In many ways, Zelikow had what should have been the job of his dreams at Virginia. He had an appointment at one of the country’s best public universities and plenty of contact with the powerful in Washington, only 120 miles away up the highway. Zelikow was careful to fill the Miller Center’s board with celebrities from the capital, including the fabled Watergate reporter Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Zelikow was liked and trusted by other Washington journalists who knew that he was often well plugged-in with government officials; Zelikow understood what reporters needed on deadline and could be depended on for a pithy quotation.
Still, colleagues could see that Charlottesville was a small pond for a man as ambitious and talented as Zelikow. He was a historian who wanted to be part of history. He seemed perplexed that his talents had not been recognized by the people who handed out the best jobs in the Bush administration.
Zelikow was in his office when he got the call from Lee Hamilton in December 2002. Zelikow did not know Hamilton, but he certainly knew of him and of his long career in Congress. He also knew Hamilton had just been named vice chairman on the 9/11 commission. “Professor Zelikow, I’m wondering if we might talk,” Hamilton said, introducing himself. Zelikow listened closely.
8
J. EDGAR HOOVER FBI BUILDING
Washington, D.C.
JANUARY 2003
FBI director Robert Mueller was horrified, too. But he could never admit that publicly when he was asked about the bureau’s incompetence before 9/11.
On the morning of the attacks, he had been on the job at FBI headquarters for exactly one week. Seven days. He barely had time to figure out how to navigate the labyrinth of the J. Edgar Hoover Building and his suite of offices on the seventh floor before he was forced to organize the FBI’s response to a terrorist attack that had left more than three thousand people dead on American soil. He was supposed to have arrived at the FBI earlier in the summer, but he delayed his swearing-in after he underwent surgery in August for prostate cancer. The bureau had been without a permanent director since June, when Louis Freeh retired abruptly. Whatever his arrival date, no one could blame Mueller for what had gone so wrong at the FBI in the months and years before the attacks.
But that did not make it easier for Mueller to hear the terrible stories—the drip-drip-drip of stories, a new one every news cycle for months, it seemed—about how the bureau might have prevented the attacks. Should have prevented 9/11. The what-if questions were being asked everywhere, and Mueller had to ask them, too.
What if someone in headquarters in Washington had acted on the pleas of FBI agents in Minnesota in August 2001 for a court warrant to inspect Zacarias Moussaoui’s laptop? (The French-born Muslim extremist had been arrested near a Minneapolis flight school on immigration charges after alarming instructors there with his bizarre request to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, even though he had no basic knowledge of flying.) What if one of the arrogant counterterrorism supervisors in Washington had taken a few minutes to read a memo sent in July from FBI agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix? (Williams had urged FBI headquarters to open a nationwide investigation of why so many young Arab men connected to radical Muslim groups were seeking commercial flight training.) What if someone in San Diego had bothered to ask a veteran FBI informant to probe into the backgrounds of two mysterious young Saudi men who had been boarders in his house in 2000? (The Saudis, Hawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were among the hijackers on the American Airlines jet that crashed into the Pentagon on September 11.)
For weeks after September 11, Mueller sat there in his suite of offices overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, trying to prevent his long Brahmin jaw from dropping to his desk in astonishment as yet another person arrived to give him more bad news—another belated discovery of a clue that, had somebody in the bureau followed up, might have allowed the FBI to roll up the hijackers before the attacks. What made it worse for Mueller was the fact that he had to demand to hear the bad news. Fairly or unfairly, Freeh, his temperamental predecessor, had a reputation of wanting only good news, and that’s what he got. At the FBI under Freeh, it was often said that “we kill the messengers.”
Even if he could legitimately duck blame for the bureau’s pre-9/11 blunders, it was still left to Mueller to try to explain them and to fix them, if that was possible. And with each new disclosure, it seemed it was going to be left to Mueller to justify the bureau’s very existence, at least in its current structure. By late 2002, it had gotten that bad.
There was sentiment on Capitol Hill and among the commissioners of the newly created 9/11 commission to break up the FBI, with terrorism investigations turned over to some sort of new domestic spy agency, perhaps one modeled on Britain’s MI-5. Its critics believed the FBI was simply incapable of being anything more than a federal police force. Certainly 9/11 had proved that, as an institution, the FBI had no ability to deal with a sinister, shadowy force like al-Qaeda; it had no ability to use tools beyond basic law enforcement; it knew how to measure success only by arrest statistics.
On his senior staff, Mueller had deputies who had moved with him to the FBI and felt no special loyalty to the bureau, and some of them wondered if a breakup was not such a bad idea. To them, the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover still haunted the FBI. “We need to junk this whole place,” one of Mueller’s senior aides blurted out after learning how an FBI agent in Minneapolis had warned FBI headquarters in August 2001, just weeks before the attacks, that Moussaoui seemed like a terrorist in training who might “fly a plane into the World Trade Center.” After the briefing, the aide went to the men’s room and vomited.
But Robert Swan Mueller III was not about to give up on the FBI. Mueller was many things—patrician, Princeton man, class of 1966, lawyer and prosecutor, passionately devoted husband and father—but he was, above all, a marine. And this battle-tested jarhead had been given a mission by his commander in chief to save the FBI.
Mueller rarely talked about his three years in the U.S. Marines, certainly not about his experiences in Vietnam in the late 1960s, where he won a Bronze Star for his valor in rescuing a trapped rifle platoon. He was far too modest for that. But there was a paper trail of his heroism. “2nd Lieut. Mueller fearlessly moved from one position to another, directing the accurate counterfire of his men and shouting words of encouragement to them,” his Bronze Star citation read.
Mueller’s performance after 9/11 was uneven. He was painfully shy—his comments at the White House press conference to announce his nomination in July 2001 lasted all of forty-eight seconds—and mostly hid from the press corps and the public in his first months after the attacks. He was happy to cede the public stage to Attorney General John Ashcroft, his patron, and the camera-loving Ashcroft was just as happy to take it.
When Mueller did make public statements about the 9/11 investigation and about the disclosures of FBI blunders, he often misspoke, raising early, unnecessary questions about his credibility.
He said repeatedly in the weeks after the attacks that there had been no clue within the FBI about Arab extremists seeking flight training in the United States, an assertion that would be contradicted with the disclosure of the Phoenix memo and the arrest of Moussaoui. In October 2001 and again in December 2001, when Moussaoui was charged with conspiring in the September 11 attacks, Mueller insisted that there had been insufficient evidence to justify a search of Moussaoui’s laptop before September 11; the hard drive was later found to contain evidence linking Moussaoui to the hijacking plot. Mueller’s claim of insufficient evidence was later shown to be wrong—astonishingly so.
His statements about Moussaoui were challenged most directly by a whistle-blower in the Minneapolis FBI office, Special Agent Coleen Rowley. She said in a letter to Mueller and congressional investigators that his comments on the case reflected a decision “to circle the wagons at FBI HQ in an apparent effort to protect the FBI from embarrassment.” Her letter was leaked to Time magazine, which went on to name Rowley as one of
its “Persons of the Year.” Rowley and other agents in Minneapolis were also outraged by the news that Mueller, far from demoting or firing FBI supervisors in Washington who had tried to derail the Moussaoui investigation before 9/11, promoted them instead.
The creation of the joint House-Senate committee on 9/11 intelligence failures in 2002 had seemed an early opportunity for Mueller to demonstrate his willingness to cooperate with outside investigators. But the Democratic chairman of the congressional panel, Senator Bob Graham of Florida, accused Mueller of a “cover-up” to protect the bureau. Graham found that Mueller’s newly discovered loyalty to the FBI trumped any commitment to allowing an open inquiry into the bureau’s failings on 9/11. In its final report, the congressional committee urged the government to consider a breakup of the FBI.
The bureau’s future appeared to be under a more serious threat with the creation of the 9/11 commission. It was one thing for the White House to ignore the findings of a congressional investigation, especially when it was led by a Democrat. It would be more difficult for the White House to ignore the findings of an independent commission led by a Republican and established by legislation that had been signed, albeit reluctantly, by Bush.
So Mueller was left with a decision: Would he follow the strategy that the bureau had used in dealing with congressional investigators—limit cooperation and hope that the investigators’ fury would blow over? Or would he cooperate fully with the 9/11 commission in hopes that the commission would show leniency and give Mueller the time he needed to fix the FBI?
In New York, Mueller’s immediate predecessor at the FBI, Thomas Pickard, a veteran agent who had been the bureau’s acting director in the months before 9/11, had a similar decision to make. Should he tell the full, awful story? The story that might destroy John Ashcroft? Or something less?
Pickard was free of the bureau now. He was retired and living happily in New York, his hometown. He was no whistle-blower. Did he really want to tell the commission all that had happened at the FBI and the Justice Department in the spring and summer of 2001—how Ashcroft had ignored the flood of intelligence warnings of an imminent, catastrophic attack? Pickard believed that the attorney general’s indifference to terrorist warnings helped explain why the nation’s law enforcement agencies were unprepared for what came on 9/11.
9
OFFICES OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
The Senate
JANUARY 2003
Senator Bob Graham took a seat at a conference table in the offices of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Graham picked up and began paging through a document that he knew could—and almost certainly should—undermine Washington’s relations with Saudi Arabia, supposedly one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East. If the report ever saw the light of day, that was.
It was January 2003. Senator Graham, a Florida Democrat who had a reputation as a cautious, politically moderate lawmaker, had spent much of the past year consumed with his duties as chairman of a special House-Senate committee to investigate intelligence failures before 9/11.
The panel’s final report was finished, but it could not be made public until the Bush administration completed a review of the voluminous secret material that it contained; it was left to the CIA and other spy agencies that answered to the White House to decide if the congressional report could be declassified. Graham suspected the Bush administration was in no hurry to complete the process.
That meant that, for now, Graham was required to read the report in the intelligence committee’s thick-walled offices on Capitol Hill. The offices had round-the-clock guards and were swept regularly for eavesdropping equipment; cell phones had to be left outside. The walls were decorated with vintage World War II military posters—LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS—that reminded lawmakers of the need for secrecy in their committee work.
Graham felt the report made it clear that Saudi government officials had a role in 9/11—simple and shocking as that was. There was a “direct line between the terrorists and the government of Saudi Arabia,” he believed. The draft contained a twenty-eight-page passage that detailed evidence that Saudis in the United States—Saudi government “spies,” Graham called them—had provided financial and logistical support to at least two of the 9/11 hijackers while they lived in Southern California.
There was no allegation that senior members of the Saudi royal family were involved in the attacks or had advance knowledge of them. But Osama bin Laden and his call for jihad against America and the West had enthusiastic support among many Saudis, including government officials, before and after 9/11; bin Laden remained a hero to many of his former countrymen. And Graham and his investigators had become convinced that a number of sympathetic Saudi officials, possibly within the sprawling Islamic Affairs Ministry, had known that al-Qaeda terrorists were entering the United States beginning in 2000 in preparation for some sort of an attack. Graham believed the Saudi officials had directed spies operating in the United States to assist them.
It was an astonishing allegation, but Graham felt the facts were indisputable. The remaining question was whether any of the evidence could be made public and whether Graham could survive the efforts by the White House and congressional Republicans to portray him as a partisan conspiracy theorist—a headline-grabbing kook.
The early indications from the White House were that while most of the committee’s report could be made public eventually, the twenty-eight pages about the Saudis would remain secret on national security grounds. Graham suspected the material would remain secret for far less noble reasons involving the Bush administration’s determination to keep Saudi oil flowing to the United States.
He believed the Bush White House was determined to cover up Saudi involvement in 9/11—and that the administration had found an eager accomplice in the FBI; Graham knew the bureau was humiliated that it had missed so many clues before 9/11 that might have allowed it to prevent the attacks. Graham had come to believe that the new FBI director, Robert Mueller, had become a “facilitator of the ineptitude of the bureau” and was directly involved in the effort to hide the truth.
The evidence about the Saudi links to the hijackers was dug up because of the tenaciousness of the joint committee’s staff director, Eleanor Hill, a veteran congressional investigator who had worked for both Democrats and Republicans, and Michael Jacobson, a former FBI lawyer and counterterrorism analyst who had joined the staff and was one of its most dogged investigators.
Jacobson had found the most important evidence about the Saudi connection to the hijackers buried in the files of the FBI’s field office in San Diego and at FBI headquarters in Washington. Two of the Saudi-born 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, had lived in San Diego for more than a year before the attacks while seeking flight training. They had lived in the open—amazingly so. Hazmi’s name, address, and home phone number were listed in the San Diego phone book. The fact that they were in the United States at all reflected the most basic sort of incompetence by the nation’s spy and law enforcement agencies, since both Hazmi and Mihdhar had been identified as al-Qaeda terrorists before their arrival in the United States in January 2000. The CIA claimed that it had almost immediately alerted the FBI to the fact that at least one of them might be in the United States, although there was no record at the bureau to support that.
What Jacobson found in searching through the FBI’s files was that Hazmi and Mihdhar had been befriended shortly after their arrival in California by a mysterious Saudi expatriate, Omar al-Bayoumi; Bayoumi seemed clearly to be working on behalf of some part of the Saudi government. Bayoumi was in his early forties at the time. He entered the United States as a business student and had lived in San Diego since 1996. He was on the payroll of an aviation contractor to the Saudi government, paid about $2,800 a month, but apparently did no work for the company. Bayoumi was described by another worker as one of several “ghost employees” on the payroll. He instead spent much of his day at a mosque in El Cajon, about
fifteen miles outside San Diego.
To Graham and several of his investigators, it seemed obvious that the amiable Bayoumi was a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent. He was no James Bond, no cloak-and-dagger spy. But he was someone who had been put on the ground in San Diego by his government to keep an eye on the activities of the relatively large Saudi community in Southern California and to carry out whatever other tasks he was given from Riyadh.
Interviewed by the FBI after September 11, Bayoumi told an improbable tale of how he had met the two hijackers. He claimed that he had driven the 125 miles to Los Angeles in February 2000 for a previously scheduled meeting at the Saudi consulate there; it was later determined he met that day with a diplomat, Fahad al-Thumairy, who worked in the consulate’s Islamic affairs office and was also a prayer leader at the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles. Thumairy, who was in his late twenties, had a reputation as fanatically anti-American and was later barred from reentering the United States because of possible ties to terrorists.
After the meeting at the consulate, Bayoumi drove an additional seven miles to an Arab food restaurant near Los Angeles, where he claimed to have overheard Arabic spoken by two men at a nearby table and stopped to introduce himself. The men were Hazmi and Mihdhar, who had arrived in the United States only two weeks earlier. Bayoumi said it was only natural for him—as a Saudi and as a follower of the Koran, which compels hospitality to strangers—to offer help to two fellow countrymen who had no friends in Southern California and spoke little English.
Over the next year, Bayoumi would offer assistance of almost every sort to the two Saudis. He helped Hazmi and Mihdhar move to San Diego from Los Angeles, find them an apartment, open a bank account, and obtain driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers. He lent them thousands of dollars. He organized a party in San Diego to welcome them to the city’s Muslim community.
The Commission Page 6