Can He Fix It?

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The White House had been considering a plan for homeland security for months, but Bush aides admit that he gave the 11-min. speech ahead of schedule. "We wanted to strike while the iron was hot," says an aide. But in truth, the heat was on Bush. For the first time since the war began, the White House was struggling to remain in control of the agenda. Bush went before the cameras only hours after the televised congressional testimony of FBI whistle-blower Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who ripped the bureau's pre-9/11 bunglings in a letter to director Robert Mueller last month. A no-nonsense Midwesterner with a grim, credible tale of field agents being smothered by layer after layer of self-protecting bureaucrats, she told her story Thursday on Capitol Hill, where multiple inquiries into last summer's intelligence failures opened to the rumble of an early-season thunderstorm.

With 400,000 pages of documents collected by the Joint Intelligence Committee ready to be made public, new revelations are already tumbling out. U.S. counterterrorism officials told TIME that by January 2001, the CIA had briefed officials at the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) about a crucial January 2000 meeting of al-Qaeda agents in Kuala Lumpur--the first indication that the CSG knew about the meeting well before Sept. 11. (The officials would not specify whether the briefing took place in the last days of the Clinton Administration or the early days of Bush's term. White House official Richard Clarke, who will testify before Congress this week, ran the CSG during both terms.) In early 2000 the CIA identified two attendees of the meeting as Nawaz al Hamzi and Khalid al Midhar. The pair would eventually help hijack Flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon. In 2000, while tracking the two, the CIA failed to refer them to the INS's terrorism watch list, allowing them to enter the U.S. A congressional intelligence source told TIME that there is "a significant possibility" that members of the CSG knew about the suspects' movements prior to Sept. 11.

The Administration hopes its proposal for the new Cabinet department will bolster sagging public faith that the government can prevent attacks. "Now we're on offense," says an aide. In Congress the plan will probably touch off a furious battle whose outcome could define Bush's presidency. But the story of how the Administration decided to stage its megamerger--and yet not take on the dysfunctional intelligence agencies--is a case study of the decision-making process of America's first M.B.A. President. George W. Bush likes to think of himself as a CEO who makes the big decisions but leaves the implementation to his hand-picked team of hands-on deputies. How that model has played out over the past few weeks reveals much about what's going wrong and right in America's war on terror. Here are the five management techniques at the heart of Bush's method.

1 DELEGATE RESPONSIBILITY