by Rizzo, John
Harriet was also at the center of an odd and unexpected crisis I got pulled into in the final hours of 2005. It started around eight o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Eve, when the CIA operations center called me at home to relay an urgent message from David Shedd of the National Security Council staff. He and I had been friends for years. Rolling out of bed with a sigh, I hauled out my CIA-issued secure-line telephone from its “concealment” device, a piece of ordinary-looking furniture in which Agency technicians had carved a hidden compartment to hide the phone when it wasn’t in use.
When I finally got through to David at the White House, I immediately sensed the tone of urgency in his voice even through the snap, crackle, and pop interference of the connection. I braced myself for some sort of political or operational catastrophe, likely having to do with our counterterrorist program. Instead, David began by asking, “You know who James Risen is, right?”
“Sure,” I replied. Risen was a longtime investigative reporter for the New York Times, working the intelligence beat.
“Well,” David said, “we just got word here that he’s about to come out with a book that’s going to blow the lid off a bunch of very sensitive intelligence operations, including at least one being run by the Agency.”
And then David’s voice got lower. “I can’t tell you how, but we have gotten our hands on an advance copy of the final manuscript, and you need to get down here now to get it and then get it to the people at Langley who know about the operation. If it’s as damaging as I think it is, we are going to have to see if we can stop it.”
None of this was making any sense to me. I had heard nothing—the CIA had heard nothing—about an upcoming book by Risen. “Stop it?” I asked. “You mean, stop the operation?”
“No,” David responded. “I mean stop the book.”
Christ, I thought to myself. He’s talking about prior restraint on publication. There goes my plan for a quiet, restful day at home with my wife, topped off with joining friends at a restaurant in Georgetown to ring in the new year.
Feeling supremely sorry for myself, I got dressed and drove down the empty streets to the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House to pick up the manuscript from David in his office. (He didn’t trust the normal White House courier system to get it to Langley in a timely and discreet fashion.) Only, when I got there and saw it, it didn’t look like some prepublication manuscript. It looked like a book, a finished book, with a dust jacket and all. It was titled State of War, published by Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
“Jeez, David,” I told him, “this looks like it’s ready to come out. Any idea when the publication date is?”
“We’re not sure. Maybe a couple of days, maybe a couple of weeks. The source who gave it to us doesn’t know, either, but he doesn’t want to get burned, so we don’t want to do anything until we know the scope of the problem. But I think there’s a big problem.”
I skimmed the section of the book that David found the most troubling. Yup, it was definitely a problem.
I got on the phone to the CIA Command Center and had them track down all the people I thought needed to know about this besides me. I wasn’t about to let myself be the only guy whose New Year’s plans were going to be screwed up by this sudden mess. I then jumped in my car, clutching a copy of the book, and raced up the George Washington Parkway toward Langley.
Once back at headquarters, I had our chief of operations (a remarkably good sport about being dragged out of bed to come in) do a speed-read. He quickly confirmed that the details largely were all too distressingly accurate and damaging to CIA sources and methods. What to do now? I made a quick call to my boss, Director Porter Goss, at his Florida vacation home to tell him what was happening. Polite and unflappable as always, Porter asked me what I thought the next step would be. “I have no idea,” I replied. I got on the phone again to Shedd, who told me to get back down to the White House, where he was convening an emergency meeting in the Situation Room.
Before hopping back into my car, I made a point to call the CIA Office of Public Affairs. “Do you have any insight into this? Has Risen ever called about any of it?” I asked. It has always been a long-standing custom for journalists working on national security stories that could involve classified information to contact Public Affairs in advance, partly as a matter of courtesy and partly to give the CIA a heads-up and an opportunity to make a case for the reporter to omit, or at least “fuzz up,” some of the details most harmful to national security. Sometimes the journalist agrees, sometimes he or she doesn’t, but the point is to give the Agency a chance. In my experience, virtually every serious journalist—whether friend or foe to the CIA and its mission—has operated on that basis. Risen, a seasoned reporter on intelligence matters, certainly knew the protocol, and he clearly had been working on this book for a long time.
The Public Affairs staff recalled that Risen had called in the recent past about some story he was working on for the Times, something that was no big deal. Then, right before hanging up, he casually mentioned he was working on a book “that will be coming out at some point.”
And then it hit me, later than it should have. The classified, highly damaging information in the book we were focusing on had come up on the screen before. Almost three years earlier, the CIA had gotten word that the New York Times was preparing to publish an article laying out the same entire story. The article’s author: James Risen. In an extraordinary step few administrations ever took during the course of my career, the Bush administration, in the person of National Security Advisor Condi Rice, summoned Risen and his boss at the Times to the White House to plead that the article not be published, spelling out in detail the grave national security interests at stake. To the surprise and relief of many of us at the Agency—this was the New York Times, after all, not exactly a toady for the Bush administration or the CIA—senior management at the Times ultimately agreed to spike the story. Risen, evidently, was not happy about the decision.
I know James Risen only by reputation. Inside the CIA, at least, he has had a reputation for being irresponsible and sneaky. This episode showed me that his reputation appeared to be richly deserved.
But on this frantic day there was no time to dwell on his professional ethics. Back in the Situation Room, David Shedd had assembled a small group of officials to review what we knew. I don’t remember all the attendees (it was now the early afternoon of New Year’s Eve, and the pickings of available senior people were slim), but I do recall that Harriet Miers was there, as always unobtrusive and quietly taking notes. I confirmed to the group that the stuff in that chapter was alarming and damaging. David had a few additional details about the timing of publication—as best anyone could tell, the books were printed in bulk and stacked somewhere in warehouses. After going around and around for a while, we arrived at a rueful consensus: game over as far as any realistic possibility to keep the book, and the classified information in it, from getting out.
It was getting dark as I walked back to my car around six o’clock for the drive home. I made a few calls on the way. One to the guys still on standby at headquarters, telling them they could go home. Another to Porter Goss, providing an update on where things stood. Finally, a call to my ever-patient and understanding wife, assuring her that we could still salvage the evening and make our dinner reservation. I knew that there would be a follow-up I would have to do—file a crimes report with the DOJ, start on a more detailed damage assessment on the harm caused by the revelations in the book—but that could wait for the first few days of 2006.
It was about four hours later, as Sharon and I were dining with friends at a crowded and noisy Georgetown restaurant, when my cell phone rang. It was from the White House, and I recognized the soft, Texas-twanged voice of Harriet Miers immediately.
“John, I am truly sorry to bother you again, but is the name Sumner Redstone familiar to you?”
“Sumner Redstone, Sumner Redstone,” I stammered into the
phone as I waded through the restaurant to get outside to escape the din.
“I am looking on the Internet,” Harriet continued, “and it says that he is the chairman of Viacom, the parent company of Simon & Schuster.” Oh, yes, I remembered, that Sumner Redstone, the legendary octogenarian corporate mogul.
“Well, I’ve been thinking that maybe you should give him a call. You know, explain to him the national security crisis we have here, and get him to order Simon & Schuster to pull back the books from the warehouses.”
I was outside, dodging revelers teeming on M Street. I was hoping I wasn’t hearing her correctly.
Harriet pressed on: “I suppose I or someone else in the White House could make the call, but I think it would have more impact if it came from the CIA, don’t you? And we have to go to the very top. But you need to do it now,” she said, her voice now more steely. “Here, I have the phone number. Do you have a pen handy?”
Numbly, I scrambled back into the restaurant and borrowed a pen, and a menu, from the startled hostess. I scribbled down the number, which Harriet apparently was reading off the Internet. It sounded like the main switchboard number for Viacom, if there was such a thing.
“Thank you so much,” Harriet signed off cheerfully. “Happy New Year!” She said it without a trace of irony.
I stared at the phone in the cold, dark night, pondering my fate. It was almost ten on New Year’s Eve, and I had just been ordered to make a cold call aimed at tracking down an iconic titan of business, a total stranger, then to invoke the Agency’s name and mystique to somehow cajole him into ordering the summary suppression of a major book that one of his companies had already printed in God knows how many thousands of copies and scattered into God knows how many warehouses around the country.
The whole idea was so crazy, so preposterous, that I had to tell somebody. Having by now lost my appetite for a New Year’s celebration, I quickly wrapped up the dinner and began to walk to our nearby Georgetown home with my wife. She could sense something was amiss with me since I had taken that phone call in the restaurant, so as we were walking I gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened and the pickle I was in. Sharon had joined the CIA in 1999, six years after we married, so she had the same top-secret security clearance I had. Still, I had previously been circumspect with her about some of the highly sensitive and hairy stuff I had been involved in since 9/11, such as the interrogation program. For one thing, I didn’t want to worry her. Beyond that, there was that bedrock principle in the intelligence world called “need to know”; her holding a security clearance didn’t necessarily mean that I could make her privy to all the secrets I knew. And she always understood and accepted that. I suppose Sharon didn’t “need to know” that night what the Miers phone call was about, but trudging home as midnight approached, with my head spinning, I sure as hell needed to talk to somebody about it. And so I blurted out the whole surreal episode to her.
“Can’t you talk to someone else at the White House, to make sure this is what they really want to do?” Sharon gently suggested. I hesitated—I liked and admired Harriet, and I was really torn about going around her. But this was too much: On the remote chance I could even hook up with Sumner Redstone in the final hours of New Year’s Eve without being dismissed as a drunken crank or lunatic, the chances were beyond remote that he would ever agree to what I would be modestly proposing. What’s more, if the word of any such call ever got out, it would spawn a huge, embarrassing sensation that would only draw more attention and customers to the book.
In desperation, trudging back to our house just before midnight, I somehow tracked down David Shedd’s home phone number. Poor David. As I blurted my story out, he had every right to conclude that this was some sort of twisted, alcohol-fueled gag on my part. But he was patient and remarkably low-key. “Forget the whole thing,” he said. “Apparently there are copies already at bookstores. Just go to bed. I’ll talk to Harriet.” He must have, because she never asked me about it again.
Thus officially ended 2005 for me.
A couple of days later I sent the requisite “crimes report” to the Justice Department on the unauthorized disclosure contained in the Risen book that had caused all the commotion. It coincided with the publication of the book, which went on to become a best seller. It would take almost four years, but in December 2010 the Obama Justice Department filed a ten-count indictment against a disgruntled former CIA undercover officer named Jeffrey Sterling, charging him with being the source of the leak to Risen. As this is written, the case has yet to go to trial because of extended procedural wrangling between the parties. Among other things, the prosecutors have subpoenaed Risen to testify at the trial about his sources. Risen has fought against testifying, claiming that the freedom-of-the-press guarantees in the Bill of Rights grant him a “reporter privilege.”
CHAPTER 14
An Offer I Couldn’t Refuse (2006)
The public controversy—and the behind-the-scenes machinations—surrounding the EIT program carried over into the new year of 2006. Media leaks about the program were now gushing, as newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV networks vied with each other on a daily basis to produce “exclusive” investigative pieces on the CIA “black sites” and what were now described as “brutal” or “torture” techniques the Agency was applying to its detainees. The word waterboarding was on its way to becoming firmly established in the national lexicon. It all made for sensational, headline-grabbing stuff. All of us involved in the program could only look on, silent and helpless, as collectively we were being publicly portrayed as untethered, sadistic goons. For its part, Congress offered no support or solace; still only a handful in Congress were privy to the underlying facts and demonstrable intelligence benefits the program was providing, and they weren’t talking.
However, there was one curious episode during this general time frame where the CIA—in the person of yours truly—had to negotiate with a journalist to keep a key, extremely dicey element of our covert counterterrorist efforts from becoming public. Actually, it had nothing to do with the EIT program. Instead, it involved the Agency’s innovative, complex initiative to uncover Al Qaeda’s worldwide financial network. The program was hatched in the early days after 9/11 as a joint CIA/Treasury Department effort to “follow the money” being generated by Al Qaeda. Like other post-9/11 CIA counterterrorist actions, it was unprecedented in its audacity and scope. In the years leading up to 9/11, the Agency had periodically floated something along its lines to policy makers in the Clinton and Bush administrations as one of the most effective ways to attack Al Qaeda at its roots, only to be summarily rebuffed each time. I remember being archly lectured by my counterparts at Treasury and State that the United States followed a strict policy, based on long-standing international conventions and understandings, not to engage whatsoever in practices that compromise the “sanctity” of worldwide financial networks. I vividly recall the use of the word sanctity because its quasi-religious connotation struck me as a peculiar status to accord a bunch of wheeling-and-dealing, ethically challenged fat-cat bankers.
Anyway, passenger jets being crashed into crowded buildings at the hub of the financial world served to dissipate erstwhile concerns about “sanctity,” and post-9/11, the CIA was given the green light to begin a full-bore offensive against the Al Qaeda money machine. From the start, it proved enormously successful on a number of levels, not the least of which was that—unlike the EIT program—the details of this tightly held program remained secret. And secrecy was particularly essential for these operations—not only was there the risk of Al Qaeda being tipped off, but the sub-rosa, cooperative role played by foreign governments could also be exposed.
The sudden threat to the entire thing unraveling in public came in the unlikely person of Paul O’Neill, treasury secretary for the first two years of the Bush administration. I should emphasize at the outset that O’Neill bears absolutely no responsibility for the crisis, which was ignited when he was forced to resi
gn his position at the end of 2002 after a relatively short, rocky tenure. Instead, the blame lies at the feet of the top levels of the Treasury bureaucracy, which made a decision to grant O’Neill’s departing request for electronic copies of all documents—thousands and thousands of them—that had come to his personal attention during his time in office. His former subordinates obliged his request by transferring everything onto DVDs and shipping them off to him shortly after he returned to private life. They did so without apparently bothering to review the stuff first—it wasn’t scrubbed for any concerns about the privacy of others, sensitive proprietary information . . . or highly classified intelligence matters. Writing about this years later, among all the flaps and screwups I observed in the government, I still consider what Treasury did to be unique in terms of its astonishing carelessness.
I cannot say for certain if O’Neill originally sought his records in order to write his memoirs, but in any case they played a key role in a best-selling book in 2004, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill, written with O’Neill’s full cooperation by Ron Suskind, a well-known, experienced reporter with a Pulitzer Prize among his credentials. The book itself, while highly critical of various Bush administration policies, didn’t raise a ripple at the Agency. What we didn’t know then was that Suskind had his own copy of the O’Neill DVDs. And he was smart enough to recognize what he had—buried in the thousands of documents were accounts of National Security Council deliberations in which the top-secret CIA/Treasury joint operations against Al Qaeda were laid out in raw, comprehensive detail, with names, places, and dates. It was a journalist’s ultimate wet dream, and Suskind clearly understood what had fallen into his lap.