The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  Hamilton opened with a question for Rice about why, if the White House was focused so sharply on the flood of terrorist threats in the summer of 2001, Bush had told Bob Woodward that his blood was “not so boiling” and he had felt no “sense of urgency” about bin Laden before 9/11.

  Rice suggested that Bush’s answer had been taken out of context—she said he meant to say that he had felt no urgency about a specific plan to assassinate bin Laden, as opposed to capturing him or shutting down his network—and that Bush had taken the al-Qaeda threat seriously from the start.

  Ben-Veniste was up next. For a veteran prosecutor whose name would be linked forever to the investigation that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon, this was Ben-Veniste’s moment again, his chance to try to extract a damaging confession from a hostile witness under oath, with all the world watching.

  “Good morning, Dr. Rice,” he said, a clear trace of menace in his voice. “Nice to see you again.”

  Rice smiled slightly. “Nice to see you,” she replied.

  To no one’s surprise on the commission, Ben-Veniste wanted to focus on the August 6 PDB and why the Bush administration—and Rice in particular—had done so little to respond to it and other warnings throughout the spring and summer of 2001. In her private interview two months earlier, Rice had acknowledged being told by Clarke of the existence of sleeper cells of al-Qaeda in the United States, and Ben-Veniste wanted to know if the warning had been passed on to Bush.

  “Did you tell the president at any time prior to August 6 of the existence of al-Qaeda cells in the United States?” he asked.

  Rice was not going to take Ben-Veniste’s bait. Either answer—yes, she did tell the president; no, she didn’t—had the potential to suggest that the White House had mishandled the threats. So she was going to run out the clock on Ben-Veniste.

  “First,” she began, “let me just make certain—”

  Ben-Veniste interrupted. “If you could just answer that question.”

  Rice: “Well, first—”

  Ben-Veniste: “Because I have a very limited—”

  Rice: “I understand, Commissioner, but it’s important—”

  Ben-Veniste: “Did you tell the president?”

  Many in the audience, especially the family members of 9/11 victims, could see what Rice was doing, her bobbing and weaving, and they applauded Ben-Veniste’s insistence that she answer the question.

  Rice interrupted again: “It’s important that I also address—it’s also important, Commissioner, that I address the other issues that you have raised. So I will do it quickly, but if you’ll just give me a moment . . .”

  Ben-Veniste: “Well, my only question to us is whether you told the president.”

  Rice: “I understand, Commissioner, but I will—if you will just give me a moment, I will address fully the questions that you’ve asked.”

  She then offered a two-minute digression—two precious minutes from Ben-Veniste’s ten-minute allotment—about the origins of the August 6 PDB and why it had been ordered up by Bush and how it offered no specific recommendation to the president about how to deal with al-Qaeda cells.

  With his time almost gone, Ben-Veniste could see that if he asked a question that left any hint of ambiguity, Rice would take advantage of it to eat up more time. So he asked as specific a question as he could.

  “Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the August 6 PDB warned against possible attacks in this country?” he said. “And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB?”

  Rice did not hesitate a moment to answer the question, which made her answer all the more startling to people in the audience: “I believe the title was ‘Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.’ ”

  There was an audible gasp in the audience as Rice confirmed officially, once and for all, what had long been suspected—that the August 6 PDB was an explicit warning from the CIA, only a month before 9/11, that al-Qaeda was going to try to strike on American soil. The guessing on the commission was that Rice had planned in advance to reveal the title at the hearing, if only because the hearing would offer her the best possible public forum to try to disparage the PDB’s importance.

  Ben-Veniste tried to cut her off before she could use up more time: “Thank you.”

  “No, Mr. Ben-Veniste,” she tried to continue. “Now, the PDB—”

  Ben-Veniste: “I will get into the—”

  Rice: “I would like to finish my point here.”

  Ben-Veniste: “I didn’t know there was a point.” The audience burst into laughter.

  Rice: “Given that you asked me whether or not it warned of attacks—”

  Ben-Veniste: “I asked you what the title was.” His tone was one of almost theatrical exasperation, and it produced more laughter in the audience.

  BY THE time Bob Kerrey had the chance to question Rice, he felt he knew exactly what she was up to. Kerrey was a veteran of the Senate, home of the filibuster, and Rice was demonstrating her mastery of the art. Still, he would try to pin her down, and his first question was about her relationship with Zelikow.

  “Let me ask you, first of all, a question that’s been a concern for me from the first day I came onto the commission, and that is the relationship of our executive director to you,” Kerrey said. “Did you ask Philip Zelikow any questions about terrorism during the transition?” Zelikow sat directly behind Kerrey, looking startled by Kerrey’s question.

  Rice replied, “Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues that we were facing.”

  Kerrey pressed her. “Did you talk to him about terrorism?” More specifically, he asked, “Did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?”

  Rice acknowledged that she had asked Zelikow specifically to review Clarke’s performance at the NSC, “to help think about the structure” of “Clarke’s operations, yes.”

  Kerrey changed the subject, thinking he had established for the record just how close the ties were between Rice and the commission’s executive director. He moved on to the larger issue of what happened in the White House in the months before 9/11.

  “You said the president was tired of swatting flies,” he said, referring to Bush’s famous remark early in 2001 about the need for a wide-ranging government strategy for dealing with al-Qaeda. “Can you tell me one example where the president swatted a fly when it came to al-Qaeda prior to 9/11?”

  Kerrey continued before Rice had a chance to answer: “We didn’t swat any flies.” His voice rose with what seemed to be sincere anger. “How the hell could he be tired?”

  Kerrey asked specifically why the White House had not ordered any sort of military response to the al-Qaeda attack in Yemen on the USS Cole, which had been bombed only three months before President Bush came to office.

  “Why didn’t we respond to the Cole? Why didn’t we swat that fly?”

  Rice fell back on the defense that the White House had offered in the past on the Cole: that the administration was in the middle of a broad review of counterterrorism strategy throughout 2001. A limited military response against al-Qaeda over the Cole, she said, would have been counterproductive, demonstrating American weakness, not strength.

  “We simply believed that the best approach was to put in place a plan that was going to eliminate this threat, not respond to it tit for tat,” she said. “I do not believe to this day that it was—would have been a good thing to respond to the Cole, given the kinds of options that we were going to have.”

  Kerrey asked her why she didn’t act on Clarke’s Delenda plan to attack al-Qaeda sanctuaries in Afghanistan in 2001. Clarke had given her a copy of the plan at the White House on January 25, 2001, when he made his initial, urgent request for an early cabinet meeting on the al-Qaeda threat.

  “I want to be very clear on this, because it’s been a source of controversy,” Rice said. “We were not presented with a plan.”

  “Well, that’s not true,” Kerrey replied.

  He could see that Rice wa
s going to play more of her word games. Clarke had given her a document called the “Delenda plan,” and Rice had previously referred to it as the “Delenda plan.” But now, she was saying, a “plan” was not a “plan.”

  “What we were presented with on January the twenty-fifth was a set of ideas and a paper, most of which was about what the Clinton administration had done, and something called the Delenda plan, which had been considered in 1998 and never adopted.”

  Under her strained definition, a “plan” was now not a “plan” if it was not acted on.

  With only a few minutes remaining of his ten-minute allotment, Kerrey tried to move the conversation elsewhere, but Rice wanted to go back again and again to the subject of Clarke and Delenda—and eat up more time.

  “Let me move to another area,” Kerrey said.

  “May I finish answering your question, though?” she asked. “Because this is an important point.”

  “No, I know it’s important, everything that’s going on here is important. But I get ten minutes.”

  Rice: “But since we have a point of disagreement, I’d like to have a chance to address it.”

  Kerrey: “Well, no, actually, there’s going . . . we have many points of disagreement with Mr. Clarke that we’ll have to give a chance.”

  Rice: “I think—”

  Kerrey had had enough.

  “Please don’t filibuster me, it’s not fair,” he said with agitation. “It’s not fair. I have been polite. I have been courteous. It is not fair to me.” Many in the audience applauded Kerrey.

  Rice stood her ground. “Commissioner, I’m here to answer your questions. And you asked me a question, and I’d like to have an opportunity to answer it.”

  Kerrey asked her the circumstances of a White House meeting that she organized with Clarke and Andy Card on July 5, 2001, to discuss how the FBI and other domestic agencies were prepared to deal with what the CIA believed was an imminent terrorist strike. Rice had argued previously that the meeting was proof of how well she had done her job that summer.

  “So you have a meeting on the fifth of July where you’re trying to make certain that your domestic agencies are preparing a defense against a possible strike—you know al-Qaeda cells were in the United States. You’ve got to follow up, and the question is: Where was your follow-up? What is the paper trail that shows that you and Andy Card followed up on this meeting?”

  “I followed up with Dick Clarke,” Rice said, once again suggesting that if anyone was responsible for the failures of coordination among domestic agencies before 9/11, it was Clarke, not her. “I talked to Dick Clarke about this all the time.”

  Then she returned to the point she had tried to make so often before—that the warnings of an attack were so vague in 2001 that there was little for the FBI and other domestic agencies to respond to. “You have no time, you have no place, you have no ‘how,’ ” she said.

  But Kerrey knew that was not true, either. The August 6 PDB had specified that al-Qaeda was considering domestic hijackings and that there were warnings of terrorist surveillance of buildings in New York. There was a place. There was a how.

  So Kerrey decided to do something at the hearing that was almost certainly illegal. He was going to take it on himself to reveal classified information—specifically, he was going to read out the most explosive finding in the body of the PDB.

  “In the spirit of further declassification, this is what the August sixth memo said to the president, that ‘the FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking,’ ” he said, reading directly from PDB. “That’s the language of the memo that was briefed to the president on the sixth of August.”

  BY THE end of the hearing, it seemed a draw. Democrats could see in it what they wanted—Rice as duplicitous, eager to hide the truth about her performance, and Bush’s, before 9/11. Republicans saw her as heroic, valiantly defending the president, giving as good as she got from Ben-Veniste and the other Democratic “bullies.” Even if they were confounded by her unwillingness to answer their questions, Democrats could not fail to be impressed by Rice’s ability to remain calm even in the midst of fierce questioning. Under the harsh television lights, style really could stump substance. Tom Shales, the television critic of The Washington Post, said that “if it were to be viewed as a battle, or as a sporting event, or as a contest,” then “Condoleezza Rice won it.” Dan Rather, the CBS News anchorman who was disdained by the White House for his perceived antagonism toward the Bush administration, praised Rice’s performance as “steady and composed.”

  If anything at the hearing qualified as truly bad news for the White House, it came in the final few minutes, when Kean closed the hearing by announcing that the commission wanted to see the entire August 6, 2001, PDB declassified and made public. “There was a lot of discussion about the PDB,” said Kean. “We have requested from the White House that that be declassified, because we feel it is important that the American people get a chance to see it. We are awaiting an answer on our request and hope by next week’s hearing that we might have it.”

  43

  301 7TH STREET, SW

  Washington, D.C.

  APRIL 8, 2004

  The government office building in southwest Washington, several blocks from the Capitol and about fifteen minutes by cab from the commission’s downtown offices, could not have been more anonymous. Suitably, it housed offices for the most faceless of federal agencies, the General Services Administration, which served as the government’s real estate broker. In 2003 and 2004, the GSA building at Seventh and D streets also served as overflow offices for the 9/11 commission, housing the teams of investigators who did not require daily access to highly classified documents.

  There was a frenzy among GSA employees when they heard the rumor on April 8, 2004, that a celebrity had been seen wandering through their building. People put down their phones and coffee cups, stood up from their desks, and rushed to the hallways to try to find him. Just a glimpse. Maybe a handshake or an autograph? The GSA workers were giddy at the thought that Bill Clinton was there.

  The former president was in the building that afternoon for his private interview by the 9/11 commission. Unlike George Bush, Clinton had readily agreed from the start of the investigation to meet with all ten commissioners and answer their questions at length. His aides said Clinton would even have considered public testimony before the commission. But the possibility was never considered seriously, since the panel’s Republicans knew Bush would never agree to a public appearance—and that would create the appearance that he, unlike his predecessor, was hiding something.

  The commission had tried to keep the Clinton meeting secret, if only to avoid a crush of television cameras and reporters; that explained the decision to conduct the interview at the commission’s out-of-the-way offices at the GSA rather than its central offices on K Street.

  Two of the Republicans on the commission knew Clinton reasonably well: Tom Kean, who had always liked the former president and once considered Clinton’s offer of a cabinet post; and Jim Thompson, who had been Illinois governor when Clinton was his counterpart in Arkansas. The other Republican commissioners had spent the years of the Clinton administration mostly bemoaning his presidency. While in the Senate, Slade Gorton had voted to convict Clinton in his impeachment trial for obstructing justice in trying to cover up about the affair with Monica Lewinsky.

  Clinton had a well-deserved reputation for being late for everything, and he was late, about an hour, for his interview with the 9/11 commission.

  “It’s not my fault,” Clinton told Kean apologetically. He said he was well aware of his reputation and had made a special effort to be on time for the commission. The FAA was supposed to have made special arrangements for Clinton’s small private plane to land at Washington’s close-in Reagan Airport, which had banned most private jets since 9/11 as a security precaution; the airport’s flight path was directly along the Potomac
and brought planes perilously close to the Pentagon. But someone at the FAA had bungled the request, so Clinton’s plane from his new home in New York did not have clearance to land. Given what they now knew about the incompetence of the FAA and its performance on 9/11, Kean and the other commissioners were forgiving. “Welcome to our world,” Kean said, chuckling. Some of the commissioners were relieved that Clinton was late. They were pleased to catch their breath after the circus of that morning’s public hearing with Condoleezza Rice.

  Whatever Clinton’s reputation for tardiness and undisciplined work habits, the 9/11 commissioners who did not know the former president were about to learn what it was like to see him at his most impressive. Clinton said he had been up much of the night, in a final push to finish his long overdue memoirs. “I finally got to bed at three a.m.,” he told the commissioners. But if Clinton was fatigued, it was impossible to detect from his performance that afternoon. He had obviously done his homework for the session, reviewing all of the counterterrorism material that Sandy Berger had prepared for him to review. Ever the politician, Clinton had also made a special point of learning in advance something about his questioners, including putting names to faces for the three Republican commissioners he did not know.

  John Lehman, one of the Republicans, was startled to see Clinton pushing past some of the Democrat commissioners to rush over and say hello.

  “He comes over to me and he says, ‘Mr. Secretary, how are you? It’s good to see you, John,’ ” said Lehman, remembering how impressed he was that Clinton seemed to know who he was. “And I’d never met him before in my fucking life. He was even more charming than his reputation.”

  Clinton then turned to “my friend Jim”—Thompson—and explained to the commissioners how, when the two men were governors, they had shared a baby-sitter at a conference of the National Governors Association.

  Then the questioning began. For most of the next four hours, Clinton offered a master class in the history of his administration’s struggle with al-Qaeda and other global terrorist threats. He offered no apologies for his failure to kill Osama bin Laden, because, he said, he had done everything within his power to accomplish it.