Combating Terrorism: 'It Starts Today'

Before the meeting ended, Bush made one other point to Rice, which encapsulated the tension they all had been dealing with since the attacks.

The American people will give us time, he told her. They will be patient enough. Still, he knew patience had its limits. He could not go on indefinitely issuing brave warnings to the terrorists and then not act. He told Rice he needed to know how long it might take before they could go to war; he had to prepare the public for what was coming.

The president said he was caught between his determination to show people that he was going to do something, and avoiding something premature that would make the United States look ineffectual. Above all, he did not want the response to appear weak.

Rice jotted his orders down, and returned to her office to draw up a one-page summary of 11 items. It was a war plan on a single sheet of paper.

After meeting with his war cabinet, the president went to the Pentagon. He had been scheduled to visit Fort Bragg, home of the Special Forces and the Delta teams, to watch a demonstration of commando tactics. But the trip to North Carolina had been canceled because it could signal the direction his war plans were taking.

Rumsfeld still wanted the president to have a detailed briefing. Special operations were going to be enormously important, he was sure, so a two-star general was sent from the Special Operations Command to brief the president.

Rice and Frank Miller, the senior NSC staffer for defense, went with the president to the Pentagon. Before the briefing, Miller reviewed the classified slide presentation prepared for Bush and got a big surprise.

One slide about special operations in Afghanistan said: Thinking Outside the Box -- Poisoning Food Supply. Miller was shocked and showed it to Rice. The United States doesn't know how to do this, Miller reminded her, and we're not allowed. It would effectively be a chemical or biological attack -- clearly banned by treaties that the United States had signed, including the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

Rice took the slide to Rumsfeld. "This slide is not going to be shown to the president of the United States," she said.

Rumsfeld agreed. "You're right," he said.

Pentagon officials said later that their own internal review had caught the offending slide and that it never would have been shown to the president or to Rumsfeld.

At the briefing, Pentagon officials outlined for Bush how the Special Forces teams were organized, what they did and how quickly they could move. They also explained the special units of the various services, such as the Navy SEAL teams.

Afterward, the president went to the entrance to the Joint Staff corridor of the Pentagon to address some reservists, some of the 35,000 who were being called up, and answered questions from reporters.

"Do you want bin Laden dead?" one asked.

"There's an old poster out West," the president said, recalling what he had told the Mexican president privately in their phone conversation the day before, "as I recall, that said, 'Wanted Dead or Alive.' "

The president said in December he used the expression to let the public know where he was heading. He knew that later in the day he was to sign a document authorizing covert and overt action designed to capture or kill bin Laden.

"A lot of times you get out here and you know something is going to happen or you're thinking about something. And you get asked a question and it just, it pops out. I'm not very guarded in that sense sometimes. . . . It was a little bit of bravado, but it was also an understanding that in self-defense of America, that I had made that decision in self-defense of America that 'Dead or Alive,' that it's legal."

Later in the afternoon at the White House, the president was presented with two documents to sign. One was a Memorandum of Notification modifying a finding that President Ronald Reagan had signed on May 12, 1986 authorizing counterterrorist operations.

The memorandum was about 10 pages long with two appendices, and it authorized all the steps proposed by Tenet at Camp David to destroy bin Laden and his network. The CIA was now empowered to disrupt the al Qaeda network and other global terrorist networks on a worldwide scale, using lethal covert action to try to keep the role of the United States hidden.

The finding also authorized the CIA to operate freely and fully in Afghanistan with its own paramilitary teams, case officers and the newly armed Predator, an unmanned airborne drone that could provide rich video surveillance and fire missiles if necessary. The Hellfire missiles were the latest covert action tool.

The second document, 2 1/2 pages long, consisted of the orders and action steps to the war cabinet and agencies that Bush had presented earlier that morning. The orders called for actions including financial pressure, diplomatic action, military planning and covert action. It was classified TOP SECRET.

In the middle of the third page the president scribbled in his distinctive longhand, "George W. Bush."

Staff researcher Jeff Himmelman contributed to this report.