Condi's Inside Man
March 15, 2008
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Choosing Philip Zelikow to head the inquiry into America's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks was akin to putting the fox in charge of the hen house, writes Philip Shenon.
Richard Clarke could not believe what he was reading as he sat in his White House office. It was one of his last days on the job after almost a dozen years at the National Security Council, and this news was no retirement gift. On the afternoon of January 27, 2003, the Associated Press issued a short news report about Philip Philip Zelikow's appointment as executive director of the 9/11 commission.
"The fix is in," said Clarke. He knew and disliked Zelikow. Christ, how could anybody be so stupid? he wondered. Condi's friend?
Clarke understood that with Zelikow - Zelikow, of all people! - in charge, there was no hope that the commission would carry out an impartial investigation of the Bush Administration's bungling of terrorist threats in the months before September 11. Could anyone have a more obvious conflict of interest than Zelikow?
It was not just that Zelikow was a close friend of Rice's from the first Bush presidency. That was the least of it. That was ancient history. Clarke wondered if the commission understood that it was Zelikow who, in his work on Bush's transition team in early 2001, had been the architect of the demotion of Clarke and his counterterrorism team within the NSC.
Clarke's colleagues believed that Zelikow's "reorganisation" had all but guaranteed that the White House would pay little attention to the flood of terrorist warnings in the months before September 11.
Was it possible that Zelikow had not told the commission chairmen Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton that he sat in on the briefings in the White House in January 2001 in which Rice was warned by her predecessor, Sandy Berger, that the biggest national security threat facing the country was al-Qaeda?
Not the threats that she and President George Bush had seemed so preoccupied with - Iraq, Iran, North Korea. The threat was Osama bin Laden. "Zelikow was right there, sitting with her, listening with her," he said.
Clarke had not always been pessimistic about the commission. When Congress finally overcame Bush's objections to an independent investigation and established the panel in late 2002, Clarke told colleagues that with the right commissioners and an aggressive staff, there was some hope that they would find out the truth of how Bush and Rice - Rice in particular - had repeatedly ignored the intelligence in 2001.
But the appointment of Zelikow suggested to Clarke the commission had been turned into just another instrument for the Bush Administration to try to hide the truth. Zelikow, he figured, would serve as the Administration's plant on the investigation, feeding information back to Rice and others that would allow them to deflect the commission's questions.
Most of the commissioners and the staff did not know until much later, but Zelikow had an important role at the White House in developing the scholarly underpinnings for the Iraq war. His 31-page "pre-emptive war" doctrine, written anonymously and at Rice's request, was released by the White House in September 2002 under George Bush's signature.
When commission staffers learned that Zelikow was the principal author, many were astounded. It was arguably his most serious conflict of interest in running the investigation. It was in his interest, they could see, to use the commission to try to bolster the Administration's arguments for war that he had helped make possible.
In the commission's early private meetings, the Democrat Max Cleland felt passionately that the commission needed to investigate the Bush Administration's reasons for going to war in Iraq - specifically, whether the President had used the September 11 attacks as an excuse to launch an invasion that he had planned to carry out from his earliest days in the White House. Cleland felt that the White House's early "obsession" with Iraq resulted from Bush's belief that his father had made a mistake by not finishing off Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Gulf War. Iraq was part of the reason the White House had paid so little attention to al-Qaeda terrorist threats in the northern spring and summer of 2001, Cleland believed.
But Cleland could see that Kean, Hamilton, and Zelikow had no interest in pursuing any line of inquiry involving the Iraq war. The war had overwhelming public support at the time, largely because most Americans saw it as a response to September 11.
Cleland found the opinion polls on the subject of Iraq astounding - the public had "drunk Cheney's Kool-Aid" and believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Iraq was somehow involved in September 11.
Cleland could tell that his harping on Iraq and the war was making him even more unpopular among the other commissioners, especially the Republicans.
"It was painfully obvious to me that there was this blanket over the commission," he said. "Anybody who spoke out or dissented, whether against George Bush, the White House, or the war against Iraq, was going to be marginalised." The investigation was only a few months old, but Cleland was already wondering if he had to find a way off the commission.
By October 2003, the Family Steering Committee, the largest of the groups representing the families of September 11 victims, and which included the four outspoken New Jersey widows known as the Jersey Girls, was convinced that Zelikow had to go.
It was not just his connections with Rice and his friendships with so many others in the Bush Administration; the basic information about his conflicts of interest had been known for months. It was his arrogance in his meetings with the families. His haughtiness. His secretiveness. The families had a justifiable sense of entitlement about the commission. It was their commission, this was their investigation.
The families knew for a fact, and no one disputed it, that the commission would never have been created without them.
So why was Zelikow, of all people, running this investigation? With each new disclosure about his relationships in the Bush White House, why did Kean and Hamilton choose to stand by him? To many of the families, it was clear that Zelikow was overseeing an investigation that would be - or at least should be - targeting people who were among his best friends and patrons. Rice in particular.
The Jersey Girls were fixated on Rice; they believed she was at the centre of all that had gone wrong in the White House in the spring and summer of 2001 in its failure to respond to warnings that al-Qaeda was about to strike. Among themselves, the Jersey Girls had taken to referring to Condoleezza Rice as "Kinda-Lies-a-Lot" Rice.
When challenged rudely by the families, Zelikow would be rude right back, which only fed the families' anger. Kean and most of the other commissioners were smarter than that.
Kean was known for agreeing to painfully long private meetings with the Jersey Girls and other families and letting them vent their anger, sometimes for hours, about the perceived failings of the investigation. He said he thought it was their right to yell at him.
"I'd be yelling at somebody, too, if I had gone through what they had gone through," he said. "I always had a feeling that, rational or irrational, they deserved to be heard."
Zelikow was apparently able to put aside any sympathy he might have had for the families. He would shout back. He stormed out of a meeting with the families held at a downtown Starbucks in Washington - the families were not allowed into the commission's offices because they did not have security clearances, which only added to their fury - after Kristen Breitweiser, one of the Jersey Girls, challenged him again about his conflicts of interest with Rice and others.
"That's right, Kristen," he said sarcastically, his face growing bright red with anger as he stood up to march out the door of the coffee shop. "Everything is connected. The hip bone is connected to the thigh bone is connected to the knee bone is connected to the ankle bone. It is all connected."
He said later that many of the family advocates had gone beyond grief to "a further level of anger, which in some cases had hardened into deep bitterness and mistrust".
In a letter to Kean and Hamilton on October 3, 2003, they said the commission had only two options - force Zelikow's resignation or demand that he recuse himself from any part of the investigation involving the National Security Council; the second option would have effectively ended Zelikow's involvement in the parts of the investigation that were most important to him.
Kean and Hamilton immediately rebuffed the committee's demands.
They wrote back to the families that Zelikow's ties to the Bush White House were "not news to us" and that "Dr Zelikow explained fully his past association with government agencies and the breadth and depth of his work experience before he was retained in his present position". They said his "experience makes him an invaluable asset to the commission".
But were Kean and Hamilton right that Zelikow's conflicts were not "news" to them? Had Zelikow really explained his background to the commission before he was hired?
Zelikow was clearly rattled by the call for his resignation. The families appeared to have sources on the commission's staff, and it seemed only a matter of time before they figured out all of his ties to the Bush White House, especially to Rice and Bush's political adviser Karl Rove.
Determined to remain on the investigation, Zelikow decided on a pre-emptive strike. He wanted to turn himself into a subject of the investigation. "I want to be interviewed," he told Kean and Hamilton. "I want to be on the record about this." He wanted the commission's staff to conduct a sworn interview with him about his work on the Bush transition team and his associations with senior White House officials.
The job fell to Dan Marcus, the general counsel, who readied himself for the interview by gathering all the material that Zelikow had submitted to Kean and Hamilton in the weeks before he was hired in January. He brought a copy of Zelikow's resume to the interview, which was held on October 8, 2003, only five days after the commission had received the families' letter demanding his removal.
Kean and Hamilton made it clear to Marcus they wanted to keep Zelikow on, regardless of what Marcus found. It was too late to find a new executive director. Besides, Zelikow had made himself indispensable, if only because he had so tightly controlled the flow of the information within the commission that only he really knew all that was going on among the teams of investigators.
Kean and Hamilton believed that if Marcus determined Zelikow had major conflicts of interest, he could be recused from those areas of the investigation.
Marcus could not be certain, but he suspected that Zelikow might have kept the information from Kean and Hamilton intentionally, in the knowledge that he would never have been hired otherwise.
He could not say that definitively.
"I have no idea whether they were deliberately blindsided or not," he said of Kean and Hamilton. But it was obvious that Kean and Hamilton had been blindsided. Zelikow, he said, "should never have been hired for this job".
Marcus took his findings back to Kean and Hamilton. If they were insistent that Zelikow remain on the investigation, his responsibilities would have to be curtailed sharply. At the very least, he needed to be recused from any part of the investigation dealing with the 2001 White House transition, and perhaps he should be excluded from anything involving the NSC, as the families had recommended.
The decision by Kean and Hamilton, at Marcus's recommendation, was that Zelikow recuse himself from all issues involving the transition from the Clinton to the Bush administrations and that he be barred from participating in any interviews of senior Bush aides, including Rice.
Zelikow was angry about the recusals, but he accepted them.
Edited extract from The Commission - The Uncensored History Of The 9/11 Investigation by Philip Shenon (Little, Brown, $35).
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