The Commission

by Philip Shenon

  The White House press office was busy, too. The morning of the hearing, it had authorized Fox News to reveal that Clarke was the formerly anonymous “senior administration official” who had given a briefing to reporters in early August 2002 to defend President Bush’s terrorism record. It was the sort of insider “background” briefing that White House officials in all administrations gave to reporters in exchange for a promise that their names would not be revealed. During the briefing, Clarke did what he had been ordered to do by the NSC: He offered a qualified defense of the Bush administration’s efforts against terrorist threats before 9/11. When the attacks happened, he said, Bush had been moving to “a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al-Qaeda.”

  What Clarke said to the reporters was true: A new antiterrorism plan was being developed in the White House before 9/11. What Clarke failed to mention in the briefing was that the White House had moved so slowly that the plan was not ready for the president’s approval until after 9/11. Nor did Clarke mention his belief that Bush and Condoleezza Rice had ignored dire terrorist threats throughout the spring and summer.

  In agreeing to allow Fox News to reveal that Clarke had given the 2002 briefing, the White House was attempting to paint him as a liar—a onetime Bush defender who had become a Bush critic in order to sell a book.

  Clarke had been asked by Rice to give the 2002 briefing to rebut charges in a damning Time magazine cover story days earlier that reported that the White House had ignored calls to get tough on al-Qaeda before 9/11. The magazine’s cover bore an ominous image of the Twin Towers, as seen through a pair of binoculars, set beneath the headline “The Secret History: Nine months before 9/11, the U.S. had a bold plan to attack Al Qaeda. It wasn’t carried out until after the towers fell.” Clarke knew that although the magazine’s story was mostly true—the “bold plan” was essentially his, after all—he was expected to spin the facts to try to knock down the story’s larger theme of the White House as negligent. And Clarke did what he was told to do, even if the spin took him perilously close to dishonesty, albeit the sort of dishonesty practiced every day in official Washington.

  The White House decision to reveal Clarke’s involvement in the 2002 briefing was denounced by Democrats as a dirty trick; Clarke had given the briefing on the assumption that his anonymity would be protected forever. But dirty trick or not, the White House got what it wanted. Clarke’s credibility was now open to question, with Fox leading the charge against him. His words from two years earlier might have been “spin,” but the White House knew that subtlety might be lost on a national audience that would wonder why Clarke was defending Bush in 2002 only to turn around and try to destroy the president two years later.

  Zelikow got hold of a copy of the briefing transcript a few minutes before the hearing, and he was thrilled by what he was reading. Maybe this would be enough to end the Dick Clarke “circus,” he said.

  “Does it get any better than this?” he asked gleefully to one of the Team 3 investigators at the thought that Clarke was about to be savaged on national television.

  With all of the frenzy created by his 60 Minutes interview and the release of the book, Clarke’s appearance before the 9/11 commission had turned into a true Washington spectacle.

  It was one of those moments in the capital when anyone of importance in the city was in front of a television set. The audience in the hearing room of the Senate’s Hart Office Building, just down the street from the Capitol dome, was packed with the family members of 9/11 victims, curious congressional aides, reporters, and anyone else who could squeeze in.

  Clarke entered the hearing room and took his seat at the witness table. Tom Kean asked him to stand and be sworn in. As Clarke raised his right hand, scores of cameras began clicking, the flashes popping, as photographers maneuvered to find the one image that captured the best of all Washington dramas—the former White House insider turned whistle-blower. It was being compared by reporters to the sort of drama that John Dean’s testimony provided in Watergate or Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North’s testimony offered in the Iran-Contra affair.

  Clarke took his seat. Kean invited Clarke to give an opening statement, asking him to limit it to the preagreed ten minutes. The witness would not need nearly so much time.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Clarke began.

  “I have only a very brief opening statement. I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a reoccurrence. I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11. For those who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn’t matter. Because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness. With that, Mr. Chairman, I’ll be glad to take your questions.”

  There was silence for a moment. Then it was replaced by gasps and then sobs from many of the family members in the audience. An apology? An admission of error? It was the first apology that the 9/11 families had heard from anybody of importance in the Bush administration. What Clarke had done seemed such a simple act, really. It was a request for forgiveness from someone who had reason to know what the government had done, and not done, to try to prevent something like 9/11. Even if Clarke’s apology was rehearsed, even if the White House was right and his motivations were entirely cynical, this was the moment of catharsis that many of the wives and husbands and children of the victims had been waiting for. Lorie Van Auken, one of the Jersey Girls, tried not to cry, but she could feel the tears streak down her face.

  At each public hearing, the commission varied the order in which the commissioners asked questions, and Clarke was fortunate in his lineup. The more harshly partisan Republicans were further down the list, which meant that the early, sympathetic questioning from Democrats would be the focus of the initial reports on CNN and the other television networks, as well as on the Associated Press and Reuters wire services. More than any other news organizations, the AP and Reuters shaped the agenda for how a story was covered by the rest of the Washington press corps, since their initial dispatches were read by assignment editors across the country within a few minutes of any important event.

  The first questioner was former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer, who was eager to have Clarke repeat his attacks on Bush and Rice. Roemer asked Clarke to compare the Clinton and Bush administrations in the urgency with which they treated terrorism threats.

  “My impression was that fighting terrorism in general and fighting al-Qaeda in particular were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration, certainly no higher a priority,” he said. “I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue but not an urgent issue.”

  When Bush came to office in 2001, he said, “George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the al-Qaeda threat were frequently given to the president and other high-level officials. And there was a process under way to address al-Qaeda. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don’t think it was ever treated that way.”

  He explained his decision to step down as counterterrorism director in 2001: His warnings about the dangers posed by Osama bin Laden were being ignored.

  “This administration, while it listened to me, either didn’t believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem,” Clarke said. “If the administration doesn’t believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there’s an urgent problem, and if it’s unprepared to act as though there’s an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job.”

  A dramatic apology? The contrast of the “extraordinarily high prio
rity” given to terrorism in the Clinton administration versus Bush’s attitude that terrorism is “not an urgent issue”? Clarke was making it easy for the reporters in the hearing room to write their stories that morning.

  Slade Gorton was up next in the questioning. His tone, as usual, was significantly less partisan than that of some of the other Republicans. He was polite; there was no sarcasm. And he obtained an important concession from Clarke, one that was surely welcomed at the White House. If all of Clarke’s recommendations had been followed in the Bush White House before the attacks, Gorton asked, “is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?”

  Clarke: “No.”

  Gordon: “It just would have allowed our response after 9/11 to be perhaps a little bit faster?”

  Clarke: “Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.”

  Clarke was not conceding that the attacks had been fated to happen. It seemed clear to Clarke and others that if the FBI and CIA had done their jobs properly before 9/11, at least some of the hijackers could have been captured before the attacks. The statement was welcomed, nonetheless, at the White House as at least a partial exoneration for the West Wing.

  RICHARD BEN-VENISTE opened his questioning with praise for Clarke’s apology: “I want to express my appreciation for the fact that you have come before this commission and stated in front of the world your apology for what went wrong. To my knowledge, you’re the first to do that.” There was wild applause for Clarke from some of the 9/11 families.

  Then it was Jim Thompson’s turn for questions. The mood in the room chilled instantly. Thompson was about to remind the audience why he had been so feared in his years as a federal prosecutor. Before Thompson’s election as Illinois governor, he had been the United States attorney in Chicago. In courtrooms in Chicago, he was renowned for his ability to take apart a defense witness on cross-examination. His questioning of Clarke had that same caustic tone.

  Thompson raised his arms slightly above the dais. In his left hand he held up a copy of Clarke’s freshly published book. In his right hand was a copy of the 2002 briefing transcript that was being distributed by Fox News. There was a contemptuous scowl on Thompson’s face.

  “Mr. Clarke, as we sit here this afternoon we have your book and we have your press briefing of August 2002,” he began. “Which is true?”

  Clarke did not flinch at the allegation that he had lied. A tough prosecutor was up against an even tougher witness.

  “I think the question is a little misleading,” Clarke began, explaining that what he had done in the 2002 briefing was a routine effort by a presidential aide “to try to explain that set of facts in a way that minimized criticism of the administration.”

  He continued: “I was asked to make that case to the press. I was a special assistant to the president. And I made the case I was asked to make.”

  Thompson tried again: “Are you saying to me that you were asked to make an untrue case to the press and the public and that you went ahead and did it?”

  Clarke: “No, sir. Not—”

  Thompson: “What are you saying?”

  Clarke: “Not untrue. Not an untrue case. I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. And as a special assistant to the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing.

  “I’ve done it for several presidents.”

  The last remark produced roars of knowing laughter in the audience, as well as among some of the commissioners. Clarke was expected to “spin” for Republican presidents, just as he had “spun” for Democrats before that, and a veteran Chicago pol like Jim Thompson understood that as well as anyone. Nobody bought Thompson’s claims of naiveté. The audience was with Clarke.

  But Thompson kept pressing the point: “What it suggests to me is that there is one standard—one standard of candor and morality for White House special assistants and another standard of candor and morality for the rest of America. I don’t get that.”

  Clarke replied: “I don’t think it’s a question of morality at all. I think it’s a question of politics.”

  The remark brought a new burst of supportive applause from the audience for Clarke. Thompson, seeming to realize that he had asked one too many questions, appeared flustered.

  There was another series of attacks from John Lehman, another Republican commissioner. He opened his questioning by referring to Clarke as “Dick,” as if they were long-lost friends, and noting that they had worked together in government dating back to the Reagan administration. “I have genuinely been a fan of yours,” said Lehman. It was the sort of syrupy praise that, in Washington, at least, tends to suggest that a witness is about to be torn to bits.

  “You’ve got a real credibility problem,” he told Clarke. He suggested that the attacks on Bush in Against All Enemies were part of a cynical marketing campaign by his publishers and that Clarke had provided contradictory testimony in his hours of private interviews with the commission.

  “This can’t be the same Dick Clarke that testified before us, because all of the promotional material and all of the spin in the networks was that this is a rounding, devastating attack, this book, on President Bush. That’s not what I heard in the interviews,” Lehman said. “I hope you’ll resolve that credibility problem because I’d hate to see you totally shoved to one side during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book.”

  Beyond suggesting that Clarke was perjuring himself, Lehman was apparently repeating the allegation by the White House that Clarke’s book was an effort to curry favor from Democrats and win Clarke an invitation to return to work at the White House if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee, ousted Bush in November.

  Clarke dealt first with the allegation that he was lying:

  “As to your accusation that there is a difference between what I said to this commission in fifteen hours of testimony and what I am saying in my book and what media outlets are asking me to comment on, I think there’s a very good reason for that. In the fifteen hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the president’s invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is because by invading Iraq—something I was not asked about by the commission, but something I chose to write about a lot in the book—by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.”

  Then he dealt with the politics: “I’ve been accused of being a member of John Kerry’s campaign team several times this week, including by the White House. So let’s just lay that one to bed. I’m not working for the Kerry campaign.”

  He continued: “The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign. So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one—on the record, under oath.”

  Lehman seemed taken aback. Once again, Clarke seemed to have the upper hand.

  After the hearing, Clarke was swarmed at the witness table by dozens of the family members of 9/11 victims. Many wanted to embrace him, choking back tears as they thanked him for his apology.

  BEYOND HIS attacks on the president and Rice, Clarke’s public testimony was significant in resolving one of the lingering mysteries about the government’s response to the 9/11 attacks—why dozens of members of Osama bin Laden’s extended family living in the United States had been allowed to evacuate the United States on special charter flights within days of the attacks.

  When the evacuations were revealed weeks after the fact, the White House had been unable to come up with a coherent explanation for why they had been allowed to take place and who had authorized them. The evacuation of bin Laden’s family inspired many of the most persistent of the conspiracy theories heard after 9/11. Was there some secret agreement between the Bush White House and the Saudi government to fer
ry terrorists, some of them bin Laden’s kin, out of the United States? The conspiracies were the focus of books and of Michael Moore’s incendiary documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

  Clarke revealed in his testimony that he was responsible for the evacuation flights. He had made the decision to allow the bin Ladens to leave after consulting with the FBI.

  “The Saudi embassy had apparently said that they feared for the lives of Saudi citizens, because they thought there would be retribution against Saudis in the United States,” Clarke said. “The Saudi embassy, therefore, asked for these people to be evacuated—the same sort of thing that we do all the time in similar crises, evacuating Americans.”

  He asked that the FBI review the names on the passenger manifests before the flights to be certain none of the passengers were terrorist suspects.

  “The FBI then approved—after some period of time, and I can’t tell you how long—approved the flight. Now, what degree of review the FBI did of those names, I cannot tell you. How many people there were on the plane, I cannot tell you. But I have asked since, were there any individuals on that flight that in retrospect the FBI wishes they could have interviewed in this country? And the answer I’ve been given is no.”

  AFTER CLARKE’S testimony, Zelikow was agitated. He saw Ben-Veniste call over Raj De, one of the young staff investigators, to ask De to quickly gather some research material for use in the questioning of another administration official that afternoon. As a commissioner, Ben-Veniste saw nothing wrong in asking for help from the staff in the middle of a public hearing. There was no time to leave the dais and do it himself.