The reputation of NIEs had become tarnished in the aftermath of the Iraq war, when it was discovered that the prewar NIE on Iraq’s purported stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction was wrong in almost every essential detail. But for many years before that, NIEs had a different reputation. They were considered the gold standard of American intelligence. They were the trusted, authoritative documents that outlined the best information available to the CIA and the government’s other spy agencies about national security threats.
The last full NIE on terrorism had been issued in 1997, and it was mostly an update of what MacEachin thought was an excellent, although incomplete, NIE on the subject two years earlier. The prescient 1995 document was prompted in part by the World Trade Center bombing two years earlier. It predicted that international terrorist groups would attack again on American soil and that the danger would only increase with time. It identified potential targets of attacks, including the White House, the Capitol, and the symbols of capitalism on Wall Street, such as the World Trade Center. The 1997 update mentioned Osama bin Laden only in passing—only a few sentences in a six-page document—and did not include any mention of al-Qaeda by name.
After 1997, the CIA issued a variety of analytical papers about bin Laden and the threat of al-Qaeda, and some of them were reasonably detailed and impressive, MacEachin thought. Information from many of the reports made its way into the president’s daily briefs, so they were seen—in bits and pieces—at the White House.
But there was no NIE, and MacEachin thought that helped explain why the response to the 1998 embassy bombings had been so timid—cruise missiles sent against bin Laden’s deserted Afghan training camps and against a factory in Sudan that may or may not have produced chemical weapons—and why the attack on the Cole in 2000 had gone entirely unanswered by both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
MacEachin thought it was “unforgivable” that there had been no NIE for four years before the 9/11 attacks. He thought that if policy makers had understood that the embassy bombings and the attack on the Cole were simply the latest in a long series of attacks by the same enemy, they would have felt compelled to do much more in response.
Instead of providing analysis that gave context to a national security threat, he said, the CIA had turned itself in the late 1990s into a “headline service” that fed small nuggets of intelligence about terrorist threats to policy makers but never made the larger context clear. That gave officials at the White House and elsewhere a chance to duck responsibility when it came to responding to individual attacks. The Cole was the most appalling example of it, MacEachin thought. By any standard, an attack on an American warship in a foreign port was a true act of war; it should have demanded an immediate, and devastating, reaction.
Even though it was obvious within days that al-Qaeda was respon-sible for bombing the destroyer, Clinton was clearly not eager to respond; a response might well have been seen as yet another “wag the dog” moment, this time intended to help Al Gore clinch an election victory the following month. When Bush and his new team came to office three months later, they saw the Cole attack as old news; it had happened on Clinton’s watch.
It occurred to many on the commission—commissioners and staff alike—that a fierce response to the Cole might have preempted or at least delayed the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11. If Clinton or Bush had pounded al-Qaeda’s camps in Afghanistan, really turned them into dust, and ordered the FBI and CIA to begin a worldwide manhunt to find bin Laden and his allies, wasn’t it just possible that bin Laden might have been tempted to rethink 9/11? Wouldn’t that have made the FBI and CIA work harder to coordinate the clues in front of them? The commission’s investigation had turned up evidence to suggest that the timing of the 9/11 attacks was decided only in late August 2001. According to the CIA interrogation reports, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind, had told his interrogators that bin Laden might have canceled the 9/11 attacks if he had known about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in August in Minnesota. But bin Laden, like the acting director of the FBI that summer, did not learn about the arrest until after September 11.
The evidence suggested that the lack of an American response to the Cole had, in fact, emboldened bin Laden to carry out larger attacks. The commission’s investigators came across a chilling intelligence report that quoted an informant as saying in February 2001, four months after the Cole bombing, that “the big instructor,” probably a reference to bin Laden, had wanted and expected an American counterattack to the attack on the destroyer. If there was no American response to the Cole, “the big instructor” planned to launch something deadlier, the report said.
Among the commissioners, no one was more agitated over the Cole than Kerrey. He was a navy man, after all. He was confronted in the mirror every morning with the evidence of the sacrifices he had made in his navy service—the missing ten inches of his right leg, blown away by an enemy grenade in Vietnam. He could not understand why an attack on an American warship, why the deaths of those seventeen sailors aboard the destroyer, should ever have gone unanswered. If there had been a fierce American response that targeted bin Laden after the Cole, wasn’t it just possible that 9/11 might not have happened? He seemed to blame Clinton as much as Bush.
John Lehman took this personally, too. The Cole was, in a sense, part of his legacy as Navy secretary. The destroyer was commissioned in 1996, but the budgeting for it had begun more than a decade earlier, when Lehman was running the Navy in the Reagan administration and doing everything in his power to expand the American fleet.
“It’s astounding,” he said of the decision made early in the Bush administration not to retaliate for the Cole. “Nobody doubted it was al-Qaeda,” he said. But the neoconservatives who were running the Bush administration were “just besotted” with other national security issues—missile defense, Iraq, North Korea, China, Russia. “They were living in another world; they had their own construction of the world, and the Cole was not part of that world. Al-Qaeda was just not part of their threat scenario.”
If there had been a response to the Cole, “I think it could well have avoided 9/11,” he said. “I totally believe that. It would have changed the calculations for Osama.”
45
K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
Washington, D.C.
JANUARY 2004
Len Hawley, the new arrival on Team 3, could see why the staff of the commission was so frustrated. He could certainly understand why Warren Bass, the commission’s NSC specialist, had seemed so close to resigning at the end of 2003. Philip Zelikow’s micromanagement meant that the staff had little, if any, contact with the ten commissioners; all information was funneled through Zelikow, and he decided how it would be shared elsewhere. Hawley certainly heard the allegations about Zelikow’s partisanship—about how he seemed to be trying to shield Condoleezza Rice and others in the Bush administration from the scrutiny they deserved for 9/11—from Bass and the others on the team.
But Hawley was willing to give Zelikow the benefit of the doubt. Hawley found it hard to believe that experienced politicians like Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton would agree to keep Zelikow on as executive director if his efforts to help the White House were so obvious. Perhaps the problem with Zelikow was not partisanship, Hawley told his new colleagues. Perhaps it was just Zelikow’s outsize, abrasive personality. People simply did not like working for him.
At fifty-seven years old, Hawley was older and more experienced than the twenty- and thirty-somethings who populated most of the rest of the commission’s staff. He radiated calm, a sense of having seen it all in Washington and in the government. He had one of the most impressive résumés on the staff, certainly the most varied. A West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, Hawley had spent the first two decades of his career in the army, rising to senior assignments on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as a professor at the National Defense University. He retired with the rank of colonel and went to work on the sta
ff of the House Armed Services Committee and then in the National Security Council and State Department. In the Clinton administration, he had been a deputy assistant secretary of state, overseeing diplomatic efforts in war zones like the Balkans, Sierra Leone, and East Timor. He was seen as likely to get a top diplomatic assignment or NSC job if John Kerry was elected president in 2004.
HAWLEY HAD initially been hired to help ease the burden on Warren Bass and other members of Team 3. And he took on other responsibilities, including helping to prepare Zelikow and the commissioners for private interviews with current and former cabinet members ahead of their public testimony. As an early assignment, he was asked to help prepare the commission for its private questioning of former attorney general Janet Reno; she was scheduled to testify in public in March.
Hawley reviewed what was available to the commission about Reno’s record at the Justice Department on terrorism. He could see she was praised within the department for her aggressive pursuit of criminal investigations involving al-Qaeda, even as she was criticized elsewhere in the government for her unwillingness to lend legal backing to military and spying operations that might end with Osama bin Laden’s assassination. Reno felt the war against al-Qaeda was best handled as a law enforcement operation, with terrorists brought to justice in courtrooms, not executed on the battlefield.
As she took her seat in the commission’s conference room on K Street, Hawley and the other staff members could see that Reno’s Parkinson’s disease had grown worse since her departure from Washington; the shaking of her head and hands had become more violent in the three years since she’d left the Justice Department. (It was certainly much worse than Sandy Berger’s shaking during his private interview.)
There were a few routine pleasantries between Reno and Zelikow, who would lead the questioning, before Zelikow launched into what turned into a fierce interrogation. Zelikow made it obvious, at least to Hawley, that he had utter disdain for Reno and her performance at the Justice Department under Clinton, that she was an architect of the Clinton administration’s weak-kneed antiterrorism policies.
Zelikow asked none of the questions that Hawley had prepared for the interview, instead pursuing his own—all of them focused on demonstrating that Reno had been disorganized, even incompetent, in her management of the department and in overseeing its part in the war on terror.
Hawley was startled by Zelikow’s antagonistic tone. He looked around the room to see if others were as concerned as he was about Zelikow’s treatment of Reno. Reno herself seemed unfazed. As was typical of Reno during her tenure as attorney general, when she routinely faced insults from Republicans anytime she testified on Capitol Hill, she gave no sense that she was offended by Zelikow.
The interview was supposed to last about two hours, and Zelikow had monopolized all but the last five or ten minutes of it before turning to Hawley and the other staff members in the room and asking if they had questions. With only a few minutes left, there was little they could do to try to undo the hostile atmosphere established by Zelikow.
After each private interview, the staff was asked to prepare a memo for the records, or MFR, as it was called in the commission, that summarized what had happened; the MFRs were then shared with commissioners and other staff members who had not attended. After the Reno interview, the task of writing the memo fell to Hawley. He decided that he needed to get across to the commission what Zelikow was up to—that his partisanship had been blatantly on display in his questioning of Reno.
So Hawley prepared a memo that, rather than summarizing the interview, was largely a transcript of the harsh questions that Zelikow had asked and the answers Reno had given.
“I don’t want anybody reading this memo, commissioner or staff, not to understand what happened,” Hawley told colleagues. After the memo was circulated, several people came up to Hawley to report they were offended to see how Reno had been treated by Zelikow. It was a pattern that Hawley would see again and again on the commission. Others would tell him how offended they were by Zelikow and what they saw as his pattern of partisan moves intended to protect the White House in the investigation. But apart from Warren Bass, most would never confront Zelikow themselves. Others on the commission, including some of the commissioners, were frightened of Zelikow.
THE TENSIONS between Zelikow and the rest of the staff kept building in early 2004. Under assault from the 9/11 families and other critics, Zelikow wanted to find some way to get out in front of the attacks before they did lasting damage to his reputation. One way, he thought, was to promote himself as the face of the investigation during a series of high-profile televised public hearings that the commission planned to hold throughout the winter and spring.
Working from a model provided by the joint congressional 9/11 committee, the commission’s teams of investigators were asked to prepare interim staff reports that would be released at the hearings and read out to the audience. Each report was meant to be a summary of the staff’s findings on the topic of the day’s testimony; the reports helped frame the questions that the commissioners would then ask witnesses. They would also form the basis of chapters of the commission’s final report, so they were an important preview of what the commission’s final report that summer would say.
Many of the staff reports made headlines; some rewrote elements of the history of 9/11. Reporters first learned to pay close attention to the interim reports after an early public hearing in January 2004, when the staff released a report that amounted to the first authoritative account of what had happened aboard the four hijacked planes on September 11. In chilling detail, the report revealed how the terrorists had used mace and wielded knives—not box cutters or guns, as had previously been reported—to enter the cockpits and take control of the jets. The same report revealed that at least nine of the nineteen hijackers had been flagged as potential security risks by the FAA’s computer screening system before they boarded the planes; that seemed to undermine the initial claims from the FBI and CIA that the terrorists had nothing in their backgrounds to arouse suspicion.
Zelikow declared to the staff that he, and he alone, should read out the interim reports before the television cameras at the hearings, depriving the principal authors of their moment in the spotlight. Under his plan, the first thirty minutes or so of each public hearing would be another episode of “the Zelikow Show,” as a few of the staffers referred to it disparagingly, with Zelikow reading out the reports that others had written. The staff was furious over Zelikow’s proposal, and several of them went to the commissioners; Zelikow was quickly forced to back down. Kean and Hamilton agreed to a compromise in which Zelikow would read the introduction of each staff report, with the report’s authors following after him, each reading a portion.
Scott Allan, a young lawyer whose specialty was international law and who had worked with Clinton’s United Nations ambassador, Richard Holbrooke, was hired by Zelikow and placed on Team 3. Allan was to focus on the State Department and review the department’s archives on terrorism policy before 9/11. His job was made easier by the fact that, unlike so many other federal agencies, the State Department seemed eager to cooperate with the investigation. That was no surprise since the department’s records showed that Secretary of State Colin Powell had grasped the al-Qaeda threat in the early months of 2001 and mobilized his department to be prepared for an attack. The records made Powell look good.
Allan was also given the assignment of drafting the interim staff report on the history of American diplomat efforts against al-Qaeda. The report was scheduled to be released at a public hearing in March in which Powell and his Clinton administration predecessor as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, would testify. Allan went at the assignment with his usual enthusiasm, producing a draft for Zelikow’s review that outlined the history of diplomatic efforts to monitor bin Laden’s actions in the 1990s and the government’s often fruitless efforts to work with Saudi Arabia and other supposedly friendly Muslim nations to rein in al-Qae
da.
Members of Team 3 expected Zelikow to rewrite the report before it was made public. Zelikow rewrote virtually everything that was handed to him—usually top to bottom, often for the better, given his talents as a stylist. But Allan and other members of Team 3 were shocked when they saw what Zelikow handed back.
In a section about bin Laden’s actions in the 1990s, Zelikow had inserted sentences that tried to link al-Qaeda to Iraq—to suggest that the terrorist network had repeatedly communicated with the government of Saddam Hussein in the years before 9/11 and that bin Laden had seriously weighed moving to Iraq after the Clinton administration pressured the Taliban to oust him from Afghanistan.
The passages were subtly crafted, with enough qualifiers to allow Zelikow to argue that he was not saying definitively that there was a working relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq. But his point was clear, and he must have known what impact the passages would have when reporters and the White House got hold of them. He wanted to put the commission’s staff on record as saying that there was at least the strong possibility that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had collaborated to target the United States before 9/11—precisely the argument that the Bush White House had made furiously before and after the invasion of Iraq.
There was nothing like it at all in Allan’s original draft. More to the point, Allan knew from his colleagues who had been through the archives at the CIA and the White House that there was no clear evidence to back up the idea of close ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The intelligence that did exist was sketchy. Yet Zelikow was coming close to presenting it as fact.
The Commission Page 37