The Condoleezza Rice meeting was a nine o’clock White House appointment John Kiriakou was travelling to with Cofer Black on the morning of 11 September 2001, and which the attacks pre-empted. Black was then director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center; Rice was National Security Advisor. “It was just the two of us with Condi.”[1][2][3][4]
The problem
Kiriakou calls the reason for the meeting “quaint at this point,” and he is consistent that it was a Greek matter rather than a terrorism one.[2][4][5]
In his fullest telling, the Government Printing Office — “a minor little-known government agency… located on Capitol Hill” — was preparing to print a volume of declassified cables titled Foreign Relations of the United States, Greece-Turkey-Cyprus. He gives the span as 1949 to 1967 in that account and as 1947 to 1969 in an earlier one. The print run was to be five or ten copies: “nobody’s ever going to read it unless there’s some PhD candidate who needs to examine one specific cable.”[6][7]
Three of the old cables identified CIA sources who were still alive — men by then “like a hundred years old.” The exposure carried a statutory consequence: “there is an obscure law in this country that if the US government outs the identity of a recruited CIA source, we have to offer that person citizenship and resettlement in the United States.”[8][7]
The purpose of the meeting followed from the arithmetic: “we thought it would be easier and cheaper if we went to Condi and asked her to just pull these three cables out of the volume. Nobody would miss them. Nobody would know that they were supposed to be there in the first place. Just pull them.”[9] Rice, in Kiriakou’s account, kept refusing on grounds of transparency and declassification, and Black proposed going down in person to make the pitch. Kiriakou agreed.[10]
What happened instead
At about 8.15 the driver telephoned Kiriakou’s desk to say he was at the East entrance and ready to take them to the White House. Kiriakou walked over to Black’s office to tell him the car was ready.[9][4]
Black’s secretary had a small television on her desk, and the North Tower was burning. Kiriakou asked what had happened and was told a plane had flown into it; he answered — “because I’m an idiot sometimes” — with the precedent of the bomber that flew into the Empire State Building in 1930 or 1931, when it was foggy with heavy rain, unlike the crystal-clear morning in front of them. “And just as the words came out of my mouth, the second plane hit the second tower.” Neither of them reacted, until she turned and asked: “did you see that? Or did I imagine it?”[11][12][10][13][5]
The meeting never took place. The account continues in the second plane.
Rice in Kiriakou’s later account
Kiriakou has been sharply critical of Rice’s competence on the Middle East, describing her as the United States government’s leading expert on the Soviet Union at a moment when the Soviet Union no longer existed, and as knowing very little about Iraq. He adds that everybody was afraid of Dick Cheney.[14]
The failure he returns to most often is her refusal, before the attacks, to act on CIA warnings that something massive was coming. Asked why the agency could not get her or the president to listen, his answer is that “this is one of the enduring mysteries of the Bush administration. I don’t know why.”[15][16] He declines to read conspiracy into it — Cheney “was powerful, but he wasn’t powerful enough to single-handedly stop the wheels of the intelligence community” — while accepting that the failure should have been investigated.[17][18]
The image of Rice’s office he keeps from that morning is of its second-in-command. Having abandoned his car on the grassy median and walked, Kiriakou reached the foot of the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge and saw the deputy national security advisor — Rice’s deputy — with no shoes on. “And that image has been burned into my brain all these years.”[19]
Three later appearances complete the picture he draws. On 12 September 2001, he says, Richard Perle went to the White House and told Rice “we have to attack Iraq” — evidence, in his reading, that “the fix was in from the beginning.”[20] On the night before the 2003 invasion, Kiriakou was the note-taker at a principals committee meeting chaired by Cheney in the president’s absence, with Rice and Colin Powell in the room.[21] And in the meeting where George Tenet objected that the agency owed the public the truth about Abu Zubaydah — that he was not the figure they had claimed — Rice “chimed in”: “George, you’re just going to have to take one for the team.” Kiriakou says he has never seen Tenet as angry.[22]
She appeared once more on the other side of a courtroom: prosecutors called her to the stand in Jeffrey Sterling’s trial to testify to what a catastrophe for national security the Merlin operation had been.[23]