The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  It was another irony about Zelikow. Just as some members of the commission’s staff worried that he was suppressing information from the commission’s final report, especially when it might do damage to his friends in the Bush administration, others on the staff worried that he was pushing too much sensitive, classified information into the final report that might embarrass the Bush and Clinton administrations alike. In a sense, it was more evidence that Zelikow’s instincts as a historian could overwhelm any other motivation, partisan or otherwise.

  The handling of classified information had been a subject of angry disputes between Zelikow and some of the intelligence specialists on his staff throughout the commission’s investigation, especially Doug MacEachin, the former CIA analyst, as well as with Marcus.

  MacEachin, Marcus, and others believed that Zelikow had taken it upon himself to declassify information without seeking the permission of the agencies that had provided the information to the commission in the first place. As he wrote staff statements during the investigation and then drafted chapters for the final report, MacEachin would flag individual sentences and paragraphs that contained classified information as “ORIGINATOR CONTROLLED,” suggesting that the material could not be released publicly without the permission of the CIA, the NSA, or whatever other agency had provided it.

  But Zelikow wanted to do things in reverse. He wanted the commission to operate under the assumption that it—or, rather, he—knew best what could be declassified. Throughout the investigation, he wanted the commission’s written reports—initially, the staff statements that were released at the public hearings, and then the final report—to be written with the assumption that everything in them could be made public. If they contained information that the White House or the CIA considered too classified to be revealed, they would have their chance to object when they reviewed the reports before they were released.

  Zelikow knew too well that if the assumption in the process was that the material in the commission’s reports was classified, the government could hold up their release—or edit it to the point where the reports were incomprehensible. That explained many of the problems faced by the joint congressional investigation that had investigated the 9/11 attacks; its final report was riddled with blacked-out passages, including the notorious twenty-eight pages about Saudi Arabia that were never made public.

  The White House, CIA, and other intelligence agencies pushed back from the start. Who was Zelikow to decide what material might or might not “harm the nation’s security”? they asked. Declassifying information was their job, not his. But Zelikow had the support of the commissioners, especially Kean and Hamilton, who thought that Zelikow had come up with an ingenious strategy to prevent the final report from being unnecessarily censored by the administration. “Looking back, I believe our view of the correct approach was vindicated,” Zelikow said later. “No one has credibly alleged that there were any leaks of genuinely classified information from the commission.”

  At the White House, maybe in all of Washington, there were days in 2003 and 2004 when no one was angrier with Zelikow than John B. Bellinger III, Rice’s in-house counsel at the NSC. Bellinger was a throwback to a time when the people who held influential White House jobs like his were invariably the cream of the Ivy League—Princeton and Harvard Law School in Bellinger’s case, by way of St. Alban’s, the preppiest of Washington prep schools. He was a good match for Rice. Like her, Bellinger was poised and articulate, effortlessly charming, as good at a Washington dinner party as he was in a tricky diplomatic negotiation. But he repeatedly lost his button-downed cool with Zelikow.

  Often he found himself screaming down a telephone line at Zelikow, furious with Zelikow’s endless demands of the White House for more classified documents or additional interviews. Zelikow was at his most bombastic and obnoxious in dealing with Bellinger. “Philip was relentless,” Bellinger said later.

  Before joining Rice at the NSC, Bellinger had been at the Justice Department in the Clinton administration, handling national security cases for Janet Reno; that meant that his loyalties to the Bush White House were sometimes called into question, mostly in jest. He was a frequent target of abuse for David Addington, Cheney’s counselor, who would accuse Bellinger of defending a “liberal” legal viewpoint, the ultimate insult in the vice president’s office.

  So Bellinger thought he had a perspective on Zelikow that others in the White House might lack. “And I really don’t think the fix was in” between Zelikow and the White House, he said. While it was certainly true that Zelikow and Rice were friends, Bellinger believed that Zelikow had developed a rocky relationship with the White House because “he recognized that his personal reputation was at stake here and that he had to bend over backwards to show to everyone—the families, the press, the commissioners, particularly the Democratic commissioners—that he was being tough on the White House. And he was being tough on the White House.”

  It was not clear how the Justice Department’s criminal division concluded its investigation of Zelikow, or even how seriously it was treated within the department. CIA officials say that Zelikow’s allegation that the agency was playing “hardball” was disproved by the simple fact that, if the agency’s supporters had really wanted to play hardball, information about the inquiry would have found its way to the commission’s many critics on Capitol Hill or in the press, creating a firestorm for the commission as well as for Zelikow. Several members of the 9/11 commission said later they had never heard anything about a criminal investigation of Zelikow, then or since.

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  OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF

  The White House

  JULY 2004

  Andy Card was beginning to like what he was hearing. The final report began arriving at the White House in pieces in late June. As each chapter was finished, it had to be forwarded to the White House for a declassification review by a special team of intelligence specialists that Card had assembled. So as the day of the report’s release approached, Card was hearing back from the team. It was almost all good news for the White House.

  After all the worrying about Dick Clarke’s allegations against Rice and Bush, about the August 6 PDB, about Ashcroft, about the subpoena threats, about Kean’s loyalty to the GOP, Card could see that the commission’s final report posed no threat to Bush’s reelection. The report would show that several government agencies, notably the FBI and CIA, had failed in their responsibilities before 9/11. But the report did not single out individuals for blame. Certainly not George Bush. The he-said, she-said material about Clarke and Rice did not seem to do any serious harm to Rice.

  The feelings of relief were not universally held in the White House. Dick Cheney and his counsel, David Addington, were outraged by the commission’s timeline on Cheney’s actions on September 11—and the clear suggestion that Cheney had issued an unconstitutional shoot-down order that morning without Bush’s knowledge or approval.

  Kean learned about Cheney’s outrage a few days before the report’s release when he was pulled aside for a phone call. It was Cheney, who made it clear he was angry. He was demanding that the sections be rewritten to remove the insinuation.

  “Governor, this is not true, just not fair,” Cheney told Kean, according to other commissioners who later heard Kean describe the call. Cheney said he thought it was startling that the commission did not accept the word of the president of the United States and the vice president. “The president has told you, I have told you, that the president issued the order. I was following his directions.”

  The truth, Kean knew, was that the staff did not believe what Bush and Cheney were saying. Kean ended the call by promising the vice president that he would ask the staff to give the material about the shoot-down another review before publication. But no major changes were made.

  To the surprise of some of the commissioners and the staff, there was no similar protest from Cheney or anyone else in the White House over the commission’s conclusion that th
ere was no significant alliance between al-Qaeda and Iraq. After the earlier blowup with Cheney over Iraq, the staff had gone back and reviewed everything the commission had in its files about the ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. At the end of it, the staff was more convinced than ever that there had been no serious collaboration between the terrorists and the Iraqis, no matter how much the administration wanted to cling to the idea to justify the war.

  To satisfy the administration, the report was rewritten to include every bit of evidence the staff could find to demonstrate links between al-Qaeda and Iraq in the 1990s, but the conclusion remained solid. The final report declared that intelligence reports about al-Qaeda and Iraq “describe friendly contacts and indicate common themes in both sides’ hatred of the United States. But to date, we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al-Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.” The report included a special subchapter, entitled “Atta’s Alleged Trip to Prague,” that debunked the idea of the Prague meeting.

  DAN MARCUS was proud of the report. It was a capstone to a career in the law and in government. He knew his own obituary would likely open with the words “Daniel Marcus, general counsel of the commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks . . . ” He knew he was returning to a happy retirement, teaching constitutional law part-time at the American University Law School and writing occasional law review articles about his newfound status as one of the nation’s premier experts on questions of executive privilege.

  Marcus could see all the flaws in the commission’s final report, especially its lack of accountability. But he could also see that if the commission had been run by someone who was Zelikow’s political polar opposite—a harshly partisan Democrat, someone determined to do damage to Bush—it would still have been forced to make many of the same sorts of compromises to reach unanimity.

  “We did pull our punches on the conclusions because we wanted to have a unanimous report,” he said. “There was this implicit threat, occasionally made explicit on both sides of the aisle on the commission, that by God, if you get explicit in criticizing Bush on this, we’re going to insist on being explicit in criticizing Clinton, and vice versa.”

  Still, as a proud Democrat, Marcus had to admit something to himself, and it was a little painful. He understood that the commission had just helped reelect George Bush.

  Bush was seeking a second term that November on the basis of his decisiveness in dealing with al-Qaeda and other terrorist threats around the globe. Voters were being asked to believe that the terrorist threat was as dire as ever and that the Iraq war had been made necessary because of it. The commission’s report did not make the accusation that the White House had most had feared most: that Bush and his administration had mishandled terrorist threats before 9/11. And it had reached the conclusion that the White House had most wanted the public to hear and understand: that there was every reason to fear another catastrophic terrorist attack within American borders. “The report, by reminding everybody about 9/11 and the terrorist threat, reelected him,” Marcus said.

  KEAN AND HAMILTON were about to get another taste of the partisan games they both so loathed. They had known for months about the criminal investigation of Sandy Berger and the allegations that he had stolen classified documents from the National Archives during his review of files that were supposed to be shared with the 9/11 commission. They had both gotten phone calls earlier that year from Alberto Gonzales to advise them of the inquiry. He asked them to keep the information secret, since the investigation might not be completed for weeks or months. They had done as they were asked.

  But on July 19, three days before the commission issued its final report, news of the Berger investigation leaked. The assumption on the commission and among its staff was that it was a leak from the White House, eager to suggest that Berger’s acts had deprived the 9/11 commission of information that might have embarrassed him and the Clinton administration. The office of House Speaker Dennis Hastert rushed out a statement to reporters:

  What information could be so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation’s most sensitive secrets? Did these documents detail simple negligence or did they contain something more sinister? Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission and potentially put their report under a cloud?

  Berger immediately announced that he was stepping down as an adviser to John Kerry’s presidential campaign. The following April, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of “unauthorized removal and retention of classified material” and of mishandling classified documents. Under the plea bargain, the Justice Department asked the court to impose a $10,000 fine; the charges carried up to a year in prison, but prosecutors did not request jail time. The judge in the case, Deborah A. Robinson, rejected the Justice Department’s proposal as too lenient. She fined Berger $50,000 and ordered him to give up his security clearance for three years. “My actions . . . were wrong. They were foolish. I deeply regret them, and I have every day since,” Berger told Robinson. “I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material.”

  THE DAY of the report’s release, Thursday, July 22, was Washington at its summer worst—miserably hot and muggy—and reporters were sweating through their clothes as they found their way to the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium downtown to attend the news conference at which the commission would release the report. Kean and Hamilton first went that morning to Capitol Hill, where they provided congressional leaders with copies of the final report and offered them a short briefing of its findings. It was protocol to give it to Congress first, since the commission was considered at least nominally a creation of the Congress. The Norton version came in at 567 pages, with a simple, elegant design for the cover: red and blue type set on a white background. The commission’s formal name remained the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, but the commissioners had always referred to themselves as the 9/11 commission, and that was the name that appeared on the title: The 9/11 Commission Report.

  At 9:00 a.m., Kean and Hamilton arrived at the White House for a meeting with President Bush in the Oval Office. Bush asked Kean and Hamilton to join him in the Rose Garden, where reporters had gathered. “I want to thank these two gentlemen for serving their country so well and so admirably,” said Bush. “They’ve done a really good job of learning about our country, learning about what went wrong prior to September eleventh, and making very solid, sound recommendations about how to move forward. I assured them that where government needs to act, we will.”

  The report was released to almost universal acclaim. For days afterward, Bush and Kerry tried to one-up each other on the campaign in expressing enthusiasm for the commission’s work. Bush eventually embraced the commission’s central recommendation—creation of the job of director of national intelligence—and put John Negroponte, the veteran American diplomat who was Bush’s ambassador to Iraq at the time, into the job. Although the DNI did not have the sweeping powers imagined by the commission, Negroponte was thought to be sufficiently close to Bush that he could force reform on the CIA and other spy agencies.

  Andy Card did not begin reading the report himself until the day it was released. But when he did start paging through it, he was impressed by how engrossing it was. “The first part is a good read,” he said. He went up to Bush later in the day. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,” he told the president. “It reads like a novel.”

  The report was hailed as much for the quality of the writing as for its findings. The historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it a “tour de force.” Time magazine called it one of “the most riveting, disturbing and revealing accounts of crime, espionage and the inner works of government ever
written.” In The New Yorker magazine, the novelist John Updike wrote that the King James Bible had been “our language’s lone masterpiece produced by committee, until this year’s ‘9/11 Commission Report.’ ” Both ABC and NBC announced plans for a television miniseries based on the report. The report rose to number one on The New York Times Best Seller List. It was nominated for a National Book Award.

  THE COMMISSION failed to win the book award. But there was no shortage of honors and other rewards for the commissioners and the staff. The commissioners delighted in the accolades.

  “This is one of the best things I’ve ever done,” Jim Thompson said later to an interviewer at home in Chicago. “I’ve had, over the years, quite a bit of face recognition. But I’ve never experienced anything like this. People coming up to me in airports, in restaurants, to talk about the commission’s work. And they always start by saying, ‘Thank you. Thank you for doing this.’ That’s extremely gratifying.”

  Norton, which had initially planned a press run of 500,000 copies of the report, eventually printed more than 1.5 million. Although Norton was not required to reveal its profits from the book, it announced in 2005 that it planned to donate $600,000 of the profits to two universities to support the study of terrorism and emergency preparedness.

  Bush replaced George Tenet at the CIA with Representative Porter Goss, a Florida Republican who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former agency spy. Goss was considered a disaster in the job and resigned under White House pressure after less than two years. He was replaced by General Michael Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency. Negroponte stepped down as director of national intelligence after only twenty-two months and was named deputy secretary of state. He was replaced by John Michael McConnell, a retired Navy admiral who had also once run the NSA.