From Time:

The Terror Consigliere
Fran Townsend, White House top adviser on homeland security, is the kind of take-charge woman Bush likes
By DOUGLAS WALLER

Call it the Fran Townsend treatment. Once in 2004, when then Homeland Security Under Secretary 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 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.'"

That Bush would have an adviser as bare-knuckled as Frances Fragos Townsend, 44, isn't unusual, particularly for a portfolio as vital as counterterrorism. He detests it when aides waste his time clearing their throat before getting to the point, and he has always had an affinity for forceful women like Rice and communications guru Karen Hughes. Still, Townsend's rise to the President's inner circle is remarkable when you consider that she was a Justice Department confidante of Janet Reno's--which made her suspect among conservatives who still love to hate Bill Clinton's Attorney General--and that some counterterrorism professionals question her credentials for the job.

Bush, who relies on gut instinct as much as résumé for personnel decisions, likes having the blunt, 5-ft. former Mob prosecutor at his side. A powerful sign of the respect Bush's loyalty to Townsend commands--or perhaps an indication of lingering Administration defensiveness over her appointment--is that heavyweights like Rice and White House chief of staff Josh Bolten praised Townsend in phone calls to TIME arranged by her office. The President, says Bolten, "likes her competence, her crispness and her ability to give him the straight scoop." Bush has entrusted her with, among other things, the task of implementing sweeping recommendations that a presidential commission made last year for reforming the intelligence community. And he named Townsend the head of a team that tracked last month's British arrests of London bomb-plot suspects. "My job is to focus on the threats and the things that are not resolved," says Townsend. "But you never deliver bad news without the next sentence being what you're doing about it."

Townsend has always had a brassy streak. A working-class kid who grew up in Wantagh, N.Y., Townsend at age 11 wrote letters to her priest, bishop, Cardinal and finally the Vatican asking to be an altar boy. Turned down, she tried to sneak into Mass in a borrowed robe before being caught by her priest. After law school, she prosecuted Gambino crime-family members for the U.S. Attorney's office in New York City under Rudolph Giuliani. She then moved to the Justice Department's Washington offices in 1993 and rose quickly to become a close Reno adviser on counterintelligence and wiretap cases. When John Ashcroft arrived in early 2001, Townsend left Justice and ended up overseeing the U.S. Coast Guard's small intelligence unit. It was a backwater job until 9/11. When the National Security Council needed quick help in staffing counterterrorism tasks, it became the "go-to organization," says retired General John A. Gordon, Bush's counterterrorism adviser from 2002 to 2003. When Gordon left that post to head the White House Homeland Security Council in 2003, he persuaded Rice, then National Security Adviser, to make Townsend his replacement.

To many counterterrorism purists, Townsend was a questionable choice because she had no operational experience. Conservatives warned she could prove to be an "enemy within," as columnist Robert Novak put it, although Townsend says she's been a Republican since age 18. But Bush stood by her and a year later added to her portfolio Gordon's post as presidential homeland-security adviser. In that role, she led the internal inquiry into the Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, prompting Democrats to complain of a conflict of interest. Her report last February acknowledged flawed planning and recommended 125 fixes but didn't blame Bush or top officials.

The criticisms haven't made Townsend shrink from the light. She sticks close to the boss. When Bush posed for photographers at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Va., last month, Townsend stood behind him along with bigger fish John Negroponte, director of national intelligence, and Michael Hayden, CIA chief. While many officials in this White House shun media interviews, she plainly enjoys them. And why not? She's got the job, and without the borrowed robe.