No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington

17 2004

MY LAST YEAR as national security advisor began as my first year had: with a visit to Mexico. Yet, sitting in Monterrey at a special Summit of the Americas, it was obvious that the agenda that we’d so hoped to pursue in the hemisphere had slipped considerably.

Our relations with Mexico weren’t bad, but they weren’t good either. The high point had been the state visit of President Vicente Fox in September 2001 shortly before 9/11. The arrival ceremony and dinner had signaled a new day in U.S.-Mexican relations. But the literal downpour that had threatened the fireworks display may have been a small sign that not all would be as we had hoped. It wasn’t long before the agenda with Mexico came to be dominated by important but seemingly intractable issues such as Mexican water deliveries to Texas and border modernization and safety. We formed a Cabinet-level commission to oversee the work, but frankly I came to refer to the interactions as “home owner’s association meetings.” We shared the same continent, and that was the basis of our cooperation. Somehow the once much-anticipated plans for hemispheric cooperation on the big issues of immigration, trade, and democratization faded.

The agenda of the Summit of the Americas, which had showed great promise in 2001, when the mostly center-right governments had united to support a Free Trade Area of the Americas, was stalling as well. At that time Hugo Chávez had seemed a quite isolated figure, but now three years later, Latin American leaders who castigated him in private lined up to hug him in public.

The Venezuelan had survived a coup attempt in April 2002, and at the time there had been lots of speculation about the role of the United States. We hadn’t backed the coup plotters, as some alleged. In fact, we’d warned that the United States would not support extra-constitutional efforts against Chavez. The crisis had been managed largely by the State Department and the embassy in Caracas. They had done so effectively.

The jobs of the national security advisor and the secretary of state are very different in that regard. With a small staff and the daily demands of the President’s schedule, I couldn’t focus on every issue—even every important issue. The Venezuelan crisis was one of many that never quite got to the level that would produce intense White House involvement—phone calls with heads of state, for instance. I was certainly kept informed and in turn briefed the President. Colin talked with him about it as well. But as I would learn later, as secretary of state, there were many, many crises that Colin had spared us and handled ably himself. Yet when the coup failed, the Venezuelan dictator was left stronger at home and more active in the region.

Though our hemisphere-wide agenda was stalling, we successfully negotiated a free-trade agreement with five Central American countries and the Dominican Republic, as well as another one with Chile. We also made progress on the bilateral agendas with Brazil and Colombia. The President was able to develop close personal ties to the leaders of these two countries that served us well.

In the case of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, the bond was forged around a common agenda against terrorism. When Uribe was elected, Colombia was very nearly a failed state. The Colombians told us that the army and police were unable to safely enter approximately 30 percent of the country. A decades-long struggle against the Communist-inspired FARC had left the country plagued by militants, and the paramilitaries that had emerged had left the Colombian state vulnerable and weak. FARC was holding numerous hostages, including three Americans. Uribe’s predecessor, Andrés Pastrana, was an honorable man, but his effort to make a peace deal with the FARC had backfired when FARC had used the pause in military action to strengthen its grip on large parts of the country. Over the years, the FARC insurgency had produced a counterreaction and the development of paramilitary groups, the most powerful of which was the AUC. At times, the paramilitaries had been closely aligned with the security forces and even some members of the government. By the time of Uribe’s election, they too had become a huge part of the problem.

The United States had trained and equipped Colombian security forces through Plan Colombia. The Clinton administration had begun a massive and comprehensive program to augment security aspects of the “war on drugs” with development assistance for Colombia and its neighbors. The idea was to help all of the Andean states so that the defeat of the druglords in one country wouldn’t simply drive them to establish operations on the territory of a vulnerable neighbor.

Uribe wanted not only to continue this effort but to change its character. He came to power speaking of “democratic security,” by which FARC would be defeated and power returned to the security forces of the state. He made clear that he’d go after the paramilitaries too, even though some of them had been associated with his political party. When he met with President Bush for the first time, he described the challenge and his commitment to confronting it. The President was immediately attracted to him and his toughness. “Do you really mean it?” the President asked. “Because if you do, you have to be prepared for really tough action. Kill their leadership, and they will start to fold.” Uribe assured the President that he intended to do exactly that. Over the next years, Uribe would become one of our closest allies, and, more important, he’d deliver on his promise. Colombia is now widely recognized as a success, a state that was brought back from the brink of failure and chaos.

The President developed a somewhat different but also close relationship with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. Uribe was a man of center-right politics, and there was a natural fit with George W. Bush. Lula was a leftist, a former labor organizer who’d won a landslide victory to lead Brazil. Though the early signs were that he’d keep in place the market-oriented reforms of his predecessors, Lula was viewed with suspicion in global business communities—and in the White House.

When Lula first walked into the Oval Office as president-elect of Brazil on December 10, 2002, the President was, as always, warm and welcoming. But he couldn’t take his eyes off the pin that Lula was wearing—the symbol of his party and one that displayed a decidedly socialist motif. The President would later say that Lula should have been wearing a Brazilian flag. Nonetheless, the chemistry between the two was immediately good. Lula has an easy manner and a twinkle in his eye that is endearing. I noticed too that he was missing a finger on his hand—he’d lost it in a lathe accident as a factory worker. There was an authentic feel to him, and unlike Chávez, a military officer turned ruling thug, Lula seemed to be someone we could work with.

With the outreach we’d done to Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and the countries of Central America, we had a good basis for a successful policy in Latin America. But sitting there in Monterrey at the Summit of the Americas, I recognized that, owing to the diversions of 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq, we’d done too little to help our friends. As a result of our inattention, our adversaries were gaining steam. The time would come later to do something about it—should the President get a second term.

BEGINNING IN 2003, Karl Rove had begun convening the senior White House staff biweekly to review the totality of the President’s agenda. Over cookies, cheese, fruit, and chips and dip, these early-evening meetings—dubbed “strategery,” for a well-known malapropism uttered by then Governor Bush—were held to keep everyone on the same page. I found them extremely enlightening, learning, for instance, what Margaret Spellings, the domestic policy advisor, was doing to promote the No Child Left Behind program or how we were progressing on the economic agenda or in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The meetings added to the genuine comity that Andy Card successfully maintained in the White House. It was not unheard of in the annals of Washington, but it was unusual to be able to say that some of your best friends were other White House staffers. I simply never worried about what someone was doing behind my back. Margaret, Larry Lindsey, and later Steve Friedman at the NEC, Mitchell Daniels and his deputy Clay Johnson at OMB, Harriet Miers, Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett, Karl, Josh, Ari, and most especially Andy were honest folk, and we supported one another in good times and bad. Al Gonzales and I repaired our relationship after he had allowed the presidential directive on military commissions to be signed without my knowledge. He too became and still is a good friend.

As the campaign approached, the “strategery” sessions became naturally intertwined with the politics of reelection. Karl and the domestic side of the White House wanted to reserve as sufficient a portion of the President’s time as possible for the necessary work of seeking a second term. But the Bush presidency was a wartime one, and everyone understood that national security would continue to dominate his agenda.

The President’s approval numbers had dropped but had not been disastrously affected by the course of the Iraq war despite the increasing difficulty there. But the controversy over the sixteen words and the suggestion by some in the media that the administration had been dishonest about prewar intelligence was clearly taking a toll. I found appalling, for instance, a Time magazine cover titled “Untruth & Consequences: How Flawed Was the Case for Going to War Against Saddam?” As amnesia set in on Capitol Hill among the many legislators who’d given fiery speeches about the threat of Saddam’s WMD, we were suddenly very much alone in defending the premise for war. Clearly we had a credibility problem, but we also had a responsibility to examine what had gone wrong.

In February the President appointed a commission, led by Judge Laurence Silberman and former Democratic Senator Charles Robb, to examine the intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction as well as the capabilities of the intelligence community. Although it concluded that many of the judgments of the intelligence community were flawed, the bipartisan Silberman-Robb Commission was sympathetic to those who supported the Washington consensus around Saddam’s WMD. “Iraq’s decision to abandon its unconventional weapons programs while simultaneously hiding this decision was, at the very least, a counterintuitive one,” the report concluded. “And given the nature of the regime, the Intelligence Community can hardly be blamed for not penetrating Saddam’s decision-making process. In this light, it is worth noting that Saddam’s fellow Arabs (including, evidently his senior military leadership as well as many of the rest of the world’s intelligence agencies and most inspectors) also thought he had retained his weapons programs.” The intelligence failure was to some degree understandable, but there were still reforms we could implement.

THE SCRUTINY WE FACED on Iraq was intensified by the 9/11 Commission’s inquiry into the September 11 terrorist attacks. In November 2002 President Bush and Congress had authorized the creation of a National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, which would explore how the September 11 attacks had happened and issue recommendations on how to avoid future tragedies. Under the direction of former New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean and former Congressman Lee H. Hamilton, the commission reviewed more than 2.5 million pages of documents and interviewed more than 1,200 individuals as part of its investigation.

As the commission did its work in the spring of 2004, those who had been in positions of responsibility on September 11 did what people do: they sought to put their own actions in the best light. So too did Clinton administration officials, since the eight-month tenure of the Bush administration was arguably too short to merit full blame for what had happened.

Yet the attacks had happened on our watch, and a narrative of negligence began to develop. In those accounts, the Bush administration had come to office focused on Iraq and missile defense but not on terrorism. We had thus been slow to respond to “unmistakable” signals that an attack was coming. In hindsight, every e-mail, memo, or phone call that even mentioned, no matter how vaguely, the al Qaeda threat became evidence of negligence.

At the commission hearings, Clinton administration officials took some heat, particularly concerning their inaction against al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Afghanistan. But Sandy Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, had been able to give a thorough, well-rounded, and generally persuasive account of their fight against al Qaeda. On the other hand, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, George Tenet, and Deputy Secretary of State Rich Armitage clearly had only pieces of the story from the perspective of individual departments, not the Bush administration as a whole. Only the national security advisor had that perspective.

I’d already given “testimony” to the commission in private, answering the commissioners’ questions over a period of four hours. But there was no public record, and the interview was not under oath. The commission hearings were now a television event. My behind-closed-doors answers in the White House Situation Room were no match for critics seeking to show that the administration—now increasingly unpopular due to the Iraq war—had been asleep at the switch on September 11.

Despite a growing chorus of demands that I testify to answer the multiplying charges against the administration, the White House counsel, the Vice President, and indeed the President continued to cling to executive privilege, saying that the President’s closest advisors (who had not been confirmed by the Senate) should not have to testify. There were elaborate arguments about the separation of powers and the President’s right to confidential communication with his staff.

The press and Congress—frankly, the whole country—were having none of it. I’d been national security advisor on the day of the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history, and people wanted to know what I had known and when I had known it. The White House advisors came up with the idea of having me make my case directly to the American people on television and radio and in newspapers. I gave interviews to everybody—the New York Times, the Washington Post, AP, and Reuters, among others—on the record. I was almost always on background when speaking to the press, meaning that I was identified as a senior administration official, not by name, so being on the record attracted some attention in its own right. Coming out of a Situation Room meeting, Sean McCormack, the NSC spokesman, pulled me aside. “Time is doing a cover and maybe Newsweek too.” The Time cover story was “Is Condi the Problem?” Clearly the strategy was backfiring horribly. The final nail in the coffin was an interview that I gave to 60 Minutes on Sunday, March 28, 2004.

The late Ed Bradley did the interview, and I was pretty comfortable. We even did a bit of the taping on the balcony outside Mrs. Cheney’s office overlooking the West Wing of the White House. Afterward, I told Sean McCormack that it had gone well. But the penchant of 60 Minutes to edit liberally is well known. And when I saw the interview, it bore little resemblance to what I remembered in its immediate aftermath.

The next day, Jim Wilkinson, who was later my senior advisor at State, Sean McCormack, and Steve Hadley came to me and said that I had to convince the President to let me testify publicly before the 9/11 Commission. I was in complete agreement.

I called Ashley Hickey, the President’s secretary, and asked when I might see him. He was available right then, minutes before his lunch with the Vice President. I went into the Oval. The President was standing behind his desk. He walked out toward me. “What’s wrong?” he asked. He could always read me, and he knew this wasn’t a visit to talk about the latest policy crisis. I told him that I felt I had to testify and that I would have no credibility going forward if I did not. The American people wanted to know the story. I’d asked to testify before and been denied. We had tried the strategy of “going directly to the people.” It hadn’t worked, and now even my own family and friends wondered what was going on. I didn’t threaten to resign. My relationship with the President wasn’t like that. But I would have had we not worked out a way for me to testify.

The President said that he was beginning to think that I should testify but that legal counsel and the Vice President were opposed. He nicely said that it was in his interest for me to testify because I was the best person to make the administration’s case. He was worried about the precedent of a national security advisor testifying under oath.

I simply said, “Mr. President, we have to find a way.” I left the Oval. Within twenty-four hours the decision had been made. I gave a heads-up to NBC News’s Tim Russert, for whom I had enormous respect and whom I trusted. The story broke that same afternoon.

It was against that backdrop that my testimony took on a political importance that surprised me. “Bush’s Credibility Now Rests on Her Shoulders” read a New York Times headline a few days before my testimony. “‘Warrior Princess’ Goes to Full-Coverage Battle,” said the Washington Times.

I studied hard, preparing as if I were going into an all-or-nothing exam. What had we done in response to the noise and chatter in the system about a coming attack? What signals had there been? What had we missed?

I put together a team to prepare me for the testimony: NSC lawyers John Bellinger and Bryan Cunningham; policy advisers Steve Hadley and Bob Zoellick, who was serving as the U.S. Trade Representative; and communications specialists Dan Bartlett, Jim Wilkinson, and Sean McCormack. I made a mental catalog of the events. I read the biographies and personality sketches of the commission members to get a feel for their styles of questioning.

And then I put it all aside the day before. “I am an academic,” I told my team. “I can’t heal anyone or create jobs or invent products. But I do know how to talk. Now you’ll just have to trust me.”

I was pretty calm the morning of the testimony. I’d slept rather well and got up early. I went through my usual routine. I exercised; then my great hairdresser, Bruce Johnson, showed up really early and trimmed my hair while I read the blasting headlines in advance of my testimony. I told myself to be conscious of how I entered the room (with confidence, I reminded the face in the mirror). Given the impact that a single picture—even a misleading one—can have, I even had to think about what the photograph would look like when I took the oath. (You sometimes have a tendency to look wide-eyed, I told myself. Narrow your eyes.)

In my testimony to the commission, I said that the failure to prevent the attacks had not been the fault of any one individual administration but was structural. The most critical issue was the stove-piping of information among government agencies and the seam between what we knew about foreign and domestic threats.

Better integrating intelligence would be critical to preventing the next attack. One example that I did not use in my testimony illustrated this point. There were phone calls made by two of the hijackers from San Diego to an al Qaeda safe house in the Middle East before September 11. Because of the legal and policy restrictions in place at the time, these calls were only intercepted overseas and neither the process of intercepting them nor their content revealed their U.S. origin. If other forms of collection had been permitted, as they were in the Terrorist Surveillance Program, it is possible we could have known the location of these two terrorists before September 11. The 9/11 Commission and the congressional Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Acts of September 11, 2001, found the seam between foreign and domestic intelligence to be a crucial weakness. We did, too. Overcoming it would later become the rationale for the hotly debated Terrorist Surveillance Program, which permitted the government to monitor the international calls of a small number of terrorists, regardless of where the calls originated.

Though my confrontation with Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste stood out, there were other memorable moments in the five-hour hearing. In a lighter one, former Senator Bob Kerrey inexplicably referred to me, not once but three times, as “Dr. Clarke,” confusing me with the pale, graying white man who’d worked for me as the National Security Council staff’s counterterrorism chief. In the run-up to the commission hearings, Dick had also taken on the role of chief accuser in insisting that the administration had been negligent in the days prior to the attacks of September 11. Finally I said, “I don’t think I look like Dick Clarke.” It provided some levity, at least for a moment.

In general, I felt good about the outcome. I had fought to at least a draw, maybe a little better. The President called when I returned to the White House to say that I had been “awesome.” That evening, I joined my close friend Mary Bush for dinner and Maundy Thursday service at National Presbyterian Church. At the restaurant, a number of people came up and thanked me for my testimony. A small group applauded. My friend Barbara Harrison, the anchor of the local NBC affiliate morning news, called the next day. She related that they’d been told to stand by in the newsroom in case something broke. The networks had shown the testimony live. I had preempted the soaps.

THE FINDINGS of those two commissions were consistent with our own thinking about ways to restructure the nation’s intelligence apparatus. I asked Brent Scowcroft, who was serving as the chairman of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, to make recommendations on changes to the intelligence agencies, and we launched an effort internally to look at major institutional reforms. Those efforts resulted in the President’s decision to create the position of director of national intelligence (DNI) to oversee the work of the nation’s fifteen intelligence agencies. Since 1947 the CIA director had been simultaneously head of the CIA (as DCIA) and head of the whole intelligence community as director of central intelligence (DCI). This odd arrangement had drawn the attention of many a reform commission over the years. Finally, due to the twin intelligence failures of 9/11 and Iraq WMD, the DCIA was stripped of the larger intelligence community function and the distinct position of DNI was born.

I was given the task of presenting this new institutional arrangement to the press hours before the President first announced that he would ask Congress to create the DNI. The details were, to put it mildly, not fully fleshed out, but in general, the DNI was to make sure that an equal and full hearing was given to the views of all agencies. For instance, the CIA had been the agency most convinced that the high-strength aluminum tubes that Saddam surreptitiously ordered were for nuclear centrifuges. The Energy Department had disagreed. In retrospect, one could see that, though the dissent had been registered, the DCI, wearing also the hat of DCIA, gave considerably more weight to his own agency’s findings. The DNI would level the playing field among the agencies.

The DNI was also to overcome the “silo” problem by ensuring cross-fertilization in the career paths of intelligence specialists. Everyone agreed that the “craft” of intelligence analysis needed to be reviewed and new training programs put into place. The country was short of linguists in such critical tongues as Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese. And someone needed to review the intelligence budget to eliminate redundancies and make certain that technical intelligence collection was balanced properly with human intelligence collection, which sometimes got short shrift. The most expensive intelligence operations—the National Security Agency, which oversees electronic intelligence, and the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees satellite intelligence—both report to the secretary of defense. Their budgets are also highly compartmented (for secrecy) and pay for programs that frequently have long development times. That gave Defense the upper hand over other agencies in budgetary matters. The DNI would have a lot to do.

Yet most important, in my estimation, was a role for the DNI as the President’s principal intelligence advisor, performing the same sort of function that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was carrying out on the military side. On any given day, the President needed someone to sort through the various inputs and present him with a neutral, coherent analysis of the intelligence picture.

Congress would pass the law creating the DNI on December 8, 2004, and Fran Townsend, the deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism, would capably lead the many steps needed to implement it. To this day the DNI position remains a work in progress, and already there are calls to kill the position, calling it an unnecessary bureaucratic layer. This resistance is not surprising. Institutions take time to evolve and find their footing; given time, the right people, and presidential support, the DNI will, I believe, fulfill its promise. President Bush was very fortunate in this regard to have John Negroponte and later Mike McConnell serve as the nation’s first and second directors of national intelligence. Their effective stewardship of the office in its early years would set the evolution of this venerable institution on a positive trajectory. The same is true of Tom Fingar, who had been my colleague at Stanford and served in various intelligence positions at the State Department before becoming deputy DNI for analysis and chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Their early leadership has left an indelible positive imprint on the DNI position.