Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

The bin Laden attack, the emissary said, “would take place on American soil and it was imminent.… Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans.… I told Mr. Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm, like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan.”

According to diplomatic sources quoted in 2002, principal officer Katz—an experienced diplomat—did not pass on the warning to the State Department. “We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff,” one of the sources said. “When people keep saying the sky’s going to fall in and it doesn’t, a kind of warning fatigue sets in.”

The CIA and counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, fielding incoming intelligence in July, reported up the line that bin Laden’s plans seemed to have been temporarily postponed. One CIA brief for senior officials read: “Bin Laden Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned,” another: “One Bin Laden Operation Delayed. Others Ongoing.” Intelligence on a “near-term” attack had eased, Clarke said in an email to Rice, but it “will still happen.”

New York Times reporter Judith Miller, busy working on a series of articles about al Qaeda, had been finding her Washington contacts unusually open about their worries. Officials, she was to recall, had recently been “very spun-up … I got the sense that part of the reason I was being told of what was going on was that the people in counterterrorism were trying to get word to the President or the senior officials through the press, because they were not able to get listened to themselves.”

The desperately slow progress of the Deputy Secretaries Committee, charged with deciding on a course of action against bin Laden, had been frustrating Clarke all year. In July, however, the deputies had finally decided on what to recommend to cabinet-level officials. “But the Principals’ calendar was full,” Clarke would recall, “and then they went away on vacation, many of them in August, so we couldn’t meet in August.”

PRESIDENT BUSH and Vice President Cheney were among those on vacation. Both, it was reported, planned to spend a good deal of time fishing. Bush was expected to spend the full month on his 1,583-acre ranch in Texas, not returning until Labor Day. “I’m sure,” said his press secretary, “he’ll have friends and family over to the ranch. He’ll do a little policy. He’ll keep up with events.” This would tie with the longest presidential vacation on record in modern times, enjoyed by Richard Nixon, and 55 percent of respondents to a CNN/USA Today/ Gallup poll thought that “too much.”

For a president, however, there is no getting away from the CIA’s daily intelligence brief—the PDB. The one Bush received on August 6 was to haunt him for years to come. CBS News would be first to hint at what it contained, in a story almost a year after 9/11. Apparently thanks to a leak, national security correspondent David Martin was to reveal that Bush had been warned that month that “bin Laden’s terrorist network might hijack U.S. passenger planes.”

Bombarded with questions the following day, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer would say the August 6 PDB had been a “very generalized” summary brought to the President in response to an earlier request. In a follow-up, he told reporters the PDB’s heading had read: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Condoleezza Rice, in her own separate briefing, made no reference to the title of the document. She went out of her way, however, to say the PDB had been “not a warning” but “an analytic report that talked about bin Laden’s methods of operation, talked about what he had done historically.” She characterized the document repeatedly as having been “historical,” that day and in the future.

Rice said there had indeed been two references to hijacking in the PDB, but only to “hijacking in the traditional sense … very vague.” No one, she thought, “could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon—that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”

In spite of efforts to slough it off, though, the August 6 PDB became the story that would not go away, the center of a two-year struggle between the Bush administration and panels investigating 9/11. The White House line was that, as the “the most highly sensitized classified document in the government,” the daily briefs had to remain secret. The CIA, for its part, refused even to provide information on the way in which a PDB is prepared.

The nature of the daily briefs was in fact no mystery, for several of those delivered to earlier presidents had been released after they left office. A PDB consists of a series of short articles, enclosed in a leather binder, delivered to the President by his ubiquitous CIA briefer. It has been described as a “top-secret newspaper reporting on current developments around the world” and “a news digest for the very privileged.” A PDB may contain truly secret information, but can as often be less than sensational, even dull.

Congress’s Joint Inquiry was to press in vain for access to all relevant PDBs delivered to both Presidents Bush and Clinton. The 9/11 Commission would return to the fray—not least so as to be seen to have resolved the celebrated question that had once been asked about President Nixon during Watergate: “What did the President know and when did he first know it?” The more the Bush White House stonewalled, however, the more the commissioners pressed their case. “We had to use the equivalent of a blowtorch and pliers,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste recalled.

They did get to the PDBs in the end. The section of the August 6 brief on 9/11, just one and a half pages long, was finally released in April 2004 with redactions only of sources of information. This established a number of things that earlier White House flamming had obscured.

The heading of the August 6 PDB had not read, as Bush’s press secretary had rendered it: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike U.S.” Not quite. Inadvertently or otherwise, the secretary had omitted a single significant two-letter word. The actual title had been “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The headline had itself been a clarion message to President Bush that bin Laden intended to attack on the U.S. mainland.

The very first sentence of the PDB, moreover, had told the President—in italicized type—that secret reports, friendly governments, and media coverage had indicated for the past four years that bin Laden wanted to attack within the United States. He had even said, according to an intelligence source—identity redacted—that he wanted to attack “in Washington.”

In another paragraph, the PDB told the President that al Qaeda had personnel in the United States and “apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks.” FBI information, the PDB said, “indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

The day after the release of the PDB, President Bush told reporters that the document had “said nothing about an attack on America. It talked about intentions, about somebody who hated America. Well, we knew that … and as the President, I wanted to know if there was anything, any actionable intelligence. And I looked at the August 6th briefing. I was satisfied that some of the matters were being looked into.” This particular PDB, he said, had been produced for him by the CIA at his own request.

Later the same month, Bush agreed to meet the full 9/11 Commission—on condition Vice President Cheney was also present. They received the commissioners in the Oval Office, seated beneath a portrait of George Washington. They had insisted it be a “private interview,” with no recording made and no stenographer present. We rely, therefore, principally on an account by commissioner Ben-Veniste, drawing on his scribbled notes and published in a 2009 memoir.