The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Yaphe felt vindicated by the hearing; it seemed to her that Mylroie had been shown for what she was.

  Yet if Zelikow was trying to give credibility to Mylroie’s views, it may have worked, at least as measured by the respectful news coverage of the hearing, and specifically of Mylroie’s testimony. At that moment, there was little of the cynicism that later became almost universal, both in the public and in the press corps, about the Bush administration’s justification for the war. The public clearly wanted to believe there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. So did many reporters. Otherwise, why had the United States gone to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein?

  But if most of the reporters in the hearing room knew nothing about Mylroie, the Jersey Girls knew plenty. From her months of research on the history of al-Qaeda, Lorie Van Auken, who was at the hearing, knew about Mylroie and her “loony” claims of a close alliance between Iraq and bin Laden. Lorie thought the invasion of Iraq was a farce. She thought the White House was ignoring the real enemy, al-Qaeda, to focus on Saddam Hussein. She confronted Zelikow at a meeting between the families and the commission’s staff shortly after the hearing.

  “That took a lot of nerve putting someone like that on the panel,” she told him. “Laurie Mylroie? This is supposed to be an investigation of September 11. This is not supposed to be a sales pitch for the Iraq war.”

  She remembered that a sly smile crossed Zelikow’s face. He said nothing to her. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” Lorie recalled. “He was selling the war.”

  Zelikow was certainly not done with this issue. After the hearing with Mylroie, he made it clear to the commission’s staff that he wanted the issue of al-Qaeda–Iraq links pursued aggressively. To some members of the staff, Zelikow seemed determined to demonstrate that whatever the evidence to the contrary, Iraq and al-Qaeda had a close relationship that justified the toppling of Saddam Hussein.

  21

  DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

  Harvard University

  Cambridge, Mass.

  MARCH 2003

  In Harvard’s History Department, the other doctoral candidates were jealous of Alexis Albion. She was actually having fun. She was at Harvard to earn her PhD, in part, by reading spy novels.

  It was a childhood fascination for Albion, the world of espionage—“assignments in exotic lands, slinky black catsuits,” as she imagined it. But rather than living out her “spy girl” fantasies by joining the CIA after earning her bachelor’s degree from Princeton, Albion had opted to become an intelligence historian. She knew enough about the CIA to understand that the reality of being a spy—long assignments in dreary, lonely places—could be “less Pussy Galore than Bridget Jones.”

  So Albion decided instead on a career in which she researched and wrote about the history of spies, real and fictional. She had a special interest in James Bond and wrote an unlikely scholarly paper, at least by the standards of Harvard’s History Department, on the subject of 007 and “the global historical moment of Bond in the mid-1960s.” Her dissertation was titled “The Spy in All of Us: The Public Image of Intelligence.”

  With her background in history and her appreciation of popular literature, her professors felt she was a natural choice to join the staff of the 9/11 commission. If Philip Zelikow was serious about turning the commission’s final report into a work of popular history that the public would want to read and understand, there were few young historians better qualified than Albion to help. Thanks to Ian Fleming and John le Carré, she knew what a page-turner was.

  Zelikow recruited her for the commission and she was placed on Team 3, the counterterrorism policy team. It was a dream assignment; it might well be the best research opportunity of her career. She would be the commission’s chief investigator on the CIA and its archives. It would be her responsibility to spend days at CIA headquarters at Langley, searching through the agency’s files for anything that involved al-Qaeda and the CIA’s response to terrorist threats.

  She was all of thirty-three when she joined the commission in April and looked several years younger. Elsewhere on the staff, Albion was perceived—incorrectly, it later turned out—as another young intellectual pawn of Zelikow’s. Like Warren Bass, who was her counterpart in dealing with the National Security Council archives, Albion would end up having to fight Zelikow to make sure the truth about 9/11 was fully told.

  While she waited in 2003 for her security clearance, Albion read through book after book about al-Qaeda and its history, as well as the modern history of the CIA. She read through the full library of Bob Woodward’s best-selling fly-on-the-wall books about the workings of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the White House.

  It was her first security clearance, and it meant that her family and friends were interviewed about every detail of her life. She got calls from friends who had always suspected she was a spy, and now—they thought—they had proof of it.

  When the security clearance finally came through that summer, Albion began her real work: driving to Langley in the morning to sit down and read through years’ worth of case files on the CIA and its history of dealing with terrorist threats. Whatever the commission’s later disagreements with George Tenet and his deputies, the staff found the CIA to be surprisingly accommodating on opening up its files to Albion and her colleagues.

  She was provided with a secure reading room of her own at the agency. She was given the electronic codes needed to enter the suite of offices where the room was located. She had remarkably free rein in the building; when she needed a break, she headed off to the CIA cafeteria for a cup of tea.

  She took notes on a laptop. Because her notes were as classified as the documents she was reading, they needed to be reviewed by a CIA lawyer before they left the agency as a printout. The lawyer who worked with Albion was concerned above all else with trying to protect information that would reveal “sources and methods”—the source of the information in the documents and how it was gathered. Albion and the lawyer got along well. Once her notes were released to the commission, Albion would transport them back to downtown Washington in a special lock bag.

  RUDY ROUSSEAU did not volunteer for the job he was given by George Tenet. But after 9/11, Tenet needed someone he trusted to help organize the agency’s vast archives on its counterterrorism programs over the years. The agency wanted to know what it had done—and more important, what it had not done—in response to the rise of Osama bin Laden beginning in the early 1990s. After Rousseau and his team had gathered the material, the CIA would have to decide which of the information could be released to congressional investigators and, eventually, to the 9/11 commission.

  Rousseau understood immediately what a terrible assignment it would be, given how many divisions of the CIA had some responsibility for terrorism—and, therefore, how far he would have to dig to make sure that Tenet saw everything he wanted to see.

  “You’d have to have your head examined to want the job,” Rousseau said.

  But he also knew that he was an obvious candidate for the assignment, given his past work in the CIA’s Inspector General’s office, where digging through classified archives was routine, and at the agency’s counterterrorism center. He had also been a Senate staffer for a decade before joining the agency in the 1980s, so he had a good idea what congressional staffers investigating 9/11 would want from the agency.

  In Albion’s first few days reviewing documents in August 2003, Rousseau had something special to show her. He had arranged for her to look over “the Scroll,” a massive chronology prepared after 9/11 to document every element of the CIA’s antiterrorist effort before the September 11 attacks.

  Albion’s eyes widened as they rolled it out for her for the first time on the table in the reading room. It was a remarkable document, produced on a special agency printer that allowed vast amounts of data to be displayed on long rolls of thick white butcher paper. No one had ever measured it, but Rousseau thought the Scroll must have measured about 150 feet across—a day-by-d
ay, hour-by-hour, almost minute-by-minute chronology of the agency’s battles against al-Qaeda.

  The information was broken down by activity. On one line was a timeline of the CIA’s covert operations, set against another line that offered a chronology of the work of the agency’s analysts; another line showed the agency’s counterterrorism budget over time. The entries on the scroll were carefully footnoted to refer to the underlying documents, so Albion could go back and read the raw material for herself, if she wanted.

  When she finished the Scroll, she moved on to the first of thousands of other documents that Rousseau had gathered for her. She would arrive in the reading room to find huge stacks of documents wrapped with rubber bands, many of them from the files of “Alec Station,” the special office the CIA had set up in 1996 to do nothing but track al-Qaeda. (It was also known as the “UBL unit,” for “Usama Bin Ladin”—the CIA’s in-house spelling of his name.)

  Albion was impressed. Over time, she came to see there was truth in what many at the agency had told her from the start: There were true heroes at the CIA in the war against bin Laden.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA had been subjected to relentless and often justifiable criticism about its failures before the attacks. But Albion could also see that there were men and women—and a remarkably large number of them were women—who had given up the rest of their lives to the mission of tracking down Osama bin Laden. She could see that the UBL unit and its first director, Michael Scheuer, had crafted detailed plans to capture or kill bin Laden from his sanctuary in Afghanistan in the late 1990s; why the operations were called off was a mystery that Albion would spend months trying to understand. She wanted to be certain that whatever the conclusions of the commission’s final report, it saluted the people who had done their jobs well.

  She could also see that within the CIA, information did travel up and down the agency quickly and with reasonable ease, certainly better than at the FBI. There was no better evidence of the differences at the two agencies than what Albion discovered about the Moussaoui case.

  Working with the FBI, federal immigration officers in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui on August 16, 2001. Based on his bizarre behavior at a local flight school, FBI agents were convinced Moussaoui, who held a French passport, was a Muslim extremist interested in hijacking a commercial jet. In searching through PowerPoint slides that had been prepared for briefings for George Tenet that month, Albion found an amazing sequence of slides dated August 23. One was labeled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” It was about Moussaoui. The acting director of the FBI, whose agents had taken Moussaoui into custody and believed him to be a terrorist, would not learn about the arrest for another three weeks, not until the afternoon of September 11. Tenet, whose agency was watching the Moussaoui case only from a distance, knew about the arrest a week after it occurred.

  WITHIN GEORGE Tenet’s inner circle, a dangerous decision had been made in 2003 about the CIA’s dealings with the 9/11 commission and other outside investigations. Tenet and his aides were going to try to make the argument that whatever had gone wrong in the months and years before 9/11, the CIA had actually done its job remarkably well on al-Qaeda. There would be none of the bowing and scraping that, they later learned, the FBI had done to try to placate the commission.

  As Albion was discovering, the CIA had warned—consistently, for years—that al-Qaeda was a grave threat to the United States. There were many people in the agency, Tenet among them, who saw al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups as the most serious threat of the new century. A review of Tenet’s congressional testimony and his speeches showed that he had warned, time after time before September 11, about bin Laden’s intentions, including the possibility that he would acquire weapons of mass destruction.

  In 1995, the CIA provided the White House with a national intelligence estimate, the term used for the agency’s most authoritative, all-sources analysis of a particular national security threat, that was entitled “The Foreign Terrorist Threat in the United States.” As Tenet reminded investigators later, the preposition in the NIE’s title was not “against” or “to.” The preposition was “in.” It warned specifically that the sort of stateless Islamic terrorists who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 intended to continue to “operate in the United States.” Their future targets would likely include “national symbols such as the White House and the Capitol and symbols of U.S. capitalism such as Wall Street.”

  In 1998, in the wake of the bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, Tenet issued a memo to employees at the CIA, the NSA, and other spy agencies about the threat of new al-Qaeda attacks. It was titled “We Are at War.” The question for Albion and her colleagues on the 9/11 commission was why so little seemed to have been done to respond to Tenet’s government-wide battle cry.

  From his initial sweep of the documents, Rudy Rousseau could see that the CIA had also repeatedly warned against just the sort of terrorist attack that had taken place on 9/11—airplanes as weapons. Rousseau had found several agency documents that reported on the possibility that al-Qaeda and other terrorists would use planes as missiles. He knew that this had been a specific concern just two months before 9/11, when Bush traveled to Genoa, Italy, for a meeting of the leaders of the so-called Group of Eight (G-8) of industrialized nations.

  Rousseau also thought that the CIA’s archives showed that the common wisdom in Washington about the CIA and the FBI—that they were locked in a tortured rivalry that prevented the sharing of information—was in many ways untrue. FBI agents and analysts were assigned to the CIA’s bin Laden unit, just as CIA analysts worked at FBI headquarters.

  For many weeks after 9/11, John Moseman, Tenet’s world-weary chief of staff, was feeling surprisingly, if still warily, optimistic. He thought that when the full story of the agency’s performance was told, the agency would weather the many outside investigations.

  His confidence was shaken when he attended one of the weekly meetings on Fridays at which Rousseau’s group updated Tenet and his aides on the seventh floor about the status of their work. They had terrible news. The team had gathered the files about Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the two hijackers who had lived in San Diego before 9/11, and determined that the CIA might have failed for more than a year to notify the FBI of the pair’s presence in the United States. Even though the CIA had strong reason to believe in 2000 that Hazmi and Mihdhar were both at large somewhere within American borders, the agency had waited until just days before 9/11 to ask that they be added to the government’s terrorist watch lists.

  Moseman understood instantly what this meant. This would be the “smoking gun” anecdote that the investigators would seize on to blame the CIA for 9/11.

  All of the good news about the agency’s performance for the years before that would not matter. Tenet agreed. Rousseau tried to convince Tenet that there was a lot of “good news” about the agency’s ingenuity in tracking Hazmi and Mihdhar until the moment they arrived in the United States.

  “No,” Tenet corrected him. “This is bad news.”

  BEFORE THAT, the agency felt, there was a remarkable, almost heroic story to be told about what had happened at the agency in late 1999 and early 2000 in the struggles against al-Qaeda. The CIA had managed to conduct surveillance of what amounted to an al-Qaeda summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the steamy capital of Malaysia, on January 5, 2000. Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim nation, was known to be home to a small but growing group of extremists loyal to al-Qaeda.

  The impressive detective work had begun in late 1999, when the National Security Agency, through its electronic eavesdropping of a telephone number in Yemen used by al-Qaeda to relay messages, learned that several members of an “operational cadre” planned to travel to Malaysia in January. One of the men had the first name “Khalid,” and the CIA was able to determine quickly that he was Khalid al-Mihdhar, a known al-Qaeda operative from Saudi Arabia. Another of the terrorists had the first name “Nawaf ”; the agenc
y would learn later that his full name was Nawaf al-Hazmi.

  While Mihdhar was en route to Malaysia for the meeting, the CIA performed a bit of espionage wizardry. Through contacts at Persian Gulf airports on his route to Southeast Asia, the agency managed to get hold of Mihdhar’s passport for a few minutes and photocopy several pages. The passport contained a multiple-entry American visa, an alarming bit of news. The surveillance information about the Kuala Lumpur meeting was widely shared within the American government in close to real time. Both National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and FBI director Louis Freeh were briefed on what was happening in Malaysia.

  But the good work of the CIA ended there. The CIA learned that Mihdhar and two of the other Arabs had suddenly left Kuala Lumpur on January 8, headed to Bangkok, Thailand, where the local CIA station and its Thai counterparts lost track of them in that city’s traffic-clogged streets.

  In March 2000, the CIA’s Bangkok station alerted CIA headquarters that “Nawaf ” was Hazmi, now identified as one of the men who had met with Khalid, and that he had left Bangkok aboard a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Presumably, he was now on American soil.

  Yet this critical piece of information—that a man closely identified with al-Qaeda terrorists, if not a terrorist himself, was in the United States in early 2000—apparently went no further for more than a year. The CIA would learn that Mihdhar had also reached the United States; he had traveled with Hazmi aboard the same United Airlines flight from Bangkok.

  But none of that information was given to the State Department for its TIPOFF terrorist watch list. More important, it did not appear to have gone to the FBI. CIA files seemed to suggest that the agency’s analysts intended to share the information with the bureau, but the FBI’s files showed no indication that it was ever received.

  Moseman came to believe there was a simple, innocent explanation for why the information about Hazmi and Mihdhar had not been watch-listed in early 2000: simple, total exhaustion.