In My Time

by Dick Cheney

  In my view, the most important lesson to be learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s is what happened after the Soviets left. The United States turned its attentions elsewhere, and Afghanistan descended into civil war. The resultant instability and eventual takeover of the country by the Taliban meant that Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorists were able to find a safe haven there. Throughout the late 1990s, thousands of terrorists were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and it became the base for the attacks of 9/11. When I hear policymakers talk about walking away from Afghanistan, I want to remind them of what the consequences can be.

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  ONE OF THE FIRST efforts we undertook after 9/11 to strengthen the country’s defenses was securing passage of the Patriot Act, which the president signed into law on October 2001. The law, passed by overwhelming, bipartisan majorities in Congress, enabled law enforcement, intelligence officers, and national security personnel to share information about potential terrorist threats. It tore down the wall that had previously prevented this kind of cooperation. It also allowed law enforcement officers to apply tools long used to investigate organized crime to the fight against terrorists.

  I also thought it important to be sure the National Security Agency, or NSA, which is responsible for collecting intelligence about the communications of America’s adversaries, was doing everything possible to track the conversations of terrorists, so I asked George Tenet whether the NSA had all the authorities it needed. Tenet said he would check with General Mike Hayden, who was then director, and a short time later both of them came to see me in my office in the White House. Hayden explained that he had already made adjustments in the way NSA was collecting intelligence. Those adjustments were possible within NSA’s existing authorities, but additional authorities were needed in order to improve the coverage and effectiveness of the program.

  The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established a court through which NSA was required to seek approval for certain activities. Hayden explained that one of the challenges he faced was that the slow procedures of the court made it impossible to do what needed to be done with speed and agility. He described the kinds of additional activities he could undertake with expanded authorities, and I told him we’d do everything we could to see that he got them.

  I reported on our conversation to the president. With his approval, I asked Dave Addington to work with General Hayden and the president’s counsel, Alberto Gonzales, to develop a legal process by which we could ensure the NSA got the authorizations Hayden needed. The president was clear that these new authorities had to be signed off on by the attorney general, the secretary of defense, and the director of the CIA before he would grant them. He also said he wanted to keep the program on a short leash and instructed that it should be reauthorized regularly. We were well aware that there is an important balance between protecting privacy and gathering intelligence. The president wanted to make sure the program was used only when needed to defend the nation.

  Although parts of the NSA program remain classified, it is now public that a key element involved intercepting targeted communications into and out of the United States where there was a reasonable basis to conclude that at least one party to the communication was associated with al Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. It is hard to imagine a more important kind of communication for us to intercept from the standpoint of our national security than one potentially involving terrorists speaking to someone already in the United States. General Hayden has observed, “Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States and we would have identified them as such.”

  On October 4, 2001, the president, on the recommendation of the director of central intelligence and the secretary of defense, with the determination of the attorney general that it was lawful to do so, authorized the program for the first time. At the National Security Agency, General Hayden took an extra step. He called in the three most experienced lawyers at the NSA, and, as he has said publicly, they did more than acquiesce in the program. They supported it.

  After the initial authorization, every thirty to forty-five days, with a fresh intelligence assessment from the CIA, the same officials made recommendations and gave legal clearance for the president to make a decision whether to continue the program. The program was so sensitive and closely held that Dave Addington carried the authorizing document in a locked classified documents pouch by hand to each of the officials involved.

  If the president did not authorize the program every forty-five days, it would stop. It was a tricky task each month getting time on each of the principals’ schedules and then getting the document to the president for signature. Once the stars did not align, and the president left for a trip to Asia before the package was ready for him to sign. Al Gonzales and Dave Addington flew to California to get the president’s signature, so the program would not stop while he was away.

  Wanting to ensure that we were proceeding absolutely within the letter and intent of the law, we also took great care to brief the Congress on the program. Given the extreme fragility and sensitivity of the intelligence sources and methods involved, we briefed only the chairman and ranking member of the House and Senate intelligence committees, a practice that has been followed by both Republican and Democratic administrations when dealing with intelligence programs of this sensitivity. This program was too important and too highly classified for briefings to the whole committees, which, given the rotations of members into those slots, would have resulted in dozens being briefed. The president had to personally approve anyone outside the NSA before they could be read into the program.

  I hosted the periodic congressional briefings myself, usually in my West Wing office. Mike Hayden would take the lead in providing detailed information about how the program was functioning and what types of intelligence we were gaining from it.

  In the spring of 2004, after Attorney General John Ashcroft had approved the program as lawful approximately twenty times, new lawyers at the Justice Department raised concerns about one aspect of it, and James Comey, who had become deputy attorney general in December 2003, did not want to proceed. In light of this, on March 9, 2004, I met with the professionals who were carrying out the program from the NSA together with the lawyers from the Justice Department who had developed concerns, hoping we could find a way to continue to collect the terrorism intelligence we needed. General Hayden briefed on the details of the program, making its value clear and emphasizing how careful the NSA was about limits and safeguards. But in the end, the lawyers from the Justice Department remained locked in place.

  Because it was crucial that the program continue, I held an expanded congressional briefing on March 10, 2004, to discuss whether we needed to seek additional legislative authorities. Seated around the long wooden conference table in the Situation Room were Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, Chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence Porter Goss and ranking member Jane Harman, and Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Pat Roberts and ranking member Jay Rockefeller. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was not present, but was briefed later.

  After Mike Hayden finished briefing on the program, I put two very clear and specific questions to the group. “First,” I said, “we would like to know whether you believe the program should be continued.” It was unanimous: Every member agreed that it should continue. “Second,” I asked, “should we come to the Congress for an amendment to the FISA statute so that we have additional congressional authority to do what is necessary?” Again, the view around the table was unanimous. The members did not want us to seek additional legislation for the program. They feared, as did we, that going to the whole Congress would compromise its secrecy.

  Later that same day, the president called the at
torney general, who was in George Washington University Hospital in Washington, D.C., and explained that the program was going to lapse without Department of Justice approval. The attorney general said that he would sign the documents, and the president asked Andy Card and Al Gonzales to take the package to him. Card and Gonzales, with Addington holding the highly classified documents, drove to the hospital, and Card and Gonzales went into the room, where they found Deputy Attorney General Comey already present. It became immediately clear that Ashcroft had changed his mind. He said he would not sign the documents. He also indicated that, because of his health issues, he had delegated all the responsibilities of his office to Deputy Attorney General Comey. Card and Gonzales departed with the unsigned documents in hand.

  Soon afterward, the lawyers began to threaten resignation, as did FBI Director Bob Mueller, whom Comey had convinced there was a problem. I had little patience with what I saw happening. The program had been in place more than two years and the attorney general had approved it some twenty times. Most important, we were at war and the program’s single purpose was to get intelligence necessary for the defense of the nation. There was a tragic reminder of the threat Islamist terrorism represented the next morning, March 11, 2004, when ten bombs exploded on trains in Madrid, Spain, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,500.

  Faced with threats of resignation, the president decided to alter the NSA program, even though he and his advisors were confident of his constitutional authority to continue the program unchanged.

  A few months later we learned that a New York Times reporter, James Risen, was preparing to publish a story about the NSA program. Such a story would alert our enemies about the program, making it more difficult for us to continue to collect the intelligence we needed. By explaining that the newspaper would be putting an important national security program at risk, Condi Rice and Mike Hayden convinced Risen and the Times to hold the story. But the next year, in December 2005, the paper threatened again to run it. This time Risen had a book about to be published that contained elements of the story, and the New York Times wanted to feature it first. We were concerned enough about the damage publication could do to the program that the president had a face-to-face meeting with the publisher and editor of the Times to ask them not to go with the story. He explained that making details of the program public would harm our ability to track terrorists’ phone calls and might well make it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks. On December 16, 2005, the Times published the story anyway, a decision the president called “shameful.” I agreed. Moreover, it seemed to me that the New York Times had violated Section 798 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which prohibits publishing classified information about America’s communications intelligence.

  Six months later, the New York Times published a story that damaged our efforts to track the flow of funding to terrorists. The June 23, 2006, story was headlined “Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror.” It exposed details about a classified program to track banking transactions, which, of course, was welcome enlightenment to those we were trying to catch. The Times’ public editor, Byron Calame, at first defended the newspaper’s decision to publish on the grounds that the classified program wasn’t really much of a secret. After Times readers pointed out that the Times story had emphasized the program’s secrecy, Calame reversed himself, writing, “I don’t think the article should have been published.”

  In the wake of the New York Times terrorist surveillance story, Andy Card hosted a meeting in his office that I attended along with some of the president’s communications team. Communications Director Dan Bartlett was urging that we be more forthcoming in revealing to the press and the public just what these programs entailed. He said that the president was “just carrying too much baggage” from all the “secret” activities we had under way. I understood it was his job to worry about the president’s image, but there were important reasons for our secrecy. “Dan,” I said, “we aren’t doing these things for our entertainment. We’re doing them because we’re at war. These programs—and keeping them secret—are critical for the defense of the nation.” The president and I and everyone else serving in the administration had one mission: to defend the nation, even if it resulted in negative press stories.

  The Terrorist Surveillance Program is, in my opinion, one of the most important success stories in the history of American intelligence. The speed with which the NSA got it up and running, the problems they solved and the way they solved them, the careful attention paid to ensure lawfulness and proper oversight, and the intelligence collected make the program a model of the tremendous work our nation’s intelligence community can do. As I think back on all we accomplished in those first post-9/11 months, this program is one of the things of which I am proudest. I know it saved lives and prevented attacks. If I had it to do all over again, I would, in a heartbeat.

  NEAR THE TOWN OF Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan there is a nineteenth-century prison fortress called Qala-i-Jangi. In November 2001, when Northern Alliance forces under the command of General Abdul Rashid Dostum captured three hundred Taliban and al Qaeda soldiers, they took their prisoners to the fort. On Sunday morning, November 25, 2001, two CIA officers went to the complex to question the prisoners, meeting with a group of them in an open area outside the cells. Almost immediately one of the officers, Johnny Micheal Spann, found himself surrounded. The prisoners overcame him in a vicious attack, “scrabbling at his flesh with their hands,” according to eyewitness accounts, and killing him with weapons they had smuggled in. Spann became the first American combat death in Afghanistan. His companion, a CIA agent known only as Dave, managed to escape the next day. It took two days and heavy American airpower to put down the riot at Qala-i-Jangi.

  Many of those being captured in Afghanistan were clearly cold-blooded killers who had committed horrific acts of savagery and welcomed a fight to the death. We needed to find a secure place to hold them away from the field of battle. Defense Department officials settled on the idea of a detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they had space and support. It was a choice dictated in part by Justice Department advice that keeping detainees off U.S. soil would prevent them from having access to U.S. courts. Holding detainees at Guantanamo also avoided the security concerns that would arise from bringing them into the United States.

  In the years since the first enemy combatants were moved to Guantanamo, the facility there and the U.S. servicemen who guard the detainees have been the target of a tremendous amount of unjustified criticism from people with little knowledge about the actual conditions at the camp. It is a model facility—safe, secure, and humane—where detainees have access to television, books, newspapers, movies, their choice of a number of sports and exercise activities, the Koran, healthy food that is in keeping with their religious beliefs, and medical care. It likely provides a standard of care higher than many prisons in European countries where the criticism of Guantanamo has been loudest.

  President Bush determined early on in the War on Terror that even though neither al Qaeda nor Taliban detainees qualified for POW status under the Geneva Conventions, the United States armed forces would as a matter of policy treat detainees humanely and “in a manner consistent with the principles of Geneva.” And that remained our policy throughout our time in office.

  Critics often point to the determination that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees as evidence of our lack of respect for the Conventions. It seems to me to demonstrate the opposite. Geneva is intended to provide protections to those who abide by the laws of war, and among the most important of those is keeping civilians safe. Terrorists intentionally attack civilians, thus putting themselves outside the realm of those whom Geneva is meant to protect. Further, an important incentive to abide by the laws of war is removed if protections are extended to the most egregious violators. When President Reagan rejected a proposal to extend Geneva’s protections to terrorists, he rightly observed
that doing so would “undermine humanitarian law and endanger civilians in war.”

  During our time in office, the State Department responded to criticism, particularly from Europe, by looking for ways to shut down the facility. In meeting after meeting we debated Guantanamo. My view was always that it was a safe, secure, humane facility, and we had no better alternative for holding dangerous terrorists. We did in fact move many detainees through Guantanamo and returned some to their home countries. We later learned that a number of the released detainees ended up back on the field of battle, fighting against us and our allies in the War on Terror. By the time we left office, the detainees still remaining in the camp were among the worst of the worst—those too dangerous to be allowed to leave and those whose home countries would not take them back.

  It was against this backdrop that President Barack Obama announced on his second day in office that he would close the facility within a year. His administration stepped up efforts to release detainees despite the lesson we had learned about released terrorists returning to terrorism, and the president repeated a number of criticisms that do not bear up under examination. He claimed, for example, that Guantanamo “was probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by” al Qaeda. If that were true, one would expect to see al Qaeda mention Guantanamo frequently, but a review of thirty-four messages and interviews by top al Qaeda leaders issued in 2009 and 2010 shows the word Guantanamo appearing in only three. The president has also suggested that Guantanamo should be closed because it is hurting America’s image around the world. But it’s not Guantanamo that does the harm, it is the critics of the facility who peddle falsehoods about it. Even if, for the sake of debate, one were to accept the image argument, I don’t have much sympathy for the view that we should find an alternative to Guantanamo—a solution that could potentially make Americans less safe—simply because we are worried about how we are perceived abroad.