Blinking Red: Crisis and Compromise in American Intelligence after 9/11

1. Blow Up

1 chapter One Blow Up On Saturday,November 20,2004,just four months after the 9/11 Commission had issued its report and recommendations,the U.S.Congress was gathering for a special session. It was Rivalry Saturday in college football—Alabama would play Auburn, Harvard would confront Yale—and after weeks of campaigning for reelection, no member of Congress could have relished having to return to Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving. But there was urgent business at hand, a historic piece of legislation meant to fundamentally reorder the Intelligence Community. The Central Intelligence Agency was created in 1947 to prevent another Pearl Harbor. Now a blue-ribbon panel of nationally prominent men and women proposed a new leader of the Intelligence Community, an empowered leader called the director of national intelligence (DNI) who could fix America’s “dysfunctional” intelligence system by uniting the nation’s scattered intelligence bureaucracies into a seamless enterprise capable of warning of a surprise attack, and of taking on the enemies of a new, post9 /11 world. A senator likened the report to a man on a shining white horse arriving to save the day.1 Heralded as the recommendations of selfless statesmen who with an “aura of impartiality and legitimacy” had transcended partisanship for the good of the country,2 the 9/11 Commission’s proposal to create a DNI barreled through Congress in the months before the 2004 presidential election. Although the measure had met some resistance from friends of the Department of Defense, a deal seemed close enough that attention turned to Capitol Hill for passage of a landmark reform of U.S. national security.3 Senator Joe Lieberman, an orthodox Jew, had sought a “national security waiver” from religious authorities permitting him to work on the Sabbath to vote for the bill.4 2 Blow Up But inside the Capitol, an insurrection was afoot. The House Republican leadership, which usually kept its disagreements safely behind closed doors, was split. The number two Republican in the House, Tom DeLay, had given cover to two powerful committee chairmen to oppose the bill, supported though it was by the Senate, the White House, and even DeLay’s boss, the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. Hallway talk for years held that DeLay was the real power behind the throne; the truth was DeLay and Hastert were rarely in disagreement. But in the pre-election weeks, when the Speaker and other members of Congress were away campaigning for reelection,the Speaker’s chief of staff had negotiated a compromise with the Senate and the White House that neither Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, nor Congressman Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), could support. Congressman DeLay went to the Speaker’s office and argued for putting off the vote, and their staffs feuded nearby. This day would be a test of congressional power politics: Could the Speaker marshal his troops behind a compromise with the Senate? Could the Speaker overcome the concerns of two committee chairmen and carry the day? The full House Republican conference gathered in Room HC-5 in the basement of the Capitol, two stories below the House floor. This was the first gathering of the Republicans since their reelection victory and the members were fresh and excited, even rowdy. Those already seated could see their colleagues as they entered through a doorway at the front of the room. They cheered as popular members came into view. Speaker Hastert, affectionately referred to as “the coach” for keeping the team together, called the rambunctious room to order. Earlier that morning, as it became clear that Hunter and Sensenbrenner were asking members to reject the compromise, the Speaker’s staff had scrambled to save the bill. They had managed to cobble together talking points for the Speaker’s use to show that he had gotten his colleagues a good deal. To begin with, Hastert appealed to his colleagues’ disdain for the Senate. In their view, the Senate had merely parroted the views of the 9/11 Commission . But, the Speaker explained, through weeks of negotiation, the House had made a bad Senate bill into something better. Republicans wanted to tighten immigration laws and protect the military from undue intrusion by the new DNI. And while the House had not gotten all it wanted from the Senate, the compromise did have some immigration provisions that Blow...