“We will be following paths, and we will follow those individual paths wherever they lead,” he said. “We may end up holding individual agencies, people, and procedures to account. But our fundamental purpose will not be to point fingers.”
A few of the family advocates cocked their ears, wondering if they had heard Kean properly. They had pushed so hard to create the commission because they wanted fingers pointed at the government. And Kean knew it; the families had told him that over and over again in their early meetings. For many families, this investigation was supposed to be all about finger-pointing. They wanted strict accountability, especially at the White House, the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and other agencies that had missed the clues that might have prevented 9/11. The families wanted subpoenas—and indictments and jail sentences, if that was where the facts led.
As Kean finished his statement, many of the family advocates were all but sneering at him. George Bush? Bill Clinton? Condoleezza Rice? Sandy Berger? George Tenet? Louis Freeh? Were they all suddenly in the clear?
“Kean is following orders,” Lorie Van Auken, one of the widows known as the Jersey Girls, mumbled to herself. “He’s taking orders from the White House.” Kean certainly did not think he was taking orders from anyone. But he could sense the families’ anger.
With Kean running the hearing, Hamilton was left to rush back and forth to the room where witnesses waited to testify. Hamilton was getting a quick education in how different things were in New York. He was a creature of Washington and of Capitol Hill, where a veteran congressional committee chairman had near dictatorial power at a public hearing; congressional witnesses sat and waited patiently until they were called. They did not dictate the schedule of their testimony.
But this was New York, and Hamilton could see that it was the witnesses who were trying to call the shots.
Pataki had arrived early for the hearing, and his staff warned Hamilton that the governor could not wait around to testify. If the commission wanted to hear from the governor, it would have to be now, this minute. That was awkward; Kean had turned over the hearing to the other commissioners to give opening statements. It was an important moment for them. Several had been at work for weeks to craft a statement that conveyed the importance of the commission’s work and their pride in serving on the investigation; this was their first moment in the spotlight, in front of the television cameras. Now, it seemed, Pataki’s hotheaded staff was about to push them aside.
Kean and Hamilton agreed that they could not offend Pataki; he would have to be accommodated. Tim Roemer was about to make his opening statement when Kean went to the microphone: “We are going to interrupt the statements from the commissioners because Governor Pataki has arrived.”
Pataki took his seat at the witness table and read out a brief, unmemorable statement in which he pledged the state’s cooperation with the investigation. He left without taking questions.
Things were even trickier with Mayor Bloomberg. When he was initially offered an invitation to appear at the hearing, he declined, saying he would instead issue a written statement to the commission and would not be present to read it. Then he informed Kean and Hamilton that he would testify but not answer questions. Then he agreed to answer questions but insisted that his police and fire commissioners would not appear for the hearing.
When Bloomberg finally arrived at the Customs House the morning of the hearing, he was in the company of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta; and he announced that they were all ready to testify.
It was clear to the commissioners and the staff that the mayor was trying to blindside them; the commission had not prepared itself to question the police and fire commissioners, who would be vital witnesses in discussing the emergency response on 9/11.
Bloomberg also made it clear that he, like Pataki, did not want to wait to testify. The commission’s staff pleaded for a little patience.
When Bloomberg was invited into the auditorium several minutes later, he appeared to be seething. In a gesture that seemed designed to make his disdain even clearer, he casually tossed his prepared testimony onto the witness table before taking his seat, as if this were a routine meeting of the zoning board.
Bloomberg’s testimony offered an unapologetic defense of the city government’s performance on September 11: “We have examined the city’s response to 9/11 thoroughly, and I can tell you that it was swift, massive, heroic, and extraordinarily effective.”
His testimony included an angry—and, the commissioners agreed, justified—attack on the way Washington had divided up the federal antiterrorism budget after 9/11. Bloomberg noted that even though New York City had been targeted repeatedly by terrorists over the years, including on September 11, it received only a small percentage of the billions of dollars that the government had allocated for counterterrorism preparations in 2002 and 2003. Per capita antiterrorism spending was far higher in Casper, Wyoming, and Biloxi, Mississippi, than in the city that almost certainly remained the world’s number one terrorist target.
“To argue that most other cities have comparable threats is just ridiculous,” Bloomberg said. “If we distributed moneys for the military this way, our troops in Iraq would have bows and arrows to fight with.”
A few minutes into his testimony, Bloomberg looked up toward the dais and scowled. He could see that Kean and Zelikow were deep in conversation about something, whispering to each other and apparently ignoring what he had to say. (Bloomberg had no way of knowing it, but Kean and Zelikow were discussing how the commission should deal with the unexpected arrival of the police and fire commissioners.)
“Would you like me to wait while you finish?” Bloomberg asked Kean, the mayor’s face a mix of annoyance and contempt. “I’d be happy to wait while you finish up. It’s quite all right. I have plenty of time.” Bloomberg rested his chin on his hand.
Kean tried his best to smile apologetically, but it was a strain. After all those years as governor in neighboring New Jersey, he had dealt with more than his share of difficult New Yorkers, including more than a few nastily combative New York City mayors. It was one more reason he would be happy to head back across the Hudson River to New Jersey when the hearing was over.
A PANEL of 9/11 survivors was scheduled to testify next, and they were a reminder to the commissioners that, whatever the political theatrics of the morning, this investigation would likely be the most important public service of their lives.
Harry Waizer, a bond trader who had worked in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, told of being in an elevator on its way to his offices on the 104th floor when it suddenly began to rumble; fire shot into the elevator from the seams in the door. The elevator stopped on the 78th floor, where Waizer jumped out and tried to join the exodus down the stairwell to the lobby. Others in the stairway looked in horror at the terrible burns across his face and his body; it was as if his flesh were melting off.
“I noticed a large flap of skin hanging on my arm,” said Waizer, whose face still bore large, purplish scars. As he continued down the stairwell, he remembered, he forced himself not to look at what remained of the skin on his other arm and the rest of his body. “I did not look any further.”
Another of the survivors, New York City fireman Lee Ielpi, told of being dispatched to the World Trade Center on September 11 and discovering that his twenty-nine-year-old firefighter son, Jonathan, was missing in the South Tower. Ielpi said he considered himself lucky because when he finally recovered his son’s body, it was intact—two arms, two legs. Of the 2,750 people who died at the World Trade Center, only 292 whole bodies were ever found. Ielpi said that before he buried his son, he took the corpse back home to Great Neck, Long Island, and “put him to bed at home, where he belonged.”
It had been difficult for the commission’s staff to organize the day’s next panel of witnesses—the families of the victims—because so many of the family advocates wanted to testify. The commission compromised by allow
ing one witness to testify from each of four of the major family groups.
Many of them wanted to voice their anger with the commission—the slowness of its investigation, the lack of subpoenas, the fact that Kean and others were now publicly dismissing the idea that individuals should be held accountable for their actions on September 11.
“I think the commission should point fingers,” testified Stephen Push of Arlington, Virginia, whose lobbyist wife died aboard American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.
“I’m not suggesting you find scapegoats—someone to hang out to dry. But there are people, people in responsible positions, who failed us on 9/11. They didn’t just fail us once; 9/11 occurred because they were failing us over a long period of time. Some of these people are still in responsible positions in government. Perhaps they shouldn’t be.”
One of the Jersey Girls, Mindy Kleinberg of East Brunswick, New Jersey, was next to testify. She, too, wanted the commission to hold someone accountable for September 11—for the death of her husband, Alan, who was trapped on the 104th floor of the North Tower.
She was tired of hearing the constant refrain—the constant excuse, really—from the Bush administration about how difficult it was to stop terrorist attacks. How often had she heard Condoleezza Rice and others at the White House say it? “The terrorists only have to be lucky once, while the government needs to be right 100 percent of the time.” It seemed to Mindy that there was plenty of evidence that the 9/11 terrorists were lucky only because bungling at the White House, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, and the Pentagon had made their luck possible. She asked: “If at some point we don’t look to hold the individuals accountable for not doing their jobs properly, then how can we ever expect for terrorists to not get lucky again?”
THERE WAS one more panel of witnesses that day—a group of foreign policy and terrorism specialists from around the country. Zelikow had drawn up the witness list, and the lead-off witness—the first outside expert of any sort to testify before the 9/11 commission—was Abraham Sofaer, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank at Stanford. Sofaer was the State Department’s legal adviser in the Reagan administration and a widely admired federal judge before that. It was certainly worth the commission’s time to hear from Sofaer, whose expertise in the intersection of foreign policy and the law was of obvious value.
But it seemed odd that he was the commission’s very first expert witness. Sofaer had no special expertise on the events of September 11. He appeared there, mostly, as an advocate for the American invasion of Iraq—the invasion had been launched a week earlier—and a champion of the concept of “preemptive defense” or “preemptive war.”
The doctrine of preemptive defense, which held that an adversary like Iraq that posed no imminent military threat could still be attacked, had been formally adopted a year earlier by the Bush administration. The decision was hailed by Sofaer. The administration argued that Iraq had worked closely for years with al-Qaeda.
“The president’s principles are strategically necessary, morally sound, and legally defensible,” Sofaer said in praising Bush. He criticized the Clinton administration for relying on law enforcement instead of military force in dealing with terrorist threats. “The notion that criminal prosecution could bring a terrorist group like al-Qaeda to justice is absurd,” he said. Under Clinton and his predecessors, counterterrorism was treated as “a game” in which “the FBI, prosecutors, and intelligence personnel attempted to learn where and when attacks were to occur before they actually happened so they could do their best to prevent it,” he continued. “This commission should, I think, make it clear that presidents don’t have the option of sitting back and playing that game.” In the future, he said, when an enemy “rises up to kill you,” the United States should “rise up and kill him first.” He called on the commission to endorse Bush’s new policy—in effect, to endorse the president’s decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Members of the commission’s staff would look back on Sofaer’s testimony as the first evidence that Zelikow might try to use the commission to promote the war with Iraq. Few people outside the Bush administration knew at the time that Zelikow was the author of the White House’s “preemptive defense” doctrine—that it was his scholarly document that had been used to justify the invasion. Sofaer later recalled how pleased he had been to receive the invitation from Zelikow for the hearing. He knew what an honor it was to be the first expert called to testify before the 9/11 commission.
17
K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
Washington, D.C.
APRIL 2003
Karen Heitkotter was one of those dedicated women who, for generations, had made the State Department work. Her job title used to be “secretary.” Then in the 1980s and 1990s the single-word title mostly disappeared, seen as sexist, and Heitkotter became an “executive secretary” or “executive assistant” to several ambitious American diplomats. She lived—and thrived—in American embassies in Europe, where she worked for the ambassadors to Italy and Norway. It was impossible to guess her age. She was timelessly pretty, poised, cheerful, full of the common sense that came from her family’s roots in Nebraska; she was just as smart as many of the diplomats she worked for, although she never felt the need to make that obvious.
Friends passed her name to Philip Zelikow and the 9/11 commission; Zelikow and the “front office” needed someone in a hurry to deal with secretarial duties—answering the phone, arranging travel, filling out paperwork. Heitkotter was a natural candidate for the job. Her résumé was especially appealing to the commission because she had been given every sort of security clearance in her years in government. She had worked with top-secret documents for most of her career. Unlike so many other new staff members on the commission, she could go to work without a long FBI background check.
She arrived at the commission’s offices on K Street to find chaos. “We didn’t have phones, we didn’t have computers, we didn’t have fax machines,” she recalled. She was given a desk near the lobby door that offered no privacy at all, which was painful for a woman who valued her privacy so highly. The consolation, she figured, was the chance to say that she had a ringside seat to the most important government investigation of her lifetime. She could see almost everything that went on.
Heitkotter had worked for difficult, dismissive bosses throughout her career, but it was clear to her and her colleagues on the commission that Zelikow was going to be in a category all his own. He was undeniably smart, but he was nasty, insecure, and prone to red-in-the-face outbursts. She was rarely the victim of his outbursts—maybe Zelikow couldn’t be bothered to waste his anger on someone at her level—but Heitkotter cringed when she saw him savage others.
Although it was unpleasant to deal with Zelikow, Heitkotter quickly made friends on the commission’s staff, and she found much to admire among the ten commissioners, especially Tom Kean. It was obvious that Kean was “wellborn,” the sort of aristocrat who had been taught at an early age to be polite to everyone, regardless of station. “A lot of people don’t treat administrative staff well, but Kean always did,’’ she said. It was the same sort of confidence and patrician good manners she saw in John Lehman; his family was prominent on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Grace Kelly, the actress-turned-princess, was Lehman’s cousin.
Part of Heitkotter’s job was taking Zelikow’s phone calls and setting up his appointments. Since the commission did not even have office supplies at the start, she brought a small spiral notebook to work that would serve as her telephone log. She began recording the phone calls that Zelikow received at the office. (She knew only who called in; Zelikow lived on his cell phone and preferred to use it to return most of his calls.)
When a phone call came into the office for Zelikow, she would log it with a date and time. In the first months of the investigation, most of Zelikow’s callers were those Heitkotter would have expected: Tom Kean and Lee Hamil
ton and the other commissioners; middle-ranking government officials who were serving as their agencies’ liaison to the investigation; and reporters. Although Zelikow had hired a press spokesman, he often preferred to return calls from reporters from large news organizations.
But then on Monday, June 23, 2003, at 4:40 p.m., Heitkotter picked up the phone and was startled to hear the voice of one of the most powerful men in Washington.
“This is Karl Rove,’’ he said. “I’m looking for Philip.”
Heitkotter wondered why Bush’s political adviser would want to talk to Zelikow. She knew that Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all unnecessary contact with senior Bush administration officials to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest, given his close ties to Condoleezza Rice and others at the White House. So why would he be talking to Rove? It was not a mystery she could answer; it was not her place to ask why someone like Rove would be calling. She explained to Rove that Zelikow was out of the office and gave him Zelikow’s cell phone number. She logged the call in the spiral notebook: “Karl Rove—gave PZ cell #.”
At 11:35 the next morning, the phone rang and it was Rove again, eager to find Zelikow. She took a message for Zelikow.
How odd, she thought, that Rove would be so insistent on tracking down Zelikow personally.
It was not the last time Zelikow would hear from Rove and others at the White House. Rove called again on September 4 and again on September 15. And Rove was not the only senior administration official in contact with Zelikow.
While Zelikow was telling people how upset he was to cut off contact with his good friend Rice, Heitkotter knew that he hadn’t. More than once, she had been asked to arrange a gate pass so Zelikow could enter the White House to visit the national security adviser in her offices in the West Wing. In September, he had gone over to the White House to have lunch with her and her staff.
The Commission Page 12