The "Smoking Gun" Of 9/11

After he was approached by Kean and Hamilton in January 2003 about running the investigation, Zelikow immediately telephoned May to discuss whether he should take the job. May was at home in Cambridge, Massachussetts, not far from his office on the Harvard campus, and he remembered that the call lasted more than an hour, with two men agreeing that it was an extraordinary opportunity to try to produce a "professional-quality narrative history" of a watershed moment in American history, "on par at least with Pearl Harbor." After Pearl Harbor, both men knew, there had been no similar effort to explain the disaster to the public. There was an effort at accountability in the Pearl Harbor investigations--the navy's fleet commander in the Pacific and his army counterpart were both relieved of their commands in disgrace--but there had been no effort to put the 1941 attacks in historical context and explain the forces that had led the Japanese to launch a surprise attack and why the military had left itself so vulnerable. As a historian, it was exciting, May remembered, to think of producing a report that would remain the reference volume on the September 11 attacks and that would be "sitting on the shelves of high school and college teachers a generation hence." Zelikow initially wanted May's advice on how the final report should be structured, and they went to work, secretly, to prepare an outline. May was given a desk in Zelikow's office on K Street in Washington, which he used on his occasional visits from Harvard. By March 2003, with the commission's staff barely in place the two men had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with "chapter headings, subheadings, and sub-subheadings." He and May proposed a sixteen-chapter report that would open with a history of al-Qaeda, beginning with bin Laden's fatwa against the United States in 1998. That would lead to chapters about the history of American counterterrorism policy. The White House response to the flood of terrorist threats in the spring and summer of 2001 were left to the sixth chapter; the events of September 11 were left to the seventh chapters. Zelikow and May proposed that the tenth chapter he entitled "Problems of Foresight--And Hindsight," with a subchapter on "the blinding effects of hindsight." Zelikow shared the document with Kean and Hamilton, who were impressed by their executive director's early diligence but worried that the outline would be seen as evidence that they--and Zelikow--had predetermined the report's outcome. It should be kept secret from the rest of the staff, they all decided. May said that he and Zelikow agreed that the outline should be "treated as if it were the most classified document the commission possessed" Zelikow came up with his own internal classification system for the outline. He labeled it "Commission Sensitive," putting those words at the top and bottom of each page. Kean and Hamilton were right to be wary. When it was later disclosed that Zelikow had prepared a detailed outline of the commission's final report at the very start of the investigation, many of the staff's investigators were alarmed. They were finally given copies of the outline in April 2004. They saw that Zelikow was proposing that the findings about the Bush Administration's actions before 9/11 would be pushed to the middle of the report, which meant that readers would have to go searching for them past long chapters of al-Qaeda history. Many assumed the worst when they saw that Zelikow had proposed a portion of the report entitled "The Blinding Effects of Hindsight." What "blinding hindsight"? They assumed Zelikow was trying to dismiss the value of hindsight regarding the Bush administration's pre-9/11 performance. A few staffers began circulating a two-page parody of Zelikow's effort entitled "The Warren Commission Report--Preemptive Outline." The parody's authorship was never determined conclusively. The chapter headings included "Single Bullet: We Haven't Seen The Evidence Yet. But Really. We're Sure."