The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism--From Al Qa'ida to ISIS (31 page)

The allegation that there had been some intentional delay gained media traction, however, and Director Petraeus asked me to call in members of the media and conduct press backgrounder. During this session, I carefully recounted—minute by minute—the time between the Annex’s getting the first call for help from the TMF and when the CIA team arrived at the ambassador’s compound, about
an hour in total, as the team first stopped short of the TMF and tried to enlist the support of a militia group. I then spent another thirty minutes or so answering questions. Many media outlets ran stories the next day outlining what had really happened, and the stand-down allegation was relegated to the fringe press.

I actually did two media backgrounders that day. The second was with a group of a dozen or so national security reporters, while the first was a one-on-one session with David Ignatius from the
Washington Post
. I have the greatest respect for Ignatius’s commentary on national security. I have always found it fair and insightful, and therefore I wanted Ignatius to have the opportunity to ask as many questions as he wished and I wanted his questions to help prepare me for the larger group of reporters. We also committed a faux pas when our public affairs office failed to invite Andrea Mitchell from NBC News to the group session. They just forgot. Mitchell was angry and so was I. Mitchell in many ways is the dean of national security reporters and to leave her out was huge mistake. I ran into her several weeks later and apologized, which she accepted in good humor. Years earlier, when I was George Tenet’s executive assistant and Mitchell was doing a story on the Agency, she asked me, “Is it true that George dribbles a basketball in the halls of CIA?” I responded, “Andrea, I will tell you the answer to that question if you tell me what your husband [Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board] is going to do with interest rates!”

There was also a controversy over how I answered two questions at a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is over these answers that Senators Chambliss and Burr questioned my integrity. The first question, from Senator Burr, was directed to all the witnesses testifying that day: “Who took ‘al Qa‘ida’ out of the talking points?” Because I did not know the answer at the time, I said I did not know. While this was truthful, Senator Burr told me later in a private meeting before I left government that he
would have expected me to say, “I do not know, Senator, but you should know that I myself edited the talking points at one stage in the process.” I agreed with Senator Burr, and I told him so at the time. I wish that the “Minority Views” section of the SSCI report on Benghazi had captured this conversation. It did not.

The second question was “Were the talking points provided to the White House for coordination or for awareness?” I said awareness. That was clearly not right, as the White House had suggested changes—albeit editorial ones—that we accepted. The important thing is that my answer to this question was not meant to mislead. I was careless with my words. What I meant to convey in my answer was that there was no way we would have allowed the White House—or anyone else for that matter—to make a substantive change with which CIA did not agree. Was there a lack of clarity in my response to the question? Yes. Should I have been clearer? Yes. Deliberately misleading Congress? No way.

There was additional uproar over how I sat next to DNI Jim Clapper at a closed House Intelligence hearing the very next day and did not speak when Chairman Rogers asked the DNI, “Who did take out… the al Qa‘ida–linked information in the talking points as they were being formed up?” I did not say anything, again because I did not know who had taken out the reference to al Qa‘ida. Later, Representative Peter King would try to reframe the chairman’s question, saying the DNI had been asked, “Who changed the talking points?”—suggesting the question “How could Morell sit there and not answer when he’d made extensive changes to the talking points?” But King was wrong; the question had been much narrower. But again, I would have served the committee better had I followed the DNI’s answer by saying, “I don’t know who took al Qa‘ida out, but you should know that I took some other stuff out.”

The biggest controversy on Benghazi was the one that arose over Ambassador Rice’s use of the talking points in her public statement.
She became a lightning rod, and it was clear that her potential nomination for secretary of state was in jeopardy. In an attempt to end the attacks on her, she wanted to face her accusers directly. A meeting with Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte was arranged for November 27. I was asked by Denis McDonough, still deputy national security advisor at the time, to accompany Ambassador Rice to the Hill. He made clear that my job was to show that the talking points were fully consistent with the classified analysis produced by the intelligence community. I said yes to the request.

In retrospect, attending the meeting was a mistake. The meeting was inherently political, and by attending, I inserted myself into a political issue. I’m sure that McCain, Graham, and Ayotte saw it that way. I’m sure they saw me as taking sides in a political fight. That is not where an intelligence officer should be. I was politically naïve to have attended, and I have paid a price for it.

The meeting went forward in a secure Senate conference room. The news media had the hallways leading to the room staked out, and photographers snapped photos of me while reporters yelled questions. A friend e-mailed me later that evening, saying that I’d looked as if I were going to my own execution, and urging me to force a smile in such situations. But once we got started there was nothing to smile about.

Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte were on one side of a table, Ambassador Rice and I on the other. McCain and Graham wasted no time in launching an attack against Ambassador Rice. They repeatedly called Rice a “political hack,” and they sometimes would not let her finish a thought before interrupting her with a new question. Senator Ayotte did not contribute to the vitriol and seemed genuinely interested in getting to the truth.

I was a silent witness, until Rice asked me to explain the consistency between the talking points and the classified intelligence
analysis. Then it was my turn to be attacked. I had brought along copies of the talking points and the classified analysis from September 13, and I tried to show the senators that every sentence in the talking points had a virtual match in the classified analysis. McCain and Graham turned on me, attacking my analysts’ capabilities, judgment, and integrity, interrupting me mid-sentence as they had Rice. “Why did it take you so long to admit there was no demonstration?” they asked. “Why didn’t you immediately interview the people on the ground?” “Why didn’t you call this a terrorist attack?”

At one point, while being battered with questions, I made an error. One of the senators asked me who had removed the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points—and I, incorrectly, said it had been the FBI. I was thinking about the one change that the FBI had made—when it asked for a change in the talking points so that they would not be too definitive in describing who might have conducted the attack, because the Bureau was just beginning its investigation. I got the two changes mixed up. I made a mistake. In the car on my way back to headquarters, our director of congressional affairs, who had joined me in the meeting, told me that he thought I had made a mistake. I immediately responded, “If I made a mistake, let’s fix it.” Upon returning to CIA headquarters and looking at the facts, I quickly realized that I had misspoken. The decision to remove al Qa‘ida from the draft talking points had been an internal CIA decision—made long before I knew that the talking points existed. I immediately directed our Office of Congressional Affairs to notify the senators’ staff of my mistake. It did so within a couple of hours. In response to my clarification, the senators issued a press release citing my mistake and using it to blast the administration about unanswered questions on Benghazi.

Even worse, months later, Senator Graham publicly insisted that he’d asked me, “Who changed the talking points?” In fact, I was asked, “Who took al Qa‘ida out of the talking points?” By providing
an inaccurate account of what he had asked me, Graham left the impression that there was no way I could have made an honest mistake in answering such a broad question. Graham also insisted that it had taken me twenty-four hours to correct the record and that I’d done so only after receiving an angry call from the FBI for saying that it had made all the changes to the talking points. The facts, as with much about what many people have said about Benghazi, could not be more different. The senators had asked a much more specific question that it was indeed possible to make a mistake in answering: “Who took al Qa‘ida out of the talking points?”—a fact that Graham, McCain, and Ayotte’s own press release issued the day of the meeting with Ambassador Rice makes clear.

Here is what that press release stated: “Around 10:00 this morning in a meeting requested by Ambassador Rice, accompanied by acting CIA Director Mike Morell, we asked Mr. Morell who changed the unclassified talking points to remove references to al-Qaeda. In response, Mr. Morell said the FBI removed the references and did so to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation. We were surprised by this revelation and the reasoning behind it. “However, at approximately 4:00 this afternoon, CIA officials contacted us and indicated that Acting Director Morell misspoke in our earlier meeting. The CIA now says that it deleted the al-Qaeda references, not the FBI. They were unable to give a reason as to why.”

In addition, the FBI never called me to complain about the mistake I’d made while briefing the three senators. Moreover, as the timing of their own press release makes clear, I corrected the record within a couple of hours, not twenty-four.

* * *

At the end of the day, I find three significant ironies in the views of those who were attacking CIA and me. The first is the striking
difference between the record of CIA in assessing what happened in Benghazi and the record of those making allegations about the executive branch.

The judgments of analysts, operating with only twenty-four hours of information, have held up over time. Only one of their main judgments regarding what had happened in Benghazi that night—that a protest immediately outside the TMF had evolved into the attack—has been shown to be wrong. They still believe their other judgments.

Contrast that with the conclusions at others:

•
The US military was ordered to stand down and not come to the aid of the State Department and CIA officers in Benghazi
. Wrong. The House Armed Services Committee report on Benghazi, the House Intelligence Committee report on the issue, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi all specifically concluded that this assertion was false.

•
The CIA officers in Benghazi were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades at the TMF
. Wrong, as I have already explained. Again, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee said there was no evidence to support this allegation.

•
There was a conspiracy between CIA and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton
. Again, wrong. There was no such conspiracy, as I have already explained, and there is no evidence to support such a theory. No committee of Congress that has studied Benghazi has come to this conclusion.

The second irony is that some believe the CIA leadership, including me, should have forced the analysts to accept COS Tripoli’s view that there had not been a protest outside the TMF, while
at the same time they firmly reject another view of the COS, who wrote that one of the possible motivations for the attack on the TMF had been the YouTube video. These critics cannot have it both ways—accepting from a source, our COS, what fits their narrative and rejecting from the same source what does not.

Finally, the third and most important irony: my critics have alleged that I misled the American people about what happened in Benghazi, while the truth is that they are the ones misleading the public—in almost everything they say about the issue. For example, in multiple commentaries after my open testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a small number of members of Congress and a small segment of the media got many facts wrong in talking about me and my role in Benghazi. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”

The best example of this is an op-ed written in the days after my testimony by Michael Mukasey, who was an attorney general in the Bush administration, and who was writing in support of my critics. In only a dozen paragraphs, Mukasey, a former US district judge as well as a former US attorney, made seven factual errors. Here are a handful:

• Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Mr. Morell changed ‘terrorist’ to ‘extremist’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As is clear from the e-mails released by the White House in the spring of 2013, no one changed “terrorist” to “extremist.” The original draft of the talking points, written by our most senior terrorism analyst, said “extremist.”

• Mr. Mukasey wrote, “He [meaning me] substituted ‘demonstration’ for ‘attack’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As my sworn testimony and the e-mails make clear, this change was made by others at the Agency and before I ever saw the talking points.

•
Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Yet the CIA was asked soon after the attack by the White House to help draft ‘talking points,’ which should have tipped him [again meaning me] off that some extramural talking was planned.” Not even close. No one has ever claimed that the White House asked for the talking points. Again, as all the evidence makes clear, the House Intelligence Committee asked Director Petraeus for the talking points.

Even Representative Trey Gowdy, the leader of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, got his facts wrong in the days immediately following his appointment as chairman of the committee. Gowdy, before being elected to Congress, was a career federal and state prosecutor and a very good one. He rightfully prides himself on uncovering the facts and letting them take him to a conclusion. But even he made mistakes.