“When the query [from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to create an Iraq war plan] arrived, [Third Army Lieutenant Colonel Thomas] Reilly and his team of five planners were summoned to a windowless room in the bowels of the Third Army headquarters that was reserved for the most sensitive communications. …The Third Army planners had seventy-two hours to sketch a plan to seize and hold Iraq’s southern oilfields. The operation, indeed the very existence of planning effort, would be classified at the highest level: Polo Step. The snowflake [nickname for Rumsfeld’s memos to army brass and Pentagon aides] had arrived on September 13 [2001], two days before the Camp David war council. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon was one step ahead of the president [Bush]. By the time Bush ordered that a contingency plan for Iraq be drawn up the effort was already quietly under way.”
– Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II, Pages 21-22