The Terror Consigliere

摘要

All it the fran townsend treatment. once in 2004, when then Homeland Security Under Sec-retary Asa Hutchinson tried to beg off giving his department's view on raising the terrorism threat level to orange until he checked with his boss, Tom Ridge, Townsend cut him off. "I need to know I now," snapped George W. Bush's top adviser for counterterrorism and homeland security. "The President will be calling, and I have to have an answer." When Representative Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, phoned Townsend earlier this year to complain that the Coast Guard was dragging its feet on sending him an officer as a temporary adviser, she "made some profane remark," he says, "and the next thing I knew the red tape was cut and the guy was sitting in our committee offices." With Bush, "Fran says exactly what's on her mind," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told TIME. "I've heard her say many times in meetings, 'No, Mr. President, that really isn't getting done.'"