A City Touched By a War Unseen

New Kind of Combat Is Felt in Quiet Ways

Washington is a city conceived in peace but built by war. Crisis, like a sledgehammer, has rammed the capital into shapes that the tap tap tap of the bureaucratic ball-peen never could.

In 1860, just before the Civil War, there were 61,122 people living in Washington, D.C., which was basically a swamp dotted with a few unfinished monuments. By 1862, a quarter of a million soldiers and clerks tramped the unpaved streets.

In the first year of World War II, the federal workforce grew so quickly that new arrivals slept in shifts in glutted rooming houses. "The largest building in the world" -- the Pentagon -- "was conceived, funded, designed and constructed in a little more than a year," as newsman David Brinkley put it.

So you might ask, a year after the sneak attacks on Washington and New York, what's changed by the War on Terror? President Bush and others said from the beginning that this would be "a different type of campaign . . . a different type of struggle." That difference seems to be: We can't see it.

The War on Terror is almost entirely an invisible war, from the "shadow government" -- a collection of about 50 experts from key federal agencies ensconced in a secret bunker outside the city to ensure continuity in case of calamity -- to the legions of spies, analysts and commandos chasing clues and dangers around the world.

Of the fighting in Afghanistan, almost nothing has been seen. Of key prisoners and detainees, almost nothing is known. The enemy is dispersed, its next target a mystery. Some 76,000 reservists and National Guard troops have been called to active duty, but they aren't bivouacked in Washington parks. SUVs and minivans, chugging Middle Eastern oil, ply the streets as before, with unrationed abandon.

The tangible signs of heightened security -- more bollards and Jersey barriers, ID tags and even street closings -- feel like merely one more turn of a screw that has been tightening, bit by bit, for a generation. The huge construction project on Capitol Hill, in which a high-security visitors center is being built under the park between the Supreme Court and the Capitol, was planned for years before Sept. 11. Even the largest proposed change wrought by the war, the creation of a new Cabinet Department of Homeland Security, remains just words on paper.

Now, as the war enters its second year, this invisibility is raising some urgent questions. Can the country's leaders, especially President Bush, keep the country focused on a large and costly cause it cannot see? If the public's attention flags, can the war be pursued to victory? And how do we judge progress?

Rep. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a Gulf War veteran running for the Senate this year, argues that Bush must find ways to make the war clear again for the American people. The War on Terror, he says, will be a "Cold War scenario," by which he means it will go on for decades, with plenty of setbacks and more sad days added to the calendar of commemoration. The struggle and the sacrifice have only begun, he said, and this needs to be plainly visible.

"I think we've been off-script," Graham said last week. "How do you implement the next stage of the war? How do you go about taking it to the next step? This message has been confusing. And this can't be done by surrogates. It's time for the president to stand up, as he did last September, and communicate."

The Cold War was an easy picture to paint, compared to this. The War on Terror is a fog of microscopic spores, of vaccine stockpiled in unseen refrigerated rooms, of underground weapons labs suspected but unconfirmed. It is a war of sleeper cells, remote caves, captured hard drives, frozen bank accounts, aerosolized toxins, radioactive material, highly classified briefings.

All invisible, theoretical, secret.

The enemy has no flag, wears no uniform, stages no parades. He could be on the next treadmill at the gym, or the next table at the sports bar. He requires no tanks or submarines; he can operate with a rental car and a box cutter. He may be in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Germany, the Spanish Riviera or the next motel room. His leader may be dead -- or not.

Terrorism deals in stealth, surprise and psychology, rather than in troops and materiel and supply lines. It is mostly faceless and placeless -- all strategy and stealth. Likewise, the War on Terror takes place substantially between the ears.

And so Washington at war looks almost exactly like Washington at peace, with only the hint of many more urgent briefings, more eavesdroppers, more cryptographers, more informants and double-crossers -- all of them operating behind closed doors.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage last week evoked the psychic tension of a war that is everywhere and nowhere. "Who here among us has not felt this in a personal way?" he asked in a speech. "Who has not hesitated before opening an unexpected envelope from an unknown address? Who hasn't looked out the window or looked overhead to wonder if that plane didn't look a little too low and wait to make sure that it turned away?"

The very idea that the city has been changed by the war is essentially a matter of faith -- which the Apostle Paul once called "the evidence of things unseen." Faith, and that gnawing in the gut.

Each morning, the directors of the FBI and CIA, or their deputies, go by limousine to their respective headquarters, where they meet with their overnight staffs to discuss the daily threat matrix. This highly classified document drives each day's war. The threat matrix is the distillation of the war between the ears.

The president receives a briefing on the matrix around 8 a.m. That's when Bush learns whether our satellites have spotted some fresh sign of movement in the mountains near Tora Bora, say; and hears the latest rumors picked up by spies; sifts the gleanings -- reliable and otherwise -- from foreign agents; mulls the frequently slim pickings from ongoing interrogations of captured al Qaeda fighters; weighs the theories spun from such bits by clever analysts doing the best they can. Out of this briefing might come a warning concerning Osama's interest in the Golden Gate Bridge, perhaps, or New York's tunnels.

The threat matrix is dominated by intangibles and charged with uncertainty. It is the opposite of a plan. Authors of plans hope they come true; authors of the threat matrix hope it doesn't. Put this elusive, deductive guesswork alongside the great battlefield maps of wars past. Compare the threat matrix, in all its shadowy vagueness, to the big sweeping arrows of thrust and flanking maneuvers. One year after Pearl Harbor, the entire war lay essentially clear and irrevocably launched. The whole enterprise hinged on the invasion of Europe (and, secretly, on the race to build an atomic bomb). Everything flowed from there.

Today, Washington at War is long on mood, if short on definition. A senior official in a domestic Cabinet agency reports that the mood inside the White House is definitely martial. When the folks from the Defense Department and the Justice Department and the spy agencies move into a room, it's as if no one else exists. "The national security and defense people are clearly the grownups, and the rest of us are like the kids," he said. "It's like we sit at the kids' table."

It is a matter of mind-set. A leading lobbyist, asked what changes he has seen in Washington after a year at war, thought a long time and settled on the busted budget. "We've thrown in the towel on controlling spending," was all he could come up with.

To find tangible signs of this new war, you need a keen eye and a browser.

Perhaps you have noticed the soldiers, sitting in their Humvees under camouflage netting, guarding the roads leading to the rebuilt Pentagon. They represent wartime in Washington the way a handful of actors in "Henry V" might represent the entire Battle of Agincourt.

For six or eight months these young men and women watched and waited while, in the near distance, construction cranes hovered over a blackened gash in the pale stone building. But then the gash and the cranes vanished, so quickly. Maybe it hit you that this vanishing was, itself, a sign of the war: No repair on such a scale could be finished that fast in peacetime.

Perhaps you notice the calm voice of a pilot explaining that no one is allowed to stand up during the 30 minutes after takeoff or before landing at Reagan National Airport (and that might make you wonder about whether there's a marshal with a gun aboard, ready to tackle anyone who violates the rule).

Perhaps you notice that more street-level windows are covered with bomb-resistant plastic, or the box of unused rubber gloves in the company mailroom, or sign-in sheets in the lobbies of office buildings that you used to waltz through unannounced, or magnetometers at the entrances to museums.

For a while, the most noticeable thing was all the flags hanging on houses. Watch for them to reappear tomorrow.

But generally, you must dig pretty hard, down to the level of job postings on government Web pages. "You Want to Help. (We Understand)," the National Security Agency confides gently on its Internet home page. "We are currently hiring people with the following language skills: Amharic, Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Greek, Pashto, Persian-Farsi, Somali, Swahili, Tagalog, Tigrinya, Turkmen, Urdu/Punjabi, Uzbek."

The NSA collects and analyzes millions of electronic messages snatched from airwaves around the globe each year. Data has been known to sit for weeks untranslated -- a fact America learned in the dumbstruck months after Sept. 11. Fixing this would be a change you can't see -- but a very big change nonetheless. It is a crusade inside the spook community.

"The Central Intelligence Agency is seeking qualified individuals able to read and translate Arabic, Dari, Pashto into English," according to the CIA Web site. The FBI casts an even wider net: "Consideration is currently being afforded English-speaking candidates with a professional-level language fluency in Amharic, Azerbaijani, Berber, Chinese (All Dialects), German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Malay, Pashto, Punjabi, Somali, Tagalog, Tamil, Turkish, Turkmen, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese and Yiddish."

In this war, "looking for a few good men" -- and women -- is not just a slogan. Winning the war requires small teams of Special Forces, not columns of infantry. It requires enough Amharic speakers to plow through the data from Ethiopia. In some cases, just one person would be an improvement.

According to a former CIA official, when U.S. troops hit Afghanistan last year, the number of American Pashto speakers among them could be counted on one hand. Marine Lt. Col. Asad Khan became a hero of the effort, because he was decisive and brave, yes -- but largely because he could understand what Afghans were saying.

Washington is looking for a few young citizens who speak Urdu at grandmother's dinner table, or whose exile fathers told them bedtime stories in Dari. This is a war of dialects and phrasebooks and crash-courses in Somali.

Again: Things you cannot see.

The fact that we can't see the War on Terror does not mean we can't feel it.

A poll by the Pew Research Center, comparing the attitudes of Washingtonians and New Yorkers to those of Americans in general, concluded that residents of the capital live in a condition of genuine anxiety. (The psychic cloud in New York is even heavier.) Anger, sadness, suspicion, fear -- and, to a lesser extent, recurring depression and sleeplessness. These were some of the symptoms Washington residents described when the pollsters telephoned.

And who could be surprised, given the horrors that most people are braced for. "As many as 69 percent of Washingtonians say that they live or work in an area where a future terrorist attack is likely," the authors report. Most residents -- an actual majority -- "fear that they or a member of their family may become a victim of terrorism."

There's something amazing about the ability of people to anticipate death and go on with business. "The thing not mentioned often enough is how resilient we are," says the well-known psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison. "We have a natural tendency to keep moving. . . . There is a real, remarkable capacity of people to cope."

This capacity -- which does not come free of cost -- is, ultimately, very soldier-like.

In that way, today's Washington is not so different from the city in past wars. The soldiers aren't all in uniform, but the city is once again full of them. Just scan the sidewalk or look around your Metro car. Just look around your office or your breakfast table.

Just look in the mirror.