The Watchers by Shane Harris Read Free Book Online

holes in national defenses and to take a more offensive posture. In a public statement accompanying the bills, the president’s aides coined a new phrase: “war against terrorism.” The White House threw down the rhetorical gauntlet, declaring it was “essential that we act immediately to cope with this menace” and address “this growing threat to our way of life.” The existential frame for a new war was set.
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    The intelligence agencies and military Special Forces would have to walk point in this fight, in which preemption was prized above retaliation. Poindexter preferred to make the war a secret campaign, fought mostly out of the public eye and through actions taken without Congress’s approval. Presidential directives and executive orders became the preferred catalyst for jolting the recalcitrant system. And he turned the NSC staff into his base of operations.
    Two senior-level policy groups had been established early in the administration to advise the president during a crisis. But they’d never fulfilled their mandates. Now, Poindexter would reengineer that structure to deal more directly with terrorism. He found a willing ally in Vice President George H. W. Bush, who chaired the NSC’s Special Situation Group set up in December of 1981. Bush had stood amid the smoldering stones of the Marine barracks only days after the bombing, and in a prelude to a similar scene two decades later, declared the nation “would not be cowed by terrorists.”
    Bush led a top-to-bottom review of the government’s haphazard counterterrorism and intelligence efforts, culminating in the most comprehensive examination to date. Poindexter headed a policy review group and proposed a slew of recommendations, including a new intelligence clearinghouse that would bring together all the terrorism reporting from across the government. The panel also called for stricter border control, enhanced aviation security, more intelligence sharing with foreign governments, and closer cooperation with the media, both to obtain more favorable coverage and to undercut terrorists’ use of the press as a megaphone.
    While the most senior levels of government tackled terrorism policy, Poindexter dove deeper into the bureaucracy to forge an operational response. Another NSC subcommittee, one without the glitter of a cabinet-level roster, gave him his most influential perch.
    The Crisis Pre-Planning Group had been established in the spring of 1982 to support the higher-level committees offering policy advice to the president. The CPPG focused on the nuts and bolts, the details that decision makers had neither time nor inclination to master. According to the group’s charter, the head was the deputy national security adviser. Poindexter turned the CPPG into the engine of the government’s antiterror campaign.
    The staff consisted of deputies from key national security departments—Defense, State, and Treasury—as well as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The members had the power to recommend freezing individual and state assets, to develop covert intelligence programs, to communicate with ambassadors at all U.S. embassies, and to send proposals to the military chain of command. They met in the increasingly well-outfitted Situation Room or the Crisis Management Center, tapping into new data sources, holding teleconferences, and crafting a playbook for managing crises—whether caused by bands of terrorists or whole armies. The essential discipline was the same.
    Poindexter’s personal access to the president, a privilege he’d long enjoyed, gave the CPPG a rare bureaucratic muscle that the group flexed in one extraordinary way. By law, the president had to issue an intelligence “finding” whenever he planned to deploy CIA or other clandestine forces abroad. Drawn up at the agency level and eventually passed along to senior members of Congress, findings were