Washington Decoded

Commission Confidential

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By Max Holland

    In a revelation bound to cast a pall over the 9/11 Commission, Philip Shenon will report in a forthcoming book that the panel’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, engaged in “surreptitious” communications with presidential adviser Karl Rove and other Bush administration officials during the commission’s 20-month investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

     Shenon, who led The New York Times’ coverage of the 9/11 panel, reveals the Zelikow-Rove connection in a new book entitled The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, to be published next month by TWELVE books. The Commission is under an embargo until its February 5 publication, but Washington Decoded managed to purchase a copy of the abridged audio version from a New York bookstore.

    In what’s termed an “investigation of the investigation,” Shenon purports to tell the story of the commission from start to finish. The book’s critical revelations, however, revolve almost entirely around the figure of Philip Zelikow, a University of Virginia professor and director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs prior to his service as the commission’s executive director. Shenon delivers a blistering account of Zelikow’s role and leadership, and an implicit criticism of the commissioners for appointing Zelikow in the first place—and then allowing him to stay on after his myriad conflicts-of-interest were revealed under oath.

     Shenon’s narrative is built from extensive interviews with staff members and several, if not all, the commissioners. He depicts Zelikow as exploiting his central position to negate or neutralize criticism of the Bush administration so that the White House would not bear, in November 2004, the political burden of failing to prevent the attacks.    

    The Commission includes these specific revelations:

• Kean and Hamilton appreciated that Zelikow was a friend and former colleague of then-national security adviser Condoleeza Rice, one of the principal officials whose conduct would be scrutinized. Zelikow had served with her on the National Security Council (NSC) during the presidency of Bush’s father, and they had written a book together about German reunification. The commission co-chairmen also knew of Zelikow’s October 2001 appointment to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. According to Shenon, however, Zelikow failed to disclose several additional and egregious conflicts-of-interest, among them, the fact that he had been a member of Rice’s NSC transition team in 2000-01. In that capacity, Zelikow had been the “architect” responsible for demoting Richard Clarke and his counter-terrorism team within the NSC. As Shenon puts it, Zelikow “had laid the groundwork for much of went wrong at the White House in the weeks and months before September 11. Would he want people to know that?”

• Karen Heitkotter, the commission’s executive secretary, was taken aback on June 23, 2003 when she answered the telephone for Zelikow at 4:40 PM and heard a voice intone, “This is Karl Rove. I’m looking for Philip.” Heitkotter knew that Zelikow had promised the commissioners he would cut off all contact with senior officials in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, she gave Zelikow’s cell phone number to Rove. The next day there was another call from Rove at 11:35 AM. Subsequently, Zelikow would claim that these calls pertained to his “old job” at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.

• The full extent of Zelikow’s involvement with the incumbent administration only became evident within the commission on October 8, 2003, almost halfway into the panel’s term. Determined to blunt the Jersey Girls’ call for his resignation or recusal, Zelikow proposed that he be questioned under oath about his activities. General counsel Daniel Marcus, who conducted the sworn interview, brought a copy of the résumé Zelikow had provided to Kean and Hamilton. None of the activities Zelikow now detailed—his role on Rice’s transition team, his instrumental role in Clarke’s demotion, his authorship of a post-9/11 pre-emptive attack doctrine—were mentioned in the résumé. Zelikow blandly asserted to Marcus that he did not see “any of this as a major conflict of interest.” Marcus’s conclusion was that Zelikow “should never have been hired” as executive director. But the only upshot from these shocking disclosures was that Zelikow was involuntarily recused from that part of the investigation which involved the presidential transition, and barred from participating in  subsequent interviews of senior Bush administration officials.

• Some two months later, as Bob Kerrey replaced disgruntled ex-Senator Max Cleland on the panel, the former Nebraska senator became astounded once he understood Zelikow’s obvious conflicts-of-interest and his very limited recusal. Kerrey could not understand how Kean and Hamilton had ever agreed to put Zelikow in charge. “Look Tom,” Kerrey told Kean, “either he goes or I go.” But Kean persuaded Kerrey to drop his ultimatum.

• In late 2003, around the time his involuntary recusal was imposed, Zelikow called executive secretary Karen Heitkotter into his office and ordered her to stop creating records of his incoming telephone calls. Concerned that the order was improper, a nervous Heitkotter soon told general counsel Marcus. He advised her to ignore Zelikow’s order and continue to keep a log of his telephone calls, insofar as she knew about them.

• Although Shenon could not obtain from the GAO an unredacted record of Zelikow’s cell phone use—and Zelikow used his cell phone for most of his outgoing calls—the Times reporter was able to establish that Zelikow made numerous calls to “456” numbers in the 202 area code, which is the exclusive prefix of the White House.

• Even after his recusal, Zelikow continued to insert himself into the work of “Team 3,” the task force responsible for the most politically-sensitive part of the investigation, counter-terrorism policy. This brief encompassed the White House, which meant investigating the conduct of Condoleeza Rice and Richard Clarke during the months prior to 9/11. Team 3 staffers would come to believe that Zelikow prevented them from submitting a report that would have depicted Rice’s performance as “amount[ing] to incompetence, or something not far from it.”

     In Without Precedent, Kean and Hamilton’s 2006 account of the 9/11 panel,  the two  co-chairmen wrote that Zelikow was a controversial choice

. . . [but] we had full confidence in Zelikow’s independence and ability—and frankly, we wanted somebody who was unafraid to roil the waters from time to time. He recused himself from anything involving his work on the NSC transition. He made clear his determination to conduct an aggressive investigation. And he was above all a historian dedicated to a full airing of the facts. It was clear from people who knew and worked with him that Zelikow would not lead a staff inquiry that did anything less than uncover the most detailed and accurate history of 9/11.

    Shenon’s radically different account of the commission’s inner workings promises to achieve what none of the crackpot conspiracy theorists have managed to do so far: put the 9/11 Commission in disrepute.

     The Commission will be reviewed in the February issue of Washington Decoded.

   

Doubt and Disbelief in the Warren Report

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By Max Holland and Tara Marie Egan

 

    Last October, when the Lyndon B. Johnson Library released a new batch of recordings, one of the most revealing conversations went literally unnoticed. Yet, the 13½ minute conversation between President Johnson and Justice Abe Fortas on January 11, 1967—the day after LBJ had delivered his third State of the Union address to Congress—underscores one of the most striking insights ever to come from the once-secret tapes.

At the outset, in error, Lyndon Johnson blamed Robert F. Kennedy for fomenting the disbelief in the Warren Report that was widespread by late 1966. Indeed, both Johnson and Fortas viewed RFK’s reach and influence with such suspicion that to them, it seemed conceivable that The New York Times had aborted its 1966 investigation into the Warren Commission because the Times’s findings had turned out to be too “favorable.” Publication of a single story, much less a series, that put the commission in a positive light would supposedly run counter to Kennedy’s interests and might incur his displeasure, or so Johnson and Fortas mistakenly thought.

    Johnson’s toxic notions about RFK, to be sure, were not entirely unwarranted. A prima facie case could be made that Robert Kennedy was bent on putting the Warren Commission into disrepute. By the fall of 1966, despite a growing chorus of criticism of the Report, Kennedy, then the junior senator from New York, resolutely persisted in his policy of “no comment” with respect to all the controversies that had arisen in the assassination’s wake. His refusal to put a damper on the damaging speculation—in a way that only the slain president’s brother could—had the net effect of allowing baseless criticism to grow and deepen. In addition, Kennedy acolytes, like former White House aide Richard Goodwin, were writing or speaking out about alleged shortcomings in the Warren Commission’s investigation. In the absence of comment from Kennedy, it was not unreasonable to believe Goodwin was acting as Kennedy’s agent, writing what the New York senator dared not say himself.

    Finally, of course, Johnson had every reason to believe Kennedy was intent on impugning the Warren Commission because of the publishing spectacle that had simply become known as the “Manchester affair.” Part soap opera, part opéra bouffe, this scandal had fixated the publishing world for more than three months by January 1967. Retained by the Kennedys to write the “authorized” version of the most agonizing four days in American history, Manchester had produced a book, The Death of a President, that depicted Lyndon Johnson in an unflattering light—an uncouth power-grabber from the very state with the unspeakable city that was responsible for the assassination. Sitting presidents had never been treated this way by a major New York publisher like Harper & Row. And although Johnson’s popularity was fast declining, the vast majority of the American people still appreciated the thoughtful and sensitive manner he had displayed immediately after the assassination, when the entire nation was on edge after the wrenching presidential transition. Now Manchester, the Kennedys’ chosen instrument, was trying to rob Johnson of his finest hour. The conversation with Fortas occurred two days after the first excerpt from Manchester’s book had been published in Look magazine.

Johnson’s near-paranoia about Robert Kennedy, however, could not have been more mistaken in this instance. The one person with the most to lose, and nothing to gain, from a re-investigation of the assassination was RFK himself. Re-opening the assassination would threaten again to expose one of the darkest secrets from the Kennedy presidency, namely, that RFK had been the leading advocate and motive force behind the CIA’s plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. Any re-investigation would almost surely tug again at the loose strands from these plots, and, as in 1964, threaten to unravel them. Ultimately, JFK’s martyrdom would be put at risk, as would RFK’s ambition to lead a Kennedy restoration, which might be the only way to repair the bottomless grief he felt over his brother’s assassination.

    Sooner than President Johnson could imagine, he would gradually become disabused of the notion that Robert Kennedy was intent on undermining public confidence in the Warren Report. Just five days after the conversation with Fortas, Washington columnist Drew Pearson would approach Johnson privately and tell him about an astonishing rumor: that the CIA had attempted to assassinate Castro numerous times in the early 1960s, and that most of these attempts had occurred at RFK’s direction, when the then-attorney general was “riding herd” on the agency for his brother.[1]

    Johnson, though so embittered that he was inclined to believe the worst about RFK, still found Pearson’s story incredible. Later he would liken it to someone “tellin’ me that Lady Bird was taking dope.”[2] But as the rumor continued to gather force, the president would turn to CIA Director Richard Helms and ask for a full report. On May 10, five months after LBJ’s conversation with Fortas, the president would learn directly from Helms that the rumor was true, save for one aspect: there was no evidence that Castro had retaliated by ordering the assassination of President Kennedy.

    Helms’s caveat would fall on unreceptive ears. Confirmation of the efforts to assassinate Castro astounded Johnson. That, together with the president’s innate proclivity to relate things that were not connected, meant that LBJ would go to his grave believing that “Kennedy was trying to get to Castro, but Castro got to him first.”[3]