The Commission Read online

  He created the same distraction with Smith, claiming he needed to make a phone call for business. She obliged. But Berger turned out to be a lousy thief, and he was detected almost immediately. Another archivist, John Laster, bumped into him on his way to the men’s room. “Okay, I know this is odd,” Laster wrote to Smith in an e-mail later that day. He explained that when he passed Berger in the hallway, he saw him “fiddling with something white, which appeared to be a piece of paper or multiple pieces of paper” that had been “rolled around his ankle and underneath his pant leg, with a portion of the paper sticking out underneath.’’

  Smith was alarmed. She tried to convince herself there was an innocent explanation. In a return e-mail, she speculated that Laster had seen something else—maybe a white compression sock, the sort used for phlebitis and other circulatory problems; maybe the sock had the same color as white paper. Berger was overweight. He had seemed agitated. Maybe there was some health problem.

  Surely Berger wasn’t stealing classified documents, she thought. She prayed. For an archivist responsible for classified documents—and few documents were as highly classified as the ones Berger was reviewing—the idea was almost too much for Smith to bear. Taking secret documents was a crime, of course. Surely it would ruin Berger, ending his hopes for another important government job; he might even be sent to jail. And there was every reason to think the archives staff would be punished—fired?—for having allowed it to happen.

  It was too late to try to reconstruct the files Berger had already gone through; they had never been fully cataloged, so it was impossible to know exactly what he might have stolen.

  Much as she dreaded the idea, Smith decided that she would have to test Berger on his next visit to the archives. He was due to return on October 2. Smith and her staff gathered the files that Berger had asked to see on the next visit and carefully numbered each document on the back in a light pencil. If he took something, Smith could detect it instantly.

  2

  350 PARK AVENUE

  New York, N.Y.

  DECEMBER 12, 2002

  The boxy glass-and-steel building at 350 Park Avenue in Manhattan had no sign in the lobby listing its tenants. Visitors entered the thirty-story building between East 51st and East 52nd streets by invitation only. The burly, unsmiling security guards saw to that. One of the tenants, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, had more stringent security measures. Clients entered the offices of Kissinger Associates, his consulting firm, only if they could prove their identity to a receptionist who sat behind a thick sheet of security glass set in a wall near the elevator lobby on the twenty-sixth floor. The quality of the security was not matched by the decor. Kissinger had nothing to prove to his clients, so while tenants at 350 Park Avenue enjoyed a fine view of the Seagram Building and an especially tony stretch of Manhattan’s East side, Kissinger’s offices were otherwise remarkably shabby, with worn carpets and dying plants.

  Lorie Van Auken of East Brunswick, New Jersey, had an invitation to meet with Kissinger at 11:30 a.m. on Thursday, December 12, 2002. It was cold, and she walked in off Park Avenue in a heavy wool coat. Her husband, Ken, had also worked in Manhattan, about four miles south of Kissinger’s office, with what Lorie knew had been a much more dramatic view out his office window. Ken Van Auken was a bond trader at the investment firm of Cantor Fitzgerald, and he had been at work at the firm’s office on the 105th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when an American Airlines Boeing 767 plunged into the building at 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Lorie heard her husband’s voice one last time when she returned home from grocery shopping on that warm, cloudless morning to find a voice message from Ken: “I love you. I’m in the World Trade Center. And the building was hit by something. I don’t know if I’m going to get out.”

  Lorie was part of a delegation of about a dozen 9/11 widows, widowers, and other family activists who had come to see Kissinger to hear him justify why he should lead the independent federal commission that had been created to investigate the attacks. The commission’s official name was a mouthful (“the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States”), but it was already being referred to as, simply, the Kissinger Commission. When she heard that for the first time, Lorie flinched. The Kissinger Commission? She was convinced that Kissinger, whose selection as chairman had been announced two weeks earlier by President Bush, had been a terrible choice to run the investigation. It was hard for her to imagine a worse choice.

  The group was buzzed into the offices of Kissinger Associates and escorted into what appeared to be his personal conference room. The room was crazily, unbearably warm—maybe eighty-five degrees, maybe more. Even as they threw off their coats and sweaters, Lorie and the others could feel themselves begin to sweat. It would not occur to Lorie until later that Kissinger might have done this on purpose; his old colleagues at the State Department could have told her it was an old and obvious diplomatic trick to overheat a meeting room if the goal was a short negotiation—or drowsy negotiators.

  Lorie quickly scouted the framed photographs on the wall, which showed Kissinger with government leaders from around the world and celebrity friends from New York and Hollywood. She was looking for Arabs, in particular anyone from Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Osama bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11. Was there a photograph of King Fahd? Prince Abdullah? She had some idea what they looked like. It’s amazing the things I know now, Lorie said to herself. From her research, she knew bin Laden’s family continued to control a multibillion-dollar Saudi construction firm that had been close to the royal family for decades. The company, the Bin Laden Group, was just the sort of well-connected foreign outfit that might have sought Kissinger’s help over the years—especially after 9/11, when it might have needed to distance itself in the West from any connection to the disowned Osama. Was there a photo of Kissinger with Muhammed bin Laden, the company’s patriarch and the terrorist’s father? She didn’t see any Arab faces in the photographs, at least none that she could identify.

  Kissinger was already in the room. He looked much older and more fragile than his visitors had expected. Kissinger was seventy-nine and had not been in good health; he stooped noticeably. Lorie certainly did not want to make the comparison, but she thought instantly of Grandpa Edward, her kindly, very short, Russian-born grandfather. Kissinger just doesn’t look like a bad guy, she thought.

  Age had not diminished Kissinger’s mind or ability to charm. And he impressed Lorie with the warmth of his welcome to the families. As chairman of the 9/11 commission, he said, he had been given the most important assignment of his life. Forget his years as secretary of state, as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser in the White House. Forget the Nobel Peace Prize. His new job was the one that “truly humbled” him. “I have never been given a greater honor than leading this inquiry,” Kissinger said, his trademark Germanic basso profundo reverberating around the room. He lowered himself onto the sofa, with his visitors in seats in a semicircle around him. He offered them coffee from a pot that had been brought into the conference room.

  Hot coffee had no appeal in Kissinger’s overheated office. “Dr. Kissinger, do you suppose we might crack open one of the windows?” asked another of the widows, Patty Casazza. “It’s very warm in here.”

  “Is it?” Kissinger answered, seemingly oblivious to the fact that some of his guests were wiping perspiration from their foreheads. Kissinger was in a coat and tie. He agreed, reluctantly, to open a window. The room began to cool.

  For the next several minutes, Kissinger was mostly silent, listening—attentively, it seemed—as the family activists went around the room, introducing themselves and describing their long struggle in Washington to create the commission. No one doubted that it was the families’ unrelenting lobbying that had forced President Bush to reverse himself and agree to an independent investigation of 9/11. When Kissinger did interrupt his visitors, it was only to salute the families for th
eir commitment to honoring the memory of their victims. Lorie could see she was falling for Kissinger, and she didn’t like it. “He is so smooth, so diplomatic,’’ she said.

  She tried to force the image of her grandfather out of her head. She needed to remind herself why she was here and what she had learned about Kissinger in her days and nights of digging on the Internet. She needed to think about Ken. This is Henry Kissinger, and he’s going to conduct maybe the only investigation of the event that caused my husband’s death, she thought to herself. If I don’t ask the tough questions now, I’ll never ask them.

  Since the announcement of Kissinger’s appointment, Lorie and a trio of other 9/11 widows from New Jersey—they called themselves “the Jersey Girls,” after the Bruce Springsteen song—had been at work, learning everything they could about Kissinger Associates; Kissinger had set up the firm in 1982. A simple Google search showed the widows that Kissinger’s conflicts of interest at his consulting firm were obvious—and everywhere. Kissinger had refused to make the client list public. But it was reported to include dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including several oil giants with reason to fear an investigation that might implicate Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich Arab countries in bin Laden’s fund-raising.

  Lorie was in her mid-forties, older than many of the other widows, and her suspicions about Kissinger went well beyond his consulting firm. She remembered him from his years in power in Washington in the 1970s. Nixon, Vietnam, the secret bombing of Cambodia, Watergate. This was a man so paranoid about keeping secrets that he had some of his colleagues in the Nixon White House wiretapped. It was laughable, Lorie thought, to think of Kissinger as a man eager to expose the truth about anything, especially 9/11. Almost certainly why Bush had picked him, she figured.

  The introductions over, Kissinger opened himself up to questions. At first, Lorie and the other Jersey Girls wanted to be diplomatic. But they had come to the meeting with an agenda—and a demand. They wanted to see Kissinger’s client list. They wanted it made public. They believed they had the law on their side. Although Kissinger had clearly not understood it when he accepted the job, federal ethics law appeared to require him and the other nine members of the commission to divulge their roster of business partners and clients.

  Kissinger did not flinch at the widows’ questions, at least not at first. He explained—slowly, patiently—that clients retained Kissinger Associates with the understanding their identities would never be made public. “It is not fair to my clients,” he said. “This request for privacy is very common for consulting firms.”

  The widows’ questions about the client list kept coming, and they grew more insistent. Lorie could see that Kissinger was becoming annoyed at the families’ effort—less subtle by the minute—to suggest he had a serious ethical conflict in leading the commission. “He got testy,” she said. “You could see he was getting a little exasperated.” He tried to deflect their questions. Was there some other way to convince the families that there was no conflict of interest? “Surely there is some way of satisfying your concerns,” he said. He suggested—hypothetically—that his client list might be shared with an outside lawyer who could vet it for conflicts but keep the list secret from the public.

  “Kristen is a lawyer,” Lorie said, nodding to Kristen Breitweiser, another of the Jersey Girls at the meeting. “Kristen could do it.”

  Kissinger frowned; handing over his client list to one of the media-savvy 9/11 widows was not what he had in mind. “I think you should just trust me,” he explained.

  It was Lorie who then asked the question directly. “With all due respect, Dr. Kissinger,” she said, trying to look him in the eye, “I have to ask you: Do you have any Saudi clients? Do you have any clients named bin Laden?”

  The room went dead quiet. Kissinger, who had been pouring himself a cup of coffee, was clearly startled by Lorie’s questions. He fumbled with the pot, spilling coffee onto the table. He seemed to lose his balance from the sofa at the same moment, nearly falling to the floor. Lorie and the other Jersey Girls rushed forward—like good suburban moms, Lorie thought—and grabbed napkins to soak up the spilled coffee.

  “It’s my bad eye,” Kissinger explained, trying to steady himself on the sofa. He said it affected his depth perception. The widows looked at one another. It was obvious to them that Lorie’s questions had thrown Kissinger off balance, not a problem with his vision.

  Lorie recalled that another of the widows tried to put the client question more delicately: “Dr. Kissinger, we would certainly hope that no one like that is on your client list. Can you understand our concern?”

  Kissinger smiled slightly and looked at his watch. He was not in a mood to answer any more questions. He drew the meeting to a close; he excused himself, saying he had another appointment. He was not going to budge on the client list.

  As the widows drove into the Lincoln Tunnel and headed under the Hudson River home to New Jersey that afternoon, Lorie was satisfied that at least Kissinger had been put on notice. The Jersey Girls had demonstrated to Kissinger that the families would scrutinize his every move on the commission. Lorie was prepared to ask many more embarrassing questions of Kissinger, and maybe next time she would ask the questions in front of a television camera.

  The next morning, Kissinger called the White House to announce that he was resigning from the 9/11 commission. In a two-page letter to President Bush faxed to the White House, Kissinger said he had “never refused to respond to the call from a president, nor have I ever put my personal interests ahead of the country’s interest.” But the dispute over his client list would do damage to the “consulting firm I have built and own.” He said that “to liquidate Kissinger Associates cannot be accomplished without significantly delaying the beginning” of the investigation.

  In the White House offices of Andy Card, Bush’s chief of staff, Kissinger’s letter was read with annoyance, anger—and a little relief. Typical Kissinger. The White House had never suggested that he shut down the firm; the request was only that he consider complying with an ethics law that seemed to apply to everyone else on the commission. The resignation letter made no reference to Kissinger’s awkward meeting with the victims’ families the day before, and the former secretary of state has since declined repeated interview requests to discuss the circumstances of his departure.

  Card began to think that maybe Kissinger’s departure was for the best. To Card, the abrupt resignation was “an embarrassment,” of course. But it also ended the debate over Kissinger and the consulting business—“he had a web of involvements that we were probably glad not to be stuck with”—that had seemed unlikely to go away. The White House now had a chance to find a new, less controversial choice to lead the 9/11 commission. Card hoped the new chairman might show as much respect for Bush and for the presidency as had been expected of Kissinger. But without all of Kissinger’s baggage.

  It was Friday afternoon, and Card wanted to announce a replacement for Kissinger as quickly as possible, preferably by the start of the new week. The dispute over Kissinger’s selection had been a distraction to the White House press office at a time when it wanted news coverage to focus on the Bush administration’s justification for what appeared to be an imminent invasion of Iraq. Card knew that Bush might be only a few weeks away from ordering a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

  Of course, Card needed to talk to Karl Rove, Bush’s top political aide, before any decision was made. Rove had been involved in the initial decision to select Kissinger, and he would want to weigh in on the names of candidates presented to Bush for a replacement. Rove was worried about the commission. Although Rove would never say it to anyone outside of the White House, he and Card had little doubt that—in the wrong hands—the independent federal commission investigating the September 11 attacks could cost President Bush a second term.

  3

  BEDMINSTER, N.J.

  DECEMBER 14, 2002

  It was a quiet Saturday afternoon for Tom Kean, j
ust as he and his wife, Debbie, liked it. Kean was at home in the leafy, affluent northern New Jersey town of Bedminster when the phone rang. Odd that anyone would be calling at this hour on the weekend, he thought. He picked up the receiver and was shocked to discover who was on the line. It was from Washington. It was the White House.

  “Governor Kean, this is Karl Rove.”

  The White House? Rove? Kean thought he had met Rove over the years, probably shook his hand once or twice at GOP gatherings. But he could not imagine why the architect of George W. Bush’s improbable rise to the White House—“Bush’s Brain”—would be calling. Kean had mostly disappeared from national politics after stepping down as New Jersey’s wildly popular Republican governor in 1990 to begin a second career as a university president. The fact that the White House had tracked him down at his unlisted home phone number on a Saturday afternoon made it all the stranger that Rove was on the line.

  Given his reputation as the most ruthless political operative in America, Rove often surprised strangers with his graciousness, or at least his ability to sound gracious. One of Rove’s press spokesmen used to explain it to new reporters on the White House beat by pointing out that “if Karl doesn’t have to knife you, why should he be rude to you?” So Rove began the conversation by apologizing profusely to Kean for interrupting his weekend.

  Then he got to the point.

  “Governor, you’ve probably heard about Henry Kissinger’s resignation yesterday from the commission investigating the September 11 attacks,” he said. “President Bush is looking for a new chairman, and your name has been mentioned.”

  There was no guarantee that Bush would select Kean, Rove explained. But would he be interested in the job if the offer came?