“You’re off balance, you’re burned out,” he remembered Downing telling him.
“You’re nuts, Jack,’’ Scheuer replied. “Do you want this problem with al-Qaeda resolved or don’t you?”
Scheuer was transferred back to CIA headquarters and given a cubicle in the agency’s library. He was made, effectively, a junior librarian and given almost nothing to do. He was despondent. He tried to telephone Tenet to discuss what was left of his career at the agency. Tenet, he said, would not call him back.
29
THE CAPITOL
JUNE 11, 2002
Tim Roemer sensed that Dick Clarke knew much more than he was saying. It was June 2002, nine months after the 9/11 attacks, and Roemer was still in Congress, finishing out his sixth and final term in the House; he had announced plans to give up his seat and retire from Congress the next year. He was among several House members and senators who had gathered on this late spring morning in a high-security conference room in the Capitol—one used by the House and Senate intelligence committees for classified CIA briefings—to hear from Richard Clarke, who was then still at the White House. Clarke had been called as a witness before the joint congressional investigation into the failures of the nation’s spy agencies before 9/11.
At the time, Roemer, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, did not know Clarke except by reputation. Clarke proved himself to be a riveting witness as he fielded questions from lawmakers for nearly six hours behind the closed doors of the hearing room. He was intelligent, articulate, seemingly candid in discussing his own failings as White House counterterrorism czar. Still, Roemer sensed that Clarke was being coy about certain questions—especially about President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. Clarke had been at the White House on the morning of September 11; he had been there throughout the spring and summer of 2001, when the government was being flooded with warnings of an imminent terrorist attack. So if anyone knew whether Bush and Rice had reacted appropriately to the threats reaching the Oval Office before 9/11, it was Clarke. Yet in front of these lawmakers, Clarke seemed unwilling to make any judgments about the president and Rice. He was certainly volunteering little about his bosses. He was still on the NSC’s payroll. Perhaps it was understandable that Clarke would want to hold his tongue for now.
Roemer figured that Clarke’s files at the NSC might answer the questions that were suddenly being asked by Democrats that spring about the pre-9/11 performance of the Bush White House; the first news reports about the existence of the August 6, 2001, PDB and its warnings about domestic hijackings had appeared in May 2002. But Clarke’s paper trail was beyond the reach of Congress, Roemer knew; the White House was well within its constitutional rights to deny National Security Council files to Congress, even if the files involved a turning point in American history like 9/11. By its very nature, the NSC existed to offer advice to the president, and presidential advice was precisely what executive privilege was supposed to shield from outside scrutiny.
For that reason, the White House had also made clear that Condoleezza Rice, as national security adviser, would never testify before the joint congressional inquiry. That her deputy Clarke was being allowed to go to Capitol Hill to answer some questions—behind closed doors, with all of his responses considered classified—was a concession by the White House. The White House had insisted that Clarke not be called a “witness” by the lawmakers since that would suggest his comments amounted to testimony; they agreed to refer to him instead as a “briefer.” For the same reason, he was not placed under oath. And because what Clarke was telling the lawmakers in June 2002 was classified, Roemer could not discuss it outside the conference room without risking prosecution.
K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D.C.
DECEMBER 18, 2003
A year and a half later, Roemer found himself back in a Washington conference room with Clarke, but now both men were out of government. And Clarke’s story, Roemer suspected, was about to create a political firestorm for the Bush administration unlike any it had ever experienced.
One of Roemer’s final acts in Congress was to make sure he was named to the 9/11 commission as one of its five Democratic members. Roemer had been a sponsor of the bill that created the commission and one of the legislation’s most aggressive advocates on the Hill. Like others involved in the congressional investigation, Roemer was convinced that the full truth about September 11 could only be told by an independent, bipartisan commission with subpoena power and the willingness to use it. He knew that the commission, unlike Congress, might actually get the PDBs and the files from the NSC, including Clarke’s.
The first of Clarke’s private interviews with the 9/11 commission was scheduled for mid-December, in the commission’s offices on K Street.
Under his recusal agreement with the commission, Philip Zelikow was not supposed to be involved in questioning Clarke on any issue involving the 2001 transition. He had reason to dread what Clarke was about to tell the commission: It was Zelikow, after all, who had been the architect of Clarke’s demotion in the early weeks of the Bush administration, a fact that had never been aired publicly.
For weeks ahead of the private interviews, Zelikow continued his campaign to disparage Clarke and his credibility, telling the commission’s investigators that Clarke was known in the White House for having a “weak grasp of the truth.” Zelikow had succeeded in convincing the rest of the staff that Clarke needed to understand that he was under threat of perjury at his private interviews. He made it clear that “Clarke was somebody who ought to be under oath,” said Dan Marcus, the general counsel. And Clarke was sworn in before the first interview.
The questioning of Clarke was left mostly to Marcus, who knew Clarke slightly from their days together in the Clinton White House. Despite Zelikow’s claims, Marcus had never heard Clarke described as a liar. Instead, he believed that Clarke was an exceptionally talented bureaucrat whose career had been hindered by his ego and prickliness. “He was not as effective as he might have been as counterterrorism coordinator because he antagonized so many people,” Marcus said. “People really hated him.”
IT TOOK only minutes for Marcus and the others who participated in the first interview to realize what a spectacular witness Clarke was going to be—and what damage he might do to Bush and Rice if he gave the same testimony in public.
“Here was a guy who is totally unknown outside the Beltway, who had been a Washington bureaucrat all of his life, who turns out to be a dynamite witness,” Marcus said later.
Clarke told the story that would later become familiar to the public, but it was shocking to Marcus and others who were hearing Clarke’s words for the first time. How the president and Rice had all but ignored the terrorism threats during 2001. How Rice rebuffed his requests to brief Bush on al-Qaeda throughout that year. How he had been demoted in the first weeks of the presidency.
He said that Rice and her deputy Stephen Hadley had seemed determined instead to focus on their “vestigial cold war concerns” like the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. Marcus remembered being amused by one particular remark from Clarke, who, as the world was about to learn, spoke in perfectly formed sound bites. “My favorite line was how people like Rice and Hadley were preserved in amber from the cold war,” Marcus recalled.
Clarke claimed that Rice, in her early briefings as national security adviser in 2001, had given him the impression that she had never heard the term al-Qaeda before (something she would later strenuously and effectively deny). He said he told her directly that al-Qaeda had cells within the United States.
Perhaps most startling of all, Clarke would also reveal that President Bush had been determined within hours of the 9/11 attacks to try to link them to Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalled being in the Situation Room on the evening of September 12 when Bush approached him.
“Look, I know you have a lot to do and all,” the president said, according to Clarke’s account. “But I want you, as
soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.”
Clarke said he told the president that the issue had already been researched extensively and there was no evidence of a close working tie between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
That was not what Bush wanted to hear, Clarke said.
“Look into Iraq, Saddam,” the president repeated testily before walking away.
Clarke explained to Marcus and the others that since leaving the White House, he had been at work on a book about his years in government; it was scheduled to be published in 2004, in the midst of the presidential election. Marcus could just imagine the impact the book might have if it included any of the details that Clarke had just shared with the commission.
“Could we see an advance copy of the book?” Marcus asked.
Clarke replied, seemingly without much concern, “Oh sure, just talk to my publisher.”
30
OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
New York, N.Y.
SEPTEMBER 2003
John Farmer’s worry bordered on panic by September 2003. There was so much to do on the commission and so little time left. There were moments when Farmer felt himself close to despondent. He told his wife that fall that joining the 9/11 commission might have been “the biggest mistake in my professional life—I really thought this was going to be a disaster.”
He was leading the team of investigators responsible for the detailed chronology of the events of September 11—what had happened to the four hijacked planes that morning and, after they crashed, how rescue efforts had been carried out at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At every turn, it seemed, government agencies were trying to stonewall his part of the commission’s work.
He was getting nowhere in his negotiations with New York City over access to much of its documentation on the rescue effort at ground zero, especially the tapes of the 911 emergency calls that morning; Mayor Bloomberg’s staff was defiantly uncooperative throughout the investigation. But at least in New York, much of the rescue effort at the World Trade Center had been documented elsewhere, if only by the nonstop presence of reporters and camera crews at the site for months after the attack. There was no shortage of witnesses in lower Manhattan or at the Pentagon. (There was no similar struggle for information from the local police and fire departments in northern Virginia that had handled the rescue effort at the Pentagon, no surprise since Farmer’s teams had found their response was performed with impressive speed and competence on 9/11; there was nothing to hide.)
There was a much bigger problem in Washington with the FAA and NORAD, the key federal agencies involved in responding in real time to the hijackings. There was no substitute to the records locked away in their files, and Farmer was convinced that both of the agencies were holding back evidence about what had happened in the skies on September 11.
Earlier in the year, Farmer had joined with some of the Democratic commissioners in urging Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton to reconsider their decision not to issue blanket subpoenas to federal agencies for documents and interviews.
Farmer thought Kean and Hamilton had made a potentially disastrous mistake; if subpoenas had been issued to the FAA and the Pentagon from the start, there would have been time to go to court to enforce them. “The agencies would know that they couldn’t run out the clock,” he said. But by fall, the clock was ticking down; the commission was scheduled to shut down in May. There would be almost no time left to litigate.
The FAA had insisted in August that it had turned over all the material that the commission had asked for in its document requests earlier that summer. But Farmer found that impossible to believe. The commission had requested every imaginable bit of evidence from FAA files about the agency’s actions on September 11, including tapes of communications among its managers and air traffic controllers and every logbook and computer entry that referred to the FAA’s contacts with the Defense Department about the four hijacked planes. The document requests were broadly worded to make it clear that the FAA should hold back nothing that might apply to the investigation. If there was any question about the relevance of a document or tape, it should have been turned over.
But much of the material that Farmer had expected from the FAA was not in the boxes of evidence that the agency had provided to the commission. There were few of the tapes or transcripts he had expected to see. There was none of the detailed records of the presumably panicked communications that morning within the FAA.
In September, he and his team organized interviews at the FAA air traffic control centers on the East Coast and the Midwest that had dealt with the hijackings. Farmer assigned himself to the Indianapolis office. He was only a few hours into the interviews before he realized just how much evidence the FAA had held back. The unionized employees in the Indianapolis office seemed eager to blow the whistle on FAA headquarters in Washington. The Indianapolis workers made it clear that there was extensive information the commission had not seen, including tape recordings of conversations between the individual air traffic controllers and the hijacked planes.
Farmer was told that FAA headquarters had apparently decided to provide the commission only with the agency’s “accident package.” It was the term used to describe an edited FAA summary of the evidence the agency had gathered in an investigation—in this case, the investigation of the FAA’s own performance on September 11. The commission had not been provided with the much larger “accident file,” which would have the full body of evidence about the FAA’s actions during the terrorist attacks. Other members of Farmer’s team were hearing the same story that same day at other FAA air traffic centers they were visiting.
Farmer was furious, and he called Dan Marcus in Washington to tell him what the staff had discovered. FAA headquarters in Washington was contacted within hours to explain itself, and officials there were surprisingly quick to admit that the FAA held back information that the commission was entitled to see. It was unintentional, they insisted. Within days, several boxes of new material arrived at the commission’s offices from the FAA, including the full library of air traffic control tapes.
But Farmer was not satisfied. This was becoming personal for him and his team; they could imagine how they and the commission would be treated by history—and by the growing circles of conspiracy theorists—if it was later found that they had missed important clues about 9/11. It was time for the commission to begin issuing subpoenas, he felt, and the panel should start with the FAA. At least if there were subpoenas, Farmer and the others could hold their heads high and say that at least they tried to get the evidence.
He asked Kean and Marcus for permission to address the commissioners to make the case for a subpoena, and he was given the chance at a meeting of the full commission on October 14.
“My team and I have lost confidence in the FAA,’’ he told the commissioners. “We do not believe we have time to take any more chances on the possibility that they will act on good faith.” He said he thought “there is no choice other than a subpoena.”
His request gave the Democratic commissioners the ammunition they had been seeking for months to call again for blanket subpoenas on the Bush administration—not just on the FAA, but on the White House and every other executive branch agency.
“This is exactly why we should have subpoenaed everything in the first place,” said Jamie Gorelick.
But Kean and Hamilton were still skeptical. To them, even the word subpoena still sounded unnecessarily confrontational. Wide-ranging subpoenas might shut down all cooperation from the Bush administration, they argued again. Slade Gorton recommended a compromise that the Democratic commissioners accepted: Subpoena only the FAA for the moment, but issue a stern public warning to the White House that more subpoenas on more agencies might soon follow.
Gorton signaled that he would break with his fellow Republicans and join the Democrats in voting for subpoenas if it came to that. When it did, he was as good as hi
s word.
In a statement the next day, the commission announced the FAA subpoena—its first subpoena of any type—and warned the White House and other agencies that the commission’s “document requests must be taken as seriously as a subpoena.” Other agencies, it continued, “must review the efforts they have made so far to assure full compliance. In the absence of such assurances, additional subpoenas will be issued.”
LATER THAT month, Farmer and his team traveled to NORAD’s regional command center in Rome, New York. Farmer found it a grim place, a grime-colored aluminum bunker that was about all that was left of Griffiss Air Force Base, which had been a major American installation for B-52 bombers during the cold war. With NORAD’s mission scaled back after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Griffiss was decommissioned, although the regional NORAD command center remained open to keep a watch on the skies.
On September 11, 2001, the Rome base in upstate New York known formally as the Northeast Air Defense Sector, or NEADS, had been responsible for trying to coordinate the military’s response to the hijackings.
Farmer’s day at Rome began with a tour of the command center. He could see the dozens of desks stuffed with electronic equipment and blinking radar monitors where NORAD workers kept watch on air traffic across much of the United States. He asked his tour guide if any of the conversations in any of the stations had been tape-recorded; the commission had received no such tapes.
The guide answered innocently enough, “Oh sure, yes.”
Farmer was startled. He asked a few more questions and discovered that it was not just some of the air traffic monitoring stations that had been taped on September 11. “They all had been taped,” Farmer said. “We didn’t have any of it.” He could see for himself that in one corner of the room there were several old-fashioned Dictaphone tape recorders; they had recorded all of the communications in the room on the day of the attacks.
The Commission Page 23