The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  SEPTEMBER 10, 2001

  In the summer of 2001, the nation’s news organizations, especially the television networks, were riveted by the story of one man. It wasn’t George Bush. And it certainly wasn’t Osama bin Laden.

  It was the sordid tale of an otherwise obscure Democratic congressman from Modesto, California, Gary Condit, who was implicated—falsely, it later appeared—in the disappearance of a twenty-four-year-old government intern later found murdered. That summer, the names of the blow-dried congressman and the doe-eyed intern, Chandra Levy, were much better known to the American public than bin Laden’s.

  Even reporters in Washington who covered intelligence issues acknowledged they were largely ignorant that summer that the CIA and other parts of the government were warning of an almost certain terrorist attack. Probably, but not necessarily, overseas.

  The warnings were going straight to President Bush each morning in his briefings by Tenet and in the PDBs. It would later be revealed by the 9/11 commission that more than forty PDBs presented to Bush from January 2001 through September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden. And nearly identical intelligence landed each morning on the desks of about three hundred other senior national security officials and members of Congress in the form of the senior executive intelligence brief, or SEIB, a newsletter on intelligence issues also prepared by the CIA.

  The SEIBs (pronounced “seebs”) contained much of the same information that was in the PDBs but were edited to remove material considered too sensitive for all but the president and his top aides to see. Often the differences between the two documents were minor, with only a sentence or two changed between them. Apart from Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff was never granted access to Bush’s PDBs, except for the notorious August 2001 PDB that warned of the possibility of domestic al-Qaeda strikes involving hijackings. But they could read through the next best thing: the SEIBs.

  It was startling to Mike Hurley and the other investigators on Team 3 just what had gone on in the spring and summer of 2001—just how often and how aggressively the White House had been warned that something terrible was about to happen. Since nobody outside the Oval Office could know exactly what Tenet had told Bush during his morning intelligence briefings, the PDBs and the SEIBs were Tenet’s best defense to any claim that the CIA had not kept Bush and the rest of the government well-informed about the threats. They offered a strong defense.

  Team 3’s investigators began to match up the information in the SEIBs—and therefore, they knew, in the PDBs—with the discoveries being made by Warren Bass in the NSC files and by Alexis Albion at the CIA. And it showed that the chronology of warnings to the White House about “UBL” was long and troubling.

  Team 3 pulled together a timeline of the headlines just from the SEIBs in the spring and summer:

  “Bin Ladin Planning Multiple Operations” (APRIL 20)

  “Bin Ladin Public Profile May Presage Attack” (MAY 3)

  “Terrorist Groups Said Cooperating on US Hostage Plot” (MAY 23)

  “Bin Ladin’s Networks’ Plans Advancing” (MAY 26)

  “Bin Ladin Attacks May Be Imminent” (JUNE 23)

  “Bin Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” (JUNE 25)

  “Bin Ladin Planning High-Profile Attacks” (JUNE 30)

  “Bin Ladin Threats Are Real” (JUNE 30)

  “Planning for Bin Ladin Attacks Continues, Despite Delays” (JULY 2)

  It was especially troubling for Team 3 to realize how many of the warnings were directed to the desk of one person: Condoleezza Rice.

  Richard Clarke’s e-mails showed that he had bombarded Rice with messages about terrorist threats. He was trying to get her to focus on the intelligence she should have been reading each morning in the PDBs and SEIBs.

  From Bass’s notes, Team 3 pulled together a chronology of the most alarming of Clarke’s e-mails to Rice from the NSC archives, and they could see that a number of them involved the threat of a terrorist attack within American borders:

  On March 23, Clarke warned Rice of the existence of Islamic terrorist cells in the United States and his fear that they might use a truck bomb on Pennsylvania Avenue, resulting in the destruction of the West Wing. Truck bombs were their “weapons of choice,” he wrote.

  In late March and early April, he relayed a number of reports to Rice from the CIA that Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda’s planning chief, was making preparations for a major attack in a foreign country, possibly Israel.

  On May 17, Clarke’s Counterterrorism Strategy Group circulated an agenda for a meeting that would, as its first item of business, focus on “UBL: Operation Planned in U.S.” It was a reference to an uncollaborated warning phoned into an American embassy the day before that bin Laden and his followers were planning a “high explosives” attack in the United States.

  On May 29, Clarke suggested to Rice that she ask Tenet if there was more that could be done to preempt “a series of major terrorist attacks” organized by Zubaydah. “When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them,” Clarke wrote; he would use similar wording in his “Americans lay dead” memo on September 4.

  On June 25, he warned Rice that six separate intelligence reports showed that bin Laden’s followers were warning of an imminent, calamitous attack.

  On June 28, he told her the al-Qaeda threats had “reached a crescendo.”

  “A series of new reports continue to convince me and analysts at State, CIA, DIA and NSA that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July,” he wrote. He pointed out to her that an intercepted message between al-Qaeda followers warned of something coming that would be “very, very, very, very big.”

  Other parts of the government did respond aggressively and appropriately to the threats, including the Pentagon and the State Department. On June 21, the United States Central Command, which controls American military forces in the Persian Gulf, went to “delta” alert—its highest level—for American troops in six countries in the region. The American embassy in Yemen was closed for part of the summer; other embassies in the Middle East closed for shorter periods.

  But what had Rice done at the NSC? If the NSC files were complete, Bass and the others could see, she had asked Clarke to conduct interagency meetings at the White House with domestic agencies, including the FAA and the FBI, to keep them alert to the possibility of a domestic terrorist strike. She had not attended the meetings herself. She had asked that John Ashcroft receive a special briefing at the Justice Department about al-Qaeda threats. But she did not talk with Ashcroft herself in any sort of detail about the intelligence. Nor did she have any conversations of significance on the issue with FBI director Louis Freeh or with his temporary successor that summer, acting director Tom Pickard.

  The records showed she had otherwise focused on al-Qaeda threats in detail only once that summer—and remarkably enough, it would involve the possibility of a suicide attack by al-Qaeda from the air. The threats centered on the G-8 summit in Genoa in July. Both the German and Russian intelligence agencies had warned of an al-Qaeda plot involving an aerial attack on the summit, and as a result, the Italians placed a battery of surface-to-air missiles near the seaport. The threats were taken so seriously that Bush’s nighttime whereabouts were kept secret; he was reported to have slept aboard an American aircraft carrier that was stationed nearby.

  There is no record to show that Rice made any special effort to discuss terrorist threats with Bush. The record suggested, instead, that it was not a matter of special interest to either of them that summer.

  Bush seemed to acknowledge as much in an interview with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post that Bush almost certainly regretted later. In the interview in December 2001, only three months after the attacks, the president said that “there was a significant difference in my attitude after September 11” about al-Qaeda and the threat it posed to the United States.

  Before the attacks, he said:

/>   “I was not on point, but I knew he was a menace, and I knew he was a problem. I knew he was responsible, or we felt he was responsible, for the previous bombings that killed Americans. I was prepared to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about going after him. But I didn’t feel that sense of urgency, and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

  If anyone on the White House staff had responsibility for making Bush’s blood “boil” that summer about Osama bin Laden, it was Condoleezza Rice.

  LORRY FENNER was dumbfounded by what she was hearing. No one from the commission—no one—would drive the twenty-seven miles from downtown Washington north to the headquarters of the NSA, in Fort Meade, Maryland, to review its vast archives of material on al-Qaeda and terrorist threats.

  There was no problem on the commission’s staff finding people willing, eager, to spend their days at the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia to review its files. Philip Zelikow had made it clear that he was fixated on George Tenet and the CIA’s performance before 9/11, and his obsessions drove the workings of the rest of the staff.

  But no one seemed worried about what the NSA knew, even though it was the NSA and its eavesdropping satellites circling the earth that allowed the CIA’s analysts to do their jobs. In the case of al-Qaeda and other terrorists groups, the NSA’s satellites and its ground-based wiretapping technology had managed at times to track the telephone conversations of Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers—and the terror networks’ e-mail and faxes and every other form of communication that involved data transmitted by electronic pulse. Often, the CIA’s analysts had little to go on beyond what the NSA’s intercepts were telling them. Sometimes the NSA material was all that the CIA had.

  So why wouldn’t anyone drive up to Fort Meade? Assuming there was no traffic jam on the expressway between Washington and Baltimore—the NSA had its own exit from the road, marked with a sign that warned NSA EMPLOYEES ONLY—the drive to the NSA could actually be quicker than the drive to Langley. But for the commission’s staff, Fort Meade might as well have been Kabul, it seemed so distant.

  Fenner could see that some of the 9/11 commissioners and staff simply did not understand what the NSA was and what it did.

  In terms of budget and people, the NSA was the nation’s largest spy agency, much larger than the CIA. Their budgets were supposed to be secret, but the NSA was reported in 2003 to have a budget of about $6 billion, compared with $4 billion for the CIA. The NSA was an agency of superlatives; it was reported to be the world’s largest owner of supercomputers and the largest single employer of mathematicians. But for Zelikow and other staff on the commission, it was just more interesting—sexier—to concentrate on the CIA. To outsiders, the CIA was Hollywood; the NSA seemed like a geeky corner of Silicon Valley. Spies seemed more interesting than satellite hardware.

  It was all the more frustrating to Fenner given the obvious willingness of the NSA, unlike so many other parts of the government, to cooperate with the 9/11 commission. The NSA’s director, General Michael Hayden, had thrown open its archives on al-Qaeda; Zelikow and others were impressed by his eagerness to help. But perversely, the more eager General Hayden was to cooperate, the less interested Zelikow and others at the commission seemed to be in what was buried in the NSA files.

  Reviewing the NSA’s terrorism archives was not part of Fenner’s job. She had been assigned by Zelikow to a team of investigators that was supposed to be reviewing the overall structure of the intelligence community and whether it needed revamping, not how the individual spy agencies had actually performed before 9/11.

  But she knew the NSA and how valuable the archives would be, and she was determined to make sure somebody looked them over. She contacted the agency and organized a transfer of the archives—several file cabinets packed with documents—to a special reading room in the NSA’s offices in downtown Washington. The NSA readily agreed. The files were moved to Washington at the end of 2003, which meant that the commission would have several months to get into the archives before issuing its final report.

  Weeks later, she was astonished to discover that no one from the commission’s staff had walked the few blocks across town in Washington to begin reading through the files. She thought about pressing the issue with the leader of her team, Kevin Scheid, a CIA budget officer on loan to the commission. But Scheid, like so many others on the commission, resisted any sort of confrontation with Zelikow; it was just too unpleasant.

  She could go to Zelikow herself to urge him to assign someone to read through the NSA files. But to her later regret, Fenner decided she was too much of a military officer to violate the chain of command like that. She decided she would have to do this herself. Scheid would be annoyed at her absence, but she began to take trips to the NSA reading room to begin paging through the archives herself.

  The reading room was only a short walk from the commission’s offices on K Street. On the first visit, Fenner entered the reading room with trepidation, given the size of the task she had assigned herself. The file cabinets bulged with tens of thousands of pages of documents about the NSA’s efforts to track bin Laden and al-Qaeda since the mid-1990s; she knew most of the documents would be densely written, with code names and abbreviations and acronyms and geographic locations that she would not understand. It would take several days of reading to get through even a small portion of it.

  But it was soon clear that they were a gold mine of information about al-Qaeda and its connections—or lack of connections—to other terrorist groups and to other countries.

  After several visits, Fenner came across a file that included references to Iran and the Iranian-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah and their possible ties to al-Qaeda. That was odd, even alarming, she thought. The United States had invaded Iraq that March; the Bush administration justified the war in part by arguing that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to al-Qaeda. The government’s concern was about Iraq, not Iran. Fenner kept reading, growing more worried about what she had found. Had the CIA just missed the Iranian connection to al-Qaeda in the Bush administration’s single-minded focus on Iraq? Why wasn’t anyone else interested in this? What else was in these files? The more she read, the more the knot in her stomach tightened.

  24

  K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION

  Washington, D.C.

  JUNE 2003

  Max Cleland said the “second grenade” hurt as much as the first, maybe more.

  The first grenade was a real one, which went off at Cleland’s feet as he stepped off a helicopter during the siege of the Vietnamese village of Khe Sanh in 1968. It blew off the twenty-five-year-old army captain’s legs and his right arm.

  What he called the “second grenade” was Cleland’s defeat in his 2002 campaign for a second term in the United States Senate. As anyone who suffers from depression knows, there is physical pain attached to the mental anguish. And for Cleland, the pain after the 2002 defeat was searing—similar to what he remembered from all those years ago in Vietnam. “It was like that pain all over again,’’ he told almost anyone who would listen after the election.

  Cleland blamed the Senate defeat on two men: President George W. Bush, who had traveled to Georgia half a dozen times to campaign for Saxby Chambliss, Cleland’s victorious Republican challenger; and Karl Rove, Bush’s “hatchet man” in the White House.

  They had turned the Senate campaign into a cynical referendum on Bush’s performance in the fight against terrorism. The GOP was determined to take Cleland’s seat, even if that meant suggesting to Georgia voters that a man who had left three limbs on the battlefield in Vietnam lacked patriotism. Cleland could not prove it, and Rove denied it, but Cleland believed Rove must have been behind the notorious television attack ads that fall that tried to link Cleland’s image with that of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

  “Evil,” he later said of the GOP’s tactics in the race. “
It’s evil in its purest form, because George Bush and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney do not care who they go after, whose character they assassinate. If you stand in their way and disagree with them, they will try to kill you politically. They will trash you. They will bring up lies.”

  After the defeat, his friends from the Senate worried about Cleland’s emotional state, even his stability. The ebullient, bearlike Cleland they knew from Congress was gone. He was replaced by a man consumed by the demons that he had first encountered thirty-four years earlier, when he woke up in a military hospital to discover what was left of his shattered body.

  To his credit, Cleland did not deny what was happening to him as the depression worsened in early 2003. He was close to other Vietnam veterans from his years in the Senate, including John McCain, John Kerry of Massachusetts, and former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and they grew used to Cleland’s late night telephone calls for consolation. Cleland would talk of how little the future seemed to hold away from the Senate, questioning whether he had a future at all. Some of his friends worried that Cleland was so despondent during those weeks that he might try to take his life.

  He had thrown himself into politics in his native Georgia in the early 1970s, describing it as a type of “therapy.” Two years after his return from Vietnam, at the age of twenty-eight, he was elected to the state senate in Georgia; he was the youngest senator in the state’s history. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter brought him to Washington to run the Veterans Administration. In 1996, Cleland won the U.S. Senate seat. But his luck ran out in the 2002 election. If politics had been Cleland’s “therapy,” it now seemed that the therapist who helped him create this good, rewarding life had cruelly abandoned him.

  He had lived off his Senate salary. The Senate had made his life comfortable in so many other ways; he had easy access to cars and drivers and a large staff on Capitol Hill and at home in Georgia. Now, it was all gone. His lowest moment in the weeks after the election came in December, when a restaurant valet in Washington, failing to understand the special driving controls in Cleland’s 1994 Cadillac, plowed the car into a telephone pole. The car, which had allowed Cleland to travel around the city without help, offering him one treasured taste of freedom in his day, was totaled.