- For a few harrowing weeks last fall, a group of U.S.
officials believed that the worst nightmare of their lives"something
even more horrific than 9/11"was about to come true. In October an
intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies,
including
the Energy Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Search Team, based
in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained
a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal and planned to smuggle
it into New York City. The source of the report was a mercurial agent
code-named
dragonfire, who intelligence officials believed was of
"undetermined"
reliability. But dragonfire's claim tracked with a report from a Russian
general who believed his forces were missing a 10-kiloton device. Since
the mid-'90s, proliferation experts have suspected that several portable
nuclear devices might be missing from the Russian stockpile. That made
the dragonfire report alarming. So did this: detonated in lower Manhattan,
a 10-kiloton bomb would kill some 100,000 civilians and irradiate 700,000
more, flattening everything in a half-mile diameter. And so
counterterrorist
investigators went on their highest state of alert.
-
- "It was brutal," a U.S. official told Time.
It was also highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the
White House's Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National
Security
Council, the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people
of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop. Former mayor
Rudolph
Giuliani says he was never told about the threat. In the end, the
investigators
found nothing and concluded that dragonfire's information was false. But
few of them slept better. They had made a chilling realization: if
terrorists
did manage to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the city, there was almost
nothing anyone could do about it.
-
- In the days after Sept. 11, doomsday scenarios like a
nuclear attack on Manhattan suddenly seemed plausible. But during the six
months that followed, as the U.S. struck back and the anthrax scare petered
out and the fires at Ground Zero finally died down, the national nightmare
about another calamitous terrorist strike went away.
-
- The terrorists did not. Counterterrorism experts and
government officials interviewed by Time say that for all the relative
calm since Sept. 11, America's luck will probably run out again, sooner
or later. "It's going to be worse, and a lot of people are going to
die," warns a U.S. counterterrorism official. "I don't think
there's a damn thing we're going to be able to do about it." The
government
is so certain of another attack that it has assigned 100 civilian
government
officials to 24-hour rotations in underground bunkers, in a program that
became known last week as the "shadow government," ready to take
the reins if the next megaterror target turns out to be Washington.
Pentagon
strategists say that even with al-Qaeda's ranks scattered and its leaders
in hiding, operatives around the world are primed and preparing to strike
again. "If you're throwing enough darts at a board, eventually you're
going to get something through," says a Pentagon strategist.
"That's
the way al-Qaeda looks at it."
-
- Thousands of al-Qaeda terrorists survived the U.S.
military
assault in Afghanistan and are beginning to regroup. Last weekend, U.S.
forces attacked some 500 Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters holed up in the
rugged, icy mountains outside the eastern town of Gardez, near the
Pakistani
border. The targets: four al-Qaeda training camps that were bombed last
fall but, sources tell Time, have since been reoccupied by al-Qaeda. Over
the past month, locals say, groups of armed men have moved into the area
from the Pakistani border town of Miren-Shah. The latest battle involved
at least 1,000 Afghan troops and 60 U.S. Special Forces, who advanced on
an al-Qaeda encampment by taking control of roads around Shah-e-Kot. The
lead forces were rebuffed by heavily armed al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
U.S. aircraft, including B-52s, F-15Es, F-18s and AC-130 gunships, were
called in to fire at enemy positions. At least one American was killed
by hostile fire. "This could go on for several days," a Pentagon
official said.
-
- As Time reported in January, Western intelligence
officials
believe that al-Qaeda may now be under the control of Abu Zubaydah, a
peripatetic
aide of Osama bin Laden's who has run training camps in Afghanistan and
coordinated terror cells in Europe and North America. A European terrorism
expert says Zubaydah oversaw the training of 3,000 to 4,000 recruits in
al-Qaeda terrorist camps, most of whom are "out there somewhere in
the world right now." Zubaydah has instructed operatives to shave
their beards, adopt Western clothing and "do whatever it takes to
avoid detection and see their missions through," the expert
says.
-
- In the past six months, the Administration and Congress
have mobilized massive amounts of government money, intelligence and
personnel
to track terrorists at home and abroad and tighten the country's protective
net. But all nets have holes. A Time investigation found some good
news"notably
that the CIA, FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are
finally starting to work as a team. But in other critical areas, such as
gathering and analyzing intelligence, strengthening homeland security and
rounding up al-Qaeda, the U.S. has yet to solve its most grievous problems.
Much of the more than $1 billion that Washington has poured into
intelligence
services since 9/11 is merely high-octane fuel flooding a leaky and
misfiring
engine. America's national security system is designed to fight Soviets
rather than suicide bombers. Sources in the Pentagon, White House and
Congress
grumble that the CIA and the nation's other intelligence bureaucracy were
caught flat-footed by the Sept. 11 attack""It was an abject
intelligence
failure," a White House aide says"and many still doubt that the
U.S. intelligence community is capable of seeing the next one
coming.
-
- Experts warn about mass contamination of the nation's
food supply and nuclear attacks on major U.S. cities precisely because
these remote threats are the ones for which adequate defenses are not yet
in place. The Coast Guard is arming itself against a possible terrorist
attempt to destroy a major U.S. coastal city by detonating a tanker loaded
with liquefied natural gas. The Bush Administration is bracing for another
disaster. "We're as vulnerable today as we were on 9/10 or 9/12,"
says presidential counselor Karen Hughes. "We just know more."
Here is what Time has learned about America's vulnerabilities"and
how the U.S. is working to bolster its defenses on four crucial
fronts.
-
- Learning to Spy Again since sept. 11, no criticism of
the CIA has been more damning than the fact that the agency's legions of
highly trained spooks were less successful at infiltrating al-Qaeda than
was a Marin County, Calif., 19-year-old named John Walker Lindh. "They
didn't see it; they didn't analyze it; they didn't locate it or disrupt
it," says a U.S. official. "It's just that simple." In
Senate
hearings last month, CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton Administration
holdover who managed to hold on to his job after 9/11 because he is close
to Bush, stubbornly defended the agency's record. "It was not the
result of the failure of attention and discipline and consistent
effort,"
he insisted.
-
- And yet intelligence officials acknowledge privately
that Sept. 11 laid bare many of the agency's most crippling weaknesses.
Six months later, the problems remain"buried under billions of dollars
in post-9/11 funding and stubbornly resistant to change. Insiders agree
that the CIA's failure to learn of the Sept. 11 plot stemmed in large part
from the CIA's inability to gather human intelligence about foreign
threats.
The agency, a senior Administration official concedes, "got out of
the human intelligence business in favor of technical collection"
after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today the average overseas assignment
for an agency spy-handler is three years, barely enough time to learn one's
way around, let alone penetrate a terror cell. And with the passing of
the Soviet threat, many CIA officials lost interest in doing dirty human
espionage"which means recruiting dangerous characters who can act
as spies and infiltrate terror networks such as al-Qaeda's. And even when
informants were coaxed into cooperating, the CIA still required almost
all "fully recruited" spies to take a polygraph test, something
that scares off useful sources and in the past has failed to catch double
agents. "We recruited a whole bunch of bad agents," admits a
senior intelligence official. "We wasted a lot of taxpayer money that
way."
-
- The CIA is larded with Russian specialists left over
from the cold war, even as the agency struggles to recruit and train
officers
with proficiency in other tongues. In last year's graduating class of case
officers, just 20% had usable skills in non-Romance languages. When the
war in Afghanistan began, the CIA had only one Afghan analyst. As Time
reported last month, American intelligence agents in Kabul almost blew
the chance to question a top-ranking Taliban minister, who may have had
information on the hiding place of Mullah Omar. The spooks had yet to hire
a Dari translator.
-
- In response to Time's questions about these shortcomings,
two senior intelligence officials said the agency has worked hard to close
the language gap and improve recruitment of informants. Since 1998, Tenet
has instructed the CIA's espionage arm, the Directorate of Operations,
to push its officers to diversify their language skills, boost recruitment
and take greater risks. But despite some progress, a senior official
admits,
"we're not there yet." Robert Baer, a former CIA field operative
in India, Tajikistan, Lebanon and Iraq, says the reforms did nothing to
"break the cold war mold"it's all about the culture." The
Administration has recalled old CIA hands with experience in Central Asia.
Says an Administration official: "You ended up going back to retirees
because the bench was so light on Afghanistan. We're still trying to get
up to speed."
-
- The dearth of qualified intelligence officers on the
ground in Afghanistan has forced the U.S. to count on unreliable sources,
dramatically increasing the risk of military mistakes, impeding the hunt
for al-Qaeda leaders and giving Omar, bin Laden and their henchmen time
to slip away. "The U.S. is totally dependent on locals, who have their
own agenda," says an expert in the region. A senior intelligence
official
disputes the scope of the problem, telling Time that "this institution
has never produced better human intelligence than it does today"but
that doesn't mean that we don't need to do more."
-
- Even when America sets its own agenda, there are serious
problems. The U.S. spends more than 90% of its $35 billion annual
intelligence
budget on spying gadgetry rather than on gathering human intelligence,
and most of that money goes not to the CIA but to spy agencies within the
Department of Defense, such as the National Security Agency (which does
eavesdropping and code breaking) and the National Reconnaissance Office
(which flies imagery satellites). The priciest gadgets are not always the
ones suited to fighting the terrorist threat. During the past five years,
while the U.S. spent billions of dollars to build and launch about half
a dozen radar-imaging spy satellites, the CIA and others built 60 Predator
unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) at about $3 million apiece. The Predators,
not the satellites, killed terrorists in Afghanistan.
-
- High-tech surveillance can do little to track adversaries
like the Sept. 11 hijackers, especially if they are in the U.S. legally
and careful about what they say on the phone. So why does the CIA persist
in spying the wrong way? Part of the answer lies in the culture of secrecy
that arose during the cold war and continues to rule the agency's hearts
and minds. Today the secrets the CIA needs to pick up are often easily
accessible"such as the travel plans of the Sept. 11 hijackers, two
of whom managed to pay for their airline tickets with credit cards in their
own names, even though the CIA had placed them on the terrorist watch list
weeks before. Exploiting such "open sources" by combining them
with newly discovered secrets is critical to fighting terrorists and others
who hide in plain sight. And yet for years the agency discounted the value
of open sources and let slip the quality of the intelligence analysts
charged
with studying them.
-
- U.S. intelligence officials remain blind to this
deficiency.
Tenet insists that the agency's proper focus remains "the relentless
pursuit of the secret." As long as U.S. intelligence continues to
peer only in dark corners, we may struggle to discover what terrorists
are hatching right in our backyard.
-
- Share and Share Alike Here's how the war on terrorism
is supposed to work. In January a U.S. soldier prowling through an al-Qaeda
compound in Afghanistan came across a document that contained outlines
of a possible plot against the U.S. embassy in Sanaa, Yemen. The document
contained the name of Fawaz Yahya al-Rabeei, a Saudi-born Yemeni who
belonged
to al-Qaeda, and it was passed to the CIA and FBI. Working with foreign
intelligence services, the agencies came up with the names of 16 Rabeei
associates and photographs of 13 of them. Then an FBI investigator poring
over the list realized that the brother of one of the men was in U.S.
custody
in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On Feb. 11 agents detailed to Camp X-Ray showed
the prisoner the photos and persuaded him to talk. The prisoner told them
that a terrorist attack"against U.S. installations in Yemen or even
the U.S. itself"was planned for the next day.
-
- At 9 that night"after consulting with intelligence
officials, White House aides and Office of Homeland Security Director Tom
Ridge"FBI Director Robert Mueller posted the names of the suspects
and their mug shots on the FBI website and issued the government's most
specific terror warning since Sept. 11. No attack took place, but two days
later a suspected al-Qaeda operative named Sameer Muhammad Ahmed al-Hada
blew himself up with a hand grenade in a suburb of Sanaa, while fleeing
from police. Al-Hada was connected to trouble: his brother-in-law is wanted
by Yemeni police for conspiring in the Sept. 11 hijackings, and another
sister is married to Mustafa Abdul Kader al-Ansari, one of the 17 men the
FBI believed had plans to attack America.
-
- The Yemen case was a rare, real-time example of
resourceful
gumshoeing, timely intelligence and open communication among government
agencies. The latter in particular went wanting in the days before Sept.
11. Most notable is the story of Khalid al-Midhar. In January 2000 a group
of al-Qaeda operatives met in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to plot the attack
on the U.S.S. Cole. Malaysian authorities caught the meeting on a
surveillance
videotape and turned it over to the CIA. Last summer the agency identified
one of the attendees as al-Midhar, a Saudi who intelligence officials
thought
had entered the U.S. shortly after the meeting in Malaysia and left six
months later. The CIA put his name on a watch list and handed it over to
the Immigration and Naturalization Service"but by then al-Midhar had
slipped back into the U.S. Within the next few days, the CIA briefed the
FBI on al-Midhar. FBI officials say they initiated a frantic manhunt for
al-Midhar but never found him. On Sept. 11, authorities believe, he flew
American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. Al-Midhar bought his Sept.
11 airline ticket under his own name, but American Airlines officials say
no government authorities informed them he was on a terrorism watch
list.
-
- That Al-Midhar could elude three federal agencies, all
of which knew his identity and the danger he posed, highlights the lack
of coordination among U.S. intelligence agencies, whose biggest problem
may be the intelligence system's splintered structure. The array of
semiautonomous
agencies"13 in all"share a secure computer network, but
collaboration
is not in their nature. Interaction between outsiders and CIA analysts
or officials is difficult. Says a frustrated Administration official:
"We
don't have a place where it all comes together."
-
- The broad ground rules that gave each intelligence
bureaucracy
its own role and swath of territory don't make much sense in the new war.
The CIA has largely stayed out of domestic intelligence gathering, in part
because of limits set by Congress in the '70s to protect citizens from
the agency's excesses, such as dosing unwitting subjects with LSD. During
the cold war and afterward, the Pentagon, FBI and CIA split the
responsibility
for tracking foreign threats, but each agency kept the others in the dark
about what it was doing. That division of labor failed completely in
spotting
clues to Sept. 11, so it's good news that in the race to stop the next
attack, the lines between fiefs have finally started to blur. The Sept.
11 terrorists crossed national boundaries at will. In response, more FBI
agents are working overseas than ever before. The Patriot Act passed in
October gives the CIA greater access to law-enforcement information and
allows the NSA to obtain warrants more easily for domestic wiretaps. In
Afghanistan, the CIA has unleashed its 150-man covert paramilitary force
to conduct sabotage, collect intelligence and train Northern Alliance
guerrillas.
-
- The paragon of interagency cooperation is the CIA's
Counterterrorism
Center, which was created in 1986 as a way to get FBI and CIA agents
working
side by side. In the past three years, the CTC has broken up three planned
attacks by the Hizbollah terror group outside the Middle East, all of them
targeting locations where Americans could have been killed. The CTC is
everything the rest of the intelligence community is not: coordinated,
dynamic and designed for the post-cold war threat. As a result, its staff
has doubled to 1,000 since Sept. 11, and the Administration has deluged
the center with new funding.
-
- But the CTC's staffers make up just 1% of the U.S.
intelligence
community. Some critics say the only sensible reform is for the CTC to
become a model for the larger community"merging multiple intelligence
agencies under the authority of the director of Central Intelligence.
Congressional
sources tell Time that an advisory panel headed by former National Security
Adviser Brent Scowcroft will recommend just such a reorganization later
this year. But the idea probably won't go anywhere. Defense Secretary
Donald
Rumsfeld is expected to oppose any proposal to take away the Pentagon's
control over the Defense Department's intelligence agencies, where most
intelligence dollars go. Tenet, who spent 10 years as a staffer on Capitol
Hill, doesn't want to challenge Rumsfeld, who is at the height of his
power.
Those who know Tenet say he has little taste for taking on superiors.
"[Tenet's]
focus is always just going to be on getting the job done," says a
source close to the Scowcroft panel.
-
- A Better Shield Once intelligence has been collected,
analyzed and shared, it must be acted on"used to set priorities and
bolster defenses. The government knows it can't wait. In the past six
months,
billions have already gone toward reinforcing cockpit doors, tightening
the airline baggage-screening process and hiring 28,000 new federal
employees
at airports to replace the private security firms that let al-Qaeda through
on Sept. 11. In October the Administration created a new Office of Homeland
Security to deal exclusively with the job of preparing the country for
future terrorist threats. Since he took the job of Homeland Security czar,
former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge has had some rough sledding; Bush
gave him no authority over Cabinet members or agencies, which means he
lacks the clout to win crucial bureaucratic fights. But Ridge has shown
his skill in the Washington art of writing checks. The Administration's
$38 billion homeland-security budget proposes a $380 million system to
track the entry and exit of noncitizens and gives $282 million to the Coast
Guard for protecting ports and coastal areas. This week, sources tell Time,
Ridge's office plans to announce a new color-coded alert system to warn
local law enforcement and the public about threats within U.S. borders.
Even the military is setting up a new bureaucracy, the U.S. Northern
Command,
dedicated to defending the homeland. By Oct. 1 the military hopes to put
a four-star general in charge of a standing domestic military force devoted
to flying combat air patrols, guarding the borders and responding to
attacks
on U.S. soil.
-
- Terrorists aren't likely to be deterred. There's plenty
of intelligence that al-Qaeda operatives want to bring down more
airliners"witness
Richard Reid"and the government is still trying to get serious about
stopping them. As recently as last month, Transportation Department
investigators
succeeded in slipping weapons and explosives past screening personnel and
onto an aircraft at Miami International Airport.
-
- Thanks to the new airport-security bill passed in
Congress
last November, airline security has been taken out of the hands of the
FAA and given to the newly created federal Transportation Security
Administration.
But many of the changes that were supposed to be carried out by the TSA
either haven't been implemented or have been killed by compromise. Federal
baggage screeners are in place at only 15 of the country's 429 airports,
and the TSA has not yet bought the 2,000 large detection devices it aims
to have operating within nine months to inspect checked baggage for
explosives.
Airlines still aren't required to match bags to passengers on every plane;
on some aircraft, the improvements to cockpit doors amount to nothing but
"a silly little bar," in the words of one pilot. "It's easy
to imagine hundreds of horrific possibilities," says TSA deputy head
Steven McHale. "We can become paralyzed if we start thinking about
all possible threats."
-
- In countless other areas as well, homeland security still
needs an upgrade. The Administration plans to hire 800 more customs agents
to police the borders but still lacks a system for tracking whether
immigrants
who enter legally overstay their visas, which three of the Sept. 11
hijackers
did. Ridge, who will visit the U.S.-Mexican border this week, has proposed
the sensible reform of getting the various border-control
agencies"Customs,
INS, Border Patrol and Coast Guard"to operate under a single command
and work off the same technology. But he lacks the power to make it happen.
Despite calls for the Federal Government to improve security at the
country's
nuclear power plants and weapons sites"and the chilling discovery
in Afghanistan of evidence that al-Qaeda may try to target them"little
has been done to lock down the sites or to clear the air corridors above
them. In October the FAA briefly banned aircraft from flying below 18,000
ft. and within 10 miles of 86 sensitive sites, including several nuclear
power plants, but the ban was lifted in November and has not been
reinstated.
-
- Government agencies are starting to prepare for other
previously unimaginable threats. Experts meeting last week in Lenox, Mass.,
said hackers in the Middle East have probed the huge computers that control
the nation's electric-power grid, and the government has received reports
of possible physical reconnaissance of power plants by terrorists.
Republican
Senator Jon Kyl frets about explosives, such as the three substances found
in Reid's shoes, which in small quantities might be missed by airport
screening
devices and some bomb-sniffing dogs. Small amounts of old-fashioned
explosives
are potent enough to blow a hole in a fuselage, and experts can't say for
certain whether airport detectors can spot them. "I don't really want
to talk about this publicly," Kyl says, "but it remains difficult
to do something about."
-
- The homeland-security budget is aimed at keeping
casualties
down; almost all of the $9.5 billion allocated to combat bioterrorism,
for instance, goes toward training and equipping local public-health
authorities
to treat victims and haul out bodies in the event of an attack. The
assumption,
of course, is that an attack will come. "We need to accept that the
possibility of terrorism is a permanent condition for the foreseeable
future,"
Ridge told Time. "We just have to accept it."
-
- Catching Bad Guys The single most effective strategy
for pre-empting another attack is to hit the attackers first"to
disrupt
and root out the terrorists who are planning the next strike. That's hard
but not impossible. The Sept. 11 hijackers kept low profiles, for example,
but didn't plan the attacks in cloistered secrecy. Mohamed Atta and his
crew received money from al-Qaeda paymasters through traceable banking
channels. Nine of them were singled out for special airport-security
screenings
on the morning of the attacks, the Washington Post reported, yet managed
to slip through. The two hijackers who were on the government terrorist
watch list before Sept. 11 possessed valid driver's licenses under their
own names and paid for their tickets with credit cards that the FBI could
have easily tracked. In some cases, the FBI failed to share information
it possessed on suspect individuals with other law-enforcement authorities;
in others, the feds simply didn't pay close enough attention.
-
- They do now. Since Sept. 11, the number of FBI personnel
working on counter- terrorism has grown from 1,000 to 4,000. A new
cybercrime
division monitors credit-card-fraud schemes that terrorists use to fund
their activities. Stung by criticism over its historic reluctance to share
secret evidence with local cops, the FBI now sees it doesn't have a choice.
Edward Flynn, the police chief in Arlington County, Va., says the FBI is
giving local cops more leads than they can handle. "They feel
compelled
to tell us this stuff," he says.
-
- Meanwhile, arrests of al-Qaeda suspects in the U.S. have
dwindled. A handful of people in federal custody are still being
investigated
for possible links to terrorist activity. The worldwide dragnet has snared
600 alleged al-Qaeda operatives. And yet the bottom line is sobering: after
six months of gumshoe work by just about every law-enforcement official
in the U.S., the number of al-Qaeda sleeper cells that have been busted
inside the country is precisely zero. Does that mean bin Laden's men have
gone further underground? "We don't know," says an FBI official.
"If you go back and look at the hijackers, they had zero contact with
any known al-Qaeda people we were looking at. They didn't break laws. They
didn't do anything to come to anybody's attention. Are there other people
in the U.S. like that? We don't know."
-
- As long as such uncertainty persists, so will the
military
assault on al-Qaeda abroad. The U.S. military campaign has removed bin
Laden's sanctuary and degraded his infrastructure of terror. Pentagon
sources
say that the U.S. has killed as many as eight high-ranking al-Qaeda
officials,
but most of the 11,000 terrorists believed to have spent time in al-Qaeda
camps are still on the loose. Efforts to apprehend al-Qaeda fighters in
Afghanistan have slowed, as thousands have bought safe refuge in the
hamlets
and villages of the Afghan countryside. "The mission is to take
al-Qaeda
apart piece by piece," says Mohammed Anwar, the head of intelligence
in Mazar-i-Sharif. "But it's very difficult work." CIA, FBI and
military intelligence officials have spent eight weeks interviewing the
300 detainees in Cuba for information on the whereabouts of the al-Qaeda
leadership, but defense sources told Time that any prisoners now in U.S.
custody know little, if anything, about bin Laden's coordinates. While
there is a genuine debate inside the government about whether he is still
alive, there is far less argument about what will happen after Washington
is able to confirm that he is dead. A U.S. official told Time last week
that it is widely presumed that al- Qaeda sleeper cells will take
retaliatory
action once the terrorist leader is killed or proved dead.
-
- With al-Qaeda sprinkled around the globe, it becomes
harder to develop the intelligence needed to take the fight to the enemy.
Last week the Administration gave its clearest signal yet that the war
won't stop in Afghanistan or even the Philippines, when it announced plans
to send special-ops troops to Yemen and the former Soviet republic of
Georgia,
both countries where al-Qaeda fighters are believed to be hiding.
-
- By keeping the pressure up, the U.S. hopes to correct
its biggest mistake of all. According to this view, the U.S.'s failure
to retaliate massively after past al-Qaeda attacks against U.S. military
barracks, battleships and embassies tempted bin Laden to go after ever
more outrageous targets"and finally the World Trade Center. Now the
U.S. has destroyed al-Qaeda's training camps and undermined bin Laden's
capacity to lead. And yet the Sept. 11 hijackings were years in the making
- which means bin Laden could have ordered up another, more lethal attack
before his world came apart. "We were overwhelmingly defensive in
our orientation before Sept. 11," Admiral Dennis Blair, the head of
the U.S.'s Pacific Command, told Time. "Now we've gone on the
offensive."
The big question is whether we did so in time.
-
- With reporting by Matthew Cooper, John Dickerson, Sally
Donnelly, Michael
- Copyright © 2002 Time Inc. All rights
reserved.
-
- http://www.time.com
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