The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Slade Gorton had served on the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1990s and found it a dismal experience. There was little in the way of true oversight of intelligence agencies because the agencies would share so little of what they knew. He quit the committee in frustration “because I felt it was a useless exercise—I never felt I was being told anything that I hadn’t learned in The Washington Post.”

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  THE SITUATION ROOM

  The White House

  FEBRUARY 7, 2004

  For all of Hollywood’s efforts to depict it as the high-tech nerve center of American power, the White House Situation Room was actually an unremarkable-looking place, a reminder of just how small the West Wing really was. The name was a misnomer. At five thousand square feet, the “Sit Room” was not a single room; it was a cramped suite of rooms in the West Wing’s basement, with a wood-paneled conference room at its core. Even though it was supposed to be the White House equivalent of the Pentagon’s war room, most of the telephones and electronic equipment in the Situation Room were years out of date. The “watch officers” who manned the room round-the-clock sat in front of computers with old-fashioned tube monitors. In fact, apart from the computers and touch-tone phones, surprisingly little had changed in the Situation Room since it was opened during the Kennedy administration. President Kennedy was alarmed to discover after the Bay of Pigs disaster that there was no central office in the White House to gather intelligence in a crisis. So one was created, literally under Kennedy’s feet, in the basement.

  Condoleezza Rice knew how the symbolism of the Situation Room would work to her advantage on February 7, 2004, the day of her long anticipated private meeting with the 9/11 commission. For all that Rice might be criticized for the foreign policy she had helped George Bush craft after 9/11, no one was better in the White House at managing its presentation.

  The Situation Room might be “uncomfortable, unaesthetic, and essentially oppressive,” as Henry Kissinger had once said of the place (he had spent too many long nights there in the Nixon and Ford administrations), but the 9/11 commissioners were obviously impressed with the setting as they filed into the conference room, their eyes darting around the walls, looking for evidence of all the history that had taken place there.

  “It was a small, plain conference room,” said Dan Marcus, the general counsel, who would lead the questioning of Rice. “But it has a mystique.”

  This was where Lyndon Johnson had spent hours poring over maps of Vietnam, personally selecting bombing targets in the paddy fields off the Mekong River; where Jimmy Carter’s closest aides had agonized at news of the failed rescue of American hostages in the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980; where Richard Clarke had directed the government’s response on the morning of September 11. (The commission’s staff had been told that when Clarke’s deputies refused his orders to evacuate the room—another hijacked plane was reported to be bearing down on the White House—they passed around a yellow legal pad; everyone wrote down their names so that recovery teams would know how many bodies to search for.)

  “I’d like to welcome you to the Situation Room,” Rice began. Her head turned slowly around the table; she looked each of the commissioners squarely in the eye. That dazzling smile. “I’ve been looking forward to this.”

  It was a Saturday. Rice had agreed to meet with the commissioners over the weekend, when she would have more time and when more of the out-of-town commissioners could get to Washington to participate.

  Under the ground rules that the commission had established with the White House a year earlier, the questioning of senior Bush aides was to be officially described as a “meeting” instead of an “interview”; the White House felt “interview” sounded too formal and prosecutorial. And the rules for the “meeting” with Rice were even more stringent than those for other top administration officials.

  Unlike cabinet officers, Rice and her predecessors as national security adviser generally never testified before Congress or anywhere else—exceptions had been made in cases involving allegations of criminal activity—and the Bush administration was not about to set a new precedent. Rice would meet with the 9/11 commission, but there would be no recording of the interview; she would certainly not be placed under oath. The interview was supposed to be limited to two hours, although it lasted four.

  Philip Zelikow was at the session, although under his new recusal rules, he could not participate; he sat glumly listening to Marcus open the questioning.

  Several of the commissioners had not met Rice before, and they marveled at her ability to take command of a room so effortlessly.

  So much was appealing—dazzling really was the word—about Condoleezza Rice. The magic began with that name; her music-loving parents named her for the Italian musical term con dolcezza, which translates as “with sweetness.” She had style, she had brains, she had “rock star” charisma worthy of a Kennedy. Rarely had fashion writers at The Washington Post used up so much ink to catalog a public figure’s wardrobe. It was all combined with a compelling life story that had taken Rice from a childhood in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where one of her childhood playmates was a victim of the city’s infamous 1963 church bombing, to the campus at Stanford University, and then to the White House.

  It was that inspiring biography that may have shielded Rice from some of the harshest attacks leveled at the administration after things started going so badly in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Few Democrats, especially the mostly doughy white males who then ran the party in Congress, were eager to be seen attacking such an accomplished black woman. To her credit, Rice seemed determined to stop anyone from seeing her as some sort of affirmative action prize.

  So how were the Democrats on the 9/11 commission going to ask the question that was on all their minds: Had Condi Rice simply failed to do her job in the spring and summer of 2001, when the government was flooded with warnings of an imminent terrorist attack and apparently did so little to respond to them?

  Rice seemed unaware of what Richard Clarke had told the commission’s investigators a few weeks earlier—that she, in particular, had ignored the warnings. Was she aware that Clarke was about to publish a book that was going to make that case publicly? There were even more sensitive questions about Rice’s truthfulness in her public statements after 9/11, especially about her assertions of what Bush had known about al-Qaeda threats before the attacks.

  Privately, some of the Republican commissioners had the same questions about Rice’s performance, although they knew they would face the wrath of the White House and congressional Republicans if they dared ask them in public. Better to leave those questions to the Democrats.

  Kean did not want to single her out for blame in the final report, “but obviously Rice bears a tremendous amount of responsibility for not understanding how serious this threat was” in the months before 9/11.

  John Lehman had worked in the National Security Council under Henry Kissinger, and he knew that had it been Kissinger and not Rice at the NSC in the summer of 2001, much more would have been done to respond to the CIA’s frantic warnings about an imminent al-Qaeda strike. Kissinger would have paid much more attention. “I have no doubt that he would have,” said Lehman. He thought Rice was no more culpable for inaction than other senior aides to Bush, including Donald Rumsfeld and George Tenet, and the president himself. But he did think that Rice, like the others, had failed to understand that the world had changed radically in the eight years that Republicans had been out of power at the White House—that terrorism was the great and growing threat of the new century. She was focused instead on missile defense, U.S.-Russian relations, the purported threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “What I don’t understand is how it was that they had totally left terrorism out of their grand strategy,” he said of the White House team.

  Slade Gorton said Rice and others in the White House had somehow come to the conclusion that they had “all the time in the world” to deal with the al-Qaeda
threat—that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen were just “a bunch of people off in a cave.” It did not seem to matter that from the moment Bush and Rice arrived at the White House in 2001, the CIA was telling them precisely the opposite.

  “Hindsight is always twenty-twenty,” said Gorton. But in failing to act on what it was being told in the spring and summer of 2001 by the CIA and by its staff, especially by Clarke, the Bush White House was “spectacularly wrong,” Gorton said. “They screwed up.”

  THE DEMOCRATS understood that they were on treacherous ground in trying to question Condoleezza Rice’s competence.

  Jamie Gorelick did not like the idea of attacking the first woman—and the first black woman at that—to hold the job of national security adviser.

  Gorelick had been the first woman herself in many of her high-powered jobs in government. But she thought that anyone who had closely reviewed Rice’s performance in 2001 had reason to question her competence. “I think most people did,” Gorelick said. “That was my question.”

  Gorelick was struck by the comparisons between what Rice had done at the NSC in 2001 and what Sandy Berger had done in the run-up to the millennium, the last time there had been such a sustained drumbeat of intelligence warnings of a terrorist strike against the United States.

  As the commission’s staff had learned, Berger had organized almost daily meetings at the White House in December 1999 at which the attendance of every cabinet secretary with national security duties, as well as George Tenet and FBI director Louis Freeh, was mandatory. Berger demanded that they “shake the trees” within their agencies every day for the smallest bit of evidence about al-Qaeda plans. There had been nothing like that in the months before 9/11.

  Gorelick thought it obvious that much would have shaken loose had there been a similar effort in 2001, especially at the FBI and CIA. The arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui. The Phoenix memo. The CIA’s belated watch listing of Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. It would not have been so difficult in August 2001 for someone to connect those dots.

  It seemed to Gorelick that Rice had “assumed away the hardest part of her job” as national security adviser—gathering the best intelligence available to the White House and helping the president decide how to respond to it. Whatever her job title, Rice seemed uninterested in actually advising the president. Instead, she wanted to be his closest confidante—specifically on foreign policy—and to simply translate his words into action. Rice had wanted to be “the consigliere to the president,” Gorelick thought.

  Domestic issues seemed to bore her. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, had told the commission something remarkable in his private interview the month before: He and Rice had not seen themselves as responsible for coordinating the FBI and other domestic agencies about terrorism. But if they weren’t responsible, who was? There was no separate domestic security adviser in the White House. They had just demoted Clarke.

  Bob Kerrey was initially less critical of Rice than other Democrats on the commission. “There was a lot of sympathy that flowed to Condoleezza Rice. She’s black, she’s female, she’s got this phenomenal demeanor, she stays on message,” he said.

  Yes, Rice should have “rattled his cage” and forced Bush to concentrate on the intelligence about an imminent terrorist threat in 2001. But he believed Bush could not duck ultimate responsibility for what went wrong in the White House that spring and summer. “He’s the president,” said Kerrey. “I don’t think you can lay this at Condoleezza Rice’s door.”

  As the investigation went on, though, Kerrey listened more closely to the way Rice described her job, and he began to reconsider. He began to view Rice much more harshly. Under the White House ground rules, Rice’s private interview with the commission could not be recorded or transcribed, so he could not remember her exact words. But Kerrey recalled a comment that Rice made about her responsibilities as national security adviser—and how troubling her description was. She said something like, “I took the president’s thoughts, and I helped the president describe what he was thinking,” Kerrey remembered.

  Kerrey thought it was a rare, unguarded acknowledgment from Rice, and it captured what she had done wrong as national security adviser. Kerrey agreed with Gorelick: Rice’s job was not simply to repackage and prettify the thoughts of a president whose understanding of national security issues was limited enough in 2001. Her job was to wake up in the morning, review the raw intelligence presented to the White House by the government’s spy agencies and the Pentagon, and then advise the president what to do. Condi Rice had turned the definition of her job on its head.

  THE QUESTIONING of Condoleezza Rice in the Situation Room was polite but pointed.

  Some of the first questions focused on Richard Clarke. Rice seemed to be suggesting that if there was a failure at the White House to respond to terrorist threats, the responsibility could be laid at Clarke’s door, not hers.

  Clarke and his Counterterrorism Strategy Group were the “nerve center” for dealing with the threats, she said. She suggested that she deserved credit for simply agreeing in early 2001 to keep Clarke on the NSC staff in the Bush administration. The decision was “not uncontroversial” since “Dick is someone who broke china,” she said. She acknowledged that she had removed him as a de facto member of the Principals Committee, but she suggested that was “sound policy making,” since everyone else of Clarke’s rank reported through the next rung of policy making—the Deputies Committee. If Clarke was unhappy about any of these changes, “he never told me,” she said.

  Richard Ben-Veniste wanted to question Rice about the August 6 presidential daily brief; it seemed to some of the other commissioners that the August 6 PDB was becoming an obsession with him. Certainly the White House thought he was obsessed with it—and with every other bit of evidence the commission could turn up that might embarrass Bush. Away from reporters, Ben-Veniste’s name was invoked often at the White House, and never with affection.

  Andy Card, Karl Rove, and others in the White House thought Ben-Veniste was struggling to re-create the glories of his early career. He wanted to bring down another president; Richard Nixon had been the first. Ben-Veniste’s shining moment in the public eye had been in the 1970s, when he was the pugnacious young lawyer on the Watergate special prosecutor’s team; he was thirty-one years old when Nixon resigned.

  Ben-Veniste had become so well-known by the 1970s that he found himself immortalized in The Incredible Hulk comic books; he was the inspiration for the series’ crusading prosecutor “Ben Vincent.” (Ben Vincent aided the Hulk in ousting the treacherous Man-Beast from the White House, which the latter had occupied.)

  After Watergate, Ben-Veniste insisted he would be happy to be rid of his celebrity status. “I never saw myself as the Jean-Paul Belmondo of the legal profession,” he said. But with his appointment to the 9/11 commission a quarter century later, Ben-Veniste again seemed to revel in the spotlight.

  If he had learned nothing else from Watergate, he knew a “smoking gun” when he saw it, and Republicans sensed that Ben-Veniste believed the August 6 PDB was just that.

  Ben-Veniste was still among the commissioners who had not been allowed to see the actual PDB before he was invited to the Situation Room for the interview with Rice in February 2004. But he had an idea of what was in the PDB: Its frightening title, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in United States,” had been revealed in news reports.

  Over the course of the commission’s investigation, no document or any other piece of evidence took on anything like the significance, real or imagined, of the August 6 PDB.

  Long before it was made public, it was assumed by President Bush’s detractors, including many of the 9/11 family groups, that the PDB would turn out to have been a clear warning to Bush that al-Qaeda was about to launch a terrorist attack within American borders involving hijackings.

  The White House had no plans to ever make the PDB public. But after word of its existence was leaked, White House aides, Rice chief among them,
wanted people to assume that it was a much less ominous document that drew together a long history of al-Qaeda plots and suggested only that Osama bin Laden hoped to attack on American soil someday, possibly by hijacking planes. It contained no up-to-date evidence of a plot, Rice said repeatedly.

  The truth, as it finally turned out, was somewhere in the middle. There were slightly more than 470 words in the entire PDB—it is not possible to say exactly how many words since four short passages in the PDB have never been declassified—and they left no doubt that bin Laden was indeed determined to kill Americans within their borders. It cited reports dating back to 1997 that bin Laden and his aides intended to “bring the fighting to America” and that the 1999 millennium plot may have been part of al-Qaeda’s plan to strike on American soil.

  From what they had learned about the PDB, the commission’s staff knew that Rice had been misstating its contents for the better part of a year. They knew that despite her claims, it did contain some fresh intelligence in 2001 to suggest an ongoing al-Qaeda hijacking plot, possibly one directed at buildings in New York.

  In preparation for the meeting in the Situation Room, some of the commissioners and staff had gone back and reread a copy of the transcript of Rice’s White House news conference from Thursday, May 16, 2002, when she had gone before the White House press corps to respond to the initial leaks about the PDB.

  In hindsight, the transcript is a remarkable document. To many of the commission’s staff, it offered proof of how, to Condoleezza Rice, everything is semantics. A threat is not a threat, a warning is not a warning, unless she says it is. The word historical appeared to have an especially broad definition to Rice. To her, a warning that was a few weeks or months old was of relatively little value because it was “historical.”