MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Twenty-five years ago today, the World Trade towers stood tall, gleaming, dominating the New York skyline. The idea that airplanes could crash into them, that people would jump from upper floors, that the towers would collapse, those were things that could only happen in an awful action movie. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed our understanding of what was possible and changed the way the U.S. government collected, analyzed and acted on intelligence, which created new dilemmas for U.S. officials wrestling with how far they were willing to go to keep Americans safe.
We gathered four of those officials this week for a live taping of NPR's national security podcast Sources & Methods. Joining me were Michael Morell, who was President George W. Bush's CIA briefer, Jane Harman, a Democratic member of Congress representing California, John McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, and Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser on 9/11 and in the days after, as the intelligence community worked frantically to prevent another attack.
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STEPHEN HADLEY: I think it's hard to understand the actions that were taken without a sense of the mood at the time. We had been attacked. We were surprised. We did not really know from whence it came. And the intelligence community was saying at the time that they thought it was likely or at least highly probable that this was the first of a wave of mass casualty attacks...
KELLY: Yeah.
HADLEY: ...Some of which might involve weapons of mass destruction from this enemy that we felt we did not know well enough.
MICHAEL MORELL: Mary Louise, can I add something (ph)?
KELLY: Please.
MORELL: Because I think Steve made a really important point. It is really hard to overstate how worried we all were in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that we were going to be hit again. There were many days when George Tenet and I walked from the old executive office building across West Executive Avenue to the West Wing where we said to each other, I wonder if we're going to get hit today.
KELLY: Yeah.
MORELL: And these weapons of mass destruction that Steve talked about, we learned an awful lot about al-Qaida's efforts in that arena in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. We knew they were talking to Pakistani nuclear scientists, trying to get their hands on a nuclear weapon. We had reporting that maybe they were going to sneak one into New York City. It is really hard to overstate the threat that we all felt. So I think it's easy to criticize sometime that we might have overreached here or overreached there, but that context is everything.
KELLY: I'm going to get to some of the overreach.
JOHN MCLAUGHLIN: And we also discovered...
KELLY: But if I could just - I just want to quote you, and then I invite you to get in here, John, because you and I have talked about this over the years in various interviews. And you told me something - I was pushing you on some of the actions that the CIA took after 9/11, which we're about to get to. You told me in 2018 something that will stay with me, and I'm going to quote you. You said, "if you were a CIA officer back in 2002, you were torn - on the one hand by the sense you might be doing something in conflict with basic values that you hold dear, on the other hand, failure to get that information might put the blood of Americans on your hands," which is about as pure a distillation I have heard of what y'all are describing.
MCLAUGHLIN: Yeah. Listen, difficult decisions were taken in those days, and we often say we hope that no one has to make those decisions again. And what I can tell you is they weren't perfectly executed, but on the other hand, the United States was not attacked by al-Qaida again. The gloves did come off, and we got new authorities from the president. That means that the president signs a piece of paper that gives you what they call a finding, which authorizes you legally to do certain things that we had not been authorized to do before. Among them was to capture terrorists, to detain them and to kill them if we - in certain cases, if we had named individuals that we could use lethal action on.
KELLY: So I was a young journalist covering the intelligence beat in those years after 9/11, and I reported from Afghanistan on the war and then from Iraq on the subsequent war and on abuses at Abu Ghraib and on waterboarding. I remember when we finally got to see the 2005 Justice Department memo that documented the CIA waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times, prompting the famous question from Dianne Feinstein - if something works, why do you have to do 183 times? We were debating in this newsroom, and I imagine every other newsroom, what do we call this? Is it enhanced interrogation? Can we just call it torture? John and Mike, can you just take me inside those conversations as they unfolded at Langley? How uncomfortable were you with what was happening?
MCLAUGHLIN: Well, I think you quoted me from 2018, which was the dilemma that we were struggling with. How do you get information that you know will protect the lives of Americans? And if you don't, you've got the blood of Americans on your hands. I will say that there was excessive focus on the issue of waterboarding. Waterboarding occurred only a small number of times in the first year of the program, and it stopped after that.
HADLEY: Only three people.
MCLAUGHLIN: Three people and...
KELLY: A hundred and eighty-three times on one of them in one month.
MCLAUGHLIN: If you look at the Red Cross interview with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and ask - and they ask him, how many times were you waterboarded? He says 10 times. So that's a whole theological argument about 183 versus 10. So the thing that kept us continuing on this program - and there's controversy about this, but I'll tell you where I stand. Day after day after day, we saw that this program yielded results that allowed us to then capture other terrorists. Capturing a terrorist stops operations. It disrupts them even before you've talked to them. This is the point I want to make. The anticipation of further attacks was not made up. They were planning further attacks, and we stopped a number of them. We stopped all of them, in so far as I know.
KELLY: Jane?
JANE HARMAN: I certainly respect the fact that the CIA and our whole intelligence community was worried about a second wave of attacks. But I would say, as someone who was in the chairs in Congress - I became the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee during that time - and who struggled to get information, that the information was not adequate at the time. I remember being briefed finally after begging by the general counsel of the CIA on the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques about which I knew nothing. And I remember writing a letter - this is not classified 'cause this has become public - to him saying, I want to know what the policy guidance was for using these techniques. It turned out that these techniques were in the so-called Army SERE manual, which is how we trained our people against tactics that could be used on them. So my bottom line is there were others who were trying to get on top of this story who really cared as everyone did about doing this the right way, and I'm not sure we got there fast enough.
KELLY: Yeah.
MORELL: Mary Louise, I just want to say one thing.
KELLY: Yes, you're going to get last word on this.
MORELL: We briefed the senior leadership of Congress. I remember one Democratic senator who would later become an opponent, a vocal opponent. His response when he was briefed on EITs was, is that all you're doing to protect the country? My constituents would expect you to do even more - 'cause he knew the context of the moment. And then fast-forward to Dave Petraeus' confirmation hearing, which John McCain attended as the ex officio member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Petraeus and McCain had a soliloquy about EITs. And at the end of that, they talked about the ticking time bomb situation.
KELLY: Yeah.
MORELL: There's a nuclear weapon in New York.
KELLY: Yeah.
MORELL: And you've got the guy who knows where it is, and he won't tell you. What do you do? They agreed - they agreed - that in that moment you would do extraordinary things.
KELLY: Yeah.
MORELL: The point is, to all of us after 9/11, it felt like a ticking time bomb situation.
MCLAUGHLIN: Every day.
MORELL: Every day.
KELLY: Every day. I take the point of what the atmosphere was at the time, but the enhanced interrogation techniques, the torture, whatever intelligence they produced of value, how do you weigh that against the damage to America's reputation as a country that believes in the rule of law?
HADLEY: I have to say one thing.
KELLY: Please.
HADLEY: The president's guidance was - do everything you can do to protect the country within the law. And we have an argument about whether the lawyers got it right in these opinions that were written. But the guidance was we were going to stay within the law.
KELLY: But the law kept changing. We kept changing it.
HADLEY: The law kept changing, and that was an evolution as we decided what we were and were not comfortable in doing. That's a strength of our democracy. That's not a criticism of our democracy.
KELLY: Yeah. I promised you last word, Mike.
MORELL: I was just going to say that, you know, Steve mentioned earlier our concern about how the American public would react at the end of the day. You know what? They supported everything that we did, the American public, in every poll that's ever been taken. It was the elite who grabbed this as an issue. The American people thought that we did the right thing to protect the country.
KELLY: That was Michael Morell, President George W. Bush's CIA briefer on 9/11. You also heard Jane Harman, John McLaughlin and Stephen Hadley. On 9/11, they were serving, respectively, as a California Democratic congresswoman, deputy director of the CIA and deputy national security adviser in the Bush White House. They joined me live at NPR earlier this week for a special taping of Sources & Methods. You can hear our hourlong conversation wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch the discussion on NPR's YouTube channel.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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