“I wanted to see him dead,” Clinton said, repeating the words that Berger had attributed to him.
Even as he defended his own actions at the White House, Clinton impressed the Republicans with his reluctance to criticize Bush for having done too little against bin Laden in the first months of 2001. He refused the invitation of some of the Democrats to attack Bush. Clinton repeated something else that Berger had already told the commissioners: He insisted that his personal scandals and the impeachment battles in 1998 and 1999 had not affected his eagerness to confront bin Laden.
That was where Bob Kerrey stopped him.
Clinton had to be kidding, Kerrey thought. Clinton may have been too self-absorbed to realize it at the time, but on Capitol Hill, the Lewinsky mess and all of Clinton’s other sexual and financial scandals had a terrible impact on the ability to rally support for any move against al-Qaeda. Clinton’s troubles had certainly hindered Kerrey and his Democratic colleagues in the Senate from trying to support the national security policy of a president who was swamped by allegations of sexual misconduct. A president less hindered by scandal might have been able to mount a determined effort to rally support in Congress to destroy bin Laden’s network before it became such a threat, Kerrey thought. Every time Clinton lobbed a cruise missile at bin Laden, the White House—and Clinton’s Democratic allies in Congress—were forced to deny that the attack was an attempt to divert attention from some turn in the Lewinsky scandal.
“I’m willing to accept the fact that it didn’t have any impact on you,” Kerrey told Clinton. “But it had a big impact on me. It affected my ability to carry out my responsibilities.”
The Republicans on the commission were wowed by the former president. Fred Fielding walked up to Kean afterward to say how impressed he had been by Clinton. “And he seems like such a nice man,” Fielding said.
Lehman went home to New York and told his wife, Barbara, about Clinton’s bravura performance. “I said, ‘This guy is really impressive, and he really answered the questions,’ ” he said.
She looked at him askance, reminding him of all the terrible, insulting things he had said about Bill Clinton during his presidency. “After all you’ve said about Clinton?” she said. “John, you’re a star-fucker.”
OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
NEW YORK, N.Y.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City had found just the right, punchy adjective to describe the 9/11 commission: “ghoulish.” It would fit nicely in one of the garish front-page headlines in the city’s tabloids. He insisted on one of his weekly radio shows in November 2003 that it was “ghoulish” for the commission to want to review the police and fire department tapes of rescue efforts on the morning of 9/11, as well as the tapes and transcripts of 911 emergency calls. The tapes, he explained, contained the last words of people who died horrifying deaths in the Twin Towers. “I have an obligation to protect the families and their memories to the extent we possibly can,” he said, questioning what value the tapes could possibly have to the commission. “I don’t know why they don’t get on with what they’re really supposed to do.”
The commission’s investigators had difficulty understanding why Bloomberg and his aides were always so antagonistic toward them. Bloomberg was elected and took office after 9/11; if errors were made in the city’s emergency planning before the attacks, he had no responsibility for them. Still, Bloomberg seemed eager to do what he could to obstruct the commission’s investigation. There was speculation that the mayor had been put up to it by his Republican predecessor, Rudy Giuliani, who might not be so eager to see all of the facts aired, especially given the glory that his performance on 9/11 had otherwise brought him.
The city government was the third and final target of a subpoena from the commission. The subpoena was issued in November 2002 and demanded the emergency tapes and transcripts. But unlike the Pentagon and the FAA, which immediately agreed to comply with their subpoenas from the 9/11 commission, Bloomberg was initially defiant. He said he would go to court to fight the commission.
Bloomberg claimed partial victory in a settlement with the commission two weeks later. The mayor agreed to make all of the material available to the commission, but with the understanding that anyone heard on the tapes would not be identified by name in any public document unless they or their survivors gave approval.
The commission’s investigators spent weeks in city offices, listening to the tapes and reviewing transcripts. Bloomberg had not exaggerated the horror of what was in the material. At the same time, they also were proof of the heroism of so many of the city’s rescue workers who had rushed into the Twin Towers in the knowledge that they were likely sacrificing their own lives.
What may have worried Bloomberg, and perhaps Giuliani, was something else the emergency tapes demonstrated. They were the clearest evidence obtained by the commission of just how unprepared the city was to deal with a catastrophic terrorist attack—the sort of attack that had been predicted since 1993, when Islamic extremists made their first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers. Eight years later, when the terrorists returned to lower Manhattan and attacked again at precisely the same place, this time with hijacked planes rather than a truck bomb, the city seemed to have been no better prepared.
44
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA
FEBRUARY 23, 2004
For its official visitors, the Saudi royal family maintains a series of palaces in Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital, and other cities. They function like four-star hotels, complete with luxury spas and complimentary round-the-clock laundry and room service. For the investigators from the 9/11 commission, there were two drawbacks to using them for their interrogations of Saudi officials in 2004: The phones and rooms were almost certainly bugged by the Saudi spy agencies, and there was no hope of finding alcohol. (The managers at Western-run hotels in the otherwise dry kingdom often kept a secret stash of alcohol for favored guests.) As they contemplated their questioning of Fahad al-Thumairy, the 9/11 commission’s investigators joked that they could have used a drink.
Thumairy was the young Saudi diplomat who had worked at the country’s consulate in Los Angeles in 2000 and 2001 and who appeared to be a middleman of some sort for Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the two 9/11 hijackers who had lived in San Diego. Mike Jacobson, Raj De, and other investigators on the commission’s “plot” team had compiled a long dossier on Thumairy, much of it built on evidence that Jacobson had found buried in FBI files that suggested just how dangerous the Saudi diplomat was.
Although he held a diplomatic passport, Thumairy’s principal, official role in Los Angeles was religious; he actually worked for the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs and was the consulate’s liaison to the city’s huge Saudi-financed King Fahd mosque. He served as an imam at the mosque and had a reputation for extremist, anti-Western views that included calls for jihad. When he tried to return to the United States in May 2003 after a brief trip home, he was detained on arrival at Los Angeles International Airport and immediately deported; his visa application had been revoked because of concerns at the State Department that he was tied to terrorists.
The evidence gathered by the commission suggested Thumairy had orchestrated help for the hijackers through a network of Saudi and other Arab expatriates living throughout Southern California and led by Omar al-Bayoumi, the seemingly bumbling “ghost employee” of a Saudi aviation contractor. Although Thumairy had denied in previous interviews with the FBI that he knew Bayoumi or the two hijackers, the commission’s investigators had found evidence and witnesses that proved he was lying. The commission’s investigators had traveled to Saudi Arabia because they wanted to confront Thumairy with his lies.
The most intriguing, potentially damning evidence against Thumairy was found by Jacobson and De in a group of classified FBI reports prepared in 2002. The reports detailed the results of the interrogation of an Arabic-speaking taxi driver from Los Angeles who had been arrested on immigration charges a few
months after 9/11. The Tunisian driver, Qualid Benomrare, was linked to Thumairy in the FBI files, apparently because he had done chauffeur work for the consulate.
The driver was shown a series of photographs of young Arab men and asked if he recognized any of them; Benomrare surprised the FBI questioners and quickly picked out the two hijackers—Hazmi and Mihdhar—before realizing what he had done. He then nervously backtracked and denied knowing the pair.
Asked about his ties to Thumairy, Benomrare said that the Saudi diplomat had introduced him before 9/11 to “two Saudis”—young men, he recalled—who had just arrived in the United States and needed help. He drove them around Los Angeles and to the Sea World amusement park in San Diego.
To Jacobson and De, it seemed likely that the “two Saudis” introduced by Thumairy to the driver were the two terrorists Thumairy claimed never to have met. The two terrorists whose photos Benomrare had initially recognized.
Bayoumi had been interviewed in an October 2003 visit to Saudi Arabia by Philip Zelikow and Dieter Snell, the head of the “plot” team. Bayoumi had returned home to Saudi Arabia after 9/11 when it became clear that he was under intense scrutiny by the FBI. He insisted to Zelikow and Snell that he had no idea Hazmi and Mihdhar might be tied to al-Qaeda, that he had befriended them in accordance with the best traditions of Muslim hospitality. He repeated the unlikely account of how he met the two men in February 2000 by coincidence at a halal restaurant near Los Angeles International Airport.
Thumairy had a problem in insisting to the FBI after 9/11 that he did not know Bayoumi, because Bayoumi acknowledged that he knew Thumairy. Bayoumi said he and the Saudi diplomat had talked on occasion at the King Fahd mosque—“solely on religious matters,” Bayoumi claimed.
The commission’s interview with Thumairy was scheduled for the middle of the night in Riyadh, traditional work hours for Saudi government officials. They tended to sleep or rest through the day, given the country’s harsh daytime temperatures. Thumairy arrived in a conference room at the visitors palace in traditional white robes and headdress.
Given what he knew about Thumairy and his support for violent extremism, Raj De was hesitant to shake his hand. It was like shaking the hand of a terrorist, he thought. De remembered Thumairy as short and slight, with small, dark eyes.
The Saudi government had made the arrangements for Thumairy’s interrogation, and Saudi minders joined in on the conversation. They were almost certainly there to make sure Thumairy said nothing that compromised the Saudi government. Although Thumairy must have understood the consequences if he misspoke to the 9/11 commission, he demonstrated remarkable calm at the start of the questioning. He spoke in Arabic through an interpreter at the beginning of the conversation, but later, as the questions from his English-language interrogators became accusatory, he switched to English for his answers.
Thumairy told the story he had told before to the FBI: that he was not a Muslim extremist, that he was not anti-American, and that it was “ridiculous” to try to link him to some sort of Saudi government support network for 9/11.
“I do not know this man Bayoumi,” he said. He certainly did not know Hazmi and Mihdhar, the hijackers, he insisted. It was possible, of course, that he had been in the King Fahd mosque at some time when Bayoumi or the hijackers had gone there to worship, but that certainly did not mean he knew them; thousands of Muslims from across Southern California worshipped there.
Raj De interrupted Thumairy. “Your phone records tell a different story,” said the young American. “We have your phone records.”
Thumairy was silent for a moment. It occurred to De that Thumairy had not expected to be cross-examined like this. Perhaps the Saudi thought he still enjoyed some sort of diplomatic immunity. Maybe he thought his phone records back in Los Angeles were protected from release by some diplomatic nicety? The expression on his face was one of shock.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Thumairy said, agitated.
De explained that the commission had obtained FBI records that documented numerous phone calls between Bayoumi and Thumairy between December 1998 and December 2000. Bayoumi had called Thumairy’s home telephone number at least ten times, and Thumairy had called Bayoumi’s cell phone and home phone even more often—at least eleven times in December 2000, nine months before the attacks.
“So you still don’t remember Mr. Bayoumi?” De asked sarcastically.
Thumairy began to sputter. “I have contact with a lot of people.”
K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
WASHINGTON, D.C.
There was something theatrical about Doug MacEachin, and it was valuable in a career spent mostly as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. He understood that a fine, well-thought-out intelligence report on some esoteric national security issue might go unread at the White House if there wasn’t a little something in it to grab a reader. A little stagecraft. He was an intellectual, a true scholar, whose specialty at the CIA had been in Soviet and Eastern European affairs. But he knew that a pithy turn of phrase in a report—or some well-timed bit of profanity uttered at just the right moment during an intelligence briefing—would keep his audience awake and engaged.
The marine veteran certainly saw his life as a performance to be savored. MacEachin was no gray bureaucrat. After his 1997 retirement from the CIA, where he had been the agency’s number two analyst, with the title “deputy director for intelligence,” he had gone off to live in the south of France, a place full of the fine wines and beautiful women he so admired. He would have happily stayed there under the Mediterranean sun had he not been invited onto the 9/11 commission by Philip Zelikow, who knew him from projects at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Zelikow thought MacEachin would be a natural to lead the team that would investigate the history of al-Qaeda and the early efforts of the government to deal with it.
By early 2004, MacEachin had spent nearly a year on the commission with his nose in the files of the CIA and other spy agencies, poring over documents that showed what the agency had known about Osama bin Laden and when. And as a career intelligence analyst, he was offended by what he had discovered about the agency’s performance on terrorist threats. There was much to admire in the CIA’s files—the work of middle-ranking officers in the United States and abroad who had recognized the al-Qaeda threat and tried to act on it.
But as someone who had made his reputation as an intelligence analyst, MacEachin was shocked that no one at the senior levels of the CIA had attempted—for years—to catalog and give context to what was known about al-Qaeda. No one had made the effort to present the White House and the rest of the government with a comprehensive analysis of the threat that bin Laden had so obviously posed since the early 1990s. It was not just Zelikow on the commission who believed that the CIA’s analysts had failed so badly in the months and years before 9/11; it was also MacEachin, who had spent so much of his career at Langley.
MacEachin decided to use a little “wise-ass” theater to make that point clear to the members of the 9/11 commission. He was called before the commissioners at a meeting on February 27, 2004, to discuss the progress of his team’s part of the investigation. He opened the session by announcing solemnly that he had just come across a critical intelligence report about al-Qaeda and that he needed urgently to share it with the commissioners. It had been kept from them until now, he said.
He held a copy of the mysterious intelligence report, apparently from the CIA, in one hand. “Commissioners, this is a coincidence, but this is the seventh anniversary of the publication of this really, really critical paper,” he said. “It was a paper written on February 27, 1997.”
The commissioners could see that the 1997 report was full of graphs and charts and timelines. They documented the early chronology of the al-Qaeda threat: the terrorist group’s ties to attacks on Americans in the 1990s, including the shoot-down of two American Black Hawk helicopters in 1993 in Somalia, prompting a firefight in which eighteen American
soldiers were killed; bin Laden’s efforts in the mid-1990s to buy weapons-grade uranium to build nuclear weapons; his later campaign to merge the efforts of terrorist groups from around the Muslim world. MacEachin had prepared PowerPoint slides of some of the charts from the report, so the commissioners could see more closely what he was talking about.
The report was startling and also, in a way, comforting. It seemed proof that some forward-thinking analysts within the CIA had tried to gather all the known evidence about al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and pre-sent it to policy makers to convince them of the need for action—action, presumably, to kill bin Laden and destroy his network long before they would have the chance to carry out 9/11.
“This is wild,” Tom Kean said.
“Why don’t we have this document?” demanded Jamie Gorelick, startled that she had never heard of it before. “I insist that we get a copy.”
“What the fuck?” Bob Kerrey said incredulously. He had been deputy chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1997 and should have seen such a finely crafted bit of intelligence analysis. MacEachin would later recall having to “bring Kerrey down off the ceiling,” he was so angry.
Then a devilish smile crossed MacEachin’s face. “I lied,” he said. “There was no such document.” He had written this “report” himself. “But my point is there could have been such a document in 1997,” he told the commissioners. There should have been such a report, he said. All of the information in the document was available within the CIA by February 1997, but nobody within the CIA had thought to pull it all together.
It was astounding, MacEachin explained. But for almost four years before 9/11, the CIA had not issued a so-called national intelligence estimate on terrorism. Even after the bombing of two American embassies in Africa in 1998. Even after the bombing of an American warship, the Cole, in the port of Aden, Yemen, in October 2000, only eleven months before the 9/11 attacks.
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