No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

8 THE WAR ON TERROR AND THE HOME FRONT

WE DID NOT HAVE the luxury of concentrating exclusively on Afghanistan. In his address to the nation on the night of September 11, President Bush had made clear that the United States would be engaged in a “war against terrorism.” The scope of the struggle, however, had yet to be determined. Was it a broad war against any terrorist group, no matter what its origin or justification, or was the enemy limited to al Qaeda and its affiliates? What were the implications of a narrow view? What about one that was broader?

In the end we held to a more expansive view, focusing on terrorists with global reach who threatened our way of life and that of our friends and allies. The President decided after much deliberation that only a broader global definition would enlist the international community in establishing the worldwide dragnet that we needed to stabilize the international system and secure the United States and its allies. How could we tell others to help us but not help them fend off terrorist attacks? The decision reflected the need both to establish an international norm against terrorism in order to delegitimize it as a tactic and to paint vividly an enemy against which the world could mobilize. That is, I believe, why some have failed to understand why we used the term “war on terror” rather than “war on al Qaeda.” The war had to be fought against both the tactic and the people who practiced it.

In some cases, that led us to become involved in distant struggles that were in fact linked only loosely to al Qaeda. This was the case with Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and the Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines. Though organizationally distinct from Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, they sometimes collaborated with al Qaeda to launch attacks, such as the 2002 bombing of a Bali nightclub that killed more than two hundred people.

That also meant confronting Chechen terrorists, even though we were uncomfortable with Moscow’s heavy-handed treatment of the conflict in the Caucasus. Occasionally we accepted a responsibility to respond to groups with no observable tie to al Qaeda and no global reach, such as the Basque separatist group ETA in Aznar’s Spain, our close ally.

While defining the target broadly, we judged the tactics that we employed on a case-by-case basis. We would not rely exclusively or even primarily on military might but leverage all instruments of U.S. power—diplomatic, economic, intelligence—to defeat the terrorists. For instance, certain lethal options were reserved for groups and individuals directly and inextricably linked to al Qaeda. But when it came to rhetorical support and, in some cases, tools such as freezing terrorists’ assets, we were liberal in the definition of who was in and who was out. We believed that we had to discredit terrorism as a weapon, with no exceptions. There would be no carve-out for “freedom fighters.” No cause could justify the use of terror.

NEW TERRORIST PLOTLINES were surfacing almost daily as the intelligence agencies struggled to determine what was real and what was not. On October 15, an anthrax-laced letter was opened at the office of Senator Tom Daschle in the Hart Senate Office Building, shortly after a similar package was received at NBC News. The discoveries bolstered suspicions that a Florida man, who had died days earlier after mysteriously contracting anthrax, had been a victim of terrorism. The United States was again under attack. In all, five letters laced with anthrax entered the postal system that fall, each containing a cryptic handwritten note that made reference to 9/11. Five people would die in those attacks, making them the worst incidents of bioterrorism in U.S. history. The FBI would later determine that the anthrax attacks had been the work of a domestic, not foreign, actor. But one month after September 11, that seemed like a remote possibility. We were all convinced that it was al Qaeda’s second wave.

We later learned of another plotline suggesting that the United States was facing the threat of a smallpox attack. Ironically, because the disease had been eradicated, the country was vulnerable, since there was no longer a program of general vaccination. I called together the NSC Principals and the newly created Homeland Security Council, led by former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, to review the situation.

The President was told that the inoculation of the whole country would be a herculean task and there was some nonnegligible risk of death to those who might be allergic to the vaccine. The thought of a significant number of fatalities due to an inoculation program—which might ultimately prove unnecessary, given the tenuous nature of the threat—haunted the President. Someone mentioned the potential for class-action lawsuits if the program went badly. The President let it be known that that was the least of his concerns.

The questions on the table were ones that we would face many times throughout the Bush presidency: How could we tell the American people of a possible threat without engendering panic? Was the information even solid enough to constitute a legitimate threat? What were the risks of acting? What were the consequences of inaction? I thought to myself that he was being confronted with unprecedented dilemmas.

Eventually we decided on an intermediate course. First responders and the military would be vaccinated, starting with those who were in the field. A division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), under the exceptional leadership of Julie Gerberding, was tasked with developing a plan for widespread inoculation of the population should the intelligence warnings intensify. The Vice President was charged with overseeing the effort.

The question then arose of whether to vaccinate the President and his closest advisors. The decision was made to do so, and a list was developed of those who would be inoculated. We were each informed individually of whether we’d be vaccinated but not told who else was on the list.

When Dr. Richard Tubb, the White House doctor, asked whether I had ever been vaccinated and my reaction to it, I remembered vaguely having rolled up my sleeve in elementary school but didn’t recall if it had been for smallpox in particular. My parents were deceased, so there was no one to ask. I took the vaccination with some trepidation but assumed that it would have no adverse effect. In that case, my sense of personal vulnerability was only fleeting. But occasionally we confronted it more directly.

IN OCTOBER 2001, I was with the President in Shanghai for the APEC summit. Each day we’d have a secure videoconference, with the Vice President and Steve Hadley in Washington and the President, Colin, Andy, and me in China. On that particular morning, the screen opened to the Vice President, dressed fully in white-tie attire for his coming speech that night at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation dinner in New York (it was twelve hours earlier on the East Coast). His face was tense and ashen.

“Good morning, Dick,” the President said. Then, noticing the Vice President’s demeanor, he asked if everything was all right.

“Mr. President,” the Vice President intoned, “the White House biological detectors have registered the presence of botulinum toxin, and there is no reliable antidote. Those of us who have been exposed to it could die.”

“What was that, Dick?” the President asked, sinking back into his chair.

Colin intervened. “What is the exposure time?” he asked, clearly calculating from his last time in the White House. After learning that he too had been exposed, Colin also sank back into his chair.

We hastily finished an abbreviated review of the situation in Afghanistan and a few other matters and closed the conference. “Go call Hadley and find out what the hell is going on,” the President said to me.

I called Steve. Indeed, the White House detectors had registered the presence of the deadly nerve agent. The substance was being tested on laboratory mice, but it would take about twenty-four hours to get an answer. “Let’s put it this way,” Steve said. “If the mice are feet down tomorrow, we are fine. If they’re feet up, we’re toast.” He would monitor the situation along with Attorney General John Ashcroft and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and call us as soon as they knew anything.

We went about our business in Shanghai as if nothing had happened. I told myself that it was probably a false alarm, though darker thoughts would flash through my mind as I sat through the endless meetings and events. At one point I remember wondering whether we’d get home before the toxin acted. I didn’t particularly want to die in China.

Finally, the next day at lunch, an aide handed me a note saying that Hadley was on the phone. I passed the President’s table. “It’s Steve,” I said. “This is it.” The President said nothing in reply.

“Hi,” I said to Steve.

“The mice are feet down,” he said. It had been a false alarm.

I went back to the table. “Feet down, not up,” I said. The President smiled. I’m sure the Chinese thought it was some kind of coded message.

I’ve been asked many times if I worried about my personal safety in the aftermath of 9/11. Occasionally, a scare like that one would remind me of my own vulnerability. But for the most part, such thoughts were buried deep behind the need to just get the work done.

The more vexing problem was the moral dilemma posed by often knowing information that was both frightening and incomplete. The question of what to say to the American people so that they could protect themselves was a constant concern.

That dilemma came into full relief later that month, when reports pointed toward another potential attack on Washington, D.C. Some of the information even suggested that it might be a radiological or nuclear attack. We knew that al Qaeda had been trying to acquire a nuclear capability, even experimenting with homemade devices. The threat was very real.

At the beginning of the week, we convened the National Security and Homeland Security Council principals and took several steps to address the scare, including the moving of radiological detection equipment and teams from the West Coast to the East. After the meeting, I walked down to the Oval Office to brief the President and to tell him that he would get a more complete report at the NSC meeting the next day.

He was in a pensive mood. “I’ve invited some of my friends here to Washington for the weekend,” he said. “Should I tell them not to come?” he asked, mostly rhetorically. I suddenly remembered that I’d invited my friend in California, Susan Ford, and her son Tommy to Washington as well.

I’d worked day after day without a break and under unspeakable pressure. Only a well-timed invitation three weeks after September 11 from Karen and Jerry Hughes and their son, Robert, had broken the string of seventeen-hour days. “You look like you need a home-cooked meal,” Karen had said. Now, a few weeks later, I was looking forward to the release that having a friend in town would bring. I suspected that the President felt the same way.

The President continued, “How can I warn my friends not to come and not tell the American people of the danger?” I suggested that his situation was different since the White House was likely a target of attack. The President was having none of it. He felt an obligation to say something. But what should we tell the population? Would they assume we were recommending an evacuation of the nation’s capital? Were we ready for such a thing?

I suggested that he should tell his friends not to come, not for their safety but because he should go to an undisclosed location. He reacted strongly. “Those bastards will find me right here in the Oval,” he said.

I was taken aback but reflexively said, “Me too.”

I always knew when to leave the President alone. I walked back to my office and called in Steve Hadley to tell him what had transpired. “Are you afraid?” I asked.

“Not for myself,” he said. “But I can’t bear the thought that something might happen to my daughters.”

I decided that whatever the moral dilemma, I had to ask Susan not to come. And in any case it would be a tense and very busy weekend. “It’s just not a good time,” I said to her. Susan later told me that she hadn’t known what was going on, but the tone of my voice had told her that it was indeed serious. We could get together some other time.

THAT WAS how we lived and worked in the months immediately after September 11. It has become fashionable years after the attacks to say that the Bush administration overreacted to 9/11 and took controversial and radical steps in the war on terrorism that were unwarranted. Early in his administration, President Barack Obama would say that in the days after the attacks on New York and Washington, the Bush administration “made decisions based on fear.”

Well, yes, we did, but not from irrational fear or paranoia. Rather, the days after September 11 were marked by the uncertainty and unease that come from operating in dangerous and unchartered territory. We knew far too little about al Qaeda and how it operated. We knew even less about what it was planning next. We were without a map but not without a compass. Our guiding principle would be to do everything within our power—and within our laws—to prevent another attack.

THREE PRESSING ISSUES arose in the post-9/11 period that challenged traditional notions of security: the classification and treatment of detainees; how to try terrorism suspects; and how to gain access to information that they might hold through interrogation and electronic surveillance. We were at war against the people who’d launched the deadliest foreign attack on the U.S. homeland in the nation’s history. I do not remember a single person questioning whether al Qaeda had committed an act of war; it simply never occurred to us that it had been anything else. From the beginning, therefore, there was no dissent from the view that we were operating on a war footing and acting under the President’s authority as commander in chief. But that is where the consensus ended. What did it mean?

That was the question that was put to the lawyers who were charged with legal interpretations of historic significance. John Bellinger, who was the NSC lawyer, is as capable a person as one can find. John had worked for the CIA and the Justice Department and was loyal and thorough. But in terms of bureaucratic warfare, he was no match for David Addington, the Vice President’s legal counsel. Addington, with the full support of the Vice President, had a view—an expansive view—of presidential prerogatives during wartime and, drawing on opinions by lawyers such as Jay Bybee and John Yoo in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was determined to push the boundaries of executive authority. The NSC staff (and sometimes the White House counsel) was at times cut out of the process. That meant that the State Department, the military, and even the attorney general were outflanked on occasion. I didn’t fully realize this until, as we will see, the President signed a military order that I had not even seen. From then on, I was more attuned to the bureaucratic process for evaluating these issues. We were not dealing with purely legal matters; there were important policy implications for such decisions, both at home and abroad.

The first question we confronted was what to do with those whom the military had detained on the battlefield. We knew we couldn’t release them because they could still pose a threat to our forces and our citizens. We decided that they should be detained under the laws of war. For those who had committed crimes, we felt that in many cases we could not try them in ordinary civil courts since traditional evidentiary standards might reveal our intelligence-gathering methods to our enemies. We wanted a system of justice that would protect our sources and methods, punish those who posed a threat to the United States, and responsibly release those who, after careful investigation, we concluded did not.

As the President’s chief legal advisor on policy questions, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales convened an interagency group to investigate the matter. Led by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues at the State Department, lawyers from the NSC, Defense, Justice, and State began exploring options for trying the detainees.

Some in the administration, however, felt the group was not working fast enough. It’s always a challenge to respond immediately to a crisis and simultaneously lay the foundations for new institutions and frameworks that adapt to that new reality. Hundreds of suspects were being captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and we urgently needed a legal framework in place to try them. But that need for urgency does not, in my mind, excuse what happened next.

On the evening of November 13, 2001, I learned that the President had signed a military order earlier that day that I had not even been given. The order directed the Defense Department to establish military commissions to try detainees and issue guidance on procedures that would govern them. I did not object to the substantive arguments behind military commissions; they had World War II–era precedents, and they seemed to resolve some of my own concerns about the protection of our intelligence-gathering methods.

What I couldn’t accept was the circumvention of the President’s top national security officials. The interagency process exists to ensure that all perspectives are represented so that the President gets a comprehensive look at the potential impact of his decisions. Colin apparently first heard about the order through CNN. The attorney general, the nation’s chief law enforcement officer, was reportedly concerned that the Justice Department would be given no formal role in the process of setting up the tribunals and had the chance to raise his objections to the draft only days before the President signed it. Perhaps a more thorough review would have brought to the surface some of the procedural challenges that led the Supreme Court to halt the commissions in 2006. We will never know for sure, but that is why vetting of controversial ideas is important.

When I learned what had happened, I went to see the President. “If this happens again,” I said, “either Al Gonzales or I will have to resign.” The President apologized, but it was not his fault. Al Gonzales and I were friends, and I respected him. But in that case I told the President that the White House counsel and the Vice President’s office had not served him well.

Then there was the question of where to hold the overwhelming number of people who were being captured on the battlefield. There was no secure location in which to detain them, and no one wanted to risk their escape in the still-volatile environment of Afghanistan—or in the U.S. homeland. The Vice President was, as I remember it, the one who suggested that we find an “offshore” facility. That would become the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which had the advantage of being administered by the United States but not on U.S. territory. The overwhelming consideration was to make sure that those dangerous people were not in the U.S. homeland only months after 9/11. There was no disagreement at the Principals level with the decision to establish Guantánamo, although there was some sparring about who would pay. The Defense Department eventually got the bill.

The military commissions debate raised a larger question of how the detainees were to be treated and what protections they were entitled to under international law. At the center of the debate was the applicability of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, a series of four treaties that address the treatment of armed forces and civilians in combat. The Third Geneva Convention sets basic standards for the treatment of prisoners of war, and Common Article 3, a provision common to all four treaties, states that individuals not otherwise covered by the conventions should at minimum be treated humanely and protected against “outrages upon personal dignity.”

In a process coordinated by the White House Counsel’s Office, the Justice Department was asked to evaluate whether the Geneva provisions would apply to our conflict with al Qaeda and the Taliban. In January 2002 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel presented its conclusions. It argued that al Qaeda detainees were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status under Geneva because, as a nonstate, violent political movement, al Qaeda could not be party to a treaty between nations. There seemed to be general consensus among the NSC Principals on that point: al Qaeda operatives were not lawful combatants in the traditional sense of the term. They did not represent a state that was party to the convention; they did not wear uniforms; and they attacked civilians with impunity.

Disagreements became more marked on whether any Geneva provisions would apply to other detainees, particularly the Taliban. The Justice Department had concluded that Taliban prisoners were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status; that the President had the authority to suspend Geneva in its conflict with Afghanistan; and that Common Article 3 of the conventions would not apply to the detainees. The President had accepted the Justice Department’s conclusions and was preparing to issue an order to that effect when Colin Powell, who had been traveling in Asia, raised some concerns. He was particularly worried about the policy consequences of determining that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to a conflict with a signatory such as Afghanistan. I made sure that the President knew that there was an objection, and Colin presented his case at a National Security Council meeting with the President in the chair.

The resulting presidential memorandum on the treatment of detainees attempted to bridge the differences between his principals. The President decided that the Geneva Conventions provisions would apply to the conflict in Afghanistan but accepted the Justice Department’s legal conclusions that neither al Qaeda nor Taliban detainees could qualify for prisoner-of-war status or the protections under Common Article 3. He nevertheless stated that “As a matter of policy, the United States Armed Forces shall continue to treat detainees humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” The Supreme Court subsequently reversed the administration’s legal judgment on Common Article 3 in 2006.

BY THE END of the year, I felt that we were getting our bearings. The war in Afghanistan was going well, and we were working with the international community to create a functioning Afghan government. Under the auspices of the United Nations, members of Afghanistan’s ethnic and political groups met in Bonn, Germany, to develop a plan for national reconciliation and the establishment of a fully representative national government. Over the course of the eight-day negotiations, delegates to the conference agreed to form an interim administration that would oversee the governance of Afghanistan until a loya jirga, a representative assembly of Afghan tribal leaders and ordinary citizens, could be convened to form a transitional government and draft an Afghan constitution.

To lead the interim administration, the delegates at Bonn selected Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun leader from Kandahar. He had led an internal resistance force against the Taliban in its southern stronghold during Operation Enduring Freedom, so we believed that the Afghans had selected a credible partner with whom the United States could work. My initial impression was largely affirmed by our first meeting in January 2002, when he attended the State of the Union address. Six months later, Karzai would be elected president of the country by a loya jirga that established Afghanistan’s transitional government.

The Agreement on Provisional Arrangements in Afghanistan Pending the Re-Establishment of Permanent Government Institutions, also known as the Bonn Agreement, created an International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to secure the environment in and around Kabul and to assist Afghans in establishing and training the country’s national armed forces. The UN Security Council endorsed the Bonn Agreement and authorized the formation of ISAF on December 20, 2001. Two days later power was officially transferred to Afghanistan’s interim administration, setting the country onto a path—not without its difficulties—toward representative governance.

With the political transition unfolding, we also devoted a great deal of attention to stabilization and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, working to enlist the support of the international community and making sure we got it right on the ground. At a donor conference in Tokyo in January 2002, more than sixty countries came together to pledge $1.8 billion to that year’s reconstruction effort. Of the total, the United States contributed almost $300 million. Those funds went to a variety of vital short- and long-term needs in Afghanistan, including emergency humanitarian relief, road construction, women’s programs, health, and education. Reconstruction efforts were important to achieving our ultimate goal, which was to empower Afghans and assist them in acquiring the capability to help themselves. But the truth is, it was more often construction than reconstruction in Afghanistan. And we were building on the weak foundations of an economy dominated by corruption and the narcotics trade.

After 9/11 it was very clear that weak and failing states were a grave security threat to the United States. They could not control their borders and risked becoming safe havens for terrorists. But rebuilding them was a monumental task, one for which the U.S. had inadequate institutions to integrate the military and civilian capabilities as such missions required. Finally, by late 2002, we developed a new model to help bring together the different pieces of the puzzle. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) were designed to couple the military’s protective forces with civil affairs officers and civilian personnel who were experts in development and reconstruction. Together with our coalition partners, we set up a number of PRTs in the following months and deployed them to the far reaches of the country. Although the PRTs varied in their composition and activities, they all shared the same goal: to extend the authority of the central Afghan government and help provide security and development to the Afghan people. It was a step in the right direction, but we had a long road ahead.

THUS THE national security structures were slowly evolving to reflect the new demands of the daily war on terror. As an academic, my work centered on institutions, particularly military institutions: their birth and how they adapted (or failed to adapt) to changing circumstances. I’d written in line with a school of thought in political science called “the new institutionalism,” which held that institutions are created with jurisdiction over a set of issues and acquire expertise and competence to exercise that jurisdiction. But they also have traditions and norms—long-standing expectations of the way something ought to be done—that constrain their ability to adapt rapidly to change. When a new challenge arises, the immediate response is to try to handle it within existing structures; but sometimes what is needed is an entirely different set of arrangements.

My own work had focused on how militaries reacted to the mechanization of warfare after World War I and to the emergence of strategic (deep-strike) airpower and nuclear weapons during and after World War II. In some cases, new institutions, such as the air force and the Strategic Air Command (for nuclear weapons)—or, in the Soviet Union, the Strategic Rocket Forces Command—were born, but not without a fight from existing institutions and continuing overlap in functions. In some cases, for instance after World War I, institutional interests had forced bad decisions such as the integration of tanks into the cavalry in most countries. Germany (the defeated country) was the first to completely leverage the power of mechanization by creating separate, fully mechanized brigades.

I found myself, even in the midst of the daily turmoil after 9/11, reflecting on this problem as I watched the existing structures strain to cope with new challenges. The most serious institutional gap stemmed from the perceived absence of a homeland threat for almost two hundred years, suggesting that national security meant external security. The United States had military commands with responsibility for every part of the world but not for the United States. (Northern Command was created in October 2002 to fill that void.) Our Interior Department dealt with environmental preserves, parks, and Indian affairs. In most countries, though, it dealt with internal security, with a writ broader than the FBI’s law enforcement role. I’d actually considered creating a deputy for homeland affairs at the NSC when we first came into office. John Hamre, the president of the respected Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), had briefed me on a commission report that made the suggestion. We decided instead to place homeland issues in the Directorate for Proliferation Strategy, Counterproliferation and Homeland Defense and kept the counterterrorism function separate under Dick Clarke. In retrospect, that was a mistake, though I doubt that it would have made a difference in the eight months before 9/11.

It was in that context that I welcomed the creation of dedicated homeland security institutions. The Vice President, Andy Card, and I conferred with the President the day before his address to the nation on September 20, 2001. He had decided to create a position for homeland affairs analogous to that of the national security advisor and asked Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania, to take the job.

The President sought to reassure me that it would mean no diminution in my role as the principal advisor on security affairs. He needn’t have worried; I had only to think back to that chaotic meeting on September 12, when agencies from transportation to energy to border protection to the U.S. Coast Guard had suddenly been necessary to secure the country. And what of the governors and leaders of municipalities who wanted to know what 9/11 meant for them and how responsibility would be apportioned between Washington and the states? The need for a new set of structures was crystal clear. I pointed out that we had to avoid the emergence of new seams between homeland and foreign policy. I was fortunate that the President chose Tom Ridge, who was a wonderful and dedicated partner. For the most part the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council met in joint session on matters of terrorism.

The Office of Homeland Security was thus established on October 8, and the next day we appointed a new counterterrorism advisor, who would report jointly to Tom and to me. General Wayne Downing assumed that role, and Dick Clarke was moved to a position as special advisor to the President for cyberspace security. We established a Critical Infrastructure Protection Board as well, and Dick guided this important new effort to bridge the gaps between government and the private sector on this issue. It was a very good change.

NOT ALL of the institutional adjustments required new structures. When I became national security advisor, I was cognizant of the important role of international finance in foreign policy, one that was becoming increasingly important in the globalized economy. On February 13, 2001, President Bush issued his first National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) and secured a regular seat for the treasury secretary at the meetings of the National Security Council. I was certainly glad that economic issues were represented at the NSC when the global financial crisis hit in September 2008, but I was even more grateful that we’d made the institutional adjustment before 9/11, because financial sanctions would become one of our most important tools.

In fact, the first strike in the war on terror was not military-led. On September 23, 2001, President Bush signed Executive Order 13224 to freeze terrorist assets and disrupt the flow of funds to terrorist organizations. Empowered by the executive order, John Taylor, the under secretary of the treasury for international affairs and a distinguished Stanford economist and friend, coordinated a unified counterterrorism policy among the G7, setting a standard for other countries to follow. The results were remarkable, and the level of international cooperation was unprecedented: 120 countries passed new laws on terrorist financing, and approximately 1,400 terrorist accounts with assets close to $137 million were frozen. The combined effort of the Treasury and our intelligence agencies to freeze and trace terrorist financing proved a powerful weapon in the war on terror.

Though it was important to cut off the terrorists’ money, the process of following the finance trail through shady hawala (remittance systems) and “charity” front networks often yielded information that was invaluable for capturing the perpetrators. The PATRIOT Act added additional instruments to our economic arsenal. Among its provisions was Section 311, which enhanced the Treasury Department’s ability to prevent, detect, and prosecute international money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Entities designated as being “of primary money laundering concern” under this provision faced economic sanctions and isolation from the U.S. financial system.

Those financial tools were useful but by no means sufficient. The fact that every day began with a review of a terrorist threat report that was pages long reinforced for us the precariousness of our situation. We all had the overwhelming sense that we were still one step behind the terrorists and in danger of another successful attack. There had indeed been close calls. On December 22 an airplane passenger, Richard Reid, had hidden explosives in his shoes that had fortunately failed to detonate aboard a commercial flight from Paris to Miami.

The PATRIOT Act had expanded the tools that the FBI and other agencies could use to fight terrorism. It helped eliminate the wall between law enforcement and intelligence officials by easing restrictions on information sharing that had prevented effective counterterrorism cooperation prior to 9/11. But the President sought to do more, and he asked his top security officials to give him more aggressive options.

The appeal sometimes resulted in good ideas with significant downsides. Attorney General John Ashcroft brought forward the possibility of greater involvement of local law enforcement officers in reporting suspicious activities and people. In general, this was fine, but when taken to the extreme it could result in overzealousness by local officials, who lacked proper training in the identification of actual terrorists—including what one might look like. As John described some of the ideas one day in the Situation Room, I felt the need to slow the momentum toward acceptance. “Mr. President,” I said, “you and I come from parts of the country where you might want to be careful in empowering local sheriffs in this way.” Enough said. The President noted that he didn’t need every sheriff trying to win the Medal of Freedom in the hunt for terrorists. I felt badly because I thought that I might have embarrassed John. I called him that afternoon, and he jokingly said that he should have thought about how it sounded. “There are some places where I come from where you’d want to be careful too,” he noted.

More consequentially, Michael Hayden, who was then the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), approached the President with a far-reaching but important proposal. The President had often wondered aloud whether intercepting terrorists’ communications before 9/11 would have prevented the attacks. Although the NSA had traditionally conducted surveillance on foreign entities, Hayden sought the President’s authorization to intercept the international communications of people affiliated with or supporting al Qaeda. The proposed Terrorist Surveillance Program, as it came to be known, would allow the NSA to conduct electronic surveillance of al Qaeda suspects even if one party to the conversation were in the United States. Despite the popular—and mistaken—perception, it was not designed to monitor communications between two parties who resided in the United States. A several-layer review process within the NSA was used to determine a suspect’s affiliation with al Qaeda and suitability as a target for the program.

The NSA hoped to conduct such activities outside of the traditional court requirements for electronic surveillance. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) required the NSA to obtain a warrant from a special court that had been established to review such requests for surveillance of individuals within the United States. The relative speed of cell phones, e-mail, and other new communications technologies, however, had made it more difficult for the NSA to collect timely intelligence under this framework. As Attorney General Al Gonzales would later explain in discussing the program, “FISA is very important in the war on terror, but it doesn’t provide the speed and agility that we need in all circumstances to deal with this new kind of threat.”

I listened to the President discuss what he had in mind, meeting with Hayden that day. He wanted to ensure that the NSA had enough authority to collect actionable intelligence in a timely manner. He told Mike that he would authorize the program after a review of its legality by the Department of Justice and the Office of Legal Counsel. I made a mental note to follow closely the advice he was getting. This was going to be very controversial.

The Justice Department concluded that it fell within his authority as commander in chief to authorize the surveillance program, as other presidents had done in past times of war. President Bush also wanted to ensure that adequate safeguards were in place to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. If, despite its best efforts, the NSA inadvertently intercepted any purely domestic communication, the incident would be reported to the Justice Department for resolution. The President was also committed to making use of the program only as long as it proved necessary. He required that it be subject to his reauthorization approximately every forty-five days and that such reauthorizations would require a comprehensive review of current threat assessments by the intelligence agencies as well as a summary of intelligence gathered through the Terrorist Surveillance Program and other programs during the previous authorization period.

As national security advisor, I had been one of the few officials read into, or briefed on, this highly classified program. Given its sensitive nature, even some of the administration’s top security officials had been left out of the loop. So I was a bit taken aback when Frances Townsend, then the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, approached me in March 2004 about a code word to a program that she didn’t recognize. Fran had run into James Comey, the deputy attorney general, in the West Wing, and he had asked to speak with her privately. Guiding her into the hallway between the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, Comey turned to Townsend.

“I’m going to start talking to you about something,” Comey said. “If you don’t recognize anything I am saying, tell me to stop.” Without going into specific details, he stated the code name for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

“Stop,” Fran said. She told him that I might know what he was referring to and that she would speak to me about their encounter. I had known Comey as an attorney who had earned a distinguished record as a New York prosecutor. If he was reaching out to someone who might not have been read into the program, it was clear to me that something must be wrong.

I spoke with the President on the morning of March 12 and recommended that he meet with Comey, though I didn’t know the details of what concerned him. “He’s a respectable guy,” I said. “You need to hear him out.”

After a counterterrorism briefing that morning, the President asked Comey to stay behind so that they could talk one-on-one. I would later learn that the President had signed a routine reauthorization of the Terrorist Surveillance Program despite an objection raised by the Justice Department to one aspect of the program. White House lawyers had apparently known about the objection for weeks, but the President had not been informed about it until the morning that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was set to expire. He had thus been placed in a difficult position: kill a program that had been important to our national security or override the objection of his Justice Department to keep the program alive.

The President opted for the latter course, but he didn’t fully realize until the day he met with Comey just how serious the situation was: Comey and a number of other Justice Department officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller, were planning to resign. It would have been a repeat of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when senior Justice Department officials, including the attorney general, resigned after President Richard Nixon fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973.

The President would modify the program to address the Justice Department’s objections, and Jim and the other officials withdrew their resignation threats. I’m awfully glad I helped arrange that meeting.

STILL, ALL OF these structural changes and new programs were no substitute for the information that could be gleaned from key al Qaeda figures themselves. Soon we got the break that we’d long hoped for. Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda affiliate who had reportedly helped facilitate the foiled millennium plot, was found in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. U.S. and Pakistani authorities had launched a predawn raid on his fortified safe house, a compound operated by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba. A firefight broke out, and Zubaydah was shot three times in the ensuing chaos. He survived, thanks largely to the treatment he received from a top American doctor flown in by the CIA. Zubaydah’s death would have cost the United States an invaluable source of information on al Qaeda’s operations. One of bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, Zubaydah had been the group’s chief recruitment officer, responsible for managing the flow of militants into training camps in Afghanistan and giving them orders on their way out. In this capacity he had acquired unrivaled knowledge about al Qaeda’s ranks, both inside Afghanistan and abroad. Zubaydah had literally written the al Qaeda manual on resisting interrogation techniques, and he proved a challenge to interrogators.

The intelligence agencies and those who were interrogating him were certain that he knew far more than he let on, perhaps even crucial information about impending plots. It was under those circumstances that the Central Intelligence Agency sought authorization to use particular procedures they referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The President asked two questions: Would the proposed interrogation program be legal? Is it necessary?

The Vice President, the attorney general, Steve Hadley, and I were told to meet with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet that afternoon. George said that he would argue to the President that the program was necessary, explaining why the CIA thought Zubaydah was the key to understanding impending plots. He described in general terms what techniques he’d recommend, including waterboarding, and the safeguards that would be employed, including the presence of medical personnel, to ensure that the interrogations were conducted safely. The DCI emphasized that the techniques were safe and effective and had been used in the military training of thousands of U.S. soldiers. The attorney general said that he’d ask the Justice Department to determine whether the program would be legal under applicable domestic and international law. I asked that Colin and Don be briefed. The President had asked a direct question, and the answers from the CIA (regarding necessity) and the Justice Department (regarding legality) would be forthcoming.

The CIA was soon pressing for an answer. The Agency was absolutely convinced that Zubaydah knew something crucial and that time was running out. I went to see the President, who asked if we’d heard from Justice. I said that the attorney general was still considering the case. In fact, I had asked the attorney general to review the case personally. The President needed that confirmation from the nation’s top legal officer, not just the lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel.

The President decided to tell George to make preparations for the interrogations but to hold off on them until the Justice Department had made its determination regarding their legality. I informed George of the President’s decision. The CIA was to begin the program only after the Justice Department concluded that the proposed program was legal, which it did by early August.

Abu Zubaydah turned out to be an important source in his own right. But it was the fact that he provided information that helped lead to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that turned out to be of great consequence. KSM, as he came to be called, was captured in an apartment building in Pakistan a year later, on March 1, 2003. We’d been closing in on him since early 2003, aided by intelligence gathered by electronic means and the interrogation of other high-ranking operatives. But the case broke open at the end of February, when the CIA cultivated an informant who clued us in to KSM’s whereabouts. Hours later, acting on the tip from the CIA, Pakistani forces raided KSM’s apartment in Rawalpindi, rousing him from sleep in the predawn hours and taking him into custody.

I was at Camp David that weekend in March with the President. The phone rang in the middle of the night. It was George Tenet. “We got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” he said. George described the circumstances under which he’d been captured and promised an update the next morning.

I decided not to wake the President since there was nothing for him to do. But after I hung up I thanked God that we had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We suspected that KSM had been the mastermind of 9/11, the al Qaeda operational commander for North America, and the man we thought most likely to know what was coming next and who was plotting it. He had also boasted that he had been Daniel Pearl’s executioner.

Pearl, a graduate of Stanford, was the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. While pursuing a story in Pakistan in January 2002, Pearl was abducted by a group of militants, who had lured him with the false promise of an interview with a prominent cleric. When Pearl arrived for the interview, however, they kidnapped him and held him hostage in a safe house on the outskirts of Karachi, where he remained until his murder. The world—and Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane—watched the drama unfold over the next several days, as the kidnappers released a series of messages denouncing Pearl as a spy and showing pictures of him with a gun to his head. When the militants found out that Pearl was Jewish, they announced that they would execute him within twenty-four hours. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the ringleader of the abduction, transferred Pearl to the custody of a group of al Qaeda militants, led by KSM, who made good on the threat. The killers released a stomach-turning videotape of Pearl’s gruesome murder that was later used to corroborate KSM’s confession.

One of the hardest phone calls I had to make in my time in government was to Mariane Pearl. I called to tell her that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had confessed to her husband’s murder but that, for the time being, we would make no public announcement. She was calm and gracious and, thankfully, did not ask much about the details, which I knew to be incredibly gruesome. It seemed that KSM had been happy to regale his captors with a graphic blow-by-blow of his murder of the journalist.

EVEN AFTER the capture of Abu Zubaydah, KSM, and others, we continued to hope we’d find Osama bin Laden. Some people contend that we had a chance to capture or kill him at Tora Bora in the waning stages of the initial Afghan campaign in 2001. In fact, there were conflicting reports about his whereabouts at the time, and as a result the military did not request additional forces to conduct a strike. To my knowledge, the President was never asked to make a decision about a possible operation. But one thing is certain: if we had known where bin Laden was, we would have done absolutely everything in our power to take him down.

Over the subsequent years there were multiple “sightings” of bin Laden, but none of them panned out. That was a deep disappointment, since we dreamed of the day that the American people would have the closure that his capture would bring. I was encouraged in 2007 when Mike Hayden, who was now serving as CIA director, told the President that we had a new lead—a courier who could lead us to the al Qaeda chief. But once again the trail went cold. In May 2011 the United States finally got bin Laden. I felt a great sense of relief and pride as well as gratitude to President Obama for the bold decision to launch the raid that had led to his killing. And I felt vindication for putting into place many of the tools that had led to that day.

I always believed that we would get bin Laden. But two years after 9/11, it was the fact that KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a logistics planner of the 9/11 attacks, were in custody and feeding us important information, that made me rest a little easier. It was a bit like having Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the brilliant and notorious Nazi general, under lock and key during World War II.

I knew at the time that the steps we took, particularly the CIA’s interrogation program, would be controversial and second-guessed as the memories of 9/11 faded. Steve Hadley and I talked about it many times. Over the next years the CIA program would be modified, suspended, modified, and eventually resumed. Three different CIA directors would continue to recommend it as necessary, and three different attorneys general would assess and affirm its legality. Congressional leaders in the Senate and House intelligence committees were briefed on the program. I welcomed the debate—which was legitimate from my point of view—inside and outside the administration as circumstances changed. Great democracies have institutions that are constantly assessing and, if necessary, adjusting the course of the country in the pursuit of consistency with our values and our law, even under the most stressing conditions. In time I would, myself, play a role in the debates as secretary of state.

Yet looking back at those days of sheer horror in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I do not regret the decisions we made. I would never have engaged in—or encouraged the President to undertake—activities that I thought to be illegal. That was why the Justice Department was front and center in the assessment of the policies. I was not enthusiastic about all that was being done, but I accepted the DCI’s recommendation that it was necessary. I also found compiling lists of people who were individually targeted for “kill or capture” disturbing, particularly because there sometimes seemed to be civilian casualties in such engagements.

But that was the hand we were dealt after 9/11. I do not believe that we should have rejected options that were legal and necessary. I could not have forgiven myself had there been another attack. And had that happened, there would have rightly been a different kind of second-guessing as Americans asked, “Why did you not do everything in your power to keep it from happening again?”