When Bush came into office, senior Justice officials were told by incoming Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's team that Townsend was one of those slated to go. They also mentioned complaints about her by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, at the time head of the secret-wiretap court. "It was clear she was not a favored person by folks who were about to take over running the department," said a Reno adviser who spoke with them. "It had to have been a political thing: 'Anybody who could be this close to Reno, we don't want.' "
In the end, Townsend said, her departure was "an agreed-upon thing." "When John Ashcroft came in, there was no doubt in my mind he might decide to put in his own team, so I made that offer" to resign, she said. "Did they fire me? The answer is absolutely not. . . . I was ready to go, they were ready to put in their own team."
By that sad September morning, she was on maternity leave from her decidedly low-profile new job as intelligence chief for the Coast Guard. "We thought it was a nice, friendly place for someone expecting her second child," her husband said.
After spending the day as a "communications hub" for O'Neill's worried friends, Townsend turned her focus to the Coast Guard. The agency was not legally part of the "intelligence community" and not entitled to share sensitive information. Working from home, she helped the Coast Guard get added to intelligence legislation and transformed the agency's priority from South American drug-smuggling to the vulnerability of America's ports.
Moving Up the Ranks
The next leap came in spring 2003, when two Townsend patrons urged Rice to hire her at the National Security Council. Both Clarke, the publicity-savvy former counterterrorism chief who later criticized Bush for failure to pay early enough attention to the al Qaeda threat, and Gen. John A. Gordon, at the time Bush's homeland security chief, lobbied for Townsend.
"They used all the right adjectives," Rice recalled. "Smart, tough, persistent, which is important. . . . Somebody who will not let anything slip past her."
It was a controversial hire. Political hands in the White House worried about her past as a Democratic appointee. Republicans on Capitol Hill circulated a stinging memo with details of her connection to the Wall. National security veterans worried, as one career official who worked with her put it, "Is she senior enough for this?" Columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that Reno's onetime protege could turn out to be an "enemy within."
At the time, Townsend told an interviewer she had volunteered to resign. But by December, she was coordinating government response to terrorism scares that led to the grounding of holiday season flights from Europe. She had also bonded with the president.
On Christmas Eve, Rice recalled, "She said to the president, 'I'll call you tomorrow morning,' which was Christmas morning. And he said, 'Yeah, do that.' And then he thought about it and said, 'But when are you going to open your presents?' . . . She said, 'Don't worry, we'll find a time.' " That May, just a year after arriving in the White House, she was promoted to head both counterterrorism and homeland security offices. "There's a toughness to her," said former homeland security secretary Tom Ridge. "There's an intensity level to get the job done."
In the months since, she has served as the administration's public face defending its controversial election-season decision to raise terrorist threat levels and as Bush's envoy to inspect Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. When a presidential commission headed by senior U.S. District Judge Laurence H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.) recommended sweeping changes in the intelligence community, Bush tapped Townsend to implement them.
"She was very tenacious about forcing people to make the hard decisions," Hadley recalled. She confronted turf-conscious bureaucrats, telling them, as Hadley recalled, "If you're going to accept it, accept it. If you've got problems, what are they and how can we work through them?"
But this quintessential Washington operator enjoys getting out in the field, too. In her office, in addition to the obligatory pictures of her with Bush and the somber aerial view of the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center, sits a more lighthearted snapshot. The picture was taken days earlier while she was in freefall at 13,500 feet, clutched in the arms of a Navy SEAL sky diving over San Diego.
The SEAL works with the top-secret team assigned to hunt down bin Laden and other remnants of al Qaeda's leadership that had recently come under attack in the wilds of Afghanistan. Townsend had flown to California to get a briefing from what she calls "the tippy end of the spear." Hurtling toward the ground at 126 mph was a side benefit of "pure joy."
Was she scared? She scoffed at the question. "Do I look scared?"
