Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda Read Online Free PDF Page A

make this happen, the American public needs to know more about what those in our counterterrorism structure know—and what they fear.
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    The memory remains strong throughout the U.S. government of how ill-prepared it was on 9/11 to cope with the threats of modern terrorism. The commander in chief, President George W. Bush, was aboard his vaunted flying command post, Air Force One, for most of the day, but its Cold War command-and-control capability made it virtually useless for the requirements of this twenty-first-century threat.
    Air Force One was built to protect the president and broadcast launch codes in the event of a nuclear war, not to operate as an airborne information hub and media center. Getting live television and Internet aboard the aircraft had never been a priority and was not possible on September 11. Bush, who had begun the day in Florida and was fuming that he could not return immediately to Washington, was infuriated that he could not receive a live feed from Fox News, CNN, or any other cable television network. The president, his aides, and reporters on board were left squinting at soundless, fuzzy images skimmed from weak ground signals of local television channels below as the presidential plane passed overhead. Despite the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars in the country’s military arsenal and spy networks, Bush was largely blind to the vivid images of destruction and disarray that were seen by millions of Americans live on television.
    To protect the president after the attacks in New York and Washington, Air Force One zigzagged west on a secret route from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to refuel. On the tarmac, Bush was unnerved by what he saw outside his window: rows of B-52 nuclear bombers were on the runway in scramble mode, and air crews were running around in battle-dress uniforms. The airmen were not gearing up in response to the terrorist attacks, it turned out, but were part of a previously scheduled annual drill by the U.S. Strategic Command, simulating a nuclear attack against the homeland. Barksdale did not possess the technology to connect the president by secure videoconference with his top advisers in Washington, so Air Force One was quickly airborne again, this time bound for Offutt Air Force Base outside of Omaha, Nebraska, the headquarters of the Strategic Command, or “Stratcom.” Deliberately located in the middle of the country during the Cold War—at that time out of reach of Soviet long-range missiles and bombers—Stratcom and its subterranean war room were built to transmit a president’s orders to launch a nuclear strike.
    Stratcom had been engaged for more than a week in a high-level exercise called Global Guardian, which posited that a rogue nation called Slumonia would attack the United States with nuclear weapons. The State Department insists that countries cast as adversaries in war games not be identified, but Slumonia was a small nuclear power in northeast Asia—obviously, North Korea. With the cancellation of constant high alerts at the end of the Cold War, American bomber crews did not have extensive experience in loading nuclear weapons, so this exercise was a way to keep their skills up to date. That is why on the morning of 9/11 air crews were pulling nuclear bombs and missiles out of their heavily guarded storage sites and loading them aboard B-52s and B-2s in Louisiana and Missouri—precisely the scene that startled Bush at Barksdale. The nuclear weapons were real, but their triggers were not armed.
    By the time Bush landed at Offutt, Admiral Richard W. Mies, Stratcom’s commanding officer, had cancelled the training exercise and ordered the nuclear warheads returned to secure storage bunkers and the bombers dispersed, lest either pose a target of opportunity for an unforeseen follow-on terrorist attack. “We are not under pretend attack,” Mies told his assembled staff. “We are really being