A Bush Aide (and Mother) Is Major Player in Antiterror Campaign (Frances Fragos Townsend)

New York Times ^ | August 6, 2004 | DAVID JOHNSTON

[OESY]

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 - As the mother of two young sons, Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's domestic security adviser, believes that families need to know as much as possible about terror threats. That is part of the reason Ms. Townsend has moved from the shadows to a center stage role as an advocate of raising the threat level with urgent warnings of a possible attack.

"I don't want the government to make decisions for me and my kids," she said in a recent interview, in which she added that the government was much better prepared to detect and deter terrorist attacks than it was before Sept. 11, 2001. "We are trying to be responsible, to give people as much information as we can so that they can make decisions for themselves and their families."

Last weekend, Ms. Townsend was a main White House contact for threat intelligence pouring in from the C.I.A., White House officials said. She was chairwoman of White House meetings with cabinet officers and the heads of intelligence and law enforcement agencies in which officials decided to raise the threat level. Since Monday, in television news appearances, she has defended the administration from criticism that it overreacted to dated intelligence.

"The intelligence was very, very detailed and unusually so,'' Ms. Townsend said in one appearance on Fox News. "And on timing, I really say that we don't know when. I mean what we know from the intelligence up until now is that Al Qaeda is targeting the United States homeland just before the elections.''

Ms. Townsend, whose sons are 9 and 2½, is a 42-year-old lawyer who spent 13 years at the Justice Department. She ended her tenure there directing the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which helps administer the country's domestic electronic eavesdropping laws in espionage and terrorism cases. She is one of the few officials from the Clinton administration to retain a senior job.

A New Yorker - she grew up in Wantagh on Long Island - she worked alongside F.B.I. and New York City police officers as a federal organized-crime prosecutor in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Rudolph W. Giuliani, a former United States attorney in New York who became mayor, and Louis J. Freeh, a top prosecutor who became a federal judge and the F.B.I. director, both helped guide her career. Mr. Freeh remains a close friend. In the early 1990's, Ms. Townsend moved to the Justice Department in Washington to focus on international legal matters. After Mr. Bush's election, she moved to the Coast Guard, where she was head of intelligence. She became the domestic security adviser in May.

She operates with a sometimes salty, streetwise style that is in sharp contrast to the sleek, buttoned-down world of the Bush White House. In an interview on Monday with Sean Hannity on Fox News, Ms. Townsend reacted with characteristic bluntness when she scowled at comments by Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate, suggesting that the administration might have raised the threat level for political reasons. Her reply was, "I found his comments absolutely outrageous.''

One F.B.I. friend, Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the assistant director in charge of the New York office, says, "She's one of the most competent, dedicated people I know. But she can carve you up in a heartbeat."

Working from a subterranean office downstairs from the Oval Office in the White House West Wing, Ms. Townsend has not seemed to hurt her career by doing intelligence work for a Democratic administration. Before she took her new White House job - which had been held by Tom Ridge before he took over the Homeland Security Department - she worked as Condoleezza Rice's counterterrorism deputy, and still performs those duties. That job was once held by Richard A. Clarke, who later wrote a book attacking the Bush administration as inattentive to terrorism issues before 9/11.

Ms. Townsend's close working relationship with top members of Mr. Bush's national security team, like Ms. Rice, was apparent last week. On Friday morning, as Mr. Bush's aides struggled to evaluate the latest terrorism reports from the C.I.A., Ms. Townsend was frequently on the phone with the president, and at one point she climbed the stairs to Ms. Rice's office and the two passed a telephone back and forth as they briefed Mr. Bush.

In an interview, Ms. Townsend warned of the seriousness of the threat posed by Al Qaeda, repeating the statements of other senior officials like Mr. Ridge, who on Sunday announced that the threat level was being raised in response to the new information, although some of it dated back to 2000 and 2001.

"We've devoted every resource of the federal government to make up for what we didn't know," she said, referring to improvements in interpreting threats. "Our insight is far better and far better refined than it was before 9/11."

As a result, she said, the government's assessment reflects the use of improved analytical skills and better information gathering.

"The threat is serious," she said, refusing to explain what intelligence lay behind the expressions of concern on grounds that disclosing more specifics might compromise the government's ability to obtain more of the same kind of information.

Administration officials, Ms. Townsend said, are aware that they have been criticized about terror warnings by those who see them as an effort to exaggerate for political effect or complain that the information is too vague to be a basis for meaningful preventative steps.

"If we are criticized, so be it," she said.

[OESY]

Frances Fragos Townsend is domestic security adviser to the president.

IMHO, a very effective spokeswoman!

[Bahbah]

"IMHO, a very effective spokeswoman!"

Agreed. I hadn't seen anything of her before last week. She just exhudes no nonsense common sense.