The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  11

  OFFICES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL

  The White House

  JANUARY 27, 2003

  Zelikow? Philip Zelikow?

  Richard A. Clarke could not believe what he was reading as he sat in his White House office. It was one of his last days on the job after almost a dozen years at the National Security Council, and this news was no retirement gift. On the afternoon of January 27, 2003, the Associated Press issued a short news report about Zelikow’s appointment as executive director of the 9/11 commission.

  “The fix is in,” said Clarke. He knew and disliked Zelikow. Christ, how could anybody be so stupid? he wondered. Condi’s friend?

  Clarke understood that with Zelikow—Zelikow, of all people!—in charge, there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation of the Bush administration’s bungling of terrorist threats in the months before September 11. Could anyone have a more obvious conflict of interest than Zelikow?

  It was not just that Zelikow was a close friend of Rice’s from the first Bush presidency. That was the least of it. That was ancient history. Clarke wondered if the commission understood that it was Zelikow who, in his work on Bush’s transition team in early 2001, had been the architect of the demotion of Clarke and his counterterrorism team within the NSC. Clarke’s colleagues believed that Zelikow’s “reorganization” had all but guaranteed that the White House would pay little attention to the flood of terrorist warnings in the months before 9/11.

  Was it possible that Zelikow had not told Kean and Hamilton that he sat in on the briefings in the White House in January 2001 in which Rice was warned by her predecessor, Sandy Berger, that the biggest national security threat facing the country was al-Qaeda? Not the threats that she and President Bush had seemed so preoccupied with—Iraq, Iran, North Korea. The threat was Osama bin Laden. “Zelikow was right there, sitting with her, listening with her,” he said.

  Clarke had worked at the NSC for three presidents, initially for Bush’s father, and was given the counterterrorism portfolio under Clinton. Earlier, he had worked for years in the State Department and the Pentagon, where he earned a reputation as a gifted bureaucrat and briefer—no one gave a briefing like Dick Clarke, full of clever turns of phrase and almost theatrical urgency—and for razor-sharp elbows. At the NSC, he infuriated colleagues with “bold, red-type e-mail messages that ranged from the merely snide to the blatantly insulting,” recalled Daniel Benjamin, a mostly admiring former colleague from the Clinton administration. He wrote later that within the White House, “few sentences were uttered with the same frequency as ‘This time Dick has gone too far.’ ”

  Clarke rarely discussed politics with his colleagues; many of them later said they had no idea if Clarke considered himself a Democrat or Republican. He seemed equally contemptuous of all politicians. Still, the last time he had been asked to declare his party loyalty publicly, in the 2000 primary for president in Virginia, where he lived, he had asked for a Republican ballot. He said later he voted for John McCain.

  In his first years in the counterterrorism job at the White House, Clarke focused on Hezbollah and Hamas and the other well-established, well-understood terrorist groups in the Middle East. But by the mid-1990s, Clarke saw his job largely as the hunt for one man, Osama bin Laden, and the destruction of his al-Qaeda terrorist network; by then, Clarke was convinced that bin Laden’s network surpassed all others as a threat to the United States. Clarke was among the first in the government to see the danger. He had long predicted that bin Laden would eventually attack on American soil, possibly with weapons of mass destruction. His passion was shared by his small, devoted staff on the NSC. One of his deputies, Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, would later startle investigators for the 9/11 commission by telling them that she had long expected to see terrorists strike in Washington with a nuclear device—“to drive to work one day and see a mushroom cloud rising over the White House.”

  In early 2003, Clarke’s name was little known outside the government. But that anonymity would not last much longer. He had finally had enough. Clarke was planning to retire from the government in late January and finish his memoirs—a book that, his friends quietly suspected, could blow apart George Bush’s hopes for a second term. Clarke had begun considering a title for the book. He was thinking about Against All Enemies, a phrase drawn from the military’s enlistment oath; new soldiers swear to defend the Constitution “against all enemies.” Clarke liked the title. Clarke knew that enemies could come from within.

  He had not always been pessimistic about the 9/11 commission. When Congress finally overcame Bush’s objections to an independent investigation and established the panel in late 2002, Clarke told colleagues that with the right commissioners and an aggressive staff, there was some hope that they would find out the truth of how Bush and Rice—Rice in particular—had repeatedly ignored the intelligence in 2001.

  But the appointment of Zelikow suggested to Clarke that the commission had been turned into just another instrument for the Bush administration in trying to hide the truth. Zelikow, he figured, would serve as the administration’s plant on the investigation, feeding information back to Rice and others that would allow them to deflect the commission’s questions. Surely Zelikow would have no interest in a detailed public explanation of what had happened during the 2001 transition, since he had been such a central part of it. Zelikow had helped lay the groundwork for much of what went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?

  THERE WAS someone else at the White House who found it difficult to believe that Zelikow had been hired by the 9/11 commission: Andy Card.

  Just before announcing Zelikow’s appointment, Tom Kean talked with Card at the White House. He wanted to give Card advance warning that the commission would not be hiring one of the White House candidates as executive director. Kean said he thought the panel had found the perfect candidate from outside the government.

  “Do you know Philip Zelikow?” he asked.

  Card hesitated before speaking. He knew Zelikow well, and he was surprised to hear the name. He wondered if Kean was aware of Zelikow’s close relationship with Rice and others in the White House. He wondered if Kean was aware of Zelikow’s difficult personality, his self-importance. Card had dealt with Zelikow during the 2001 transition and repeatedly during preparation of the Miller Center’s oral history of the first Bush administration. He found Zelikow remarkably abrasive.

  Almost as worrying, Card thought, was Zelikow’s tendency as a historian to see his work as itself historic; Card had seen that in action in Zelikow’s work on the transition team and at the NSC under the first Bush administration. “I think he is a historian who wants to live it,” Card said, wondering how much of this he should tell Kean. “So sometimes he may overplay the historic work he is doing, believing that is historic rather than allowing it to be deemed historic by future generations.”

  Card did not think it was his place to tell Kean not to hire Zelikow, but he urged Kean to be careful before making a final decision. He put it to Kean diplomatically.

  “I’ve had quite a bit of dealing with him before, and sometimes it was frustrating,” Card said of Zelikow. “He has strong views. He’s very intelligent, and he knows it.” Zelikow has a mind “like a steel trap,” but his secretiveness “sometimes invites conspiracy theories—he recognizes that knowledge is power, and he doesn’t want to share the knowledge,” Card said.

  Card was not surprised that Zelikow had found his way onto the list of people being considered to run the commission. Among the nation’s historians, Zelikow was about as well-known to prominent politicians as any in the country, thanks to his work at Harvard and the Miller Center. But the conflicts of interest—or at least the appearance of them—seemed so obvious to Card.

  Card considered it part of his job to worry about “unintended consequences,” and he saw the potential for endless trouble if reporters and congres
sional Democrats figured out all of Zelikow’s connections to senior officials in the administration. Card did not want to have to spend the next year and a half trying to explain away all of Zelikow’s conflicts of interest.

  Since Kean said that there had been no final decision on Zelikow, Card hoped he had a little time. He decided to start asking around at the White House if others saw Zelikow’s appointment to the 9/11 commission as a problem. He wanted it to be known that he had done his due diligence. Among the first people he went to see was Rice, Zelikow’s friend and an obvious target of the commission’s investigation.

  “I raised this with Condi,” he said. “She didn’t have a problem with it.”

  In later interviews, Kean did not recall getting a warning from Card that he should not hire Zelikow. He did remember that Card had no special enthusiasm for the choice.

  “Zelikow?” he remembers Card saying. “I guess we can live with that.”

  12

  WOODROW WILSON INTERNATIONAL CENTER FOR SCHOLARS

  Washington, D.C.

  DECEMBER 2002

  Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton bonded instantly. They met for the first time in December over a lunch of soup and turkey sandwiches in Hamilton’s offices at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank that he joined as president after retiring from Congress. Hamilton had a spacious suite of book-lined offices between Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues, a few blocks from the White House.

  Kean decided before the meeting with Hamilton that he wanted to make an early, dramatic gesture of bipartisan unity. So between mouthfuls of his sandwich, he made what was, by Washington standards, a remarkable offer: He wanted to share power—cede power, even. Forget what the law said, he told Hamilton. As far as Kean was concerned, there should be no chairman, no vice chairman. He proposed that they would effectively be co-chairmen of the commission, with equal say on hiring and the structure of the investigation.

  “I walked in with the idea that either he and I get along or this wouldn’t work,” Kean said. “I wanted him to understand that I wouldn’t use the powers I had without his consent.” He proposed to Hamilton, and Hamilton immediately agreed, that the two of them should be “joined at the hip”—always appearing together in public, certainly any time a television camera or microphone was nearby.

  Hamilton thought the arrangement was especially important since he worried that he and Kean did not, individually, have the stature of the men they replaced. “Tom and I were both substitute hitters, and I wondered whether that would harm the prestige of the commission,” he said. “Mitchell and Kissinger both have very prestigious reputations. Tom and I were not in their category.”

  Because the Christmas holidays were approaching, the full commission did not meet for another month. They all gathered for the first time on Sunday, January 26, 2003, for a dinner hosted by Kean and Hamilton at the Wilson Center. It was the night of the Super Bowl, and Kean hoped there were no fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers or Oakland Raiders among the commissioners. Just in case, there was a television nearby if anyone wanted to sneak out of the meal to watch Tampa Bay rout Oakland, 48–21.

  Kean thought a relaxed supper would allow the commissioners to put aside their party affiliations for the evening and see one another, from the start, as friends. Or at least not as adversaries. But there was an edge to the meal, especially among the Democrats; they had gotten word of the selection of Philip Zelikow as executive director. The decision to hire Zelikow was made unilaterally by Kean and Hamilton. To the Democrats, it seemed to establish the wrong tone from the start. “It was presented as a fait accompli,” recalled Richard Ben-Veniste, who was alarmed to learn some of the details about Zelikow’s past relationship with Condoleezza Rice and others in the White House. Nor had the other commissioners been consulted in detail about Kean and Hamilton’s plan to have a single, nonpartisan staff led by Zelikow.

  Among the commissioners, Ben-Veniste and Max Cleland were especially upset by the way the investigation was being structured by Kean and Hamilton. In joining the commission, they assumed they could have a staff member of their own, typical on these sorts of independent commissions. Cleland had hoped he would have an office, possibly a secretary and driver; transportation around Washington was always a problem for the wheelchair-bound Cleland.

  Other proposals from the Democrats were shot down. Ben-Veniste proposed that issues under investigation be divided up, with each of the commissioners developing an expertise in one of two areas. Over time Ben-Veniste would develop a special interest in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Defense Department and why it had taken so long for the nation’s air defense system to respond to the reports of the hijackings on September. 11. But Kean and Hamilton—and Zelikow—did not want a formal division of responsibilities among the commissioners. Kean and Hamilton made it clear that while the commissioners were invited to visit the panel’s offices whenever they wished, they would not have a permanent presence there. Kean and Hamilton would not have separate offices at the commission, either. Everything would be run through Zelikow.

  To Ben-Veniste, the way the staff was being organized guaranteed that the commissioners’ involvement in the details of the investigation would be limited. It centralized control in Zelikow’s hands.

  The commission’s first formal meeting was held the next morning—Monday, January 27, 2003—behind closed doors at the Wilson Center. Kean and Hamilton opened the session with a statement of purpose and with a warning. “There are two things that can destroy us,” Kean said. “One is a leak of classified information. That would give the White House all the excuse it needs to deny us material. The second is politics.” Kean reminded the other commissioners that he was an outsider in Washington but that it was clear to him that the city’s vicious partisanship prevented the government from getting anything done. He did not want to see that repeated on the commission that was charged with getting at the truth about “a national tragedy.”

  “If we become like everybody else in Washington, if the Republicans on the commission start fighting Democrats, then we’ll destroy our credibility,” he said.

  Zelikow was there to introduce himself to the commissioners, and he was invited by Kean and Hamilton to explain his vision for the investigation and the final report. His presentation was impressive. The Democrats were wary of Zelikow, but they could not deny that he was a graceful speaker and a true expert in the national security issues before the commission.

  The conversation turned to the question of how the commission would gather information and how it would make use of its subpoena powers. To Jamie Gorelick, it was obvious: Every request made to the Bush administration for documents or other information should include a subpoena. Subpoenas did not have to be seen as threatening if they were issued routinely, she argued; a subpoena was simply evidence of the commission’s determination to get what it needed. She explained there was a “nice” way of doing it. “You simply say, ‘We’re very serious and, therefore, here’s a subpoena,’ ” she said. If the commission held off on subpoenas until late in the investigation, she warned, there would be no time to go to court to enforce them. The other Democrats, apart from Hamilton, agreed.

  But Kean and Hamilton had already made up their minds on this issue, too. There would be no routine subpoenas, they decreed; subpoenas would be seen as too confrontational, perhaps choking off cooperation from the Bush administration from the very start of the investigation. Kean and Hamilton had the power to enforce the decision. The law creating the commission offered only two methods for issuing a subpoena: It required either an agreement between Kean and Hamilton or a vote of six of the ten commissioners. Given Hamilton’s opposition to any early subpoenas, the other Democrats had little hope of mustering the Republican support they would need to issue one.

  Kean played the role of stern headmaster at another early meeting of the commission. He arrived to see Democrats seated with the Democrats at one end of the room, Republicans gathered with Repub
licans at the other.

  “I don’t want to see this again,” he declared in a surprisingly angry tone. Kean knew that the other commissioners probably saw him as a “stupid schoolteacher” at that moment. “They probably thought I was treating this like a kindergarten,” he said. But he asked them—ordered them—to seat themselves Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. He had already told the Republican commissioners that he did not want them to meet separately as a “caucus.” He certainly would not participate.

  MAX CLELAND sat glumly in his wheelchair. He did not like what he was hearing from Kean or Hamilton at the first meeting. Ultimately, he would never like what he heard.

  It was obvious to him that “Bush and Rove and the other nutsos in the White House” would do whatever they needed to do to block the commission’s access to evidence about intelligence blunders. Yes, Cleland was deeply depressed and angry after his election defeat; he admitted it probably made him more eager to be confrontational with the White House. But no subpoenas? A nonpartisan staff? An executive director who was close to Condi Rice? To Cleland, Kean and Hamilton were giving up the fight before it had begun.

  Cleland had been named to the commission in December, a few days after Henry Kissinger, and unlike so many other Democrats, he was genuinely disappointed by Kissinger’s resignation.

  “With Kissinger, I thought we were going to get somewhere,” Cleland said. “This is Henry Kissinger. He’s the big dog.”

  Whatever his loyalties to the president and the Republican Party, Kissinger was not going to sacrifice his own legacy to George Bush’s by covering up for the White House on 9/11, Cleland thought. In the Senate, Cleland had come to know Kissinger slightly over the years, “and he’s too strong a personality to do anybody’s business.” He felt certain that Kissinger would not have tolerated any attempt by the White House to limit the commission’s access to documents or to interviews with the president and his top aides. “We’re talking about Henry Kissinger here,” Cleland said. He was similarly impressed by the Democrats’ choice of George Mitchell—“a man with a real power and gravitas all his own.”