In My Time - Dick Cheney [176]
THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL convened again that afternoon, and the president went around the table, asking each of us for our thoughts on the road ahead. I spoke last. I stressed that preventing the next attack had to be our top priority. We had to make sure we were leaving no stone unturned in that effort. Improvements in visa procedures, border control, and immigration security were critical, and we had to think more broadly. We had to do everything we could to keep those who would harm us from arming themselves with weapons of mass destruction.
We also had to realize that defending the homeland would require going on the offense. Relying only on defense was insufficient. The terrorists had to break through our defenses only one time to have devastating consequences. We needed to go after them where they lived in order to prevent attacks before they were launched.
Although we had discussed Iraq earlier in the day, I also took time now to say that Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists had trained and plotted, should be first. I believed it was important to deal with the threat Iraq posed, but not until we had an effective plan for taking down the Taliban and denying al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan.
During my years as secretary of defense, I’d seen what our special operations forces were capable of. Paul Wolfowitz made the point that any use of American force in Afghanistan should take advantage of our special operators, and I joined him in urging that we use them extensively. They were a natural choice for rooting out the enemy in some of the harshest terrain in the world.
THE NEXT DAY, SUNDAY, September 16, I left Camp David before 9:00 a.m. for the short trip to Camp Greentop, a National Park Service facility not far from the presidential retreat. Tim Russert of NBC News was waiting in the dining hall to interview me for that morning’s Meet the Press. I had done Russert’s show a number of times over the years, but never under circumstances remotely approaching the ones that prevailed now. The nation was still reeling. People wanted to know how we were going to respond to the attacks and how we would prevent further ones. Nearly nine million viewers tuned in to Meet the Press that morning, more than ever before or since.
Tim asked me about the deliberations he knew had been under way at Camp David for the last thirty-six hours. The president had said publicly that Osama bin Laden was the prime suspect, and I talked about al Qaeda, the breadth of its reach, and other terrorist organizations, such as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, with which al Qaeda shared common ideologies. Tim wanted to know what options the president was considering for response. I couldn’t talk about specifics, but I did note that nations such as Afghanistan should understand “that if you provide sanctuary to terrorists, you face the full wrath of the United States.”
I emphasized how important intelligence would be in this new kind of war. We could not hope to learn about and prevent attacks, to disrupt networks, to defend the nation, without robust intelligence programs. I told Tim we would have to work “the dark side, if you will”:
We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.
And, yes, I said, when Tim asked, this would mean working with some less than savory characters. Penetrating terrorist networks would require that. “If you’re going to deal only with sort of officially approved, certified good guys, you’re not going to find out what the bad guys are doing,” I said. “We need to make certain we have not tied our hands.”
My comments about the “dark side” have been used by critics over the years to suggest something sinister. I don’t see it that way. Only five days earlier we had lost nearly three thousand Americans. It was true then and remains true today that defending this nation and preventing