and Grief
Part V: September 15 - At Camp David, Advise and Dissent
Part VI: September 16-17 - Combating Terrorism: 'It Starts Today'
Part VII: September 18,19,20 - A Presidency Defined in One Speech

PART I:
America's Chaotic Road to War
Bush's Global Strategy Began to Take Shape in First Frantic Hours After Attack

By Dan Balz and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 27, 2002; Page A01

First in a series
Tuesday, September 11

Shortly after 9:30 p.m., President Bush brought together his most senior national security advisers in a bunker beneath the White House grounds. It was just 13 hours after the deadliest attack on the U.S. homeland in the country's history.

Bush and his advisers sat around a long table in the conference room of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. Spare and cramped, the bunker was built to withstand a nuclear attack, with sleeping berths and enough food for a few people to survive for several days.

"This is the time for self-defense," he told his aides, according to National Security Council notes. Then, repeating the vow he had made earlier in the evening in a televised address from the Oval Office, he added: "We have made the decision to punish whoever harbors terrorists, not just the perpetrators."

Their job, the president said, was to figure out how to do it.

That afternoon, on a secure phone on Air Force One, Bush had already told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that he would order a military response and that Rumsfeld would be responsible for organizing it. "We'll clean up the mess," the president told Rumsfeld, "and then the ball will be in your court."

Intelligence was by now almost conclusive that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, based in Afghanistan, had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the aides gathered in the bunker-the "war cabinet" that included Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and CIA Director George J. Tenet-were not ready to say what should be done about them. The war cabinet had questions, no one more than Rumsfeld.

Who are the targets? How much evidence do we need before going after al Qaeda? How soon do we act? While acting quickly was essential, Rumsfeld said, it might take up to 60 days to prepare for major military strikes. And, he asked, are there targets that are off-limits? Do we include American allies in military strikes?

Rumsfeld warned that an effective response would require a wider war, one that went far beyond the use of military force. The United States, he said, must employ every tool available-military, legal, financial, diplomatic, intelligence.

The president was enthusiastic. But Tenet offered a sobering thought. Although al Qaeda's home base was Afghanistan, the terrorist organization operated nearly worldwide, he said. The CIA had been working the bin Laden problem for years. We have a 60-country problem, he told the group.

"Let's pick them off one at a time," Bush replied.

The president and his advisers started America on the road to war that night without a map. They had only a vague sense of how to respond, based largely on the visceral reactions of the president. But nine nights later, when Bush addressed a joint session of Congress, many of the important questions had been answered.

Meeting in secret, often several times each day, Bush and his advisers deliberated, debated and ultimately settled on a strategy that is still emerging, an unconventional and risky worldwide war against terrorism. This series of articles is an inside account of what happened from Sept. 11 to Sept. 20, based on interviews with the principals involved in the decision-making, including the president, the vice president and many other key officials inside the administration and out. The interviews were supplemented by notes of NSC meetings made available to The Washington Post, along with notes taken by several participants.

This contemporaneous account is inevitably incomplete. The president, the White House staff and senior Cabinet officers responded in detail to questions and requests. But some matters they refused to discuss, citing national security and a desire to protect the confidentiality of some internal deliberations.

6:30 a.m.
The President in Florida: Disbelief and Determination

President Bush rose early the morning of Sept. 11, and went for a four-mile run around the golf course at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, Fla., where he was staying.

On Bush's schedule that day was what White House aides call a "soft event"-reading to about 16 second-graders in Sandra Kay Daniels's class at the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota. The night before, Bush had dined with his brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former governor Bob Martinez and other state Republicans. It was a relaxed evening, full of joking and talk about politics, including some handicapping of Jeb Bush's possible opponents in his 2002 reelection campaign.

Bush's motorcade left for the school at 8:30 a.m. As it was arriving, pagers and cell phones alerted White House aides that a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Bush remembers senior adviser Karl Rove bringing him the news, saying it appeared to be an accident involving a small, twin-engine plane.

In fact it was American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 out of Boston's Logan International Airport. Based on what he was told, Bush assumed it was an accident.

"This is pilot error," the president recalled saying. "It's unbelievable that somebody would do this." Conferring with Andrew H. Card Jr., his White House chief of staff, Bush said, "The guy must have had a heart attack."

That morning the president's key advisers were scattered. Cheney and Rice were at their offices in the West Wing. Rumsfeld was at his office in the Pentagon, meeting with a delegation from Capitol Hill. Powell had just sat down for breakfast with the new president of Peru, Alejandro Toledo, in Lima. Tenet was at breakfast with his old friend and mentor, former senator David Boren (D-Okla.), at the St. Regis Hotel, three blocks from the White House. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was halfway across the Atlantic on the way to Europe. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was bound for Milwaukee. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, on the job for just a week, was in his office at FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue.

At 9:05 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, also a Boeing 767, smashed into the South Tower of the trade center. Bush was seated on a stool in the classroom when Card whispered the news: "A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack."

 News From New York: In Florida, Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. tells Bush about the second trade center attack. "I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war," the president recalled later. File Photo/Doug Miles - AP
Bush remembers exactly what he thought: "They had declared war on us, and I made up my mind at that moment that we were going to war."

A photo shows Bush's face with a distant look as he absorbed what Card had said. He nodded and resumed his conversation with the class. "Really good," he said before excusing himself and returning to the holding room. "These must be sixth-graders."

9:30 a.m.
The Secretary of State in Peru: 'Go Tell Them We're Leaving'

In Lima, Powell abruptly ended his breakfast with the Peruvian president after getting word of the second strike on the trade center and made plans to return to Washington. "Get the plane," he told an assistant. "Go tell them we're leaving." He had a seven-hour flight, with poor phone connections, ahead of him.

At the St. Regis Hotel, aides hurriedly approached Tenet's table next to a window overlooking K Street. "Mr. Director, there's a serious problem," one of them said.

Through much of the summer, Tenet had grown increasingly troubled by the prospect of a major terrorist attack against the United States. There was too much chatter in the intelligence system and repeated reports of threats were costing him sleep. His friends thought he had become obsessed. Everywhere he went, the message was the same: Something big is coming. But for all his fears, intelligence officials could never pinpoint when or where an attack might hit.

"This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet said to Boren. "I've got to go."

He had another reaction in the first few minutes, one that raised the possibility that the FBI and the CIA had not done all that they could to prevent the terrorist attacks from taking place.

"I wonder," Tenet was overheard to say, "if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training." He was referring to Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been detained in August after attracting suspicion when he sought training at a Minnesota flight school.

Moussaoui's case was very much on Tenet's mind. The previous month, the FBI had asked the CIA and the National Security Agency to run phone traces on Moussaoui, already the subject of a five-inch-thick file in the bureau.

At 9:30 a.m. the president appeared before television cameras, describing what had happened as "an apparent terrorist attack" and "a national tragedy." He appeared shaken, and his language was oddly informal. He would chase down, he said, "those folks who committed this act."

Bush also said, "Terrorism against our nation will not stand." It was an echo of "This will not stand," the words his father, President George H.W. Bush, had used a few days after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990-in Bush's opinion, one of his father's finest moments.

"Why I came up with those specific words, maybe it was an echo from the past," Bush said in an interview last month. "I don't know why. . . . I'll tell you this, we didn't sit around massaging the words. I got up there and just spoke."

9:32 a.m.
The Vice President in Washington: Underground, in Touch With Bush

Secret Service agents burst into Cheney's West Wing office. "Sir," one said, "we have to leave immediately." Radar showed an airplane barreling toward the White House.

Before Cheney could respond, the agents grabbed the vice president under his arms-nearly lifting him off the ground-and propelled him down the steps into the White House basement and through a long tunnel that led to the underground bunker.

Meanwhile, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 that had taken off from Dulles International Airport, turned away from the White House and flew back across the Potomac River, slamming into the Pentagon at 9:39 a.m.

In the tunnel below the White House, Cheney stopped to watch a television showing the smoke billowing out of the World Trade Center towers, heard the report about the plane hitting the Pentagon and called Bush again. Other Secret Service agents hustled Rice and several other senior White House officials included in an emergency contingency plan into the bunker with the vice president.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta, summoned by the White House to the bunker, was on an open line to the Federal Aviation Administration operations center, monitoring Flight 77 as it hurtled toward Washington, with radar tracks coming every seven seconds. Reports came that the plane was 50 miles out, 30 miles out, 10 miles out-until word reached the bunker that there had been an explosion at the Pentagon.

Mineta shouted into the phone to Monte Belger at the FAA: "Monte, bring all the planes down." It was an unprecedented order-there were 4,546 airplanes in the air at the time. Belger, the FAA's acting deputy administrator, amended Mineta's directive to take into account the authority vested in airline pilots. "We're bringing them down per pilot discretion," Belger told the secretary.

"[Expletive] pilot discretion," Mineta yelled back. "Get those goddamn planes down."

Sitting at the other end of the table, Cheney snapped his head up, looked squarely at Mineta and nodded in agreement.

Over the Atlantic, Shelton ordered his plane to return to Washington. But he couldn't get approval from air traffic controllers, who were diverting all planes, even the one used by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was ready to defy the controllers, figuring it was easier to ask later for forgiveness, when his deputy called to say he had obtained the necessary clearance.

In his Pentagon office, Rumsfeld felt the huge building shudder. He looked out his window, then rushed out toward the smoke, running down the steps and outside where he could see pieces of metal strewn on the ground. Rumsfeld began helping with the rescue efforts until a security agent urged him to get out of the area. "I'm going inside," he said, and took up his post in the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon war room.

Pentagon officials ordered up the airborne command post used only in national emergencies. They sent up combat air patrols in the Washington area and a fighter escort for Air Force One. They also ordered AWACs radar and surveillance planes airborne along the East Coast and, fearing another round of attacks, along the West Coast as well.

Commanders worldwide were ordered to raise their threat alert status four notches to "Delta," the highest level, to defend U.S. facilities. Rumsfeld raised the defense condition-signaling U.S. offensive readiness-to DefCon 3, the highest it had been since the Arab-Israeli war in 1973. U.S. officials also sent a message to the Russians, who were planning a military exercise not far from Alaska, urging them to rethink their plans.

After Bush's statement at Booker Elementary School, his motorcade raced back to Sarasota Bradenton International Airport. As Bush boarded Air Force One, a Secret Service agent, showing a trace of nervousness, said, "Mr. President, we need you to get seated as soon as possible."

The plane accelerated down the runway and then almost stood on its tail as it climbed rapidly out of the airport. It was 9:55 a.m.

9:55 a.m.
The Vice President in the Bunker: 'Should We Engage?' 'Yes.'

Once airborne, Bush spoke again to Cheney, who said the combat air patrol needed rules of engagement if pilots encountered an aircraft that might be under the control of hijackers. Cheney recommended that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any such civilian airliners-as momentous a decision as the president was asked to make in those first hours. "I said, 'You bet,'" Bush recalled. "We had a little discussion, but not much."

 Louisiana Detour: Advised not to return to Washington, Bush confers with Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card, Jr. on Air Force One. By Eric Draper - The White House
Bush then talked to Rumsfeld to clarify the procedures military pilots should follow in trying to force an unresponsive plane to the ground before opening fire on it. First, pilots would seek to make radio contact with the other plane and tell the pilot to land at a specific location. If that failed, the pilots were to use visual signals. These included having the fighters fly in front of the other plane.

If the plane continued heading toward what was seen as a significant target with apparently hostile intent, the U.S. pilot would have the authority to shoot it down. With Bush's approval, Rumsfeld passed the order down the chain of command.

In the White House bunker, a military aide approached the vice president.

"There is a plane 80 miles out," he said. "There is a fighter in the area. Should we engage?"

"Yes," Cheney replied without hesitation.

Around the vice president, Rice, deputy White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, tensed as the military aide repeated the question, this time with even more urgency. The plane was now 60 miles out. "Should we engage?" Cheney was asked.

"Yes," he replied again.

As the plane came closer, the aide repeated the question. Does the order still stand?

"Of course it does," Cheney snapped.

The vice president said later that it had seemed "painful, but nonetheless clear-cut. And I didn't agonize over it."

It was, "obviously, a very significant action," Cheney said in an interview. "You're asking American pilots to fire on a commercial airliner full of civilians. On the other hand, you had directly in front of me what had happened to the World Trade Center, and a clear understanding that once the plane was hijacked, it was a weapon."

Within minutes, there was a report that a plane had crashed in southwestern Pennsylvania-what turned out to be United Flight 93, a Boeing 757 that had been hijacked after leaving Newark International Airport. Many of those in the PEOC feared that Cheney's order had brought down a civilian aircraft. Rice demanded that someone check with the Pentagon.

On Air Force One, Bush inquired, "Did we shoot it down or did it crash?"

It took the Pentagon almost two hours to confirm that the plane had not been shot down, an enormous relief. "I think an act of heroism occurred on board that plane," Cheney said. Later, reports of cell phone conversations before the plane crashed indicated that some passengers had fought with the hijackers.

In a national emergency, a secret "continuity of government" plan is supposed to protect the country's constitutional leadership. It designates which officials should be taken to the underground bunker at the White House, which Cabinet members should be taken to secure locations, and where to move congressional leaders.

Senior administration officials were given briefings on the procedures shortly after Bush was inaugurated and some had toured the White House bunker. But others who were told to go to the bunker Sept. 11 had no idea where to find it and still others who should have been on the list were left off until they received authorization. Some Cabinet security details initiated plans to protect and move agency officials; some did not.

In the early confusion that day, there was a series of frightening but ultimately false reports: A plane was down near Camp David and another was down near the Ohio-Kentucky border; a car bomb exploded outside the State Department; an explosion near the Capitol, fires on the Mall and at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building; a plane heading at high speed toward Bush's ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Secret Service agents ordered the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building evacuated at 9:45 a.m., first telling staffers there to file out in an orderly way, then screaming at them to run as fast as they could across Pennsylvania Avenue to Lafayette Park on the other side. At one point, some women were told to remove their shoes so they could run faster. Some staffers were advised to remove the White House identification from around their necks so they couldn't be singled out by possible snipers outside the White House gates.

Other than those officials taken by the Secret Service into the White House bunker, no one knew where to go, what to do or how to communicate with one another.

In the bunker, conditions were not ideal. There were secure video links to the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies and military installations, but no way to broadcast on television from the bunker, no way to link government officials to the public. For a time, no one could make the audio on the TV sets work.

Capitol Hill was more chaotic. From the bunker, Cheney officially implemented the emergency continuity of government orders, which provided for evacuating the third and fourth in the line of presidential succession-Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and the president pro tem of the Senate, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), who chose to go home. Other top leaders on Capitol Hill were forced to improvise. "We had no plan and we certainly had trained with no plan," said House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.).

Capitol Police ordered an evacuation of the building shortly after the Pentagon was hit, but no one had instructions on where to go. Gephardt went to his home nearby. Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) went to the Capitol Police headquarters near Union Station, then joined some of his staff at a nearby town house. Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) also was taken to the police headquarters but decided it was unwise for the leaders to be clustered in a nonsecure facility. He asked to be taken to Andrews Air Force Base.

Many cell phones weren't working because the system was overburdened. For more than an hour, Daschle's staff did not know where he was. Rank-and-file lawmakers didn't have guidance from their leaders or from Capitol Police. It was not until late in the morning or early in the afternoon that orders were given to remove Daschle, Lott, Gephardt and other members of the leadership to a secure location outside Washington.

When they arrived for the trip at the West Front of the Capitol, Gephardt recalls an "unimaginable" scene: helicopters ringed by black-suited SWAT teams carrying automatic weapons, as other SWAT team members looked down from atop the Capitol.

At the secure location outside Washington, there were too few phone lines for the congressional leaders. Communication with Cheney was frustrating. Coordinating with lawmakers left behind in Washington was difficult, sometimes contentious.

Many members had drifted back to Capitol Police headquarters. Desperate for information, they set up a conference call with their sequestered leaders. During one call, a small group of House members demanded that the speaker order everyone back for a late-day session in the Capitol as a show of defiance. Over the speaker phone, Rep. Doug Ose (R-Calif.) said it would be an act of cowardice if lawmakers did not hold a session that day.

The leaders agitated to get out of their bunker and back to Washington, but Cheney resisted. Terrorist threats persisted and there was no way to guarantee their security, he said. Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.) protested. We're a separate branch of government-why do we need the approval of the White House, he complained.

"Don," the vice president replied, "we control the helicopters."

10:32 a.m.
The President on Air Force One: 'Still a Threat to Washington'

Cheney called Bush on Air Force One, on its way from Florida to Washington, to say the White House had just received a threat against the plane. The caller had used its code word, "Angel," suggesting terrorists had inside information. Card was told it would take between 40 minutes and 90 minutes to get a protective fighter escort up to Air Force One.

Bush told an aide that Air Force One "is next." He was in an angry mood. "We're going to find out who did this," he said to Cheney, "and we're going to kick their asses."

Air Force One was still en route to Washington when Cheney called again at 10:41 a.m. This time, he urged Bush not to return. "There's still a threat to Washington," the vice president said. Rice agreed, and had told the president the same thing.

There was little debate or discussion. Cheney was worried the terrorists might be trying to decapitate the government, to kill its leaders. Bush agreed.

Within minutes, those on board the president's plane could feel it bank suddenly and sharply to the left, its course now westerly toward Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. It was within easy range, and once there food and fuel could be loaded and the president could have access to its more sophisticated communications systems.

The threat to the plane turned out to be false. Someone inside the White House had heard a threat to Air Force One, perhaps in a phoned-in call, and passed it up the line using the code word "Angel." Others thought the threatening caller had used the code word. It took days for the incident to be sorted out and weeks before the White House publicly acknowledged it.

As Air Force One headed to Barksdale, Russian President Vladimir Putin called the White House, seeking to speak with the president. Rice took the call instead. The Russian president told Rice the Russians were voluntarily standing down their military exercise as a gesture of solidarity with the United States.

News reports portrayed Washington as shut down, the Capitol and the White House evacuated, federal agencies emptied out, the streets under patrol. In their underground bunker, Cheney and the others began to worry that the rest of the country and capitals around the world would assume that the U.S. government was not functioning.

White House counselor Karen P. Hughes was at her home in Northwest Washington when she received a page telling her that "Angler" was trying to reach her. "Angler?" she wondered, before realizing it was the code name for the vice president, a devoted fly fisherman.

Cheney asked her to begin working on a presidential statement that could be delivered as soon as Bush landed at Barksdale. Cheney's wife Lynne, who had been brought to the bunker by the Secret Service, and his counselor, Mary Matalin, also went to work on it.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer was drafting a statement on Air Force One as it neared Barksdale and called Hughes for consultation. One phrase drew an instant response. "This morning we were the victims of . . ." Fleischer read from the text.

"Wait a minute-we aren't the victims of anything," Hughes interjected. "We may have been the targets, we may have been attacked, but we are not victims."

Bush had insisted that he be the first to speak for the government. But his team in Washington grew increasingly frustrated with the time it would take for him to reach Barksdale and appear before the cameras. Hughes considered giving an interview to the Associated Press to reassure the public that the government was working. She tried to reach the president through the White House signal operator.

"Ma'am, we can't reach Air Force One," the operator said.

11:45 a.m.
The President in Louisiana: Reassuring a Nation

Air Force One arrived at Barksdale, where it was immediately surrounded by military personnel wearing green fatigues, flak jackets and helmets, and bearing automatic weapons. Reporters were told they could say only that the president was at "an unidentified location in the United States."

Bush soon spoke to his wife, first lady Laura Bush, who was in a secure location, for a second time that day and touched base with Cheney again.

"I think it's important for the people to see the government is functioning, because the TV shows our nation has been blasted and bombed," the president told Cheney. "Government is not chaotic. It's functioning smoothly." He described the attackers as "faceless cowards" and said America had to prepare for "a new war" against this new enemy.

By 12:16 p.m., the FAA command center reported that U.S. airspace had been cleared of all commercial and general aviation aircraft; only military and lifeguard flights were airborne. Twenty minutes later, according to the red digital clock in the conference room near the Barksdale base commander's office, Bush entered, looking grim. Reporters in the room noted that his eyes were red-rimmed. It had been more than three hours since Bush or any senior official had said anything publicly.

When Bush finally appeared on television from the base conference room, it was not a reassuring picture. He spoke haltingly, mispronouncing several words as he looked down at his notes. When he got to the last sentence, he seemed to gain strength. "The resolve of our great nation is being tested," he said in even tones. "But make no mistake: We will show the world that we will pass this test."

His remarks were fed by the media pool to the networks, causing a short delay before the nation could see the commander in chief. The entire statement consisted of just 219 words, and the president took no questions from reporters.

Shortly after 1:30 p.m., Air Force One took off for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where there were secure facilities that would allow the president to conduct a meeting of his National Security Council in Washington over a video link.

 Conference: Via Video link from Offutt Air Force Base, Bush convenes the National Security Council's first meeting of the day. By Eric Draper - The White House
On the plane, Bush expressed his irritation over being away from the White House. "I want to go back home ASAP," he told Card, according to notes of the conversation. "I don't want whoever did this holding me outside of Washington."

Some aides recall Bush saying he would return to Washington later in the day, unless there was some extraordinary new threat. The senior Secret Service agent aboard Air Force One told Bush the situation was "too unsteady still" to allow his return.

"The right thing is to let the dust settle," Card said.

As he was leaving Barksdale, Bush made another round of calls, including one to Rumsfeld expressing shock over the damage at the Pentagon. "Wow, it was an American airliner that hit the Pentagon," Bush said. "It's a day of national tragedy, and we'll clean up the mess, and then the ball will be in your court and Dick Myers's court to respond."

Air Force General Richard B. Myers was slated to become the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in three weeks.

2:36 p.m.
The President on Air Force One: A 'Comforting Call'

En route to Offutt, the president reached his father on the phone. His aides left him alone in the cabin.

"Where are you?" Bush recalled asking his father.

The former president said he and his wife, Barbara, were in Milwaukee, on their way to Minneapolis.

"What are you doing in Milwaukee?" the president inquired.

"You grounded my plane," the former president said.

It was, said Bush, "a comforting call."

"I told him, 'We're going to be fine.' I said I knew exactly what we need to do, the team is functioning well."

2:50 p.m.
The President in Nebraska: National Security Council Meets

Air Force One landed at Offutt. Before leaving his plane, Bush repeated to his lead Secret Service agent, "We need to get back to Washington. We don't need some tinhorn terrorist to scare us off. The American people want to know where their president is."

The president was driven the short distance to the U.S. Strategic Command headquarters and was ushered into the secure command center, a cavernous room with multi-story video screens and batteries of military personnel at computer terminals hooked into satellites monitoring activities around the globe. As Bush arrived, they were tracking a commercial airliner on its way from Spain to the United States. It was giving out an emergency signal, indicating it might be hijacked.

Bush remembers a voice booming out from a loudspeaker. "Do we have permission to shoot down this aircraft?"

"Make sure you've got the I.D.," the president responded. "You follow this guy closely to make sure."

It was another false alarm.

At 3:30 p.m. Bush convened the day's first meeting of his National Security Council; the others were piped in by secure video links from various command centers in Washington.

CIA Director Tenet reported that he was virtually certain bin Laden and his network were behind the attacks. A check of the passenger manifests of the hijacked flights had turned up three known al Qaeda operatives on American Airlines Flight 77, which had struck the Pentagon.

One of them, Khalid Al-Midhar, had come to the CIA's attention the previous year, when he traveled to Malaysia and met with a key al Qaeda suspect in the 2000 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. The FBI had been informed about Al-Midhar and he had been put on a watch list, but he had slipped into the United States over the summer and the bureau had been looking for him since. Tenet said al Qaeda was the only terrorist organization in the world that had the capability to pull off such well-coordinated attacks. And, he said, intelligence monitoring had overheard a number of known bin Laden operatives congratulating each other after the strikes. He said information collected before Sept. 11 but only now being processed indicated that operatives had expected something big. But none of it specified the day, time or place of the attacks in a way that would have allowed the CIA or FBI to preempt them.

"Get your ears up," the president told Tenet and the others. "The primary mission of this administration is to find them and catch them."

Cheney voiced concern that more hijacked planes could be out there.

Tenet said that since all the attacks had taken place before 10 a.m., that was probably it for the day but there was no way to be sure.

FBI Director Mueller expressed concerns that investigators still did not know how the terrorists had penetrated airport security. Tenet said it was essential to know this before flights resumed.

"I'll announce more security measures, but we won't be held hostage," Bush insisted. "We'll fly at noon tomorrow," he said, although it took three more days for commercial flights to resume and then only on a reduced schedule.

Someone mentioned that New York officials had asked whether they should urge people to go back to work the next day, particularly those working in banks and the financial markets.

"Terrorists can always attack," Rumsfeld said. "The Pentagon's going back to work tomorrow."

People in New York should go back to work, the president said. "Banks should open tomorrow, too."

Bush asked about coming back to Washington, although he had already told his traveling party that he would fly back immediately after the video conference. Cheney suggested the president return and make a statement at Andrews, but the Secret Service still insisted that it was not safe.

"I'm coming back," Bush said.

As the meeting was ending Bush said, "We will find these people. They will pay. And I don't want you to have any doubt about it."

The American public had seen Bush only twice during the day, both times in less than ideal circumstances. In the White House bunker, Bush's advisers felt someone had to appear in public to provide information about what the government was doing to deal with the crisis.

Cheney was the logical candidate, but one administration official said there were concerns that his appearance would remind people of then-Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, who on the day President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981, came into the White House briefing room and declared, "As of now, I am in control here."

Instead, Hughes was deputized to make a statement, which she did from the FBI building, since the Secret Service refused to allow the press into the White House briefing room. Hughes described a government still functioning, but took no questions.

As Air Force One headed for Washington, the president placed a sympathy call to Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, whose wife, Barbara, had been killed in the plane that smashed into the Pentagon. Bush then conferred with Hughes. He wanted to make a short address to the nation that night from the Oval Office.

The president's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, working from home, had e-mailed Hughes a rough draft, which she substantially reworked, based on her conversation with Bush.

One sentence in the draft from Gerson read, "This is not just an act of terrorism. This is an act of war." That squared with what Bush had been saying all day, but he told Hughes to take it out. He was not ready to talk publicly about going to war.

"Our mission is reassurance," Bush told her.

"One of the things I wanted to do was, I wanted to calm nerves," Bush said in the interview. "I wanted to show resolve, and I wanted the American people to know a couple of things-one that this was an unusual moment, but that we will survive, and we'll win.

"But I didn't want to add to the angst of the American people yet, I guess is a good way to describe that. I felt like I had a job as the commander in chief to first, not be warlike, but to be more-as good as I could to be firm, but to be as comforting as possible, in a very difficult moment for the country."

Bush said in the interview that he was seeking to reassure the country "that I was safe . . . not me, George W., but me the president; reassuring that our government was functioning, and that we're going to take care of the American people; reassuring that those who did this would be brought to justice. In other words, there had to be some sense of balance in the speech. On the other hand, I also knew I had plenty of time to make warlike declarations, which happened the next morning."

6:34 p.m.
The President in Washington: Formulating a Policy

Air Force One landed at Andrews. On his way back to the White House, his Marine One helicopter flew over the Pentagon to give the president a first-hand look at the damage. At the White House, he went to the small study off the Oval Office to confer with Rice, Hughes, Card, Fleischer and others about the speech.

 Back Home: Bush exchanges salutes with a Marine guard as he steps off the presidential helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House. File Photo/Frank Johnston - The Washington Post
Gerson had gone back to the campaign speech on national defense that Bush made in 1999 at The Citadel, in which he said that those who sponsored terrorism or attacks on the United States could count on a "devastating" response. In the draft text Gerson sent to Hughes that day, he had written, "We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them."

"That's way too vague," Bush complained, proposing the word "harbor" as an alternative. In final form, what the White House came to call the Bush Doctrine was put this way: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."

The declaration was a huge step for the administration. Although he had talked about the idea in the campaign and aides had been working for months on a new policy for dealing with al Qaeda, Bush had never enunciated his anti-terrorism policy as president. What he outlined that night from the Oval Office committed the United States to a broad, vigorous and potentially long war against terrorism, rather than a targeted retaliatory strike. The decision to state the policy that night was made without consulting most of his national security team, including Cheney and Powell.

Rice asked whether he wanted to make that kind of far-reaching declaration in a speech designed mostly to reassure the nation. "You can say it now or you'll have other opportunities to say it," she told him.

"What do you think?" he asked.

She said she favored including it that night. First words matter more than almost anything else, she thought.

"We've got to get it out there now," Bush said.

Bush then went down into the White House bunker, where he gave his wife a hug and conferred with Cheney before going back upstairs to freshen up for the speech.

Back in the West Wing, aides were still debating whether the president should make a firmer statement about America being at war. Hughes told them she was confident she knew where Bush stood on that issue but agreed to have it aired one more time. Her deputy, White House communications director Dan Bartlett, was given the assignment to speak to Bush directly.

The president had just come out of the bedroom and was putting on a different necktie when Bartlett arrived. He told Bush he was carrying a proposed change to the text.

"What?" Bush said. "No more changes."

Bartlett showed him the proposed language.

"I've already said no to that," Bush said.

Bartlett returned to the West Wing. "Thanks," he said to Hughes. "You can take the message next time."

Bush spoke for approximately seven minutes from the Oval Office. "A great people has been moved to defend a great nation," he said, closing with a statement of resolve. "America has stood down enemies before and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day. Yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."

At 9 p.m., Bush met with his full National Security Council, followed roughly half an hour later by the meeting with a smaller group of key advisers who would become his war cabinet.

Powell, back in Washington from Peru, described the immediate diplomatic tasks: dealing with Afghanistan and its ruling Taliban, which harbored bin Laden, and neighboring Pakistan, which had closer ties to the Taliban regime than any other nation.

"We have to make it clear to Pakistan and Afghanistan this is showtime," Powell said.

"This is a great opportunity," Bush said, adding that the administration now had a chance to improve relations with other countries around the world, including Russia and China. It was more than flushing bin Laden out, he indicated.

Cheney raised the military problem of retaliating against al Qaeda's home base, noting that in Afghanistan, a country decimated by two decades of war, it would be hard to find anything to hit.

Bush returned to the problem of bin Laden's sanctuary in Afghanistan. Tenet said they must deny the terrorists that sanctuary by targeting the Taliban as well. Tell the Taliban we're finished with them, he urged.

Discussion turned to whether bin Laden's al Qaeda network and the Taliban were the same. Tenet said they were. Bin Laden had bought his way into Afghanistan, supplying the Taliban with tens of millions of dollars.

Rumsfeld said the problem was not just bin Laden and al Qaeda but the countries that supported terrorism-the point of the president's address that night.

"We have to force countries to choose," the president said.

11:08 p.m.
The President at the White House: 'We Think It's Bin Laden'

After the meeting had ended and Bush had returned to the residence, he and his wife were awakened by Secret Service agents. The agents rushed them downstairs to the bunker because of a report of an unidentified plane in the area. Bush was in running shorts and a T-shirt as he made his way down the stairs, through the tunnel and into the bunker. It proved to be a false alarm, and the Bushes returned to the residence for the rest of the night.

Like his father, Bush tries to keep a daily diary of his thoughts and observations. That night, he dictated:

"The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today."

"We think it's Osama bin Laden."

"We think there are other targets in the United States, but I have urged the country to go back to normal."

"We cannot allow a terrorist thug to hold us hostage. My hope is that this will provide an opportunity for us to rally the world against terrorism."
 
 

PART II:
'We Will Rally the World'
Bush and His Advisers Set Objectives, but Struggled With How to Achieve Them

By Bob Woodward and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 28, 2002; Page A01

Second in a series
Wednesday, September 12

At 7:30 a.m., half an hour after arriving for work in the Oval Office, President Bush phoned his friend Tony Blair, the British prime minister. He knew Blair would help buoy his spirits -- and might have some useful advice about what to do.

The president was driven by conflicting impulses that morning. He was anxious, even impatient, to strike back as quickly as he could at those responsible for the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks less than 24 hours earlier. He wanted, as he said later, "to move yesterday." But the response had to be big enough to inflict pain on the terrorists and demonstrate to them and the rest of the world that there had been a fundamental change in U.S. policy.

Within Blair's government -- and in other European capitals -- there were widespread fears that Bush would be under irresistible political pressure at home to retaliate with an immediate military strike. Many Europeans believed that hasty military action not only would be ineffective in deterring future terrorism but also would shatter any hopes of building an international coalition.

Blair did not share those fears about the United States acting prematurely, confiding to an adviser his belief that American public opinion would give Bush breathing space and adequate time to prepare. But on the phone with Bush, he expressed shock and horror, pledged his "total support" to the president and said he assumed Bush was considering an immediate response.

"Obviously, you know, we're thinking about that," the president replied. But he added that he did not want to "pound sand with millions of dollars in weapons" to make himself feel good. He did not plan to shoot off a bunch of cruise missiles.

The two leaders agreed it was important to first move quickly on the diplomatic front to capitalize on international outrage about the terrorist attack. If they got support from NATO and the United Nations, they reasoned, they would have the legal and political framework to permit a military response afterward.

Before hanging up, Bush and Blair returned to the question of a military response. Blair told Bush he had to make a choice between rapid action and effective action. And effective action would require preparation and planning.

Bush agreed. For the second time, he said he didn't want to fire missiles at targets that did not matter.

In the first hours after the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, Bush and his top advisers had been preoccupied with the crisis at hand, assessing additional threats, grounding airplanes, moving government officials to safety, mobilizing emergency rescue crews, measuring the scope of the devastation in New York and Washington, determining who might be responsible. Now, on the day after, they began to turn their attention more systematically to the U.S. response.

Like many members of his national security team, the president believed the Clinton administration's response to Osama bin Laden and international terrorism, especially since 1998, had been so weak as to be provocative, a virtual invitation to hit the United States again. Most often, they believed, Clinton had chosen to respond to terrorist incidents by launching a cruise missile attack that did not jeopardize U.S. forces.

In an interview last month, Bush described his own thinking. "The antiseptic notion of launching a cruise missile into some guy's, you know, tent, really is a joke," he said. "I mean, people viewed that as the impotent America . . . of a flaccid, you know, kind of technologically competent but not very tough country that was willing to launch a cruise missile out of a submarine and that'd be it."

"I do believe there is the image of America out there that we are so materialistic, that we're almost hedonistic, that we don't have values, and that when struck, we wouldn't fight back," he said in the interview. "It was clear that bin Laden felt emboldened and didn't feel threatened by the United States."

Many months earlier, in the formative stages of his new administration, Bush had talked with his prospective secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, about their shared belief that America's deterrent strength had been eroded through misapplication of the country's military power. Rumsfeld recalls saying to Bush that whenever the United States was attacked or threatened, the Clinton administration had followed a pattern of "reflexive pullback." Rumsfeld said he believed that U.S. power was needed to help discipline the world.

"I left no doubt in his mind but that, at that moment where something happens, that I would be coming to him to lean forward, not back. And that I wanted [him] to know that," Rumsfeld said. "And he said, unambiguously, that that is what he would be doing, and we had a clear, common understanding."

However, until the attacks of Sept. 11, Bush had not put that thinking into practice. For months, his advisers had been developing a plan to fight terrorism, and specifically bin Laden and al Qaeda. Among the proposals was one by the CIA for expanded covert action against bin Laden. Its cost was $200 million.

But formal recommendations had never been presented to the president. Nor had he demanded them.

"I know there was a plan in the works. . . . I don't know how mature the plan was," Bush said in the interview.

What was his state of mind about bin Laden?

"There was a significant difference in my attitude after Sept. 11. I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the [previous] bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling."

Just before 8 a.m., CIA Director George J. Tenet and a top aide arrived at the White House for the president's daily intelligence briefing. Vice President Cheney and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice joined them in the Oval Office.

Bush's father, the former president and former CIA director in the Ford administration, had once told him that the morning intelligence briefing was one of the most important things he would do every day as president.

As a new president without significant foreign policy experience, Bush had taken intelligence seriously from the start of his administration and invited Tenet for regular 20- to 30-minute sessions most mornings. It was a departure from the previous administration, when President Bill Clinton used to receive his briefing in writing.

Tenet's briefing for Bush this morning included a review of available intelligence tracing the attacks to bin Laden and his top associates in al Qaeda. One report out of Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, showed the attacks were "the results of two years' planning." Another report said the attacks were "the beginning of the wrath" -- an ominous note. Several reports specifically identified Capitol Hill and the White House as targets on Sept. 11. One said a bin Laden associate -- erroneously -- "gave thanks for the explosion in the Congress building."

A key figure in the bin Laden financing organization called Wafa initially claimed "the White House has been destroyed," before having to correct himself. Another report showed that al Qaeda members in Afghanistan had said at 9:53 a.m. Sept. 11, shortly after the Pentagon was hit, that the attackers were following through with "the doctor's program." The second-ranking member of bin Laden's organization was Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician often referred to as "the doctor," as was another Chechen al Qaeda leader.

A central piece of evidence involved Abu Zubayda, identified early as the chief field commander of the October 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer USS Cole that killed 17 sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden. One of the most ruthless members of bin Laden's inner circle, Zubayda, according to a reliable report received after the terrorist attacks, had referred to "zero hour."

In addition, the CIA and the FBI had evidence of connections between at least three of the 19 hijackers, bin Laden and his training camps in Afghanistan.

For Tenet, the evidence on bin Laden was conclusive -- game, set, match. He then turned to the agency's capabilities on the ground in Afghanistan.

As the president knew, the CIA had had covert relationships in Afghanistan authorized first in 1998 by Clinton and then reaffirmed later by Bush. The CIA was giving several million dollars a year in assistance to the Northern Alliance, the loose amalgam of opposition forces in the northern part of the country that had been fighting with the ruling Taliban. The CIA also had contact with tribal leaders in southern Afghanistan. And the agency had secret paramilitary teams that had been going in and out of Afghanistan without detection for years.

Over the past few months, as part of the administration's review of its policy on terrorism, Tenet, along with Rice and other officials, had been working on a plan to vastly expand covert action in Afghanistan and throughout the world. Tenet told Bush an even more expanded plan would soon be presented for approval, and it would be expensive. Tenet said CIA paramilitary teams would be able to provide indispensable assistance to any U.S. ground forces that might follow.

"Whatever it takes," the president said.
 

After the intelligence briefing, Bush met with Karen P. Hughes, the White House counselor who served as the administration's communications czar and one of the president's closest confidants. Bush told Hughes he wanted a daily meeting to shape the administration's message to Americans about the fight against terrorism. It should be modeled, he said, on the meetings held in the spring during the administration's first international crisis, when the Chinese had held an American spy plane crew hostage for 11 days.

Hughes, who was focused on details of the day ahead, proposed that Bush make an early public statement and reminded him that he would need remarks for a visit to the Pentagon that had been scheduled for the afternoon.

"Let's get the big picture," he said, interrupting her. "A faceless enemy has declared war on the United States of America. So we are at war."

They needed a plan, a strategy, even a vision, he said, to educate the American people to be prepared for another attack. Americans needed to know that combating terrorism would be the main focus of the administration -- and the government -- from this moment forward.

Hughes returned to her corner office on the second floor of the West Wing to begin drafting a statement that reflected the president's instructions. But before she could open a new file on her computer, Bush called and summoned her.

"Let me tell you how to do your job today," he told Hughes when she came back to the Oval Office. He handed her two pieces of White House notepaper with three thoughts scratched out in his handwriting: "This is an enemy that runs and hides, but won't be able to hide forever."

"An enemy that thinks its havens are safe, but won't be safe forever."

"No kind of enemy that we are used to -- but America will adapt."

Hughes went back to work.

9:30 a.m.
In the Cabinet Room: Confidence, Determination

Bush convened his National Security Council in the Cabinet Room and declared that the time for reassuring the nation was over.

The enemy, he said, "hides in shadows and runs." The United States would use all its resources to find this enemy, but it would entail "a different kind of war than our nation has ever fought." He said he was confident that if the administration developed a logical and coherent plan, the rest of the world "will rally to our side." At the same time, he said, he was determined not to allow the threat of terrorism to alter the way Americans lived their lives. "We have to prepare the public," he said, "without alarming the public."

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III began to describe the investigation underway to identify those responsible for hijacking the four airplanes the day before. Mueller said it was essential not to taint any evidence gathered so that if accomplices were arrested, they could be convicted.

But Attorney General John D. Ashcroft interrupted him. Let's stop the discussion right here, he said. The chief mission of U.S. law enforcement, he added, is to stop another attack and apprehend any accomplices or terrorists before they hit us again. If we can't bring them to trial, so be it.

The president had made clear to Ashcroft in an earlier conversation that he wanted to make sure an attack like the ones on the Pentagon and World Trade Center never happened again. Now, Ashcroft was saying, the focus of the FBI and the Justice Department should change from prosecution to prevention, a fundamental shift in priorities.

"It was made very clear to me" by Bush, Ashcroft said in an interview, "that we had a responsibility to do everything in our power and to find ways to do those things that we might not otherwise think there are ways to do, to curtail the likelihood, to reduce the risks, to prevent this from happening again."

"My instruction was this: We've got to think outside the box. . . . We can't think outside the Constitution, but outside the box. . . . If there's a question between protecting a source and protecting the American people, we burn the source and we protect the American people. That's just the way it has to be."
 

After he finished with the NSC, Bush continued meeting with a smaller group of senior administration officials -- the half-dozen principals, including the vice president and the secretaries of state and defense who formed the war cabinet, without most of their deputies and aides.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said the State Department was ready to carry the president's message -- you're either with us or you're not -- to Pakistan and the Taliban.

Bush responded that he wanted a list of demands for the Taliban. "Handing over bin Laden is not enough," he told Powell. He wanted the whole al Qaeda organization handed over or kicked out.

Rumsfeld interjected. "It is critical how we define goals at the start, because that's what the coalition signs on for," he said. Other countries would want precise definitions. "Do we focus on bin Laden and al Qaeda or terrorism more broadly?" he asked rhetorically.

"The goal is terrorism in its broadest sense," Powell said, "focusing first on the organization that acted yesterday."

"To the extent we define our task broadly," Cheney said, "including those who support terrorism, then we get at states. And it's easier to find them than it is to find bin Laden."

"Start with bin Laden," Bush said, "which Americans expect. And then if we succeed, we've struck a huge blow and can move forward." He called the threat "a cancer" and added, "We don't want to define [it] too broadly for the average man to understand."

Bush pressed Rumsfeld on what the military could do immediately.

"Very little, effectively," the secretary replied.

Bush told his advisers what he had told Blair -- that above all he wanted military action that would hurt the terrorists, not just make Americans feel better. He understood the need for planning and preparation but said his patience had limits. "I want to get moving," he said.

Powell drew an obvious conclusion from the president's words. "Focus is on winning the war," he scribbled on his pad.

When Bush posed the question of what military action could be taken immediately, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later told others that he recalled feeling that the president might be heading down the same path that the Clinton administration had followed: Strike quickly, but with no follow-through.

Shelton, just three weeks away from retirement, knew there were two important problems in formulating a response. First was geography: The United States had no bases close to Afghanistan. Any large-scale military strike would entail multiple in-flight refuelings for helicopters or aircraft involved in an operation. The second problem was al Qaeda, a guerrilla organization whose members lived in caves, operated with mules and large sport-utility vehicles, and presented few desirable targets. Their training camps were mostly empty. Airstrikes might destroy a few buildings or tents but also send the message that the United States was looking to fight terrorism on the cheap.

Shelton was relieved as he rather quickly realized Bush was not looking for an easy or obvious response, not demanding military options on his desk by the next day.

Bush said he knew some of the generals might have had reservations about him. "I think General Shelton wasn't sure about the commander in chief at this point in time," Bush said last month. "He was a little uncertain as to whether or not we were going to create expectations for him that he couldn't live up to."

Bush said he knew the military would resist committing forces to an ill-defined mission. But he also believed he needed to push the Pentagon to think differently about how to fight this war. "They had yet to be challenged to think on how to fight a guerrilla war using conventional means," he said. "They had come out from an era of strike from afar -- you know, cruise missiles into the thing."
 

Shelton, though he would soon be gone, was part of a national security team notable for its experience. Cheney was a former secretary of defense, White House chief of staff and leader in the House. Powell had served as national security adviser and as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, like Cheney, was an architect of the Persian Gulf War during the administration of Bush's father. Rumsfeld had been White House chief of staff and secretary of defense in Gerald Ford's administration a quarter-century earlier. Tenet was serving as CIA director under his second president. Rice had been a Russia specialist on the NSC staff in the first Bush administration. Ashcroft was a former state attorney general, governor and senator. Mueller was a highly respected former prosecutor.

But for all the experience around the table, this was a team that had not fully lived up to expectations. Cheney had struggled, particularly early in the administration, not to appear to be overshadowing his boss. His true role -- the power behind the throne or simply the sage, confidential adviser -- remained a mystery to outsiders. Rumsfeld had irritated lawmakers on Capitol Hill and many of his senior military officers at the department with his brusque and sometimes secretive style of management. Powell suffered from perceptions, fair or not, that he had been pushed to the edges of the new administration, a view encapsulated by a headline on the cover of the Sept. 10 Time magazine: "Where have you gone, Colin Powell?"

Rice and Tenet had become presidential confidants but were little known to the public. Ashcroft, attacked for his conservative views, had survived a bitter confirmation battle in the Senate, while Mueller had taken over the FBI just one week before the attacks.

The biggest unknown of all was Bush himself. He had come to the presidency with little foreign policy experience, and his early actions on global climate change and national missile defense had rattled U.S. allies in Europe. America's friends feared the administration was infected with a new strain of unilateralism, a go-it-alone attitude of looking inward rather than engaging the world as the lone superpower might be expected to do.

Bush described in the interview how he believed the rest of the world saw him in the months leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11. "Look," he said, "I'm the toxic Texan, right? In these people's minds, I'm the new guy. They don't know who I am. The imagery must be just unbelievable."

From his first trips abroad, Bush also had come to some conclusions about how the rest of the world saw the United States. "People respect us, but they like to tweak us," he said. "People respect America and they love our values, but they look for every excuse in the world to say that, because we didn't do exactly what, you know, the international community wanted, we became unilateralist. In other words, I had a very interesting taste of what it would mean to be the president of a great country. There is a certain sense of jealousy, I guess is one way to describe it."

He said the international community simply did not know what he was really like. "Nor does the nation, by the way, understand what it's like to have a commander in chief tested under fire like this," he added. "No one knew."

'We Will Rally the World'

10:53 a.m.
Ratcheting Up the Rhetoric: 'Good Will Prevail'

Reporters were ushered into the Cabinet Room. Dressed in a dark blue suit, light blue dress shirt and blue striped tie, Bush sat slightly forward in his chair. He wanted to escalate his public rhetoric from the previous night.

"The deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against our country were more than acts of terror," he said. "They were acts of war."

He described the enemy as one America had never before encountered, an enemy who operated in the shadows, who preyed on innocent people, who hit and then ran for cover. "This is an enemy that tries to hide," he said, "but it won't be able to hide forever."

Hughes had taken the president's verbal instructions and hand-written statement from two hours earlier and drafted the language the president was now reading. But she had misread his handwriting, mistaking "havens" for "harbors." And so the president said, "This is an enemy who thinks its harbors are safe, but they won't be safe forever." Bushsaid the country would use all its resources to find those responsible. "We will rally the world," he said. "We will be patient, we will be focused, and we will be steadfast in our determination."

He closed by saying, "This will be a monumental struggle between good and evil. But good will prevail."

Bush's effort to "rally the world" had begun earlier that day. He had told his advisers Tuesday night that the crisis was not only a challenge but also an opportunity, a chance to change relationships with many countries. After his telephone call to Blair, the president called Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On the day of the attacks, Putin had canceled a planned military exercise after the United States had raised its defense condition to DefCon3, a gesture that not only impressed Bush but also convinced him that the terrorist attacks offered an opportunity to reshape U.S.-Russian relations.

During the five-minute call, Putin told the president he had signed a decree calling for a moment of silence the next day to express Russia's outrage over the attacks, and the two agreed to work together to combat terrorism.

Much of the work of assembling an international coalition was left to Powell, but on that day alone, Bush called the Russian president a second time and also spoke with French President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

"My attitude all along was, if we have to go it alone, we'll go it alone; but I'd rather not," Bush said in the interview.

11:30 a.m.
With Congressional Leaders: Pledging Bipartisan Support

Bush met with the joint leadership of Congress. On the day of the attacks, Democrats on Capitol Hill had been plotting a fall offensive against the White House over the way its tax cuts had eaten away the surplus. Both parties were preparing for a long, partisan autumn of warfare.

Now all of that was swept aside. The congressional leaders had spent the previous day thrown together in a secure facility outside Washington. For House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), the time spent in that bunker was more than they had spent together the previous two years. The leaders all understood that the attacks of the previous day required them to show a united front -- to the president and to the country.

The meeting itself, the president said, according to notes taken by people who were there, was a signal to the terrorists that they could not bring the country down however hard they tried. "The dream of the enemy was for us not to meet in this building," he said. "They wanted the White House in rubble."

He warned of additional attacks against the United States. "This is not an isolated incident," he said. "This is war." The public might lose focus, he added. A month from now Americans will be watching football and the World Series. But the government would have to carry out the war indefinitely.

The enemy was not only a particular group, he said, but also "a frame of mind" that fosters hate. "They hate Christianity. They hate Judaism. They hate everything that is not them." Other nations, he added, would have to choose, and he singled out Pakistan. That country's intelligence service, the ISI, had been instrumental in creating the Taliban in Afghanistan, and many of its intelligence officers maintained close ties to Taliban leaders. "We're talking to Pakistan in a way we've never talked to them before."

Hastert invited the president to address a joint session of Congress. Bush replied that he would accept when he had something significant to say.

Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) cautioned the president to use care in his rhetoric. "War is a powerful word," he said. Daschle pledged bipartisan support but asked that the administration make Congress a full partner with ongoing consultations.

Gephardt said the leaders had to work together to reduce the sense of fear in the country over additional attacks and find a new balance between freedom and security as they did so. He also told the president, "We've got to trust you and you've got to trust us" -- something that had been lacking for much of the previous eight months.

Near the end of the meeting, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), the 83-year-old president pro tempore of the Senate, took the floor and described his dealings with 10 presidents. He noted that Bush had said he did not want a declaration of war from the Congress but would be interested in a resolution endorsing the use of force. Byrd said he could not expect the kind of blank check Congress had given Lyndon Johnson with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution early in the Vietnam War. We still have a Constitution, he said, pulling a copy from his pocket.

Then Byrd recalled the night he and his wife dined with Bush at the White House. Bush had said grace before dinner, without asking. "It impressed me," Byrd said. He talked about Hollywood's negative influence on the culture, the slide America had taken toward permissiveness and materialism. "I'm praying for you," Byrd said. "Despite Hollywood and TV, there's an army of people who believe in divine guidance and the creator." His closing line brought silence to the room: "You stand there," he said. "Mighty forces will come to your aid."

During the morning meeting with his national security team, Bush had asked for a draft statement of objectives in the war on terrorism. It was the administration's first attempt to distill the sometimes random and unfocused discussions of the morning and the previous night -- including some of his visceral remarks -- into a set of principles that would shape the war on terrorism.

About 12:30 p.m., the so-called deputies committee, a little-known but powerful group that includes the No. 2 officials at State, Defense, the Joint Chiefs, the CIA and NSC, convened in the Situation Room to take a first cut at defining the scope of the war.

Deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley chaired the meeting. The president had spoken in grandiose terms in his public statements, but the group quickly agreed that a goal of wiping out all terrorism everywhere was too broad and simply unrealistic. Instead, they concluded that the objective should be defined as eliminating terrorism as a threat "to our way of life," and proposed adoption of a comprehensive strategy that would use all elements of national power: diplomatic, intelligence, financial, military.

At 4 p.m., the NSC reconvened. Bush reviewed the draft statement, which now said that the goal was to "eliminate terrorism as a threat to our way of life, including terrorist organizations, networks, finances and access to weapons of mass destruction."

Bush said it was inadequate. It's not just us, he said, referring to the "our way of life" phrase, but a cause on behalf of all our friends and allies around the world. He wanted the statement to capture that idea. Others suggested making it read, "our way of life and U.S. interests."

"That still doesn't get it," Bush said.

What about "and to all nations that love freedom," he said.

Not surprisingly, the president's language was adopted.

However, the statement left unanswered some important questions, which then dominated much of the discussion during the afternoon meeting. One was how broadly to define the mission. Who or what was the real target of a war on terrorism? The second was the role of an international coalition. The country's principal reference point was the 1991 Gulf War launched by Bush's father, but the president believed -- and others shared his view -- that this war and, therefore, this coalition would have to be different.

As the meeting continued, Rumsfeld hammered on a point he had made before. He asked, "Are we going against terrorism more broadly than just al Qaeda? Do we want to seek a broader basis for support?"

Bush said his instinct was to start with bin Laden. If they could strike a blow against al Qaeda, everything that followed would be made easier. But Rumsfeld worried that a coalition built around the goal of taking out al Qaeda would fall apart once they succeeded in that mission, making it more difficult to continue the war on terrorism elsewhere.

Powell argued that it would be far easier initially to rally the world behind the specific target of al Qaeda. They could win approval of a broad U.N. resolution by keeping it focused on al Qaeda.

Cheney again focused on the question of state sponsorship of terrorism. To strike a blow against terrorism inevitably meant targeting the countries that nurture and export it, he said. In some ways the states were easier targets than the shadowy terrorists.

Bush worried about making their initial target too diffuse. Let's not make the target so broad that it misses the point and fails to draw support from normal Americans, he said. What Americans were feeling, he added, was that the country had suffered at the hands of al Qaeda.

As the discussion turned to the shape of the international coalition, several things became clearer. Everyone believed that a coalition would be essential, particularly to keep international opinion behind the United States. But Bush was prepared, if necessary, to go it alone. The United States had an absolute right to defend itself, he believed, no matter what others thought; although he believed that the rightness of the cause would bring other nations along.

Cheney argued that the coalition should be a means to wiping out terrorism, not an end in itself -- a view that others shared. They wanted support from the rest of the world, but they did not want the coalition to tie their hands: The mission should define the coalition, not the other way around.

In that case, Rumsfeld argued, they wanted coalition partners truly committed to the cause, not reluctant participants. Powell offered what a colleague later described as the "variable geometry" of coalition-building. The coalition should be as broad as possible, but the requirements for participation would vary country by country. This would entail, as Rumsfeld put it, a coalition of coalitions.

Rumsfeld then raised the question of Iraq, which he had mentioned in the morning meeting. Why shouldn't we go against Iraq, not just al Qaeda? he asked. Rumsfeld was not just speaking for himself when he raised the question. His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, was even more committed to a policy that would make Iraq a principal target of the first round in the war on terrorism and would continue to press his case. Arrayed against the policy was the State Department, led by Powell, and among those who agreed with him was Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Everyone around the table believed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was a menace, a leader bent on acquiring and perhaps using weapons of mass destruction. Any serious, full-scale war against terrorism would have to make Iraq a target -- eventually. The issue Rumsfeld raised was whether they should take advantage of the opportunity offered by the terrorist attacks to go after Hussein immediately.

Powell countered that they were focused on al Qaeda because the American people were focused on al Qaeda, and the president agreed. "Any action needs public support," Powell said. "It's not just what the international coalition supports; it's what the American people want to support. The American people want us to do something about al Qaeda."

Bush made clear it was not the time to resolve the issue. And he underscored again that his principal goal was to produce a military plan that would inflict real pain and destruction on the terrorists.

"I don't want a photo-op war," he told his advisers. He also wanted "a realistic scorecard" and "a list of thugs" who would be targeted. Everyone was thinking about the Gulf War, he said, which was the wrong analogy. "The American people want a big bang," he said. "I have to convince them that this is a war that will be fought with many steps."

Although they were moving quickly, Bush was still impatient. In the December interview, he said that he recalled the problems of Vietnam as the U.S. military fought a conventional war against a guerrilla enemy and that he "instinctively knew that we were going to have to think differently" about how to fight terrorists. "The military strategy was going to take awhile to unfold," he said. "I became frustrated."
 

After the meeting, Bush left the White House and headed for the Pentagon for a look at the damage caused by the terrorist attack. Rescue workers had hung a huge American flag from the side of the building, and the president was overwhelmed by what he saw. "Coming here makes me sad, on the one hand," he told reporters. "It also makes me angry."

He went inside to meet some of the military planners and acknowledged that his emotions were just below the surface. But he wanted to put the military on notice, he said, that the nation was now at war with terrorism. With the same determination he had demonstrated since the early hours of the crisis, he said, "I wish it was tomorrow and I could announce to the nation, we're going to wipe it off the face of the Earth."

Rumsfeld said in a later interview that the first 36 hours of the crisis -- the meetings and debates -- were crucial. "You cannot micromanage something like this," he said. "You've got to think of concepts and strategic direction."

By the end of the second day, some of those concepts were taking shape. The war would be comprehensive, employing all instruments of national power, not just conventional military force; building a coalition was essential, but other nations would not dictate the terms of battle; the targets would be terrorists and terrorist states; they would seek to destroy al Qaeda worldwide, starting in Afghanistan.

Bush and his team were scrambling, and although they had made progress, they were far from having anything that remotely resembled a plan of action. They worried about more terrorist attacks. Some saw Afghanistan as a potential quagmire. They knew little about the real strength of the Taliban. They feared that Pakistan could unravel. For all their resolve and determination -- and rhetoric -- they still had an enormous amount of work to do and decisions to make.
 

PART III:
Afghan Campaign's Blueprint Emerges

By Dan Balz, Bob Woodward and Jeff Himmelman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 29, 2002; Page A01

Third of eight articles
Thursday, September 13

Shortly after 12:30 p.m., President Bush's limousine pulled into the White House driveway, stopping not far from the Oval Office. The president was returning from a visit to the burn unit of Washington Hospital Center, where he had had several emotional encounters with severe burn victims injured when a hijacked airliner hit the Pentagon two days before.

Before Bush could get out of the car, White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., who had walked outside to meet the limousine, put up his hands. "Mr. President," Card said, "sit back down for a minute. I've got to tell you something."

Card climbed into the back seat next to Bush and closed the door.

"We've got another threat on the White House," the chief of staff said. "We're taking it seriously."

Terrorists were believed to have targeted the White House on Sept. 11, and the fear was they would do it again. Card explained to the president that the CIA had just sent over a warning from a foreign intelligence service that Pakistani jihadists – Muslim extremists – were planning a direct attack on the White House.

"Why are you telling me in here?" snapped Bush, irritated that Card had unnecessarily risked a scene that could be observed by the press pool that was just down the driveway. "You could have waited until I got into the Oval Office."

Bush got out of the car, and he and Card walked directly to the Oval Office, where Secret Service Director Brian L. Stafford and the head of Bush's personal Secret Service detail were waiting for them.

"We need to evacuate you," Stafford said, explaining that the threat was credible and consistent with other intelligence that established an immediate danger. Stafford wanted to take Bush to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, the bunker beneath the White House complex where Vice President Cheney and other officials had been taken two days before.

"I'm not leaving," Bush said.

He told Secret Service officials that he wanted more information if they got it. For now, he wasn't going anywhere. "And by the way," he added, to no one in particular, "I'm hungry." He located Ferdinand Garcia, the Navy steward on duty in the West Wing. "Ferdie," he said, "I want a hamburger."

Card realized that Bush was a bit of a fatalist, believing you could take reasonable precautions and make decisions, but if something was going to happen you could only do so much. Prior to the attacks, Bush had been eating lighter – fruit and other healthy foods – in an attempt to lose weight.

"Well," said Karen P. Hughes, his counselor who had joined them in the Oval Office, "you might as well have cheese."

But the mood quickly turned serious. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice had joined the group and they all agreed that, even if the president wasn't prepared to leave, they had an obligation to the rest of the employees in the White House. Many on the staff, particularly some of the younger, lower-level aides, were still suffering from anxiety after the trauma of Sept. 11, when the White House had been evacuated.

Bush and his advisers decided they should allow all nonessential employees to go home that afternoon. Card relayed the information at a senior staff meeting and announced that the Secret Service would implement additional measures to protect the building, such as expanding the secure perimeter around the White House complex.

Card said the vice president would be moved to an undisclosed location as a precaution against having the president and vice president together in the event of another attack. Continuity in government – ensuring the survival of someone in the constitutional line of succession to the presidency – remained an essential priority.

The decision to move Cheney was the starkest example of how seriously the federal government has taken the threat of additional attacks. Although the decision led to questions about the vice president's whereabouts and well-being, Cheney himself has insisted on staying away from the White House on a regular basis.

The stepped-up threats added a sense of urgency to the deliberations underway among the president and his war cabinet. They knew they were under pressure to strengthen defenses at home and develop a plan to go after the terrorists.

9:30 a.m.
In the Situation Room: 'Flies on Their Eyeballs'

Earlier that morning, after his intelligence briefing from the CIA, Bush had met with the war cabinet in the White House Situation Room, one floor below the chief of staff's office in the southwest corner of the West Wing. Forty-eight hours after the attacks, Bush and his advisers began to focus more intently on how to go after Osama bin Laden, his al Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

CIA Director George J. Tenet and several other agency officials described in more detail the ideas Tenet had outlined the previous day. This was the second presentation in what became an increasingly detailed set of CIA proposals for expanding its war on terrorism.

Tenet's concept called for bringing together expanded intelligence-gathering resources, covert action, sophisticated technology, agency paramilitary teams and opposition forces in Afghanistan. They would then be combined with U.S. military power and Special Forces into an elaborate and lethal package designed to destroy the shadowy terrorist networks.

The CIA director was a holdover from the Clinton administration, but he had emerged as a key member of Bush's team. A former congressional staffer, Tenet was unexpectedly tapped first as deputy director in 1995 and then as director of central intelligence in 1997 after the nomination of Anthony Lake, President Clinton's national security adviser, was held up by the Senate and Lake requested that his name be withdrawn.

Tenet and Clinton had never really bonded; the former president preferred his daily briefing in writing. With Bush, who liked oral briefings and the CIA director in attendance, a strong relationship had developed. Tenet could be direct, even irreverent and earthy.

In his presentation, Tenet said the United States could begin to go after bin Laden and the Taliban by invigorating the Northern Alliance, the primary opposition force in Afghanistan, where bin Laden was hiding and operating. The alliance's roughly 20,000 fighters were decidedly a mixed bag dominated by five factions, but in reality probably 25 sub-factions.

It was a strained coalition of sometimes common interests, Tenet said. On top of that, its most charismatic leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by two suicide bombers posing as journalists on Sept. 9, in what was believed to be an al Qaeda operation. Without Massoud, the Northern Alliance was more fractured and leaderless than ever.

But with the CIA teams and tons of money, the alliance could be brought together into a cohesive fighting force, Tenet said.

The president and war cabinet members knew the CIA was giving very limited financial and technical covert support to the Northern Alliance – several million dollars a year – under a previous intelligence order. The agency's paramilitary teams had periodically met clandestinely with alliance leaders over the past four years. Tenet said he could insert paramilitary teams inside Afghanistan with each warlord. Along with Special Forces teams from the U.S. military, they would provide "eyes on the ground" for further U.S. military action. American technological superiority could give the Northern Alliance a significant edge.

The CIA had been on the ground in Afghanistan for years and had engaged in developing a more aggressive approach toward bin Laden and the Taliban prior to Sept. 11. The Pentagon, by contrast, had not been asked or encouraged to do any new planning as part of this pre-Sept. 11 process. As a result, Pentagon thinking about fighting bin Laden was far more conventional – to the frustration of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld – at a time when Bush was looking for the unconventional.

Tenet was followed by Cofer Black, head of the CIA's counterterrorism center. Black, 52, a veteran covert operator, was one of the agency's legends, credited with helping in the 1994 capture of Carlos the Jackal, one of the most notorious international terrorists prior to bin Laden. Tall, well-dressed and almost hulking, Black was a bit of a throwback to the agency's earlier, more colorful days. Though Tenet was called George by almost everyone in the CIA, Black addressed him as "Mr. Director."

If Tenet had been businesslike in his presentation that morning, Black was theatrical in describing the effectiveness of covert action. Animated and enthusiastic about the plan's potential and the agency's capabilities, he kept popping up and down from his chair as he made his points, gesturing wildly, throwing paper onto the floor as he described putting forces on the ground in Afghanistan.

Black wanted the mission to begin as soon as possible, and he didn't have any doubt that it would succeed.

"You give us the mission," he said, "we can get 'em." At one point he threw his fist in the air.

"We'll rout 'em out," he said, echoing the president's public language about smoking out the terrorists from their caves.

"They'll have flies on their eyeballs," he said – an image of death that left a lasting impression with a number of war cabinet members. Black became known in Bush's inner circle as "the flies-on-the-eyeballs guy."

It was a memorable performance, and it had a huge effect on the president, according to his advisers. For two days Bush had expressed in the most direct way possible his determination to track down and destroy the terrorists responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11. Now, for the first time, he was being told without reservation that there was a way to do this, that he did not have to wait indefinitely, that the agency had a plan.

Black's enthusiasm was infectious, and perhaps overly optimistic. It would never be quite as quick or as simple as he made it sound, but at that moment it was what the president wanted to hear. Bush was tired of rhetoric, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell thought; the president wanted to kill somebody.
 

Shortly before 11 a.m., White House aides ushered the press pool into the Oval Office for a scheduled conference call from Bush to New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and New York Gov. George E. Pataki.

The previous day, White House officials had decided to televise the conversation. They wanted Bush to be seen reaching out to the families of the thousands of victims who had died when the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed, as well as to the rescue workers who were laboring around the clock in a desperate search for survivors. Because it seemed doubtful that Bush could get to New York before the following Monday, the televised conference call was seen as the next best gesture.

But Bush decided he should go sooner. When he got the mayor and governor on the phone, he told them he would fly to New York the next afternoon, immediately after the prayer service at Washington National Cathedral.

Bush appeared slightly uncomfortable, almost distracted as he talked on the televised conference call. "I wish I was visiting under better circumstances," Bush said in closing. "But it will be a chance for all three of us to thank and hug and cry with the citizens of your good area."

The call over, Bush decided to take questions from the reporters standing only a few feet away, including one about the upcoming prayer service. "Mr. President," the reporter asked, "could you give us a sense as to what kind of prayers you are thinking and where your heart is, for yourself, as you – "

"Well I don't think about myself right now," he said, and it was instantly obvious he was struggling with his own emotions. "I think about the families, the children." He turned his head and his eyes filled with tears.

"I am a loving guy," he said, as he started to regain his composure, "and I am also someone, however, who has got a job to do, and I intend to do it. And this is a terrible moment. But this country will not relent until we have saved ourselves and others from the terrible tragedy that came upon America."

Tears still in his eyes, Bush ended the question-and-answer period with a slight nod of his head, and the pool reporters were escorted out.

"Presidents don't particularly like to cry in front of the American public, particularly in the Oval Office, but nevertheless I did," Bush said in an interview last month. But he said he believed his "mood reflected the country in many ways. People in our country felt the same way I did."

As the reporters filed out, Bush walked back to his private study off the Oval Office. Karl Rove, his longtime political adviser, was there, and he too was overcome with emotion. Rove looked away, and Bush turned his back. Rove realized they were both in tears.
 

After his call to Giuliani and Pataki, Bush met with his speechwriting team to begin preparing for the prayer service at Washington National Cathedral the next day. The service had been Bush's idea, and he had instructed his aides to include in the program leaders of all the major faiths – Christian, Jewish, Muslim – and denominations.

Michael Gerson, the president's chief speechwriter, had worked with Bush since the formative days of his presidential campaign and, with Hughes, was the author of Bush's most important speeches. He had a sense of history, a strong belief in the concept of compassionate conservatism and a flair for language, which Hughes would sometimes distill into Bush's earth-bound style.

On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, Gerson had been on Interstate 395, trying to get to the White House, when the Pentagon was hit. He watched the plane, American Airlines Flight 77, come right over the highway, so low he could see the windows. The plane disappeared below the tree line and he never saw the impact, but almost immediately he could see the smoke rising in the distance. He never made it to the White House that day, nor did he see Bush on Sept. 12. Now Bush's first words jolted Gerson.

"Mike, we're at war," Bush said.

It was said almost as if Bush couldn't quite believe it himself, and for Gerson, who had written mostly about education, taxes and compassionate conservatism, it was sobering.

Seeing Bush break down in the Oval Office a few minutes earlier had moved Gerson, and he told the president he believed it was an important moment for the public to see a president who refused – or was unable – to conceal his true emotions, the same emotions experienced by all Americans.

Bush said little, steering the discussion toward the prayer service the next day. Gerson already had some ideas for the speech, mentioning a quote he thought would fit the event, about how adversity introduces us to ourselves.

Bush said the speech had to acknowledge the reality that the attacks were not some distant event and that this could not be a conventional memorial service. They were still in the midst of tragedy. It was too early for the kind of closure a traditional memorial service sometimes brings.

The president said he had one other element he wanted his speechwriters to weave into the text. He wanted to express full confidence in the outcome of the conflict, to make it clear that he believed they would win this war. There was to be no doubt left in anyone's mind about where he stood on that. "Go produce it," Bush said. "I want to see it tonight."
 

Bush left for the tour of the burn unit at Washington Hospital Center, where a number of the victims from the Pentagon attack were being treated. It was his first face-to-face meeting with attack survivors, who were burned, bathed in oils and dressings and swathed in bandages, some almost unrecognizable.

Since airplanes weren't flying, about 70 square feet of human skin, kept on dry ice, had been sent by van from Texas to stabilize the wounds. Some of those who were burned over large percentages of their bodies talked about crawling through fire. In one room, Bush encountered a young Navy lieutenant named Kevin Shaeffer, who was in bad shape.

"He wants to play golf with you when he gets out," said one of Shaeffer's friends.

"Tell him he has a date," the president said.
 

By now, the war cabinet was moving in many different directions. At the State Department, Powell and his team were working on building an international coalition against terrorism.

They were focusing on Pakistan, regarding it as the linchpin of their plan. It was one of only two nations in the world that formally recognized the Taliban as the official government of Afghanistan, and the radical Islamic movement had a substantial following within its borders. Gen. Pervez Musharraf had come to power in a military coup in 1999, and the year before the United States had imposed sanctions after the Pakistanis set off a nuclear test. This had significantly increased the danger of nuclear war with India and raised tensions in the South Asian subcontinent.

Powell had told Bush that whatever action he took, it could not be done without Pakistan's support. But the Pakistanis had to be put on notice, and Powell had in mind a pitcher's brushback pitch to a particularly dangerous batter – high, fast and hard to the head. Squeezing Musharraf too hard was risky, given the potential for fundamentalist unrest inside his country, but Powell believed they had no other choice.

"Do what you have to do," the president said. Working with his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, Powell realized he had a blank check. Let's make it up, he said to Armitage. What do we want out of these guys? The two started making a list:

"Stop al Qaeda operatives at your border, intercept arms shipments through Pakistan and end ALL logistical support for bin Laden."

Second: "Blanket overflight and landing rights."

Third: Access to Pakistan, naval bases, air bases and borders.

Fourth: Immediate intelligence and immigration information.

Fifth: Condemn the Sept. 11 attacks and "curb all domestic expressions of support for terrorism against the [United States], its friends or allies." Powell and Armitage knew that was something they couldn't even do in the United States.

Sixth: Cut off all shipments of fuel to the Taliban and stop Pakistani volunteers from going into Afghanistan to join the Taliban.

The seventh demand was one Powell thought would trip up the Pakistanis or cause Musharraf to go into a fetal position: "Should the evidence strongly implicate Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network in Afghanistan AND should Afghanistan and the Taliban continue to harbor him and this network, Pakistan will break diplomatic relations with the Taliban government, end support for the Taliban and assist us in the aforementioned ways to destroy Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network."

In so many words, Powell and Armitage would be asking Pakistan to help destroy what its intelligence service had helped create and maintain: the Taliban.

Armitage called the Pakistani intelligence chief, Gen. Mahmoud Ahmad, with whom he had met the previous day, to the State Department. This is not negotiable, he told the general, handing him a single sheet of paper with the seven demands. You must accept all seven parts.

At 1:30 p.m. Powell called Musharraf. "As one general to another," Powell said, "we need someone on our flank fighting with us. Speaking candidly, the American people would not understand if Pakistan was not in this fight with the United States."

Musharraf said that Pakistan would support the United States with each of the seven demanded actions.
 

 Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz conducts Pentagon briefing. AP Photo
The Pentagon briefing that day was conducted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a senior defense official under Cheney during the administration of Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. Wolfowitz often gave voice to the views of an outspoken group of national security conservatives in Washington, many of them veterans of the Reagan and senior Bush administrations. These conservatives believed there was no greater menace in the world than Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, and they argued that if Bush was serious about going after those who harbor terrorists, he had to put Hussein at the top of that list.

Iraq posed nearly as serious a problem for the president and his team as Afghanistan. If Hussein, a wily and unpredictable survivor, decided to launch a terrorist or even a limited military strike on U.S. facilities after Sept. 11 and the president had failed to move against him, the recriminations might never end.

Rumsfeld had raised the issue of Iraq during the previous day's national security meetings. Now, in the daily briefing, Wolfowitz issued an implicit public warning to terrorist states that was quickly taken as another effort to prod the president to include Iraq in his first round of targets.

"It's not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable, but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism," Wolfowitz said. "It will be a campaign," he said, "not a single action. And we're going to keep after these people and the people who support them until it stops."

In its most benign form, it was merely a provocative restatement of the Bush Doctrine from the night of Sept. 11, but it was certain to alarm many U.S. allies. "Ending states who sponsor terrorism" – regime change – was not an easy task. The earlier Bush administration had gone to war with Hussein in 1991 but never attempted to oust him with military force.

Toppling Hussein would mark a major escalation of what the administration was trying to do. Nobody at that point had even agreed that Iraq should be part of the initial phase of the war on terrorism; in truth, at that point nobody other than Tenet was even talking about dislodging the Taliban, only threatening to punish the regime if it didn't break with bin Laden.

Wolfowitz's words caught others in the administration by surprise. A few days later, Powell publicly distanced himself from the deputy defense secretary, saying, "Ending terrorism is where I would like to leave it, and let Mr. Wolfowitz speak for himself."

At the Pentagon, Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was firmly opposed to bringing Iraq into the military equation at this early stage. In Shelton's analysis, the only justification for going after Iraq would be clear evidence linking the Iraqis to the Sept. 11 attacks. Short of that, targeting Iraq was not worth the risk of angering moderate Arab states whose support was crucial not only to any campaign in Afghanistan but to reviving the Middle East peace process.

At State, Powell and others were alarmed by the Wolfowitz drumbeat. At the end of one early meeting of Bush's war cabinet, during which Rumsfeld had raised Iraq as a potential target, Powell approached Shelton and rolled his eyes.

"What the hell, what are these guys thinking about?" asked Powell, who had once held Shelton's job as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Can't you get these guys back in the box?"

Shelton could not have agreed more. He had been trying, arguing practicalities and priorities, but Wolfowitz was fiercely determined and committed.
 

2 p.m.
Making Key Decisions: 'This Is War. Do It.'

At the National Security Council meeting that afternoon in the Situation Room, the president said he was going to approve the CIA proposal to give paramilitary and financial support to the Northern Alliance.

"I'd like to tell you what we told the Pakistanis today," Powell said, getting out a copy of the seven demands he had presented to them. He knew the president didn't like to sit still for long readings, but he was proud of what they had done, unencumbered by a long interagency debate. So he read them aloud. When he finished, Powell reported that Musharraf had already accepted all of them.

"It looks like you got it all," the president said. He thought it was the State Department at its best, no striped-pants formality.

"Can I have a copy of that?" some of the others asked. Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill reported on the effort to go after the finances of the terrorists. In early, pre-Sept. 11 deliberations about what to do with bin Laden during the spring and summer, Treasury officials had resisted efforts to go after terrorists' financial assets and there was continuing institutional resistance to imposing sanctions.

Bush noted that some bureaucrats were nervous about this new authority but dismissed concerns that the moves might be unsettling to the international financial order. "This is war, this isn't peace. Do it," he said. "He [bin Laden] needs money and we need to know whoever is giving him money and deal with them."

Shelton continued to offer a pessimistic assessment of the immediate military options. The contingency plans on the shelf were only cruise missiles against training camps. "It's just digging holes," he said.

Rumsfeld said they needed new tasks for the military if they wanted to go after states harboring bin Laden. "We've never done that before," he said.

Bush was concerned that the meetings with his national security advisers were too much on the fly, sometimes lasting 90 minutes or an hour, sometimes much less. Bush's time was being chopped into small pieces to accommodate the demands of both his private and public roles in the crisis. They had not had time to chew on the issue the way he wanted, so he asked his advisers to come to Camp David with their spouses that weekend, in the hope that a day together at the presidential retreat in Maryland would give them the setting and the time to talk at greater length and in more detail about what they wanted to do.

"This is a new world," Bush said insistently. "General Shelton should go back to the generals for new targets. Start the clock. This is an opportunity. I want a plan – costs, time. I need options on the table. I want Afghan options by Camp David. I want decisions quick."

Rumsfeld was trying to push the Pentagon, and he applauded Bush's decisiveness and sense of urgency. But he reminded the president of the embarrassments of some earlier attacks – the bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo conflict or the missile attack on the Sudan chemical plant in 1998 that was part of the unsuccessful operation on bin Laden in Afghanistan.

"We owe you what can go wrong," Rumsfeld said, "things that can take wind out of our sails. For example, hitting camps with no people."

"Tell the Afghans to round up al Qaeda," Bush said. "Let's see them, or we'll hit them hard. We're going to hurt them bad so that everyone in the world sees, don't deal with bin Laden. I don't want to put a million-dollar missile on a five-dollar tent."

A note-taker at the meeting wrote down snatches of dialogue that captured the sense of urgency.

"We need new options," Rumsfeld said at one point. "This is a new mission."

The president seemed to agree. "Everything is on the table," Bush said. "Look at the options."

The president also told his military advisers that the British really wanted to participate. "Give them a role," he said.

"Time is of the essence," Bush said. "By the time we get to Camp David, we need a clear timetable for action – but I want to do something effective."
_____________________

The day before, Bush had sent a letter to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), requesting a supplemental appropriation of $20‚billion to defray the costs of recovery and rebuilding efforts and other expenses associated with the war on terrorism. Schumer said they were grateful for the supplement but that New York was going to need more money. Ticking off a list of priorities, Schumer said, "We figure we'll need at least another $20‚billion."

"You've got it," the president said, looking at the senator. "I'll agree to that."

It was about midnight that third night of the crisis when Condi Rice returned home to her apartment at the Watergate. She had spent the first night of the crisis at the White House; the Secret Service had told her it wasn't safe to go home, and she was preparing to sleep in the bunker when the president and first lady invited her to stay in the residence. She slept for a few hours that night and again on Wednesday night, but she had been operating, like everyone, on adrenaline. Now she had a few moments at home to unwind. She flipped on her television for the first time since the crisis began, and the screen showed a familiar scene – the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace in London. But it was the music that caught her attention. In a gesture of solidarity and sympathy with the United States, the queen's band was playing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Rice listened for a few seconds, and then she started to weep.
 

PART IV:
A Day to Speak of Anger and Grief
After Bush’s Pivotal Speech and New York Visit, Time to Decide Strategy

By Dan Balz and Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 30, 2002; Page A01

Fourth in a series
Friday, September 14

The entire Cabinet, meeting at the White House for the first time since the terrorist attacks, stood and applauded when President Bush entered the room. Caught by surprise, Bush choked up for a moment, the second time in two days he had lost his composure in front of others.

The show of emotion worried Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. He knew that in a few hours, the president would be speaking at Washington National Cathedral, and he thought the country and the world needed to see a strong president.  Powell, who by tradition as senior member of the Cabinet sits next to the president, jotted a note. Dear Mr. President, it said, what I do when I have to give a speech like this, I avoid those words I know will cause me to well up such as Mom and Pop. Then, with some trepidation, Powell slid the note along the table.

Bush picked up the piece of paper, read it, and smiled. "Let me tell you what the secretary of state told me," Bush said, holding up the note for the rest of the Cabinet to see. "Dear Mr. President, don't break down!"

The room erupted in laughter, shared by both Powell and the president.

"Don't worry, I've got it out of my system," Bush said. He recalled in an interview last month that he appreciated the suggestion. "It was a gentle moment on his part."

It was also one of the few moments of levity on a day that was to be the most gut-wrenching of Bush's presidency. Bush would have to find his public voice, with scripted and unscripted words. He would have to speak to and for the entire nation. And he would have to find a way to move everyone, including himself, through a day of sorrow and consolation – to war.

The president likes to open every Cabinet meeting with a prayer, and asks a Cabinet member to prepare one ahead of time.  On this morning it was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Among the things that Rumsfeld prayed for was the "patience to measure our lust for action."

Bush assured the meeting that he and the war cabinet were developing plans for a military response that would be effective, and then went around the table asking for updates.

Powell described the diplomatic offensive. Like Bush, Powell saw the attacks as an opportunity to shape relationships throughout the world. But, he told the Cabinet, this was coalition-building in which the United States would have clear definitions of what it expected from its partners, including intelligence-sharing to help in freezing the terrorists' finances and assistance in the military campaign. "This is a long war," he said, "and it's a war we have to win. We are engaging with the world. We want to make this a long-standing coalition."

By that morning, he had already made 35 calls to world leaders, with another 12 ahead of him that day. "I have been so multilateral the last few days, I'm getting seasick," Powell joked.

Rumsfeld updated the group on the damage to the Pentagon and announced that the military alert status had been reduced one notch, to DefCon 4. On Sept. 11, the Pentagon had moved to DefCon 3 for the first time since the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The highest possible alert status, DefCon 1, would be used in time of war.

Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said the Justice Department later that day would identify the 19 hijackers aboard the four crashed airplanes, and Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta described the status of the nation's air travel system. Mineta reported that flights were beginning to resume that day, but at just 16 percent of normal.

Bush concluded with a reminder that while the focus of the administration now was the war on terrorism, they should not ignore domestic priorities. He said he still hoped to be able to sign by year's end an education bill, a patients' bill of rights and legislation giving him greater authority to negotiate trade agreements.

"This should not stop us from getting our agenda through," he said. In light of the unity expressed at his meeting two days before with congressional leaders, he added, there was a renewed opportunity for progress. "We need a nice spirit of cooperation," he said.

Powell had taken the lead in contacting foreign leaders, but that morning, Bush made two calls of his own.

The first was to Tony Blair in London, his second call to the British prime minister in three days. Bush thanked Blair for the outpouring of support from his country and for sending along a five-page memorandum on Sept. 12 outlining the prime minister's thoughts on how the campaign against terrorism should be shaped and executed. The memo mirrored the president's views.

Shaping world opinion was crucial in Blair's estimation. He argued for presenting evidence linking Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to the Sept. 11 attacks, and also recommended focusing on the terrorist camps in Afghanistan as a way to draw attention to the role of the Taliban regime in nurturing the terrorist network. In the memo, he proposed giving the Taliban an ultimatum. He focused on the need for an alliance with Pakistan and said it would be important to try to improve relations with Iran, which was on Afghanistan's western border and was a nation that had actively supported terrorists.

Blair also urged stepping up support for the Northern Alliance, the amalgam of opposition forces fighting the Taliban, and to make those forces part of the military campaign. And he reiterated that Bush could continue to count on unswerving support and solidarity from the British.

Intelligence continued to point directly at bin Laden and al Qaeda, and Blair said the immediate task should be to concentrate on the terrorist leader and on Afghanistan. But he and Bush agreed that al Qaeda would have to be pursued far beyond Afghanistan.

The president then outlined his thinking about how the action would unfold. It was a variation of what he had told his war cabinet on the night of Sept. 11, but this time Bush used a new metaphor. He described the campaign as a series of circles emanating from a pebble dropped in the water.

"We focus on the first circle," Bush told Blair, "then expand to the next circle and the next circle."

The discussion turned to the Taliban regime. Should we issue them an ultimatum – and if so, what should be the terms, Bush asked.

Blair said he believed an ultimatum was essential and that it would have to be put together carefully. The Taliban should be given no opportunity to wiggle out of the terms: give up bin Laden and his key lieutenants, shut down the training camps and allow international monitors into Afghanistan for verification.

The two men also discussed the effort to build an international coalition against terrorism, the role of Pakistan, Russia and moderate Arab nations, and shared with one another their conversations with other leaders. Bush said the United States expected full cooperation from Pakistan, and that it would be needed long after bin Laden was captured or killed.

In his memo to Bush, Blair had emphasized the importance of making a concerted effort to restart the peace process in the Middle East as a way to solidify support in the Arab world for the war on terrorism. Now Bush said that he had had a good talk with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and that he would be talking to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon later in the morning. Bush said he hoped to use the call to Sharon to impress on the Israeli leader the importance of seizing the moment in the Middle East.

Blair had one other piece of advice, growing out of his own experience during the war in Kosovo. You've got to decide what you're going to do and then you've got to focus very single-mindedly on it, Blair told Bush.

The president said he agreed 100 percent.

Bush then called Sharon in an effort to prod the Israeli leader to take steps to try to reduce the violence that threatened to destroy any hopes of peace in the Middle East. Bush believed that Israel ultimately could be one of the principal beneficiaries of a global war on terrorism and wanted Sharon to see that as well. It was not clear that Sharon understood Bush's message.

Around lunchtime, the presidential motorcade left the White House in a driving rain for a ride of about 12 minutes north to the cathedral. Bush had practiced the speech early that morning and made a few last-minute changes. But he was generally happy with the draft he had received the night before.

Chief speechwriter Michael Gerson had assimilated Bush's advice from their meeting on Thursday. From his own reading of history, Gerson had concluded that a presidential speech about war was a delicate balancing act in which it was crucial to offer people confidence and resolution without seeming arrogant. The speech that he had prepared along with White House counselor Karen P. Hughes and others in the speechwriting office attempted to do that.

Almost from the start of the crisis, Bush had described the conflict in the starkest possible terms, as one of good versus evil, light versus darkness. It was Gerson's belief, gained from the experience of working with Bush for more than two years, that the president's language and confidence were rooted in his religious faith and his belief that all things happened for a reason.  Gerson believed they had found the proper way to include an affirmation of that faith in the speech.

An extraordinary group awaited Bush at the cathedral for the service, which had been planned largely by first lady Laura Bush and Hughes. The speakers included a Protestant minister, a rabbi, a Catholic cardinal, a Muslim cleric and the Rev. Billy Graham. Former presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were there, as was former vice president Al Gore. The audience included the Cabinet, much of the Senate, many members of the House, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and many other top officials. Seated next to Bush and his wife in a tableau that linked both generations and the presidency were Bush's mother and father.

1 p.m.
War Speech in a Cathedral: 'A Steadfast Resolve to Prevail'

"We are here in the middle hour of our grief," Bush began. He said Americans would read the names of the dead and "linger over them and learn their stories" and weep. But he assured the audience that the grief, tragedy and hatred were "only for a time." Already, he added, the nation had learned what a poet once said, "Adversity introduces us to ourselves." He quoted Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase, "the warm courage of national unity," which produces "a kinship of grief and a steadfast resolve to prevail against our enemies."

There was much in the speech meant to comfort, but the most memorable line – which originated with his team of speechwriters and was quickly adopted by the president – came when Bush spoke confidently about what was to come. "This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others," he said.  "It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing."

A war speech in a cathedral was perhaps risky, even jarring, but it delivered the message Bush wanted. When he finished and returned to his seat in the front row, his father reached across Laura Bush and squeezed his son's hand.

At the end of the service, the congregation stood and sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." National security adviser Condoleezza Rice believed she could almost feel the whole church stiffen with determination. She later realized the service had helped her make a transition from abject sadness about what had happened on Sept. 11 to a feeling of defiance toward the terrorists.

Gerson was in tears during the final hymn, and when the congregation boomed out the words "terrible swift sword," he felt that the country already was at war. When the service ended and the presidential party walked out of the cathedral, the grayness and rain of the morning had lifted and they were greeted by brilliant sunshine and blue skies.

A number of the president's advisers later called the cathedral speech the pivot toward war. In an onterview last month, Bush said that he saw the speech in less far-reaching terms. "I saw it as a moment to make sure that I helped comfort and helped get through the mourning process," he said. "I also really looked at it from a spiritual perspective, that it was important for the nation to pray."

Bush agreed that some of the language was "very tough," and said it "reflected my mood." But he added, "To me, the moment was more, it really was a prayer. I didn't view it as an opportunity to set the stage for a future speech. I believed that the nation needed to be in prayer. . . ."

A Pivotal Day of Grief and Anger
12:00 am

That morning, a mid-level officer at the National Military Command Center, the Pentagon war room, had called the White House to confirm that the president did not want a fighter escort accompanying Air Force One when he flew to New York that afternoon. Rice and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. agreed it was Rumsfeld's decision.

One of Rice's deputies called the Pentagon and the question was relayed to Rumsfeld. He was furious to find out someone from the Pentagon had called the White House without his knowledge or permission. "I will not have that!" he said.

A search was immediately launched to identify the officer who had called the White House.

For Rumsfeld it was an issue of chain of command. Information regularly flows between the Pentagon and the White House, he said in an interview, but the decision to take action is his alone by law. "The national command authority is the president to me," he said. "And to the extent you get people down below sending instructions into the building that people then act off of, then the president can't be sure that, that the actions are going to be consonant with what he's wanted me to do.

"And to the extent people talk to other people and someone then says, 'Oh, let's send up an escort or let's send up a CAP [Combat Air Patrol] or let's not,' it may very well be completely opposite of what the resident wants or of what I want. . . . This is something you do not want to mess around with."

About 15 minutes before Air Force One left, the secretary gave his order. There would be an escort.

"Do you smell something?" Hughes asked as a helicopter carrying White House staff members approached New York on the final leg of the trip from Washington. They were still 20 or 25 miles from Lower Manhattan.

The others nodded. Press secretary Ari Fleischer thought it must be from the helicopter. But looking out their windows to one side, they saw a giant plume of smoke. What they smelled was the burning rubble of the World Trade Center.

The helicopters put down at the Wall Street heliport, and an enormous motorcade – 55 vehicles in all, the largest motorcade that anybody on the presidential advance team had ever seen – was formed. The President drove past cheering, flag-waving crowds to ground zero.

Bush had wanted to visit the site sooner but had waited so as not to get in the way of rescue teams searching for survivors. The night before, a White House advance team had surveyed the site and concluded it was risky to bring the president too close to the worst of the damage. That morning they