The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [185]
It was at Clinton’s request, and in his capacity as one of the very few people allowed access to the former administration’s most secret documents, that Berger went to the Archives to review selected files. Given his seniority, he was received with special courtesy and under rather less than the usual stringent security conditions. All the more astounding then that on his third visit a staff member “saw Mr. Berger bent down, fiddling with something that could have been paper, around his ankle.”
Under cover of asking for privacy to make phone calls, or in the course of uncommonly frequent visits to the lavatory, the former national security adviser was purloining top secret documents, smuggling them out of the building hidden in his clothing, and taking them home. He was caught doing so, publicly exposed, forced to resign from his senior post with the 2004 Democratic campaign for the presidency, charged with taking classified documents, and—a year later—fined $50,000 and sentenced to one hundred hours of community service.
What had possessed Berger? What seemed so compromising to himself or to the Clinton administration—or so essential to be hidden from 9/11 investigators—as to drive him to risk national disgrace?
What is known is that Berger took no fewer than five copies of the Millennium After Action Review, or MAAR, a thirteen-page set of recommendations that had been written in early 2000, focused mostly on countering al Qaeda activity inside the United States. While the MAAR is still classified, it seems somewhat unlikely that it is the item that Berger deemed potential dynamite. It may have been handwritten notes on the copies that he thought potentially explosive, former 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer has surmised. That would account for the former official’s apparently frantic search for additional copies.
The National Archives inspector general and others worried about what other documents Berger may have removed from the Archives. Short of a further admission on his part, the director of the Archives’ presidential documents staff conceded, we shall never know. Whatever he took, Farmer pointed out, it made him appear “desperate to prevent the public from seeing certain papers.”
“What information could be so embarrassing,” House Speaker Dennis Hastert asked, “that a man with decades of experience in handling classified documents would risk being caught pilfering our nation’s most sensitive secrets? … Was this a bungled attempt to rewrite history and keep critical information from the 9/11 Commission?”
The question is all the more relevant when one notes that, so far as one can tell, Berger’s focus was on the period right after the CIA’s resolve to “penetrate” bin Laden’s terrorist apparatus, or “recruit” inside it, an aspiration followed in rapid order by the discovery of Khalid al-Mihdhar’s U.S. entry visa—and the highly suspect failure to share that information with the State Department and the FBI.
THOUGH FRAGMENTARY, there are pointers suggesting that the CIA did not promptly drop its coverage of Mihdhar. On January 5, 2000—the day of the discovery of Mihdhar’s visa, and in the same cable that claimed the FBI had been notified—desk officer “Michelle” noted that “we need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities.” As late as February, moreover, a CIA message noted that the Agency was still engaged in an investigation “to determine what the subject is up to.”
Mihdhar was to tell KSM, according to the CIA account of KSM’s interrogation, that he and Hazmi “believed they were surveilled from Thailand to the U.S.” KSM seems to have taken this possibility seriously—sufficiently so, the CIA summary continues, that he “began having doubts whether the two would be able to fulfil their mission.” Later, in 2001, two other members of