The Man Who Briefed the President on 9/11

0:03Gordon:For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com.

0:24David:Welcome everybody to this episode of the Declassified Club. Greetings to our secrets. We're all sold and new. Welcome back, especially though, to a guest we have, David, who appeared with us a few months ago on our Iraq WMD series. People might remember Michael Morrell, and he is back with us again to look at the subject of 9-11, isn't he?

0:48Gordon:He is. We are very lucky to have Michael back with us. Listeners who enjoyed the series that we did back in the spring on Iraq WMD, we'll remember that Michael was gracious enough to speak with us about the intelligence picture at CIA around Iraq for that series. And we are very fortunate to have him back with us today to talk about his experience at CIA, to talk about 9-11, and to talk about the fight against terrorism. Michael is former acting director and deputy director of the CIA. He spent 33 years there, where in addition to those roles, he spent two years as the director of intelligence, the agency's top analyst.

1:29Gordon:He was also the executive director, the CIA's top administrator. He's the only person who was with both President Bush on September the 11th and with President Obama on May 1st when bin Laden was brought to justice. We'll be talking about both of those experiences in our time with Michael today. He is now currently the co-founder and managing partner of a private global intelligence and advisory firm, Ardwolf Global Solutions. He's the author of the New York Times bestseller on CIA's war against Islamic extremism, which is called The Great War of Our Time, an insider's account of the CIA's fight against terrorism.

2:07Gordon:I would highly commend that book to all listeners. And actually, last time, Michael, when you were with us, we teased it. you had an Emmy, but we neglected to actually ask you what in the world you have an Emmy for. Yeah, what's it for? Michael, welcome back to the Declassified Club. And what is the Emmy for? It's great to be with you guys again. Thank you, David. Thank you, Gordon. I bought the Emmy on eBay.

2:35So I was a national, senior national security contributor for CBS News, for almost a decade. And the whole team at CBS won an award for its morning program. And I received one as a result of my contributions to the morning show.

2:56David:When David was doing, Michael was the only person to do various things. I was going to interject and say, was the only person ever to promote David McCloskey as an analyst. Because we learned that as well last time, as well as the Emmy.

3:08Gordon:That was maybe the most shocking part of that series. And that maybe deserves an Emmy, best drama. That was the only thing that made headlines. Yeah, that's right. My promotion from GS6 to GS7 back in 2008. And Michael, I think last time we obviously spent a lot of time talking about Iraq and the WMD question, we didn't actually spend a lot of time talking about your experience at CIA. I thought we'd start there. How did you end up working at the CIA? Why did you join the CIA in the first place? It was a bit of a fluke. I'm often interested in hearing people who say, you know, I wanted to work at CIA since I was three.

3:48Like, really? I wanted to be a garbage man. I was an economics major, and I fell in love with economics. And what I really wanted to do was to go to grad school and get a PhD and teach. But I had a professor who I think worked for the CIA, did some work for the CIA. And I could never find out he died early in life, so I could never talk to him about it. But I think he did. And he encouraged me to apply, and I did. And I was invited to Washington for a set of interviews, and I had never been to Washington, D.C. before, so I thought, all right, I'll go. I'll go see a nation's capital on the taxpayer's dime with zero intention of taking a job if offered because I had already applied to grad school, I had been accepted, and that's what I wanted to do.

4:41And I went for these five interviews on one day and five interviews the next day, and I was blown away. I was blown away by the mission of keeping the country safe. I was particularly attracted to this mission of your job being to figure out what's really going on and tell the president, irrespective of the policy implications or the political implications. It was very attractive to me. I was blown away by the quality of the people I met in this very strong sense of family that I felt, which, David, as you know, is a defining characteristic of the place. Yeah. And then I was blown away by them saying, you know this grad school thing you keep talking to everybody about?

5:27Well, if you come to work here, we'll send you back to school.

5:30Gordon:And so I did. And they did send me back to school. The other little piece, which I don't always add in this story, is that when I got back home and I told my parents that CIA had essentially offered me a job, but I wasn't going to take it. I was going to go to grad school. They were like, hey, do you know we're not going to pay for your grad school? you're on your own pal so both the attractiveness of the cia job and no money to go to grad school led me to say yes to the cia powerful convergence powerful convergence yeah that's how i ended up there as a young economic gs7 economic analyst and it's an amazing you could not have imagined

6:10David:that you would then end up briefing the president of the united states and be his briefer and that you would be doing it on one of the most dramatic days of American history on 9-11, I guess. Let's focus a little bit. We'll talk a bit more broadly about CIA as well. But on that day, where you were and what was happening for you? So I was President Bush's first daily intelligence briefer. George Tenet, who I had served as the executive assistant to a few years earlier, asked me to do this job. He figured that my personality and the president's personality would mesh. And he was absolutely right about that.

6:48So he asked me to do it. And I saw it as a good thing for somebody with a very young family to do. My kids were very young at the time. And I thought I'd be seeing them more. I was wrong about that.

7:04Gordon:That is an analytic failure right there, Mike. We can unpack that. Believe me, I've had a lot of them. We talked about one a few months ago. So anyway, so I said yes to that job and I started briefing him on January 4th, 2001 at the governor's mansion in Austin. I briefed him. I was with him six days a week wherever he was in the world. In the Oval Office, we'd probably spend an hour. And I say we because George Tenet, the director, would join me. The roles were I was the play-by-play guy and he was the color commentator. That's how we thought about it. So six days a week, Oval Office, Camp David, his ranch in Texas, traveling overseas, traveling domestically.

7:49So when Air Force One went wheels up on September 10th to go to Florida for two events around the president's new education policy, I was with him. And I briefed him on the morning of September 11th in his hotel room at the Colony Resort, where he stayed, where we stayed that night. I could go through the day in excruciating detail because it's all still here in my mind. But if I was going to sum it up for you, Gordon, I'd say it was a mixture of the intensity of doing my job with a surreal. A couple of examples of the intensity of doing my job. The president on our flight to Omaha, so we went to Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha so the president could go into the deep, deep bunker and do a call with his national security team.

8:39So on the flight to Offutt from Florida, the president asked to see me and it was in his office. It was me and it was Andy Card, his chief of staff. And the president looked me in the eye and said, Michael, who did this? It's a kind of direct question you get from president. And I told him that I had not seen any intelligence yet that would take us to a perpetrator so that he was going to get my best guess, my best assessment. He said, I understand the caveat, now move on.

9:09Gordon:Answer my question. So I said, your mind, somebody's mind, right? Thinking about this, one's mind might go to a nation state like Iran or Iraq, both of which have the capabilities to do something like this, but neither of them have anything to gain and both of them have everything to lose from doing something like this. So I don't think it was them or a nation state. I think when we get to the end of the trail, we're going to find bin Laden and we're going to find al-Qaeda, which we had talked about him with him over and over and over again in the run-up to this. He took that in and then he said, when will we know?

9:49Which is another kind of direct question you get from a president for which there is no good answer. So I fell back on something that we teach analysts, which is context is everything. So I gave him context. And the context I gave him was, Mr. President, the East Africa bombings, which had taken place in August of 1998. I told him it took us three days to pin that on al-Qaeda and bin Laden. I told him the USS Cole, the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, it took us several months to trace that back to Afghanistan and bin Laden. And the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, it took us an entire year to trace that back to Tehran and the Iranians.

10:34So I took all that context, provided that to him and then said, so Mr. President, we may know soon or it may take some time.

10:41Gordon:So that's kind of an example of what it was like briefing him and the intensity of that moment. Later, when we were flying back to Washington, George Tenet had sent me a piece of intelligence that a European intelligence service had shared with us that day. And Tenet wanted me to show it to the president. Now reading it, you didn't have any idea how they got this piece of intelligence, where it came from, what the sourcing was. So just no way to judge the credibility of it, but the director wanted me to show it to the president, so I did. It said that what happened that morning, what happened on the morning of September 11th in the United States was the first of two waves of attacks on the United States.

11:24So I'm sitting with the president on Air Force One in the conference room, the leader of the country who has just suffered the worst attack on the homeland ever, and I'm telling him there might be another one.

11:37Gordon:What's the reaction? I remember him simply saying, Michael, thank you, and pushing it back across the table to me. He was somber. So there's two examples of the intensity of doing my job. An example of the surreal was on the final approach to Andrews that night, coming back to Washington, the president's military aide, the guy who carries the nuclear football, the nuclear codes. Actually, I learned they're not codes. They're different strike packages for the president to choose from in a nuclear strike. Anyway, so he's looking. I'm sitting in the staff compartment in my seat, and he's looking out the windows on the left side of the aircraft.

12:18And he sees me looking at him, and he waves me over. It's dim in the plane. Lights have been dimmed. And so I go over, and he says, he points out. And I look out, and there is a F-16 on the wingtip. And he says to me, F-16, D.C. Air National Guard, and there's another one on the other wingtip. We have two guiding us in. And I'm like, wow. And the plane was so close that you could see the pilot. He had his head turned toward us. It looked like he was looking at us. And in the distance, you could see the still smoldering Pentagon. And then he said to me, do you know why they're there? Do you know why the F-16s are there?

13:04And I said, no. And he said, they're there. This literally sent chills down my spine then and still does. It just happened. He said, they're there. In case somebody fires a surface-to-air missile at us on final approach, their job is to put themselves between that missile and the President of the United States.

13:25David:It's like the Air Force equivalent of the Secret Service agent running, jumping in front of the bullet. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah.

13:34Gordon:Did you feel that day or did the president, insofar as you could discern what he was thinking or feeling or anyone around him, have a sense that the entire world had changed? Or was that something that happened later? I was so focused on doing my job in the moment that I didn't think about the broader consequences. I can't tell you whether the president did or not. But I will tell you that I saw in him, in those handful of hours after the attacks, I saw him change from a president who really didn't have direction prior to 9-11, was struggling a little bit politically, to somebody, and he's talked about feeling this way, to somebody who literally knew why he was put on this earth and literally knew why he was president.

14:41And he was determined to make sure that this never happened again. I remember him on the flight back to Washington. I was back in this staff compartment in my seat and he came walking back. And everybody else was kind of sleeping a little bit, sitting. It was dark. It was right before the thing with the F-16s. And I stood up and I went over to him and I simply said, are you doing okay? And the way he said yes, there was a determination and a mission and a focus to the way he said yes, that I just felt.