-Caveat Lector- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18597-2002Jun8.html
Bush Plan's Underground Architects In Silence and Stealth, Group Drafted Huge Security Overhaul By David Von Drehle and Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writers Sunday, June 9, 2002; Page A01 There was little doubt in the White House that the creation of a Cabinet department would have to be done in secret. That's the preferred style of the Bush administration. But how secret? Near-total. In the beginning just four men and a few trusted aides worked on the most ambitious reorganization of the government's national security structure since the creation of the Department of Defense half a century ago. As the work became more detailed and the PEOC Group (from their underground meeting space, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center) expanded, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joseph Hagin gravely explained the omerta, or code of silence, to each new arrival. At the end of each meeting, all the papers were collected: nothing left that room. The work was virtually completed before two of President Bush's most trusted confidants, Karen Hughes and Karl Rove, were briefed on the plan. Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans -- known around the White House as "Uncle Don" for his long and close relationship with Bush -- heard the news for the first time the night before it was made public. No Cabinet secretary was directly consulted about a plan that would strip 170,000 employees and $37 billion in funding from existing departments, according to members of the PEOC Group interviewed late last week. Time will tell if these extraordinary measures meant too little input in answering an extremely complicated set of questions. The heads of several hard-hit departments declined to comment on the process. Architects of the Bush plan say they were able to learn all they needed to know through feints and sleight-of-hand, along with think-tank style research. "We consulted with agencies and with Congress," said White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr., "but they might not have known we were consulting." Card concluded this extraordinary secrecy was necessary last spring. Tom Ridge, director of the Office of Homeland Security, had proposed just one piece of what became an enormous reorganization. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Ridge wanted to gather the agencies responsible for protecting American borders under one umbrella. The bureaucracies erupted. Ridge hoped to have the proposal finished in time for Bush's State of the Union address in late January. "It frankly went nowhere," according to Nicholas E. Calio, the president's lead liaison to Congress. Turf squabbles delayed things for nearly three months. Finally, in mid-March, Bush stepped in. He convened the Cabinet secretaries who could lose agencies from their departments, including Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. He found "obvious examples of bureaucratic inertia that would prevent this from happening," according to Card. Card -- and Ridge, and Bush -- drew the following lesson: Ideas introduced piecemeal will be killed piecemeal. Trial balloons, an administration official explained, "are easy to shoot down." The scale of the project was dictated by Bush, influenced by months of nudging from Ridge and Vice President Cheney, and galvanized by the bureaucracy's success in scuttling the border proposal. "Start with a clean piece of paper," Bush instructed the group, according to one senior official. "It's going to have to be something big or nothing at all." On Thursday, Bush surprised Washington with a proposal that would combine such agencies as the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency -- even the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory -- into the third-largest unit of the federal government, behind the Pentagon. Congressional leaders learned of the plan only hours before the public did. Same with members of the Cabinet. "We were worried about the rumor mill," explained Hughes. "People get scared in an agency when they think something's going to happen to their agency. A lot of these are front-line agencies that we were counting on to defend us. So we didn't want rumors starting and people being worried about losing their jobs." According to Card and other sources, the work of the PEOC Group can be traced back to Bush's presidential campaign, when he and his opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore, agreed on the need to bolster the country against terror. This subject intrigued Cheney, who "did a deep dive" into the available research and theories, Card said. Aided by a small staff, Cheney examined security proposals from commissions headed by former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, by former senators Gary Hart (D-Colo.) and Warren B. Rudman (R-N.H.), "and others, going back a ways," Card said in an interview Friday. When terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, Cheney's work became the basis for Bush's announcement nine days after the attacks that he was creating the Office of Homeland Security, led by Pennsylvania Gov. Ridge. It was an advisory position, with no authority over the estimated 100 federal agencies with some role in homeland defense. Critics on Capitol Hill and elsewhere derided the office as an empty gesture. But several knowledgeable sources said that Cheney never expected the initial design to endure; instead, he favored a large-scale reorganization of the government from early on. Bush, on the other hand, remained agnostic. When a chart was published showing a spaghetti bowl of tangled lines of authority for homeland protection, "he knew instinctively that there had to be a better way," one adviser said, but the president also had more pressing concerns. The first task, Bush told Ridge, was to "harden America, secure the country, make sure everyone was vigilant," according to Card. In early October, in separate meetings with key House members and senators to discuss homeland defense, Bush heard one lawmaker after another extol the need for a Cabinet-level authority to force changes on agencies that had never before thought of themselves as fighting a war. The president pleaded for time to let Ridge tackle the immediate job -- "to try to do what we could with the legal authority we had," Hughes said. After that he would have time to examine the deeper structure of the bureaucracy. It was better to have Ridge pep-talking state police leaders and exhorting governors and touring border checkpoints looking for holes than to have him "blah, blah, blah up on the Hill," one senior White House official said. But what the administration now presents as an orderly two-step process -- the short-term strategy and the long-term strategy -- was not always laid out that way. Officials repeatedly said things that made it sound as if Bush were fundamentally opposed to a formal Cabinet agency. "He does not think it's necessary," press secretary Ari Fleischer said last fall. As recently as May 30, as the final details of the Bush plan were being tweaked in secrecy, Ridge told the National Journal that he would advise Bush to veto any bill that made his office more than advisory. In the last months of 2001, as Ridge went about his immediate tasks, he seemed increasingly frustrated by his inability to force change. ("I'm not authorized to be frustrated," the former soldier snapped recently, when asked about this impression.) He found that even when agencies wanted to shift their priorities to focus on terrorism, they didn't feel free to do so. "You'd say to Customs, look for any material related to bioterrorism in incoming packages," Card explained. "Customs might agree. But Treasury" -- the parent department for the Customs Service -- "says the top priority is to collect the tariff. Or Immigration would say, no, our priority is to process the paper, not look at the people." Meanwhile, some of the things Ridge managed to accomplish were widely scorned, especially his system for rating the degree of terrorist threat each morning according to a color-coded scale. The conservative magazine National Review headlined a recent article about Ridge, "Color Me Pointless." Ridge continued to meet daily with Bush, and often steered their conversations to the crippling effect of having key agencies spread out over multiple Cabinet departments. After one of these conversations, Chief of Staff Card ordered his deputies, Hagin and Joshua B. Bolten, to gather as much intelligence as they could concerning the roots of the bureaucratic impasse over immigration, intelligence sharing and one or two other issues. "I stuck a microscope in some of the organizations," Card said, and he came away persuaded that only a secret lightning strike could force the needed changes. In the last week of April, the president authorized "a little team" to tackle the subject, without concern for personalities, favored appointees or prickly institutions, Card said. The nucleus was Card, Ridge, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. and White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales. The next officials to be brought in, in the first week of May, were Hagin, Bolten, Calio, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley. One trusted staff member of each of the four officials in the nucleus began to meet daily on the issue. The team was given 10 days to collect enough information to sketch options and identify obstacles. Card ordered up research into the creation of the Defense Department in the late 1940s as a case study. A small team of analysts gathered journal articles and think-tank reports and position papers posted by members of Congress on their Web sites. "People imagine that we were working in a closet," Card said, "but it was more like working in a library." PEOC Group members, meanwhile, collated the information they had and gathered more, as much as they could without letting anyone know what they were up to. Ridge had already been at this for some time. During visits to the borders with Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner, Immigration Commissioner James W. Ziglar and then-Coast Guard Commandant James M. Loy, he learned the details of those agencies. He met with Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), and other backers of a bill that would have forced the sort of changes that Ridge was secretly designing. He talked with Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and other leaders of the intelligence committees; House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), and a long list of other officials. Always he kept the focus fairly narrow, trying to figure out the shape of one puzzle piece without giving away the overall picture. "These were very specific conversations," Ridge said. Card, Cheney and congressional liaison Calio were conducting similar missions. The PEOC Group found it very helpful that Lieberman's bill had started moving in the Senate. It covered a lot of the same issues the White House was secretly wrestling with. By pretending to seek reactions to the bill, they were able to learn a lot from potential supporters and opponents of their own work. They used this camouflage right up to the end. "I got a call from Ridge on Wednesday," Lieberman recalled. "He said, 'We're looking at your bill and I have a couple of questions about it.' " Ridge never let on that Bush had his own even larger proposal at the printers. "The next morning, a reporter asked me about the plan," Lieberman continued, "and I said, 'I didn't realize I had this much influence with the administration.' " By May 10, the PEOC Group was ready to start making decisions. By then the group had grown to include I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Card presented the task as almost an academic exercise. "Don't assess the political feasibility or the unintended consequences," he said in his opening remarks. And indeed, they started out in a highly theoretical vein, according to several participants. Analysts presented a lecture on six common traits of effective organizations, "unity of command," "unity of effort," and so on. Then they looked at all the existing proposals -- from bills in Congress to special commission reports -- and discussed the strengths and weaknesses of each one. In subsequent meetings they steadily narrowed the choices. Throughout the process, Card and Ridge continued to see Bush daily, and he would ask how things were going. "He'd say, 'How's that Coast Guard issue coming?' or 'How's this gonna affect Customs?' " Card said. Little by little, group members realized they were moving toward a more sweeping plan than any of the existing models, for reasons that were, ultimately, partly political. New details hit the news almost daily of failures to anticipate the Sept. 11 attacks. This had two effects: it raised the pressure for a serious response and it built support for Lieberman's bill, leading to fears in the White House that he would preempt the administration. "Everybody became clear that we were all headed in the same direction, which was larger rather than smaller," Calio recounted. >From the pragmatic viewpoint of a professional vote-counter, Calio heartily agreed with this trend. He initially doubted whether any proposal that stepped on so many toes and threatened so much turf could pass Congress. Ironically, though, Calio concluded the only hope was to propose something so significant it would generate its own momentum. "The only way to get anything passed was to get something big," he said. On the other hand, not every idea was added to the proposal. One key question was whether to shift the FBI into the new agency, but Bush decided against it. "The president said this needs to be a homeland security, not a law enforcement, agency," a senior official said. The group also discussed tying the National Guard into the new department, and concluded that it should stay under the Defense Department. The final proposal was three-quarters of an inch thick, filled with charts outlining various options and the pros and cons of the groups's recommendations. Card and Ridge met with Cheney on May 21 to present their work. The next day, during the long flight from Washington to Berlin to begin a presidential tour of Europe, Card took Bush page-by-page through the fat document. Bush raised a number of specific questions, mostly nuts-and-bolts matters regarding the problems of unifying agencies with different work rules and pay scales. But he approved the basic outline. >From there, it was a race to plug in enough details to go public before the inevitable leaks. June 6 and June 12 were proposed as release dates. Some inside the White House wanted more time to prepare, but Calio insisted that speed was of the essence to capture momentum and give Congress time to act. On Wednesday, June 5, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), co-sponsor of a bill to overhaul homeland security, was heading to a television studio when she learned that a scheduled session on the subject had been abruptly canceled by the House Judiciary Committee. Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) had just complied with a mysterious request from the White House to cancel a different hearing that he had planned on the same topic. "If I were a conspiracy nut I'd say something's up," an aide said. "Yep," Harman answered. "Something's up." It wasn't until the next morning that she found out what: minutes before it broke in public. Staff writers Dan Balz, Dan Eggen and Bill Miller contributed to this report. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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