Despite Robert Mueller’s promises for reform at the FBI, the bureau remained the target of withering criticism for its failures in terrorism investigations and for its outdated technology. Five months after the 9/11 commission released its report, Mueller announced that the FBI was abandoning a $170 million computer overhaul that was considered critical to its stepped-up efforts to track terrorists; the system was found to be riddled with technical problems. Despite Mueller’s continued insistence that terrorism remained the bureau’s number one priority, there was no stability in senior management at the FBI when it came to terrorism investigations. In the five years after September 11, six people had moved through the job of counterterrorism chief at FBI headquarters.
The Saudi embassy in Washington was so pleased by the conclusions of the commission’s final report that it posted large excerpts of the report on its website. “The 9/11 commission has confirmed what we have been saying all along,” said the Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. “The clear statements by this independent, bipartisan commission have debunked the myths that have cast fear and doubt over Saudi Arabia.”
Investigations by the Defense Department’s inspector general and by the Senate Intelligence Committee disputed allegations by a group of military officers and contractors who reported in 2005 that a top-secret Pentagon data-mining program known as Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers long before the attacks and linked them to a terrorist cell inside the United States. The 9/11 commission was drawn into the dispute after it was disclosed that a navy captain who had overseen the Able Danger program visited the commission’s offices on K Street in Washington in 2004 and urged it to investigate, only to be rebuffed by Dieter Snell. The commission later said it was aware of Able Danger but had uncovered nothing in its investigation to suggest that Atta and the other hijackers were known to the government before 9/11.
Several staff members of the commission said later that while they were convinced the rumors about Able Danger and Atta were untrue, they believed that other vital intelligence about the 9/11 attacks and about al-Qaeda did remain hidden in government files after the commission had shut its doors. They were alarmed especially about what the commission had missed with its frantic, last-minute search of the NSA’s terrorism archives. To date, they said, those archives have never been thoroughly reviewed by outside investigators. “I never felt complacent and remain ready to believe that someone may, in the future, find evidence we missed or didn’t know about,” Zelikow acknowledged later when asked about the NSA files.
On NOVEMBER 2, 2004, President George W. Bush was elected to a second term, taking 51 percent of the vote to John Kerry’s 48 percent. Even though its conclusions questioned the Bush administration’s justification for the Iraq war, the 9/11 commission’s final report was never a major issue on the campaign trail. Opinion polls showed that a key factor in Bush’s victory was the perception that he was the more decisive leader in dealing with terrorist threats. Several of the most prominent of the 9/11 family activists, including some of the Jersey Girls, had campaigned actively for Kerry.
Within days of his reelection, President Bush moved to oust Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was perceived within the White House as insufficiently loyal to the president’s agenda, especially the pursuit of the war in Iraq. Even before Powell was told of Bush’s decision, Bush had approached National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice about replacing him. With what she insists was reluctance, she accepted. She was confirmed by the Senate on January, 26, 2005, by a vote of 85–13, becoming the second woman, and the first black woman, to run the State Department. It was the largest number of “no” votes in the Senate for any secretary of state since 1825. The same day, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted even more sharply along partisan lines to approve White House counsel Alberto Gonzales as Bush’s attorney general, replacing John Ashcroft.
Many of the Senate Democrats who voted against Rice’s nomination said they were troubled by her role as an architect of the Iraq war, as well as by her failings before 9/11 to deal with terrorist threats. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, said she voted against the nomination because she wanted “to hold Dr. Rice and the Bush administration accountable for their failures in Iraq and in the war on terrorism.” Senator Robert C. Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat who was one of the most vocal opponents of the Iraq invasion, said Rice simply did not deserve to be promoted given her record before and after 9/11. “I cannot support higher responsibilities for those who helped set our great nation down the path of increasing isolation, enmity in the world, and a war that has no end,” he said on the Senate floor.
Rice quickly set to work to put a new team in place at the State Department, to replace the Powell loyalists who had departed with him. On February 25, she announced that she had decided to reestablish the job of State Department counselor, a sort of all-purpose adviser who would have her ear at all times. The position, which had been a powerful one earlier in the history of the department, had been vacant for four years, and she found just the candidate for the job: Professor Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia.
“Philip and I have worked together for years,” Rice said in a press release. “I value his counsel and expertise. I appreciate his willingness to take on this assignment.”
Zelikow told his new colleagues at the State Department that it was the sort of job he had always wanted.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In a sense, I began work on this book in January 2003, when I was assigned the 9/11 commission as a beat for The New York Times. I was not sure I wanted the job. It is odd to think of it now, but it was not clear to anyone at the time that the 9/11 commission would be much of a story. Only a few weeks earlier, Henry Kissinger had resigned as chairman of the commission in a dispute over his apparent refusal to abide by federal ethics rules and reveal the names of his consulting clients. He was replaced by former governor Tom Kean of New Jersey: a successful state politician, to be sure—but Kean would be the first to admit that in terms of national celebrity and geopolitical expertise, he was no Henry Kissinger. Far from it. Kean had removed himself from the political stage for more than a decade; he had never worked in Washington or for the federal government and he seemed to take pride in that fact. Certainly it seemed that Kean and the commission’s vice chairman, former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana, lacked the clout to get at the rest of the truth surrounding what happened on September 11. And was there much more to tell? The origins of the 9/11 plot and the history of the government’s failures to deal with the al-Qaeda threat had already been well fleshed out in the joint House-Senate investigation of 9/11, or so it appeared; the congressional inquiry was beginning to wind down just as the 9/11 commission opened for business. In early 2003 the public’s attention, and the attention of many of my colleagues, was turning to what seemed to be the imminent invasion of Iraq. That was the much bigger story.
But in the nearly two years that followed, the commission became one of the best assignments of my career. There were days when I got lost in the exciting twists and turns of a story that had elements of a well-paced Washington thriller: Before terrorists struck on American soil, what did the president know about the threat and when did he know it? Would he be forced to divulge his super-secret daily intelligence memos to the public? Would his savvy and telegenic national security adviser agree to testify in public and under oath regarding the damning charges made against her by a whistleblowing aide? Who was this mysterious White House whisteblower and what did he claim to know about the president and his top aides? Why did a top White House aide in the previous administration try to steal classified documents from the National Archives, apparently stuffed in his pockets, maybe in his socks? Every so often, I took a deep breath and reminded myself how important all of this was—how much larger this story was than the day’s twists and turns might sometimes suggest. All of my stories dealt in some way with the most important event of our time
: September 11, 2001. For our generation, this was our Pearl Harbor; this was our equivalent to the Kennedy assassination; this was the horrifying moment that changed all of our lives. I had daily contact with many of the widows and widowers and mothers and fathers and daughters and sons of the people who died at the Twin Towers and the Pentagon and that lonely field in Pennsylvania. Better than anyone else, they reminded me why this was not just another blue-ribbon federal commission that deserved the occasional 700-word story in the Times. The 9/11 commission was the last, best hope to understand why September 11 happened—and if it had to happen.
This book would not have happened without the help of many people who took risks to talk to me about the 9/11 commission. That is especially true of several of the commission’s former staff investigators. Many of the key sources in this book are men and women who were detailed temporarily to the staff of the commission and then returned to their careers elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy. Although they do not figure by name elsewhere in the book, I have real admiration for the work of Mark Bittinger, Daniel Byman, Sam Caspersen, Lance Cole, Steven Dunne, Alvin Felzenberg, Susan Ginsburg, Doug Greenburg, Barbara Grewe, Bonnie Jenkins, William Johnstone, Janice Kephart-Roberts, John Raidt, John Roth, Peter Rundlet, Kevin Scheid, and several others on the staff. Whether I talked to these people or not is secondary; they should be saluted for terrific work on the commission. Certainly their colleagues had admiration for them.
Among the commissioners, Governor Kean and Congressman Lee Hamilton deserve my special thanks. They are model public servants and exceptionally decent men. When I first considered writing a book about the 9/11 commission, I thought about trying to help the two of them write their own account of the investigation. I was too late: It turned out they were already at work on a book, and the result, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, was published in 2006 by Knopf and co-written by the very talented Benjamin Rhodes. Their book was invaluable to me in organizing this unofficial history of the commission, and I have retold a couple of that book’s best stories.
I am grateful to my colleagues at The New York Times for all of their assistance on this project and on so many other reporting projects over my career there. I shared many bylines on stories during that period with generous colleagues who made me look good, including Lowell Bergman, Elizabeth Bumiller, Jeff Gerth, Carl Hulse, Douglas Jehl, David Johnston, Neil Lewis, Eric Lichtblau, Alison Mitchell, Robert Pear, James Risen, David Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Thom Shanker, Richard Stevenson, David Stout, Don Van Atta, Matt Wald, and the late Christopher Marquis and David Rosenbaum; Chris and David are greatly missed by their colleagues. On stories about the 9/11 commission, I had terrific backing from the editors of the Washington bureau of the Times, especially Richard Berke, Greg Brock, Jack Cushman, Adrianne Goodman, and Susan Keller, as well as our team of researchers, especially Barclay Walsh, Monica Borkowski, and Marjorie Goldsborough. The former Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, convinced me to take on the 9/11 commission as an assignment over those initial misgivings, and I’m thankful he talked me into it.
In working on this book, I have had several cheerleaders from within the Times, especially my friends Jan Battaile, Marion Burros, Lynette Clemetson, Linda Greenhouse, Jan Harland, and the late, great R.W. Apple Jr. The new Washington bureau chief, Dean Baquet, has impressed everyone with his extraordinary talents as both a newsman and as a manager; he was generous to give me additional leave to finish this book. He is the fitting successor to my first boss in journalism, the legendary James “Scotty” Reston of the Times. A week after my college graduation, I began my career at the Times as Scotty’s clerk in the Washington bureau. Dean and Scotty are alike in many ways, and that is a tribute to them both. Everyone in the Washington bureau owes a debt to Maureen Dowd, who has demonstrated her bravery so often during the Bush administration. In the bureau, we all miss William Safire, who was a remarkably generous colleague. I am grateful to the executive editor of the Times, Bill Keller, and managing editor Jill Abramson for recognizing the importance of stories about the 9/11 commission long before editors at other news organizations.
I thank my colleague Michael Gordon of the Times for his wise counsel on the book-writing business. He urged me to hire on his research assistant, Christopher Mann, and it may have been the best decision I made in reporting and writing this book. Christopher is the perfect reporting partner—smart, hard-working, imaginative, unflappable—who has a brilliant future wherever he ends up. I look forward to reading his books someday soon. Christopher also led me to the very talented Alexis Blanc, a graduate student at George Washington University, who gave up weeks of her time to assist me with research.
I have been blessed to be represented by Kathy Robbins of The Robbins Office; with this book, I have learned that Kathy is as talented an editor as she is an agent. She is spectacular. She also has surrounded herself with terrific colleagues, including Coralie Hunter and Kate Rizzo. The talented David Halpern of The Robbins Office has given me my early education in dealing with Hollywood.
Kathy immediately thought of Jonathan Karp to publish this book, and it became obvious why. Editor, publisher, marketer, diplomat, deadline-enforcer, psychotherapist—he can do it all, with grace and humor, all the while bouncing that cute little kid of his on his knee. Jon is the great future of American publishing. It is an honor to be among the authors of the first twelve of his Twelve books. I am grateful to Jon’s many talented colleagues at Twelve and at Hachette, including Cary Goldstein and Nate Gray. Robert Castillo, the managing editor of New York operations for Hachette Book Group, makes everybody look good. Jon and Bob found a splendid copyeditor in Sona Vogel. Hachette provided me with the services of a fine lawyer, Kevin Goering, who proved to be a thoughtful editor as well.
I am grateful to my loving parents and the rest of my extended family in northern California for putting up with my long disappearances to get this book done—and, for that matter, to pursue a career in newspaper journalism for the past quarter-century far from home. I’ll try to get home more often. And my thanks and love to Susan Howells for also putting up with my long silences in Washington. My friends Grace and Evan know who they are.
Edward B. MacMahon, the brilliant court-appointed defense lawyer for Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-born extremist who would later be described as “the 20th hijacker” of September 11, and Ed’s crackerjack deputy, Michele Jenkins, gave me valuable insight over the years into the workings of the legal system in the aftermath of September 11. Moussaoui almost certainly does not realize it, and he would not express gratitude, but the fact that he is not on death row is due largely to the hard work of Ed and Michele.
Although I have told him he will not like much of this book, Bill Harlow, the former chief spokesman for the CIA, has still been hugely helpful to me. I hope Bill takes some solace from the fact that, because of his assistance, this book is doubtless more balanced in its presentation of the CIA and its officers than it would otherwise have been. The same is true of Mark Corallo, John Ashcroft’s former spokesman at the Justice Department. Bill and Mark have always served their bosses well, yet I have never felt led astray by either of them; that is the highest compliment I can pay to men who hold jobs like theirs.
My many friends at Café 1612, Steam Café, and the Starbucks at the corner of U and New Hampshire, all in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, kept me fed and well-caffeinated during the long, otherwise lonely writing of this book in 2006 and 2007. The bulk of the text was written in those three places, mostly over cups of steaming coffee. There were days I talked to almost no one else.
If anyone is responsible for this book, ultimately, it is the families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The families were responsible for the creation of the commission, over the fierce opposition of the Bush White House and many in Congress; the families fought to try to keep the investigation honest, against incredible odds. They did much of the digging that produced scoops for me and ra
ised important issues about the commission, its leadership and the conduct of the investigation. I cannot imagine their suffering. If the full truth is ever told about September 11, 2001, it will be their doing. It has not been told yet.
Washington D.C.
December 2007
NOTES
I don’t like anonymous sources either. I have spent my career at a newspaper that is so wary of anonymous sources that the word “sources” is effectively banned. (The popular formulations at other papers—“according to sources” or “sources said”—do not appear in The New York Times.) But in any sort of reporting on the inner workings of the government, especially when it involves intelligence agencies and classified information, there is almost always a need to depend on sources who cannot be identified by name. This book is no exception. Whatever they are called, the anonymous sources cited in this book had good reason to keep their names out of print. After the 9/11 commission went out of business in August 2004, many members of its staff returned to jobs in the CIA, the Pentagon, or other government agencies in which they could lose their jobs, even be prosecuted, if it became known they had talked to a reporter without permission. That sort of fear among government officials has grown steadily worse in Washington in the years since 9/11. I feel honored that so many of the commission’s staff members who now hold sensitive government jobs were willing to take the risk to speak to me, albeit with a promise of anonymity.
My first executive editor at the Times, the legendary A.M. Rosenthal, had a firm rule about anonymous pejorative quotations about an individual: He would not allow them into his newspaper. And I have tried, whenever possible, to follow that rule in this book. As often as possible, I have tried to use material from “on-the-record” sources, including almost all of the commissioners and several key members of the commission’s staff. Nearly two-thirds of the eighty members of the commission’s staff talked to me for this book, on or off the record.
The Commission Page 49
