The departure of both Kissinger and Mitchell alarmed Cleland. He knew their replacements did not have similar stature in Washington. Kean had never worked in the capital—he seemed to take pride in it, in fact—and had no experience at all in foreign policy and intelligence. “You darn well know that an ex-governor who has no basic background in these issues is not going to be the world’s greatest tiger in asking a difficult question,” Cleland said. He certainly respected Hamilton, but he knew that Hamilton had a well-deserved reputation for cooperating with Republicans, not confronting them.
“It just didn’t seem to me that Kean and Hamilton had the bite and the authority to tell the White House to go fly a kite,” Cleland said.
He decided from the start that he would have to fight the battles himself—or at least constantly goad Kean and Hamilton to do battle. “You don’t want to be the dog in the manger,” Cleland would later say. “Nobody wanted to be that. I didn’t want to be that.” But if nobody else was going to make trouble for the Bush White House, Cleland would.
13
OFFICE OF THE COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT
The White House
JANUARY 2003
Philip Zelikow could not help himself. Whatever his instincts as a Republican partisan and friend of the Bush White House, his instincts as a historian overwhelmed everything else as he walked up the stairs to the second floor of the West Wing and entered the office of Alberto Gonzales. Zelikow did not consider this a negotiation. He was there to present Gonzales, Bush’s White House counsel, with a list of highly classified documents and other material that the commission needed to see to do its job. To Zelikow, the access seemed nonnegotiable; he was there mostly to work out the logistics.
At the top of Zelikow’s list were copies of the “crown jewels” of American intelligence—the president’s daily brief, the intelligence summary delivered by the CIA to the Oval Office every morning. The PDB was a sort of supersecret newspaper, the information usually organized into short items, divided by bullet points, that summarized the latest, most important, or most sensational news gathered by the CIA and other spy agencies overnight. The readership was tiny. Copies were presented to Bush, Cheney, and a handful of their aides and to Secretary of State Powell and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Bush had cut back distribution of the PDB after he took office. While Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, had received the PDB, her successor, John Ashcroft, did not.
Zelikow believed the commission needed to see the PDBs given to Bush and Clinton in the years before 9/11 to determine what warnings they received about the al-Qaeda threat. Zelikow was well aware what an extraordinary concession that required from the White House. Although a handful of PDBs from the Nixon and Johnson administrations had been declassified over the years, the intelligence memos were, as a rule, never shared outside the executive branch. The PDBs had been denied to congressional investigators even after 9/11. But in an investigation by an independent commission of the worst surprise attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, the rules were different, Zelikow believed. Surely the White House understood that.
There were a few pleasantries as Zelikow took a seat in Gonzales’s office, which was decorated with mementos of his years in the service of George W. Bush, first in the Texas governor’s office, then in Washington. Gonzales had left his treasured seat on the Texas Supreme Court to join his patron at the White House in 2001. The new president had an unfortunate habit of referring to Gonzales as mi amigo or mi abogado—“my lawyer,” in Spanish—in gatherings in the White House. They were references to Gonzales’s Mexican ancestry that drew cringes from others in the West Wing who thought them patronizing. But Gonzales was never heard to complain; he was absolute in his loyalty to Bush, describing the president in heroic terms. To Gonzales, Bush was a “great man.”
Zelikow had thought the meeting might go well. He and Gonzales shared friends from the administration, so Gonzales might have had reason to see Zelikow as a potential ally. Gonzales was known to be unfailingly polite. He had a reputation as being one of the most mild-mannered and self-effacing people in Bush’s inner circle; when he was introduced at GOP gatherings, it was often noted that Gonzales was raised in the small town of Humble, Texas, near Houston. (Humble served as a metaphor in other ways: The town was in the noisy flight path of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, named for the first President Bush.)
But the meeting started going badly from the start. From his earlier conversations with Andy Card, as well as the assurances given to Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, Zelikow believed that the commission already had an agreement from the White House for full cooperation. To Zelikow, that meant the commission would have access to virtually everything it wanted, including the PDBs and the files of the NSC.
“Given my belief about the president’s commitment to cooperate fully with the commission, I came into the meeting pushing hard,” Zelikow recalled. “I felt it important for folks to understand from the very start what full cooperation would entail.”
He turned to Gonzales.
“The White House should be prepared to provide full access to documents and people,” Zelikow began. He explained that Kean and Hamilton had to be able to assure the public at the end of its investigation that nothing was held back from the investigation. The commission’s members “had to be in the position of saying publicly and truthfully, at the end of the day, that they had seen every document they wished to see,” he said.
But Gonzales made it clear there would be no such cooperation. The commission, he said, “would receive the kind of access the White House has given to the joint inquiry” on Capitol Hill, nothing more. Anything more would be a clear violation of executive privilege, Gonzales said.
Zelikow hadn’t expected this. He thought this had all been agreed to. “When I took the job, I thought that the White House had reconciled itself to the necessity of fully supporting such a commission, with all that implied,” he remembered later. He was surprised by how dogmatic Gonzales seemed.
He tried to reason with Gonzales, reminding him that the legacy of other blue-ribbon federal commissions formed following a national crisis—the Warren Commission, the panels that investigated the Pearl Harbor attacks—had been tarnished after the discovery that they had been denied access to secret files. It proved to be a breeding ground for the sort of conspiracy theorists who were already beginning to swarm around 9/11.
He tried a brief history lesson, reminding Gonzales of the uproar that followed the discovery that the Warren Commission had never seen files from the CIA’s “Operation Mongoose” to assassinate Fidel Castro during the Kennedy administration. The news gave birth to theories, long after the commission had gone out of business, that Castro had ordered Kennedy’s murder in retaliation. Surely Gonzales understood that the 9/11 commission faced a “unique challenge” and would need much more material than the White House had provided Congress.
Gonzales was unmoved. He thought he was being lectured to by the arrogant historian.
Zelikow decided to up the stakes. If the White House would give the commission nothing more than it had given Congress, he would consider resigning from the 9/11 commission. It was not hard to imagine the damning headlines for the White House if the 9/11 commission’s executive director resigned over White House stonewalling in the very first days of the investigation.
The White House offer was “unacceptable,” Zelikow told Gonzales. “I would not want to serve with the commission if it ended up only receiving that kind of access.”
Gonzales had nothing more to say. The meeting ended with Zelikow quietly seething and with Gonzales offended by Zelikow’s tone and his threats. A day or so later, Tom Kean got a phone call from Gonzales about Zelikow, and the message was remarkably blunt and undiplomatic for a man as polite as Gonzales.
“I don’t want to see him again,” Gonzales declared to Kean. “I don’t want to see Philip Zelikow again.”
In the future, Gonzales would meet on
ly with Kean and Hamilton themselves. There would be no intermediary.
CIA HEADQUARTERS
LANGLEY, VA.
Within days of his appointment to the commission, Zelikow also made arrangements to visit the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia. He already knew many people at the agency, and this would be more than a friendly reintroduction. Zelikow wanted to make clear what he expected of the agency. Much as he had made an early enemy of the White House counsel, Zelikow was about to do the same with the CIA.
The agency’s headquarters in McLean, Virginia, are about eight miles down the Potomac from the center of Washington, a ten-minute drive from the White House in good traffic. In the self-important bureaucratic shorthand of Washington, the 258-acre compound is known as “Langley” (as in “I was just out at Langley” or “Langley is calling”), which is actually the name of the McLean neighborhood where the CIA is found.
In 1999, the compound was renamed the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Cynical CIA colleagues saw the new name as a ploy by the agency’s crafty, politically astute director, George Tenet, to curry favor with any Republican who might replace Bill Clinton in the elections the following year. Tenet loved the CIA job and would want to hold on to it. Was there anything better? Tenet wondered to himself. In his wildest dreams, could this former congressional staffer have imagined himself here? Tenet’s aides said he had little to do with the renaming of the CIA headquarters, in fact. It was proposed by House Republicans and agreed to by Clinton in a generous moment. George Herbert Walker Bush had served as the director of central intelligence for less than a year in the mid-1970s. When his son was sworn in as president in 2001, the elder Bush urged that Tenet be kept on.
Zelikow drove past the agency’s heavily guarded main gate, past the barbed-wire barricades and the nine-foot granite wall that served as a memorial to two CIA employees who were gunned down in January 1993 as they waited in their cars to clear the gate and go to work. The gunman, a twenty-eight-year-old Pakistani, Aimal Kasi, later confessed to the killings with an AK-47 rifle, saying he had wanted to punish the CIA for its meddling in Muslim nations.
Zelikow pulled up in front of the OHB, the Original Headquarters Building, where Tenet and the rest of the agency’s senior leaders had their offices. He could see the evidence of how well Allen Dulles, Eisenhower’s spy chief, had succeeded in his dream of creating a universitylike setting for the CIA. For an agency that represented the darkest sort of malice to people in much of the world, the CIA had some of the most civilized offices in the federal government. The compound could pass for a college campus, with long stretches of well-tended, tree-shaded lawns. The OHB, designed in the mid-1950s by the same New York architects who designed the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, had an airy, open feeling.
Zelikow headed to the seventh floor, where Tenet’s suite was located, and went to see two of the director’s most trusted lieutenants, Mark Lowenthal and Winston Wiley.
Lowenthal, a friend of Tenet’s since they were staffers on Capitol Hill, had been hired by Tenet shortly after 9/11 to help him prepare for the congressional investigation of the attacks. With the creation of the 9/11 commission in November 2002, Tenet asked Lowenthal to deal with the commission as well. Lowenthal was quick-witted and had a detailed, scholarly knowledge of the intelligence community. (Lowenthal had a scholar’s knowledge of many things; he had been a grand champion on the television show Jeopardy! in the 1980s, winning $154,000.) Wiley was the CIA’s assistant director for homeland security, a job created after 9/11. Both men had met Zelikow before.
Wiley felt more strongly about the Virginia historian. “He reeks of arrogance,” Wiley said of Zelikow, whose appointment to the 9/11 commission was no surprise to him. “Here’s a guy who spent his career trying to insinuate himself into power so when something like this came his way, he could grab it.”
There was a little chitchat before Zelikow took a seat in Wiley’s conference room and slapped his palm on the table. “If you guys had a national intelligence director, none of this would have ever happened,” he declared, according to Lowenthal’s account.
Wiley remembers Zelikow saying that 9/11 represented a “massive failure” of the CIA and that the attacks had happened because “you guys weren’t connected to the rest of the community.”
Zelikow said later that he had no memory of the meeting or of the remarks attributed to him by Lowenthal and Wiley; he insisted later that he had taken no stand in 2003 on the idea of a national intelligence director. But the two CIA veterans recalled Zelikow’s comments clearly and remembered being dumbfounded by his tone. They thought this was going to be a simple courtesy call. But Zelikow was apparently at the CIA to issue a verdict about the cause of 9/11—and pronounce sentence. The blame didn’t rest with the FBI. Or with the Pentagon. And certainly not with Zelikow’s friend Condoleezza Rice and the NSC.
To Lowenthal’s mind, Zelikow had decided to scapegoat the CIA and Tenet; they were going to be blamed for 9/11. He could see where Zelikow was going: He was going to call for the elimination of Tenet’s job—director of central intelligence, which gave him direct control over the CIA and at least nominal authority over other spy agencies. Zelikow was suggesting that the fix for 9/11 was to replace Tenet with a director of national intelligence, a sort of spy czar who would be above the CIA director.
“My God, he thinks he already has the answer,” Lowenthal recalled thinking at the time. “He’s going to make this all about the CIA.”
Lowenthal figured it was a bad idea to confront Zelikow about the remark. He could only hope that this was Zelikow’s bluster. “I purposely decided not to react,” he said. “I was afraid I was going to provoke him some more.” Wiley thought it was so typical of Zelikow to “come in with answers rather than questions.” Wiley hoped that, unlike their staff director, the ten members of the 9/11 commission would not be so quick to reach judgment about the CIA.
But if he wasn’t going to confront Zelikow, Lowenthal would certainly go see Tenet and warn him about what Zelikow had said. He went to Tenet’s office that afternoon.
“George, Phil Zelikow has all the answers,” Lowenthal said ominously. “He’s going to create a national intelligence director. You mark my words, he’s going to drive the idea through the commission with a truck.”
Tenet shrugged. He was exhausted, and he did not have the time or energy to worry about Zelikow. At least not now. There would be time later to sort this out, he thought. The 9/11 commission had just opened for business; its final report was at least eighteen months away, and God knew what the world would look like then or where he would be. Maybe Lowenthal had misheard Zelikow, Tenet figured.
Single out the CIA for blame? It seemed crazy to Tenet that any legitimate review of what had gone wrong on 9/11 would end up with a conclusion that the CIA bore more responsibility than any other agency for the attacks. It was even nuttier, he told colleagues, to think that the answer was the creation of a new superspy to oversee the intelligence agencies. That would just add one more layer of bureaucracy to the layer cake of spy agencies that existed before the attacks.
He knew Zelikow a little—during his years at Harvard, Zelikow had helped prepare case studies for the CIA on intelligence issues—and Tenet was willing to be more charitable than others toward him. It was really true about Tenet: He was charitable about everybody. George Tenet wanted to be thought of as a very nice man. He wanted to be liked. He considered it a strength, his refusal to engage in backstabbing. He didn’t criticize Condi Rice, and certainly not George Bush, for all of the bungling in the spring and summer of 2001, when the White House had apparently done so little in response to Tenet’s repeated warnings of an al-Qaeda attack. He did not criticize Clinton, either, although hindsight showed that Clinton should have taken much bigger risks in the 1990s to destroy bin Laden’s network.
Tenet did not criticize the FBI, at least not by name, even though it was common wisdom at Langley that if any one agency was respon
sible for 9/11, it was the bureau. The incompetent, arrogant FBI. How could anyone compare the pre-9/11 record of the CIA with the FBI’s and decide that it was the CIA that needed to be shaken up?
The perfect anecdote? Zacarias Moussaoui, “the twentieth hijacker.” Tenet was notified about Moussaoui’s arrest a few days after he was picked up in Minnesota in August 2001. But no one had bothered to report it up the line in FBI headquarters in Washington until after 9/11. The FBI arrests a suspected Muslim terrorist in the “summer of threat” and nobody bothers to tell the FBI director? “Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest,” Tenet would say later in exasperation. “I had no idea that the bureau wasn’t aware of what its own people were doing.”
Forget Zelikow. There was so much else on Tenet’s mind at the start of 2003. He suspected Bush was only weeks away from ordering an invasion of Iraq, justified by CIA reports that concluded Saddam Hussein had hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Tenet was “working my ass off.” Zelikow? Zelikow was a “staffer,” the dismissive title that Tenet had next to his own name earlier in his career in government. There would be plenty of time later to make sure the 9/11 commission got the story straight. Tenet was friendly with several of the 9/11 commissioners; he could talk to them if Zelikow got out of hand.
For his part, Zelikow and others on the commission’s staff insisted that in the early stages of the investigation, they did not see Tenet as dishonest. They did not think that he would fudge the truth or lie outright—and under oath—to protect himself and the CIA. That realization would come only later, they said.
The Commission Page 9