Colin Powell took the unusual step during the transition of asking to meet with the CSG, the senior counterterrorism officers from NSC, State, Defense, CIA, FBI and the military. He wanted to see us interact, respond to each other's statements. When we all agreed at the importance of the al-Qaida threat, Powell was obviously surprised at the unanimity.

Brian Sheridan, the soon departing Assistant Secretary of Defense, summed it up: "General Powell, I will be leaving when the administration changes. I am the only political appointee in the room. All these guys are career professionals. So let me give you one piece of advice, untainted by any personal interest. Keep this interagency team together and make al-Qaida your No. 1 priority. We may all squabble about tactics and we may call each other assholes from time to time, but this is the best interagency team I have ever seen and they all want to get al-Qaida. They're comin' after us and we gotta get them first." Powell asked extensive questions about what State could do, took detailed notes, and later asked Rich Armitage (who would become Deputy Secretary) to get involved.

I met Condi Rice wandering the halls of the Executive Office Building looking for my office. She said that she had fond memories of working in the old building on the White House grounds. I escorted her to my office and gave her the same briefing on al-Qaida that I had been using with the others. Condi Rice's reaction was very polite, as she almost always is. I realized when I prepared to brief my former colleague and now boss, that she was the fourth National Security Advisor I had worked for and the seventh I had worked with.

Brent Scowcroft had been the lovable old sage, focused largely on the strategic nuclear balance until the First Gulf War came along. Brent, although a close friend of the first President Bush, suffered from the fact that the Secretary of State cut him out and talked, frequently, directly to the President. Tony Lake had been the passionate, thoughtful leader whose professorial image belied the fact that he was a master bureaucratic schemer, always several moves ahead of everyone else. Lake had always won the bureaucratic battles, but he had not won the President's heart. Their two personalities did not mesh well and Clinton shifted him to CIA Director in the second term. (Lake withdrew during a bruising confirmation fight in the Senate. Had he been CIA Director, there is no doubt in my mind that he would have relentlessly gone after bin Laden and moved out the bureaucrats who got in the way.)

Sandy Berger had been Lake's deputy, but also a long-standing friend of both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Initially the assumption on the NSC Staff was that Berger was the political commissar, but his prodigious capacity for detailed work on the tough national security issues won him the respect of the bureaucrats. As National Security Advisor, he had dominated State and the Pentagon.

Now Condi Rice was in charge. She appeared to have a closer relationship with the second President Bush than any of her predecessors had with the presidents they reported to. That should have given her some maneuver room, some margin for shaping the agenda. The Vice President, however, had decided to be involved at the NSC Principals level. The Secretary of Defense also made clear that he didn't care about anyone else's relationship with the President; he was doing what he wanted to do. As I briefed Rice on al-Qaida, her facial expression gave me the impression that she had never heard the term before, so I added, "Most people think of it as Osama bin Laden's group, but it's much more than that. It's a network of affiliated terrorist organizations with cells in over 50 countries, including the U.S."

Rice looked skeptical. She focused on the fact that my office staff was large by NSC standards (12 people) and did operational things, including domestic security issues. She said, "The NSC looks just as it did when I worked here a few years ago, except for your operation. It's all new. It does domestic things and it is not just doing policy, it seems to be worrying about operational issues. I'm not sure we will want to keep all of this in the NSC."

Rice viewed the NSC as a "foreign policy" coordination mechanism and not some place where issues such as terrorism in the U.S., or domestic preparedness for weapons of mass destruction, or computer network security should be addressed. I realized that Rice, and her deputy, Steve Hadley, were still operating with the old Cold War paradigm from when they had worked on the NSC. Condi's previous government experience had been as an NSC staffer for three years worrying about the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Steve Hadley had also been an NSC staffer assigned to do arms control issues with the Soviet Union. He had then been an Assistant Secretary in the Pentagon, also concerned with Soviet arms control. It struck me that neither of them had worked on the new post-Cold War security issues.

I tried to explain: "This office is new, you're right. It's post-Cold War security, not focused just on nation-state threats. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have blurred. Threats to the U.S. now are not Soviet ballistic missiles carrying bombs, they're terrorists carrying bombs. Besides, the law that established the NSC in 1947 said it should concern itself with domestic security threats too." I did not succeed entirely in making the case. Over the next several months, they suggested, I should figure out how to move some of these issues out to some other organization.

Rice decided that the position of National Coordinator for Counterterrorism would also be downgraded. No longer would the Coordinator be a member of the Principals Committee. No longer would the CSG report to the Principals, but instead to a committee of Deputy Secretaries. No longer would the National Coordinator be supported by two NSC Senior Directors or have the budget review mechanism with the Associate Director of OMB. She did, however, ask me to stay on and to keep my entire staff in place. Rice and Hadley did not seem to know anyone else whose expertise covered what they regarded as my strange portfolio. At the same time, Rice requested that I develop a reorganization plan to spin out some of the security functions to someplace outside the NSC Staff.

Within a week of the inauguration I wrote to Rice and Hadley asking "urgently" for a Principals, or Cabinet-level, meeting to review the imminent al-Qaida threat. Rice told me that the Principals Committee, which had been the first venue for terrorism policy discussions in the Clinton administration, would not address the issue until it had been "framed" by the Deputies. I assumed that meant an opportunity for the Deputies to review the agenda. Instead, it meant months of delay. The initial Deputies meeting to review terrorism policy could not be scheduled in February. Nor could it occur in March. Finally in April, the Deputies Committee met on terrorism for the first time. The first meeting, in the small wood-paneled Situation Room conference room, did not go well.

Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, began the meeting by asking me to brief the group. I turned immediately to the pending decisions needed to deal with al-Qaida. "We need to put pressure on both the Taliban and al-Qaida by arming the Northern Alliance and other groups in Afghanistan. Simultaneously, we need to target bin Laden and his leadership by reinitiating flights of the Predator."

Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy at Defense, fidgeted and scowled. Hadley asked him if he was all right. "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden," Wolfowitz responded.

I answered as clearly and forcefully as I could: "We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al-Qaida, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."

"Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example," Wolfowitz replied, looking not at me but at Hadley.

"I am unaware of any Iraqi-sponsored terrorism directed at the United States, Paul, since 1993, and I think FBI and CIA concur in that judgment, right, John?" I pointed at CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, who was obviously not eager to get in the middle of a debate between the White House and the Pentagon but nonetheless replied, "Yes, that is right, Dick. We have no evidence of any active Iraqi terrorist threat against the U.S."

Finally, Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: "Al-Qaida plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states." Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: "They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in 'Mein Kampf,' you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do."

Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. "I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan."

"I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything." I spoke slowly. "I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it."

To my surprise, Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage came to my rescue. "We agree with Dick. We see al-Qaida as a major threat and countering it as an urgent priority." The briefings of Colin Powell had worked.

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I wasn't the only one asserting an al-Qaida threat whom Wolfowitz belittled. Our ambassador to Indonesia, Robert Gelbard, was putting pressure on the Jakarta government to do something about al-Qaida and its offshoot, Jemmah Islamiyah (JI). Gelbard had closed the U.S. embassy in Jakarta when he received credible reports that a six-person al-Qaida hit team had been dispatched from Yemen. He had publicly criticized the Indonesian government for turning a blind eye to al-Qaida infiltration and subversion. Then on Christmas Day 2000, the JI launched an offensive against Christians, bombing 20 churches. Gelbard stepped up his pressure privately and publicly.

Bob Gelbard had been a star in the Foreign Service for three decades, had been ambassador to Bolivia, Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and Narcotics, Special Presidential Envoy to the Balkans. He was not the kind of diplomat who worried about place settings, but instead knew about armed helicopters and communications intercepts. He had fought drug lords and Serbian thugs. Now he saw what was taking place in Indonesia: Al-Qaida was targeting the largest Islamic nation in the world as its next battlefield.

Arriving in the Pentagon early in 2001, Paul Wolfowitz began calling old acquaintances in Indonesia, where he had earlier been ambassador. What he heard from them was that Gelbard was making things uncomfortable, making too much noise about al-Qaida, being paranoid. Wolfowitz reportedly urged Gelbard's removal. Bob Gelbard came home and retired from the Foreign Service. In October 2002, al-Qaida's local front attacked nightclubs in Bali, killing 202, mainly Australians. Ten months later, they attacked the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, killing 13. The investigations that followed revealed an extensive network of al-Qaida operatives in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia led by those whom Gelbard had suspected and had demanded be stopped.

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George Tenet had also been asked to stay on from Clinton to Bush. He and I regularly commiserated that al-Qaida was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. Sometimes I would walk into my office and find the Director of Central Intelligence sitting at my desk or the desk of my assistant, Beverly Roundtree, waiting to vent his frustration. We agreed that Tenet would insure that the President's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al-Qaida. President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al-Qaida, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al-Qaida. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al-Qaida was coming in the Deputies Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

For years George Tenet had called me directly when he read a piece of raw intelligence about a threat. Often when I checked out these reports with CIA experts, they would point out that the source was untrustworthy or the report was contradicted by more reliable information. Now Tenet's calls to me about threatening intelligence reports became more frequent and the information was good. There were a growing number of reports that al-Qaida's operational pace was picking up. Cells were discovered and rounded up by security services in Italy, France, and Germany. There were reliable reports of a threat to the U.S. Navy in Bahrain, causing me to call the Bahraini Crown Prince on a yacht in the Mediterranean to ask for increased security for our Navy base and access to recently arrested al-Qaida prisoners. The Italians had credible reports that there would be an attempt to attack the G-7 Summit in Genoa, causing the CSG to review plans for that meeting with Secret Service and DOD.

By late June, Tenet and I were convinced that a major series of attacks was about to come. "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one," Tenet told me. No one could have been more concerned about the al-Qaida threat than George, but he had been unable over several years to get his agency to find a way to go after the heart of al-Qaida inside Afghanistan. Now CIA's analysis said the attacks were most likely going to be in Israel or Saudi Arabia.

During the spring as initial policy debates in the Administration began, I e-mailed Condi Rice and NSC Staff colleagues that al-Qaida was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America. During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.

The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry. We considered a broad public warning, but we had no proof or specificity. What would it say? "A terrorist group you have never heard of may be planning to do something somewhere"?

FBI joined us as well as a senior CIA counterterrorism expert who explained that CIA believed al-Qaida was preparing something. When he was done, I added what I had already told the CSG agencies: "You've just heard that CIA thinks al-Qaida is planning a major attack on us. So do I. You heard CIA say it would probably be in Israel or Saudi Arabia. Maybe. But maybe it will be here. Just because there is no evidence that says that it will be here, does not mean it will be overseas. They may try to hit us at home. You have to assume that is what they are going to try to do. Cancel summer vacations, schedule overtime, have your terrorist reaction teams on alert to move fast. Tell me, tell each other, about anything unusual."

Somewhere in CIA there was information that two known al-Qaida terrorists had come into the United States. Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States. I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree, red lights and bells should have been going off. They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House.

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Could we have stopped the Sept. 11 attack? It would be facile to say yes. What is clear is that there were failures in the organizations that we trusted to protect us, failures to get information to the right place at the right time, earlier failures to act boldly to reduce or eliminate the threat.

Had we had any chance of stopping it, had we the knowledge we needed to prevent that day, those of us sitting as members of the CSG would literally have given our lives to do so; many of those around the CSG table had already put their lives at risk for their country. But it must be said in truth that if we had stopped those 19 deluded fools who acted on Sept. 11, as we should have done, there would have been more later. At some point there would probably still have been a horrific attack that would have required the United States to respond massively and systematically to eliminate al-Qaida and its network. Al-Qaida had emerged from the soil after the Cold War like some long dormant plague, it was on a path of its own, and it would not be swayed. And America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings. Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity that validates the importance of the threat.

After Sept. 11, I thought that the arguments would be over, that finally everyone would see what had to be done and go about doing it. The right war was to fight for the elimination of al-Qaida, to stabilize nations threatened by radical Islamic terrorists, to offer a clear alternative to counter the radical "theology" and ideology of the terrorists, and to reduce our own vulnerabilities at home. It was an obvious agenda.

Copyright © 2004 by RAC Enterprises, Inc. Reprinted by permission.