Condoleezza Rice was the U.S. National Security Advisor at the time of the September 11 attacks, and she appears in John Kiriakou’s accounts three times: as the meeting he never made that morning, as the official who told the CIA director to absorb a lie, and as his own preferred explanation for why the warnings went nowhere.
The meeting that never happened
Kiriakou recounts that he and Cofer Black had a meeting scheduled with Rice on the morning of 9/11 over a mundane matter: an obscure Government Printing Office report, Foreign Policy of the United States, Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, 1949 to 1967[1], was about to be published, and its declassified cables would out three recruited assets — still alive in their 90s — whom U.S. law would then require the government to protect with citizenship, a house, and money. They wanted Rice simply to pull those cables.[2][3][4] The meeting never happened; as the driver arrived, Kiriakou saw the first tower burning on a secretary’s small TV.[5] In a separate retelling he again describes the scheduled meeting over the same obscure book — nobody, he says, was ever going to read its 1,200 declassified pages — noting it also happened to contain the names of three still-living CIA sources, whom an obscure U.S. law would require the government to offer citizenship if the agency ever outed them.[6] He remembers that on the morning itself people around him were calling her Condi rather than Condoleezza.[7]
Kiriakou recalls that just as he remarked, elsewhere that morning, on how clear the day was compared to a 1930s accidental bombing of the Empire State Building, the second plane struck the second tower.[8]
‘Take one for the team’
Kiriakou confirms the account of a briefing in which George Tenet told George W. Bush that Abu Zubaydah was not who the Agency had said he was, and Bush replied that Tenet was not going to make him lose face over it, having called Zubaydah important repeatedly.[9][10]
Rice was in that meeting. When Tenet objected that they owed it to the public to tell the truth — that Zubaydah was not the man they had thought — Rice, in Kiriakou’s account, chimed in: “George, you’re just going to have to take one for the team.”[10]
Kiriakou’s own memory is of the effect on Tenet rather than the substance: “I don’t think I have ever seen George Tenet as angry as he was that day” at having been spoken down to that way. “He was livid.”[10][11] The stake was not private: Abu Zubaydah’s supposed importance was the main public justification for the torture programme.[12]
In the room for Iran
Rice also appears in Kiriakou’s account of a principals committee meeting he attended as Tenet’s note-taker, sitting directly behind him. It was chaired not by the president but by Dick Cheney, with Rice and her note-taker on the next screen, Colin Powell and his, the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs and theirs, and General Tommy Franks of CENTCOM with his.[13][14][15][16]
The meeting is the one at which Franks closed an order-of-battle briefing by saying that if all went as planned they could be in Tehran by August — prompting Tenet to cut his microphone and ask Kiriakou whether Franks had said Baghdad or Tehran. Kiriakou told him: Tehran. Back at the office the deputy director’s response to the news was “are they still talking about that? We’re not going to attack Iran.”[17][18]
Her failure to listen, and what he makes of it
Pressed on how the warnings could have gone unheeded — the CIA saying something massive was coming, and Rice not acting — Kiriakou declines the conclusion the question invites. He does not believe an American president would allow an attack like that, and does not believe any one official had the power: the bureaucracy is too vast, and Cheney, though powerful, was not powerful enough to single-handedly stop the wheels of the intelligence community.[19]
His alternative is unflattering rather than conspiratorial: “Maybe Condoleezza Rice was an incompetent boob. I mean, there’s that school of thought too.”[20] He grants the underlying complaint — that the warnings were enough to justify telling immigration to be stricter, or taking a closer look at Saudi immigration — while pointing out that policy changes in a big lumbering bureaucracy can take months or years.[21]