Inside The War Room

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Dark, windowless and small, the White House Situation Room feels cramped even on quiet mornings. But as the President's top advisers filed in early on Sept. 12, their faces drawn and eyes puffy from lack of sleep, the room was jammed to capacity. Arrayed around the table was one of the most seasoned foreign policy teams ever assembled by a President, and every one of them had just been caught completely off guard. No one more so than George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The day before, after hijacked planes obliterated the World Trade Center and smashed into the Pentagon, George W. Bush had turned to an aide aboard Air Force One and barked, "Get me Tenet!" But the President didn't want Tenet's head. He wanted his help.

Tenet brought four strangers into the Situation Room from CIA headquarters that morning. They stood quietly in the back of the room, almost unseen. One was the head of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center; two others had been covert operatives during the guerrilla war against the Soviets in the 1980s. They had owned whole parts of Afghanistan then. And they had come to the White House to tell the President that they could own Afghanistan again.

If others regarded Tenet as an unlikely choice to run the war on al-Qaeda, Bush didn't see it that way. He knew Tenet was obsessed with Osama bin Laden--"almost abnormally obsessed," says former Oklahoma Senator David Boren, Tenet's mentor. Most important, Bush knew Tenet had a plan. Over the summer--"when we were getting a lot of chatter in the system about potential threats," National Security Council chief Condoleezza Rice recalled--Bush had ordered the CIA and the NSC to draw up a comprehensive proposal for breaking al-Qaeda for good. "I feel like I'm swatting at flies," Bush had complained. "I want a way to take the network down." Tenet's team was working one up when al-Qaeda attacked.

Bush trusted Tenet, even liked him. The President matches his desire for loyalty with an unshakable faith in his ability to judge people instantly--to "look them in the eye," as he likes to say, and size them up. Despite being a Clinton appointee, Tenet had passed those tests months before. Bush made it clear early on that, unlike his predecessor, he expected to see his CIA director often. Tenet obliged, turning up at least twice a week for the President's morning intelligence briefing. He fed Bush the good stuff--raw human intelligence, along with plans for action--instead of meandering analysis. "He wasn't puffed up or pompous," says Vice President Dick Cheney. "The President clearly likes that." It also helped the CIA director that the President's father, the only person in the world who had been both CIA director and President, gave Tenet high marks.