The Way of the World Read online

  More notes are jotted on the pad.

  Usman looks, pleadingly, at Italian. “Can you at least tell me why I was picked up? Was it just the way I look?”

  “It was also what you were doing, fooling with your iPod as the motorcade passed. That didn’t help. You understand how bombs are detonated by remote devices?”

  No, no, I’m not going there.

  “Um, no, not really.”

  Dirty Blond: “You’re from Pakistan and you don’t know how things are detonated with radios or cell phones or PDAs?” He seems angry.

  “Well, I guess—yes, I do.” A lie.

  More notes on Dirty Blond’s pad. I’ll never see my mother again.

  Italian, smiling, asks, “Why did you think you were stopped?”

  Usman pauses. He’s drenched in sweat. Hasn’t eaten yet today. He was going to get a muffin this morning near the office. He’s been underground for hours. Has to be at least midafternoon. He tries to answer with only the facts he’s sure of.

  “Well, a guy in a uniform stopped me.”

  “What kind of uniform?”

  “Secret Service, or something else.” He can’t pull it up.

  “You don’t remember? It just happened.”

  “No, no I can’t.” This draws arched brows from both agents.

  They ask him a long list of medical questions. Has he ever been treated for depression? Paranoia? Bipolar disorder? The list goes on.

  Dirty Blond produces a form, a medical release form.

  He pushes it across the table. “This is so we can access all your medical records, to check everything you’ve just said.”

  Usman is thoroughly beaten. He just nods, silently, and signs.

  Both agents rise, Dirty Blond in the lead. “If anything you told us today doesn’t check out, we know where to find you. And we will find you.”

  Usman nods, looking down. “Let’s go,” Dirty Blond orders.

  As George W. Bush is returning to the White House—having just finished a rousing speech about the “miracle of the U.S. economy” to manufacturers gathered at the Grand Hyatt Washington—Usman Khosa is leaving it.

  Dirty Blond leads him through the security gate and onto the sidewalk. He seems oddly jocular, assuming Italian’s friendly posture. They walk along, as though they’ll be staying together.

  “So I think I’ve got you,” he says, like it’s a joke. “Why are you wearing shorts and a T-shirt if you’re really on your way to an office, right over there?”

  He stops. Usman stops. They’re face-to-face, or rather forehead-to-chin. Usman measures every word. “Because my suit for today is at the cleaners near the office. I was going to pick it up.”

  Dirty Blond stops, calculating the response. It’s clear he was saving this one—saving it until Usman had let down his guard. “So what’s the name of the cleaners?”

  “Oh God, I really just don’t know.”

  “Okay, you’re free to go. But I’ll be checking out everything you’ve told us. And, at this point, we know everything about you and where to find you.” He turns and walks briskly back toward the White House. Usman is left standing on the sidewalk.

  And so two characters—a president, chosen to represent America to the world, and a Muslim striver, who’s acutely representative of a struggle now turning history’s wheel—watch the day’s shadows lengthen.

  One reads through security briefings, preparing for his meeting the next morning with Tony Blair when he plans to talk frankly about this airline plot.

  The other walks across the street to Lafayette Park, sits in the grass, and weeps.

  After a time—could be five minutes, or twenty-five—he calls his friend. “Thank God, Usman, thank merciful God,” Reggie says. “Look, come over to the office. Everyone here’s been worried sick.” Usman says he will, but first he calls his other friend, Zarar. He calls his father, leaves another message. He calls Linas at his office, and David at his. He tells them they may be getting calls from the Secret Service. He sits some more, wondering how many people of all those he mentioned will now be called by the FBI, or the Secret Service, or Homeland Security, or CIA, or whoever the hell follows up on this sort of thing. Will some of them get tripped up in the questioning? Should he call them all and alert them, or would that constitute “suspicious behavior”?

  These questions distress him for a half hour. He begins to wander over toward Alexander Hamilton. Looks up at the pointed, patrician chin, the aquiline nose, and then crosses Fifteenth Street. When he gets off the elevator on ten, Reggie leaps from the reception desk and throws his arms around him. He’s talking excitedly as others start to gather in the carpeted reception area. The whole gang seems to be moving, carrying Usman along, toward the conference room.

  Usman sees something on the long mahogany table. The crowd parts. It’s a cake, a sheet cake the size of a car door. Linda the office manager ran to a bakery across the street and got it once Reggie trumpeted the good news. Written in blue on the white icing are the words WELCOME HOME USMAN.

  What a strange and surprising country this is, Usman Khosa thinks, lifting the first slice to his lips. Heaven and hell, and then we eat cake. His mind reels, as his heart searches the faces—his friends, his colleagues, this makeshift American family—aching to know if he’s still one of them.

  CHAPTER 2

  Takeoffs and Landings

  EVENTS MOVE FORWARD SWIFTLY AND in secret. These are the operational trademarks of the era of Bush and Cheney. Keep the information loop small, a tight circle of trusted people. The actual decision is often made by just the two men, alone in a room—the Oval Office, the video room at Camp David, the small dining room on the second floor of the White House, where they lunch.

  Once the why is decided, keep discussion of the how—how it will be done—as tightly controlled as possible. Just like running an intelligence operation, people will sometimes see part of the equation—this was ordered, that was done—but not the whole.

  For complete context you need to pull back a distance and gauge, first, the traditional dilemmas of the so-called political mandate. Politicians have always felt its pull—survival’s tug—and have had to decide, day to day, where or whether their political self-interest coincides with the broader interests of the nation. Their reelection, or place in history, often depends on their choices along this axis.

  The oddity, however, of the modern conflict between governments and terrorists, conducted largely in secret, is that this tendentious line can be drawn in the privacy of the White House, invisible to anyone except those who need to know.

  Along with its penchant for secrecy, a feature of the Bush presidency, clear at this point, six years along, has been a sense of messianic purpose that makes the national interest almost indistinguishable from the political interests of the president. What triggers action, thereby, is often Bush’s simple dissatisfaction, the garden-variety frustration of not getting one’s way.

  And the meeting with Blair on the morning of July 28 happens not to go well. When Bush brings up the airliner plot and expresses his desire to snap the trap shut, Blair is unmoved. He says he’s quite clear about the position of his people—Eliza Manningham-Buller, the imperious head of MI5, domestic intelligence; and John Scarlett, the chief of MI6, the foreign service. They seem to have prepared Blair for just this kind of push from the Americans. It’s not just that this is a UK operation, Blair says, and that nearly two thousand British operatives have been working it for nearly a year. It’s also that if they’re patient, at some point they’ll be “at the ready” when the plotters seek “green light” approval from al Qaeda’s chiefs. It’s too large a plot for them not to. After all, it was U.S. intelligence, Blair points out, that discovered how Zawahiri called off the New York City cyanide-in-the-subway plot in 2003 for “something better.” With a plot as big as what is slowly developing in London, the terrorists will surely seek permission to move forward, and when they do, Blair asserts, we can run the thread right
into Zawahiri’s beard.

  By then, it’s time for their joint press conference. Bush is not going to get anything. After Blair leaves, Bush tells Cheney about his dissatisfaction. Cheney receives the message clearly, as he’s received many others over the years. He knows how concerned Bush is about the coming midterm elections, that Congress will go to the Democrats and the rest of his administration will be a wash of gridlock and recrimination. Cheney, of course, is similarly concerned. And now Bush wants something done. No one needs to create any memos, which some historian might dig up. In a private, two-man exchange there is an understanding. This is the way their relationship works, especially on the most sensitive matters that Bush will want to deny if he’s ever confronted.

  This sort of deniability is the product of the arrangement Bush and Cheney slipped into in the first few months of the administration. That’s when Bush told Cheney that he had to “step back” in large meetings when they were together, like those at the NSC, because people were addressing and deferring to Cheney. Cheney said he understood, that he’d mostly just take notes at the big tables and then he and Bush would meet privately, frequently, to discuss options and action. This gave Cheney the structural latitude to carry forward his complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president. After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know—things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive. The key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never anything he’d authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his actions. Cheney’s view is that accountability—a bedrock feature of representative democracy—is not, in every case, a virtue.

  So over the next week, as Bush packs up and arrives in Crawford, Cheney makes provisions. It’s all very tightly held. No one can know what’s under way—no one, certainly, in the foreign policy establishment and not even most top officials in the intelligence community.

  If this were run on a split screen, one image would be a man slipping into Islamabad in darkness in early August. The man is Jose Rodriquez, the director of operations at CIA, the agency’s number four official, and the head of all clandestine operations and CIA stations around the world. He was moved into that position in 2005 by Porter Goss, as part of Goss’s mission to rein in the renegade agency and make it more attentive to filling the needs of its “customer,” the White House. Outside of Cheney’s office, virtually no one in America or abroad knows that Rodriquez has been dispatched to Islamabad. It is not, however, Pakistan’s powerful Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, that Rodriguez and Cheney are concerned about. It’s that British intelligence will discover Rodriguez’s presence through their sources in Pakistan or those in the U.S. intelligence community.

  His mission is to secretly pass information to a selected Pakistani intelligence official, who will summarily arrest one Rashid Rauf, the Pakistani contact for the British airline plotters. Rodriguez then has to get out of the country undetected.

  He manages this, and Rauf is quietly apprehended. As a whisper of the arrest spreads to a few top officials in British intelligence—first in Islamabad and then in London—they curse, throw ashtrays, and scream bloody murder. They know the Pakistanis would never have moved on Rauf without first checking with them. And God knows the Brits didn’t the give the order.

  This was their investigation. They might have made arrests in a week, or in a month. Clearly the hijackers were moving into some next stage of planning, but many inside of the British intelligence and law enforcement communities were beginning to suspect it was more experimentation than anything resembling a “dry run.” If so, taking them down too early would leave investigators with insufficient evidence to effectively prosecute. The British model is, after all, to be patient, gather sufficient evidence to try terror suspects in open court, and get long prison terms, treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic—and terrorist-glamorizing—clash of power and ideology. As for Rashid Rauf, the British had even more specific plans. He was wanted for murder in the UK. The Brits were preparing a case, with plenty of evidence, for the Pakistani police to arrest him and have him extradited to England for trial, just like any murderer on the lam. Instead, he gets picked up by the notorious ISI, where he’ll be either tortured or feted—depending on ISI’s complicated views of the matter—and rendered unsuitable for public trial in the UK or anywhere else.

  His arrest lights a fuse that will swiftly implode their entire investigation. Top U.S. officials are perplexed. DHS intelligence chief Charlie Allen, a CIA legend who helped uncover the Iran-Contra affair, predicted the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1991, and was ahead of the curve on al Qaeda in 1998, tells the Brits that he and DHS are surprised as well. “Jose had to get the green light from upstairs, but no one here was briefed,” a senior intelligence official recounted later. “We were all shocked.” No one, beyond a half-dozen people in the entire U.S. government, several of them among Cheney’s national security team, knew who was responsible.

  But not everyone is upset. Bush suddenly is in a very good mood. He’d seemed a bit glum when he first arrived in Crawford, aides said. But by Tuesday, August 8, he is notably ebullient, spirits high, watching the thermometer with glee. It’s turning into a Central Texas scorcher. Ninety-seven degrees by late morning. Now ninety-nine! Just after 1:00 p.m., as the temperature passes one hundred, he starts rousting up staffers: tryouts, immediately, for the president’s 100-Degree Club. The rules? Run three miles when the thermometer hits triple digits. The coveted prize: a gray Under Armour T-shirt with the insignia “The President’s 100-Degree Club” framed by a Texas Star. You also get a photo with Bush, commemorating membership in the club. Eighteen White House aides, among them the press secretary, Tony Snow, line up and set off. Bush, who blew out his knee jogging in 2003, pedals around them on his bike, mocking the leaders, taunting the stragglers. He’s giddy. The ones who make it the three miles, including Snow, gasp toward the finish line, purple and breathless. The rest, also called losers, get no shirts. Then, pumped up, Bush hits the phones, making preparations for some political jaunts over the coming days to assist beleaguered Republican candidates. He knows he’ll be able to deliver something for them, an August surprise, something very good for the Protectors of America.

  On Wednesday, August 9, Cheney decides he wants to do a surprise press briefing from his vacation home in the Wyoming hills. This is unusual. Reporters sign on. The previous evening, antiwar candidate Ned Lamont defeated Joe Lieberman in Connecticut’s Democratic primary. Cheney is notably strident, saying that Lamont’s victory will encourage “al Qaeda types.”

  “And when we see the Democratic Party reject one of its own,” Cheney continues, referring to Lieberman, “a man they selected to be their vice presidential nominee just a few short years ago, it would seem to say a lot about the state the party is in today if that’s becoming the dominant view of the Democratic Party, the basic, fundamental notion that somehow we can retreat behind our oceans and not be actively engaged in this conflict and be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won’t—we can’t be.” He goes on to describe this as a sort of “pre-9/11 mind set, in terms of how we deal with the world we live in.” Now he just has to sit in his vacation home and wait for events to catch up with his words.

  Of course, everything becomes clear in the early morning hours of August 10. An associate of Rauf’s in Pakistan alerted one of the British plotters that their man in Pakistan had been arrested—a conversation that is picked up by electronic surveillance shared by the UK and the United States. As th
e plotters panic, British police slip into high gear. They race across metropolitan London, rounding up more than twenty suspects in a few hours, shutting down a yearlong operation in what can only be called a frenzy. The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they’re already assessing the damage from what one calls a “forced, foolish hastiness.” The haul from a suburban “safe house” shows that the plotters had begun to experiment with ways to get the explosives aboard the airliners. In a general way, they’d started to examine the pattern of flight schedules to the United States. In other words, early planning stages—the most valuable time for British agents to sit and wait, tug the net gently and watch for the arrival of “operational readiness,” the moment the plotters would seek permission from on high.

  But by the time panicked British police are kicking down doors, the White House already has a media strategy set to leverage news of the thwarted attack, “the worst since 9/11.” All that’s left to do is wait a few hours until sunrise, when the arrests will hit the U.S. news cycles and the president and vice president can register surprise about how right they’ve been all along, about everything.

  WHILE AMERICA SLEEPS, NAEEM MUHSINY is walking through the Frankfurt Airport, thinking of Moses.

  And he hates that. Religious allegory, there’s no getting away from it! He views religion, all religions, as “an illusion, an opiate,” though he won’t tell that to just anyone or how that conclusion grew during his youth in an Afghan madrassa and deepened across the years he endured the sectarian strife of his country and neighboring Pakistan.

  No, such candor doesn’t fit with Naeem’s current obligations, shepherding Afghanistan’s brightest teenagers to America for an extraordinary experiment in cultural connection, in the possible. The mission: pluck forty kids from across the war-torn Islamic nation, teach them everything that can be learned about America in a month of orientation, find families in the United States to host them, and then manage a journey across a dozen time zones and several centuries to deposit each unwitting youngster into the living room of some volunteer family and the bustling halls of an American high school. In a year they’ll return home—if they can survive that long.