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U.S. NAVY COMMAND CENTER
The Pentagon
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
His right hand flew up to his scalp to find the source of the terrible pain. Navy lieutenant Kevin Shaeffer could not feel his hair, he could feel only the heat from the flame; it was rushing over his head and neck. He threw himself to the ground, frantically rolling back and forth to smother the fire before it engulfed his face. The pain was secondary to Shaeffer’s very conscious thought that he did not want this to be the day that he died.
Shaeffer was at work on the morning of September 11 in what he considered “the safest place the world,” the navy’s global command center in the heart of the Pentagon. He was on the staff of the chief of naval operations. It was a prestigious assignment for a young sailor. The command center, located on the first floor of the Pentagon’s “C Ring” of offices, tracked the movement of the navy’s ships and their crews around the world. The entire floor was blown apart when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the southeastern wedge of the Pentagon in a bright orange fireball at 9:37 a.m. Shaeffer was the only one of thirty people working nearby to survive.
The twenty-nine-year-old was burned over 40 percent of his body, losing most of the skin on his arms and back, and he survived by clawing his way toward daylight through mounds of red-hot rubble and shattered glass. Rescue workers used a pen knife to pry a metal ceiling beam from his back. His lungs were seared from inhaling the smoke from burning jet fuel.
Shaeffer arrived early for his job interview with the 9/11 commission, which had no permanent offices in the first weeks of 2003 and used a lounge in Philip Zelikow’s downtown Washington apartment building to interview applicants. Shaeffer wanted desperately for the interview to go well. He had been seeking a job on the commission since mid-December, when he sent e-mails to Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, recounting the story of his survival at the Pentagon and attaching copies of news articles about his recovery. He closed all of his e-mails with the words Never Forget. Hamilton met with Shaeffer, was impressed, and forwarded his name to Zelikow.
As Shaeffer took a seat for the interview, Zelikow and others in the room could not help but notice Shaeffer’s injuries. He was missing part of his right ear. His hands and arms were covered in red, mottled skin from more than a dozen skin grafts. He sucked in air through a hole in his neck from a tracheotomy.
But Zelikow told himself he was damned if he was going to make a “pity choice” and hire a “token victim” for the commission.
“Why should I hire you?” he asked coldly, as if it were the most obvious, appropriate question in the world to ask of Shaeffer. “The commission does not really have a role for you.”
Zelikow’s dismissiveness shocked the others in the room.
Shaeffer seemed startled, too, by the callousness of the question. But he tried to keep himself calm. He explained to Zelikow that he thought his military background would be valuable to the investigation; he had glowing references from his former navy commanders and from his alma mater, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis.
He did not want pity, he said. But he believed it would also be useful for the commission to have a staff member with the perspective of a victim of the 9/11 attacks. The commission offered him a way to understand—and in his own small way, even help bring to justice—the people who had done this to him. “No one has suffered the way I’ve suffered at the hands of terrorists,” he said later.
Zelikow eventually offered Shaeffer a job on the commission—appropriately enough, on the team of staff members who investigated the emergency response at the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.
Zelikow later said that he had not intended to be rude to Shaeffer at the interview, but he’d wanted to make a point. He’d wanted Shaeffer to understand that “he needed to pass muster for his ability, not just his 9/11 experience. He had to be a real hire, able to do real work as a full colleague of his fellow investigators.” He later praised Shaeffer’s performance on the commission as “outstanding by any standard.”
The story about Shaeffer’s brutal job interview spread quickly among the commission’s earlier hires. It was one more bit of lore about the personality of their new boss. Zelikow wanted to make it clear to everyone that he was in charge; the people being hired for the commission worked for him. Even a job applicant who had the support of Kean and Hamilton, even one with circumstances as extraordinary as Shaeffer’s, had to have Zelikow’s approval, too.
Before taking the job, Zelikow had insisted to Kean and Hamilton that he have responsibility for recruiting the staff, and they had readily agreed. Kean and Hamilton could veto Zelikow’s staff selections, of course; they could insist that certain candidates be hired. But in the end, it was left mostly to Zelikow to choose who would conduct the investigation and how their responsibilities would be divided.
Zelikow had insisted that there be a single, nonpartisan staff because it would create a “collective identity” for the commission. Just as important, it would prevent any of the commissioners from striking out on their own in the investigation.
“If commissioners have their own personal staff, this empowers commissioners to pursue their own agenda,” Zelikow said later to a Harvard researcher. “It doesn’t mean that the commissioners are powerless. It means that they are powerless individually and powerful together.”
It also meant that, ultimately, the staff answered to Zelikow. Every one of them. If information gathered by the staff was to be passed to the commissioners, it would have to go through Zelikow.
He put that in writing. As the first members of the staff began to arrive at the commission’s newly opened offices on K Street in March, they were handed a five-page memo from Zelikow entitled “What Do I Do Now?” Much of the memo had a collegial, uncharacteristically friendly tone.
“Welcome,” Zelikow wrote. “Thank you, once again, for joining up for an intense, challenging and rewarding period of public service. You are now part of a history-writing and history-making enterprise.”
Some of the guidance in the memo was commonsensical, including Zelikow’s request that—unless absolutely necessary—the staff not reveal the commission’s exact address on K Street, a large thoroughfare that cut through the heart of Washington and was lined with the offices of lobbying firms.
The FBI and local police had warned that because of the commission’s presence in the building, it could be a terrorist target, so Zelikow’s warning was appropriate. He said in the memo that “our location is secure, but its security rests partly on its anonymity.”
The offices were in a seemingly undistinguished nine-floor federal building between the White House and Georgetown. The building was secretly owned and operated by the CIA, used as downtown office space by the agency. It was ideal for the commission because it qualified as a so-called SCIF, the acronym for secure compartmentalized information facility, which meant that it had security measures that allowed for the storage of highly classified documents. Apart from witnesses called to private interviews with the commission, only people with security clearances would be allowed to enter the commission’s offices; all cell phones and other electronic devices had to be left at the door. Each of the staff members at K Street was provided with two computer hard drives—one for classified information, one for unclassified information.
By page four of Zelikow’s memo to his new staff, the tone was formal—and threatening. Here, he outlined the rules that, if broken, would get an investigator fired:
“You should not discuss the commission or its work with the press. Period. This is a bright line rule. Do not talk to the press at all. If you are contacted by a reporter, do not return the call.” To Zelikow’s mind, “there are no innocent conversations with reporters.”
All reporters’ calls had to be forwarded to Zelikow or Chris Kojm, a longtime congressional aide to Lee Hamilton who had been named the commission’s deputy executive director. The mild-mannered, professorial Kojm was never seen
by the staff as any sort of Democratic counterbalance to Zelikow. He often seemed cowed by Zelikow, in fact.
A ban on talking to reporters was not a surprise; most federal agencies bar workers from talking directly to reporters about government business.
But another rule on Zelikow’s list was unusual—and worrying to the staff. It was one thing to tell the commission’s investigators not to return a reporter’s call. But Zelikow’s memo also instructed them not to return calls from the ten commissioners, at least not without his permission. “If you are contacted by a commissioner, please contact Chris or me,” Zelikow wrote. “We will be sure that the appropriate members of the commission’s staff are responsive.”
It occurred to several of the staff members, especially those with experience on other federal commissions, that Zelikow was trying to cut off their contact with the people they really worked for—the commissioners.
Democratic commissioner Jamie Gorelick saw a copy of Zelikow’s memo and was furious. Through an arrangement with her law firm, she intended to spend nearly half of her work week on commission business, and she was not going to have Zelikow telling the staff that they could not speak freely with her—that they had to wait to get his permission to return her phone calls. She called Kean and Hamilton.
“This is totally unacceptable,” she told them. “I’m going to have free access to the staff.”
Max Cleland said he worried from the start that Zelikow was trying to “stovepipe” the investigation. It was ironic, said Cleland; it seemed Zelikow was going to duplicate just the sort of information bottlenecks that had plagued the FBI and the CIA and made them unable to “connect the dots” before September 11.
“It violates the whole spirit of an open look at what the hell happened on 9/11,” he said.
Zelikow was forced to rescind that portion of the memo; the commission’s staff would be permitted to talk to the commissioners.
But another Zelikow rule stayed in place. Some staff members did not have salaries large enough to require them to file government financial disclosure forms. But Zelikow still instructed them to “prepare a confidential memo to me that describes any potential conflicts of interest that may arise with your work on the commission.’’ He added, “In making these judgments, consider outside perception—ask yourself how it would look if this information was made public and you had not disclosed it.” Staff members who knew some of Zelikow’s own conflicts of interest found it amusing that he was so worried about theirs.
Kean and Hamilton were the public face of the commission. But the staff could see that with every passing day, Zelikow was centralizing control of the day-to-day investigation in his own hands. He was becoming the eleventh commissioner and, in many ways, more powerful than the others. Kean and Hamilton stayed in close touch by telephone with the commission, and Hamilton could depend on Kojm to keep him informed about problems as they arose on the staff. But in the early months of the investigation, most of the commissioners rarely visited K Street. Zelikow was in charge.
THE COMMISSION’S early hires for the staff were impressive. Even the Democratic commissioners who were most suspicious of Zelikow conceded that he had hired smart, experienced investigators. Few had any sort of political agenda that was detectable; Kean and Hamilton had not wanted staff members with close ties to the Republican or Democratic party organizations.
Zelikow had divided the investigation into nine teams:
•al-Qaeda and its history
•intelligence collection
•counterterrorism policy
•terrorist financing
•border security and immigration
•the FBI and other domestic law enforcement agencies
•aviation and transportation security
•emergency response in New York and around the Pentagon on 9/11
•the federal government’s emergency response
Over time, “Team 1,” the al-Qaeda team, would be divided into two—one focused on the terrorist network and its history, another on the 9/11 plot. The plot team was known as “Team 1A.’’
The counterterrorism team, “Team 3,” would have responsibility for the most politically sensitive part of the investigation. It would review the performance of the Bush and Clinton administrations in dealing with al-Qaeda threats before 9/11.
Its investigators would be permitted into the files of the NSC and CIA to determine what happened in the spring and summer of 2001 and why the government had been unable to stop the attacks. It was the team that would draw judgments about whether Clinton had done enough to destroy al-Qaeda in eight years in office and why the Bush administration had seemed to do so little in response to the flood of terrorism warnings in the months before 9/11.
Zelikow chose the members of the team with special care. He knew it was a dream assignment for a historian or political scientist with a bent for national security issues, and he had reason to think that the team’s members would be grateful to him for the assignment. Among the hires for the team were Warren Bass, a young Columbia PhD who was a terrorism researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, and Alexis Albion, a doctoral candidate in intelligence studies at Harvard. Bass would focus on the NSC. Albion would be the central researcher on the CIA.
Zelikow found someone with hands-on intelligence experience to lead the team: Michael Hurley, a taciturn Minnesotan who was the real thing—a battle-hardened spy on loan to the commission from the CIA. He had given up his “cover” at the agency a few years earlier, so he could tell people that he worked for the CIA. Still, what he had done immediately after 9/11, including his work on the ground in ousting the Taliban from Afghanistan, remained highly classified.
Zelikow made it clear from his earliest days on the commission that Team 3 was his priority. He gave special care to reviewing the lists of documents and interviews that were being requested from the Bush administration. He announced that he wanted to be present for all of its major interviews. At first, members of the team found it flattering that Zelikow wanted to spend so much of his own time and energy on the work of Team 3. Their suspicion of his motives grew later.
The commissioners presented Zelikow with strong candidates for other jobs. At the urging of Gorelick, Zelikow reviewed the résumé of Colonel Lorry Fenner, an air force intelligence officer who had worked closely with the National Security Agency, the government’s eavesdropping agency, during portions of her career.
Fenner was hired and assigned to Team 2, which was reviewing the overall structure of the intelligence community. But she believed her knowledge of the workings of the NSA might be helpful to the teams that would be investigating the September 11 plot, especially when it came time for the commission to begin reviewing the NSA’s vast archives of raw intelligence on al-Qaeda.
The CIA might be the agency that had the most direct contact with the White House in warning of al-Qaeda threats before 9/11. But much of the CIA’s analysis of Osama bin Laden and the intentions of his terrorist network over the years had been built on the intelligence gathered by the NSA and its spy satellites circling the globe. Fenner knew the NSA archives would be a treasure trove—assuming somebody went to the NSA’s headquarters in suburban Maryland to review them. Surely, she thought, somebody would.
DEALING WITH the 9/11 families was left mostly to two members of the commission’s staff, Ellie Hartz and Emily Walker, who found the duty wrenching. They were the commission’s “family liaison” team. For Hartz, the torment of the families was familiar. Her husband, John, had died in the South Tower of the World Trade Center; he had been a senior vice president of Fiduciary Trust. “John was just a pure and utter gentleman,” she later told an interviewer. “I think that would be the word that most people would use to describe him. He was a very kind gentleman.”
But Walker, who joined the commission from the executive ranks of Citibank, had known nothing like this. She had been at work in lower Manhattan on September 11, but she lost no close friend
s or relatives in the attacks. Now she found herself dealing with the concerns of men and women and children who felt they had lost everything that day—and wanted to know why. She got the job after innocently asking Zelikow, “Who is going to work with the families?” He had an answer a few weeks later: She would. “I was a banker,” she said. “Emotionally, I worried I couldn’t do it.” She had no training at all as a grief counselor. She sought advice at the Justice Department from a woman who had worked as the department’s go-between for families of the victims of the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Scotland in 1988. She told Walker that the 9/11 families would be traumatized—and angry—and that she would sometimes be the target of their fury. “Don’t take it personally,” Walker said she was told. “The process they are going through is normal.”
Walker said her worst day on the investigation—and also maybe her best, in an odd way—was January 27, 2004. It was the day of a public hearing in Washington at which the commission heard a tape recording of the last known words of Betty Ong, a flight attendant for American Airlines Flight 11, the plane that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Ong had used an on-board phone to call airline supervisors to alert them to the hijacking. In a remarkably calm, steady voice, she described the terror aboard the plane. “The cockpit’s not answering, and somebody’s stabbed in business class,” she explained. “I think there’s mace, that we can’t breathe. I don’t know. I think we’re getting hijacked.”
Shortly before the hearing, Walker and Hartz were given the job of escorting Ong’s family to a special soundproof booth in the Senate hearing room so they could hear the tapes before they were played for the world. As they all listened together, Walker was struck by the family’s composure. “Ellie and I were a wreck,” said Walker, who remembered asking someone outside the booth to find paper towels for the two women to weep into. “But the family was so calm. Stoic. No tears. They had obviously prepared for this day.”
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