The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Russert then asked Kean and Hamilton an even trickier question—about Philip Zelikow. He raised “the very sensitive issue” of Zelikow’s involvement in the investigation and the families’ repeated complaints about Zelikow’s ties to Condoleezza Rice and his involvement in George Bush’s 2000 White House transition team. It was the most public forum in which Kean and Hamilton had ever been asked about the conflicts of interest of the commission’s executive director.

  Kean insisted that Zelikow had been chosen for the Bush transition team in 2000 because “he was one of the best experts on terrorism in the whole area of intelligence, in the whole country”—not because he was Rice’s friend. Kean said that he had not found “any evidence to indicate in any way that he is partial to anybody or anything. In fact, he’s been much tougher, I think, than a lot of people would have liked him to be.”

  Zelikow, he said, “is the best possible person we could have found for the job.”

  Hamilton agreed. He said Zelikow had “played it right down the line—I found no evidence of a conflict of interest of any kind.” It was a judgment that almost no one on the commission’s staff would have agreed with.

  If there had been any lingering doubt that Zelikow would survive as executive director until the end of the investigation, Kean and Hamilton had put it to rest with their statements of support to Russert on national television. Zelikow would remain in charge.

  CAMP DAVID, MD.

  Despite his obvious disdain for what was increasingly becoming known as the “mainstream” media, Vice President Dick Cheney had a special relationship with Russert. Certainly he had a respect for the platform that Meet the Press offered. It had been the top-rated Sunday morning show for years. Cheney offered Russert arguably the most important exclusive of the newsman’s career when, on September 16, 2001, the Sunday after the attacks, Cheney invited Russert to the presidential retreat at Camp David for an hour-long interview. Although the public did not realize it at the time, Camp David often functioned as the “secure undisclosed location” where Cheney worked and lived in the first weeks after 9/11—supposedly an effort to guarantee a smooth transition of power if Bush was killed or disabled in a new terrorist strike on Washington.

  It was the vice president’s first significant interview after the attacks, and it seemed an obvious effort by the White House to establish an early, and definitive, account of what had happened in the executive branch on the morning of the attacks. It would be the most authoritative account until the 9/11 commission’s report was released in 2004.

  It was a riveting hour of television. Cheney was characteristically articulate and composed, even as he reviewed the chaos in the White House on the morning of September 11. He described watching television in his West Wing office and seeing the second plane hit the Twin Towers. “Terrorism,” he remembered thinking at that moment. “This is an attack.”

  He described how Secret Service agents hustled him from his office into the tubelike underground bunker beneath the East Wing, the so-called Presidential Emergency Operations Center, or PEOC. The bunker had been built for Franklin Roosevelt during World War II.

  “They came in and said, ‘Sir, we have to leave immediately,’ and grabbed me,” he said. “They hoisted me up and moved me very rapidly down the hallway, down some stairs, through some doors, and down some more stairs into an underground facility under the White House.” He said that he had been moved to the PEOC because of warnings that another hijacked airplane was headed for the White House.

  Russert asked Cheney what was the most difficult decision made during the course of the day.

  “Well, I suppose the toughest decision was this question of whether or not we would intercept incoming commercial aircraft,” Cheney said, referring to the decision to order military jets to shoot down passenger planes that approached Washington.

  Russert followed up: “And you decided . . .”

  Cheney corrected Russert. “We decided to do it.” He was referring to himself and Bush.

  “So if the United States government became aware that a hijacked commercial airliner was destined for the White House or the Capitol, we would take the plane down?” Russert continued.

  “Yes,” Cheney said somberly. “The president made the decision—on my recommendation.” He said that Bush decided that if passenger planes “wouldn’t pay any attention to instructions to move away from the city, as a last resort, our pilots were authorized to take them out.” Bush relayed the decision to Cheney in one of their telephone calls that morning, Cheney said.

  “Now, people say, you know, that’s a horrendous decision to make,” Cheney continued. “Well, it is.”

  On the commission, the chronology of events of the morning of 9/11 had been left to John Farmer’s team, and the commission’s investigators had come to believe that a central element of Cheney’s account—the shoot-down order—was false.

  The staff was convinced that the “horrendous decision” was not made by Bush; it was made by Cheney, and the vice president had almost certainly made it alone. If Farmer’s team was right, the shoot-down order was almost certainly unconstitutional, a violation of the military chain of command, which has no role for the vice president. In the absence of the president, military orders should have been issued by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, bypassing the vice president entirely.

  Apart from Cheney’s account, and a later attempt by Bush to back up the vice president, there was no evidence to suggest that Bush had weighed in on the shoot-down order before Cheney had issued it. And there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Bush knew nothing about it. “We didn’t believe it,” Dan Marcus, the general counsel, said of Cheney’s account.

  Even in moments of crisis, the White House keeps extraordinary records of communications involving Bush and his senior staff; every phone call is logged, along with a detailed summary of what happened during the call. Many foreign leaders who talk to Bush by phone might be surprised to learn how many other people in the White House are listening in silently.

  But for 9/11, the logs offered no evidence of a call between Cheney and Bush in which Bush authorized a shoot-down. And Farmer’s team reviewed more than just one set of communications logs. There were seven of them—one maintained by the White House telephone switchboard, one by the Secret Service, one by the Situation Room, and four separate logs maintained by military officers working in the White House.

  Many of the people in the PEOC that morning, including Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Cheney’s wife, Lynne, took detailed handwritten notes on yellow legal pads about everything that happened, including what they overheard of Cheney’s phone conversations; there was no reference to a shoot-down order from Bush. The notes of Ari Fleischer, the press secretary, who was aboard Air Force One with Bush, also showed no reference to an order until several minutes after it had been issued by Cheney.

  Joshua Bolten, who was then deputy chief of staff in the White House and was in the PEOC with Cheney, told the commission’s staff in an interview on March 18, 2004, that he was so concerned about the shoot-down order that he urged Cheney to take a “quiet moment” to call Bush. Bolten wanted Cheney to make sure the president understood the ominous military order that had just been issued in his name by the vice president. Although Bolten might be too discreet to say so, the commis- s-ion’s staff took his comment to mean that he did not believe Bush knew of the order. (Bolten later suggested that the commission’s staff had misconstrued his comments. “I was not concerned that the vice president lacked authority to issue the shoot-down order, but I did want the president to know that the vice president had executed on that authority,” he said.)

  Farmer’s team discovered that the timing of the shoot-down order—and Bolten’s recommendation to Cheney to call the president—was memorialized in Libby’s notes, which referred to Bolten by his initials.

  Libby’s entry from 10:15 a.m. to 10:18 a.m. read: “Aircraft 60 miles out, confirmed as hijack—e
ngage? VP? Yes. JB: Get President and confirm engage order.”

  Marcus thought that, in many ways, it would have been completely understandable for Cheney to issue a shoot-down order without authorization from Bush. Whatever the constitutional issues, it would have been difficult to second-guess Cheney about a decision to save the White House from destruction if a suicide hijacker was bearing down on the capital and there were only seconds to act.

  “If Cheney orders a shoot-down of a plane that he thinks is coming at the White House, who’d blame him?” Marcus said. “But his staff was obsessed with showing that he didn’t give the order.”

  It was not difficult to imagine why Cheney and his staff would have been determined to rewrite the history of that morning. The White House would have been concerned about any perception that Cheney had usurped presidential power, especially in a crisis. By the start of the 2004 campaign, no one doubted that Cheney was the most powerful vice president in the nation’s modern history; Bush’s reelection strategists were eager to dispel any notion of Cheney as Bush’s puppeteer or Svengali.

  Members of the commission’s staff suspected that the Russert interview was the moment that the false but well-packaged account was first presented to the public. By then, Marcus said, “they all had their stories straight, and the story was that the president was in charge, was in full communication with the staff,” on September 11. Even if it was not true.

  Marcus wondered how Cheney and his staff would respond if the commission concluded in its final report that summer that it did not believe the vice president was telling the truth about what really happened that morning in the White House. Cheney, as it turned out, would be furious. He would try to have the report rewritten on the eve of its release.

  39

  FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION

  Washington, D.C., Field Office

  OCTOBER 2003

  Maybe you could just mail it in?” the FBI agent asked in October 2003. “You know, snail mail?”

  He had that tone of resigned embarrassment that the 9/11 commission’s investigators had grown used to when they interviewed FBI employees.

  “There really isn’t e-mail at the bureau,” he said. “I know that’s hard to believe.”

  The agent in the FBI’s Washington field office was explaining why, if the commission’s investigators wanted him to answer more questions in writing, they should mail them in. The U.S. Postal Service might take a day or two for delivery, he said, but it was the best way of ensuring that the information got to the FBI.

  It had come to that. In 2003, nearly a generation after electronic mail had become routine in American businesses and on college campuses and almost everywhere else, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had no functioning internal e-mail system or easy employee access to the Internet. There was no searchable computer database for most FBI case files.

  FBI agents might go home at night to find their teenagers playing on their laptops, swapping e-mail messages with school friends, or trading MP3 files. But when the agents went back to work at the bureau the next morning, they were returned to the electronic dark ages. Amy Zegart, a professor of public policy at UCLA who studied the way the FBI managed information before and after September 11, found to her amazement that the bureau’s computers were so out of date before 9/11 that it took twelve commands to store a single document. That explained why almost half of all the FBI’s records—six billion pages—was still stored on paper. Tom Pickard, the bureau’s acting director in the summer of 2001, told the commission that “the FBI computer system was the joke of Washington, D.C.—the FBI knew it, DOJ knew it, and Congress knew it.” In the hours after the 9/11 attacks, FBI agents sent around copies of photographs of the suspected hijackers by Express Mail, the U.S. Postal Service’s overnight delivery service, because they did not have computer scanners in the bureau’s field offices.

  It wasn’t just the FBI’s field agents who were complaining about the bureau’s shockingly out-of-date technology. The acting director of the Washington field office, the second largest FBI field office in the country, after New York, told the commission’s investigators that he was embarrassed that he had only one way to relay a message across town to FBI headquarters from his desk in an emergency: Pick up the phone and dial. If he wanted to use e-mail or the Internet, he had to walk down the hall. There was only one Internet terminal on each floor of the field office.

  The commission’s team of investigators focused on the FBI, Team 6, was appalled by what it was discovering about the operations of the FBI, and their surprise went well beyond outdated computer equipment or nonexistent e-mail service. Members of the team found it difficult to describe what they were learning about how dysfunctional the FBI was, especially when it came to terrorism. Words like “incompetent” or “inept” were often used, but they could not begin to capture how far the problems went.

  To Team 6, the bureau’s great blunders before 9/11—Moussaoui, the Phoenix memo, Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego—were all too understandable the more the commission learned about the way the FBI operated; they were typical of the sorts of errors that the bureau was making day after day, especially when it came to counterterrorism. The career path for the bureau’s terrorism specialists was considered a backwater.

  “It failed and it failed and it failed,” Tom Kean said later of the FBI. “This is an agency that does not work.” Philip Zelikow agreed. “There were some things about what the FBI had become that were just really indefensible,” he said, describing the largely justified conventional wisdom after 9/11 that the FBI was “the poster child for the broken agency.”

  The investigators on Team 6 were always careful to point out that there were some extraordinary, dedicated people at the FBI—men and women who were as talented as any criminal investigators in the world. The honors list began with the Minneapolis agents who were rebuffed when they tried to warn FBI headquarters about Moussaoui in August 2001, and with Kenneth Williams, the agent in Phoenix who sent a memo to headquarters that July asking the bureau to study why so many young Muslim men were seeking flight training in the United States.

  The problem was mostly with the agency’s sclerotic, hierarchical bureaucracy in Washington—at its core, unchanged since the days of J. Edgar Hoover—as well as the FBI’s unmatched arrogance in dealing with other government agencies.

  Its failures were on display most clearly when it came to the threat posed to the United States by terrorist groups.

  Hoover may have been the greatest turf fighter in the modern history of the federal bureaucracy. During his nearly half century at the FBI, he maneuvered to ensure that serious proposals for a separate domestic intelligence agency—an American equivalent to Britain’s MI-5—went nowhere. If spies or terrorists operated within American borders, Hoover believed it should be the responsibility of the FBI to track them down, just as it dealt with bank robbers and kidnappers and pornographers.

  But for FBI agents, the incentive within the bureau for chasing bank robbers and kidnappers was always much greater than for hunting down spies and terrorists. Bank robbers got arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison every day. Every one of those convictions was a notch on an arresting FBI agent’s belt, an easy way of establishing how well the agent was doing the job.

  In tracking down spies and terrorists, success could never be so clear. There was no simple way to quantify what the FBI’s counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents did for the bureau. The most talented counterintelligence and counterterrorism agents at the FBI might not make a single arrest in their careers. Spies tended to be kept under surveillance, not arrested. Foreign-born terrorists were not seen as much of a problem until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And the commission’s investigators were startled to discover that even after the 1993 attack, there was no grand rethinking of the FBI’s role on terrorism.

  In the eight years between the 1993 attempt to bring down the Twin Towers and the 2001 attacks that succeeded in that horrifying
goal, FBI headquarters in Washington produced no analytical reports—not a single one—on the overall terrorist threat facing the United States. Before 9/11, if President Clinton or President Bush wanted a briefing from the FBI on domestic terrorism threats, there was no piece of paper to offer him.

  Even though the bureau functioned as the government’s domestic intelligence agency, FBI agents “literally didn’t write intelligence reports,” Zelikow said. Instead, when they completed an interview as part of an investigation, FBI agents prepared a “302,” the standard FBI form used to record interview results, and often deposited it in a file cabinet or desk drawer, never to be read again.

  Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism czar who had served both Republican and Democratic presidents, told the commission’s investigators in his private interviews that the FBI was simply incompetent when it came to terrorism: “I didn’t think the FBI would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States by al-Qaeda.” The FBI, he said, was “clueless” on terrorist threats.

  Many FBI analysts who were supposed to be terrorism specialists were routinely asked to take up other, unrelated duties. The commission had several tearful interviews with counterterrorism analysts who explained how they were demeaned by their colleagues who handled routine criminal cases. Some terrorism analysts said they were treated as “übersecretaries,” asked to man the reception desk while secretaries went to lunch; a few analysts said they were asked repeatedly to empty the trash.

  There was plenty of blame to go around for the desperate condition of the FBI in 2001. Surely Attorney General Janet Reno, who had titular authority over FBI director Louis Freeh during the Clinton administration, and President Clinton himself deserved criticism for having failed for eight years to insist on reforms at the bureau.

  That point would be noted repeatedly by Condoleezza Rice when she was asked to explain the government’s intelligence failures before 9/11. If the bureau was broken, why wasn’t it fixed during President Clinton’s two terms in office? “I think the question is why, over all of these years, we did not address the structural problems that there were with the FBI,” she told the commission. It was a legitimate question.