But now, to the horror of Bush’s reelection team, the 9/11 commission was about to knock down that justification for the war as well. There was no close link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. Even if he wanted to, there was little Zelikow could do to rescue the administration now.
The results of the commission’s investigation of the al-Qaeda–Iraq ties and the Prague meeting were supposed to be released in a staff statement at the panel’s final public hearings, scheduled for June 16 and 17 in Washington. If Zelikow tried to tamper with the report now, he knew he risked a public insurrection by the staff, with only a month left before the commission’s final report was due.
The staff’s findings about the tenuous relationship between al-Qaeda and Iraq were contained in a single paragraph, found at the bottom of page five of the sixteen-page staff report entitled “Overview of the Enemy” that was made public at the June hearing. The paragraph read:
Bin Ladin also explored possible cooperation with Iraq during his time in Sudan, despite his opposition to Hussein’s secular regime. Bin Ladin had in fact at one time sponsored anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Sudanese, to protect their own ties with Iraq, reportedly persuaded Bin Ladin to cease this support and arranged for contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Ladin in 1994. Bin Ladin is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Ladin had returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. Two senior Bin Ladin associates have adamantly denied that any ties existed between al Qaeda and Iraq. We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States.
Within minutes of the release of the report, the Associated Press and Reuters carried their first bulletins, setting the tone for what would become a nightmarish day of news coverage for the White House. An early story by the normally sober AP began with a stark first sentence: “Bluntly contradicting the Bush administration, the commission investigating the September 11 attacks reported Wednesday there was ‘no credible evidence’ that Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida.’ ” The revised story later in the day was even worse for the White House. “Already in question, President Bush’s justification for war in Iraq has suffered another major setback,” it began. “An independent commission threw cold water Wednesday on the administration’s insistent claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.”
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Bush’s Democratic opponent in the November elections, saw the opening that the commission had given him. He quickly released a statement to reporters: “The president owes the American people a fundamental explanation about why he rushed to war for a purpose that it now turns out is not supported by the facts.”
AT THE WHITE HOUSE, no one was reading the news coverage more closely, or with greater fury, than Dick Cheney. He seemed instantly to grasp the political danger posed by the commission’s findings on Iraq and how they were being conveyed to the public. He was incensed by the banner front-page headlines the next morning in The Washington Post (AL QAEDA–HUSSEIN LINK IS DISMISSED) and The New York Times (PANEL FINDS NO QAEDA-IRAQ TIE). Cheney had a special loathing for the Times, in part because its editorial board, unlike the Post’s, had so fiercely opposed the Iraq invasion and the conduct of the American occupiers.
Reminded of why he had tried to block creation of the 9/11 com-mission in the first place, Cheney decided to go public with a counter-attack. The attack would be targeted not at the commission, at least not directly, but at the reporters and headline writers who had dared to accurately describe the commission’s findings. He singled out the Times in an interview the next day on the financial cable news network CNBC.
The veteran political reporter and CNBC anchor Gloria Borger had known the vice president for decades and could see that the normally imperturbable Cheney was visibly upset: “Mr. Vice President, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you, in all the years I’ve interviewed you, as exercised about something as you seem today.”
She was right, said Cheney.
“What The New York Times did today was outrageous,” he said. “They do a lot of outrageous things. But the headline? ‘Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie.’ The press wants to run out and say there’s a fundamental split here now between what the president sad and what the commission said” about al-Qaeda and Iraq. “There’s no conflict,” he declared.
He said that reporters, including those at the Times, had confused the question of whether there was an Iraqi tie to September 11 with the larger issue of whether a relationship existed between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. Cheney said the commission “did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda in other areas, in other ways.”
President Bush joined in from the West Wing, telling White House reporters after a cabinet meeting that “the reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda” is “because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda.”
There was an Alice in Wonderland quality to the White House response to the conclusions of the commission’s staff. The president and vice president were trying to pretend, at least publicly, that the report did not say what it clearly said—that the commission had found no convincing evidence of a “collaborative relationship” between al-Qaeda and Iraq after bin Laden returned to Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Cheney went one step further in this parallel universe of spin. He wanted to revive a theory that even Bush had repeatedly knocked down: that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks. In his CNBC interview, Cheney said that whatever the commission’s conclusion, he still would not rule out the possibility that Saddam Hussein was tied to the 2001 attacks; he still did not rule out the possibility that the Prague meeting had occurred. “We don’t know,” he said when asked about an Iraqi link to the 9/11 attacks. “What the commission says is that they can’t find any evidence of that. We had one report which is a famous report on the Czech intelligence service. And we’ve never been able to confirm or knock it down.”
Borger put it to Cheney: “Do you know things that the commision does not know?”
“Probably,” replied Cheney.
KEAN, HAMILTON, and several other commissioners were alarmed at the prospect of a public debate with the White House over al-Qaeda and Iraq. And they began to equivocate about the meaning of the words in the staff report. Some of the Republican commissioners all but disowned the staff report in interviews after the hearing, seeing the damage it might do to Bush’s reelection hopes. Kean and Hamilton asked Doug MacEachin, the principal author of the report, and his team to go back and determine if they had missed evidence tying Iraq and al-Qaeda. Was it possible that Cheney was right, that the intelligence showed a closer link? “We really need to nail this,” Hamilton said sternly to MacEachin. Kean and Hamilton also issued a public challenge to Cheney. If he “probably” had information that the commission lacked, the vice president needed to hand it over in a hurry. “I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about,” Hamilton told reporters.
55
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Cambridge, Mass.
JUNE 2004
Philip Zelikow had hired Harvard historian Ernest R. May as a consultant to the 9/11 commission. A specialist in foreign policy and the workings of the federal government, the courtly, seventy-five-year-old Harvard professor was a friend and mentor of Zelikow’s from their years together at the university’s Kennedy School of Government. Throughout the spring and early summer of 2004, May paid regular visits to the commission’s offices in Washington to review early drafts of chapters of the final report. May, the author or editor of more than a dozen books himself, was struck by the quality of the writing and editing in the chapters he saw; it was a tr
ibute to his protégé Zelikow.
May could see that this was not going to be just another gray, bureaucratic government report that would go unread, gathering dust on a bookshelf. The commission’s staff did a little research on the subject: Since 1965, there had been 640 federal blue-ribbon commissioners on one subject or another, and almost all of their public reports were impenetrable. But not this one. The 9/11 commission report was going to work as literature. The writing was elegantly spare, a result of a directive from Lee Hamilton that adjectives and adverbs be avoided whenever possible to avoid the appearance that judgments were being made. “Go to the facts,” he said. Among the commissioners and staff, “Go to the facts” became a mantra whenever there were debates over the wording of a passage. “Democrats pushed for adjectives to support President Clinton, while Republicans pushed for adjectives to support President Bush,” Hamilton said later. “It was such a minefield that we finally cut all adjectives and ended up with a sparse narrative style.” Some of the draft chapters, especially the chapters detailing events in the air and on the ground on the morning of September 11, read like a taut, well-paced thriller.
The commissioners appreciated May’s perspective. He was not quite an outsider; he had been brought in by Zelikow in the early weeks of the investigation in 2003. But unlike Zelikow and the rest of the commission’s staff, May had not lived and breathed the investigation every day for more than a year. Although he spoke often by phone to Zelikow, he visited Washington only sporadically. And unlike so many of the staff, he was not intimidated by Zelikow.
As the investigation was coming to an end, May told Zelikow something that he almost certainly did not want to hear. He was troubled by much of what he was reading. He thought the report was incomplete in many ways. It was a report that was being censored—had to be censored, probably—to achieve unanimity between a group of harshly partisan Democrats and harshly partisan Republicans. But what he was reading went beyond a balancing act to satisfy partisans. The 9/11 commission’s report was skirting judgments about people who almost certainly had some blame for failing to prevent September 11. That included two presidents and their top advisers. The commission’s judgments about Bush and Clinton and their senior aides were overly forgiving—“indulgent,” May said—and veiled many of their failures at the White House in dealing with terrorist threats. To achieve unanimity, there was little accountability.
THE FRIENDSHIP between May and Zelikow perplexed some of the commission investigators. In temperament, they were opposites. Like Zelikow, May had family roots in Texas; he was from Fort Worth and still spoke with a slight drawl. Like Zelikow, May had headed west to California for college. But unlike his protégé, the courtly May had allowed some of the easygoing charms of the Texas plains and Pacific coastline to rub off on him. May earned his PhD in history, as well as his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, at UCLA; it was not a university that bred the sort of Ivy League pomposity that May would encounter through much of the rest of his career at Harvard. The commission’s staffers figured that May was willing to overlook Zelikow’s prickliness because the younger historian was so well-read, hardworking, and willing to share credit. They taught classes together at Harvard and had collaborated on The Kennedy Tapes, the book about the Cuban missile crisis that was turned into the 2000 Hollywood movie Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner. Friends said May found it a heady thing to see his name in the screen credits with Costner’s.
May thought that Zelikow was often unfairly criticized. The two men met when Zelikow was a graduate student at the Fletcher School of diplomacy at Tufts University and he took a course offered by May at Harvard. Zelikow was May’s “prize student,” and after Zelikow left the NSC in the first Bush administration, he was recruited by May to join the faculty at Harvard. “I can only say that Philip and I have managed harmonious cooperation over many years,” May said. “We have had our differences but never serious ones.”
After he was approached by Kean and Hamilton in January 2003 about running the investigation, Zelikow immediately telephoned May to discuss whether he should take the job. May was at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from his office on the Harvard campus, and he remembered that the call lasted more than an hour, with the two men agreeing that it was an extraordinary opportunity to try to produce a “professional-quality narrative history” of a watershed moment in American history, “on a par at least with Pearl Harbor.”
After Pearl Harbor, both men knew, there had been no similar effort to explain the disaster to the public. There was an effort at accountability in the Pearl Harbor investigations—the navy’s fleet commander in the Pacific and his army counterpart were both relieved of their commands in disgrace—but there had been no effort to put the 1941 attacks in historical context and explain the forces that had led the Japanese to launch a surprise attack and why the military had left itself so vulnerable. As a historian, it was exciting, May remembered, to think of producing a report that would remain the reference volume on the September 11 attacks and that would be “sitting on the shelves of high school and college teachers a generation hence.”
Zelikow initially wanted May’s advice on how the final report should be structured, and they went to work, secretly, to prepare an outline. May was given a desk in Zelikow’s office on K Street in Washington, which he used on his occasional visits from Harvard. By March 2003, with the commission’s staff barely in place, the two men had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with “chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings.”
He and May proposed a sixteen-chapter report that would open with a history of al-Qaeda, beginning with bin Laden’s fatwa against the United States in 1998. That would lead to chapters about the history of American counterterrorism policy. The White House response to the flood of terrorist threats in the spring and summer of 2001 were left to the sixth chapter; the events of September 11 were left to the seventh chapter. Zelikow and May proposed that the tenth chapter be entitled “Problems of Foresight—And Hindsight,” with a subchapter on “the blinding effects of hindsight.”
Zelikow shared the document with Kean and Hamilton, who were impressed by their executive director’s early diligence but worried that the outline would be seen as evidence that they—and Zelikow—had predetermined the report’s outcome. It should be kept secret from the rest of the staff, they all decided. May said that he and Zelikow agreed that the outline should be “treated as if it were the most classified document the commission possessed.” Zelikow came up with his own internal classification system for the outline. He labeled it “Commission Sensitive,” putting those words at the top and bottom of each page.
Kean and Hamilton were right to be wary. When it was later disclosed that Zelikow had prepared a detailed outline of the commission’s final report at the very start of the investigation, many of the staff’s investigators were alarmed. They were finally given copies of the outline in April 2004. They saw that Zelikow was proposing that the findings about the Bush administration’s actions before 9/11 would be pushed to the middle of the report, which meant that readers would have to go searching for them past long chapters of al-Qaeda history. Many assumed the worst when they saw that Zelikow had proposed a portion of the report entitled “The Blinding Effects of Hindsight.” What “blinding hindsight”? They assumed Zelikow was trying to dismiss the value of hindsight regarding the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 performance. A few staffers began circulating a two-page parody of Zelikow’s effort entitled “The Warren Commission Report—Preemptive Outline.” The parody’s authorship was never determined conclusively. The chapter headings included “Single Bullet: We Haven’t Seen the Evidence Yet. But Really. We’re Sure.”
AFTER THE FINAL public hearings in Washington, the commission had only a month to finish the report. Although there was a legal deadline of July 26 to release the report, Kean wanted it out at least a few days earlier. The Democratic National Convention in Boston, at which Senator John Kerry would be a
nointed as his party’s nominee, was scheduled to open on July 26, and Kean and Hamilton wanted to avoid competition with the convention as a news story. So the release date was set for Thursday, July 22.
The body of the report was mostly written by late June. The interim staff reports released throughout the public hearings provided discrete, well-written chapters about the history of the attacks and the chronology of al-Qaeda, as well as a detailed analysis of the failures at the FBI, the CIA, and elsewhere that prevented the government from foiling the attacks.
Whatever May’s criticisms of the final report, he mostly did not share them with others on the staff. There was not much point in that. He talked directly to Zelikow, who, more than anyone else, controlled what the final report would say.
May’s complaints centered on the lack of judgments in the report, both about people and about institutions. Within the staff, Zelikow tended to take the blame for the perception that the report was going easy on his friends in the Bush White House. But May believed that the report was going soft on Clinton, too, and on a generation of American policy makers who had failed to prepare the nation for the potential of domestic terrorist threats.
“The report is probably too balanced,” May later wrote in a remarkably candid assessment of the work of the commission in The New Republic magazine a year later. It was true for agencies and people. If an institution was criticized in one sentence, it would be praised in the next. “Individuals, especially the two presidents and their intimate advisers, received even more indulgent treatment,” he said. “The text does not describe Clinton’s crippling handicaps as leader of his own national security community. Extraordinarily quick and intelligent, he more than almost anyone else had an imaginative grasp of the threat posed by al-Qaeda. But he had almost no authority enabling his to get his government to address the threat.”
The Commission Page 45