The president wanted the same from everyone on the team. "I don't need people around me who are not steady. ... And if there's kind of a hand-wringing att.i.tude going on when times are tough, I don't like it."

He attributed the concern to the echo chamber in the media. He was paying only peripheral attention to it. "I don't read the editorial pages. I don't - the hyperventilation that tends to take place over these cables, and every expert and every former colonel, and all that, is just background noise." He knew, however, that members of his war cabinet paid attention. "We've got these very strong people on the National Security Council who do get affected by what people say about them in the press.

"If there's going to be a sense of despair," Bush said, "I want to know who it is, and why. I trust the team, and it is a team. And I trust them because I trust their judgment. And if people are having second thoughts about their judgment, I needed to know what they were, and they needed to lay them on the table."

No member of the war cabinet had come to the president privately to express any concern. Before the next morning's NSC meeting, he talked to Vice President Cheney about what Rice had brought to him.

"d.i.c.k," he asked, "do you have any - is there any qualms in your mind about this strategy we've developed? We've spent a lot of time on it."

"No, Mr. President," Cheney replied.

THE NEXT MORNING, Friday, October 26, Bush arrived at the White House Situation Room for the NSC meeting. None of the princ.i.p.als, including Andy Card, knew what Rice had raised with him the evening before. He decided to let the meeting proceed with its routine presentations. He did, however, report that he had just spoken by phone with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

"The crown prince said we shouldn't strike during Ramadan." The Muslim holy month would begin in several weeks. "I'm going to write him a letter saying we'll continue because al Qaeda continues to threaten the United States, and they will keep fighting whether we bomb or not." As if to hint at his mood, he added, "And that's at the end of the day what is decisive."

"There's concern about the Russians," Tenet said. "Russians are providing arms to the Northern Alliance. That's good. We want to make sure the Russians don't play the Tajiks and the Uzbeks against each other." Russia still wanted to have influence, if not dominance, in the breakaway republics. There was a lot of regional positioning going on, and the U.S. had to take this into account. "The Russians are more focused on the endgame than we are."

Tenet reported that they had CIA paramilitary team Alpha in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance leader Dostum and were about to get one in with Attah Mohammad, another Alliance leader. Both Dostum and Attah were south of the city of Mazar. "There's a meeting with leaders in the north without Fahim Khan's approval." Fahim was still not moving so the CIA was going ahead without him. Tenet also said he hoped to have a team with Karzai, the leader in the south of Afghanistan. "I believe the southern piece is beginning to develop."

"There is more than enough food in the region," Powell said. The problem was that the food was being distributed by Afghan nationals. "That's what is not working."

"We need to do a major meeting to dramatize our humanitarian a.s.sistance," Rice said.

Rumsfeld reported they had done only 60 sorties the day before because the weather was bad. It was better today. "We hit yesterday in the Shamali Plains and Mazar" - the two places General Myers had said could be their focus. Some barracks had been hit in the eastern city of Herat. They planned to concentrate the bombing on the front lines in support of the tribes, not the fixed targets such as Taliban aircraft. "One half is on the Shamali Plains and half of it is on Herat and Mazar-e Sharif.

"We've got a third team in, plus some communications with Fahim's people.

"We have five teams in Uzbekistan waiting to get in," he added in some frustration. Two more teams were at Fort Campbell in the United States.

Now it was time for the president to deal with Rice's advice.

"I just want to make sure that all of us did agree on this plan, right?" he said. He looked around the table from face to face.

There is an aspect of baseball-coach, even fraternity-brother urgency in Bush at such moments. He leans his head forward and holds it still, makes eye contact, maintains it, saying in effect, You're on board, you're with me, right?

Are we right? the president was asking. Are we still confident? He wanted a precise affirmation from each one - Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Rice - even backbenchers Hadley and Scooter Libby. He was almost demanding they take an oath.

Each affirmed allegiance to the plan and strategy.

"Anybody have any ideas they want to put on the table?"

No's all around.

Rice believed the president would tolerate debate, would listen, but anyone who wanted debate had to have a good argument, and preferably a solution or at least a proposed fix. It was clear that no one at the table had a better idea.

In fact, the president had not really opened the door a crack for anyone to raise concerns or deal with any second thoughts. He was not really listening. He wanted to talk. He knew that he talked too much at times, just blowing off steam. It was not a good habit, he knew.

"You know what? We need to be patient," Bush said. "We've got a good plan.

"Look, we're entering a difficult phase. The press will seek to find divisions among us. They will try and force on us a strategy that is not consistent with victory." In the secrecy of the room, the president had voiced one of his conclusions - the news media, or at least some elements, did not want victory or at least acted as if they did not.

"We've been at this only 19 days. Be steady. Don't let the press panic us." The press would say they needed a new strategy, that the current strategy was a failed strategy. He disagreed. "Resist the second-guessing. Be confident but patient. We are going to continue this thing through Ramadan. We've got to be cool and steady. It's all going to work."

Hadley thought the tension suddenly drained from the room. The president was saying he had confidence and they should have confidence. In their souls, Hadley believed, some of them had to wonder if the president might be losing confidence in them. Presidential confidence, once bestowed, was vital for all of them to function. Any hint of less than full trust would be devastating. They served at his pleasure. They could be gone or sidelined in an instant. Not only had Bush declared confidence in their strategy but more importantly, Hadley believed, he had declared confidence in them.

Tenet wanted to stand up and cheer. He went back to Langley and told his senior leadership what the president had said. What it meant, Tenet said, was simple: Keep going.

Rice believed it was one of the most important moments. If the president had opened up to alternatives, the war cabinet would have lost the focus of trying to make the current strategy work and flitted off to think up alternatives. She hoped that the recommitment would cause everyone to redouble their efforts on the current strategy that he had just then fully blessed.

Rumsfeld reported to some of his senior aides that the president had been particularly strong that day. He didn't provide details.

Powell found the situation in Afghanistan troubling, but he didn't think they were in a quagmire, yet.

Pakistani President Musharraf, their friend, was interviewed that evening by ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, who asked him right off the bat if the United States was facing a quagmire.

"Yes," the Pakistani president declared, "it may be a quagmire."

JAWBREAKER TEAM WAS approaching its one-month anniversary on the Shamali Plains. The Special Forces A-team 555 had been with them for a week with its laser target designators. Though the A-team had some initial successes calling in bombing runs, Gary could see they were getting leftovers - U.S. bombers who had been a.s.signed to other fixed targets. If these bombers didn't find their target or for some reason did not expend their munitions, they were available to come to the front lines and attack Taliban fighters there. So there was an increase in bombing. But Gary had witnessed too many occasions when the A-team would spot a convoy of Taliban or al Qaeda trucks - once there were 20 trucks - and they would call and call to get a bomber and couldn't get one. The planes were still focused on predesignated fixed targets.

The battlefield on the Shamali Plains was unusually flat. About 35 miles separated the Alliance force of some 3,000 and the Taliban, Arab and Pakistani volunteer force of about 7,000. They formed battle lines in trenches, bunkers, fortifications and other military hardware placements protected by some minefields. Rain clouds were crossing the mountains which rimmed the plains, a forerunner of winter and the coming snow.

Gary sat down at one of the 10 computers his team had in their dusty quarters and wrote a cable to CIA headquarters. If we don't change the pattern, we're going to lose this thing, he wrote. The Taliban had never been bombed hard; they have not been impressed very much; they think they can survive this. The Northern Alliance is ready; they want to go and they are as ready as they ever will be, but they're losing confidence; they think what they are seeing is all we can do. If we hit these Taliban with sustained bombing for three or four days, the young Taliban are going to break. Most of them were conscripts, joining up because it was the thing to do, believing they were on the winning side. Hit the al Qaeda Arabs here also, and the younger Taliban would see it and crack. Three or four days maximum would be all that was needed. The front lines would collapse.

Most of the Taliban had come from the south, and they would want to leave, return south. But there were only a few roads they could come down, and the Northern Alliance, with bombardment from U.S. airpower, would control those roads. The Taliban would find themselves trapped. Less a few pockets around Mazar and Konduz, the Alliance would soon have the entire north of the country, even Kabul.

Gary sent the cable, which was only two pages long. Tenet decided to take it to the White House the next day.

DURING THE EARLY morning secure phone conversation that Rumsfeld had with General Franks on Sat.u.r.day, October 27, the secretary wanted to make sure they were planning and thinking way ahead - to the worst case scenario if necessary.

Suppose the Afghan opposition, the Northern Alliance, the mercenary force that was being paid by the CIA, could not do the ;ob? They were going to have to consider the possibility that they would have to Americanize the war, send in large numbers of U.S. ground forces.

Marine General Peter Pace, Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman, -3T15 taking notes in a white spiral notebook. He wrote, "Be prepared to go in - major land war - either on our own or with coalition partners. . .. Process of organizing for it would be very, very useful. ... It would become visible and people would know that we're not kidding, we are coming, if you don't change sides now, we are going to continue the process."

Rumsfeld and Franks agreed to step up bombing the Taliban front lines as the Northern Alliance wanted. With the first A-teams now inside Afghanistan, that would be possible. But both the secretary and CINC were skeptical of the Alliance and General Fahim, who seemed slow to move on their own.

PRESIDENT BUSH AND the first lady were supposed to have their friends from East Texas for the rescheduled poker and Kennedy Center weekend that Sat.u.r.day and Sunday. But the threat a.s.sessment was increasing, not abating, so Bush called his best friend in the group, Elton Bomer, who had been Texas insurance commissioner when Bush was governor. "Elton, I just can't let you come," the president told Bomer. "I'm just too worried, the a.s.sessments look too bad, and I just don't want to take the chance."

The Bushes instead went to Camp David, and the president joined the secure video-teleconference at 8:30 A.M. Sat.u.r.day morning.

Tenet reported that he had two more CIA paramilitary teams scheduled to go into Afghanistan in the coming week. He was staking much on his paramilitary teams. Other than two U.S. military Special Forces A-teams inside Afghanistan, there was still no other direct U.S. presence in-country.

Tenet was still scrambling in the south of Afghanistan. One setback in the south was that the Taliban had just captured and killed Abdul Haq, a 43-year-old Pashtun leader who had successfully fought the Soviet invasion from 1979 to 1989. In 1987, Haq, then 29, lost his right foot in a land mine. The Taliban had later killed his wife and son.

He had returned to Afghanistan with a group of 19 to consolidate support among Pashtuns in the south against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Haq was not a CIA a.s.set who took direction but the agency had had contact with him. They had urged him to have a fallback plan and had offered communications gear. Haq said he thought the communications equipment would enable the CIA to spy on him. He refused.

Haq was captured by the Taliban, tortured and executed. At the last minute the CIA had dispatched one of its Predators, which fired on some Taliban forces who were surrounding him, but it was too late. The Taliban intelligence chief was publicly gloating.

Tenet, with a dozen secret paid a.s.sets in the south, was still not making headway in the crucial region.

Powell reported that he had talked to Musharraf, who said he needed more economic a.s.sistance. The demonstrations in two Pakistani cities were the largest so far. Musharraf was continuing one of the all-time political balancing acts.

On the military operation, Rumsfeld said that "70 percent of our effort today will be in support of the opposition." Rumsfeld said one focus continued to be the Tora Bora area outside Jalalabad, believed to be a refuge for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.

The secretary also reported that the humanitarian drops and the information drops were continuing.

Tenet said, "We're going to move ahead without waiting for Fahim." It was a dramatic decision since Fahim was the overall leader of the loose affiliation of warlord forces in the Northern Alliance.

No one objected.

"We're sending a message to the Northern Alliance," Rumsfeld said, "that we want them to do more." Bypa.s.sing their leader was not a subtle message.

Cheney said there had been press reports that the Northern Alliance might shut down for Ramadan.

Tenet said the agency would have to a.s.sess that likelihood.

The news got worse. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the sprawling service created by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to integrate Pentagon intelligence efforts, had been asked to come up with an alternative a.s.sessment about the prospects on the ground. In a highly cla.s.sified memo, the DIA suggested that neither Mazar nor Kabul would be taken by winter. the sprawling service created by former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to integrate Pentagon intelligence efforts, had been asked to come up with an alternative a.s.sessment about the prospects on the ground. In a highly cla.s.sified memo, the DIA suggested that neither Mazar nor Kabul would be taken by winter.

The memo in large part blamed General Fahim, essentially calling him a wimp who would talk and talk, then not show up for battle. Fahim was never quite ready, always declaring his need for more money, more bullets.

It was alarming - a weak Fahim and no prospects for taking a city by winter. With discussion of a quagmire already in the media after three weeks of bombing, it was hard to imagine what would be said after months of apparent stalemate.

Referring to the DIA memo, Cheney said, "It raises two questions. Are we doing everything we can to get something done before Ramadan?" The holiday started in three weeks.

"And secondly," he continued, "what military operations could be done during the winter?" They had to get very concrete, not just to obtain a specific objective for obvious military reasons but for psychological reasons. "We want to create a feeling of inevitability so that people will come over to our side." Alternatively, imagine the Taliban sitting in Afghanistan for months, continuing to provide bin Laden and his terrorists with sanctuary. Cheney didn't have to say anything about the likely impact of that.

He worried also that if they didn't do something before winter, would the Taliban be able to regroup? Would they be emboldened now that they had not been defeated rapidly?

"Is there anything that the U.S. can do between now and winter, such as set up a U.S. operating base in the north?" Cheney asked. At least that would be something up on the board. "I'm worried that we won't have anything concrete to point to by way of accomplishment." When the snow and bitter cold came next month, the Northern Alliance force would be malpositioned, meaning they would not be able to move for months.

"What is our objective for accomplishment before the snow?"

They went through some sensitive, fresh intelligence which was even more depressing. The Northern Alliance was still not moving, further supporting the notion that there was no chance of getting to Mazar or Kabul very soon.

Rice knew the princ.i.p.als didn't like to argue in front of the president, who had said very little. "Princ.i.p.als need to review this on Tuesday," she said, referring to an upcoming meeting without the president when they could thrash it out.

"We need to look at some limited objectives," Tenet said, picking up on Cheney's point, "such as Mazar-e Sharif which are achievable and where we should concentrate our effort,"

No one seemed to know for sure.

The next day, October 28, Rumsfeld hit the Sunday talk shows.

"Is the war just not going as well as you had hoped it would at this point?" c.o.kie Roberts asked him on the ABC television show This Week.

"No, quite the contrary," Rumsfeld said. "It's going very much the way we expected when it began... . And the progress has been measurable. We feel that the air - air campaign has been effective."

THE TOP SECRET/CODEWORD Threat Matrix for Monday morning, October 29, was filled with dozens of threats, many new and credible, suggesting an attack in the next week. All kinds of signals intelligence, SIGINT, showed that many known al Qaeda lieutenants or operatives were saying that something big would happen soon.

It was quite a list. Some said that good news would be coming, perhaps within a week, or that good news would be bigger and better than September 11. Some of the intercepts revealed discussion of a radiological device - the use of conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material. Other intercepted discussions mentioned making lots of people sick.

A nongovernmental organization in Pakistan called Umma Tameer-e-Nau, or UTN, could be putting a structure in place linking senior al Qaeda members and several Pakistani nuclear scientists who had been involved in developing their bomb, according to other intelligence.

Taken together, it was evident that something was going on at least with a radiological device. The intercepts indicated that there was going to be another attack, and since al Qaeda tended to come back to targets it might have missed, Washington and the White House were particularly vulnerable.

The bottom line was a consistent though uncorroborated worry about a radiological weapon, and some concern that it might be headed for Washington or New York. It might be another try to decapitate the government.

All this was presented to the president in the Monday morning intelligence briefing.

"Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are going to find me exactly here," the president said. "And if they get me, they're going to get me right here."

Whoa! Rice thought.

"This isn't about you," Cheney told the president. "This is about our Const.i.tution." He was focused on their responsibility to ensure continuity of government if something happened to Bush. "And that's why I'm going to a secure, undisclosed location," he said. He was not asking permission. He was going.

Card found it sobering. Cheney was right.

"We began to get serious indications that nuclear plans, material and know-how were being moved out of Pakistan," the president would recall. "It was the vibrations coming out of everybody reviewing the evidence."

Rice asked Bush, "Do you think you need to leave too?"

He refused. "Had the president decided he is going too," Bush recalled, "you would have had the vice president going one direction and the president going another, people are going to say, 'What about me?' I wasn't going to leave. I guess I could have, but I wasn't."

The most dramatic action was kept secret. Four special covert monitoring teams who operated out of vehicles capable of detecting the presence of nuclear material were dispatched. Said one of the most senior administration officials, "We had teams roaming around the city" - Washington, D.C. "We had a team in New York. That was a time of great anxiousness." Haifa dozen special teams that could detect biological and chemical warfare agents were also sent to six other cities.

IN TENET'S VIEW, a terrorist could wreak havoc on the United States at this point with any attack. The impact of a second large strike was almost unfathomable - with a radiological or nuclear weapon, truly unimaginable. Since neither the CIA nor the FBI were "inside the plot," as Tenet liked to say, he believed a good form of deterrence was to try to give the terrorists the idea that the U.S. was aware of things being planned. Since the terrorists didn't know what the U.S. knew and didn't know, it was a potential deterrent to find a way basically to "tell them we know." This might force them to worry and certainly would make the operational environment rougher for them.

On that morning, Monday, October 29, Tenet told Mueller that it was so serious - and the potential benefits of causing a stir so great - that a second global alert should be issued to the public.

Mueller and Attorney General John Ashcroft began preparations to make the announcement later that day.

The NSC met at 9:15 A.M. Tenet said he was going to meet with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and the new director of homeland security, former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge. The topic: "How to change our security posture." That meant doing things differently at airports and elsewhere so potential terrorists would encounter different procedures, mix up what they might see. Tenet said he wanted to make sure they were coordinated on "how to try and disrupt and deter whatever might be coming."

Tenet summarized the threat reporting. Intelligence showed that al Qaeda was planning to use a hijacked aircraft to attack a nuclear facility - either a nuclear power plant, or worse, storage sites of nuclear weapons or other nuclear weapons facilities.

With the vivid images of the World Trade Center towers in flames not even seven weeks old, the prospect of a nuclear equivalent silenced the group.

"d.i.c.k Cheney's going to stay gone for a while," the president said. The vice president was already off at a secure location many miles away.

Referring to the intelligence, Tenet said, "It suggests to me there's a worldwide threat. We should b.u.t.ton up our emba.s.sies and our military facilities overseas, and we should all be implementing continuity of government things." That meant each of the princ.i.p.als should make sure as much as possible that they were not with their deputies in the same place.

"Our coalition is holding together pretty well," Powell said. "They are not as hysterical as the press suggests. But there is a level of nervousness that's reflected on the Arab street." The day before, militants had killed 16 people in a Roman Catholic church in Pakistan, The headlines about collateral damage from the bombing campaign were harder to stomach. Sat.u.r.day's New York Times front page said, "U.S. PLANES BOMB A RED CROSS SITE," a mistake the U.S. had now made twice. No one was killed, but warehouses full of much needed humanitarian supplies were destroyed. Powell spoke with restraint: "To the extent we have collateral damage as a result of the U.S. operations, it inflames the situation." But then he took a direct shot at the Pentagon. "It's a problem, and we need to redouble our efforts to avoid collateral damage."

Rumsfeld felt he had already maximized efforts to avoid such damage, issuing unprecedented, even draconian orders not to shoot or drop bombs unless there was specific intelligence about the targets, preferably U.S. eyes also having verified the target.

Bush sprang to the defense. "Well, we also need to highlight the fact that the Taliban are killing people and conducting their own terror operations, so get a little bit more balance here about what the situation is." He jumped ahead to add that they needed to focus on Afghanistan after the Taliban, make sure the tribes in the south "see themselves in the post-Taliban Afghanistan," as he put it.

"We also need a public relations campaign focused around the Taliban. We need a donors' conference," he continued, meaning all the countries who were making humanitarian donations to Afghanistan, "someone who will organize it as an offset to Ramadan. We need - how to get the coalition something to hang its hat on when we continue the bombing during Ramadan. We need to have humanitarian help during Ramadan, the likes of which Afghanistan has never seen. We also need a political initiative in this time period."

"The president's calls to Crown Prince Abdullah were very helpful," Rumsfeld said, referring to the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. Bush was continuing to make calls to Arab leaders to prepare them for his decision that bombing would not stop during Ramadan. Many of the Arab leaders had privately told the president that while they would have to criticize the decision publicly, they understood his position.