At Camp David, Advise and Dissent

Then came Tenet with his professionally packaged briefing papers. He flipped past the cover to the first page, which read, "Initial Hook: Destroying al Qaeda, Closing the safe haven." The haven was Afghanistan. Then he went methodically, page by page, through the briefing material, providing for the president and the others the basic covert-action foundation for an unconventional war on terrorism.

It would start with a half-dozen small CIA paramilitary teams on the ground in Afghanistan. They could eventually link up with military Special Forces units, who would bring firepower and technology to aid the opposition fighters in Afghanistan. The plan called for intelligence-sharing with other nations and a full-scale attack on the financial underpinnings of the terrorist network, plus covert operations across the globe.

At the heart of the proposal was a recommendation that the president give the CIA what Tenet labeled "exceptional authorities" to attack and destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the rest of the world. Tenet wanted a broad, general intelligence order that would allow the CIA to conduct the necessary covert operations without having to come back for formal approval for each specific operation. Tenet said he needed the new authority to allow the agency to operate without restraint -- and he wanted encouragement from the president to take risks.

Tenet had with him a draft of a presidential intelligence order that would give the CIA power to use the full range of covert instruments, including deadly force.

For more than two decades, the CIA had simply modified previous presidential findings to obtain formally its authority for counterterrorism. Tenet's new proposal, technically called a Memorandum of Notification, was presented as a modification to the worldwide counterterrorism intelligence finding signed on May 12, 1986, by President Ronald Reagan. As if symbolically erasing the more recent past, it superseded five such memoranda signed by President Bill Clinton.

Another proposal was that the CIA increase liaison work with key foreign intelligence services. Tenet hoped to obtain the assistance of these agencies with some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in new funding he was seeking. Using such intelligence services as surrogates could triple or quadruple the CIA's effectiveness.

Like much of the world of covert activity, these kinds of arrangements carried risks: It would put the United States in league with questionable agencies, some with dreadful human rights records. Some of these intelligence services had a reputation for ruthlessness and they used torture to obtain confessions. Tenet acknowledged that these were not people you were likely to be sitting next to in church on Sunday.

Tenet also said the United States already had a "large asset base," given the work the CIA had been doing in countries near Afghanistan.

The unmanned Predator surveillance aircraft that was now armed with Hellfire missiles had been operating for more than a year out of Uzbekistan to provide real-time video of Afghanistan. It could be used to kill bin Laden and his key lieutenants from the air -- a major focus of what Tenet now proposed.

In addition, he said, the United States should seek to work closely with Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan to stop the travel of al Qaeda leaders and "close all border crossings" to them. Tenet called for initiating intelligence contact with some rogue states that he said might be helpful in trying to destroy al Qaeda.

A key portion of Tenet's briefing covered operations inside Afghanistan, and here he presented in more detail how the Northern Alliance, the loose amalgam of forces that had been fighting the Taliban for years, could be used. The CIA believed the alliance was potentially a powerful force but was desperate for money, weapons and intelligence. Tenet advocated substantially stepping up "direct support of the Northern Alliance," a proposal the president had said he would approve. U.S. ground forces could then link up with the Northern Alliance fighters.

Operationally, Tenet envisioned a strategy to create "a northern front, closing the safe haven." His idea was that Afghan opposition forces, aided by the United States, would move first against the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif, try to break the Taliban's grip on that city and open up the border with Uzbekistan. From there the campaign could move to other cities in the north, he said.