If you are a Little Leaguer, you fantasize about playing in the World Series. If you are a piano student, you aspire to perform in Carnegie Hall. And if you are a young CIA analyst, your dream job is to be the daily briefer for the president of the United States. I was no different. I grew up in CIA admiring the officers who briefed presidents—including an officer named Chuck Peters, nicknamed Pete, who briefed President George H. W. Bush and was a legend at the Agency for completely rewriting PDB (President’s Daily Brief) articles drafted by the analysts, or even writing his own PDB pieces and calling surprised analysts to his office to sign off on them. There was also an officer and friend named John Brennan, now the director of CIA, who was President Bill Clinton’s first intelligence briefer.
My dream came true in December 2000 when I was selected to be the briefer for the newly elected George W. Bush. My boss at the time, the Agency’s head of analysis, Winston Wiley, called me into his office and offered me the job, saying, “There is no one else who can do this as well as you can.”
Although I knew there was hyperbole in what Wiley said, if he thought that this was good for the Agency, then that meant a great deal to me. When he asked me about the briefer job, he and I had just returned from a conference in Hawaii on Asian issues. My five-year-old son Luke was working on a Flat Stanley project for kindergarten class. The project involves a cutout doll—Flat Stanley—and the goal is to get photographs of Stanley taken in as many places around the world as possible. With that objective in mind, I had brought Stanley along with me to Hawaii. When Wiley heard about this, he’d insisted on driving Stanley and me around Oahu and Maui, snapping pictures on the sides of steep volcanoes, stunning green valleys, and beautiful sandy beaches. Luke’s project had hit pay dirt. Wiley was the kind of boss who earned total loyalty from his people.
I said yes to Wiley’s offer on the spot. He was asking me to walk into the Oval Office every morning. Being a presidential briefer is a huge honor but an even greater responsibility, because what a briefer chooses to show to a president and what he says about it helps shape a commander in chief’s view of the world and therefore the decisions he makes on important national security issues. This, of course, is widely known across the senior ranks of the national security team, which pays close attention to what a briefer says to a president. Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, once sent a letter to George Tenet complaining that something I had told President Bush regarding Taiwan’s relationship with the United States was not accurate and he wanted the record corrected. When Tenet showed me the letter, it hit home just how big a deal this job was. Just a couple of months later the importance of the job was again driven home—this time by Steve Hadley, the president’s deputy national security advisor. Tenet and I gave Hadley a ride to Camp David on a Saturday morning, and he and I had a conversation about the PDB and the president. I learned a lot from the conversation that would help me in the months ahead but I particularly remember Hadley saying, “The Agency’s analysis shapes the president’s view of the world. He makes decisions based on your analysis. So you have a huge responsibility to get everything right, every day.”
After talking to Wiley about the job, I walked across the suite and met with Wiley’s principal deputy, Jami Miscik, who had just returned from a few days of briefing President-elect Bush at the governor’s mansion in Austin, Texas. What Miscik said scared the hell out of me. “You will really need to be prepared every day,” she said. “He will fire questions at you at a rapid pace and he expects you to be able to answer most of them. He will test you to see how much you know, and he will test you to see if you are willing to say you don’t know when you have reached the limits of your knowledge. He doesn’t want you guessing or speculating if you don’t know. In short, get ready for a challenging assignment.” All of a sudden, I was having second thoughts.
By the time I got home that night, I had mostly pushed the second thoughts out of my mind. I told my wife, Mary Beth, the news. Although I have this bad habit of accepting jobs and talking about it with her after the fact, she was OK with the decision. This not only made sense professionally but it also seemed to both of us to make sense from a family perspective. At the time our children were seven, five, and three, and we figured that starting work in the middle of the night and coming home about noon, I would be able to pick the kids up at school, help them with their homework, and just be around more.
With only a week of preparation, I was on my way to Texas to be introduced to the president-elect as his dedicated intelligence briefer. I walked into the kitchen of the Governor’s Mansion in Austin where the president-elect had just finished getting a haircut. George W. Bush stood from the chair and with a firm handshake, looking me straight in the eye, said, “Welcome to Texas. Grab a cup of coffee and let’s go upstairs to my study.”
The job was another baptism by fire. The first day I watched Wiley do most of the briefing, although he had me walk through one piece about Chinese military modernization “to get my feet wet.” The second day I did the entire briefing myself, with Wiley observing. I asked the president-elect if he wanted a Saturday briefing and he said, “No, but call me if you think I need to know something. Otherwise, I will see you on Monday.” From then on I would be flying solo.
The second day provided an indication of the high expectations of our new “First Customer,” as CIA analysts call the president of the United States. At the end of the briefing, Wiley explained that CIA planned to change the presentational format of the PDB. After a few sentences of detail, the president-elect interrupted him. “Winston,” he said, “I don’t care about the format. I don’t care if you bind it at the top, on the side, hold it together with a paper clip or even spit. What I care about is the content.” The president-elect then went on to speak for thirty minutes about his expectations for the intelligence community. He said, “There are people out there who want to hurt the United States. I want you to find out what they are trying to do and tell me. And I don’t want to hear that it is hard to do; I know it is hard, but I expect you to do it.” I thought to myself, “Not a bad mission statement for the collectors of intelligence.” The president added, “And I am going to be making many tough decisions as president on national security, and I expect that you will fully inform every one of those decisions.” I thought, “Great mission statement for our analysts.” I also thought, “I really like this guy.” Then came the punch line: the president-elect said, “I guess when I am president I will start seeing the good stuff.” It struck Winston and me that the president-elect thought we were holding back, not showing him the Agency’s most sensitive secrets. But we were already showing him “the good stuff.” The president-elect had just raised the bar sky-high. We went back to the office we were working out of in Austin, called Director Tenet, and reported, “We just had an oh shit moment.”
President Bush had this way of always raising the bar, always challenging you to do better. Once, on Air Force One, I showed him an intelligence report based on the comments that a Middle Eastern leader had made to our chief of station. After reading the report, the president said, “Michael, that is interesting. But what I really want to know is not what the leader is saying to me through CIA but what he is saying behind my back to Saddam Hussein.”
Along with the very high bar, though, came one of the most enjoyable experiences of my life—getting to know the forty-third president of the United States. He treated me with respect and affection—like a member of his family, like a son. Before briefings at the ranch in Crawford, we would have cereal together, talk about the previous night’s baseball games, and wash and dry the breakfast dishes together (a requirement of the First Lady). On my first visit to the ranch, the president-elect insisted on giving me a tour. Into a golf cart we jumped, and with the Secret Service in tow, Bush drove through the ranch, describing the different environs and the flora and fauna in great detail.
What struck me quickly about the president was that he was a normal guy—informal and approachable. During one briefing at the ranch in January 2001, the phone rang, and the president-elect answered and simply said, “Of course.” When he finished the call, he explained to me that the First Lady was doing some work on the new home they were just finishing on the ranch and that she’d asked that he bring some light bulbs over when the briefing was done. He then said, “Pal, the most important thing you are going to do today is not let me forget those light bulbs when we’re done here.” On another occasion in Crawford, I walked into the house to find the president tidying—picking up newspapers, straightening pillows, that sort of thing. I said to him, “Mr. President, it is sure good to know that even presidents have to do housework.” He responded, “Pal, you don’t know my wife!” All of this, of course, made me very comfortable around the president, and my biggest concern was that I would one day slip up and call him George instead of Mr. President.
Starting Monday, January 8, it was my job to deliver the PDB—five days a week during the transition and six days a week after the inauguration. I’d start work at four a.m., sifting through the most critical pieces of current intelligence and analysis, deciding which ones to present and in what order, cramming additional information on each topic into my head in case the president or any of the others in the room—almost always Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and White House Chief of Staff Andy Card—had additional questions, as they almost always did. The president told me once, “I’m easy. It is the other folks in the room that you have to worry about.” It was like preparing to orally defend several graduate school dissertations every day, six days a week.
And there was a new twist with this president, something we had never done before with any president—travel with him. The president’s first trip was to Mexico to see President Vicente Fox, and the day before the president was to depart, he asked me if I was coming along. Thinking that we had never done this before and having no idea how we would do it, I actually responded, “I think it is a long way to go just for a thirty-minute briefing.” As Tenet and I walked out of the Oval Office, Tenet whispered to me, “I can’t believe you just blew off the president of the United States.” Not surprisingly, the president got his way about the travel, and never again did my response to a presidential query carry so little tact. If nothing else, I am a fast learner.
I traveled with the president wherever he went—on day or overnight trips around the country, on foreign trips, and on vacations, which turned out to be either at his father’s home in Kennebunkport, Maine, or, much more often, at the ranch in Crawford, Texas. The president spent Memorial Day weekend in 2001 at the Kennebunkport estate, and as I walked up the driveway for the briefing, he was playing fetch with his beloved dog Barney. As he threw a tennis ball across the lawn and with Barney in hot pursuit, the president said, “Michael, I have a question for you and this is a test.” “Oh, God,” I thought, “not a test!” The president continued, “Should we spend the month of August here, where it will be a beautiful seventy degrees, or in Crawford, where it will be one hundred degrees?” I knew the “right” answer, of course, but I went the other way. “Mr. President, no doubt about it. We should be right here.” “Wrong,” the president said, adding with a grin, “Michael, I am disappointed in you.”
A briefing would generally include seven or eight items, each of them placed in a three-ring blue leather binder with the words “President’s Daily Brief” and the president’s name embossed on the cover. Copies were made for the others in the room, although each of them, except Card, had already received his or her own briefing before the session with the president. If Rice or the vice president had had an issue with a particular piece, the briefers tried to alert me before I went into the Oval Office so that I would not be blindsided.
It was up to me to decide both what to show the president and how to brief complex issues so that he took away the key points. Typically I would “tee up” each item in the briefing book with a few words—for example, reminding him of the last thing we had told him about the topic, telling him how this new piece advanced the story, and giving him a preview of the key points. The president would then read the item, often quite carefully. But sometimes, with a complicated or poorly constructed piece, I would have to do more. One morning I found on my desk a two-page piece containing a detailed chart on the Palestinian intifada. After reading the piece several times, I could not see the bottom line. After more reading and a detailed study of the chart, I concluded that the key point was that, despite the very high levels of violence in the West Bank, the vast majority of it was occurring in only three towns. Interesting, I thought, so I simply asked our cartographers to put all the violent incidents on a map, which showed three main clusters, and I showed the president only this map, making the main point orally.
After reading a piece or listening to me brief it, the president would either ask me questions about the item’s substance or, more frequently, ask the senior officials in the room questions about the policy implications of the intelligence. When the discussion ended on the first topic we would move to the next item in the binder. Although thirty minutes were usually allotted for the briefing, more often than not it ran much longer.
Bush entered office with a strong-willed and strong-minded national security team including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. But he personally did not have a particularly deep background in foreign affairs. One thing that made him stand out, however, was that he was the son of a former president who was also a former CIA director. The president told me that his father, George H. W. Bush, had stressed to him the importance of his daily intelligence briefing. He had clearly taken that advice to heart, and I found him incredibly interested in the broad range of subjects I would bring to him each morning. The president was very quick to understand the essence of an issue, and I found his gut instincts on policy to be right on the mark. Sometimes I thought the president too quick to make a decision, but I also know from my own experience as a leader that a quick decision is better than a late decision or no decision.
Some of the most special moments for me were when President George H. W. Bush, aka “41,” would join the briefing, which he did fifteen or so times during my year as briefer. As a former president, he had that right; as a national security expert and a former CIA director, he very was interested; and as a man who commanded deep respect inside the Agency, he was more than welcome. One morning, just days before the inauguration, 41 joined us for the briefing, which was being held in Blair House (the president’s official guesthouse). In the middle of a discussion about the steps Russian president Vladimir Putin was taking to rebuild the Russian military after a decade of decay, the former president said to the president-elect and the rest of us, “I’ve done this before. You guys deal with this. I’m going to play with the grandkids.”
43 asked many questions—just as Miscik had predicted. One of the things he was interested in knowing was how we knew what we knew. For a piece of information provided to us by a human spy, he would want to know the source’s position so he could judge for himself the credibility of the information—perhaps the informant was an aide in the prime minister’s office who had been at the meeting when the issue was discussed, or a friend of the aide who’d heard the information secondhand. When the intelligence was derived from intercepted communications, he would want to know exactly who was communicating with whom and how—by phone, e-mail, fax, etc. In response, I developed separate mechanisms with CIA operations directorate and with the National Security Agency to get the information I needed. I was now sharing with the president and the others in the room some of the most sensitive information anywhere inside the US intelligence community or even the entire US government.
For the first briefing I did following the inauguration, I was accompanied by George Tenet, who had been director of central intelligence since 1997 under President Clinton. After that, Tenet came only sporadically, and I was on my own most of the time. This ended in the second week of February when President Bush, at the end of a briefing, asked me, “Does George understand that I would like to see him here with you every day?”
“He will, as soon as I get back to the Agency,” I responded.
“Good,” said the president. That had never been the practice, but Tenet, as any Agency director would have been, was happy to comply. It was awkward at first, since the Bush team had not told Tenet whether it planned to keep him on or not, a decision it did not make until late February.
I asked Tenet how he wanted to handle the sessions and he quickly decided that I was to continue doing the “play-by-play” and he would jump in periodically to do the “color commentary.” It proved successful. When the president traveled, only I would be with him, but when he was in Washington, I had Tenet as my wingman. It’s a bit odd having your boss watch you do your job every day, like being named starting quarterback and finding your coach in the huddle. But I had been his executive assistant for two years; Tenet and I were close, and he helped my performance by regularly giving me useful tips and critiques.
Tenet and I would meet every morning in his “downtown” office in the Old Executive Office Building at the White House. There we would plan the briefing, with Tenet deciding which pieces he wanted to remark on. Then, at 7:55 a.m., we would walk across West Executive Avenue to be outside the Oval Office at precisely eight a.m. for the briefing. The president was almost never late.
Tenet’s presence in the room was extremely helpful to the president. For almost any national security issue that came up, Tenet was able to explain the history of the issue, how the Clinton administration tried to deal with it, what had worked, and what had not. I was worried at first about Rice’s reaction to Tenet’s talking about policy, but she too seemed appreciative of the background. There was an early tendency on Bush’s part to be leery of any of Clinton’s approaches to issues—investing US credibility in trying to find an accommodation between the Palestinians and the Israelis, for example—but Tenet’s commentary seemed to ease that tendency. Tenet provided a continuity in national security policy that most presidents do not get.
The briefings during those first few months were tough sledding, not because of the president or anyone else in the room, but because the Agency was not producing a sufficiently high-quality product to meet the president’s expectations. Tenet would routinely pull pieces from the book—sometimes at my urging—judging them to be not good enough for the president, either because they told him something he already knew or because the analysis was not insightful enough. Our Middle East analysis was most often the victim—the analysts for that region frequently produced pieces that did not advance the president’s thinking. Occasionally one of these pieces would slip by, and after reading it, the president would look at me and say, “Duh, no shit.” That is customer feedback. But to its credit, the analytic side of the Agency worked hard to improve its game and the number of pieces pulled by Tenet or criticized by Bush declined sharply over time.
There were a number of international incidents during the first few months of the Bush administration that dominated the briefings. The biggest crisis in those early months was when a US Navy EP-3 surveillance aircraft had a midair collision with a Chinese fighter over the South China Sea and was forced to land at a Chinese military base on Hainan Island. A tense ten-day diplomatic crisis ensued, and I think our analysis proved extremely helpful to the president. One piece that seemed particularly useful was a comparison of China’s public statements about the United States regarding the EP-3 incident with its statements during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996 (when the Chinese moved military assets in response to an independence-minded Taiwanese president and the United States responded by moving an aircraft carrier into the Taiwan Strait). This comparison showed that the Chinese were much less concerned about the EP-3 incident than they had been about Taiwan, and spoke to the need for patience on the part of the United States. Bush was indeed patient and the crisis ended peacefully.
While the briefings were filled with analysis and discussions about serious issues, the sessions were not without their lighter moments. I particularly remember the president’s dog Barney chewing on the tassels on Tenet’s loafers as the CIA director struggled mightily to give Bush the impression he didn’t mind. I also remember the president’s telling a not particularly funny joke one morning in the Oval Office. When no one laughed, the president turned to me and said, “Michael, your job is to laugh at my jokes—even if they are not funny.”
And during a briefing at Camp David as the president, George Tenet, Steve Hadley, and I were sitting around a coffee table discussing a PDB article, Barney got a piece of plastic stuck in his throat. The president was the first to notice. Both the president and I pushed the briefing books from our laps and tried to reach the dog, who was under the table. The president grabbed Barney, and the piece of plastic popped out of his mouth onto the floor. I quickly grabbed it, and when I did, I said proudly, “Mr. President, I got it.” The president responded by saying, “Good job, Michael.” And during this entire time, Tenet and Hadley continued their substantive discussion. The president looked at them with wry irritation.
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When it came to al Qa‘ida and Bin Ladin, the early 2001 briefings focused on two issues. The first surrounded responsibility for the October 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole. President Clinton had left office with no clear intelligence linking the al Qa‘ida leadership with the bombing that had killed seventeen of the ship’s crew and wounded thirty-nine. On January 25 we wrote a piece for the new president outlining our preliminary assessment, that the plot had been directed from Afghanistan by the al Qa‘ida leadership. Because we could not nail down responsibility with certainty and because President Bush believed that the “pinpricks” of cruise missile strikes did not serve any real military objective, there would be no US response to the Cole bombing pending development of a more robust response to al Qa‘ida, which in the spring and summer of 2001 was in the process of being put together.
The second issue with regard to al Qa‘ida in the early months was bringing pieces to the president designed to educate him about the group. We provided the president with analytic pieces on the group’s training camps in Afghanistan, its fund-raising capabilities and networks, its complex relationship with the Taliban, and the Taliban’s multifaceted relationships with some of our allies. In short, I wanted to give the president as much as we could provide about what CIA believed was the leading national security threat facing the United States.
In retrospect, I think it would have been helpful had the intelligence community produced a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for the new administration on the threat posed by al Qa‘ida. An NIE is the community’s premier product—the authoritative voice of the analysts throughout the IC on an issue. It is discussed and approved by the leadership of the community. I think such a document would have helped put al Qa‘ida in context for the new administration and helped it understand the seriousness with which intelligence officials took al Qa‘ida.
I should add, however, that during the transition and during those first three months, there was little to no specific threat reporting on what al Qa‘ida was plotting. That changed dramatically in the spring. In fact, starting in the spring and through early summer, the bulk of my time in the Oval Office was taken up with wide-ranging and increasingly frightening reports about terrorist threats from al Qa‘ida. From late April until early July we were picking up very worrisome intelligence, with al Qa‘ida members telling each other of “very good news to come,” and that “significant victories” were on the horizon. None of the reports were specific in terms of location, timing, or method of attack, but all were shared with the president and his entire national security team.
On the morning of April 18, I walked, as I did every morning, into Tenet’s “downtown” office at the Old Executive Office Building. As soon as he saw me, he said, in a tone that I knew meant there would be no debate, “I’m taking over the briefing today.” The night before, at his daily CT update, our officers had briefed Tenet on credible information that Bin Ladin was planning multiple significant attacks. The analysts were writing a piece to put this information together and explain it, but Tenet was not going to wait to tell the president. He switched seats with me to place himself closer to the president and vice president—the only time he did that in my entire year of briefing—and he did both the play-by-play and the color commentary in vintage Tenet style. And there was a lot of color that morning. When Tenet gets rolling it can be an amazing thing to witness. He is an outstanding briefer who speaks with great clarity and with a conviction that commands the room, and that morning he expressed in words, tone, and body language his deep concern that al Qa‘ida was going to hit us. While he had the floor in the Oval Office, I was watching the reactions of the president and his senior advisors. It was not clear to me at the time if the tactic was working, however. I could see that they did not know what to make of Tenet’s passion, which made sense in the context of what the previous administration had been through—the East Africa bombings, the attempted attacks during the pre-millennium period, and the Cole attack. The piece produced by the analysts the next day, on April 19—based on the same information that Tenet had orally presented the previous morning—was titled “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations.” The 9/11 Commission would later title one of the chapters of its report with a quote from Tenet about this period: “The system was blinking red.”
After the one-time event of Tenet leading the briefing, we went back to our usual format. The threat reporting continued—other pieces were titled “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” and “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks”—but I sensed some skepticism about it. The vice president one morning asked me whether all this threat reporting might not be deception on the part of al Qa‘ida—purposely designed to get our attention and to get us to needlessly expend resources in response. We were getting the same question from Donald Rumsfeld’s staff at the Defense Department. Steve Cambone, at that time a special assistant to the secretary of defense, visited Tenet in his office to tell him that the Pentagon’s view was that this was all deception. Tenet told Cambone, “I want you to look in my eyes. I want you to hear what I have to say. This is not deception. This is the real deal.” Still, the vice president deserved an answer. So I had CIA analysts consider that possibility, and they came back with a report titled “UBL Threats Are Real.” When I finished briefing that piece—that day on Air Force One—the president jokingly said to me, “OK, Michael. You’ve covered your ass.” I tell this story only to ensure that the history of this period is recorded with accuracy, as word of the president’s comment spread and it was mistakenly referred to as a response to the now-famous August 6 briefing that I will address shortly. Most important, the president said it to me as a joke. It was not a serious comment on the piece or on the warnings that CIA was providing about an al Qa‘ida attack, which he took seriously.
In mid-July the threat reporting suddenly dried up, with some intelligence even suggesting that the major attacks had been delayed. At the time we could not explain the lull, nor can we fully explain it today. We do know that a good bit of the reporting we saw in the late spring and early summer resulted from Bin Ladin’s going from training camp to training camp giving pep talks to his troops. During these talks the Sheikh, as he was known to his followers, would speak of “good news to come” and “preparations to strike the idol of the world.” Not surprisingly, this kind of talk spread and we picked up some of it. Why it stopped in mid-July is hard to say. My best guess is that, as the hijackers were moving into position and lying low, Bin Ladin and his leadership stopped talking about attacks even in general terms. They were practicing operational security. As the time for their strike approached, they went silent in an effort to make sure nothing interfered with their murderous plans. There are two times when you need to worry about terrorists: when you pick up their chatter and when you don’t—which means, of course, that you worry all the time.
In August the president went off on an extended vacation to his ranch in Crawford, and I went with him. Earlier in the summer, I had met with each analytic office in the Agency to discuss what it might want to write during the “summer doldrums”—the weeks of late July and August when it was hard to get the number of good PDB pieces we needed because so many people were on vacation. So we did as much preparation as we could. When I met with the terrorism analysts, I asked them to write the now-famous August 6 PDB titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” I asked for this piece because earlier in the year, whenever Tenet and I would brief the president on the al Qa‘ida threat, the president would directly ask us, “Is there any indication that this threat is aimed here at the United States?” He was clearly very worried about that possibility. My answer to that question—supported by Tenet—was always the same: “Mr. President, while there is no specific information to suggest that these attacks we are hearing about are aimed at the homeland, Bin Ladin would like nothing more than to bring the fight here to our shores.” Given the president’s frequent question, I wanted to have the analysts dig deeper into the subject.
The resulting piece later became the first PDB item ever declassified and released. A casual reading makes clear that we thought the threat from al Qa‘ida to the homeland was very real. The threat was not limited to attacks on US interests abroad. But a careful reading also shows that nothing in the item told the president where, when, or how al Qa‘ida might strike our country—or even that we thought there was a link between the threat reporting of spring and early summer and a catastrophic attack on the homeland. Later some analysts would claim—some of them to the 9/11 Commission—that they had intended the piece to convey such a linkage. However, the words on the piece of paper we read that morning simply did not do so.
The August 6 briefing took place in the living room of the president’s ranch. There was only one other person present, Steve Biegun, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, who was filling in for Rice and her deputy, Steve Hadley, who themselves were taking turns spending time with the president at the ranch that August. I teed up the piece by explaining why we had written it. The president then read it closely. I do not recall any further discussion of the piece; we moved on to the next item. I did not treat it as a “hair on fire” or action-forcing piece, and the president did not read it that way either.
* * *
During this period of heightened threat, CIA was not just collecting the intelligence chatter and passing it on to policy-makers. It was also working to disrupt whatever plotting might be under way. As a briefer, I did not have visibility into these operations, but I later learned they included Tenet’s contacting dozens of his foreign counterparts and urging action. Thanks to these efforts, a number of terrorist suspects were arrested and detained in almost two dozen countries. We helped halt, disrupt, or uncover weapons caches and plans to attack US diplomatic facilities in the Middle East and Europe.
But this level of operational intensity is hard to maintain for a long period, and particularly difficult in the absence of specific threat reporting. So after a period of intense action, we returned to the status quo—still deeply concerned about the next possible attack but no longer on the trigger the way we had been for several months. Without additional intelligence to guide us, there was simply no other place to go.