As Jacobson and the other congressional investigators kept digging, they found more evidence that Bayoumi appeared to be part of a larger network of Arab expatriates who had been tasked to help Hazmi and Mihdhar. Bayoumi’s income had grown dramatically in the period in which he had assisted the two hijackers—almost $40,000 above his usual salary from his “ghost” job. Jacobson had found evidence that another Saudi in San Diego who appeared to work as a spy, Osama Bassan, had funneled thousands of dollars to Bayoumi.
The source of Bassan’s money was an additional shock to the congressional investigators: Much of it had come in the form of cashier’s checks directed to his family by Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington. The princess had a charity fund that assisted Saudis in distress in the United States, and she had supposedly sent the money to help Bassan’s wife pay for thyroid surgery; Bassan’s wife had signed a number of the checks over to Bayoumi’s wife.
There was one more alarming surprise in the FBI files: Hazmi and Mihdhar had been in close contact in San Diego with a longtime FBI informant, Abdussattar Shaikh; they had both lived in Shaikh’s home for a time. The FBI blocked the congressional investigators from interviewing the informant after Jacobson learned his identity. There was no evidence to show that Shaikh knew the two Saudis were terrorists, but Graham was astounded to discover that “terrorists were living under the nose of an FBI informant.” It was just more proof of the FBI’s incompetence, he thought.
More than a year after 9/11, Graham found it hard to believe that the FBI was ignoring the implications of what was in its own files. The special committee’s report would not say so explicitly, but Graham believed that the evidence gathered by his investigators showed that Saudi officials sympathetic to al-Qaeda had done the terrorist network’s bidding.
He imagined how the al-Qaeda middleman might have to put it to his contacts in the Saudi government shortly before Hazmi and Mihdhar landed in California: “We are going to be insinuating some of our people into the United States, and it’s very important to us that they be able to carry out the mission with the maximum amount of anonymity.”
Graham knew that many of his colleagues on the congressional committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, shared his view that the material that had been gathered in San Diego was explosive; they, too, felt it should be made public. But in what seemed to many of them to be a breach of the Constitution’s separation of powers, they had been muzzled into silence by the White House and the FBI.
In January 2003, Graham and the other members of the committee were still the focus of a criminal investigation by the FBI into whether someone on the panel had leaked classified information. A report on CNN on June 19, 2002, revealed the wording of messages sent among al-Qaeda sympathizers in the days and hours before 9/11. The messages (“Tomorrow is zero day,” “The match is tomorrow”) were intercepted by the National Security Agency but not translated from the original Arabic until after the attacks. The CNN report aired only hours after the messages were shared with Graham’s committee.
The leaks resulted in a fierce White House protest. Vice President Cheney called Graham at home.
“What the hell is going on, Bob?” Cheney asked. “We have tried to be as cooperative as possible, but we cannot tolerate this leakage to the press. If this continues, we will terminate our assistance to the committee.” Graham thought Cheney’s warning “disingenuous and pompous,” but he felt compelled to call in the FBI. Without some sort of leak investigation, Graham thought, the White House would follow through on Cheney’s threat and shut down all cooperation.
The FBI had responded aggressively to the request to find the leak, interviewing dozens of members of Congress and their aides. The bureau suggested it wanted to use polygraphs on some of the lawmakers.
To Graham and other lawmakers, the situation was “surreal.” Members of Congress were under investigation by the FBI at the behest of the White House because, Graham believed, the lawmakers had brought such uncomfortable scrutiny to the FBI and White House. Graham thought the leak investigation was an obvious effort by the administration to intimidate Congress. And if that was the intention, it worked. Members of the joint committee and their staffs were frightened into silence about the investigation.
Graham was left as one of the only people who would talk openly—if more cautiously—about what the congressional investigation had found.
The only bit of good news in early 2003 for Graham was that Congress had finally overcome the administration’s objections and created an independent commission to investigate the terrorist attacks. He knew and respected many of the 9/11 commissioners. With more time and a fresh eye, the 9/11 commission could do what Congress had been unable to do so far—reveal the truth about the duplicity of the Saudis and the FBI and expose what had really happened in San Diego. What reason would the new commission have to protect the Saudis and the FBI?
ONE OF Graham’s former Republican colleagues, retired senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, had heard the rumors, too. His friends in Congress assumed he was going to be joining the 9/11 commission. His name had been circulating for weeks as a likely GOP member. He had years of background on terrorism and intelligence issues, and his candidacy was being championed by many of the 9/11 family groups.
But Rudman also figured—correctly, as it turned out—that the White House would bring pressure on Senate leaders to try to keep him off the investigation. “I’ve never had great relations with the Bush administration,” he said, smiling at the understatement. Rudman was one of John McCain’s best friends, and he had been instrumental in the Arizonan’s victory over Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, nearly derailing Bush’s presidential campaign before it began.
Rudman said McCain came to him in late 2002 and told him—“in ultimate frustration”—that Rudman would not be invited onto the 9/11 commission. McCain did not give him the details why, but Rudman figured there was “pushback from the people at the White House.”
Rudman suspected it might have gone beyond politics. There was another, possibly more important reason why the White House would want to keep Rudman off the investigation. Rudman had firsthand knowledge of how little attention the Bush administration had paid to domestic terrorist threats before 9/11. He had tried to deliver some of those warnings himself to President Bush in early 2001 and, to Rudman’s astonishment, was rebuffed.
Throughout the Clinton administration, Rudman had been one of the Republican members of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which meant he had been briefed in detail by the CIA about the al-Qaeda threat as late as 2001. More to the point, Rudman had been co-chairman with former senator Gary Hart of a Pentagon-chartered commission on terrorist threats that released a report in January 2001 that predicted a catastrophic terrorist strike on American soil. The so-called Hart-Rudman report warned that “in the face of this threat, our nation has no coherent or integrated governmental structures” to respond to it.
Rudman had wanted to share those findings with President Bush, then newly arrived at the White House. Whatever the bad feelings about his support for McCain in the 2000 race, Rudman assumed that he would be given the courtesy of at least a brief meeting in the Oval Office with Bush. It was a federal commission. He was a former GOP senator. Rudman had wanted to deliver a “very blunt and very direct” warning to Bush that he needed to deal early in his presidency with the question of domestic terror threats.
But he could not get past Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. She met with Rudman at the White House, heard his presentation about the committee’s findings, and agreed to pass on his request to see the president. After that, Rudman heard nothing. He contacted Rice’s office again several more times to push for a meeting with Bush. But there was no invitation. The new president was described as being too busy with other, more pressing issues. He was focused on his huge tax cut proposal.
“Offended is not the right issue, but I was d
isappointed,” Rudman said later. He could not understand why Rice would not press harder to have the president briefed on such a clear national security threat—the certainty of a domestic terrorist attack in coming years. Wouldn’t Bush want to know? “There’s no question in my mind that somebody at the White House dropped the ball on this,” Rudman said.
10
DREW UNIVERSITY
Madison, N.J.
JANUARY 2003
Philip Zelikow had been recommended to Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton by one of the other Republican commissioners, former senator Slade Gorton. Gorton could not have been more effusive about Zelikow. “I picked up the telephone and called both of them and said that you couldn’t possibly find a better person to direct the staff,” he said.
Kean and Hamilton learned early on to pay attention to Gorton’s advice. He seemed to be nothing like the harsh partisan they had been told to expect. Before his election to the Senate, Gorton had been Washington State’s attorney general, and his instincts seemed to be those of a get-to-the-facts prosecutor, even when the facts might embarrass Republicans.
Gorton knew Zelikow from another federal commission—a blue-ribbon panel on electoral reform created in response to the 2000 recount fiasco in Florida. The commission was led by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford; Zelikow was staff director. Gorton had been wowed by Zelikow’s intelligence, his writing skills, and his all-important ability to meet a deadline. Zelikow was known to be indefatigable, able to go without sleep for days, surviving off whatever was available from the nearest vending machine.
Gorton was also impressed by Zelikow’s ability to quietly move the commission toward recommendations that he, Zelikow, supported. “He did a marvelous job of deferring to everyone but leading the commission in the direction that he wanted,” Gorton said.
After his initial meeting at the White House, Kean went on a long-scheduled winter vacation to the isolated Caribbean island of Barbuda, which had only sporadic telephone service; he figured it would be his last real holiday for more than a year, and he was right. So Hamilton took on much of the job of vetting Zelikow as a prospective executive director of the 9/11 commission. He called around Washington and liked what he heard, and not just from Republicans. Zelikow had admirers among prominent Democrats, including Carter, who praised Zelikow’s diligence in managing the staff of the electoral reform commission. Carter said he saw no evidence of political bias in Zelikow’s work.
If Hamilton had talked to the staff of the Carter-Ford electoral commission, he would have heard a very different opinion of Zelikow. Many on that commission’s staff, especially those who identified themselves as Democrats, found him arrogant and secretive. His success, they decided, rested largely on his ability to serve the needs—and stroke the egos—of the two former presidents and the other commissioners.
Zelikow provided Kean and Hamilton with a copy of his résumé. They found even more to like about Zelikow: author or editor of fourteen books, dozens of scholarly articles, an expertise in every sort of national security issue, including terrorism. They were both impressed with a remarkably prescient 1998 article that Zelikow and two coauthors had published in Foreign Affairs magazine. It was titled “Catastrophic Terrorism” and warned that the United States needed to ready itself for a massive domestic terrorist attack, possibly with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons.
The résumé listed Zelikow’s book with Condoleezza Rice and his appointment by Bush to a special White House intelligence advisory board in 2001; Kean and Hamilton knew that both of those entries would raise obvious concerns about a conflict of interest if they hired Zelikow for the commission. But Kean and Hamilton, who had no reason to believe that the résumé Zelikow had provided was incomplete, decided the conflict was not insurmountable.
Kean and Hamilton agreed that in the circles in which Zelikow traveled—and in which they traveled, for that matter—it was often impossible to avoid the appearance of a conflict. They could sympathize with Zelikow. In joining the 9/11 commission, both Kean and Hamilton had themselves faced allegations of conflicts of interest—Kean because he had been a director of companies with large business interests in Arab nations; Hamilton because he sat on advisory boards that oversaw the CIA and other national security agencies. Another of the Democrats, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, had been deeply involved in developing policies in the Clinton administration’s Justice Department to deal with terrorist threats. Should the appearance of a conflict be enough to prevent people as obviously talented as Zelikow and Gorelick from contributing to the 9/11 investigation?
Zelikow’s 1995 book with Rice was a special concern, given that Rice was likely to be such a central figure in the commission’s investigation. But Kean decided that since both Zelikow and Rice were out of government service at the time it was published, the conflict was not obvious. “I thought they were both academics, so what’s wrong with that?” he said.
After returning from his holiday, Kean asked Zelikow to travel up to New Jersey so they could talk, and Zelikow made the trip to Drew. Zelikow presented Kean with a plan for the commission that Kean found exciting, even thrilling. Zelikow proposed that the panel’s final report be written for the general public, not in the bureaucratese of most government documents, and made available to the public on the same day it was presented to the White House and Congress. The commission should find a private publisher who would stock the report in bookstores around the country within hours of its release in Washington, Zelikow proposed. The idea had obvious appeal to Kean, who liked to consider himself “a historian who went into politics.” Away from his duties as president, Kean also taught history at Drew, and he was proud of his master’s degree in the teaching of history from Teachers College at Columbia University. This would not be another government report that would be ignored and gather dust on a bookshelf, thought Kean.
As far as Kean was concerned, Zelikow was the only choice for executive director of the 9/11 commission. After reviewing the résumés of about twenty candidates, including those proposed by the White House, “there wasn’t anybody even close to Zelikow,” he said. “Nobody else had the qualifications or anything even close to them. His experience, his brilliance, the fact that he was a historian.”
Although Zelikow could not have been more polite in his initial phone contacts with them, Kean and Hamilton heard stories about his abrasiveness. Kean’s staff at Drew experienced it directly. Just after Zelikow’s visit to the university, Kean’s office assistants at the university, veterans of several prickly phone calls with Zelikow, urged Kean not to hire him. “They just didn’t like him,” Kean recalled. He also talked with Henry Kissinger, who knew Zelikow from projects at the Miller Center and Harvard.
“He’s one of the most brilliant men I know,” Kissinger told Kean. “But you will not like him. Nobody does.”
Kean and Hamilton were hugely self-confident politicians who had spent their careers dealing with, and co-opting, people with big, abrasive egos. Kean was famous for it in New Jersey, making allies out of hard-nosed Democrats who spoke in the “dems and does” accent of the rougher parts of the state. So Kean and Hamilton were certain they knew how to rein in someone like Zelikow. “I figured he was going to break china, and I figured I’d have to clean it up,” Kean said. Certainly, Kean thought, if there was any sign of partisanship in Zelikow’s actions, the commission would put an end to it.
But could Kean and Hamilton rein in Zelikow if they did not know what he was up to? If they did not learn until much later what he had left off his résumé?
Zelikow has insisted that before he was hired, he made sure Kean and Hamilton knew about all of his connections to the Bush administration, including his work on the Bush transition team in 2001.
“In my very first conversations with Tom and Lee—on the phone—I discussed my past work and friendship with Rice and asked them whether they had considered that issue,” Zelikow said later. “They said they were, of co
urse, aware of that and had taken it into account.” He said that none of the three of them realized how the issue might come back to haunt them later. “I don’t think Tom or Lee or I anticipated the extent to which the commission’s work would be used as a partisan battlefield.”
But in interviews long after the commission had shut down, Kean and Hamilton seemed unsure of what Zelikow had told them. Kean acknowledged that he “wasn’t sure” he knew anything about Zelikow’s work on the Bush transition before hiring him. He said that when he did find out, he found it “worrisome” but consoled himself with the thought that Zelikow was brought into the transition because of his expertise as a historian, not because of his loyalty to Bush or the GOP. Hamilton said he thought he was aware that Zelikow had been on the transition team for Bush: “I think I did, but I don’t think I’d swear to that.” Whatever the case, Hamilton acknowledged that he did not know any of the details of what Zelikow had done during the transition.
Kean and Hamilton would learn all of those remarkable details, but not until much later—too late to think of removing him from the investigation.
On January 27, 2003, Kean and Hamilton issued a press release announcing Zelikow’s hiring as the 9/11 commission’s executive director. It identified Zelikow as director of the Miller Center and staff director of the Carter-Ford electoral commission. “Phil Zelikow is a man of high stature who has distinguished himself as an academician, lawyer, author, and public servant,” Kean was quoted as saying.
The release was notable for what it did not say. It made no mention of the fact that Zelikow had worked on the NSC for the first President Bush. Nothing about the book with Rice. Nothing about Zelikow’s role on the Bush transition team. Nothing about the fact that he had just written a policy paper for the White House that was going to be used within months to justify the American invasion of Iraq. Aides to Hamilton at the Wilson Center said they wrote the press release, based on the background information that Zelikow had provided to Hamilton. Zelikow reviewed it before it was handed out to reporters.
The Commission Page 7