A Strategy's Cautious Evolution

Rice told him first, he said, that the dangers appeared to be greater than she had known.

"Her second reaction was 'What are you going to do about it?' " Clarke said. "I don't think we actually got a tasking at that meeting, but it was clear that she wanted an organized strategy review. She didn't just passively take this information."

Soon afterward, Rice had lunch with the man she would replace in the northwest corner office of the White House. Sitting face to face in blue wingback chairs, Rice and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger traversed the policy horizon from Russia, China and the Middle East to the spread of nuclear weapons. Berger made what he thought might be an unexpected claim.

"I said to Condi, 'You're going to spend more time during your four years on terrorism generally and al Qaeda specifically than any other issue,' " he said. Bush administration officials gave a similar account.

In the Situation Room on Jan. 10, a CIA briefer showed Rice a video clip of bin Laden filmed by a Predator drone -- then unarmed -- some months before. The live-action image tracked him out the door of a villa and across the road. The same villa, in another five months, would rise and fall on the Nevada desert test range.

Across the Potomac River, outgoing defense secretary William S. Cohen and his chief of staff, Robert Tyrer, prepared what may stand as the shortest memo of consequence in Pentagon lore.

"There's a period in the transition where the building gets its hooks into you and you get 'death by briefing' by each component in every service," Tyrer recalled. Before that started, he said, "we wanted to lay out, from the perspective only the top guy has, what are some of the issues that may not occur to you that you need to be prepared for."

One of those came in a handwritten note, covering less than a page. The lined paper had nothing on it but three names and three telephone numbers -- the Pentagon's top career specialists on terrorism. Cohen had found out the hard way that a defense secretary might need them fast.

"Literally, it was 'Here's a piece of paper, here are the names of your experts who you haven't met, here are their home phone numbers,' " said another top Cohen aide, who had prepared the list. "We tried to make it clear that you can wake up on the morning of your inauguration and have something very big in your face."

At a Jan. 10 meeting in the Tank, the secure conference room of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, President-elect Bush and his defense team took their first briefing from Gen. Henry H. Shelton, the chairman, and the four service chiefs. Participants said neither side, then or later, raised the subject of a six-hour alert force near Afghanistan.

Shelton had no interest in returning Los Angeles-class submarines, which carry cruise missiles, or AC-130 gunships, which fire computer-directed cannon, to their previous Afghan stations. The intelligence community had yet to give him a target for bin Laden that he thought he could strike in time.

Those on Bush's team had different reasons. They had already begun discussions, one adviser said, of whether bin Laden's death would be enough. And they were convinced that "this wasn't about [bin Laden], this was about al Qaeda, and that's why we had to go after the network as a whole."