The Commission: The Uncensored History
of the 9/11 Investigation
By Philip Shenon
TWELVE. 457 pp. $27
Print
By Max Holland
The citizens who lost beloved ones on September 11, 2001 were once like
most Americans: politically disengaged if not disenchanted, preoccupied
with family and friends, earning a living, and life’s pleasures. On
9/10, a majority of them would undoubtedly have been hard pressed to
name George Bush’s national security adviser. “Is it Colin Powell?” But her identity hardly seemed to matter outside the beltway until precisely 9:03:11 AM
on September 11. At that moment a second passenger jet crashed into the
World Trade Center, and it instantly became apparent that the federal
government had failed miserably in a most fundamental obligation.
There are a hundred different ways to write about 9/11’s
impact, but surely one of the most revealing is the unwanted civics
lesson the bereaved families received after the terrorist attacks. For
many of them, their last exposure to how federal government works was
probably a high school class, and they only dimly remembered “how a
bill becomes law.” But they naturally wanted answers and accountability
from their government in the wake of the terrorist attacks. Why had
fathers, sons, and brothers, mothers, daughters, and
sisters—non-combatants all—been killed, most of them pulverized beyond
recognition, for the crime of showing up on time?
What these families received instead of prompt answers was an
advanced and protracted course in high-stakes Washington politics. To
denizens of the nation’s capital, who have devoted their lives to
working in or covering government, none of this came as a particular
surprise. To the families, particularly the so-called “Jersey Girls”
who spear-headed the search for answers and accountability, it was in
many ways a bitter education.[1]
This clash is at the heart of Philip Shenon’s book on the
9/11 Commission. Shenon, who was the lead reporter on the panel for The New York Times, has written an account of the commission’s 20-month investigation from start to finish. In the process, The Commission
unavoidably lays bare the difference between what we are taught to
think about how the government works, and the actual, often deflating,
reality. After reading it, one cannot help but think back to Attorney
General Janet Reno’s response to the 1993 debacle at the
Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Reno did the unimaginable: she
promptly took responsibility for a decision that turned out to have
terrible consequences. But her public contrition was the exception that
proved the rule. In Washington, the single hardest thing to do is to
get a government official or agency to own up to a mistake—the
finely-honed strategies of avoidance would tax the imagination of any
great novelist.
Shenon skips the first semester in the education, i.e., the
protracted political wrangling that lasted more than a year before
President Bush reluctantly signed the legislation creating the
commission on November 27, 2002.[2]
The White House’s opposition was comprehensible if untenable, and
almost certainly reflected the then-dominant mentality of Vice
President Dick Cheney. Experienced Washington hands know that
commissions tend to take on a life of their own and can be
unpredictable. Besides, any bipartisan commission would be an
irresistible vehicle for Democrats bent on making the Bush
administration bear the lion’s share of responsibility for 9/11. And if
they succeeded, George Bush could presumably kiss good-bye his chances
of being re-elected.
Shenon’s basic argument, however, is that rather than
becoming an instrument of Bush’s demise, the commission helped reelect
George Bush. As the panel’s general counsel, Daniel Marcus, a liberal
Democrat, put it to Shenon, the August 2004 final report, by “pulling
its punches” to achieve unanimity, mainly served to remind Americans of
a dire threat to their security and well-being.[3]
It thus played into the hands of the White House’s re-election
strategy, which was to depict George Bush as far more reliable and
steady than John Kerry in the face of this existential menace.
At least one commissioner, though, former Nebraska Senator
Bob Kerrey (D), takes strong exception to the view Shenon posits.
Kerrey argues that the 9/11 Report
provided plenty of fodder for the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, and that the
real problem was John Kerry’s failure to exploit fully what was in the
final report. Rather than harp on the warnings that went unheeded
inside the White House, Kerry stupidly (from a political point of view)
concentrated on trying to express more enthusiasm for the report than
did the White House, which abruptly decided it liked the final document
after all. Kerry was also content with trying to outbid Bush in terms
of the haste with which a Democrat would implement the panel’s
recommendations.
Bob Kerrey may have a point. Any Democratic nominee with a
sure instinct for the jugular—say, John F. Kennedy, who based his 1960
campaign on a non-existent “missile gap”—might easily have turned the 9/11 Report to partisan advantage. That John Kerry did not says more about his political instincts than about the report.
Shenon ignores this nuance, perhaps because it clashes with
his major theme, which is a very dramatic one: that the commission’s
ability to report the truth was neutered and neutralized by an
executive director, Philip Zelikow, who was allowed to serve despite
deep conflicts-of-interest, as well as surreptitious ties to the White
House, including with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Although there are other revelations, the book’s axis of criticism is
almost entirely about Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and
former director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Shenon’s book
is a blistering critique of Zelikow’s performance, and a
not-very-veiled criticism of the commission co-chairmen (Tom Kean and
Lee Hamilton) who hired him in the first place, and then allowed
Zelikow to stay on even after his multi-faceted conflicts-of-interest
were fully revealed under oath.
Kean and Hamilton’s seeming obliviousness to appearances,
which can be more important than private realities when the political
and historical stakes are so high, certainly gnawed at the 9/11
relatives, several of whom called for Zelikow’s resignation or recusal
from the most sensitive aspects of the inquiry about half-way through
the commission’s term. In this regard, Shenon’s critique closely
parallels the perspective of these 9/11 families, who believe the
investigation they had to fight for tooth and nail was fatally
compromised after Zelikow assumed the commission’s most important job.
Shenon goes to some pains to refute the most extreme
interpretation of Zelikow’s hiring: that he was a “mole” emplaced by
the White House to thwart the issuance of a devastating report. In
fact, his name was put into play by former Senator Slade Gorton
(R-Washington). Zelikow then quickly dazzled the co-chairmen, Tom Kean
(R), a former governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton (D), a former
Indiana congressman, who were responsible for hiring an executive
director. One measure of the suspicion generated by Zelikow’s
appointment, however, is that this “mole” allegation is widely
circulated and given credence (particularly on conspiracy-oriented
websites) despite its falsity.
Shenon’s portrait of Zelikow is depressingly familiar to anyone who has worked under him, as I did.[4]
A lawyer and foreign service officer before entering academia, Zelikow
has many of the traits once ascribed to a young Henry Kissinger, minus
the accent and Central European charm. Zelikow is routinely described,
and rightly so, as having a keen and quick mind. He speaks in complete
paragraphs, and has a striking capacity for boiling down a complicated
problem, conveying its essence, and proposing a solution. He is also,
as Shenon depicts, tightly wound, arrogant, unctuous, and prone to
bullying. Kissinger himself probably summed up Zelikow best when Kean
asked him what he thought about appointing the University of Virginia
professor. “[Zelikow’s] one of the most brilliant men I know,”
Kissinger responded. “But you will not like him. Nobody does.”[5]
If for no other reason, Shenon’s book is valuable because it finally
provides a coherent explanation for how the 9/11 panel came to have an
executive director who simultaneously oversaw the investigation and was
a subject of it—an unprecedented situation. According to Shenon,
Zelikow minimized, to a point of disingenuousness, the exact nature of
his activities until it was too late
(or so the commissioners thought) to fire him.
Kean and Hamilton, of course, knew and appreciated from the outset that
Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct
would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National
Security Council (NSC) under Brent Scowcroft during the presidency of
George Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German
reunification. The commission co-chairmen were also aware that
Zelikow’s connections were not just past but current; Bush had
appointed him to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), one of the most sensitive advisory posts an administration “outsider” can hold.
According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose on
his résumé several more egregious conflicts-of-interest, including the
critical fact that as a member of Rice’s transition team in 2000-01, he
had been the architect responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his
counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow’s
reorganization plan “laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the
White House” in the months before 9/11.[6]
There was also the fact that Zelikow had secretly authored, at Rice’s
request, the Bush administration’s post-9/11 national strategy paper
released in September 2002, a doctrine that justified unilateral and
pre-emptive attack whenever Washington felt threatened.[7]
Given his other entanglements, Zelikow’s role on the transition alone
was probably sufficient to disqualify him from serving as executive
director, and this latter involvement compounded the problem. It was as
if J. Lee Rankin, Zelikow’s equivalent on the Warren Commission, had
written a book with J. Edgar Hoover, frequented Jack Ruby’s burlesque
joint, and donated money to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee before
November 22.
Shenon quotes Kean as saying he “wasn’t sure” that he knew
anything about Zelikow’s work on Rice’s transition team before he
agreed to hire him, but when he did find out he found it “worrisome.”[8]
Hamilton, for his part, told Shenon, “I think I did [know], but I don’t
think I’d swear to that.” In any case, Hamilton admitted that he did
not know any of the “details” of what Zelikow had done during the
transition.[9]
Zelikow, meanwhile, has provided various explanations whenever this
issue has arisen. He has claimed, despite the absence of these
entanglements on his résumé, that Kean and Hamilton knew all about his
past work with Rice because he told them orally. They have no clear
recollection of that. Zelikow has also insisted that his transition
role was so widely and even publicly known that Kean and Hamilton could
not have been unwitting.[10]
Lastly, Zelikow has attempted to defuse the extremely sensitive matter
of his loyalties, by telling Shenon, for example, that “I don’t think
Tom or Lee or I anticipated the extent to which the commission’s work
would be used as a partisan battlefield.”[11]
It was this kind of patently false and dismissive remark that used to
infuriate the Jersey Girls. They knew better at this point in their
crash education.
In October 2003, as word of Zelikow’s conflicts spread, the 9/11 relatives’ umbrella group, the Family Steering Committee, released a statement
demanding Zelikow’s resignation or recusal from the part of the
investigation involving the NSC. Shaken by the demand, Zelikow decided
on a pre-emptive strategy: he told Kean and Hamilton that he wanted to
describe the exact nature of his pre-commission activities under oath.
But even before Zelikow’s examination by general counsel Daniel Marcus,
the co-chairmen made clear they wanted to keep the indispensable
Zelikow in place, eight months into the investigation. Marcus was
instructed to do what needed to be done on the recusal front, and “make
it work.”[12]
The upshot was that Zelikow was recused from that part of the
investigation dealing with the NSC transition, and was barred from
participating in interviews of senior Bush aides. The decision
reportedly angered Zelikow, but he nonetheless accepted these
limitations. Thereafter he would represent his recusal as voluntary,
taken at his own initiative because of his integrity.[13]
Zelikow, rather than tread lightly on those areas where his conflicts
were manifest, is depicted by Shenon as inserting himself energetically
into the most politically-charged areas of the investigation, and
arousing suspicion that he had a bias in favor of the Bush
administration. According to Shenon, Zelikow acted as Rice’s in-house
advocate, repeatedly putting the best spin on her activities in the
months leading up to the attacks, especially in comparison to those of
the other key officials involved, such as counter-terrorism chief
Richard Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet. Certainly Zelikow was
hardly the only staffer to harbor a point of view. But few were as
manifest about their biases, and there was only one executive director.
The investigation was divvied up into 10 teams, and there appears to be
a direct correlation between the frequency of Zelikow’s interaction
with any given team, and the degree to which its members ended up
disturbed and angry.
In an early response to Shenon’s embargoed book, after some of its disclosures had been first revealed on Washington Decoded,
Zelikow told ABC News that he didn’t think most of the 9/11 commission
staffers would criticize his leadership. Out of a total of 85, Zelikow
said, only about six were disgruntled, and given the circumstances
“that was a pretty low fraction.”[14]
Thus, Shenon’s book was not representative because he relied primarily
on the recollections of these malcontents. But one staffer told Washington Decoded
that when Kirsten Lundberg wrote up a case study on the 9/11 Commission
for Harvard University’s Kennedy School, Lundberg was taken aback by
the harsh reviews of Zelikow that poured forth, often unsolicited, from
almost every staffer she interviewed.[15]
Lundberg confirmed, when interviewed, that criticism of Zelikow was not
limited to a few malcontents. But she also said that virtually every
staffer leavened their criticism of Zelikow’s management with praise for the other qualities he brought to the undertaking.[16]
Zelikow refused to be interviewed in person for Shenon’s
book, insisting instead that all questions be submitted in writing via
email, which was also the way he answered them. This arrangement has
led to an unusual circumstance, whereby the curious reader has instant
access to the raw information that Shenon gathered for his book. Both
Shenon and Zelikow have made the exchange available; Shenon on the book’s website, while Zelikow began distributing his version of the email compilation to interested journalists and others once word of the book began to seep out.
From these emails, it’s possible to juxtapose Shenon’s
account with how Zelikow attempted to characterize his role when the
commission’s work rubbed up against the Bush administration’s rationale
for the invasion of Iraq. In a way, this was an issue even more
sensitive than the Rashômon-like
problem of how the White House performed in the months prior to
September 11. Specifically, the issue here was what role the commission
would play with respect to the White House’s assertion of a meaningful
link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s security services.
The first episode concerned an interim staff report on the
history of the State Department’s efforts to counter al Qaeda, which
was drafted by Team 3’s Scott Allan, an attorney specializing in
international law. When Zelikow returned the draft, according to
Shenon, Allan was shocked to find that it had been altered in one
direction: it now read so that it would surely be interpreted in public
as supportive of the Bush administration’s unsubstantiated case. Allan
was aghast, and a meeting was arranged between Zelikow and Team 3 to
talk over the inserted language. Zelikow, at the outset, expressed
“surprise” that anyone had gotten worked up about the changes.[17]
With the entire Team 3 arrayed against him, Zelikow backed off, the
language was re-jiggered, and when the staff statement was presented to the
commission in March 2004, it generated only modest attention.[18]
When Shenon raised this episode with Zelikow in two separate
emails, in March and September 2007, the former executive director gave
somewhat contradictory answers. He claimed initially that the dispute
had not been over the substance at all, but over whether Allan’s
statement was the proper place to discuss the linkage. Zelikow admitted
subsequently to being “argumentative about this [subject], since I
resented any implication of [a] political motive.” He then went on to
claim that he “was probably too defensive about the matter, and I was defensive on behalf of [Douglas] MacEachin too [emphasis added], since I have a high regard for his integrity.”[19]
Zelikow was thus asserting that the language had been drafted
principally by MacEachin, a well-regarded former deputy director of
intelligence at the CIA, and that Zelikow had merely inserted it into
Allan’s draft in a misplaced act of respect. (MacEachin
was the head of Team 1, charged with writing a history of al Qaeda).
But MacEachin, who came out of semi-retirement after 9/11 to write a
crash, all-source history of al Qaeda for the CIA, had neither drafted
nor proposed anything that resembled Zelikow’s insertions. Indeed, MacEachin was
known within the commission as the most outspoken critic of any claim
of meaningful collaboration between al Qaeda and Hussein’s Iraq.
MacEachin also figured in a subsequent episode in which
Zelikow displayed a skewed sense of history. Three months after Allan’s
interim staff report, it was MacEachin’s turn to present Team 1’s
findings before the commission. In keeping with a thoroughly-researched
conclusion, the statement noted that while there were reports of
contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda, “they do not appear to have
resulted in a collaborative relationship . . . . We have no credible
evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the
United States.”[20]
The statement was duly vetted by the so-called “front office.” Yet,
when MacEachin actually presented the statement to the commissioners on
Wednesday, June 16, it instantly created a media firestorm. The press
picked up on the fact that the staff statement was directly challenging
the Bush administration’s insinuations. When MacEachin returned to his
office, he was bombarded by dozens of calls from reporters. In response
to one query, which pointed out that the Bush administration was
claiming the opposite, MacEachin flatly asserted that he stood by the
statement.
When Zelikow eventually realized what was happening, and that
the media was going to use the finding to impugn the White House, he
exploded at the supposed temerity of the former CIA deputy director. You can’t do that!
Zelikow screamed, according to one staffer. MacEachin refused to back
down. President Bush and Vice President Cheney (the latter, in
particular) then made a number of public statements reasserting a
sinister connection. The following Sunday, Tom Kean, in an effort to
dampen the still-raging controversy, pointed out to ABC’s George
Stephanopoulos that MacEachin’s finding was an interim report, but also
vindicated MacEachin’s unyielding stance. Commission members “do not
get involved in staff statements.”[21]
Ultimately, the 9/11 Report stoutly affirmed and only elaborated upon MacEachin’s finding.[22]
Yet, when Shenon asked Zelikow about this celebrated judgment—the first
indication that the commission would not simply parrot the
administration line, vigorously advanced by Dick Cheney—in Zelikow’s
recounting, all the accolades belonged to the commission’s executive
director. As he explained to Shenon,
When we
then came to judgment on how to describe the Iraq connection, I was the
initial point person defending it, first to the commissioners and then
to the American people . . . . I wanted to put myself behind that
judgment and stake my integrity on it. I took some heat from folks like
[William] Safire . . . . At the time, there was also a spectrum of
views about these questions within the commission. But at that point I
could look anyone in the eye—including any commissioner—and tell them,
honestly, that we had looked hard and fairly at this, and there was
simply no credible evidence of a connection between Iraq and 9/11.[24]
Here, too, Zelikow’s account was an audacious rewrite of what actually happened. It seems fair to conclude that Zelikow has a supple relationship to the truth.
While Shenon makes the case that Zelikow was widely perceived
by the staff to have dual loyalties—or at least a loyalty to something
other than the task at hand—gauging Zelikow’s exact influence is
nonetheless difficult. No one exercised more day-to-day influence over
the investigation, and had more of a hand in drafting the final report
than Zelikow. But Shenon veers toward giving the executive director too
much agency, falsely depicting him as the architect of the report and
the main obstacle to the truth being told.[3] It makes for good drama but is simplistic and not accurate.
For one, it ignores what might be called the “foxhole effect”
that typically occurs among the staff. Working on a commission combines
the urgency of a political campaign with a sense that everything hinges
on getting it right. Whatever institutional loyalties existed prior to
the commission tend to get subsumed by an increasing dedication to the
task at hand. And when the worker bees are as talented as the 9/11
staff was, the notion of a single executive director wielding the kind
of control suggested by Shenon doesn’t add up. Typically, the executive
director becomes preoccupied with getting the job done, and simply
doesn’t have the luxury of policing the report, much as he might want
to.
Another truth is that the formative die was cast by the
legislation which set the terms for the bipartisan commission, and via
the nature of the appointments to the panel by the White House and the
congressional leadership from both parties. The panel’s essence was
congenital bipartisanship, not nonpartisanship. At the point where the
ownership, if not authorship, of the report was given to the
commission, the nature of the panel dictated the lack of precise
accountability that so disappointed the 9/11 families. Blame was spread
so diffusely that everyone involved was responsible in some way, and,
as a result, no one in particular was to blame.
If
the commission was to hold together and deliver a unanimous bipartisan
report that meant, by definition, a report with a “he said, she said”
quality to it—especially when it came to sorting out what had happened
inside the White House between Richard Clarke and Condoleezza Rice. The
commission was bound to the Sergeant Joe Friday
school of history—just the facts, ma’am, without analysis or
common-sense judgments. Anything much beyond that would have split the
panel down the middle, or very close to it. If one cost was to leave
citizens feeling dissipated and amorphous after reading the report . .
. well, that was a small price to pay for bipartisan unanimity.
These factors were beyond Zelikow’s control, though he surely
played to them. But the decisive influence on the tone and content of
the 9/11 Report was exercised by the
commissioners, as it always is, even if the words were first put on
paper by a staff with a far superior grasp of the source material.
Shenon doesn’t exactly ignore these truths, but makes them appear
relatively less important than Zelikow’s supposed ability to browbeat
everyone into submission.
Shenon could have made a more sophisticated argument: namely,
that Zelikow, even while he was being loyal to the 9/11 mission by
pushing for full disclosure of relevant documents, was essentially
trying to get the Bush administration to act in its own self-interest.
Zelikow likes to point out that “I was not a very popular person in the
Bush White House when this [investigation] was going on. There’s a lot
of carryover of that to this day.”[25]
While that is true amongst the maximalist defenders of executive
privilege, like Vice President Cheney, it also skirts the point.
As Zelikow himself has been known to observe, there is actually no such unitary thing as “the White House” or “the Bush administration.” Every
presidency is like a “Medieval village,” with inte
