The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  That changed when Giuliani, being questioned by Slade Gorton, suggested that the problem with the fire department’s faulty radios did not explain why so many firemen had died on September 11. He suggested that the firemen had chosen to remain in the North Tower, despite evacuation orders, because they wanted to help with the rescue. “Their willingness, the way I describe it, to stand their ground and not retreat,” he said.

  That was too much for many of the families of the firemen. To clear his own conscience, or to duck the blame for the faulty radios, Giuliani seemed to be suggesting that their fathers and sons and brothers had chosen to die.

  “Talk about the radios!” a man in the audience screamed out, interrupting Giuliani.

  Another voice yelled out from among the families: “Put one of us on the panel—just one of us!”

  Kean tried to interrupt the protesters. “You are simply wasting time at this point, which should be used for questions,” he said.

  The questioning turned to Lee Hamilton, who said he had no questions but wanted to say that “it’s important that I simply express to you my appreciation not just for your leadership—you’ve heard a lot of that this morning—but also because of the cooperation you’ve given this commission and the candor with which you’ve responded this morning.”

  “Stop kissing ass!” one of the family advocates screamed out at Hamilton. “Three thousand people are dead!”

  There was another voice: “Give me two minutes to rebut him—two minutes to ask a couple of real questions.”

  And another: “My brother was a fireman, and I want to know why three hundred firemen died. And I’ve got some real questions. Let’s ask some real questions. Is that unfair?”

  Another family member spoke up for Giuliani from the audience: “You know what? My brother was one of the firemen that was killed, and I think the mayor did a great job, so sit down and shut up.”

  WHEN IT was over, Kean and Hamilton realized that the Giuliani hearing had been a “low point” for the commission. It was a moment when the commission had abdicated its responsibility to ask tough questions. “It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or of Mayor Giuliani,” Kean and Hamilton later wrote. “To those assembled in our hearing audience, it seemed that there was no middle ground: Either the response to 9/11 was heroic and as good as it could have been or it was a terrible failure, and individuals had to be blamed.”

  50

  OFFICES OF THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE

  CIA Headquarters

  Langley, Va.

  JULY 2, 2004

  Bill Clinton was ready to kill Osama bin Laden in late 1998; there wasn’t any doubt. Even Philip Zelikow, who had been so critical of the Clinton administration for dealing with terrorism as a law enforcement problem rather than a dire threat to national security, could see that Clinton had done it. He had effectively signed bin Laden’s death warrant.

  The proof was in a one-page document found by the commission, almost by accident, in the files of the National Archives in the late spring of 2004. The document had been drafted just before Christmas 1998, a part of a so-called memorandum of notification; MONs were special, highly classified documents signed by the president that made changes that granted authority to the CIA for covert operations. This MON, sent by Sandy Berger to Clinton on Christmas Eve 1998, gave the CIA authority to kill Osama bin Laden.

  The exact wording of the MON remains classified, but Zelikow said later that the one-page document amounted to the “operative language” in the MON—it was the page of instructions about how to carry out the mission. It was the “kill authority,” Zelikow later said. “According to one of the administration’s lawyers, it was one of the most sensitive and extraordinary documents signed out during President Clinton’s time in office.”

  The December 1998 MON replaced an earlier one that had directed the CIA, through its allies among tribal leaders in Afghanistan, to capture bin Laden but barred them from killing the al-Qaeda leader, except in self-defense. Frustrated by the fruitless search for bin Laden after the August 1998 embassy bombs, Clinton agreed in the new MON to give the tribes the authority to kill bin Laden if his capture seemed impossible. Clinton’s aides justified what might be perceived as the assassination of bin Laden. They argued that because the al-Qaeda leader posed an imminent threat to the United States and its citizens, his death would be seen as self-defense—and justified under international law.

  As a historian, Zelikow was thrilled by the discovery, even if it tended to bolster the idea that Bill Clinton was more determined to destroy al-Qaeda than Zelikow’s friends in the Bush White House wanted to believe.

  The Christmas MON resolved an important mystery that had been percolating throughout the investigation: the question whether Clinton had given legal authority to the CIA to kill bin Laden. For months, George Tenet and the others at the CIA had suggested that there was no lethal authority, or at least that the authority was so muddied up by legalisms that effectively there was no authority to kill bin Laden. Tenet had insisted in his private interviews with the commission that “the White House did not authorize a straight kill operation,” Zelikow said. CIA agents in the field in Afghanistan had clearly felt that they did not have the authority.

  But senior Clinton administration officials, Sandy Berger in particular, had insisted that there was a direct order and that the commission needed to keep digging to find it.

  Zelikow and others on the commission’s staff would later conclude that the key one-page document they found in the archives had not been withheld intentionally from the commission; it was just so highly classified and tightly held that there would have been few copies of it to find.

  During the commission’s investigation, inspection of the MONs was left mostly to Alexis Albion, who found it a challenge to understand them since so much of the language was so heavily lawyered. But that was not the case with this one-page document. She agreed with Zelikow: It was written in stark language. It included a list of instructions that were to be read to Afghan tribal leaders as they prepared to try to take bin Laden into custody. It was very clear to Albion and Zelikow that the president was telling the tribal leaders they could kill bin Laden.

  The wording had been revised to remove any doubt among CIA officers in the field and the tribal leaders that “if a capture operation is not feasible, you may conduct an operation to kill him,” Zelikow recalled. “There were no euphemisms in the language.”

  So why had Tenet and others insisted in all of their interviews with the commission that there was no such order, no such explicit authority? The one-page document appeared not only to have received Tenet’s blessing; it appeared to have been written at his request following conversations between himself and Berger. The commission needed to talk to Tenet again to find out why, once again, his memory appeared to be so cloudy on this and so many other issues. Zelikow asked for another private interview with Tenet.

  THE INTERVIEW was scheduled for July 2, 2004, again in Tenet’s conference room on the seventh floor at CIA headquarters. Tenet was wary of being interviewed by the commission privately for a third time. He called Jamie Gorelick, an old friend, and others to find out what Zelikow and the commission were up to. She assured him that Zelikow just had a few follow-up questions; there was nothing for him to worry about.

  But in fact, for Zelikow, Albion, and others on the commission, this interview was a final test of Tenet’s credibility. Now they had the December 1998 document. Would Tenet still claim that he knew nothing about a document that gave explicit authority to the CIA to kill bin Laden?

  Zelikow and Albion took their seats around Tenet’s conference table. It was only two days before the Independence Day holiday weekend, and Tenet looked, as usual, as though he needed a long vacation—drawn, exhausted. Still, he put on his best smile, welcoming the commission’s investigators back to
the CIA even if he had reason to believe they meant him ill.

  Zelikow said he wanted to discuss the Christmas 1998 MON.

  “What are you referring to?” Tenet replied.

  Zelikow explained that the commission had found the one-page document of instructions that gave direct authority to the CIA to kill bin Laden through the Afghan tribes. That seemed to conflict with Tenet’s insistence through all the months of interviews that there had been no such authority.

  “I’m not sure I know what we’re taking about,” Tenet replied. He said he knew nothing about the one-page document. He suggested he was aware of a separate draft of the MON, dated December 21, 1998, that had no explicit lethal authority.

  Zelikow tried explaining again what the commission had found. There was a December 24 revision of the MON, apparently requested by Tenet himself, that gave the CIA precisely what it needed: the authority to kill Osama bin Laden. The revision included the one-page “kill” authorization. Surely Tenet remembered it?

  Tenet smiled and repeated his reply: He was not sure what Zelikow was referring to. Perhaps Zelikow had a copy to show him? Zelikow did not; the MON was so highly classified that he had no authority to travel with it, even the few miles from downtown Washington to the CIA. “Well, as I say, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tenet said.

  Zelikow and Albion looked at each other across the table in disbelief. It was the last straw with Tenet, the final bit of proof they needed to demonstrate that Tenet simply could not tell the truth to the commission.

  Zelikow later insisted that the realization was long in coming, but he said he concluded that Tenet’s “memory lapses” were not that. This final interview seemed to prove it. Zelikow said he “slowly came to conclude that George had decided not to share information on any topic unless we already had documentary proof, and then he would add as little as possible to the record.”

  It was only later that Tenet would learn how Zelikow and others on the commission had, behind his back, accused him of lying—of perjury, essentially, since he had been under oath at each of his private sessions.

  In the case of the Christmas MON, for example, he told colleagues he was telling the truth when he said he did not remember it—he had been on his Christmas vacation with his family when it had been signed by Clinton and when its message was transmitted to CIA operatives and tribal leaders in Afghanistan.

  And although Zelikow and the commission tried to portray the 1998 MON as a clear-cut authorization to kill bin Laden, it was apparently clear-cut only for a specific group of bin Laden’s potential assassins. In February 1999, another MON went to Clinton that granted lethal authority to the insurgent Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. But in that case, Clinton had gone out of his way to cross out the key language allowing bin Laden to be killed if necessary. Clinton would later tell the commission he could not remember why he had given authority to take bin Laden’s life to the Afghan tribal leaders but not to the Northern Alliance.

  LIKE ALMOST everybody else on the commission who knew George Tenet, Tim Roemer liked him. But like so many others, Roemer felt he could not trust him. After investigating the 9/11 attacks for almost three years nonstop—first on the joint congressional committee when he was still a member of the House and now on the 9/11 commission—Roemer was even more confounded by how poorly Tenet had done his job at the CIA in the months before 9/11.

  Roemer had heard Tenet’s excuses for why he did not act on the reports in mid-August 2001 within the CIA about Zacarias Moussaoui’s arrest in Minnesota—how Tenet figured that since it was an FBI domestic case, surely the FBI had it under control. Roemer thought it was a lousy explanation. Tenet knew as well as anyone how dysfunctional the FBI was in terrorism investigations; certainly he knew that in August 2001, the FBI was under temporary leadership—Robert Mueller’s arrival was still weeks away—and that FBI headquarters would need some prodding. “The report about Moussaoui shoots up the chain of command at the CIA like the lit fuse on a bomb, but Director Tenet never picks up the phone to call the FBI about it?” Roemer said.

  Roemer thought the world might be a very different place if that single, simple phone call had been placed—if Tenet had telephoned Tom Pickard, the acting FBI director, who at that moment was ignorant of Moussaoui’s arrest, to tell him that the CIA was ready to help out on the case. Roemer said he was astonished when he learned that Tenet went to a Principals Committee meeting at the White House on terrorism on September 4 and said nothing about Moussaoui then, either. “If the system is blinking red, why don’t you bring it up?” Roemer asked.

  Roemer had heard all of the criticism within the commission, certainly from Zelikow, about Tenet’s credibility. But Roemer wanted to withhold judgment about Tenet; it was a serious matter, of course, to accuse a senior government official of lying under oath. That changed for Roemer on April 14, when Tenet appeared at the second of his two public hearings before the commission and was being questioned about the events of August 2001.

  Roemer wanted to know about Tenet’s discussions that summer with President Bush about terrorist warnings, especially the period around August 6, when Bush received the now-famous PDB at his Texas ranch that detailed domestic terrorist threats. What had the CIA told Bush in the weeks before 9/11 about a possible al-Qaeda attack?

  Roemer: “You see him on August sixth with the PDB—”

  Tenet: “No, I do not, sir. I’m not there.”

  Roemer: “Okay. You’re not the—when do you see him in August?”

  Tenet: “I don’t believe I do.”

  Roemer: “You don’t see the president of the United States once in the month of August?”

  Tenet: “He’s in Texas, and I’m either here or on leave for some of that time. So I’m not here.”

  Roemer: “So who’s briefing him on the PDBs?”

  Tenet: “The briefer himself. We have a presidential briefer.”

  Roemer: “So—but you never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk, at this level of high chatter and huge warnings during the spring and summer, to talk to him, through the whole month of August?”

  Tenet: “Talked to—we talked to him directly throughout the spring and early summer, almost every day.”

  Roemer: “But not in August?”

  Tenet: “In this time period, I’m not talking to him, no.”

  To Roemer and many in the audience, it seemed like a bombshell. For a full month in what was being called “the summer of threat,” the CIA director was not in contact with the president? It was all the more alarming given the repeated claim by Bush and Condoleezza Rice that the president depended principally on Tenet for his information about terrorist threats. It was true that by August, the terrorist threat appeared to have diminished. But there was still clearly a threat; the August 6 PDB talked about recent evidence of terrorist surveillance of the skyline of New York, after all. Wouldn’t Tenet want to follow up with Bush on the information in the PDB at some point in the month?

  But if Tenet was insisting that there had been no briefing, Roemer was in no position at the public hearing to pursue it. He moved on to a different question.

  Roemer was startled that evening to learn that the CIA’s press office had been calling reporters to correct the record. Tenet had misspoken. He had briefed Bush in August 2001. Twice. He had flown to Waco, Texas, the airport closest to the president’s ranch in Crawford, on August 17 to brief the president personally about intelligence issues; it was Tenet’s first visit to Bush’s ranch. And then he briefed Bush again in Washington on August 31. In its call-out to reporters, the CIA did not disclose the subject of either of the conversations between the president and Tenet.

  ROEMER WAS furious with Tenet. Either Tenet’s memory was faulty to the point of dementia or he had lied, hoping that no one would learn what had been discussed between him and Bush on August 16 and August 31. The Texas briefing was especially perplexing. How do you claim to forget flying halfway across the co
untry to brief the president of the United States at his Texas ranch in the middle of August? “It’s probably 110 degrees down there, hotter than Hades,” Roemer said. “You make one trip down there the whole month and you can’t remember what motivates you to go down there to talk to the president?”

  By now, Roemer felt he was entitled to assume the worst about Tenet’s veracity—and the worst about what had actually happened in August between him and the president. He suspected that Tenet had gone to Texas specifically to talk to Bush about the domestic terrorists, to press upon him that he needed to pay attention to the sort of information that was in the August 6 PDB.

  Tenet has since given conflicting accounts about what happened at the meeting at Bush’s ranch, suggesting at times that the conversation with the president had nothing to do with the August 6 PDB. In his 2007 memoirs, At the Center of the Storm, however, he seems to link the PDB to his visit to the ranch, noting that “a few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events.” Tenet wrote that it was his first visit to Bush’s ranch, which had made the trip especially memorable: “I remember the president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and fauna, none of which were native to Queens.” (Tenet was raised in the New York City borough.) If Roemer’s suspicions were right, that meant that the CIA had warned Bush not once but at least twice in August 2001 that al-Qaeda was planning to attack in the United States. The second time had been face-to-face with Tenet in the brutal summer heat of central Texas.

  51

  J. EDGAR HOOVER FBI BUILDING

  Washington, D.C.

  APRIL 2004

  FBI director Robert Mueller understood that the commission, or at least its staff, was gunning for the bureau. He knew the commission’s team of investigators focused on the FBI’s disastrous pre-9/11 performance—Team 6—included former bureau employees who were all too aware of the bureau’s failings. And he was right to be worried. Most of the team was convinced that the bureau needed to be overhauled, maybe even broken up and replaced by an American MI-5. As they set to work in the spring of 2004 to draft recommendations for the commission to endorse in its final report, they thought they had the commissioners behind them. John Lehman in particular had talked openly of the need for a separate domestic spy agency to replace the FBI. At the start of the investigation, Lehman had thought “it was a no-brainer that we should go to an MI-5.”