The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  The CBS story startled the White House, especially after it was picked up by other news organizations, including reliably conservative newspapers and magazines that had given Bush mostly unquestioned support since 9/11. There was special alarm among Bush’s aides over the stark front-page headline in the otherwise Bush-friendly New York Post: 9-11 BOMBSHELL: BUSH KNEW. The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, called the Post’s editor to complain.

  Instead of releasing the PDB or at least offering a detailed explanation of what was in the document, the White House chose to have National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice hold a news conference at the White House in which she raised as many questions about the August 2001 briefing as she answered.

  It would later become clear to many of the commission’s members and its staff that she had tried to mislead the White House press corps about the contents of the PDB. She acknowledged that Bush had received a briefing about possible al-Qaeda hijackings, but she claimed that the PDB offered “historical information” and “was not a warning—there was no specific time, place, or method.” She failed to mention, as would later be clear, that the PDB focused entirely on the possibility that al-Qaeda intended to strike within the United States; it cited relatively recent FBI reports of possible terrorist surveillance of government buildings in New York.

  The commission was bolstered in demanding access to the PDBs because of what became known on the panel as “the Woodward factor.” Even as the White House had refused to share the PDBs with the commission, senior administration officials had begun to share information from the briefings, if not the actual documents, with Bob Woodward of The Washington Post. Woodward had mostly removed himself from day-to-day reporting at the Post, devoting himself instead to his best sellers about what went on in Washington’s corridors of power. The White House had given Woodward extraordinary access to Bush and his senior aides for Woodward’s November 2002 book, Bush at War. The book described the actions of the Bush White House in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and was mostly flattering in its portrayal of the president.

  The White House did not welcome all of Woodward’s reporting. A few days after Rice’s news conference, Woodward and his colleague Dan Eggen published a front-page article in the Post that revealed the full, alarming title of the August 6, 2001, PDB—“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”—and quoted “knowledgeable sources” as saying that the PDB made it clear that al-Qaeda was determined to “bring the fight to America.”

  The article seemed a direct challenge to Rice’s credibility. It noted that despite her claim at the news conference, the information in the PDB was not solely historic; it noted her failure to make it clear that the document referred specifically to domestic terrorist threats. The article also cited an intriguing error made by Ari Fleischer, who told reporters after Rice’s appearance at the White House press room that the title of the PDB was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike the United States.” As Woodward noted, Fleischer had left out the title’s all-important preposition—“in” the United States.

  The commission debated for months in early 2003 how to go about making a formal request for the PDBs. The White House had refused to make them available to congressional investigators about 9/11, citing executive privilege. The PDBs had never been made available to Congress in any fashion. In more than three decades in Congress, including his tenure as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Lee Hamilton had never seen one.

  Alberto Gonzales had made it clear in his very first meeting with Philip Zelikow that the commission would not get them, either, and he repeated the denial in his later meetings with Kean and Hamilton.

  But Kean and Hamilton would have to try, if only to preserve the commission’s credibility; they needed to demonstrate that it had at least attempted to see every important document in the government’s files related to al-Qaeda and 9/11. Like Kean, Hamilton could also see that the PDBs were becoming the “holy grail” for the 9/11 families and for the press corps. If the commission ended its investigation without reviewing them, “that would be the only thing the press would be interested in,” said Hamilton. It seemed as if no other evidence unearthed by the commission mattered; if the commission did not see the PDBs, it would be seen in history as having failed.

  The decision was made to hold off on requests for the PDBs until the commission had gone through several other rounds of document requests with the White House and had built up some sort of track record with Gonzales and his deputies.

  When the request was finally made for the PDBs themselves in late summer 2003, it was to the CIA—the agency that wrote and kept custody of the PDBs—instead of to the White House. Dan Marcus and the commission’s other lawyers felt it would be easier to get a court to enforce a subpoena against the CIA than against the president, if it came to that.

  The request was not as wide-ranging as it might have been. It was not for the full library of PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Instead, the commission requested PDB articles from 1998 on that made mention of the following: al-Qaeda; domestic terrorist threats; terrorist plots involving airlines used as weapons; and intelligence involving Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Yemen, and Germany. Mohammed Atta and many of the other 9/11 hijackers had met as students in Hamburg.

  Through Gonzales, the White House responded in September: No, there would be no inspection of PDBs, not even brief excerpts of them.

  Gonzales offered what he said was a compromise—a briefing for all ten commissioners about the “contents” of the PDBs. Kean and Hamilton wondered what that meant. Was Gonzales suggesting that he would share details verbally about what was in the PDBs about al-Qaeda? Kean and Hamilton agreed to the briefing, reluctantly, with no promise that it would satisfy the commission’s demands. Their wariness was justified. The briefing was held on October 16, 2003, in the same reading room in the New Executive Office Building where the commission’s staff reviewed other documents, and it was comically inadequate.

  The White House lawyers offered an overview of the PDBs: a general description of what the documents were, how they were prepared, the choreography of the CIA’s morning briefings in the Oval Office. The lawyers disclosed that about three hundred PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations contained the sort of information about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups that the commission was looking for.

  And that was where the briefing stopped. The White House lawyers went silent. They said they were barred from saying anything more. They refused to answer any other questions about what might actually be in the hundreds of PDBs. It was the equivalent of a book reviewer promoting a new book because it had many interesting pages, with no other hint at what might be on those pages.

  “This is ridiculous,” Jim Thompson, the former Illinois governor, could be overheard grumbling.

  The commissioners were seething. If the briefing was meant to placate them, it had done the opposite; it was one more bit of proof of Gonzales’s ham-handed strategy in dealing with the investigation. If anything, the commissioners were now more anxious to see the actual PDBs. Thompson and the other Republicans felt a special snub from Gonzales and his team. They were effectively being told by a Republican White House that it did not trust them with classified information.

  After the White House had wasted their time yet again, the commissioners wanted the PDBs themselves. “We were not going to take no for an answer,” said Thompson.

  The negotiations between the commission and Gonzales went on for two more weeks, without any sign of agreement. Gonzales was his usual obstinate self, and Kean’s patience had run out. Hamilton was always amazed by Kean’s willingness to keep negotiating “until hell freezes over.” It finally had.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES had a long-standing request to interview Tom Kean at Drew University; he was more likely to speak openly there. Washington really did seem to be enemy territory to Kean. He invited a reporter from the paper’s Washington bureau up to New Jersey in late
October.

  His offices took up much of the second floor of Mead Hall, a Greek Revival–style mansion that dated from the 1830s and was the sort of ornate pile that Kean’s aristocratic ancestors would have called home. The interior decoration of the president’s office reflected Kean’s whimsical sense of humor. Near his desk was a life-size cardboard cutout of Sarah Michelle Gellar, the actress from the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer; a blue Drew T-shirt was pulled over the cutout. Kean had become a Buffy fan after watching the show at the urging of students. At one corner of the room was a water bowl for Kean’s champion border terrier, Willie, who greeted guests to Kean’s office with an excited shower of licks. It occurred to the reporter that Fala must have served the same purpose in the White House for Kean’s distant cousin FDR.

  It was not clear if Kean had an agenda for the meeting; the commission’s battles over the PDBs were not public at that point. But his agenda became clear within minutes.

  Only a few days earlier, the commission had issued its first subpoena (to the FAA). Was the commission having trouble obtaining evidence from other government agencies? Was it possible there would be other subpoenas?

  “Yes,” Kean said somberly. “We’re having trouble with the White House.” The reporter leaned over to check his tape recorder to make sure it was working. From his tone, Kean seemed ready to drop a bombshell on the White House.

  He revealed that the commission was in a battle with the White House over intelligence briefings—he was careful never to say “president’s daily brief ” or “PDB” because he believed the terms were secret—and it was now a possibility that the commission would need to slap a subpoena on the White House.

  His language was remarkably direct.

  “Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach,” he said. “I will not stand for it.”

  The reporter called editors at the Washington bureau of the Times and urged them to make space for an important story that weekend. The article, which had the headline 9/11 COMMISSION COULD SUBPOENA OVAL OFFICE FILES, was the lead story on page one in the paper on Sunday.

  The interview infuriated the White House, especially after potential Democratic presidential candidates seized on Kean’s remarks to accuse the White House of hiding evidence about 9/11. “After claiming they wanted to find the truth about September 11, the Bush administration has resorted to secrecy, stonewalling, and foot-dragging,” said Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, one of the Democrats hoping to challenge Bush in 2004. “They have resisted this inquiry at every turn.”

  The White House could not allow the perception that Bush was stonewalling the 9/11 investigation to go unchallenged, and the decision was made to have Bush himself address the issue. He met with the White House press corps in the Oval Office the day after the story. They asked about Kean’s complaints.

  “You’re talking about the presidential daily briefing,” Bush said. “It’s important for the writers of the presidential briefing to feel comfortable that the documents will never be politicized and/or unnecessarily exposed for public purview.

  “Now having said that,” he continued, “I am—we want to work with Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton. And I believe we can reach a proper accord to protect the integrity of the daily brief process and, at the same time, allow them a chance to take a look and see what was in the—certain—the daily briefs that they would like to see.”

  Kean knew that Bush’s comments had changed everything. First of all, by using the words presidential daily briefing, Bush had effectively declassified the name of the document, or so Kean believed. So now Kean could say specifically what it was that the commission wanted to see. More significant, Bush had now made a public vow to work to allow the panel to see at least some of the PDBs. Intentionally or not, he had undermined his loyal counsel, Gonzales, who had been so insistent that the PDBs would never be revealed to the commission.

  Bush’s aides had little choice but to try to negotiate this out. Gonzales notified Kean that the White House had a new proposal: Kean and Hamilton and two staff members would be allowed to review twenty “core” PDBs that mentioned al-Qaeda or had other information that met the commission’s criteria for relevance. And then one of the four members of the review team would be allowed to read through the full universe of PDBs to determine if any needed to be moved to the “core” pile.

  The commission met on November 6 in Washington and rejected the offer as painfully inadequate. There was a vote to subpoena the PDBs. The vote failed, but it received the support of all the Democrats except Hamilton, who, characteristically, wanted to continue the negotiations.

  Kean and Hamilton went to see Gonzales and Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff, the next day with a counterproposal: that two of the four members of the review team be allowed to look over the larger universe of PDBs. Hoping to stem the tide of headlines about White House “stonewalling,” the White House reluctantly agreed.

  “We expect the terms of this agreement will provide the commission the access it needs to prepare the report mandated by our statute, in a manner that respects the independence and integrity of the commission,” Kean and Hamilton said in a press release.

  Two of the commission’s Democrats, Tim Roemer and Max Cleland (who was in his final weeks on the commission), were beside themselves with anger over the compromise and expressed it to any reporter who called. They believed all ten commissioners needed to see all of the PDBs. Many of the 9/11 family advocates were equally furious with what they saw as the commission’s capitulation. “A limited number of commissioners will have restricted access to a limited number of PDB documents,” the Family Steering Committee said in its own statement. “The commission has seriously compromised its ability to conduct an independent, full, and unfettered investigation.”

  The families were startled by one more announcement from Kean and Hamilton. They revealed the names of the other two members of the review team. One was Jamie Gorelick, a choice the families did not consider controversial. But the other was Philip Zelikow. None of the other Republican commissioners was eager to make the commitment of time that would be required for the review. So Kean and Hamilton thought that Zelikow was the logical choice for the job given his wide-ranging knowledge of national security issues.

  The families took the Zelikow choice as one more bit of evidence that the commission was doing the bidding of the Bush White House.

  “How much more Zelikow do we have to take?” asked Kristen Breitweiser, one of the Jersey Girls. Her view was shared by several members of the commission’s staff, who said the selection of Zelikow to review the most secret intelligence files in the White House would give him yet another opportunity to protect Bush and Rice from scrutiny, or at least create that perception. Said Dan Marcus: “If we were going to have a staff person do this, Philip was not the right person.”

  32

  ROOM 5026

  New Executive Office Building

  Washington, D.C.

  DECEMBER 2003

  Tom Kean could not deny the thrill of this. He took a seat in the reading room in the New Executive Office Building in early December and was handed the sheaf of PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations. Here in his hands were the documents that the White House had been so determined for so long to keep from him. Lee Hamilton liked to refer to the PDBs as the “holy of holies”—the ultimate secret documents in the government—and Kean assumed that must be the case.

  “I thought this would be the definitive secrets about al-Qaeda, about terrorist networks and all the other things that the president should act on,” he said. “I was going to find out the most important things that a president had learned.” He assumed they would contain “incredibly secretive, precise, and accurate information about anything under the sun.”

  Each PDB was only several pages long, so Kean could read through months of them in a stretch of a few hours.

  And he found himself terrified by w
hat he was reading, really terrified. Here were the digests of the most important secrets that were gathered by the CIA and the nation’s other spy agencies at a cost of tens of billions of dollars a year.

  And there was almost nothing in them.

  “They were garbage,” Kean said of the PDBs. “There really was nothing there—nothing, nothing.” If students back at Drew turned in term papers this badly researched, “I would have given them an F,” he said.

  There were “snippets of information” in the PDBs about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Occasionally, there was something intriguing, maybe a report of a bin Laden sighting somewhere or a tip from Israel’s Mossad or Britain’s MI-6 or another foreign spy agency on what sort of attack al-Qaeda might be planning next. But there was usually little context for these nuggets, and the PDBs often did little but repeat what had already appeared that morning on the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times.

  Kean pointed that out to one of his White House minders who accompanied him to the reading room. “I’ve read all this,” he told the minder in astonishment. A lot of the information in the PDBs and other supposedly top-secret intelligence reports had already been revealed by the nation’s big news organizations. “I already knew this.”

  “Oh, but you’re missing the point,” the minder replied. “Now you know it’s true.”

  It occurred to Kean that this might be the commission’s most frightening discovery of all: The emperors of espionage had no clothes. Perhaps the reason the White House had fought so hard to block the commission’s access to the PDBs was that they revealed how ignorant the government was of the threats it faced before 9/11. Kean could understand their fear. Imagine the consequences if al-Qaeda and its terrorist allies knew how little the United States really knew about them.