No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

by Condoleezza Rice

  More consequentially, Michael Hayden, who was then the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), approached the President with a far-reaching but important proposal. The President had often wondered aloud whether intercepting terrorists’ communications before 9/11 would have prevented the attacks. Although the NSA had traditionally conducted surveillance on foreign entities, Hayden sought the President’s authorization to intercept the international communications of people affiliated with or supporting al Qaeda. The proposed Terrorist Surveillance Program, as it came to be known, would allow the NSA to conduct electronic surveillance of al Qaeda suspects even if one party to the conversation were in the United States. Despite the popular—and mistaken—perception, it was not designed to monitor communications between two parties who resided in the United States. A several-layer review process within the NSA was used to determine a suspect’s affiliation with al Qaeda and suitability as a target for the program.

  The NSA hoped to conduct such activities outside of the traditional court requirements for electronic surveillance. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) required the NSA to obtain a warrant from a special court that had been established to review such requests for surveillance of individuals within the United States. The relative speed of cell phones, e-mail, and other new communications technologies, however, had made it more difficult for the NSA to collect timely intelligence under this framework. As Attorney General Al Gonzales would later explain in discussing the program, “FISA is very important in the war on terror, but it doesn’t provide the speed and agility that we need in all circumstances to deal with this new kind of threat.”

  I listened to the President discuss what he had in mind, meeting with Hayden that day. He wanted to ensure that the NSA had enough authority to collect actionable intelligence in a timely manner. He told Mike that he would authorize the program after a review of its legality by the Department of Justice and the Office of Legal Counsel. I made a mental note to follow closely the advice he was getting. This was going to be very controversial.

  The Justice Department concluded that it fell within his authority as commander in chief to authorize the surveillance program, as other presidents had done in past times of war. President Bush also wanted to ensure that adequate safeguards were in place to protect the civil liberties of innocent Americans. If, despite its best efforts, the NSA inadvertently intercepted any purely domestic communication, the incident would be reported to the Justice Department for resolution. The President was also committed to making use of the program only as long as it proved necessary. He required that it be subject to his reauthorization approximately every forty-five days and that such reauthorizations would require a comprehensive review of current threat assessments by the intelligence agencies as well as a summary of intelligence gathered through the Terrorist Surveillance Program and other programs during the previous authorization period.

  As national security advisor, I had been one of the few officials read into, or briefed on, this highly classified program. Given its sensitive nature, even some of the administration’s top security officials had been left out of the loop. So I was a bit taken aback when Frances Townsend, then the President’s chief counterterrorism advisor, approached me in March 2004 about a code word to a program that she didn’t recognize. Fran had run into James Comey, the deputy attorney general, in the West Wing, and he had asked to speak with her privately. Guiding her into the hallway between the Roosevelt Room and the Cabinet Room, Comey turned to Townsend.

  “I’m going to start talking to you about something,” Comey said. “If you don’t recognize anything I am saying, tell me to stop.” Without going into specific details, he stated the code name for the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

  “Stop,” Fran said. She told him that I might know what he was referring to and that she would speak to me about their encounter. I had known Comey as an attorney who had earned a distinguished record as a New York prosecutor. If he was reaching out to someone who might not have been read into the program, it was clear to me that something must be wrong.

  I spoke with the President on the morning of March 12 and recommended that he meet with Comey, though I didn’t know the details of what concerned him. “He’s a respectable guy,” I said. “You need to hear him out.”

  After a counterterrorism briefing that morning, the President asked Comey to stay behind so that they could talk one-on-one. I would later learn that the President had signed a routine reauthorization of the Terrorist Surveillance Program despite an objection raised by the Justice Department to one aspect of the program. White House lawyers had apparently known about the objection for weeks, but the President had not been informed about it until the morning that the Terrorist Surveillance Program was set to expire. He had thus been placed in a difficult position: kill a program that had been important to our national security or override the objection of his Justice Department to keep the program alive.

  The President opted for the latter course, but he didn’t fully realize until the day he met with Comey just how serious the situation was: Comey and a number of other Justice Department officials, including FBI Director Robert Mueller, were planning to resign. It would have been a repeat of the “Saturday Night Massacre,” when senior Justice Department officials, including the attorney general, resigned after President Richard Nixon fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in October 1973.

  The President would modify the program to address the Justice Department’s objections, and Jim and the other officials withdrew their resignation threats. I’m awfully glad I helped arrange that meeting.

  STILL, ALL OF these structural changes and new programs were no substitute for the information that could be gleaned from key al Qaeda figures themselves. Soon we got the break that we’d long hoped for. Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda affiliate who had reportedly helped facilitate the foiled millennium plot, was found in Faisalabad, Pakistan, on March 28, 2002. U.S. and Pakistani authorities had launched a predawn raid on his fortified safe house, a compound operated by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba. A firefight broke out, and Zubaydah was shot three times in the ensuing chaos. He survived, thanks largely to the treatment he received from a top American doctor flown in by the CIA. Zubaydah’s death would have cost the United States an invaluable source of information on al Qaeda’s operations. One of bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants, Zubaydah had been the group’s chief recruitment officer, responsible for managing the flow of militants into training camps in Afghanistan and giving them orders on their way out. In this capacity he had acquired unrivaled knowledge about al Qaeda’s ranks, both inside Afghanistan and abroad. Zubaydah had literally written the al Qaeda manual on resisting interrogation techniques, and he proved a challenge to interrogators.

  The intelligence agencies and those who were interrogating him were certain that he knew far more than he let on, perhaps even crucial information about impending plots. It was under those circumstances that the Central Intelligence Agency sought authorization to use particular procedures they referred to as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The President asked two questions: Would the proposed interrogation program be legal? Is it necessary?

  The Vice President, the attorney general, Steve Hadley, and I were told to meet with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet that afternoon. George said that he would argue to the President that the program was necessary, explaining why the CIA thought Zubaydah was the key to understanding impending plots. He described in general terms what techniques he’d recommend, including waterboarding, and the safeguards that would be employed, including the presence of medical personnel, to ensure that the interrogations were conducted safely. The DCI emphasized that the techniques were safe and effective and had been used in the military training of thousands of U.S. soldiers. The attorney general said that he’d ask the Justice Department to determine whether the program would be legal under applicable domestic and international law. I asked that Col
in and Don be briefed. The President had asked a direct question, and the answers from the CIA (regarding necessity) and the Justice Department (regarding legality) would be forthcoming.

  The CIA was soon pressing for an answer. The Agency was absolutely convinced that Zubaydah knew something crucial and that time was running out. I went to see the President, who asked if we’d heard from Justice. I said that the attorney general was still considering the case. In fact, I had asked the attorney general to review the case personally. The President needed that confirmation from the nation’s top legal officer, not just the lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel.

  The President decided to tell George to make preparations for the interrogations but to hold off on them until the Justice Department had made its determination regarding their legality. I informed George of the President’s decision. The CIA was to begin the program only after the Justice Department concluded that the proposed program was legal, which it did by early August.

  Abu Zubaydah turned out to be an important source in his own right. But it was the fact that he provided information that helped lead to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that turned out to be of great consequence. KSM, as he came to be called, was captured in an apartment building in Pakistan a year later, on March 1, 2003. We’d been closing in on him since early 2003, aided by intelligence gathered by electronic means and the interrogation of other high-ranking operatives. But the case broke open at the end of February, when the CIA cultivated an informant who clued us in to KSM’s whereabouts. Hours later, acting on the tip from the CIA, Pakistani forces raided KSM’s apartment in Rawalpindi, rousing him from sleep in the predawn hours and taking him into custody.

  I was at Camp David that weekend in March with the President. The phone rang in the middle of the night. It was George Tenet. “We got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” he said. George described the circumstances under which he’d been captured and promised an update the next morning.

  I decided not to wake the President since there was nothing for him to do. But after I hung up I thanked God that we had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. We suspected that KSM had been the mastermind of 9/11, the al Qaeda operational commander for North America, and the man we thought most likely to know what was coming next and who was plotting it. He had also boasted that he had been Daniel Pearl’s executioner.

  Pearl, a graduate of Stanford, was the South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. While pursuing a story in Pakistan in January 2002, Pearl was abducted by a group of militants, who had lured him with the false promise of an interview with a prominent cleric. When Pearl arrived for the interview, however, they kidnapped him and held him hostage in a safe house on the outskirts of Karachi, where he remained until his murder. The world—and Pearl’s pregnant wife, Mariane—watched the drama unfold over the next several days, as the kidnappers released a series of messages denouncing Pearl as a spy and showing pictures of him with a gun to his head. When the militants found out that Pearl was Jewish, they announced that they would execute him within twenty-four hours. Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the ringleader of the abduction, transferred Pearl to the custody of a group of al Qaeda militants, led by KSM, who made good on the threat. The killers released a stomach-turning videotape of Pearl’s gruesome murder that was later used to corroborate KSM’s confession.

  One of the hardest phone calls I had to make in my time in government was to Mariane Pearl. I called to tell her that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had confessed to her husband’s murder but that, for the time being, we would make no public announcement. She was calm and gracious and, thankfully, did not ask much about the details, which I knew to be incredibly gruesome. It seemed that KSM had been happy to regale his captors with a graphic blow-by-blow of his murder of the journalist.

  EVEN AFTER the capture of Abu Zubaydah, KSM, and others, we continued to hope we’d find Osama bin Laden. Some people contend that we had a chance to capture or kill him at Tora Bora in the waning stages of the initial Afghan campaign in 2001. In fact, there were conflicting reports about his whereabouts at the time, and as a result the military did not request additional forces to conduct a strike. To my knowledge, the President was never asked to make a decision about a possible operation. But one thing is certain: if we had known where bin Laden was, we would have done absolutely everything in our power to take him down.

  Over the subsequent years there were multiple “sightings” of bin Laden, but none of them panned out. That was a deep disappointment, since we dreamed of the day that the American people would have the closure that his capture would bring. I was encouraged in 2007 when Mike Hayden, who was now serving as CIA director, told the President that we had a new lead—a courier who could lead us to the al Qaeda chief. But once again the trail went cold. In May 2011 the United States finally got bin Laden. I felt a great sense of relief and pride as well as gratitude to President Obama for the bold decision to launch the raid that had led to his killing. And I felt vindication for putting into place many of the tools that had led to that day.

  I always believed that we would get bin Laden. But two years after 9/11, it was the fact that KSM and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a logistics planner of the 9/11 attacks, were in custody and feeding us important information, that made me rest a little easier. It was a bit like having Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the brilliant and notorious Nazi general, under lock and key during World War II.

  I knew at the time that the steps we took, particularly the CIA’s interrogation program, would be controversial and second-guessed as the memories of 9/11 faded. Steve Hadley and I talked about it many times. Over the next years the CIA program would be modified, suspended, modified, and eventually resumed. Three different CIA directors would continue to recommend it as necessary, and three different attorneys general would assess and affirm its legality. Congressional leaders in the Senate and House intelligence committees were briefed on the program. I welcomed the debate—which was legitimate from my point of view—inside and outside the administration as circumstances changed. Great democracies have institutions that are constantly assessing and, if necessary, adjusting the course of the country in the pursuit of consistency with our values and our law, even under the most stressing conditions. In time I would, myself, play a role in the debates as secretary of state.

  Yet looking back at those days of sheer horror in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, I do not regret the decisions we made. I would never have engaged in—or encouraged the President to undertake—activities that I thought to be illegal. That was why the Justice Department was front and center in the assessment of the policies. I was not enthusiastic about all that was being done, but I accepted the DCI’s recommendation that it was necessary. I also found compiling lists of people who were individually targeted for “kill or capture” disturbing, particularly because there sometimes seemed to be civilian casualties in such engagements.

  But that was the hand we were dealt after 9/11. I do not believe that we should have rejected options that were legal and necessary. I could not have forgiven myself had there been another attack. And had that happened, there would have rightly been a different kind of second-guessing as Americans asked, “Why did you not do everything in your power to keep it from happening again?”

  9

  TROUBLE IN NUCLEAR SOUTH ASIA

  HISTORY TENDS TO IMPOSE a kind of sequential order on events, but a participant does not have the luxury of paying attention to them sequentially. In the fall of 2001, even as every day started with the terrorist threat report, events were unfolding around the globe, particularly in South Asia and the Middle East, each with its own dynamic. Yet in this new security environment there were unmistakable connections among those events, the rise of extremism, and the war on terror.

  The meeting in the Situation Room that mid-December morning in 2001 was extremely tense, perhaps more so than at any time since the attacks on the Twin Towers. Trouble between India and Pakistan was escalating in the wake of a December 13 a
ttack on the Indian Parliament House in New Delhi, which had killed nine people. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had sent a letter of condolence to Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and under enormous pressure internationally—particularly from the United States and Britain—condemned the attack in a televised address two days later. But Musharraf had also warned India not to take any actions that might escalate tensions. “This would lead to very serious repercussions,” he said. “It must not be done.” The warning did not sit well with the Indians, who suspected that Lashkar-e-Taiba, an extremist organization based in Pakistan and known to be supported by the country’s security service, the ISI, was the culprit. Vajpayee was facing significant domestic pressure to respond militarily to the devastating attack on the Parliament.

  As the NSC gathered that morning, military preparations were under way in the region, a mobilization that in a matter of weeks would result in nearly a million troops facing off across the border. Ever since the independent state of Pakistan had been carved out of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, tensions between Islamabad and New Delhi, particularly over disputed territory in Kashmir, remained high. The two neighbors had fought four wars against each other, and as hostilities escalated in the winter of 2001, we were eager to avoid yet another conflict. But because the nuclear-armed rivals have their forces in a near-constant state of alert, they had managed to mobilize and reach a heightened state of alert in a matter of days.