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The night before President Obama was inaugurated in 2009, David Axelrod got a call from an agitated Rahm Emanuel, the president-elect’s chief of staff, according to Mr. Axelrod’s book, “Believer,” which was released on Tuesday.

After instructing Mr. Axelrod, a top Obama adviser, to call back on “a more secure phone line,” Mr. Emanuel informed Mr. Axelrod about what officials believed to be a serious terrorist threat on the inauguration. A group of four young Somalis might have slipped into the United States, Mr. Emanuel said, and officials believed that they might be targeting the ceremonies, Mr. Axelrod wrote.

The potential Somali threat has been noted in news reports, including one by Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The Times. But Mr. Axelrod adds a twist: a secret statement that Mr. Emanuel asked him to write.

Mr. Emanuel explained that the statement would be delivered in the place of the president’s Inaugural Address if an attack was imminent and the Secret Service needed Mr. Obama to help disperse the hundreds of thousands of people on the National Mall. In that case, Mr. Obama was to go to the lectern and read the statement Mr. Axelrod would write.

“I can’t read the speechwriters into this,” Mr. Emanuel said, according to Mr. Axelrod, “so I want you to write a brief statement for the president-elect. Meet him right before the ceremonies in the speaker’s office and give it to him. He’ll put it in his pocket in case it’s needed.”

In his book, Mr. Axelrod does not reprint the statement that he wrote, perhaps leaving it to Mr. Obama to reveal when he leaves office. Mr. Axelrod does express the fear he felt the next morning as his wife and son attended church with Mr. Obama and George W. Bush before the inauguration.

“I was frantic,” Mr. Axelrod wrote. “What if an attack happened there? I desperately wanted to tell them to stay away, but that would have violated Rahm’s edict. As I watched my wife and son disappear through the door, I worried that I might have made a terrible mistake, one I would regret for the rest of my life.”

Officials later concluded that the threat had been a false alarm. But Mr. Axelrod said he tossed and turned the night before the inauguration, wondering what might happen. When he cornered Mr. Obama in the House speaker’s office moments before the inauguration, Mr. Axelrod wrote, he handed Mr. Obama the emergency instructions.

“He tucked it into his pocket without even looking at it — and thankfully, he would have no reason to read it later,” Mr. Axelrod wrote.