500 Days (3 page)

Crawford, Texas

Twelve Months

With the flick of a switch, the electronic timer on a concealed briefcase bomb flashed red, its digits counting down from five minutes. A small fan quietly whirred, generating a breath of air that could disperse enough sarin gas to kill everyone within several yards.

A few feet away, George W. Bush set a plate of cookies on a table, shooting a glance outside as he dropped into an overstuffed chair. His beloved ranch was as tranquil as he had ever seen, with sunlight pouring through the trees in streaks of blazing heat. A cow lumbered past, attracting the fleeting attention of the grim-faced visitors who were there to reveal some of the nation’s most sensitive secrets to the Texas governor.

Thirty days earlier, Bush had been selected at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia as the party’s candidate for the 2000 presidential election. By tradition, the Central Intelligence Agency provides a broad-ranging intelligence briefing during the presidential campaign to both the Republican and the Democratic nominees, preparing them for the responsibilities of the White House. On this day, September 2, 2000, four agency officials—led by John McLaughlin, the acting deputy director—had traveled to Bush’s ranch outside of Waco to present him and three of his senior advisors—Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Josh Bolten—with classified information from the most closely guarded sanctums of American power.

For three hours, the conversation roamed the globe—from Russia to China, from the Middle East to Latin America. Ben Bonk, the deputy director of the
CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, kept his silence, biding his time as he took the measure of America’s would-be commander in chief.

Bush struck him as intriguingly quirky; here was an aspirant to the highest office in the land attending his first intelligence briefing decked out in full Marlboro Man regalia—cowboy boots, jeans with a big buckle, and a checked short-sleeved work shirt. He was unpretentious, a presidential candidate willing to fetch food from the kitchen for his guests. Just as strikingly, the walls were plastered with tacky memorabilia, like a rubberized bass that could turn its head and break into song—a peculiar choice for a man seeking to become leader of the free world. But Bush’s down-home veneer, Bonk thought, disguised a keen mind. He had expected to be dealing with an intellectual lightweight, reliant on his aides for guidance in the subtleties of statecraft. Instead, it was Bush who peppered the briefers with frequent and often insightful questions, while his subordinates stayed quiet.

Bonk’s plan for this day was itself a testament to the effectiveness of Bush’s aw-shucks folksiness. Because of that reputation, Bonk had overcome his hesitance about sneaking the briefcase bomb into the house, providing Bush a vivid exhibit of the terrorist threat. Even though it contained no poison gas, the device was real enough—the CIA had built it based on a design seized from a Japanese terrorist cult that had used the bomb to kill thirteen commuters in attacks on Tokyo subway stations.

He had let the Secret Service in on the ruse, of course—otherwise, the security detail would probably have arrested him at the door—but the governor had been left in the dark about it. Once inside, Bonk set the briefcase on the floor next to his chair and had now, just before it was his turn to speak, activated the bomb with the switch on the briefcase handle.

The governor’s eyes shifted to Bonk.

“All right, Ben,” he said. “You’re up.”

Bonk looked down at his briefing book. His colleagues had all opened their presentations with a joke—some were even funny—but terrorism didn’t lend itself to laughter. So Bonk had chosen a more attention-grabbing tack: shock.

“Governor Bush, everything you’ve heard today about future events has been qualified as probable or likely things,” he said. “But I can say one thing for sure without any qualification: Sometime in the next four years, Americans will die as a result of a terrorist incident.”

Bush furrowed his brow as the slightest wisps of joviality were sucked out
of the room. Bonk paused to let his audience absorb the import of his statement.

Numerous terrorist organizations were on the move, he continued, but the most dangerous were the Islamic extremist groups. Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad—the names varied but their recipe for mayhem was the same: suicide and truck bombings, kidnappings, torture, executions.

Still, the bloody toll from those tactics was nothing compared to what lay in store for America and its allies if the terrorists succeeded in their quest for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear weapons, collectively known as CBRN. Al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, was the group most likely to succeed, Bonk said; it had the deepest pockets and the most far-flung operational networks. Its deadly shopping list was long—sodium cyanide, anthrax, radiological disbursal devices, improvised nuclear arms. If al-Qaeda or another terrorist group got its hands on any of them, it would show no hesitation in using the weapons immediately to murder as many Americans as possible. America’s nuclear arsenal, which had kept an uneasy peace with the Soviet empire in the decades of the Cold War, wouldn’t deter Islamic extremists.

These weapons of mass destruction did not have to be large or cumbersome to transport, Bonk explained. Terrorists could easily slip compact bombs into a crowd without raising suspicion.

Bonk reached for his briefcase, stood, and walked toward Bush. As he approached, he popped it open, then tilted the case forward. Bush saw the red digits counting down.

“Don’t worry,” Bonk said. “This is harmless. But it is exactly the kind of chemical device that people can bring into a room and kill everybody.”

He glanced down at the timer. “And this one would be going off in two minutes.”

Bush looked at Josh Bolten. “You’ve got one and a half minutes to get that thing out of here,” he said.

Outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan

Three Months

The dilapidated minibus kicked up a cloud of dust as it rumbled over a wasteland of sand and rock. Inside, a Pakistani journalist named Baker Atyani rode in silence, occasionally glancing at the Arab fighter beside him. The man cut an imposing—even frightening—figure, with grenades hung from his belt and a
machine gun clutched in his hands. Atyani’s seat had been installed facing the rear, and the windows on all sides were darkened, leaving him unable to see where they were or where they were headed. He knew better than to ask.

For three hours, the rattletrap bounced and shuddered until it finally arrived in front of the towering walls of a compound. The main gate swung open and the bus passed through, heading toward a nondescript mud house. A group of heavily armed men approached; their alert eyes flickered about, looking for signs of danger.

The man in the passenger seat—whom Atyani knew as Osman—rolled down his window. “This is the guy who is supposed to meet the sheikh,” he said.

Okay, a guard replied. But they still needed to search the newcomer.

Atyani stepped out of the bus. Dust stung his eyes and heat baked the air. The security team patted him down for weapons, riffled through his bag, and confiscated his watch, promising to return it later. Then they escorted Atyani and Osman into the house and made them wait for five minutes. Finally, the guard led them to an unimposing room. As they entered, Atyani spotted several men wearing head coverings and dressed in long white robes. Among them was Osama bin Laden, the most wanted man in the world.

Bin Laden approached Atyani, greeting him with a handshake and customary hug. “You are welcome here in Afghanistan, and in my place,” he said.

The moment was dreamlike. As he looked around the room, Atyani could not help but wonder if the house might be bombed while he was there. Yet, it had never crossed his mind to refuse the offer to travel to this remote spot for an interview with a man shaping history, an Islamic radical whose global influence exceeded that of some nations.

Bin Laden preached a philosophy of endless battle, of international conspiracies seeking to destroy Islam by attracting Muslims to the material comforts of
jahiliyya
, an evil rejection of divine guidance. This was a battle between God and Satan, bin Laden declared, requiring Muslims to wage war against the purveyors of
jahiliyya
—be they Westerners, Jews, or fellow Muslims. Defending Islam, he said, justified any action—even mass killing.

The army that would scatter the enemy and drive Western nations out of the Middle East was al-Qaeda, a group bin Laden cofounded in 1989 to lead a religious purification of the Muslim world. By 2001, he had transformed al-Qaeda into a formidable fighting force, trained at camps like Tarnak Farms near the Kandahar airport. He and his followers established hideaways and safe houses: Mujama’ 6 in Kandahar; Bayt al-Ruman, a religious institute inside an
old Afghani school; Khan Gulan Patsheh, a Kabul guesthouse that was previously part of the palace for the king of Afghanistan; and four mountain military bases named for “martyrs” who killed themselves in battles against the West.

Al-Qaeda had also set up a sophisticated communications system. The solar-powered technology relied on Casio FX-795P computers and handheld Yaesu radios. When a computer operator typed in a message, the Casio system encrypted it into a series of numbers. The operator would then read them over the radio. A second operator would enter the numbers into another computer, which would decrypt the message. The al-Qaeda members used a set radio frequency, but knew to switch to another if someone in the conversation called out a code name.

The true power of al-Qaeda flowed from its arsenal of deadly weapons: SA-7 Grail surface-to-air missile systems, Stinger missiles, self-propelled antiaircraft systems, ZIL-130 vehicles with mounted SA-6 missiles, cluster bombs, RKG-3 antitank grenades, Sagger antitank guided missiles, 30mm automatic grenade launchers, AKSU-74 assault rifles, Uzi 9mm, and scores of other armaments. Most were kept safely stashed in a four-and-a-half-mile tunnel in the vicinity of the Sharsiab camp near Kabul.

While al-Qaeda had yet to obtain chemical, nuclear, or biological weapons, bin Laden’s top deputies had their sights set on a radioactive waste storage site in the Turkmenistan city of Ashkhabad. There, they believed, al-Qaeda could obtain the fissionable material it needed for an atomic bomb or a dirty bomb that would use conventional explosives to spread radiation over a wide area. The group had come close; in March 2000, some of its members had tried to spirit a load of strontium 90 from Uzbekistan to Kazakhstan, but it was seized at the border.

Even without weapons of mass destruction, bin Laden and al-Qaeda had orchestrated large-scale assaults on Americans. They bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, slaughtering 224 people; in 2000, they crippled the USS
Cole,
a navy destroyer, killing 17 sailors. The attacks were a triumph for al-Qaeda, yielding a bonanza of recruits eager to wage jihad.

Al-Qaeda rarely varied its basic plan for carrying out its lethal missions. The group would spend years planning an attack, then, before it was launched, bin Laden would issue a public warning that a strike was in the offing. Atyani had traveled to this terrorist enclave anticipating that he would hear just such a proclamation of calamity to come. It would be the biggest scoop of his career.

His voice quiet and measured, bin Laden invited Atyani to sit. The men
settled down on flowered throw cushions and started talking. There was the usual delicate choreography of an interview, until Atyani shifted the conversation away from pleasantries to the matter at hand.

“Now, I need to do my job,” he said.

Bin Laden nodded gravely. “We will bring the camera,” he said. But circumstances had changed since his followers had last contacted the reporter.

“I know we agreed for you to come here for an interview with me,” bin Laden said. “In fact, I cannot give interviews myself.”

He was a guest of Afghanistan’s ruling government, the Taliban, bin Laden said, and he had promised them that he would no longer speak with reporters. Speaking on camera would be too egregious a violation of his word.

“But we will give you something better. There is some footage we are going to give to you, and some news.”

“What footage?”

“Have you watched CNN or Al Jazeera in the last few days?” bin Laden asked. There had been some video of al-Qaeda members training, images from the heart of the group’s operations.

“I will give you that film and more,” bin Laden said. “We will give you better than what’s already been shown, so you can use it in your story.”

Amazing.
Bin Laden knew the rules of television broadcasting—a video already shown on another network was old news. To generate a new report, there needed to be fresh footage. And apparently, bin Laden had saved some film for Atyani. He might live like a nomad, Atyani thought, but bin Laden was pretty media-savvy.

Bin Laden played one videocassette and one DVD for Atyani. It was standard propaganda, showing al-Qaeda fighters training and bin Laden praising jihadists who killed Americans. Once the screening finished, bin Laden told Atyani that he could have the videos.