Word: tenet
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...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...
...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...
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...
...Tenet was urging the President to make a huge leap of faith--to combat America's new enemy by waging a new kind of war. Tenet's plan: deploy CIA officers and special-ops commandos to aid Afghan opposition forces on the ground while warplanes drop bombs from the sky; collaborate with other intelligence services around the world to bust up terrorist cells with tips from the CIA's spies; and do it all without allowing a Vietnam-style gradual escalation of U.S. military involvement. This would be a war fought by others, with the U.S. role both obvious...
...Tenet let his four operatives fill in the details. They passed around maps of Afghanistan and photographs of 15 al-Qaeda leaders. They briefed Bush and the team on the intricacies of Afghan politics and ethnic rivalries. "We knew all these guys," a senior U.S. intelligence official recalled. "We knew the tribes in the south, which ones were pro-Taliban, which ones weren't, which ones were likely to work with an opposition coalition and which ones were fickle and liable to change sides for the highest bidder." Bush was impressed. "These [CIA] guys had had a lot of experience...