At the time of her news conference, no reporter had a copy of the PDB or knew about its title. CBS had broken the story of its existence but had few details of what was actually in the document. So the White House press corps would have to trust Rice’s description of what was in it.
She described the PDB as a “warning briefing but an analytic report” about al-Qaeda threats and said that it contained “the most generalized kind of information—there was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack” mentioned apart from a “very vague” concern about hijacking. “I want to reiterate,” she said. “It was not a warning.”
Ben-Veniste would learn by the spring of 2004 that all of that was wrong; the PDB would later be shown to refer to the scores of ongoing FBI investigations of al-Qaeda threats, as well as reports of recent efforts by terrorist groups to carry out surveillance of the New York skyline. It was certainly more than “historical.”
Her most astonishing claim in the news conference was one that was replayed again and again on the network news broadcasts that night. Asked if 9/11 didn’t represent an intelligence failure by the administration, she replied almost testily, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon—that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”
Over time, Ben-Veniste learned that the nation’s intelligence agencies had predicted exactly those things before 9/11.
Rice’s news conference came eight months after the attacks. Yet she was suggesting that in all that time, no one had bothered to tell her that there were indeed several reports prepared within the CIA, the FAA, and elsewhere in the government about the threat of planes as missiles. Was she really suggesting that no one informed her that in the Moussaoui case, an FBI agent had warned specifically in August 2001 that he might be involved in a plot to “crash a plane into the World Trade Center”? Had no one told her in all those months that the Department of Defense had conducted drills for the possibility of a plane-as-missile attack on the Pentagon? Had she forgotten that when she and President Bush attended the G-8 summit in Italy in July 2001, the airspace was closed because of the threat of an aerial suicide attack by al-Qaeda?
Like Ben-Veniste, Tim Roemer made it his goal to get the August 6 PDB made public and to prove once and for all that Condoleezza Rice and her White House colleagues had a concept of the truth about 9/11 that was, at best, “flexible.”
To Roemer, Rice had long ago passed the “threshold” between spin and dishonesty. “She’d lost credibility with me,” he said. The question among the Democratic commissioners was whether anybody would be brave enough to go public to question Rice’s competence and her honesty.
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26 FEDERAL PLAZA
New York, N.Y.
JANUARY 21, 2004
It seemed like a good omen for Thomas Pickard, the accountant-turned–FBI agent who ran the bureau as its acting director in the months before 9/11. The 9/11 commission was not requiring him to travel down to Washington for his interview. Instead, the commission’s staff agreed to meet with him in its New York offices, which were in the same sprawling government building in lower Manhattan—the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building at 26 Federal Plaza—where Pickard had spent so many of the best years of his career. The FBI’s New York field office was in a separate wing of the Javits Building, reached through a different elevator bank.
For Pickard, it was comforting simply to do it in New York. This was home. He still spoke with the heavy accent of his childhood neighborhood in Woodside, Queens; he could sound more like a New York City cop than a suit-and-tie agent of the FBI. He returned to New York after retiring from the bureau in 2002 and was now security director of pharmaceutical giant Bristol-Myers. Pickard had been Louis Freeh’s top deputy when Freeh resigned abruptly in June 2001 as FBI director, leaving Pickard to run the bureau until Robert Mueller’s arrival in September.
Few FBI officials welcomed the invitation to be questioned by the 9/11 commission. Within the bureau, it was assumed—feared—that the commission would try to punish the bureau for its pre-9/11 blunders by recommending that it be broken up, with terrorism investigations turned over to some new domestic equivalent of the CIA.
But by the time he took a seat in a commission’s conference room for his interview on January 21, 2004, Pickard felt almost relieved to be answering these questions. Yes, the bureau had made mistakes, terrible mistakes, before 9/11. Pickard was not going to defend them. The “FL,” the “fuck-ups list,” as it was known at FBI headquarters in Washington, was long: Zacarias Moussaoui, the Phoenix memo, the failure to detect the two hijackers who had lived under their own names in San Diego in the home of an FBI informant.
Pickard had lost sleep for months after 9/11 because of the blunders. Especially about Moussaoui. It still seemed unimaginable that no one had told him—or anybody else at the senior ranks of the FBI in Washington—about Moussaoui until the afternoon of September 11. “It all haunts me,” Pickard said. “I’ll take that to my grave.”
The first time he heard about Moussaoui was during a hastily arranged 3:00 p.m. conference call on September 11 with FBI supervisors from around the country. The sheepish Minneapolis supervisor mentioned that some Muslim extremist “nut” had been arrested at a flight school out there a few weeks earlier. Was it possible that the “nut” was tied to the terrible events of that morning? asked the Minneapolis agent.
But if the FBI failed before 9/11, Pickard knew that it had not failed alone. The bureau was only one agency of the Justice Department, all of it overseen by the attorney general. Why weren’t people asking more questions about Attorney General John Ashcroft and his failures in the spring and summer of 2001 as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer?
Pickard took his seat across the conference table from Mike Jacobson and Caroline Barnes, two former FBI analysts who were now working on the staff of the 9/11 commission. Both Jacobson and Barnes had worked on counterterrorism cases during their bureau careers, and they knew all too well how the FBI had largely ignored domestic terrorist threats before 9/11.
The interview did not begin well. The commission’s investigators asked Pickard if they could tape-record the interview. That was fine with Pickard, as long as he could have a copy of the tape. Jacobson and Barnes knew that Zelikow would never approve of it, so they declined. Both sides would have to depend on the accuracy of their handwritten notes in remembering the remarkable things that Pickard was about to say.
Pickard did not consider himself a whistle-blower. Certainly not. He had seen too many whistle-blowers torn apart in his long years at the FBI. He knew and had always liked Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis agent who had gone public with her account of the FBI’s disastrous performance on Moussaoui. She was one of a trio of women whistle-blowers who had been named Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002. (The others blew the whistle at Enron and WorldCom.) But Rowley also saw her career at the FBI and many of her friendships there destroyed by her disclosures.
Pickard was by nature a cautious, conservative man, entering the FBI in 1975, three years after the death of J. Edgar Hoover, whose influence was still everywhere to be seen at the bureau.
In part because his accounting background was so valuable in a complex criminal case, Pickard found himself attached early in his career to headline-grabbing investigations, including ABSCAM, in which members of Congress were caught accepting bribes from a phony Arab sheikh. Later, as a supervisor for “national security” cases in New York, Pickard had a hand in the investigations of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800 near Long Island.
Pickard would later find himself on a first-name basis with the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Youssef. Youssef was captured in Pakistan two years later and brought to the United States for trial. Pickard would take visitors to go see “Ramzi”
defend himself in the federal courthouse in lower Manhattan. Youssef had asked to serve as his own lawyer, and when he saw Pickard enter the courtroom, he would stop and welcome his distinguished visitor from the FBI. “He’d just call me Tom,” said Pickard.
For Pickard, Youssef—whose uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the mastermind of 9/11—offered a frightening introduction to the sort of sophisticated terrorist threat that the United States now faced. Youssef was intelligent, poised; he spoke English with a British accent, and his vocabulary and grammar were better than many of the New Yorkers on his jury.
“My God,” Pickard recalled thinking at the time, “this is what we’re up against? If there are a lot more like this, we’re in trouble.”
In the spring and summer of 2001, Pickard could see that John Ashcroft had no similar interest in the terrorist threat faced by the United States.
The relationship between Ashcroft and Pickard had been difficult since they talked for the first time in December 2000, when Bush announced that he was nominating Ashcroft as attorney general. Pickard, then Louis Freeh’s deputy, was responsible for the nominee’s security detail, and within hours of Bush’s announcement, the FBI learned of threats against Ashcroft.
Ashcroft was a hero in the most conservative circles of the Republican Party—and a lightning rod for liberals—for his absolutist views on abortion and gun control; he was fiercely opposed to both. His selection for Bush’s cabinet was seen as an effort to placate the religious conservatives who had helped Bush eke out his election victory.
“The threats started right away,” said Pickard, recalling how he had called Freeh and said, “I think we should put a protection detail on Ashcroft.”
Freeh did not want to make the call to Ashcroft himself. “Why don’t you call him?” Freeh told Pickard, warning his deputy that Ashcroft had a reputation for being unpleasant. “I understand that he’s testy to deal with.”
“Gee, thanks,” Pickard replied with annoyance.
Pickard had found it a pleasure to deal with Ashcroft’s predecessor, Janet Reno. She was popular with the FBI’s rank and file, especially the agents in her security detail. “She was so nice,” Pickard said. “The agents loved working with her. She was very good about making sure that they got something to eat. If it was the holidays, she wanted to make sure they got home to their families.” Reno’s modest apartment in downtown Washington was a two-minute walk from the FBI, and Pickard was called over one day to see her there. He was startled to arrive at the building and find no agent on duty in the lobby. “So I draw my weapon, thinking that there’s something wrong,” Pickard said. “I knock on the door. I go inside. Reno is there. She’s making chicken soup because the agent is not feeling well.”
Pickard remembered his exasperation. “You know, Ms. Reno, if he’s not feeling well, we can call another agent,” he told her.
Given Freeh’s warning, Pickard made the call to Ashcroft with trepidation. But he had no choice. “I called Ashcroft’s office and finally got through to him and explained about how we were getting these threats,” Pickard said.
“Who is making these threats?” Ashcroft asked.
“We’re just getting anonymous threats. There are letters coming in. There’s e-mail coming in,” Pickard replied, thinking that Ashcroft would welcome the FBI’s concern for his safety. “We’re responsible for your personal protection. I recommend we put a security detail on you and your family, until we can sort this out. I can have a team there tonight at your residence. They’ll want to meet you and your family members so they can recognize them. They’ll want to look through your house and determine a room where you could go and be safe if something should happen. And then they’ll come back in a couple of days for a further security survey. Check the locks and alarms.”
Ashcroft cut him off. “That’s all fine, but they’re not coming in my house.”
Pickard wasn’t sure Ashcroft had heard him properly; the idea here was to protect Ashcroft and his family. “I didn’t know what to say,” Pickard recalled. “So I went through it again, thinking maybe we had a poor connection.”
Ashcroft was growing angry. “You don’t understand,” the nominee barked. “They’re not coming into my house. They’re not meeting my family.”
Pickard was growing perplexed—and just as angry as Ashcroft. “I said, these guys are risking their lives to protect you,” he told Ashcroft.
Ashcroft ended the conversation: “Well, that’s the way it’s going to be.”
Ashcroft had finally arrived at the Justice Department in February, confirmed after a bruising confirmation battle in which all but eight of the Senate’s Democrats voted against him, and the relationship between the new attorney general and the FBI grew even more difficult.
Whatever Ashcroft’s odd behavior, he had reason to be wary of the FBI. On his first day in his new offices, literally within hours of his swearing-in, Ashcroft was informed that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, Robert Hanssen, was about to be arrested as a Russian spy; the FBI argued that the investigation was so sensitive—Hanssen’s betrayal lasted more than twenty years—that Ashcroft could not be told about it until he had assumed his duties at the department. Six weeks later, the FBI notified Ashcroft’s office that it had failed to provide defense lawyers for Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, with potentially exculpatory information from FBI files, which meant that McVeigh’s execution would have to be delayed at least one month, and maybe much longer. Then Freeh resigned in June, pointedly giving no advance warning to Ashcroft.
But if Ashcroft was worried about the FBI, the FBI was growing equally alarmed about the new attorney general and his peculiar behavior.
Because federal tax laws require officials who travel in government cars from their homes to pay some taxes for the service—about $4,500 a year in Ashcroft’s case—Ashcroft declared that he would not ride in a government car from home in the morning. He walked, while armed FBI agents rode in the car beside him.
Ashcroft’s fixation on his personal privacy only intensified. That winter, an obviously pregnant Justice Department lawyer was forced to fly to Missouri, where Ashcroft had kept a home, during a storm to obtain his signature on a document to authorize a special intelligence wiretap. CIA director George Tenet was traveling, so Ashcroft’s signature was required. The lawyer knocked on his door and was amazed when Ashcroft did not invite her in. For the next thirty minutes, the big-bellied Justice Department lawyer remained on the porch, in the bitter cold and rain, while he read the wiretap application. He would not invite her in. The story quickly made the rounds at the FBI. “It was just so weird,” Pickard said.
To Pickard and other senior officials at the FBI, Ashcroft made it clear he had two priorities as attorney general: supporting the agenda of the National Rifle Association (NRA), a major backer of Ashcroft in his political career, and ending the court disputes that had delayed the execution of McVeigh. In the Senate, Ashcroft had been a passionate champion of restoring the federal death penalty, and Pickard could see that Ashcroft was “dying to be the first attorney general to pull the switch.”
Pickard thought Ashcroft’s obsession with the logistics of putting McVeigh to death were perplexing, given Ashcroft’s very public devotion to the nonviolent tenets of his Christian faith. Pickard said he was startled to attend meetings in Ashcroft’s office at the Justice Department in which prayers were said.
“I found it astonishing,” he said, recalling how he and another senior FBI official, Ruben Garcia, walked into Ashcroft’s office to “find him standing there by himself, his arms outstretched to his sides, praying. So Ruben and I just bowed our heads until he finished.” As Ashcroft concluded his prayer, Pickard and Garcia weren’t quite sure what to do. “But we’re both good Catholics, so we started making the sign of the cross, just as the good nuns had taught us to do.”
At the same time, Pickard could see, Ashcroft had no interest in many of the other issues before the Justice Department
, including dealing with terrorist threats. The CIA was warning of an imminent attack, probably overseas, but the agency made it clear to Pickard that there was no assurance it would not occur in the United States. Yet Ashcroft suggested the topic was of little interest to him. In May, Ashcroft released an agencywide statement listing his ten priorities for the Justice Department; terrorism was not on it. Pickard was in his office when Dale Watson, the bureau’s executive assistant director for counterterrorism, walked in, exasperated.
“Did you see this?” he said in a disgusted tone, holding a copy of Ashcroft’s statement. “Nothing about terrorism.”
Pickard found it hard to believe that Ashcroft’s office had accidentally left terrorism off the list, given how focused the rest of the government was on the threat. “If he didn’t think about it, his staff should have,” Pickard recalled thinking.
After Freeh’s resignation in June, Pickard said he had resisted Ashcroft’s request that he lead the FBI until a new Senate-confirmed director was in place. The two men had continued to battle regularly since Ashcroft’s arrival at the Justice Department.
“I told him, ‘Look, you can pick somebody else, and I’ll do whatever they want,’ ” Pickard said. “I was already well past retirement age.” Working directly for Ashcroft for several more months was “the last thing I needed,” Pickard thought.
But Ashcroft insisted. “No, no, no, I want you to stay,” he told Pickard. “And I want to meet with you once a week. I want to know what’s going on in the FBI.” Pickard agreed, warily.
Ashcroft made new attempts to assert control over the famously independent bureau. He ordered Pickard never to give a briefing on Capitol Hill or go to the White House without his approval. He told him that the FBI should never issue a press statement without approval from the Justice Department.
The Commission Page 28