The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  After the East Africa bombings, Clinton weighed a military response to the attacks targeting al-Qaeda and its sponsors in the African nation of Sudan. Clinton’s political advisers worried that the attacks, especially if they failed to kill bin Laden, would be perceived as an effort by Clinton to divert attention from Lewinsky. But Berger said Clinton refused to allow any political considerations to be factored into the response to the attacks. The commission’s staff had heard this from others around Clinton, including Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, the cabinet’s sole Republican. “We’re going to get crap either way,” Berger recalled Clinton saying. “So you should do the right thing.”

  Berger said there was another important way of measuring the commitment of the Clinton White House to dealing with terrorism. “Look what we did with Dick Clarke,” he reminded the commission’s staff. An otherwise midlevel career bureaucrat in the NSC, Clarke had become a formidable power in his own right during the Clinton administration, with almost instant access to the Oval Office. The Counterterrorism Strategy Group, which Clarke led, bypassed the usual reporting lines in the White House. The CSG reported directly to Berger’s so-called Small Group, which was made up of Cohen, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Janet Reno, and a tiny number of other senior officials cleared to know the most secret information about the government’s counterterrorism efforts. The decision to grant so much authority to Clarke had come at an institutional cost to Berger, who often had to spend much of his workday in the West Wing trying to soothe the egos of others in the government who were offended by the sharp-elbowed Clarke.

  Berger explained that during the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations, he had tried to impress upon his successor, Condoleezza Rice, how dangerous bin Laden was. He recalled how he made a special effort to drop in on the introductory NSC briefing that Clarke gave to Rice, his new boss, about al-Qaeda. Berger said he wanted to signal, by his presence at the briefing, the severity of the threat. “You know, Condi, you’ll be spending more time on terrorism in general—and al-Qaeda in particular—than anything else,” he recalled telling her. He was never sure he got his message across to Rice or the other members of the transition team, including her counterterrorism adviser, Philip Zelikow.

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  OFFICES OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Va.

  JANUARY 22, 2004

  Rudy Rousseau thought George Tenet looked tired, as tired as he had ever seen him.

  “He just didn’t look well,” said Rousseau, a twenty-year veteran of the CIA who was leading the DCI Review Group; Tenet had set up the group shortly after 9/11 to reconstruct the agency’s work over the years on al-Qaeda and prepare for the inevitable investigations that would follow.

  Rousseau joined Tenet in the director’s seventh-floor conference room at CIA headquarters on January 22, 2004, the first of three days that Tenet would set aside for private interviews by the 9/11 commission. Tenet would also be called to testify at two of the commission’s public hearings later in the year.

  The wood-paneled room could have passed for one of the more modest corporate boardrooms on Wall Street, apart from how the walls were decorated. There was a framed government-issue photograph of President Bush on one wall, next to digital clocks that showed the time in Kabul, Baghdad, and other global hot spots. Another wall was covered with plaques with the logos of the CIA and the government’s fourteen other spy agencies, including the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Tenet’s title was “director of central intelligence,” not “director of the CIA.” He was supposed to supervise the work of all of the government’s spy agencies, not just the CIA, although it was increasingly clear to the staff of the 9/11 commission that his real powers did not extend much beyond the gates of Langley.

  As in any reasonably equipped corporate boardroom, Tenet’s conference room had flat-screen monitors that were supposed to allow him and his deputies to keep an eye on the television networks and beam in their colleagues from around the globe for videoconferences. “The truth is the damn stuff never worked, so we mostly gave up on it,” said Rousseau.

  Tenet took a seat at the long, rectangular table at the center of the conference room. His aides thought it was remarkable that he was able to set aside most of a day for the commission; Tenet and the agency were overwhelmed at that moment with the deteriorating situation in Baghdad. Eight months after the invasion, there were clear signs of an insurrection in Iraq. That morning, the Knight Ridder news service had reported that CIA officers in Iraq had issued new warnings to the Bush administration that the country might be headed toward civil war; the White House, which refused to apply the term civil war to what was happening in Iraq, was furious with the agency over the article.

  Tenet had insisted on all-day, almost all-night cram sessions to prepare himself for the interview with the 9/11 commission. “He spent an enormous amount of time mastering an enormous amount of material,” Rousseau said. “George is very intense, and this was very personal.”

  That meant sessions on the weekend—and until midnight during the week—to review the vast archives of material on the work of the bin Laden unit and the various, failed plans to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. There were mountains of paperwork for Tenet to look over, much of which he had never seen before. It occurred to Rousseau that Tenet was being obsessive in the preparation. “He tried to master too much material,” he thought later.

  Tenet wanted specifically to master what had happened in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 with Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar and why the CIA had apparently failed for so long to alert anyone that the two hijackers had later entered the United States from Asia. Like almost everyone else at the agency, Tenet seemed to understand that the CIA’s failure to watch-list the pair after their arrival in California was the agency’s Achilles’ heel—the one horrendous blunder that could sink the CIA.

  On the other side of the conference table, Richard Ben-Veniste took a seat alongside Philip Zelikow and several of the commission’s investigators from Team 3. As Zelikow had recommended, Tenet was sworn in for the interview. Tenet, not realizing there was anything unusual about the oath, did so without protest.

  If anyone had protested, Zelikow was ready to make a strong argument why Tenet needed to testify under threat of perjury. The CIA’s record was full of discrepancies about the facts of its operations against bin Laden before 9/11, and many of the discrepancies were Tenet’s.

  The interview with the commission started going badly almost immediately, although Tenet appeared not to understand that. (It was only long after the commission had gone out of business that Tenet realized, angrily, that it had been playing “stump the dummy” with him.)

  The problem was Tenet’s memory. It was incredibly faulty, or so he seemed to be trying to suggest. As he was led through the chronology of the CIA’s struggles with al-Qaeda since the 1990s, he kept falling back on the same answers:

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “Let me go through the documents and get back to you with an answer.”

  Tenet remembered certain details, especially when he was asked the sorts of questions he was eager to answer—about how he had battled budgetary restraints throughout the 1990s, about how prescient many of the CIA’s analysts had been about the al-Qaeda threat.

  But on so many other questions, his memory was cloudy. The closer the questions came to the events of the spring and summer of 2001 and to the 9/11 attacks themselves, the worse his memory became.

  It wasn’t just details that Tenet claimed he could not remember. He could not recall entire meetings and key documents. The commission’s staffers eyed one another warily as Tenet claimed that he could not remember anything of what was discussed at his first meeting with George Bush after Bush’s election in 2000. That seemed especially suspicious given how eager Tenet was at the time to try to hold on to his job in the transition from
the Clinton to the Bush administration. The commission’s investigators thought it would have been one of the most important meetings of Tenet’s career—essentially a job interview with the new president of the United States.

  Tenet could not remember exactly what he had told Bush in the morning intelligence briefings at the White House in the months before 9/11, a time when his “hair was on fire,” the memorable phrase he uttered in the interview to describe the frenzy over the threat reporting in 2001.

  Zelikow said there was no one “a-ha moment”—no one set of questions or answers—when he began to question seriously whether Tenet was telling the truth under oath. It was the cumulative “I don’t recall” and “I don’t remember” responses that did it for Zelikow—Tenet’s “inability to recall or add much to our understanding of many critical episodes.” Zelikow said later that “we just didn’t believe him.”

  The former prosecutors among the ten commissioners had seen this before. Tenet was like a grand jury witness who had been too well prepared by a defense lawyer. The witness’s memory was good when it was convenient, bad when it was convenient. Unless the witness had something to say that would bolster the defense case, the witness would say nothing, blaming a faulty memory.

  THE OTHER CIA officials in the room would say later that Tenet’s memory was no better or worse in his meetings with the 9/11 commission than usual.

  Rousseau believed Tenet was telling the truth throughout the interviews. He acknowledged that it was a shame that Tenet did not remember more—“It wasn’t good that he doesn’t remember”—about some central moments in the CIA’s battles against bin Laden. But to Rousseau, it was a miracle that Tenet’s memory was not more faulty given the whirlwind of his tenure at the CIA. “I’m surprised he remembered as much as he did,” said Rousseau.

  Tenet’s loyal aides were furious when they were told later that Zelikow had reported back to the commissioners that Tenet had, essentially, perjured himself. Given the thousands of documents, the millions of words of e-mail, that passed through Tenet’s office in any given week, was it a surprise that his memory sometimes failed him? Rousseau wondered. As director of central intelligence, Tenet went to upward of twenty meetings a day; was he supposed to remember them all? “It’s outrageous to suggest the DCI held back,” said John Moseman, Tenet’s former chief of staff. “I attended every prep session, and every meeting with the commission, open and closed. The DCI, and those of us supporting him, provided an enormous amount of information. Neither he, nor we, held information back. At no time did any commissioner or member of the commission’s staff tell the DCI that they thought he was not being fully candid. To suggest so now is not honorable.”

  Rousseau was indisputably right about one thing: By early 2004, George Tenet was dead tired—physically exhausted. Apart from the president and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld, Tenet was under pressure like no man in Washington. Not only was the war in Iraq going badly, Tenet was also faced with multiple investigations of why the intelligence that took the nation to war—the intelligence that he had presented to the president about Iraq’s weapons programs—had been so wrong. Unlike Bush and Rumsfeld, Tenet gave himself no chance for rest. He had aged visibly in the job. (Between his insistence on a full night’s sleep and his extended ranch vacations in Texas, the president almost always looked well rested; and the astonishingly youthful-looking seventy-one-year-old Rumsfeld seemed incapable of showing fatigue no matter how long his workday.)

  Sleep deprivation was a frequent topic of conversation among people who worked in the executive offices at the CIA, just as it was at the Pentagon and the White House and other agencies where round-the-clock workdays were common. It occurred to many of Tenet’s deputies, just as it occurred to aides to the administration’s other true workaholics, that a little more sleep and a lot more time at home would have resulted in better decisions.

  Tenet rose before dawn every day so he was ready at 6:15 to climb into an armored SUV for the ride to the White House, where he conducted a final read-through of the PDB before it was presented to Bush. The workday would not end until after he had reviewed a copy of the PDB for the next day’s Oval Office briefing; it arrived on a classified fax machine in Tenet’s home at about 11:00 p.m. He would read it through and call in to Langley if he wanted changes. REM sleep was almost impossible for Tenet, since the phone tended to ring in the middle of the night with news of some disaster somewhere in the world.

  Rousseau could see that Tenet was growing more and more tired as the questioning from the commission went on in the conference room. He worried that Tenet was setting a trap for himself because of his fatigue.

  “I thought he was pushing it,” he said. During a break in the afternoon, Rousseau took Tenet aside in the hallway outside the conference room.

  “George, you’re getting tired, you’re going to make mistakes,” Rousseau told his boss. “This needs to end.”

  Tenet warily agreed. He returned to the conference room, made excuses, and told Ben-Veniste and the commission’s investigators that they were welcome back, anytime, for more questions.

  The commission’s delegation returned to their offices alarmed by Tenet’s claims of a faulty memory.

  If Zelikow needed any more evidence of what was wrong at the CIA, he now had it in Tenet’s seeming inability to tell the truth under oath. It soon became common wisdom on the commission’s staff—and among most of the ten commissioners—that George Tenet was, at best, loose with the facts. At worst, they thought, he was someone flirting with a perjury charge. Even Tom Kean, who found it difficult to say anything critical of anyone, began to accept the common wisdom. Tenet was a witness who would “fudge everything.”

  WHATEVER HIS memory problems, Tenet had a good answer to a question that had perplexed many on the commission’s staff: If he had truly warned President Bush every day for months before 9/11 that al-Qaeda was about to launch a catastrophic attack, why didn’t the White House do more to respond, especially within American borders?

  Tenet explained that his contacts with the White House were limited mostly to Bush—at the morning intelligence briefing—and Condoleezza Rice and Chief of Staff Andy Card. As director of central intelligence, he looked mostly to threats abroad; he would not have had daily contact with the FBI or other domestic agencies. He would have had much more contact with the Pentagon, especially over the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, and with the State Department. And he was confident in the summer of 2001 that the Pentagon and State Department were fully mobilized for the terrorist attack he was certain was coming. “Ships were being put out to sea, embassies were being put on heightened alert,” Tenet said. “I could see what I could see.”

  He could only assume the FBI and the other domestic agencies were being mobilized for a possible al-Qaeda strike as they had been in the past—through the National Security Council. That had certainly been true during the millennium threats; in December 2000, Berger and the NSC had daily meetings at the White House with the directors of the domestic agencies, including Janet Reno and Louis Freeh, to insist that they prepare for the possibility of a domestic terrorist attack during the holidays that year. Tenet assumed—he certainly hoped—that the same thing was happening in the summer of 2001, when the threat from Osama bin Laden was far more severe. “I had no reason to believe the domestic side was not fully engaged,” he later told colleagues. “I thought Condi had it under control.”

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  STUDIOS OF NBC NEWS

  Washington, D.C.

  APRIL 4, 2004

  The studios of Meet the Press were sometimes compared to a confessional, a place where Washington’s powerful go early on Sunday morning to acknowledge some weakness, political or otherwise. It was not that they always wanted to confess. But the show’s host, Tim Russert, NBC’s Washington bureau chief, was better than most other television journalists in the capital at dragging something out of them. Russert was accused of being deferential to Washington’s powerful; he
was unfailingly polite to his guests. But he was known for the quality of the research behind his questioning. He seemed to relish the chance to confront politicians with a quotation dug out from a years-old newspaper story or some grainy piece of videotape that demonstrated the hypocrisy of their current positions. He tended to ask public officials the questions they did not want to answer.

  On April 4, 2004, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton went on Meet the Press and reluctantly acknowledged—in response to Russert’s questions—what many on the commission’s staff believed had been obvious since the early days of the investigation: The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. They should have been prevented.

  It was a conclusion that Kean and Hamilton had seemed wary of reaching publicly, since it might be seen as an election-year judgment on the Bush administration’s performance on dealing with terrorist threats in the months before 9/11. (It might also be seen as a reflection on the Clinton administration’s performance, but in the early heat of Bush’s reelection bid in 2004, Bill Clinton’s presidency seemed a distant memory.)

  “Congressman,” Russert asked Hamilton, “do you think September eleventh could have been prevented?”

  “There’s a lot of ifs,” Hamilton replied with his usual caution, pausing for a moment to collect his thoughts. “You can string together a lot of ifs.” But he had to acknowledge that, “frankly, if you’d had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented.”

  Kean went through the list of bungled opportunities at the FBI and CIA: Moussaoui; the delays in putting Hazmi and Mihdhar on watch lists after they entered the United States; the decision to call off some of the CIA’s more promising capture-or-kill operations against bin Laden.

  “There were times we could have gotten him, there’s no question,” Kean said of bin Laden. “Had we gotten him and his leadership at that point, the whole story might have been different.”