An Outsider's Quick Rise To Bush Terror Adviser

Townsend is a renowned detail freak, "an accumulator of the facts," as Mueller put it. This obsessive personality is wrapped in a colorful, even flamboyant style. In a city of dark threads, the petite Townsend sat for an interview in a butter-yellow pantsuit. She is a mother of two young sons who manages to make sure her pedicure matches her outfit and maintains her deep tan though she spends each day -- from 6:30 a.m. to 8 or 9 p.m. -- at the White House.

Even her husband, John -- an arbitrage lawyer, a classmate of Bush's at Andover and Yale, and a registered Democrat -- said his wife confounded expectations for someone in her position. "People tend to be surprised," he said. "They don't expect a woman. They don't expect a young woman. They don't expect a small, fairly attractive young woman. So she surprises people on several layers."

A Career Turning Point

On that fateful Sept. 11 nearly four years ago, Townsend was at home with her 2-week-old son, Patrick, frantically paging her close friend John O'Neill.

O'Neill, a legendary FBI official who led its efforts against al Qaeda before growing disillusioned, had just quit the bureau to head security at the World Trade Center. He assured her he was all right in a text message that arrived minutes before the first tower collapsed, burying him in the rubble.

The day came at a low point in Townsend's career. Until a few months earlier, she had run the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review that decided which cases merited supersecret intelligence wiretaps, work that took her inside al Qaeda cases, such as the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

She also became a key adviser to Reno, acting in her own words as a "back channel" between O'Neill and the attorney general, briefing her multiple times a day during a crisis. "Reno would call at all hours of the day or night from her office," Townsend's husband remembered.

"She was very close to Janet," Reno deputy Eric H. Holder Jr. said. "Not just professionally. Clearly there was a personal dynamic to it."

Townsend had arrived at Justice headquarters a few years earlier under the patronage of Reno's criminal chief. She is a native of Wantagh, Long Island, the daughter of a Greek American roofer and an Irish American bookkeeper. She rushed through American University in three years, then the University of San Diego law school. Her first job was at the Brooklyn district attorney's office. Early work on mob cases led Rudolph W. Giuliani to hire her in the U.S. attorney's office in New York; the future mayor recalled that "she was exactly like today -- very, very smart. Very much in charge."

After returning to Washington in late 1993, Townsend caught Reno's attention at the department's daily 8:30 a.m. senior staff meetings, recalled a former top aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "She was very 'we'll take care of it' in those meetings. She understands the principle that you say 'We'll take care of it' even if you have no clue how you'll actually take care of it."

By the late 1990s, Townsend was a fixture. "Fran would be back-channeling to Janet," the former aide said. "Things would be inked and decided. And Fran would go off to Janet and things would be decided the other way."

Her office would be a focus of controversy after Sept. 11. As the gatekeeper for intelligence wiretap requests, Townsend's office fought efforts to invoke the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in matters that could result in criminal cases, fearing that prosecutors would use such surveillance to circumvent the more difficult threshold for obtaining a criminal wiretap. In practical terms, the result was what commission reports called "The Wall," fencing off investigators from potentially useful information about suspects on American soil.

In an example cited by a bipartisan congressional commission, Townsend refused to endorse a secret intelligence wiretap on Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee because the FBI's interest in the case was "way too criminal." (She told the panel she did not recall making that remark but did not deny conveying such a point.) Townsend in recent years has said she fought "tooth and nail" against information-sharing restrictions. But three former senior advisers to Reno said they knew of no such examples. "She was one of the leading defenders of the famous Wall," one of them said. "She was an assiduous defender of the rules."