By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 19, 2002; Page A01

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On Feb. 8, Assistant Secretary of State Alan Eastham summoned Abdul Hakeem Mujahid to the State Department. Mujahid called himself the Taliban's United Nations ambassador, though the world body paid little notice. Now Eastham ordered his office shut down.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher highlighted the move and said Washington would reconsider Mujahid's visa status. But the Bush administration had no intention of expelling him. Nor did the symbolic closing, mandatory under new U.N. sanctions, stop Mujahid from conducting business from a third-floor walk-up in Queens.

The same old deadlocked conversations played out among the United States, the Taliban and interested bystanders. Taliban Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil Muttawakil told Pakistani news agencies Feb. 11 that his government had a new "fourth proposal" to resolve the bin Laden problem. (Others had included keeping a close eye on him for the United States, or submitting U.S. complaints to a panel of Islamic scholars.) Washington never discovered what, if anything, Muttawakil was talking about this time.

Bush officials continued to scold the Taliban for harboring terrorists and for the "cultural barbarism" of its March 16 destruction of Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. But the government's impotence came through on March 29 when Eastham gave a long interview on PBS's "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." The transcript remained the State Department's major policy statement until Sept. 11.

"You have to take the country as it presents itself," Eastham said. "The reality is that the Taliban do control most of the territory of Afghanistan." Asked whether Washington might back the Taliban's military opponents, he replied, "We don't do that."

As it happened, Massoud had just set off on his first tour of the West. Rebuffed by the Clinton team and discouraged by what he heard from Bush, he basked in a statesman's welcome at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. On April 5, a reporter there asked Massoud if he had a message for Bush.

"If President Bush doesn't help us," he replied in Persian, according to a recording of his remarks translated by Afghan allies, "then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon, and it will be too late."

The CIA said it might be too late for Massoud. Officers who traveled to rebel territory that spring reported that the Northern Alliance's weapons were in "abysmal condition," according to someone who reviewed their account. Massoud had five Mi-8 HIPs-lumbering 12-ton Russian transport helicopters built in the 1960s-but no more than two could fly on a given day and those were so shaky that the Americans refused to board. (Massoud was assassinated in a suicide bombing on Sept. 9.)

Behind the closed doors of the Situation Room, and in secure video conferences, Bush's mid-level advisers were hardening their stance. The CSG, represented most often by assistant secretaries of their departments, had begun its work by looking for a "rollback" strategy against al Qaeda. By April 20, when the group transmitted a 12-page discussion draft for the first time to their superiors, they were proposing a plan of "significant action to permanently erode what is now a robust terrorist organization."

"There was, I think, an increasing frustration at our inability to convince the Taliban or anybody else to get to them," said Francis X. Taylor, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism.

When the Deputies Committee met April 30, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage declared an important shift in stance by saying the destruction of al Qaeda should be the top American priority in South Asia-higher than slowing the spread of nuclear arms, or preventing another Indo-Pakistan war, or restoring democracy after Gen. Pervez Musharraf's coup in Pakistan. Only al Qaeda, Armitage said, represented a direct threat to the United States.

Sometime in early spring, according to an account reconstructed by Rice from her own memory and from those of others present, Bush expressed impatience with the pace of progress against bin Laden. As Rice briefed him in the Oval Office about recent threat warnings, with Cheney and White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. in the room, Bush is said to have replied: "I'm tired of swatting flies. I'm tired of playing defense. I want to play offense. I want to take the fight to the terrorists."

White House officials acknowledge in broad terms that a president's time and public rhetoric are among his most valuable policy tools. But they challenge the view that Bush's silence on al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and his absence from strategy reviews, meant inattention. "You didn't deal with al Qaeda by hyping it in presidential speeches," one senior adviser said. "You dealt with it by putting together a plan."

Rice, by this account, thought "the last administration had made a major mistake after the embassy bombings by saying we're going to war on terrorism and then not doing it. And she thought it would be much better to take the reverse tack, which was to say nothing and do it."

As the interagency review reached for still bolder objectives against al Qaeda in April, the global effort to track bin Laden's money trail reached a stumbling point.

O'Neill directed his businessman's doubts about regulation toward the tools of financial probes. Sen. Carl M. Levin (Mich.), an influential Democrat on the banking committee, handed the treasury secretary a copy of the department's Money Laundering Strategy, a report required annually by Congress.

After reading "all this data and verbiage in the book," O'Neill told Washington Post reporters and editors in December, he was astonished to find his department spending $642 million against money laundering: "I started asking questions. What are we getting for it?"

With the old enforcement tools under cost-benefit review, new ones languished in Congress. Three bills offered rival approaches to a common problem: how to identify the owners of foreign accounts that clear money through the U.S. banking system.

American banks have to verify the identities of their domestic customers, but not of foreign owners in "correspondent accounts" and other arm's-length relationships designed for obscurity. Useful to drug traffickers and tax evaders, the same methods allowed terrorists to cover their tracks as they wired money in and out of the United States.

All three bills in Congress would have imposed some new form of legal obligation on U.S. banks to know whose money they were holding. Until Sept. 11, the Bush administration was so torn-among the Justice Department, the president's National Economic Council and three separate views inside Treasury-that it supported none of them.

In a complementary approach to the problem, wealthy countries banded together in two joint efforts to punish rogue banking systems that declined all law enforcement requests.

At first glance, O'Neill declared that kind of ganging up to be "by its nature, highly coercive." The United States, a founding member of each panel-one at the Group of Seven industrial nations, the other at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development-stepped away from both of them in April. O'Neill said the G-7 task force should use "dialogue," not sanctions, to shift scofflaw countries. And the separate OECD project to stamp out tax havens, O'Neill wrote May 11 in the Washington Times, was "not in line with this administration's tax and economic priorities."

By July 7, when he met his counterparts again in Rome, O'Neill had agreed to resume the full money-laundering program of the G-7. But he continued to say he would cooperate "exclusively on information exchange" at the OECD-without possibility of sanctions.

Summer brought a storm of intelligence warnings that blew longer and harder even than those of the millennium. Through June and July, one foreign interlocutor said, CIA Director George J. Tenet worked himself "nearly frantic" with concern.

With Bush scheduled to meet foreign leaders in Genoa starting July 20, U.S. and Italian surveillance found alarming signs in June of an active al Qaeda cell at Milan's Islamic Cultural Institute. The Secret Service assumed that Bush was the target. Pentagon analysts feared for the vast naval base in Naples. Hundreds of fragmentary clues pointed to threats aimed, or emanating, elsewhere.

On June 22, U.S. Central and European commands imposed "Force Protection Condition Delta," the highest anti-terrorist alert, and the Fifth Fleet steamed out of port in Bahrain. On June 28, according to an authoritative account, the CIA station chief in Rome assessed that the targets at highest risk were the U.S. Embassy and the Vatican. That led Bush to move his scheduled meeting with Pope John Paul II, on July 23, to the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

Tenet dispatched an urgent request on July 3 to 20 foreign intelligence services, asking them to arrest a list of suspected al Qaeda members. Two days later, his Counterterrorism Center called in the FBI, Customs and Coast Guard, as well as immigration and aviation authorities, to say a major attack on U.S. interests appeared to be imminent-likeliest, by now, in Saudi Arabia or Israel, but a target inside the United States could not be excluded.

Hoping to head off an attack, the State Department sent instructions on June 29 for U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan William B. Milam to find his Taliban counterpart. Warn Abdul Salam Zaeef, the instructions said, that Washington regarded the Taliban as equally accountable for any attack. Clarke, by telephone, conveyed the same message to intermediaries in the United Arab Emirates.

Following local custom, Milam first poured tea for Zaeef in his grand reception room, with a view of Islamabad's Margalla Hills. Then he said his piece.

"I told him we had information that al Qaeda was planning something, and they were our enemies," Milam recalled. "Since the Taliban were their hosts, and very accommodating hosts, we would have to hold the Taliban responsible."

By late July, according to one national security official, Tenet had delivered so many warnings with so much urgency that some administration colleagues grew tired of hearing them.

New tests in the Nevada desert, meanwhile, showed that a Predator armed with a Hellfire missile could strike its target consistently in atmospheric conditions suitable for laser guidance. Equipped with a standard armor-piercing warhead, one of them struck no more than six inches off dead center of a surplus Army tank, spinning the shattered turret 30 degrees.

The warhead for killing men behind walls remained classified. And according to the Air Force and CIA, there was no compelling reason in June to rush the Predator back to Afghanistan.

"This was not a mature system," Air Force Secretary James G. Roche said in an interview. When a new system passes a flight test, he said, "usually you just start doing a whole lot more tests."

Some of the Bush administration's strategists were now describing the new policy as a crucible for terror, from the Latin word for a pot and flame hot enough to melt metal into slag. They did not want al Qaeda rolled back or eroded. They wanted it gone-a molten puddle, nothing more. Another of the word's modern meanings applied equally to them: a severe test.

By June 7 they had reached a form of words for their goal that remained largely intact through Sept. 4. It would be U.S. policy to eliminate al Qaeda as a threat to the United States and to friendly governments. The strategy called for a multiyear and multifaceted effort involving diplomatic, economic, intelligence, law enforcement and, if necessary, military efforts.

The strategy was phased escalation. It would start with fresh diplomatic demands on the Taliban, combined with overtures to the regime's opponents, north and south, to assess the prospects of stoking rebellion.

Those two steps, according to authoritative accounts, would have begun the moment Bush signed the document. What came next was backing for the rebels, but the directive stopped short of deciding that in advance. Still further in the future were options for direct military attack.

Twin appendices directed the CIA and the uniformed chain of command to prepare broad palettes of options. At Langley, Tenet was nearly ready. His proposed assistance to the Northern Alliance rebels ranged from $125 million to $200 million and included money, battlefield intelligence, nonlethal equipment such as body armor and winter clothing, and lethal equipment such as ammunition and upgrades for the Northern Alliance's dying helicopter fleet.

The military's task was to devise targets among al Qaeda leaders, the networks they use to direct their forces, and their training facilities; to plan direct support for Afghan rebel offensives; and to prepare strikes on Taliban leaders, ground forces and stores of military supplies.

But Shelton found himself troubled by the objective in its broadest form.

"To say 'eliminate' is to define defeat for yourself right up front," he said in an interview. "A terrorist organization operating in 50 or 60 countries-the odds of you eliminating it are pretty slim. So words like 'reducing,' 'degrading,' 'rendering it operationally ineffective' would be more realistic."

Shelton liked the plan to back anti-Taliban rebels, but he did not think it would compel the Kabul government to break with bin Laden.

"You're not left with many options in that region of the world, and that one had some potential," he said. "I never thought [the Taliban] would agree to do it, but I thought it forced them to take sides."

What came next would have been the hard part. But if decision-makers were serious about taking each step in sequence, they would have needed time. Some policymakers said the initial diplomacy alone would have taken months. Building up the Northern Alliance and other rebels, and testing their strength against the Taliban, would likely have kept overt U.S. force off the table through 2002.

But officials speaking for the White House maintained strongly that the plan never had a timetable. Had it come to war, Hadley said, dividing al Qaeda from the Taliban, or attacking them together, could not have been accomplished "just with cruise missiles."

"You're going to have to use air forces and you're going to have to use ground forces," Hadley said. "You can't say no casualties and standoff weapons only. You've got to go in and put boots on the ground and American young men and women at risk, in order both to get the job done and also to show that you're serious about it."

Shelton, who has since retired, said the Bush administration did not commit itself nearly that far by Sept. 4. Still chairman of the Joint Chiefs when American Airlines Flight 77 power-dived into the Pentagon, Shelton said serious contemplation of war began that day.

"We had started looking at options" for a military campaign before that, he said. But "we had really not leaned into going into Afghanistan against al Qaeda in the manner we did, or against the Taliban almost at all, until September 11th."

Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.

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