From Newsday:

LIer's journey from Wantagh to the White House

BY CRAIG GORDON
Newsday Washington Bureau

August 20, 2006

WASHINGTON -- Across the sea, the British terror-plot takedown was about to spring into action, sooner than expected.

Now, someone needed to alert President George W. Bush.

It wasn't some top federal cop or high-ranking spy chief who made the call earlier this month. It was a barely 5-foot-tall mother of two from Long Island, a blunt-spoken former mob prosecutor who became Bush's point person on the plot.

Just 10 minutes after getting word of arrests in Pakistan, Frances Fragos Townsend was on a secure line to Bush at his Texas ranch, with no time for the usual protocol of setting up the call with top aides.

The biggest terror plot since 9/11 would hit the news by morning, and a plan Townsend helped coordinate would guide the U.S. response.

Townsend's journey from working-class Wantagh roots to White House homeland security adviser hasn't made her a household name, but she is winning good marks for bringing street-savvy grit and know-how to the job.

Her own job description says it all: "I go to bed worried. I wake up worried.

"Don't underestimate how serious and committed the terrorists are to pulling one of these off," Townsend said last week.

Bonding with the president

At first blush, she is a surprising match for Team Bush - an ex-Brooklyn prosecutor who once worked for Democrats.

But that Aug. 9 call is the kind of thing White House insiders say has bonded her with the president - a cut-through-the-clutter style that matches his own impatience with rhetorical two-stepping.

"She's a hard-charger and not afraid to get involved and speak up," said former Bush Chief of Staff Andrew Card. "I was always looking for potential superstars, especially people who are not white males, and she rose to the occasion."

That style has won her high-powered mentors - Rudolph Giuliani, Janet Reno - but fueled a few bureaucratic scrapes as well.

And some question whether she has the heft, just two years on the job, to prod Bush to sharpen his oft-maligned homeland security agency.

Already, Townsend has become Bush's one-woman fix-it crew on everything from Hurricane Katrina response to spy agency restructuring.

Rep. Peter King saw that side up close when a Townsend-recommended hire for his office got snarled in red tape. "I called Fran, she let out with an expletive, and the next day it was taken care of," recalled King (R-Seaford), who chairs the House homeland security committee. "It was an eight-second conversation."

To friends who knew Townsend back in Wantagh, growing up in a house where her mother, Dorothy, still lives, there were early signs of the self-described "triple type-A" personality that has driven her career.

Like the time around age 11, when she wanted to be an altar boy at St. Frances de Chantal Church in Wantagh. The fact she lacked one qualification - actually being a boy - didn't dissuade her, but the Catholic Church still wouldn't allow it.

"Oh, I wrote to the bishop and the cardinal. I wrote to the apostolic delegate. Then I wrote to the pope. I wrote to everybody," Townsend recalled.

Crestfallen, she turned to Plan B, making friends with one of the altar boys. She offered to iron his robe - then took off with it.

"I did iron it, but I took it in the next morning to Mass, and I just went into the sacristy and put it on and thought maybe nobody would notice," trying to blend in.

Townsend describes an only-child upbringing that was not "an Ozzie-and-Harriet kind of growing up," with parents - dad a roofer, mom a bookkeeper - who later separated. Money was tight, but they were committed to getting her an education. One of her first jobs was as a waitress at Jones Beach.

"She's got the same energy as when she was 15," said Rich Sullivan, now of Rockaway, a childhood friend. "You knew she was going to be successful, but coming from where we came from, you never anticipate that," making it to the White House.

Townsend says a frightening incident at her college dorm room - where she was physically threatened by a man who was let off with little more than a warning - sparked an interest in being a prosecutor. "I wanted to be a good guy. I wanted to wear a white hat," she said.

Terrorism, organized crime

At the Brooklyn district attorney's office, she caught the eye of then-federal prosecutor Giuliani and soon was prosecuting the Gambino crime family.

"I think her experience in doing organized crime back in the '80s has helped her when it comes to understanding terrorism. They're similar in many ways," the former New York mayor said. "She brings to the White House and the president something every White House needs, which is a lot of practical experience. She has a sense of how things work on the street."

Soon, this one-time doorbell-ringer for Republican candidates on the Island followed her legal career to a Democratic Justice Department, emerging as confidant to then-Attorney General Reno, who associates say was drawn to the same can-do style that appeals to Bush. But those connections later worried some Republicans, who launched a whisper campaign hoping to kill her chances with Bush.

As the key official overseeing secret surveillance at Justice in the late 1990s, Townsend's office said wiretaps for foreign intelligence shouldn't be used for criminal cases - the "wall" blocking information-sharing that Bush emphatically rejected as he has sought to expand domestic eavesdropping. Ex-FBI supporters say she did not contribute to that, and Townsend insists she has fought such restrictions.

Today, Townsend faces different questions - can she bring Bush's massive domestic security and intelligence apparatus up to the task? "She does not have the power, the time or the resources to set it right," said Michael Greenberger, a University of Maryland homeland security expert.

Townsend says the busted British plot shows otherwise, with greater FBI and CIA cooperation and careful use of the oft-mocked color-coded threat levels.

But she's still working, always with an eye on 9/11. Townsend lost her close friend, legendary FBI agent John O'Neill, in the collapse of the towers that day, receiving what she believes may have been the last text message O'Neill sent, saying he was OK.

A 6-inch replica of the Twin Towers right after the planes hit sits on her desk. An overhead shot of a smoldering Ground Zero dominates one wall of a cramped West Wing office.

"I still get chills looking at it," Townsend said. "It ought to be hard to look at, and the person who sits in this seat ought to have to look at it every day. Otherwise, it becomes another job, another security job in government, and that can't be."

Frances Fragos Townsend

Formal title: Assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism

Age: 44

Family: Husband John Townsend, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a classmate of George W. Bush at Andover and Yale. Two sons, ages 11 and 4.

Long Island roots: Raised in Wantagh, the daughter of a roofer and a bookkeeper.

Career highlights: Current post, 2004 to present. Deputy assistant to the president, 2003-2004. U.S. Coast Guard, assistant commandant for intelligence, 2001 to 2003. U.S. Department of Justice, several jobs including counsel for intelligence policy to then-Attorney General Janet Reno, 1991-2001; prosecuted organized crime and white-collar crime cases in the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, 1988-91. Started prosecutorial career in Brooklyn district attorney's office, 1985.

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