The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  They were escorted to a reading room at NSA headquarters to find huge piles of documents—the raw material on which the reports in the agency’s downtown reading room in Washington were based—and set to work. “There were stacks and stacks of paper,” MacEachin recalled. He sat himself at a table and began to read. “I was angry that I hadn’t seen this before,” he said.

  The next morning at the commission’s offices at K Street, the group began to organize the material they had gathered from the NSA that weekend and hurriedly wrote new passages of the final report. With so little time left, the passages might raise as many questions as they would answer. And at a time when the Bush administration seemed eager to engage in saber rattling with Iran, the staff could see the dangers of overstating what they had found about ties between al-Qaeda and Tehran. The Bush administration had gone to war in Iraq the year before based on faulty intelligence; Fenner and her colleagues did not want to see the same thing happen with Iran.

  “There is strong evidence that Iran facilitated the transit of al-Qaeda members into and out of Afghanistan before 9/11, and some of these were future 9/11 hijackers,” MacEachin and the others wrote, documenting the NSA reports about the movements of the 9/11 hijackers in and out of Iran before the fall of 2001. “We believe this topic requires future investigation by the U.S. government.”

  What was left unsaid in the report, although the staff knew it perfectly well, was that the NSA archives almost certainly contained other vital information about al-Qaeda and its history. But there was no time left to search for it. Zelikow would later admit he too was worried that important classified information had never been reviewed at the NSA and elsewhere in the government before the 9/11 commission shut its doors, that critical evidence about bin Laden’s terrorist network sat buried in government files, unread to this day. By July 2004, it was just too late to keep digging.

  53

  K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION

  Washington, D.C.

  JUNE 2004

  Philip Zeikow came out of his K Street office and went down the hallway to the secure phone-fax machine, the so-called STU-III. The phone, which looked like an ordinary office telephone in many ways, was a model designed by the National Security Agency to scramble phone calls; the call was unscrambled by an STU (Secure Telephone Unit) at the other end of the line. The STU-III was used by the commission’s staff for phone calls that involved discussions of classified information.

  Zelikow was calling the CIA. It was not clear why he believed that the conversation would not be overheard, or why he did not care if it was. Some of the commission’s staffers later saw his carelessness as a final bit of evidence that Zelikow believed that, ultimately, his authority on the commission was unchecked.

  And the call was overheard by one of the commission’s young staff members, who was startled by what he could make out of Zelikow’s end of the conversation.

  Zelikow had called CIA headquarters to conduct an interview with one of the agency’s analysts who had prepared the August 6 PDB. He wanted to know about the origins of the PDB. And from what the young staffer heard, Zelikow’s questions were leading ones, designed to bolster the White House account of where the document had come from and why it had been written for President Bush in the first place.

  With the deadline looming for the final report, Zelikow understood the implications for the White House and Condoleezza Rice if the commission concluded that the PDB was ordered up from within the CIA—not at Bush’s request—and that it was some sort of desperate, last minute effort by the agency to warn Bush of the potential for a domestic terrorist attack that summer.

  Among other things, that would undermine Rice’s sworn testimony in April. She had insisted that the PDB had been written specifically in response to questions raised by President Bush and reflected no new evidence of an imminent domestic threat.

  The young investigator who overheard the conversation could not make out every bit of what Zelikow said. But it was clear to him that Zelikow was pressuring the CIA analyst to accept Rice’s version of events. He was trying to get the analyst to say that the intelligence in the document was mostly “historical,” the word Rice used so often in trying to downplay the PDB’s significance.

  Whatever Zelikow’s intentions in making the call, it seemed a violation of several internal commission rules, including a requirement that significant interviews be conducted in the presence of at least two staff members. With the phone call, Zelikow was conducting a private inquiry into the origins of what was, without doubt, the most controversial document in the investigation.

  OVER THE MONTHS, the staff members who were most worried about Zelikow’s partisanship had set up a back-channel network to alert the Democratic commissioners when they thought Zelikow was up to no good. Tim Roemer said he often got phone calls late at night or on weekends at home from staffers who wanted to talk about Zelikow. “It was like Deep Throat,” Roemer said.

  So word of Zelikow’s phone call to the CIA quickly reached Richard Ben-Veniste, arguably Zelikow’s harshest critic among the Democrats. He had been suspicious of Zelikow from the day of their first meeting in January 2003, worried that Zelikow’s close ties to Rice and the White House would undermine the investigation. For Ben-Veniste, Zelikow’s unauthorized call to the CIA—in what seemed an obvious last minute effort to diminish the importance of the August 6 PDB—was the last straw.

  Ben-Veniste’s Washington law firm was only a block from the commission’s offices on K Street. During his next visit to the commission’s offices, he confronted Zelikow, demanding to see the transcripts of all the interviews with the CIA analysts who had helped prepare the August 6 PDB. “Let me go back and see the interviews,” he insisted.

  With a condescending tone that reflected his disdain for Ben-Veniste, Zelikow explained matter-of-factly that there weren’t any transcripts, Ben-Veniste recalled. Apart from Zelikow’s one telephone conversation, none of the CIA analysts involved in the August 6 PDB had ever been questioned in any sort of detail about the document. Certainly not in the detail that would justify a transcript.

  After months of battles with Zelikow, it was hard for Ben-Veniste to be shocked by almost anything he did. But the staff could see that Ben-Veniste was genuinely startled. He and other Democrats had made it clear that they believed the August 6 PDB was a vital document—at the very least, a clear warning to President Bush only weeks before 9/11 that al-Qaeda intended to strike within American borders.

  Now he was learning that Zelikow and the staff had made no special effort to talk to the people at the CIA who knew the most about the PDB—the analysts who had written it. “Well then, Philip, I will interview them,” Ben-Veniste declared.

  Zelikow would later remember placing the call on the secure phone line to the CIA analyst, but he rejected any suggestion that he was trying to pressure the analyst to say anything at all. He said the call was made as part of his effort to prepare a summary for the commissioners of what was known about the August 6 PDB. “If we had sought to arrange a personal interview, it would have taken time to schedule it,” he said. “So CIA folks suggested the phone call for the discussion.” He noted that at least one of the authors of the August 6 PDB had been interviewed in April 2004, which demonstrated that questions about the memo had not been ducked earlier in the inquiry, whatever Ben-Veniste’s suggestion. It is not clear, however, how much of that earlier interview focused on the August 6 PDB, and how much focused on other PDBs and other issues.

  BEN-VENISTE HAD found himself dispirited by the end of the commission’s investigation. He was under almost constant attack by Republican lawmakers and conservative editorial page writers and television commentators, depicted as the Democrats’ most partisan “attack dog” on the commission. Like some of the other Democrats, he found it frustrating to work under Lee Hamilton, who had proved so unwilling to lead the Democrats into combat with the Bush White House.

  Still, he felt he had no choice
but to mount one last battle with Zelikow—and possibly with the commission—to get to the truth about the August 6 PDB.

  It was early July. The final report was only days away from being sent to the publisher, and Zelikow told Kean and Hamilton that the commission should resist Ben-Veniste’s demand to interview the PDB authors. He got backing from some of the Republican commissioners, who argued that Ben-Veniste was engaged in some sort of last-gasp effort to rewrite the report to make it overstate the importance of the August 6 PDB and embarrass the White House. Zelikow told the commission that he had been advised by the CIA that the analysts who wrote the PDB were reluctant to be interviewed and that the interviews would interfere with important counterterrorism work being done at the CIA that summer. “The CIA was pleading with us not to do this, since the career people involved in preparing and presenting PDBs would be intimidated, disrupting the sense of confidentiality and candor they considered essential for the PDB process,” Zelikow said.

  As often happened, it was Kean, not Hamilton, who came to Ben-Veniste’s defense. Ben-Veniste’s admiration for Kean, for Kean’s genuine desire to prove the value of bipartisanship and for his honesty, had grown stronger. Kean sided with Ben-Veniste against the other Republicans. If Ben-Veniste felt that an important avenue of investigation had not been pursued, he should be allowed to pursue it, Kean declared. “We should let Richard do this,” he said. The time was short, though; Ben-Veniste understood that the interviews would have to be done quickly. And the Republicans insisted that Ben-Veniste be accompanied by a Republican to the interviews. Jim Thompson, who had become slightly more engaged with the commission in its final weeks, was chosen to sit in.

  TO THE PUBLIC, they could be identified only as “Barbara S.” and “Dwayne D.” They were veteran CIA analysts who, in the summer of 2001, wrote and edited the president’s daily brief. They had written the August 6 PDB, and after 9/11, they were quietly celebrated within the agency as heroes. The document was gravely flawed—it made reference to seventy ongoing FBI al-Qaeda investigations in the summer of 2001, most of which did not exist—but at least it was tangible proof that the CIA was aware of the possibility that bin Laden was eager to strike within American borders. At the White House, it was widely assumed that when the existence of the PDB was leaked to reporters in the spring of 2002, the leak came from the CIA.

  Colleagues said that Barbara S. and Dwayne D. were as confused—and later appalled—as anyone over the repeated claims by Rice and others at the White House that the August 6 PDB was simply a “historical” overview of domestic terrorist threats. It was certainly not meant to be, they said. It was meant to remind President Bush that al-Qaeda remained a dire threat in August 2001 and that a domestic attack was a distinct possibility, no matter what he was hearing elsewhere. At the CIA, no one trusted the FBI to know if al-Qaeda had sleeper cells within the United States. If the FBI was not reporting a domestic threat, no one should assume that it did not exist.

  Barbara S. and Dwayne D. came to the commission’s K Street offices for the interviews on Tuesday, July 13. Despite Zelikow’s earlier claim that they had been reluctant to be interviewed, Ben-Veniste found the two analysts willing, even eager, to answer his questions about the PDB. They were proud of their work. As he listened to their answers, Ben-Veniste came quickly to understand what Zelikow had been so nervous about: They were contradicting Condoleezza Rice. Despite Rice’s claim that Bush had effectively ordered up the PDB, supposedly a sign of how concerned the president had been about terrorist threats that summer, Barbara S. and Dwayne D. said the PDB was ordered up “in-house” at the CIA in hopes that the White House would pay more attention to the threat. Bush had indeed asked his intelligence briefers several times during 2001 about the possibility of a domestic strike by terrorists. But he had not directed that a special PDB, or any other sort of intelligence report, be prepared. The White House might try to portray it as a subtle distinction, but to Ben-Veniste and other Democrats on the commission, it was important. The most detailed warning to the president about domestic threats that summer had not been ordered up by the president. It had been ordered up within the CIA to remind the president that the threat was still out there.

  Barbara S. and Dwayne D. acknowledged that the PDB was “historical” to the extent that it did outline the history of threat reporting involving bin Laden going back to 1997. But the concluding paragraphs of the PDB were meant to tell the president that the threat was current. The president, they said, should have taken no comfort from the passages in the document—written in the present tense—that referred to “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

  “That’s not historical,” scoffed Barbara S. She and Dwayne D. agreed that when they wrote the report in early August 2001, the threat of a domestic terrorist attack by al-Qaeda was “current and serious.”

  Over Zelikow’s objections, Ben-Veniste insisted that the material from Barbara and Dwayne be placed prominently in the final report. The negotiations over how it would be worded were tortured, but Ben-Veniste finally agreed to this paragraph:

  During the spring and summer of 2001, President Bush had on several occasions asked his briefers whether any of the threats pointed to the United States. Reflecting on these questions, the CIA decided to write a briefing article summarizing its understanding of this danger. Two CIA analysts involved in preparing this briefing article believed it represented an opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a Bin Ladin attack in the United States remained both current and serious. The result was an article in the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.”

  54

  K STREET OFFICES OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION

  Washington, D.C.

  JUNE 2004

  By June, Philip Zelikow acknowledged the truth of it; certainly he could not stand in the way of the truth being told. In the early days of the investigation, he had pushed for the commission’s staff to try to find evidence linking al-Qaeda and Baghdad. He pushed so hard that even some of the less suspicious investigators on the commission became alarmed that Zelikow was doing the bidding of the White House, trying to help the Bush administration justify the war in Iraq.

  But with only weeks left in the investigation, Zelikow agreed that the evidence was just not there. Certainly there had been contacts over the years between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis. Most tantalizing, the commission’s staff found intelligence reports that a senior Iraqi spy made visits to bin Laden’s sanctuary in Sudan in the mid-1990s in which the Iraqi met with the al-Qaeda leader. It appeared from the reports that bin Laden had asked for Iraq’s help during that time period in establishing terrorist training camps in Iraq and obtaining weapons.

  But the intelligence suggested bin Laden’s interest in Saddam Hussein went unrequited; the Iraqi leader mostly did not reply to al-Qaeda’s overtures. The intelligence showed that when bin Laden wanted to do business with Iraq, Iraq did not want to do business with al-Qaeda. Among intelligence analysts, it was assumed that Saddam Hussein saw bin Laden, who was crusading for an overthrow of secular government in the Muslim world, as a threat to his own very brutal and very secular rule in Iraq.

  The commission’s staff believed that it had debunked, once and for all, the widely circulated intelligence report about the so-called Prague meeting—a supposed encounter in the Czech capital between a senior Iraq spy and Mohammed Atta, the 9/11 ringleader, on April 9, 2001. The report had been circulated by the Czech intelligence service and embraced by the Bush administration—Vice President Dick Cheney in particular—to suggest an Iraqi link to 9/11. But the commission’s staff was convinced that the Prague meeting never happened; the CIA and FBI had reached the same conclusion. The Czech report was based on a single, uncorroborated witness account. There were extensive phone and travel records to show that Atta was in Virgini
a on April 4 and then traveled to Florida, where he was seen on April 11. His cell phone was used in Florida several times on April 6, 10, and 11, as well as on April 9, the day Atta was supposedly in Prague.

  The staff’s conclusion that there was not a working relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq had the makings of a political firestorm for the White House—as dire a threat to George Bush’s reelection hopes in November as any the commission would pose at the end of its investigation.

  By June 2004, the situation for American troops in Iraq had grown even worse. Insurgent groups had stepped up their violence throughout the country. The previous few months had been especially grisly for Americans and Iraqis alike. After four American military contractors were ambushed as their convoy passed through the Iraqi city of Fallujah on March 31, their charred bodies strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates, the Pentagon responded with an assault on the city that had left twenty-seven American soldiers dead. The chaos in Iraq was driving down Bush’s poll numbers and, by definition, his hopes for reelection. By June, with only five months left before the November elections, polls showed that the president was viewed favorably by about only half the public.

  The administration’s initial justification for the war, its claim that Iraq had been secretly stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, had been proved disastrously wrong a year earlier, within weeks of Saddam Hussein’s ouster. No chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons were ever found. The administration then struggled to shift the argument, suggesting that the war was justified instead because Hussein had been collaborating for years with bin Laden—that the Iraqi leader was a patron of the man behind 9/11. It was a constant refrain in the speeches of both Bush and Cheney throughout 2003 and 2004. “The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror,” Bush said aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln in May 2003; it was the speech in which he stood beneath a banner that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED and prematurely declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq. “We have removed an ally of al-Qaeda and cut off a source of terrorist funding.”