Kean and Hamilton immediately rebuffed the committee’s demands. They wrote back to the families that Zelikow’s ties to the Bush White House were “not news to us” and that “Dr. Zelikow explained fully his past association with government agencies and the breadth and depth of his work experience before he was retained in his present position.” They said his “experience makes him an invaluable asset to the commission.”
But were Kean and Hamilton right that Zelikow’s conflicts were not “news” to them? Had Zelikow really explained his background to the commission in detail before he was hired?
Zelikow was clearly rattled by the call for his resignation. The families appeared to have sources on the commission’s staff, and it seemed only a matter of time before they figured out all of his ties to the Bush White House, especially to Rice and Karl Rove. Would they learn about the phone calls to Rove, all of the details about Zelikow’s work on the transition team? Better for Zelikow to tell the story himself than to leave it to the families and the press to distort it and try to make a scandal of it.
Determined to remain on the investigation, Zelikow decided on a preemptive strike. He wanted to turn himself into a subject of the investigation.
“I want to be interviewed,” he told Kean and Hamilton. “I want to be on the record about this.” He wanted the commission’s staff to conduct a sworn interview with him about his work on the Bush transition team and his associations with senior officials in the Bush White House. (Zelikow has said that he actually volunteered to be interviewed in the summer of 2003 but that the staff was not “ready to conduct the interview until early October.”)
The job fell to Dan Marcus, the general counsel, who readied himself for the interview by gathering all the material that Zelikow had submitted to Kean and Hamilton in the weeks before he was hired in January. He brought a copy of Zelikow’s résumé to the interview, which was held in the commission’s conference room on K Street on October 8, 2003, only five days after the commission had received the families’ letter demanding his removal.
Marcus thought it was silly to place Zelikow under oath, but Zelikow had insisted: It would be proof, he said, of his eagerness to tell the truth.
In personality, Marcus was Zelikow’s opposite. Marcus was open, unpretentious, slow to anger. Where Zelikow saw information as something to hoard in accumulating power, to keep secrets to himself, Marcus was garrulous. He liked to talk—sometimes too much, he admitted. The principal criticism of Marcus from some of the Democratic commissioners and staff members was that he was too nice a guy, too unwilling to take on Zelikow.
From his first days at the commission that spring, Marcus had been concerned about Zelikow’s conflicts of interest.
“Let me tell you something: I always worried about him, and so did a lot of other people,’’ Marcus said later. He thought that perhaps Zelikow was just oblivious to the whole concept of a conflict of interest, that his ego was so large that he simply could not fathom the idea that he would be capable of something so pedestrian as protecting friends for some partisan reason.
Zelikow was “just blind to this stuff,” Marcus said. “For a guy who is as smart and savvy as he is in some ways, he’s just totally unaware, doesn’t worry about these conflicts. I viewed it as one of my jobs to help protect him from himself.”
Kean and Hamilton made it clear to Marcus that they wanted to keep Zelikow on, regardless of what Marcus found. It was too late to find a new executive director. Besides, Zelikow had made himself indispensable, if only because he had so tightly controlled the flow of the information within the commission that only he really knew all that was going on among the teams of investigators.
Kean and Hamilton believed that if Marcus determined Zelikow had major conflicts of interest, he could be recused from those areas of the investigation.
“I think Tom and Lee basically made the decision that they were going to stick with this guy, that it was too late in the game to make a change,” Marcus said. “I don’t remember whether I had a specific conversation with Tom or Lee about it. But it was pretty clear that my instructions were to do what we needed to do on the recusal front and to make it work. We were going to make it work.” He said that Kean and Hamilton appeared to be motivated by a “combination of practical considerations and loyalty to Philip.”
Zelikow was sworn in and took a seat at the commission’s conference table. And over the next ninety minutes, he told a story that was especially shocking when heard in this much detail.
Yes, he had worked on Bush’s White House transition team. Yes, he had, on Rice’s behalf, reviewed the operations of Richard Clarke and the NSC’s counterterrorism operation—the review that ended with what amounted to Clarke’s demotion. Yes, he had written the national security strategy in 2002 that would later be used to justify a preemptive strike on Iraq. No, he did not see any of this as a major conflict of interest.
Marcus ran his eyes down Zelikow’s résumé once again. There was nothing on it about his role on the Bush transition. Certainly nothing about his review of the performance of Clarke’s operation. Nothing about the fact that he was the author of the “preemptive war” strategy paper.
Marcus shook his head. He was certain that Kean and Hamilton had not known these things; if they had, they never would have hired Zelikow. Certainly if some of the Democratic commissioners had known, they would have insisted back in the early weeks of the investigation that Zelikow be fired.
Marcus and others on the staff tried to imagine how Zelikow’s conflicts could be any worse. They tried to imagine a comparable conflict on other important blue-ribbon commissions. It became a little parlor game in the office. Would the commission that investigated the Challenger disaster have hired a staff director who was a NASA lobbyist or an executive of one of the contractors that built the faulty shuttle? Would the Warren Commission have hired the chairman of the Dallas tourism board?
Marcus could not be certain, but he suspected that Zelikow might have kept the information from Kean and Hamilton intentionally, in the knowledge that he would never have been hired otherwise.
He could not say that definitively. “I have no idea whether they were deliberately blindsided or not,” he said of Kean and Hamilton. But it was obvious that Kean and Hamilton had been blindsided. Zelikow, he said, “should never have been hired for this job.”
Marcus took his findings back to Kean and Hamilton. If they were insistent that Zelikow remain on the investigation, his responsibilities would have to be curtailed sharply. At the very least, he needed to be recused from any part of the investigation dealing with the 2001 White House transition, and perhaps he should be excluded from anything involving the NSC, as the families had recommended.
Kean and Hamilton were surprisingly unconcerned at the discoveries about Zelikow. It reflected what Marcus saw as misplaced confidence by Kean and Hamilton and the other commissioners about their role in the investigation. Hamilton in particular seemed to believe that Zelikow and the staff were secondary to the investigation—that it mattered only what the ten commissioners thought and did.
“Lee had this view, which was somewhat unrealistic, that the staff was not important,” he said. In Hamilton’s view, Marcus thought, Zelikow might be the most important person on the staff, but he was still a “staffer” and was not capable of “sneaking something” by the commissioners.
The decision by Kean and Hamilton, at Marcus’s recommendation, was that Zelikow recuse himself from all issues involving the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administrations and that he be barred from participating in any interviews of senior Bush aides, including Rice.
Zelikow was angry about the recusals, but he accepted them. He would have left the commission, he said, if he had been forced to accept the more sweeping recusals sought by the families. If the commission had tried to force him off all parts of the investigation involving the NSC, “it would have had the prompt and foreseeable effect of forcing my resignation.”
“Dan, I need to talk to you about something,” she said. “I’m not comfortable with an order that Philip has given me. He asked me to stop keeping records—phone logs—for his contacts with the White House.”
She said that Zelikow had called her into his office, shut the door, and given her the order. He had not explained why he wanted no more records of the White House conversations; Heitkotter and Marcus both knew that it was not like Zelikow to explain anything he did. But Zelikow was insistent about it, Heitkotter said. She was worried that she was being asked to do something improper; one of her friends on the commission’s staff, a lawyer, had urged her to tell someone in authority to protect herself if the information ever became public.
“I thought I should let you know,” she told Marcus.
Marcus did not alert Kean or Hamilton to what had happened, nor did he confront Zelikow. He acknowledged that Zelikow’s order on the phone logs “looks bad—it certainly doesn’t look good.”
But he figured that by late 2003 Zelikow’s conflicts of interest were well-known to everyone on and off the commission; Marcus certainly did not want another fight with Zelikow, who was clearly growing paranoid about how closely he was being watched.
He thought there was a simple solution. He told Heitkotter just to ignore Zelikow’s order. She should keep recording the calls.
“I told her to forget about it,” he said. For his part, Zelikow later said that he issued no such order to Heitkotter, nor was he aware that any phone logs were being kept. “I don’t think my office kept phone logs,” he said. “I think this is recycled, garbled office gossip.”
The existence of the logs and Zelikow’s contacts with the White House were the talk of the commission’s staff for weeks. Many staff members were furious about what appeared to be his surreptitious communications with Karl Rove and Condoleezza Rice. (Hamilton would later say he had authorized some limited contacts between Zelikow and Rice, especially over the logistics of a trip by the commission’s investigators to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia in 2003; but both Kean and Hamilton said they knew nothing about the calls between Zelikow and Rove.)
Several staff members debated whether to make a formal protest to Kean and Hamilton about Zelikow’s continuing communications with his friends in the White House. They decided against it out of fear that it would throw the commission into scandal if it ever leaked out, jeopardizing so many months of their own hard work. It was a moment in which Zelikow’s decision to hire so many young, ambitious people for the staff may have paid off. They were furious with what Zelikow had done and how his conflicts had threatened the integrity of the investigation. But they knew how valuable this work was and how valuable their affiliation with the 9/11 commission would be to their careers. They wanted its legacy to be untarnished.
Word about the phone logs also reached some of the 9/11 families, including the Jersey Girls, and they alerted the Washington bureau of The New York Times in November 2003.
It was a remarkable tip—why was the executive director of the 9/11 commission, already under suspicion because of his ties to the White House, swapping telephone calls with President Bush’s top political adviser?
A reporter telephoned Zelikow, who seemed alarmed that the Times knew about his contacts with Rove and eager that this not become a story for the paper. It is not clear if it was the reporter’s phone call that prompted Zelikow to order Karen Heitkotter to stop keeping logs of his White House calls, although that is a theory offered by some members of the commission’s staff.
Zelikow said that there had been only one exchange of phone calls with Rove months earlier and that they involved questions involving his old job at the Miller Center at the University of Virginia.
A senior White House official, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said that Rove called Zelikow on behalf of a neighbor in Washington; the neighbor was in his nineties and had been a senior lawyer at the State Department at the end of World War II and had retained his files from negotiations over postwar economic recovery plans for Europe. He thought the Miller Center would want to talk to the man and see his files.
Zelikow said he instantly understood the potential appearance problem of any contact with Rove, so he cut the conversation short and referred Rove to the Miller Center. He said he had no further contact with Rove beyond the one exchange.
The reporter wrote a modest article for the Times about the contacts between Zelikow and Rove. Kean and Hamilton were interviewed for the story. Both said they knew nothing about the phone calls between Zelikow and Rove’s office and seemed surprised by the news. But they said they accepted Zelikow’s explanation that the contacts were innocent.
The article was not published in a crush of other stories at the time about the deteriorating situation in Iraq. So the reporter pulled the story back, asking for more time to see if there was evidence of contacts between Zelikow and Rove beyond the one exchange. There was no evidence at the time of Zelikow’s continuing contacts at the White House with Rice.
The phone logs maintained by Karen Heitkotter showed that there were several phone calls from Rove to Zelikow’s office telephone number over a four-month period in 2003—at least two in June and two more in September. The logs do not show Zelikow’s calls out, nor would they show any calls on Zelikow’s cell phone, on which he relied for most of his outgoing calls.
The General Services Administration, which maintains some of the telephone records from the 9/11 commission, would not release records showing the specific telephone numbers called by Zelikow on his cell phone. But the records do show frequent calls to phone numbers in area code 202, which is Washington, that begin with the prefix 456-. That prefix is exclusive to phone numbers at the White House. (In fairness to Zelikow, many if not most of those calls were almost certainly routine; he had frequent contact with White House lawyers over the commission’s document and interview requests.)
Zelikow later insisted that regardless how many conversations he had with Rove, he was careful never to discuss the business of the 9/11 commission with him. Zelikow said he understood that would create an appearance problem. But White House officials contradicted Zelikow. A senior White House official familiar with Rove’s memory of the contacts with Zelikow said there had been “ancillary conversations” about the workings of the commission.
26
OFFICE OF POLITICAL AFFAIRS
The White House
AUGUST 2003
Karl Rove had a surprisingly modest office on the second floor of the West Wing. Alberto Gonzales and Margaret Spellings, President Bush’s domestic policy aide, were at opposite ends of the same hallway, with much nicer corner offices. Scott McClellan, the president’s press secretary, had an office that was nearly twice as large downstairs on the first floor, close to the Oval Office.
But despite everything else that he had accomplished in a career in Republican politics, including electing a president and helping orchestrate the GOP takeover of Congress, Rove insisted he was not one to concern himself with the square footage of the office space he controlled. He had more important things to worry about in 2003, including the work of the 9/11 commission. He would have been a fool not to keep an eye on the commission, given the potential trouble it could create for Bush on the eve of his reelection campaign—a campaign that would be centered almost entirely on the president’s record on terrorism.
Certainly the commission and its staff had a sense of being watched by Bush’s political guru. Some of the Republican commissioners had heard from GOP friends that Rove had ordered up secret opinion polls on the commission’s visibility—and, as important, its credibility—with the public.
John Lehman, whose support for John McCain in the 2000 election had cost him most but not all of his friends in the Bush administration, had heard that Gonzales’s stubbornness in his negotiatio
ns with the commission on legal issues was choreographed by Rove. Lehman said Rove viewed the commission’s work as a “mortal threat” to the president’s reelection hopes in 2004.
“Absolutely Rove was very much involved,” Lehman said. “Gonzales cleared everything with Rove.” Lehman said he was told by Republican friends that “Rove was the quarterback for dealing with the commission.”
The White House always denied it. Senior administration officials insisted that Rove was never as concerned about the 9/11 commission as the commissioners clearly wanted to believe. In modern American politics, there had never been anybody quite like Karl Rove—Darth Vader meets George Gallup, a political strategist who inspired fear, respect, and loathing in equal measure. Rove’s formidable reputation meant that his hand was seen in many political disputes in which he actually had no involvement at all. Many Democrats tried to flatter themselves in the belief that Rove was obsessed with their every move—if Rove was targeting you, you must be important. In truth, Andy Card said later, Rove was never obsessed with the 9/11 investigation. He had too much else to worry about as the presidential campaign approached.
Still, it was hard for Tom Kean to forget that it was Rove who first approached him about running the commission. And Rove was part of the internal debates in the White House throughout 2003 and 2004 over whether to share documents with the commission and authorize interviews. Rove’s office did do some polling about the commission; White House officials acknowledged that Rove’s office conducted at least two polls that gauged the public’s interest in the work of the 9/11 commission. In a GOP survey in early 2004, respondents were asked which of several news stories they were paying closest attention to. Among the possible choices: Martha Stewart’s insider-trading case, Enron’s collapse, and the 9/11 commission’s investigation. The poll suggested that the commission’s work was not high on the public’s list of priorities, which was a relief at the White House.
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