COULD WE HAVE STOPPED the September 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 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 mut be said in truth that if we had stopped those nineteen deluded fools who acted on September 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 Qaeda and its network. Al Qaeda 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 vaidates the importance of the threat.
After September 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 Qaeda, 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.
Roger Cressey, my deputy at the NSC Staff, came to me in early October, after the time that I had intended to switch from the terrorism job to Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Security. The switch had been delayed by September 11. He and I, and the others in our little office, had been working eighteen-hour days and more every day since the attacks. At age thirty-six, Cressey had often been mistaken for a graduate student ten yers younger. Not anymore. His worry showed and now his concern was that I would want to stay on in the NSC terrorism job to implement our plans. "You're not gonna move now, are you? Finally, they're paying attention to ya, so you wanna hang around and get your White Whale, huh?" Cressey had grown up near the fish piers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He knew about obsessive fishing boat captains. He had wanted me to move to the new Critical Infrastructure and Cyber job. His frustration with our NSC collegues and bosses had been getting dangerously high before the attacks.
I was exhausted, from the ten years in the White House, from the marathon since the attacks, from the sleepless nights going over what I might have done to prevent the attacks. I looked at Cressey. "Well, Rog, as I said before: counterterrorism from now on will be a self-licking ice cream cone. It won't need anybody like me running it. Everybody will know what to do now. There won't be disagreements over policy or any need for a ramrod to get things done. It's obvious stuff now. We gave them the game plan. Hell, we gave it to them in January." Cressey was beginning to smile back at me; he saw where I was going. "Cyber security is a virgin issue where we can make a real impact." I went on. "It's the next threat, the next vulnerability, but people do not understand that yet. Let's go do that for a year and see what we can get done."*
A month later, after a six-hour trip from Washington, we walked into a bar in Silicon Valley. I had just become the Special Advisor to the President for Cyberspace Security and was going to spend two weeks getting to know the leaders of the high-tech industry in California. There was a jazz combo playing and I ordered my first alcoholic drink since the night of September 10. People were laughing and having a good time. Cressey and I had spent the weeks since the attacks holed up in a fortresslike White House, going to our homes for a few hours a day, carrying our gas masks, expecting another wave of attacks. In Palo Alto, as in most of America, life was going on. The people trusted, as I did, that the mechanisms of government, now awakened, would deal with the terrorist threat completely and systematically. We were wrong.
I looked at Cressey. "Well, Rog, as I said before: counterterrorism
from now on will be a self-licking ice cream cone. It won't need anybody like me running
it. Everybody will know what to do now. There won't be disagreements over policy or any
need for a ramrod to get things done. It's obvious stuff now. We gave them the game plan.
Hell, we gave it to them in January.
—Against All Enemies
