The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  The Kuala Lumpur meeting occurred at a time when the CIA and its analysts were recovering from weeks of some of the most frantic activity in the agency’s history. The CIA had expected a series of massive terrorist attacks around the millennium—one, the bombing of Los Angeles International Airport, had been foiled—and its counterterrorism teams had been working round-the-clock for weeks. Many counterterrorism analysts had given up holiday celebrations with their families to be at their stations in case al-Qaeda attacked. By January 5, 2000, when the terrorist summit was underway in Malaysia, the agency’s analysts were bone-tired; they were not much recovered by January 8, when the two hijackers left for Bangkok and disappeared.

  But although that might be the explanation, Moseman also knew that fatigue would not be accepted by the 9/11 commission or anyone else as an excuse. He feared the CIA’s failure to watch-list Hazmi and Mihdhar would be the “gotcha” anecdote that would threaten the CIA’s very existence if investigators seized on it. “I kept wondering how it could have happened,” he said of the day he learned of the blunder with Hazmi and Mihdhar. “I know that the rest of our record was so strong. Up to that moment, I thought we had tried our damnedest in every way to stop the attacks.”

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  ROOM 5026

  New Executive Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  AUGUST 2003

  There was a window in the reading room that had been set aside for Alexis Albion, the commission’s chief researcher on the CIA, for her visits to Langley. When she needed a break, she could push aside the stacks of classified documents in front of her and admire the view out onto another part of the CIA’s airy headquarters building. But Warren Bass, who had been assigned to review the archives at the National Security Council, had no view at all from room 5026 in the New Executive Office Building on 17th Street. The building was in the heart of downtown Washington, and the blinds had to be drawn at all times as a security measure, given how highly classified the documents were.

  The room had been designated by the White House as the commission’s reading room for documents from the National Security Council, and it was as dreary as the building itself. The New Executive Office Building, built in the 1960s to house the offices of lesser federal agencies, was a soulless bit of redbrick construction that had the only advantage of location. It was right behind Blair House, where the White House housed visiting heads of state, and only a block and a half from the West Wing. The commission’s K Street offices were a ten-minute walk away.

  Inside room 5026 was a thick-walled safe, where the secret files were stored between visits from Bass and others from the commission; a table where Bass could spread out documents; and a pair of computer terminals for note taking. The furniture in the room was standard government issue; in one of the chairs sat Bass’s “minder,” a lower-level White House official who had been assigned to keep watch on Bass as he worked.

  As at the CIA, notes taken by the commission’s staff needed to be reviewed by a White House lawyer and given a security classification before they could be moved to K Street. With few exceptions, the documents themselves could not be removed from room 5026. (In general, notes were classified at the same level as the documents they referred to, so Bass’s notes about a “top secret” document would also have been stamped “top secret.”)

  It might have seemed a depressing place to contemplate spending weeks of his life in 2003. But Bass was exhilarated by his assignment. His doctorate from Columbia was in history, with a specialty in American diplomatic history, so the files stored in this reading room—the most secret documents maintained by the National Security Council under two presidents—would likely be the prize reading of his career.

  Long before his first visit to the New Executive Office Building, Bass had an idea what he was searching for. He certainly knew he wanted to see the personal files of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice; her predecessor under Clinton, Sandy Berger; and Richard Clarke, the NSC’s counterterrorism czar for both Clinton and the second President Bush.

  Clarke’s name was essentially unknown outside the government until 2004 and his startling public testimony before the 9/11 commission. But it was well known within the government, and there were rumors in 2003 at the State Department and the Pentagon that Clarke had left the Bush White House earlier that year in dismay over its performance on terrorism before and after 9/11. Clarke’s small staff at the NSC knew the rumors were true, that Clarke was planning to go public, and that his NSC files would be a revelation for the 9/11 commission. Clarke’s files, they knew, would help explain the mystery of why the Bush administration did so little in the spring and summer of 2001 to respond to the urgent warnings of an imminent al-Qaeda attack. They knew that much of what Clarke had written in the months before 9/11—his e-mails and memos and policy papers warning of catastrophe—had gone straight to his boss, Condoleezza Rice.

  BASS WAS an urbane, quick-witted historian who had been recruited for the 9/11 commission from the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, where he ran a terrorism research program. Born in Boston and raised in Toronto, he was a citizen of both the United States and Canada. His Canadian citizenship created complications when he sought a high-level security clearance to work for the commission. At an interview for his clearance, he was startled to be asked, apparently seriously, “If Canada and the U.S. went to war, which side would you be on?” He was asked if he would be upset if the United States bombed Toronto. After some delay, the security clearance came through. He was a fine writer, maybe the best on the commission. His first book, a well-reviewed history of the origins of the alliance between the United States and Israel, was published by Oxford University Press just as he was joining the commission. He signed on to the investigation knowing that Zelikow would be a difficult boss—in scholarly circles, Zelikow’s ego and abrasiveness were no secret—but one still worth working for. Like Alexis Albion, Bass was only thirty-three, and for a young historian, Zelikow was a wonderful contact to have.

  But the relationship quickly turned difficult. Bass and other members of Team 3, the commission’s counterterrorism policy team, were startled to discover that Zelikow expected to be involved in the smallest details of their work. He virtually ignored the work of other teams of investigators; by mid-2003, many of the other teams had been pushed far across town to the commission’s overflow space in an office building that housed employees of the General Services Administration, the agency that functioned as the government’s real estate manager. The dark, claustrophobic GSA offices were known to investigators sent there as “the Cave.”

  The members of Team 3 were also alarmed by the revelations, week by week, month by month, of how close Zelikow was to Rice and others at the White House. They learned early on about Zelikow’s work on the Bush transition team in 2000 and early 2001 and about how much antipathy there was between him and Richard Clarke. They heard the stories about Zelikow’s role in developing the “preemptive war” strategy at the White House in 2002. Zelikow’s friendships with Rice and others were a particular problem for Bass, since Rice and Clarke were at the heart of his part of the investigation.

  It was clear to some members of Team 3 that they could not have an open discussion in front of Zelikow about Condoleezza Rice and her performance as national security adviser. They could not say openly, certainly not to Zelikow’s face, what many on the staff came to believe: that Rice’s performance in the spring and summer of 2001 amounted to incompetence, or something not far from it. David Kay, the veteran American weapons inspector who was dispatched to Iraq by the Bush administration in 2003 to search for weapons of mass destruction, passed word to the commission that he believed Rice was the “worst national security adviser” in the history of the job, a statement he would later repeat to Bob Woodward for one of his books.

  For Team 3, there was a reverse problem with Clarke. It was easy to talk about Clarke in Zelikow’s presence, as long as the conversation centered on Clarke’
s failings at the NSC and his purported dishonesty. Long before Bass had seen Clarke’s files, Zelikow made it clear to Team 3’s investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect.

  “I know Dick Clarke,” he said; he argued that Clarke was a braggart who would try to rewrite history to justify his errors and slander his enemies, Rice in particular. The commission had decided that in its private interviews with current and former government officials, witnesses would be placed under oath when there was a substantial reason to doubt their truthfulness. Zelikow argued that Clarke easily fell into that category; Clarke, he decreed, would need to be sworn in.

  WHEN HE finally got his security clearance and was allowed into room 5026, Bass discovered he could make quick work of Rice’s e-mails and internal memos on the al-Qaeda threat in the spring and summer of 2001. That was because there was almost nothing to read, at least nothing that Rice had written herself. Either she committed nothing to paper or e-mail on the subject, which was possible since so much of her work was conducted face-to-face with Bush, or terrorist threats were simply not an issue that had interested her before 9/11. Her speeches and public appearances in the months before the attacks suggested the latter.

  Tipped by an article in The Washington Post, the commission discovered the text of a speech that she had been scheduled to make on September 11, 2001—the speech was canceled in the chaos following the attacks—in which Rice planned to address “the threats of today and the day after, not the world of yesterday.” The speech, which was intended to outline her broad vision on national security and to promote the Bush administration’s plans for a missile defense system, included only a passing reference to terrorism and the threat of radical Islam. On the day that Osama bin Laden launched the most devastating attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, bin Laden’s terrorist network was seen by Rice as only a secondary threat, barely worth mentioning.

  But if Rice had left almost no paper trail on terrorism in 2001, Clarke’s files were everything that Bass could have hoped for. Clarke wrote down much of what he saw and heard at the White House, almost to the point of obsession when it came to al-Qaeda. Bass and his colleagues on Team 3 could see that Clarke had left behind a rich narrative of what had gone so wrong at the NSC in the months before 9/11, albeit filtered through the writings of the very opinionated Clarke.

  Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move, urgently, to respond to a flood of warnings about an upcoming and catastrophic terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden. The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.

  He pushed for an early meeting in 2001 with President Bush to brief him about bin Laden’s network and the “nearly existential” threat it represented to the United States. But Rice rebuffed Clarke. She allowed him to give a briefing to Bush on the issue of cyberterrorism, but not on bin Laden; she told Clarke the al-Qaeda briefing could wait until after the White House had put the finishing touches that summer on a broader campaign against bin Laden. She moved Clarke and his issues off center stage—in part at the urging of Zelikow and the transition team.

  Rice had admirably resisted calls to remove Clarke entirely from the White House staff, a fact that she would recall repeatedly after 9/11 in defending herself. But she had pushed Clarke so far away from the center of power that his warnings through 2001 about an imminent terrorist attack could be—and were—ignored.

  By comparison, Clarke’s files from the Clinton administration showed that he and the NSC’s Counterterrorism Strategy Group, which he led, had enjoyed easy access to the Oval Office in the Clinton years. Bass could see from the paperwork that Sandy Berger, Rice’s predecessor, had forwarded Clarke’s e-mails and CSG memos directly to Clinton, often without changing a word. At Berger’s recommendation, Clarke was made a de facto member of the White House Principals Committee when it discussed terrorist threats; that gave him regular face-to-face contact with the secretaries of state and defense, as well as with George Tenet at the CIA. Rice removed Clarke from the Principals Committee and forced him in 2001 to report up through the Deputies Committee, made up of the number two officials from the cabinet departments.

  Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001, exactly a week before the attacks, in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. It was a memo that seemed to spill out all of Clarke’s frustration about how slowly the Bush White House had responded to the cascade of terrorist threats that summer. The note was terrifying in its prescience.

  “Are we serious about dealing with the Al Qaeda threat?” he asked Rice. “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping Al Qaeda attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the U.S. What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

  Bass’s colleagues said he knew instantly that the September 4 e-mail was so sensitive—and potentially damaging, especially to Rice—that the White House would never voluntarily release a copy to the commission or allow him to take notes from the room if they came close to reproducing its language. Under a written agreement between the commission and the White House, notes could not “significantly reproduce” the wording of a classified document.

  Bass decided he would have to try to memorize it in pieces, several sentences at a time, and then rush back to the commission to bat them out on a computer keyboard.

  The day he discovered the document, Bass all but burst into the commission’s offices on K Street and rushed over to Mike Hurley, the Team 3 leader. Bass had taken to calling Hurley “Chief ” as a sign of humorous affection—he was Jimmy Olsen to Hurley’s Perry White. Hurley, the veteran spy, was uniformly admired by his team members. Zelikow seemed a little intimidated to have a true spy on his staff. It was not so long ago, Zelikow and others knew, that Hurley was in Afghanistan, calling in air strikes that left the smoldering remains of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters littered across the desert.

  “Holy shit, Chief,” Bass said excitedly. “You won’t believe what I found.”

  He told Hurley that Clarke’s September 4 memo was a “document that grabs you by the throat, a document that you write when you’re at the end of your tether—or well past it,” as Clarke clearly was in the weeks before September 11. Hurley instantly understood the significance of what he was being told by Bass. The question for both men was whether Zelikow would allow them to share any of it with the public.

  MONTHS LATER, Bass could not take it any longer. He was going to quit, or least threaten to quit, and he was going to make it clear that Zelikow’s attempts at interference—his efforts to defend Condi Rice and demean Clarke—were part of the reason why. He marched into the office of Dan Marcus, the general counsel, to announce his threat to leave the investigation.

  “I cannot do this,” he declared to Marcus, who was already well aware of Bass’s unhappiness. “Zelikow is making me crazy.”

  If he had ever felt any loyalty toward Zelikow from the early days of the investigation, it had evaporated. He was outraged by both Zelikow and the White House; Bass felt the White House was trying to sabotage his work by its efforts to limit his ability to see certain documents from the NSC files and take useful notes from them. Marcus urged him to calm down: “Let’s talk this through.”

  The tensions between Bass and Zelikow had been building for months. Zelikow described his struggles with Bass as the result of an honest difference of opinion between two historians with a mutual admiration. Colleagues said Bass saw something much less innocent.

  For a while, their struggles had seemed almost comical. Alexis Albion tacked up a poster from the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai, with a photograph of Bass’s head pasted over Cruise’s. A photo of Zelikow’s head was taped over that of Cruise’s sword-wielding Samurai rival. Even Zelikow found
that funny.

  But as time had gone on, Bass had lost his sense of humor on the subject. He made it clear to colleagues that he believed Zelikow was interfering in his work for reasons that were overtly political—intended to shield the White House, and Rice in particular, from the commission’s criticism. For every bit of evidence gathered by Bass and Team 3 to bolster Clarke’s allegation that the White House had ignored terrorist threats in 2001, Zelikow would find some reason to disparage it.

  Marcus and Hurley managed to talk Bass out of resigning, although the threat lingered until the final weeks of the investigation. Hurley thought that Bass’s departure would have been a disaster for the commission; Bass was the team’s institutional memory on the NSC, and his writing and editing skills seemed irreplaceable. Hurley could see that Bass’s punishing workload was part of the problem; the whole team was overworked to the point of exhaustion. By the end of 2003, working past midnight and through the weekend had become routine on Team 3. Hurley asked Zelikow if he could hire a friend, Leonard Hawley, a retired West Point–educated solider who had worked in the State Department and the NSC, as a consultant. It would ease the workload on everyone. Hawley’s calm and his sense of humor would be welcome on the staff, Hurley said.

  Zelikow interviewed Hawley before agreeing to hire him. Zelikow seemed concerned by Hawley’s work on the NSC in the Clinton administration, specifically about whether he had a friendship with Zelikow’s nemesis Richard Clarke. Hawley did not deny that he admired Clarke. “But I think I’m a fairly independent guy,” he told Zelikow. It was another hiring decision that Zelikow might quickly come to regret.

  23

  Washington, D.C.