But members of Team 6, as well as the commissioners, had no idea what they were up against in Mueller. He was determined to keep the bureau intact, and he still had plenty of weaponry at his disposal—his tenacity, most importantly. It was painful for a man as shy as Mueller to contemplate, but he and his aides knew that a full-court, in-your-face lobbying effort by the FBI director might make the difference with the commissioners who seemed most determined to break up the FBI.
By the spring of 2004, Mueller had been at the bureau for more than two years, and he had come to understand the mystique that the FBI still had. He could see that no matter how well its pre-9/11 failures were documented, no matter how poorly it continued to do its job after 9/11, the FBI was an institution that still managed to inspire the respect of much of the public, even if it did not deserve it. Hollywood was part of the reason; the arbiters of popular culture continued to celebrate the bureau, to want to assume the best about it. In the years after the 2001 terrorist attacks, CBS television alone launched four weekly series about the heroic exploits of FBI agents.
Mueller did not talk about it openly, but his deputies say he was also aware of how much fear the FBI continued to inspire among Washington’s powerful and how, even after 9/11, that fear dampened public criticism. Members of Congress who might otherwise describe themselves as champions of civil liberties shrank at the thought of attacking the FBI. Why make an enemy of an agency that has the power to tap your phones and harass your friends and neighbors? For many on Capitol Hill, there was always the assumption that there was an embarrassing FBI file somewhere with your name on it, ready to be leaked at just the right moment. More than one member of the 9/11 commission admitted privately that they had joked—and worried—among themselves about the danger of being a little too publicly critical of the bureau.
MUELLER’S LOBBYING campaign with the 9/11 commissioners could not have been more aggressive. He was in their faces, literally. The commissioners said later that it was a remarkable thing to have the director of the FBI announce that he was ready to open his schedule to them at a moment’s notice. He would return phone calls within minutes. He would meet the commissioners whenever and wherever they wished—breakfast, lunch, dinner, at the FBI’s expense, of course. If a commissioner wanted to meet with Mueller in Washington, he would volunteer to drive across town to do it. Dan Marcus, the commission’s general counsel, referred to it as “Mueller’s dog-and-pony show.” For some of the commissioners, Mueller’s lobbying got to the point of near harassment. Tom Kean told his secretaries at Drew University to turn away Mueller’s repeated invitations for a meal.
At some point, Mueller decided to take the biggest possible risk with the commission—“to go for broke,” one of his top aides at the bureau later said. Mueller could see that the lobbying was paying off. The commissioners were becoming his friends and admirers. So he agreed to open the commission’s case files to the investigation, virtually all of them. He directed his staff to open up a special office at FBI headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and provide the commission’s investigators with electronic identification cards that allowed them instant access to the building. They could come and go as they pleased. Computer terminals were placed in the commission’s room that allowed the investigators to have direct access to the FBI computerized case files, such as they were.
In the minds of the commissioners, Mueller was creating a clear—and, in terms of the FBI’s survival, essential—distinction between himself and his CIA counterpart, George Tenet. While Philip Zelikow was reporting back to the commission about Tenet’s duplicity and his unwillingness to answer basic questions, the commissioners were seeing Mueller for themselves. And they clearly loved the attention he was lavishing on them.
Slade Gorton would later agree with the statement that Mueller’s lobbying prevented the FBI from being dismantled, that Mueller had “saved the FBI.” He was a fresh face within the federal government, and he was saying the right things about the need to reform the bureau. “Mueller was a guy who came in new and was trying to do something different, as opposed to Tenet,” said Gorton. It was a pleasure to deal with Mueller, who seemed so eager to cooperate. Tenet? “The president should have fired George Tenet in the first week after 9/11 and started all over,” Gorton said.
Mueller also benefited from a decision that Lee Hamilton had made. Hamilton had been calling for years for a shake-up of the intelligence community and the creation of a national intelligence director, a superspy to oversee the workings of all of the nation’s agencies, including the FBI. That meant a major overhaul of the CIA.
Whatever the failings of the FBI, Hamilton believed that the government could not afford to overhaul two major institutions—the CIA and the FBI—at the same time, especially in what was being described as a time of war. If only one could be shaken up, Hamilton felt it should be the CIA, not the bureau. This was, then, a zero-sum game. “Mueller had made a very favorable impression on the commission, and on me,” Hamilton said later. “We were recommending major changes in the intelligence community. And I, among others—maybe more than others—believed that the system can only stand so much change.”
AT OXFORD, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller had charmed an audience in the role of fairy godmother in a school production of Cinderella. Her colleagues at MI-5, the British domestic spy agency, said there was still something of a fairy godmother about her as she went about her job in 2004. It was as if there were some magic wand that allowed her to dispel all self-doubt in the face of the terrorists who, she was certain, were walking the streets of Britain, waiting to attack. Dame Eliza had led MI-5 as its director general since 2002, a job that made her the person most responsible for preempting terrorism on British soil.
If the pressures of such a thankless job weighed on her, Dame Eliza did not let it show. She carried out her duties with the air of the supremely confident aristocrat she was. Effortless self-confidence had been bred into her; her father was a viscount and had been Britain’s lord chancellor in the 1960s. She had hobnobbed with royalty since childhood. In the British press, there were frequent, if obvious and sexist, comparisons between Dame Eliza and “M,” the spymaster played most recently by Dame Judi Dench in the James Bond movies; friends said that Dame Eliza was far more collegial than Dame Judi’s M. (And unlike M, who ran a fictional version of MI-6, the British equivalent of the CIA, Dame Eliza had spying responsibilities that were mostly domestic, not foreign.)
Dame Eliza had arrived in Washington in early 2004 to help play fairy godmother once more—this time for her new friend at the FBI, Bob Mueller. She would try to help grant Mueller his wish to prevent the 9/11 commission from breaking up the bureau. Since the FBI had responsibility for domestic counterterrorism, Mueller amounted to Dame Eliza’s closest counterpart in the American government, and the two had bonded since 9/11. The ties had grown closer after the Iraq invasion in 2003, when it became clear that British support for the war would make Britain an almost certain target for new al-Qaeda attacks.
During one of her regular trips to Washington, Dame Eliza rearranged her schedule to permit a visit to the 9/11 commission’s offices for an interview. She took a seat in the conference room on K Street—and instantly took command of her audience. She set about dismantling the idea that the United States could have its own MI-5.
“It just wouldn’t work for you,” she told the commissioners. “The United States is too large.”
Dame Eliza said that in a country as physically small as Britain, with less than a quarter of the population of the United States, it was much easier for a central spy agency to maintain close ties with local police departments and keep watch on the population. There were fewer than sixty chief police constables in all of Britain, and she said she knew them all by name. She reminded the commissioners that there were also important civil liberties differences between Britain and the United States. The United Kingdom had no written constitution and far more limited guarantees of personal privacy. The lev
el of electronic surveillance carried out by MI-5 would raise severe constitutional issues if the United States government tried to carry out something similar.
One of the commissioners pointed out the relative success that MI-5 had in dealing for generations with the Irish Republican Army. Why couldn’t that success be repeated with Muslim extremists who might now be in the United States?
“It’s not a good comparison,” Dame Eliza explained. “First, IRA terrorists were not suicidal. Second, IRA terrorists didn’t deliberately target women and children. And third, the IRA all came from one place—one island, a sort of game farm,” where British secret agents could mix far more easily with the community and target and capture—or kill—the terrorists.
The commissioners could not determine if Dame Eliza was trying for a bit of dark humor with the reference to a “game farm.” She said it with a straight face.
IN APRIL, Mueller was called to testify publicly before the commission. He might have expected that it might be the showdown in which he would be asked to explain, in excruciating detail, how the FBI had blundered so often before 9/11—the familiar roster of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Phoenix memo, the disasters in San Diego. Instead, he was welcomed as a hero.
Tom Kean: “I came to this job with less knowledge of the intelligence community than anybody else at this table. What I’ve learned has not reassured me. It’s frightened me a bit, frankly. But the reassuring figure in it all is you, because everybody I talk to in this town, a town which seems to have a sport in basically not liking each other very much—everybody likes you, everybody respects you, everybody has great hopes that you’re actually going to fix this problem.”
John Lehman: “I’d like to echo the encomiums of my colleagues about how good the process has been working with you from the first time you got together with us a year and a quarter ago. It’s been a very—very much of a two-way dialogue. You’ve clearly listened to us, and you’ve taught us a good deal.”
Richard Ben-Veniste joked about Mueller’s aggressive lobbying campaign—and praised it. “Let me first echo the comments of my colleagues on this commission, say how much we appreciate not only the time that you’ve given us, but the interactive nature of our relationship with you. You have been responsive to our questions. You’ve come back. Sometimes you’ve come back and showed up when you weren’t invited. But we appreciate that.” The audience laughed.
Mueller smiled. “I don’t recall that occurrence.”
Slade Gorton hinted at what the outcome might have been for the FBI—its dismantling—without Mueller’s lobbying: “Mr. Mueller, not only have you done a very aggressive and, I think, so far a very effective reorganization of the FBI, you’ve done an excellent job in preempting this commission.”
52
K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION
Washington, D.C.
JUNE 2004
Lloyd Salvetti liked to say that he ran “the best museum you’ve never seen.” It was the CIA’s own museum at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia. And like the rest of the CIA compound, it was not open to the public. After a thirty-two-year career at the agency that included stints undercover in Europe and an assignment on the National Security Council in the 1990s, Salvetti was given his last assignment at the CIA as director of its Center for the Study of Intelligence. The center functioned as the CIA’s internal think tank and history department. It was also responsible for the museum, which boasted spyware artifacts that included a KGB-designed umbrella that doubled as a weapon (poison pellets were released from the tip) and a spy camera disguised as a matchbox; Kodak had built the miniature camera at the CIA’s request in the 1960s. Other items went much further back into the intelligence history, including one of the Enigma code machines used by the Germans in World War II. The cracking of the Enigma codes was considered one of the Allies’ great intelligence coups.
Salvetti had been recruited for the 9/11 commission by Philip Zelikow; they had been colleagues together on the NSC. Considered a Renaissance man among spies, Salvetti took on a variety of assignments in the investigation. He formed a close friendship with Lorry Fenner, the air force intelligence officer, if only because both had scholarly backgrounds; she held a PhD in history from the University of Michigan.
In June 2004, Fenner needed Salvetti’s help, albeit quietly. As a career military officer, she was not comfortable breaching the chain of command and did not feel comfortable approaching Zelikow directly about her dilemma with the NSA terrorism archives. This was not her job. Reviewing the NSA documents had nothing to do with her formal duties on the commission; her team was focused on the overall structure of the intelligence community, not the details of the government’s surveillance of al-Qaeda. But she trusted Salvetti, and with only weeks left in the commission’s investigation, she wanted to share her growing alarm that the NSA documents were going unread.
Since December, she had spent several days in the NSA reading room in downtown Washington, two or three hours at a time. And the more she read from the NSA files, the more worried she became about what the commission had missed. She was especially worried about the files she had seen that seemed to suggest the relationship between al-Qaeda and Iran, and between Osama bin Laden and the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
The NSA files were tough reading. They were densely written and were often cross-referenced with other documents not immediately available to the commission because they were still back at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade in suburban Maryland. They would be made available if the commission wanted to see them, but it would take time to retrieve them.
When she saw the first of the material about Iran and al-Qaeda, Fenner hoped that someone had already been through all of it—that she was duplicating someone else’s effort on the commission. Maybe her alarm was unwarranted, she thought, “but I thought that I’d still better tell somebody.” She wanted Salvetti to be a second set of experienced eyes to help her look over what she was finding, someone “who would know more than I would.”
At her urging, Salvetti walked over to the NSA’s reading room and began to read some of the files that Fenner had set aside for him. It was not long before he could see that Fenner’s worries were well-founded. The NSA files were a gold mine, full of critical information about al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups dating back to the early 1990s—material that the commission should have read through months earlier. Salvetti knew nothing about the detailed links between Iran and al-Qaeda, for example, and he feared no one else at the commission did, either.
“Holy moley,” he said to himself, almost smacking his forehead as he read through the first of the documents and saw how important they were. “You come away with the inference that there was an implicit collaboration between the jihadists and elements of Hezbollah and Iran.” But what should he and Fenner do? The commission’s final report was supposed to be completed within days: “It was the eleventh hour.”
That al-Qaeda had contacts with Iran and Hezbollah had been reported for years. There were well-documented communications between al-Qaeda and Iranian and Hezbollah officials when bin Laden’s network was based in Sudan in the mid-1990s.
But the NSA files suggested that the ties were much more direct than had been previously known, and much more recent. Alarmingly, they showed that Iranian authorities had helped facilitate the travels of several of the 9/11 hijackers in the year before the attacks. There was nothing to suggest that Iran or Hezbollah leaders had knowledge of the 9/11 plot. But there was plenty of evidence to show that they had made special arrangements to allow many of the 9/11 hijackers to visit or pass through Iran.
According to the files, at least eight of the fourteen young Saudi men who were “muscle” hijackers on the 9/11 flights traveled through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001, when the plot was well advanced. In November, three of the young Saudis, who had obtained American visas only the month before, flew together from Saudi Arabia to Beirut and then on to Iran;
the NSA files showed that an associate of a prominent Hezbollah official was on the same flight and that other senior Hezbollah figures were closely monitoring the travels of the three young Saudis. Later that month, two more of the “muscle” hijackers flew to Iran. There were similarities to the discoveries being made in the commission’s “plot” team about the Saudi expatriates in San Diego and the help they provided to Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. If these connections between the 9/11 terrorists and Iran and Tehran’s allies in Hezbollah were all a coincidence, it was a remarkable one.
Salvetti thought that Doug MacEachin, the veteran CIA analyst, needed to see this, too. From his work on the commission, MacEachin was the commission’s best historian on al-Qaeda. The NSA documents would mean even more to him than to Salvetti or Fenner. After a short visit to the NSA reading room, MacEachin was just as alarmed as they were.
“This is trouble,” he said. “We’ve got to call Hayden.” He was referring to General Michael Hayden, head of the NSA. The commission would need to organize a trip as soon as possible to the NSA’s headquarters to review the rest of the material.
To his credit, Zelikow immediately understood the implications of what Fenner had discovered: A huge archive of the intelligence community on al-Qaeda and terrorist threats had not been adequately reviewed. And he understood there was almost no time left to do it. He helped organize an early morning trip that weekend by Salvetti, MacEachin, and others to the NSA’s headquarters in Maryland to begin poring over the files. The group left before 7:00 a.m. and stayed virtually all day.
The Commission Page 43