The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Rove was among Kean’s growing number of detractors in the White House. In many ways, it seemed, the White House should have been grateful to Kean, given his adamant early refusal to consider issuing subpoenas against the administration; a subpoena battle was a nightmarish thought among the president’s aides. In an election year, could Bush afford a court battle in which he was seen as fighting to withhold subpoenaed information about his own performance on terrorism?

  But in a White House that demanded total loyalty from within the GOP, that saw loyalty to the president as the same thing as loyalty to the party, Tom Kean was trouble.

  Certainly Gonzales had come to believe that. In Gonzales’s meetings with Kean and Hamilton, it was Kean who was adamant that the White House needed to turn over documents and make officials available for interviews. Kean was always much more agitated than Hamilton, sometimes coming close to raising his voice. Card, who had tried to convince Kean in their first meetings in 2002 to “stand up” for the president, was disappointed to see that Kean usually would not.

  There was “angst that some of us were feeling about Tom Kean,” Card said. “Is he a friend? Who is defending us over there? Who is looking out for us?”

  The anger with Kean had spread to the White House press office, where Kean was seen as trying to resurrect a long-dormant political career at the expense of the president who had given him the honor of running the 9/11 commission. In the press office, Kean was referred to—out of earshot of most reporters, of course—as “the Has-Been.”

  The White House found that its best support on the commission came from an unexpected corner—from Lee Hamilton, the panel’s top Democrat. Hamilton, they could see, was as much a man of the Washington establishment as he was a Democratic partisan. Probably more so.

  Hamilton understood the prerogatives of the White House—in particular, the concept of executive privilege—in a way that Kean did not or would not. Cheney and Rumsfeld, Hamilton’s old friends, let others in the White House know that Hamilton could be trusted.

  “I came to really respect Lee Hamilton,” Card would later say. “I think he listened better to our concerns than we had expected and maybe even heard our concerns better than Tom Kean.” He said Hamilton was a “better listener than Tom Kean. I think Tom Kean had a tendency to speak before he absorbed everything that had been said.”

  In many ways, the White House came to see Kean as disloyal, effectively operating as one of the commission’s Democrats, while Hamilton was a de facto Republican.

  Kean and Hamilton could see that for themselves.

  “I think the White House believed Lee was more reliable than I was,” Kean said later. “They thought I was volatile.” Hamilton thought that Gonzales in particular trusted him more as a go-between. “I think Gonzales felt I was the more reliable channel to convey the White House’s feeling to the rest of my commission,” he said.

  Dan Marcus, the general counsel, recalled a funny, if slightly awkward, moment during the investigation when a CIA official arrived for a private interview with commission investigators and explained that she had once lived in Indiana, that Hamilton had been her congressman there, and how much she admired him.

  Jim Thompson, the former Illinois governor, told the woman with a wry grin that it was not surprising she held Hamilton in such esteem. “Well, he is a Republican,” Thompson said. The crack produced knowing laughter among the commission staff in the room.

  At the White House, the other Democrats who had been on the commission from the start were considered partisans who could not be trusted, especially Richard Ben-Veniste and Tim Roemer. Jamie Gorelick seemed to be less partisan, more reasonable, but her connections with the Clinton administration made her suspect, too. The commission’s new arrival, Bob Kerrey, was an uncertain commodity; the White House took some comfort in his past antagonism toward Clinton.

  AS THEY came to office in 2001, Bush and his White House treated John Lehman like a “pariah” because of his support for John McCain in the presidential election in 2000.

  “They wouldn’t touch me in the transition, even for a briefing, because I had been with McCain,” he said. “I knew they hated me.” If McCain had defeated Bush for the nomination and gone on to become president, Lehman would likely have been in line for a top cabinet job, maybe defense secretary or director of central intelligence. But in the Bush administration, he was a nonentity.

  Outside the Bush White House, no one ignored John Lehman like that. He was described by friends and enemies alike as a force of nature. In his twenties, he was a brash top aide to Henry Kissinger in the National Security Council in the Nixon administration. In 1981, when Lehman was thirty-eight, Ronald Reagan named him navy secretary. Lehman oversaw a massive buildup of the fleet, which grew by more than a hundred warships during his six years in the Pentagon.

  He also engineered the unthinkable at the navy—he forced the retirement of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the legendary if self-worshipping father of the nuclear navy; Rickover’s cultlike following had allowed him to avoid normal retirement rules.

  As he prepared to pack up his office in 1982, Rickover took the opportunity to go to Reagan and warn him that Lehman was a “pissant” and “goddamned liar” who knew “nothing about the navy.” Lehman wore Rickover’s insults as a badge of honor. After the Reagan administration, Lehman earned a fortune as an investment banker in New York.

  The Bush White House’s suspicion of Lehman began to lift several months after he joined the 9/11 commission. He was proving to be of help to the White House on the investigation when it came to Iraq. As much as anybody on the commission, Lehman was willing to listen to the administration’s arguments about the possible links between al-Qaeda and Iraq and why the invasion of Iraq had been justified, in part, by Saddam Hussein’s purported collaboration with Osama bin Laden.

  There had been undeniable contacts over the years between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Saddam’s intelligence agencies had approached bin Laden’s representatives in the 1990s “if for no other reason than they really worried about these guys,” Lehman said. Ultimately, he said, the Iraqis believed al-Qaeda was “a major threat to Saddam” and needed to be closely monitored in the guise of working together. There was solid evidence to show that Iraq had also provided al-Qaeda with weapons training over time.

  Lehman was open to conversation at the White House about its theories, promoted most heavily by Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon, that the ties between Iraq and the terrorist network went well beyond weapons training. In 2003 and 2004, Lehman was given frequent meetings at the Pentagon and the White House, including with Cheney, Card, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz.

  The White House was trying to cheer Lehman on, to urge him to keep asking questions that might cement in the public’s mind the idea that Saddam Hussein was al-Qaeda’s patron—more ominously, that Iraq’s rumored stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction might eventually end up in bin Laden’s hands for use against the United States.

  The White House told Lehman it could not share with him every bit of intelligence it had to demonstrate al-Qaeda’s ties with Iraq—the material was just too closely held, too classified—but he should take it on faith that the intelligence existed. He could “take it to the bank.” He remembered Wolfowitz telling him, “Just wait until you see the evidence we’ve got.”

  “I got that line from everybody I talked to: ‘Wait and see, just wait until you see the evidence,’ ” Lehman said. It would take almost a year for him to understand fully how wrong the administration had been about Iraq and al-Qaeda. “I think they were all drinking their own bathwater,” Lehman said later.

  27

  OFFICES OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Va.

  SEPTEMBER 2003

  In the fall of 2003, Lee Hamilton wanted to see George Tenet, and the former congressman was invited to join Tenet for breakfast at CIA headquarters in Langley. The two men had known each other for a qu
arter century, since Tenet’s days as a junior staffer on Capitol Hill, and they had always gotten along. Hamilton had always admired Tenet’s gruff, slap-on-the-back charm and his ability to turn potential adversaries into members of his admiration society. Hamilton had barely sat down before Tenet answered the most important question that Hamilton was there to ask.

  “Lee, you’re not going to get access to them,” Tenet blurted out before either man had taken a mouthful of his breakfast. “It’s not going to happen. Meeting adjourned.”

  Tenet had gotten advance warning of why Hamilton was there—to request access on behalf of the commission to senior al-Qaeda terrorists captured after 9/11. At the top of Hamilton’s list were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, known throughout the intelligence community as “KSM”; and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, the young Yemeni who was the plot’s middleman in Germany. Both men had been captured in Pakistan and were then being held, it was reported, in secret prisons that the CIA had established in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. The conditions of their confinement and the methods of their interrogation were a mystery at the time outside the CIA, although no one assumed they were being treated with kid gloves.

  Apart from Osama bin Laden himself, it was unlikely that anyone knew more than KSM and bin al-Shibh about the logistics of the 9/11 plot, how it was financed, and if foreign governments had provided assistance to the hijackers.

  The head of the commission’s “plot” team of investigators, Dieter Snell, a former assistant United States attorney in New York who had helped prosecute Ramzi Youssef, the 1993 World Trade Center bomber, insisted that there be face-to-face interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects in American custody.

  Snell was described by Justice Department colleagues as a true by-the-book prosecutor—an exceptionally decent and honest lawyer who was wedded to rules and regulations, sometimes to the point where he could appear inflexible. Snell joked that it was part of his heritage. He had been raised by German-born parents in New York City, and German was the language spoken in his home; Zelikow could see how that would be of value when it came time for the commission to consult German prosecutors about their monitoring of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg that had carried out the attacks.

  At the Justice Department, Snell was seen as more insistent than other prosecutors in bringing an indictment only if there was near 100 percent certainty of a defendant’s guilt. He did not want to go to trial unless he was convinced that he would, and should, win. His dedication to protecting the innocent was admired by defense lawyers in New York City.

  And even though this was not a criminal prosecution, he seemed determined to try to bring the same standards to the evidence and proof before the 9/11 commission. Snell knew that testimony from key witnesses like the al-Qaeda detainees would have value only if they were questioned in person, with investigators given the chance to test their credibility with follow-up questions. The face-to-face interrogations would be especially important in situations in which the al-Qaeda members were giving conflicting testimony.

  Hamilton had gone to see Tenet to make the case.

  “It’s just not going to happen,” Tenet repeated, trying to preempt Hamilton from asking any more questions on the subject of the captured terrorists and their whereabouts. “Not even the president of the United States knows where these people are,” he said. “And he does not have access to them. And you’re not going to get access to them.” Hamilton could see this was a “bright line” for Tenet. The conversation was over.

  THE COMMISSION had first requested information about the detainees in June 2003, when it put in a written request to the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon for “all reports of intelligence information’’ from a list of the key captured al-Qaeda suspects. There was no request for the full interrogation reports; the commission wanted only the information the terrorists had revealed about the 9/11 plot and their activities before the attacks.

  Within months, the commission had begun to receive partial interrogation reports reflecting interviews with some of the detainees. But Snell and the others on the team could see that partial reports were inadequate; they addressed few of the questions that the “plot” team needed to answer. The CIA and Pentagon interrogators were not focused on 9/11 and al-Qaeda’s activities before the attacks; their focus, understandably, was on learning what future attacks al-Qaeda was planning and trying to preempt them.

  Despite Hamilton’s unsuccessful lobbying effort with Tenet, Snell continued to press the commission to demand access to the detainees. “They’re the only people who really know what happened” on 9/11, he said. Snell had gone so far as to offer to fly anywhere on Earth wearing a blindfold if that was what it took to protect the secrecy of the CIA’s interrogation sites. There was an offer to question the detainees by video-conference, or to observe questioning through one-way glass. Tenet, with the blessings of the White House, rejected all of the commission’s proposals.

  MIKE JACOBSON could tell that dealing with Snell, his new boss on the commission, was not going to be easy. From his years as an intelligence analyst at the FBI, Jacobson knew that the 9/11 commission was making a mistake if it tried to bring courtroom standards of proof to the investigation. Gathering information about al-Qaeda and other shadowy terrorist networks was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, albeit with the understanding that important pieces of the puzzle had been lost long ago and were irretrievable. The 9/11 commission was not like a criminal prosecution; there was never going to be 100 percent proof of anything. If the CIA waited for guilt beyond a reasonable doubt to move against the country’s enemies, it would never act against anyone (and the agency was commonly accused of inaction anyway, of course).

  In his first weeks on the commission, Jacobson was still trying to figure out what to make of the astonishing documents that he had uncovered buried in the FBI’s files in Washington and San Diego.

  During the congressional investigation into 9/11, where he had worked until he was hired by the commission in 2003, it was Jacobson who had uncovered the evidence to suggest that two of the 9/11 hijackers—Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar—had a support network in Southern California, a network that appeared to be connected somehow to the government of Saudi Arabia. Jacobson knew how explosive that might be.

  He had been frustrated at how much more was left to do when the congressional investigation shut down in 2003. He was convinced that FBI officials had tried to hide much of the evidence in its files that was connected to the two hijackers, and he knew there was much he probably still had not seen.

  He wanted the commission to press the Saudi government for access to Omar al-Bayoumi, the Saudi middleman in San Diego who had befriended the two hijackers, and even more importantly to Fahad al-Thumairy, the former Saudi diplomat in Los Angeles. Both Bayoumi and Thumairy were back in Saudi Arabia. Thumairy was not at home by choice; he had been banned from resuming his diplomatic duties in the United States because of his alleged ties to terrorists.

  With Dana Lesemann’s firing, Jacobson had lost his most knowledgeable ally in the hunt for new information in San Diego. But he had eager new allies when Zelikow assigned Raj De, the young Harvard Law School graduate, and Hyon Kim, a former FBI lawyer who had also worked on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to the “plot” team.

  As De and Kim listened to Jacobson offer a primer on the mysteries of San Diego, they could see few innocent explanations for why so many Saudis and other Arab men living in Southern California had come forward to try to help the two hijackers—to help them find a home, to set up bank accounts, to travel.

  At first, Jacobson and the others found the FBI to be as uncooperative with the 9/11 commission as it had been in the congressional investigation. It was painfully slow to meet the commission’s initial request for documents and interviews. Had Robert Mueller learned nothing from the congressional inquiry, which ended with a recommendation that the government seriously consider breaking up the FBI?

  Jacobson knew that the cautious
Snell would never join any sort of formal protest over the FBI’s obstruction—that would have been too confrontational for the hypercautious Snell—so they went around him to Jamie Gorelick. She was among the most approachable of the commissioners, and she knew the FBI from her years at the Justice Department. Gorelick went to see Mueller personally to complain. She warned him that he was fast losing the goodwill of the commission. If Mueller wanted to save the FBI, he needed to listen and cooperate.

  JACOBSON AND the others had an ally in John Lehman. Just as he was worried about ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda, Lehman was also concerned about a Saudi tie to the 9/11 plot itself. He thought it was clear early on that there was some sort of Saudi support network in San Diego that had made it possible for the hijackers to hide in plain sight in Southern California.

  He was especially intrigued by the thousands of dollars’ worth of “charity” checks that had been signed by the wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington and how that money had ended up in the bank accounts of the men in Southern California who had befriended Hazmi and Mihdhar.

  Lehman was convinced that Princess Haifa, the ambassador’s wife, had no idea where the money was going to end up. She had simply signed checks that had been put in front of her by the radicals who worked in the embassy’s Islamic affairs office in Washington. Lehman said it was well-known in intelligence circles that the Islamic affairs office functioned as the Saudis’ “fifth column” in support of Muslim extremists.

  When he went to the White House to talk about a possible connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda (a conversation the White House was eager to have), Lehman also brought up Saudi Arabia (a conversation the White House never wanted to have).

  Lehman was struck by the determination of the Bush White House to try to hide any evidence of the relationship between the Saudis and al-Qaeda. “They were refusing to declassify anything having to do with Saudi Arabia,” Lehman said. “Anything having to do with the Saudis, for some reason, it had this very special sensitivity.”