The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [84]
The war planners dined that evening on what the President called “comfort food,” fried chicken and mashed potatoes. Afterward, Attorney General Ashcroft accompanied Condoleezza Rice on the piano as she sang “Amazing Grace.” Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill sat in an armchair in the corner perusing the briefing documents the CIA had brought along that day. He read of measures to track and cut off the flow of money to terrorists, his special interest—and of draconian measures of a different sort.
The CIA proposed the creation of Agency teams to hunt down, capture, and kill terrorists around the world. It would have the authority to “render” those captured to the United States or to other countries for interrogation—effectively establishing a secret prison system. It would also be authorized to assassinate targeted terrorists. Two days later, the President signed a secret Memorandum of Notification, empowering the Agency to take such measures without the prior approval of the White House or any other branch of the executive.
Bush was by now referring to the coming fight as a “war on terrorism.” By the following week, when he addressed a joint session of Congress, it had become the “war on terror”—the label for the conflict that was to endure until the end of his presidency.
So far as Osama bin Laden personally was concerned, the White House set the tone. “I want justice,” the President told reporters on September 17, “and there’s an old poster out West, I recall, that said, ‘WANTED—DEAD OR ALIVE.’ ” Vice President Cheney said on television that he would accept bin Laden’s “head on a platter.” If he intended this figuratively, others did not.
Three days later, the CIA’s Cofer Black gathered the team that was to spearhead the covert operation in Afghanistan. He dispensed with any notion of taking the terrorist leader alive. “Gentlemen, I want to give you your marching orders and I want to make them very clear. I have discussed this with the President, and he is in full agreement.… I don’t want bin Laden and his thugs captured. I want them dead. Alive and in prison here in the United States, they’ll become a symbol, a rallying point.… They must be killed. I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden’s head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden’s head to the President. I promised him I would do that.”
“The mission is straightforward,” Black told a colleague at headquarters. “We locate the enemy wherever they are across the planet. We find them and we kill them.”
In the field, three men led the operations that targeted bin Laden, two veteran CIA officers, and a Special Forces officer with the unit popularly known as Delta Force. Their teams in the early months numbered only some seventy men, including a dozen Green Berets, Air Force tacticians, communications experts, and a small group of elite British commandos.
Asked by his wife why he was accepting the mission—he was on the verge of retirement—the CIA’s Gary Schroen had picked up a newspaper with a picture of a Manhattan firefighter, his arm at the salute, tears running down his cheeks. “This is why I’m going,” he said. “We all feel the pain.… Everyone wants to strike back.” Schroen’s successor, Gary Berntsen, told that some Afghan officers favored negotiating with al Qaeda, would merely snap, “Tell them your commander is from New York. I want them all dead!”
The U.S. generals’ requirement, recalled Dalton Fury, the major in command of the military component, was a little less exorbitant than the demand for bin Laden’s head in a box. “A cloudy photograph would do, or a smudged fingerprint. A clump