In My Time - Dick Cheney [186]
Faced with threats of resignation, the president decided to alter the NSA program, even though he and his advisors were confident of his constitutional authority to continue the program unchanged.
A few months later we learned that a New York Times reporter, James Risen, was preparing to publish a story about the NSA program. Such a story would alert our enemies about the program, making it more difficult for us to continue to collect the intelligence we needed. By explaining that the newspaper would be putting an important national security program at risk, Condi Rice and Mike Hayden convinced Risen and the Times to hold the story. But the next year, in December 2005, the paper threatened again to run it. This time Risen had a book about to be published that contained elements of the story, and the New York Times wanted to feature it first. We were concerned enough about the damage publication could do to the program that the president had a face-to-face meeting with the publisher and editor of the Times to ask them not to go with the story. He explained that making details of the program public would harm our ability to track terrorists’ phone calls and might well make it more difficult for us to prevent future attacks. On December 16, 2005, the Times published the story anyway, a decision the president called “shameful.” I agreed. Moreover, it seemed to me that the New York Times had violated Section 798 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, which prohibits publishing classified information about America’s communications intelligence.
Six months later, the New York Times published a story that damaged our efforts to track the flow of funding to terrorists. The June 23, 2006, story was headlined “Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror.” It exposed details about a classified program to track banking transactions, which, of course, was welcome enlightenment to those we were trying to catch. The Times’ public editor, Byron Calame, at first defended the newspaper’s decision to publish on the grounds that the classified program wasn’t really much of a secret. After Times readers pointed out that the Times story had emphasized the program’s secrecy, Calame reversed himself, writing, “I don’t think the article should have been published.”
In the wake of the New York Times terrorist surveillance story, Andy Card hosted a meeting in his office that I attended along with some of the president’s communications team. Communications Director Dan Bartlett was urging that we be more forthcoming in revealing to the press and the public just what these programs entailed. He said that the president was “just carrying too much baggage” from all the “secret” activities we had under way. I understood it was his job to worry about the president’s image, but there were important reasons for our secrecy. “Dan,” I said, “we aren’t doing these things for our entertainment. We’re doing them because we’re at war. These programs—and keeping them secret—are critical for the defense of the nation.” The president and I and everyone else serving in the administration had one mission: to defend the nation, even if it resulted in negative press stories.
The Terrorist Surveillance Program is, in my opinion, one of the most important success stories in the history of American intelligence. The speed with which the NSA got it up and running, the problems they solved and the way they solved them, the careful attention paid to ensure lawfulness and proper oversight, and the intelligence collected make the program a model of the tremendous work our nation’s intelligence community can do. As I think back on all we accomplished in those first post-9/11 months, this program is one of the things of which I am proudest. I know it saved lives and prevented attacks. If I had it to do all over again, I would, in a heartbeat.
NEAR THE TOWN OF Mazar-e-Sharif in Afghanistan there is a nineteenth-century prison fortress called Qala-i-Jangi. In November 2001, when Northern Alliance forces under the command of General