Part II of the Washington Post article:
High Value Targets, Lost Chances
Because defending against even the highest priority threats is so difficult, offense has been at the center of Bush's thinking.
But his favored strategy -- decapitating al Qaeda by hunting down its three dozen top leaders -- has had mixed results elsewhere. Japan's Aum Shinrikyo cult, which unleashed a nerve gas attack in Tokyo's subway system, withered with the arrest of its founding generation of leaders. In the Middle East, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have grown new leaders and redoubled their suicide bombing attacks in the face of Israel's relentless campaign of "targeted killings."
"As we go after some of these" al Qaeda leaders, "some of them will get replaced," said the official made available by the White House for answers on strategy. "It doesn't appear they can replace them with people of the same quality and training." He acknowledged, however, that "we don't know these [new] guys in great detail."
Downing had a different view.
"Certainly they've been blooded, which has strengthened their misguided commitment to their cause," he said. "Those who have survived have learned valuable lessons. They have adapted, decentralized their organization, grown new leaders. They have had to find new ways of operating. This makes them more dangerous."
In his early White House days, Downing had been among the foremost advocates of accelerating the hunt.
At one meeting in November 2001, according to two people present, he glowered at his colleagues and slammed the flat of his hand against the table, a gesture seldom indulged in the White House Situation Room.
"We've got to kill the [expletives]!" Downing said, voice raised.
His frustration stemmed from what he viewed as missed opportunities. The CIA had a "profile," an official there said, of the appearance from the air of the class of al Qaeda leaders they wanted most. The profile looked for a small traveling party in sport-utility vehicles, with a security team close by and another around a perimeter. Taliban or al Qaeda fighters would show one figure special deference, perhaps kissing the hem of his garment.
Predator drones have about the weight and engine power of a golf cart and resemble mosquitoes with 58-foot wings. But they have lived up to their name. They are uniquely valuable in hunting individuals because they are the only known U.S. technology for finding and shooting at a person in the same moment.
Under its first rules of engagement, the CIA pulled the trigger "in support of" Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks at U.S. Central Command, which led the military's effort in Afghanistan. Far too often, Downing thought, the Central Command became mired in "covering its ass," as two colleagues described his remarks. Its legal adviser applied the laws of war, not the broader authority Bush had granted for lethal force in his September intelligence finding. Approval to fire came late, or not at all.
Downing's frustration was mirrored in the teams at the Predator's controls. One operator put his fist through a computer screen after being forced to hold his fire against a top al Qaeda operative, according to a friend who heard his account. Another broke furniture with his helmet on a similar occasion.
Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, felt obliged to caution Downing that he had no operational role. His blunt talk and exasperated demeanor struck even friendly critics as unsuited to the interagency debate.
"I know how to play the Washington game," Downing said. "It was just at this stage of my life I didn't have the stomach or patience for it. . . . I felt we spent an inordinate amount of time on the NSC process."
Before Downing's departure, described in the White House as a mutual decision, the consensus had moved somewhat his way. Rules of engagement were changed to give the CIA an escape clause in Afghanistan -- its operators could open fire if Central Command did not give an answer in time. Then it won a measure of independent authority.
Still later -- in October -- the agency got its first go-ahead to use the Predator outside Afghanistan. Abu Ali al-Harithi, who had been listed among al Qaeda's most wanted, died in Yemen on Nov. 3 when a missile obliterated his car.
By then, most of the most-wanted operatives had dispersed.
"It took six months, and I wanted to do it in six days," Downing said.
Sleeper Cells in the United States
Rice, in the interview, said the United States is making progress in "knocking out key nodes of the network, knocking out key operators," adding: "You're not going to get everybody, and you don't get to choose the ones that you get. You get an opportunity, either through hard work or by chance, and you take it."
The hunt for al Qaeda has been slowest in the United States, and inside government there is anxiety about the reasons.
Some of those interviewed said they fear undiscovered sleeper cells in this country, citing gaps in the FBI's knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot. They expressed strong skepticism of the FBI's public stance that 19 hijackers pulled off their complex feat without the kind of local help that al Qaeda always used before.
FBI Director Mueller gave closed testimony in June, made public in September, that "to this day we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot."
FBI investigators acknowledge that mysteries endure. They do not know why, on the eve of his final flight, suspected hijacker leader Mohamed Atta traveled to Portland, Maine.
At first investigators supposed that the detour enabled Atta to avoid Boston's stricter security on the morning he seized control of American Flight 11. But in fact Atta had to pass through security twice, once at each airport. One theory now is that he met on the evening of Sept. 10 with an al Qaeda handler -- to return unused funds or documents, to make a report, or to give the handler a final chance for instructions.
From docks in Portland's Casco Bay, the Quoddy Loop line offers frequent ferries to Canada. No identification was required to buy a ticket. If a handler did meet Atta there, he might have left no trace.
Perhaps because of questions like these, Rice and other top officials give lukewarm backing to the FBI theory that the hijackers worked alone.
"Is it conceivable that there were only the [19] plotters in the United States, and the direction was coming from the outside?" she said. "It is conceivable. If the FBI doesn't have evidence yet, it doesn't mean they won't find evidence."
Larry Mefford, assistant FBI director and chief of the counterterrorism division, said in an interview that the "number one priority in the FBI today is to detect and uncover terrorist sleeper cells" in the United States.
"We have not discovered an operational cell that would be under the model of the 19" hijackers, he said, but the bureau has established "a whole series of tripwires" to "detect highly disciplined and motivated groups of terrorists. I guess I can't tell you with a high level of certainty they're not here. We're looking aggressively to ensure they're not here."
Orange Alert on Orange Street
Some members of Bush's security team conceive homeland security in offensive more than defensive terms. No amount of spending can prevent a severe attack, one senior team member said, but hardening targets forces terrorists "to make more efforts, spend more resources, to overcome" the defensive measures. And every new effort the terrorists make "gives you more chances to see what they're up to."
How to defend themselves locally has been an agonizing question for state and city governments. Their puzzlement emerged clearly on Sept. 10, the eve of a traumatic anniversary, when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced an increase in the national threat level from yellow to orange -- high risk.
In New Haven, Conn., Mayor John DeStefano Jr. asked the White House Office of Homeland Security in a conference call what to do.
Answering that question is not the way Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has conceived his job. The theory behind the advisory system, with danger expressed on a continuum from green to red, is that any change of threat level will be accompanied by "an appropriate set of protective measures." Only local authorities, Ridge tells them, can decide the meaning in their own settings of his generic advice, such as "taking additional precautions at public events."
On Sept. 10, DeStefano decided to open his city's Emergency Operations Center, in the "sub-sub basement" of the government complex on Orange Street. Police, fire and health departments, along with agencies responsible for roads, bridges and utilities, began standing 24-hour watches. Police increased their port patrols, looking for they knew not what.
"After two days, after incurring a lot of overtime, we made the decision to shut it down," DeStefano said.
Gaps in Homeland Defense
As Ridge makes the transition to a new role as secretary of the new Homeland Security Department, he will have major gaps to address. The biggest, in the view of many experts, is port defense.
The government's new Transportation Security Agency now screens the shoes of millions of airline passengers but less than 2 percent of the 21,000 shipping containers that arrive in U.S. ports every day. Each is 40 feet long and easily holds the contents of a private home. Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner has said there is "virtually no security for what is the primary system to transport global trade."
Bonner calls for a container security initiative to screen incoming cargo offshore, or in its originating port overseas. White House officials often praise the initiative but its funding is unclear. In fiscal 2002, according to legislators in both parties, the president's lobbyists negotiated a reduction in funding for that initiative to $39 million. Bush signed the bill but did not spend the money. In Bush's fiscal 2003 budget, he has proposed no specific funding for container security.
"Obviously if there's an attack in ports, you could have hundreds of thousands of people die, depending on the weapons used, and there certainly is a colossal risk to the economy," said Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), who has clashed with the White House over spending.
Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Ridge, said there was no time to spend last year's appropriation for container security. Customs will fund the initiative this year, he said, out of general increases in its budget.
Snakes, Weeds and Iraq
Disagreements about the president's strategy, among officials interviewed for this story, sometimes took the form of competing analogies. Those who believed al Qaeda is losing leaders faster than it can replace them spoke of cutting the head off the snake. Those who disagreed spoke of the need to pull up weeds by their roots.
"Roots" was a taboo word in the Bush administration for a time, with "evil" the only acceptable explanation for the attacks of Sept. 11. More recently, senior Bush advisers have addressed other sources of al Qaeda's support.
Speaking on Dec. 11 of cooperation with Islamic and Arab allies, Tenet said, "We can't let this engagement stop at the level of tactical wartime cooperation, as necessary as that is. We also need to make more fundamental connections. Because at the end of the day, we cannot hope to make lasting progress in the war against terrorism without serious steps to address 'the circumstances that give it rise.' "
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell followed that two days later with a call to bridge "the hope gap" among the young men and women in the Arab world who have grown hostile to the United States. "It has become increasingly clear that we must broaden our approach to the region if we are to achieve success," he said. "We must work with peoples and governments to close the gulf between expectation and reality."
Powell, declaring that "hope begins with a paycheck," accompanied his remarks with an offer of $29 million in new assistance to be divided among 23 countries. They have a combined population of about 260 million.
The debate over roots has also addressed the prospect of war with Iraq, with some officials saying it will intensify rage against the United States. That rage promotes a "functional sanctuary," as one official put the argument, among sympathetic populations in the Arab and Islamic world.
Bush and his senior advisers argue that war to dislodge Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, should it come, would be integral to the global struggle with al Qaeda. They say Iraq's undeclared biological and chemical weapons, in potential combination with al Qaeda's ruthless intentions, make for the most dangerous possible terrorist threat. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has taken to using a new shorthand for that formula: "weapons of mass terror."
Most officials interviewed acknowledged some tradeoffs at the tactical level between the two conflicts.
The FBI, according to sources, has been obliged to shift some emphasis in its counterterrorism and counterespionage units from al Qaeda to Iraq, though senior officials said the shift was modest. And in the event of war with Iraq, formal priorities in intelligence-gathering will give that war first call on scarce resources such as photo interpretation, translation and satellite coverage.
"There's no such thing as a tie in priorities," one national security official said. "One of them is going to win, and for the duration of any war it will be Iraq."
Among the costliest tradeoffs comes in the currency of linguists and regional specialists. No authorized government spokesman acknowledged a conflict, but every affected agency has said in the past year that it had shortages in those skills.
Downing said the scarcity of foreign language speakers with top-secret security clearances had left "reams of material waiting to be exploited" in the war against al Qaeda. He was so alarmed by the gap that he suggested, before leaving the White House job, that intelligence agencies hire native speakers with abbreviated security checks.
The D.C. area, he said, has "probably the best-educated cab drivers in the world that can speak any language you want."
In the months after Sept. 11, one of the CIA's most important South Asia resources was a man named Bob, then station chief in Pakistan, who will be identified here by first name only. Conversant with local languages, he was immersed in the people and institutions of the nation that arguably remains most important to the war on al Qaeda.
Recently he returned to headquarters in Langley. His new assignment: "issue manager" for Iraq.
"He completed his tour," said a senior intelligence official. "When you have something like Iraq come up you want to put your best guy on it."
Staff researchers Lucy Shackelford and Margot Williams contributed to this report.
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