Despite a growing chorus of demands that I testify to answer the multiplying charges against the administration, the White House counsel, the Vice President, and indeed the President continued to cling to executive privilege, saying that the President’s closest advisors (who had not been confirmed by the Senate) should not have to testify. There were elaborate arguments about the separation of powers and the President’s right to confidential communication with his staff.
The press and Congress—frankly, the whole country—were having none of it. I’d been national security advisor on the day of the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history, and people wanted to know what I had known and when I had known it. The White House advisors came up with the idea of having me make my case directly to the American people on television and radio and in newspapers. I gave interviews to everybody—the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, and Reuters, among others—on the record. I was almost always on background when speaking to the press, meaning that I was identified as a senior administration official, not by name, so being on the record attracted some attention in its own right. Coming out of a Situation Room meeting, Sean McCormack, the NSC spokesman, pulled me aside. “Time is doing a cover and maybe Newsweek too.” The Time cover story was “Is Condi the Problem?” Clearly the strategy was backfiring horribly. The final nail in the coffin was an interview that I gave to 60 Minutes on Sunday, March 28, 2004.
The late Ed Bradley did the interview, and I was pretty comfortable. We even did a bit of the taping on the balcony outside Mrs. Cheney’s office overlooking the West Wing of the White House. Afterward, I told Sean McCormack that it had gone well. But the penchant of 60 Minutes to edit liberally is well known. And when I saw the interview, it bore little resemblance to what I remembered in its immediate aftermath.
The next day, Jim Wilkinson, who was later my senior advisor at State, Sean McCormack, and Steve Hadley came to me and said that I had to convince the President to let me testify publicly before the 9/11 Commission. I was in complete agreement.
I called Ashley Hickey, the President’s secretary, and asked when I might see him. He was available right then, minutes before his lunch with the Vice President. I went into the Oval. The President was standing behind his desk. He walked out toward me. “What’s wrong?” he asked. He could always read me, and he knew this wasn’t a visit to talk about the latest policy crisis. I told him that I felt I had to testify and that I would have no credibility going forward if I did not. The American people wanted to know the story. I’d asked to testify before and been denied. We had tried the strategy of “going directly to the people.” It hadn’t worked, and now even my own family and friends wondered what was going on. I didn’t threaten to resign. My relationship with the President wasn’t like that. But I would have had we not worked out a way for me to testify.
The President said that he was beginning to think that I should testify but that legal counsel and the Vice President were opposed. He nicely said that it was in his interest for me to testify because I was the best person to make the administration’s case. He was worried about the precedent of a national security advisor testifying under oath.
I simply said, “Mr. President, we have to find a way.” I left the Oval. Within twenty-four hours the decision had been made. I gave a heads-up to NBC News’s Tim Russert, for whom I had enormous respect and whom I trusted. The story broke that same afternoon.
It was against that backdrop that my testimony took on a political importance that surprised me. “Bush’s Credibility Now Rests on Her Shoulders” read a New York Times headline a few days before my testimony. “ ‘Warrior Princess’ Goes to Full-Coverage Battle,” said the Washington Times.
I studied hard, preparing as if I were going into an all-or-nothing exam. What had we done in response to the noise and chatter in the system about a coming attack? What signals had there been? What had we missed?
I put together a team to prepare me for the testimony: NSC lawyers John Bellinger and Bryan Cunningham; policy advisers Steve Hadley and Bob Zoellick, who was serving as the U.S. Trade Representative; and communications specialists Dan Bartlett, Jim Wilkinson, and Sean McCormack. I made a mental catalog of the events. I read the biographies and personality sketches of the commission members to get a feel for their styles of questioning.
And then I put it all aside the day before. “I am an academic,” I told my team. “I can’t heal anyone or create jobs or invent products. But I do know how to talk. Now you’ll just have to trust me.”
I was pretty calm the morning of the testimony. I’d slept rather well and got up early. I went through my usual routine. I exercised; then my great hairdresser, Bruce Johnson, showed up really early and trimmed my hair while I read the blasting headlines in advance of my testimony. I told myself to be conscious of how I entered the room (with confidence, I reminded the face in the mirror). Given the impact that a single picture—even a misleading one—can have, I even had to think about what the photograph would look like when I took the oath. (You sometimes have a tendency to look wide-eyed, I told myself. Narrow your eyes.)
In my testimony to the commission, I said that the failure to prevent the attacks had not been the fault of any one individual administration but was structural. The most critical issue was the stove-piping of information among government agencies and the seam between what we knew about foreign and domestic threats.
Better integrating intelligence would be critical to preventing the next attack. One example that I did not use in my testimony illustrated this point. There were phone calls made by two of the hijackers from San Diego to an al Qaeda safe house in the Middle East before September 11. Because of the legal and policy restrictions in place at the time, these calls were only intercepted overseas and neither the process of intercepting them nor their content revealed their U.S. origin. If other forms of collection had been permitted, as they were in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, it is possible we could have known the location of these two terrorists before September 11. The 9/11 Commission and the congressional Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Acts of September 11, 2001, found the seam between foreign and domestic intelligence to be a crucial weakness. We did, too. Overcoming it would later become the rationale for the hotly debated Terrorist Surveillance Program, which permitted the government to monitor the international calls of a small number of terrorists, regardless of where the calls originated.
Though my confrontation with Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste stood out, there were other memorable moments in the five-hour hearing. In a lighter one, former Senator Bob Kerrey inexplicably referred to me, not once but three times, as “Dr. Clarke,” confusing me with the pale, graying white man who’d worked for me as the National Security Council staff’s counterterrorism chief. In the run-up to the commission hearings, Dick had also taken on the role of chief accuser in insisting that the administration had been negligent in the days prior to the attacks of September 11. Finally I said, “I don’t think I look like Dick Clarke.” It provided some levity, at least for a moment.
In general, I felt good about the outcome. I had fought to at least a draw, maybe a little better. The President called when I returned to the White House to say that I had been “awesome.” That evening, I joined my close friend Mary Bush for dinner and Maundy Thursday service at National Presbyterian Church. At the restaurant, a number of people came up and thanked me for my testimony. A small group applauded. My friend Barbara Harrison, the anchor of the local NBC affiliate morning news, called the next day. She related that they’d been told to stand by in the newsroom in case something broke. The networks had shown the testimony live. I had preempted the soaps.
THE FINDINGS of those two commissions were consistent with our own thinking about ways to restructure the nation’s intelligence apparatus. I asked Brent Scowcroft, who was serving as the chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to make recommendations on changes to the intelligence agencies, and we launched an effort inter
nally to look at major institutional reforms. Those efforts resulted in the President’s decision to create the position of director of national intelligence (DNI) to oversee the work of the nation’s fifteen intelligence agencies. Since 1947 the CIA director had been simultaneously head of the CIA (as DCIA) and head of the whole intelligence community as director of central intelligence (DCI). This odd arrangement had drawn the attention of many a reform commission over the years. Finally, due to the twin intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq WMD, the DCIA was stripped of the larger intelligence community function and the distinct position of DNI was born.
I was given the task of presenting this new institutional arrangement to the press hours before the President first announced that he would ask Congress to create the DNI. The details were, to put it mildly, not fully fleshed out, but in general, the DNI was to make sure that an equal and full hearing was given to the views of all agencies. For instance, the CIA had been the agency most convinced that the high-strength aluminum tubes that Saddam surreptitiously ordered were for nuclear centrifuges. The Energy Department had disagreed. In retrospect, one could see that, though the dissent had been registered, the DCI, wearing also the hat of DCIA, gave considerably more weight to his own agency’s findings. The DNI would level the playing field among the agencies.
The DNI was also to overcome the “silo” problem by ensuring cross-fertilization in the career paths of intelligence specialists. Everyone agreed that the “craft” of intelligence analysis needed to be reviewed and new training programs put into place. The country was short of linguists in such critical tongues as Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese. And someone needed to review the intelligence budget to eliminate redundancies and make certain that technical intelligence collection was balanced properly with human intelligence collection, which sometimes got short shrift. The most expensive intelligence operations—the National Security Agency, which oversees electronic intelligence, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees satellite intelligence—both report to the secretary of defense. Their budgets are also highly compartmented (for secrecy) and pay for programs that frequently have long development times. That gave Defense the upper hand over other agencies in budgetary matters. The DNI would have a lot to do.
Yet most important, in my estimation, was a role for the DNI as the President’s principal intelligence advisor, performing the same sort of function that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was carrying out on the military side. On any given day, the President needed someone to sort through the various inputs and present him with a neutral, coherent analysis of the intelligence picture.
Congress would pass the law creating the DNI on December 8, 2004, and Fran Townsend, the deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, would capably lead the many steps needed to implement it. To this day the DNI position remains a work in progress, and already there are calls to kill the position, calling it an unnecessary bureaucratic layer. This resistance is not surprising. Institutions take time to evolve and find their footing; given time, the right people, and presidential support, the DNI will, I believe, fulfill its promise. President Bush was very fortunate in this regard to have John Negroponte and later Mike McConnell serve as the nation’s first and second directors of national intelligence. Their effective stewardship of the office in its early years would set the evolution of this venerable institution on a positive trajectory. The same is true of Tom Fingar, who had been my colleague at Stanford and served in various intelligence positions at the State Department before becoming deputy DNI for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Their early leadership has left an indelible positive imprint on the DNI position.
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“IRAQIS NEED TO GOVERN THEMSELVES”
THE TRANSITIONAL administrative law that Jerry successfully shepherded through the Iraqi Governing Council gave Iraq an institutional framework for governance. But it’s one thing to have a piece of paper that outlines principles and quite another to put those principles into practice. That needed to be done not by the United States but by Iraqis, who were increasingly anxious to assert their independence. I met with several members of the Iraqi Governing Council on January 20, 2004, and listened to their many complaints. It was clear that the representatives agreed on very little and were pressing largely sectarian agendas.
Ahmed Chalabi was one of my visitors. He was then and remains a controversial figure. There was no doubting his intelligence, and I found him an interesting—if somewhat manipulative—interlocutor. On this day, though, he crystallized something that I had been thinking and that drew approving nods from the others. “We need you to respect our need for sovereignty,” he said simply. I walked down to the Oval and talked to the President, saying that I felt we were running out of time because the Iraqis were running out of patience. I don’t know what I expected him to say, but it was clear that the Iraqis had an ally in the President of the United States. “They’re right,” he said. “The Iraqis need to govern themselves.”
There was a lot to do to achieve that goal. The training and equipping of the Iraqi security forces were proceeding in fits and starts. Practical problems such as the fact that very few Iraqis had bank accounts meant that recruits would leave their units when they were paid to take money home to their families. Sometimes they didn’t come back. When we received the weekly briefings about progress in building the forces, there seemed to be a contradiction: on one hand, a rising numbers of trained security forces and, on the other, a worsening security situation. I came to the conclusion that the Pentagon simply didn’t have reliable metrics. That led me to employ a substantial “discount” factor whenever I listened to the briefings.
Rebuilding the economy was an equally difficult task. Oil production resumed shortly after the war, giving the Iraqis something that most new democracies lacked: resources. But attacks by insurgents against key pipelines were taking their toll, particularly in the south of the country, and it was hard to keep production steady. After falling from a prewar average of 2.5 million barrels per day, oil production climbed through the summer of 2003 but plateaued in October at about 2 million barrels per day. It remained at that level through June 2004, due largely to insurgent attacks.
Congress had approved a grant of $18.4 billion to help reconstruct Iraq. It had not been easy to argue for a grant to the oil-rich nation. Josh Bolten, by now the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and I carried the case to Congress in scores of individual meetings and group briefings. The United States, we said, needed to show generosity toward Iraq, which could use the grants to get back onto its feet and then use its own resources to sustain economic development and growth. Some very good work flowed from that commitment of money, particularly rehabilitation of agricultural lands and the construction of schools, hospitals, safe water sources, bridges, and the like. We made progress on pipeline renovation and rebuilding the electrical grid. But the larger projects were difficult to complete as insurgent attacks increased. The electrical grid was especially vulnerable. The creaky system was already overburdened by the decision after the invasion to distribute power more evenly throughout the country. We quickly learned that Saddam had been quite willing to starve most of Iraq of energy in favor of Baghdad. Countrywide demand increased too as Iraqis used their new freedom to buy goods such as satellite dishes in huge numbers.
In retrospect, reconstruction might have been better served by smaller, more localized projects. That was essentially the strategy that we would prioritize starting in 2005 and accelerate with the surge of 2007, which focused the U.S. military and civilian reconstruction in the provinces and localities.
Nonetheless, at the macroeconomic level, there were many positive developments. The Treasury Department, led by Secretary John Snow and Under Secretary John Taylor, had pulled off a major miracle in 2003, replacing the existing Iraqi currency with a new dinar. Prewar planning for economic recovery had included consideration of how to prevent monetary and financial
collapse and stabilize a currency badly in need of reform. Iraq’s economy under Saddam had been plagued by rampant inflation, not to mention problems with counterfeit notes. Largely out of public view, billions of dinars had been printed, shipped into the country, and swapped. Iraq’s currency was quickly made stable and largely remains so today.
The Iraqis also needed international help with their debt, which included more than $42 billion that was owed to the Paris Club, a collection of creditor states including the G8 countries, and other industrialized nations. Iraq owed an estimated $45 billion to other Gulf States, principally Saudi Arabia. I thought that important enough to ask former Secretary of State Jim Baker to act as a presidential envoy to the G8 and the Arabs, which he agreed to do. Jim negotiated a reduction of the Iraqi Paris Club debt by 80 percent. The new debt framework helped create a basis for IMF assistance to the Iraqis, capably championed by Anne Krueger.
But the most important task would be to replace the Iraqi Governing Council with an interim government. The Council was by its nature unwieldy, with a change in the presidency every month. The new interim government would have a prime minister and a cabinet to take over as many functions as possible. On January 28, 2004, the NSC met to approve a “transition matrix” that detailed the process for handing over functions to the Iraqis. The new government would also receive sovereignty from the CPA, ending the occupation. And preparation would commence for landmark elections in the Arab world.
The task of forming the interim government to administer the country until the January 2005 elections was entrusted to Lakhdar Brahimi of the United Nations, who worked closely with Jerry Bremer, Bob Blackwill, and British envoy Jeremy Greenstock. I talked to Blackwill every morning and again before the day ended. I felt that I could do little to help them sort out the complicated process as the fortunes of various candidates for ministerial positions and other posts in the interim government rose and fell.
No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington Page 32