Before His Inauguration, Rumors of a Terrorist Plot Weighed on Obama

As Barack Obama prepared for his inauguration, Bush administration officials learned of an alleged plot by Somali extremists to detonate explosives during the ceremony, The New York Times Magazine reports.

"All the data points suggested there was a real threat evolving quickly that had an overseas component," said Juan Carlos Zarate, President George W. Bush's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism. As the inauguration approached, signs of a plot "seemed to be growing in credibility and relevance."

The rumored plot weighed heavily on Obama in the final days before Jan. 20; aides said he was much more "subdued" than usual. The Bush team worked frantically to foil it, saying that even a failed attack would have a devastating effect on an event that the entire world was watching. Members of Obama's incoming security team, including Hillary Clinton, met with senior Bush officials and debated the best approach.

Clinton stressed the negative imagery of Obama fleeing the scene in the event of attack. "Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see their incoming president disappear in the middle of the inaugural address?" she asked. "I don't think so." The teams decided that Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the only Obama cabinet member-to-be who was already confirmed by the Senate, would stay away from the ceremony in a secret location and be next in the line of succession in the event of a disaster.

John Brennan, a former CIA officer who served in the Bush administration and was returning to be Obama's head of counterterrorism, finally figured out that the rumors were a "poison pen" plot -- a setup by one extremist group to get the United States government to take out its rivals. He discovered that one Somali group knew its rivals were traveling to the U.S. and planted false information about their intentions, and thus a hectic 72 hours came to an end.

"For a fledgling president, the incident would be a lesson in the fluid, murky nature of terrorism," reporter Peter Baker writes. "The challenge of leading the struggle against violent extremists is more than just hunting down bad guys; it's distinguishing between what's real and what's not, tracking down where threats begin, figuring out the right response and finding a balance between acknowledging danger and projecting confidence."