Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

On June 30, 2001, the CIA issued a top-secret report known as the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief that included an article titled “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.” By late July “the system was blinking red,” according to the CIA director, George Tenet, and could not “get any worse.” Yet the highest-ranking members of the Bush administration—including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Bush himself—continued to express doubts about the seriousness of the threat posed by bin Laden. Two senior officials in the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center were so dismayed by the failure of the White House to heed their impassioned warnings that they considered resigning and taking their concerns to the media.