April 2, 2014, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, US Congress. Open hearing on “The Benghazi Talking Points and Michael J. Morell’s Role in Shaping the Administration’s Narrative.” Selected quotes:
MR. DEVIN NUNES, CONGRESSMAN FROM CALIFORNIA’S TWENTY-SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Mr. Morell… I read your testimony and you have an excuse for everything, right? For everything.
MS. MICHELE BACHMANN, CONGRESSWOMAN FROM MINNESOTA’S SIXTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Mr. Morell, they [the White House] didn’t have to change, because you made the changes for them. That is the point. That is why you are in front of this committee today. You made significant substantive changes for the White House.
MR. LYNN WESTMORELAND, CONGRESSMAN FROM GEORGIA’S THIRD CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: You know, it just seems—I mean if you look at the whole picture that I think the majority of people look at, when those talking points were edited, they were edited in favor of the administration’s philosophy of how they wanted to be portrayed in Libya, you know.
MR. PETER KING, CONGRESSMAN FROM NEW YORK’S SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Mr. Morell, there are so many questions from beginning to end on this whole issue of the talking points. And to believe your version would require almost absolute faith in your word.
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I had many unforgettable experiences as a result of my time at CIA, and it’s odd that one of them came months after I left the organization. It was April 2014 and I was called to appear in open session before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and testify about Benghazi.
Appearing before Congress was not a new experience for me. I had done so hundreds of times before—but doing so in public, and on live TV, was new (all but one of my past sessions with Congress had been behind closed doors). But this did not faze me. What did shock me, after standing and swearing an oath to tell the truth, was to hear at that session a handful of members of Congress essentially accuse me of lying. As someone who had always thought of himself as honest to a fault, I was stunned to hear respected political leaders question my integrity. Here is how that came about.
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Politics in America should end at the nation’s shores—that is, national security policy should be off-limits for playing politics. Both parties should respect this, as statesmen in both know that making national security policy is difficult enough and should not be made more so by the bare-knuckle brawls of politics and as both know that to be strong in the world the country needs to be united at home—in principle, purpose, and practice. Unfortunately, as our political system has evolved to become more partisan and as almost every issue has become politicized, so has national security and so has the most important issue within that arena—terrorism and our nation’s response to it. Both parties are to blame.
Benghazi is a poster child for this new dynamic. It is the poster child of the intrusion of politics into national security. It was not the first time, but it was the most significant time that I can remember. This chapter is a detailed look at the politics of the Benghazi issue—from the point of view of someone who found himself in the gunsights of one of the two sides in the debate. I believe Benghazi is an example of what is wrong with American politics—politicians focused on scoring political points rather than working together to advance the interests of our country. I took the time in this book to go through this event largely because I hope it becomes a shining example of how not to respond to a national security crisis.
I should mention to readers that most of the rest of this chapter is detailed—in fact, very detailed. If you are an “inside the Beltway” kind of person and want to know all the facts, read on. Otherwise, jump to the end of this chapter, where I draw some broader lessons that I believe our nation should learn from the Benghazi tragedy.
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While those on the ground in Benghazi during that fateful night did what they do so well—carrying out their mission, protecting each other, watching each other’s backs—the political wheels in Washington started to turn. Benghazi emerged as a major issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, and will probably remain an issue until the 2016 presidential campaign is completed. The essential question in the 2012 debate was whether the Obama administration had deliberately downplayed the terrorism aspect of the attack to keep intact its campaign claim that Obama had made great progress in the war against al Qa‘ida. And an essential question in the 2016 debate will undoubtedly be what responsibility Secretary Clinton should shoulder for what happened that night in Benghazi.
In pursuing the first question, a few in the media and a small group of politicians have mounted an assault on me personally. Their narrative is that I “cooked the books” regarding how CIA thought and wrote about the tragedy in Benghazi—particularly with reference to the now-famous talking points that CIA produced at the request of the House Intelligence Committee—and that I did so in conspiracy with senior White House and State Department officials or that I did so on my own with politics in mind. It has been alleged that I did all this with the intent of assisting in President Obama’s reelection in 2012 and protecting Secretary Clinton. It has also been alleged that I lied about all of this to Congress in order to cover up what I had done.
I thought I had put this narrative to bed before I left government. I testified before Congress three times in closed session—twice before the House Intelligence Committee and once before the Senate Intelligence Committee—and, at the request of the White House, I briefed the media in detail on the unclassified talking points after the White House decided to publicly release internal government e-mails related to the talking points in the spring of 2014.
The issue reemerged in early 2014 after the Senate Intelligence Committee publicly released a report on Benghazi. One media outlet used one reference in the bipartisan portion of the report to argue that I’d known the talking points were wrong when I edited them (the bipartisan Senate report did not say this) and a second reference in the Republicans’ “Additional Views” section of the report to argue that I’d lied to the committee when I answered a specific question about the talking points (the Senate report did not say this). Interestingly, very few news outlets picked up on the story. In fact, beyond the lead reporter working on the story, no other reporter even called me to ask about the allegations.
But then a handful of senators joined the scrum, with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina calling me a liar and Senator John McCain of Arizona questioning why I would violate my oath of office. These public comments got my attention, as I have always respected both senators’ care for and attention to the national security of the United States—and as there was not a single shred of evidence for the allegations being made against me.
And then the big blow. Two of the senators whom I respected the most spoke out against me. Both Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, a leading member of the committee, publicly questioned my integrity. Senator Chambliss said, “It is really strange. I always thought Mike was a straight up guy.”
The allegations made by all of these senators were serious ones. The fundamental tenet of an intelligence officer is to call it like you see it—no matter what your audience wants to hear, no matter the implications for policy, no matter the impact on politics, and no matter what the implications for yourself. Intelligence officers must be totally nonpartisan and objective. I was being accused of violating that fundamental tenet. I was also being accused of lying to Congress—a serious accusation against anyone in the executive branch, because misleading Congress undermines the central pillar of our constitutional democracy—Congress’s role in overseeing executive branch activities.
In response to these allegations, I sat down to write my side of the story. I wrote it as a letter to my children—to explain why what they were hearing in the media and from a handful of senators about me was not true. I wanted them to know the truth. And that is what I am going to do in this chapter. In fact, this chapter began as that letter to my children. Some will not like what they read here, but I am only doing what I was trained to do—put the facts and analysis on the table and let the chips fall where they may.
As I was finishing the letter to my children in late February, I met with Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Rogers and I had seen each other one recent Sunday on the set of CBS’s Face the Nation and decided to get together and catch up.
Rogers is smart, tough, and interested in doing what is right for national security—an interest that was drilled into him when he served our country in a different way, as an FBI agent. His retirement from Congress was a loss for the country, and it speaks volumes about the dysfunction on Capitol Hill when Congress loses it best people.
I asked Chairman Rogers what he thought I should do about the small but vocal chorus about Benghazi and me. “What would you do if I asked you to testify again?” he asked. I responded immediately, “If you want me to testify in the open, before the American public, I would jump at the opportunity.” He said, “I will get back to you,” and two days later we agreed that I would testify on April 2, 2014.
It was not lost on me that I was doing the chairman a favor by testifying (even though he never asked me for the favor). I knew from friends on the Hill that Rogers had been under pressure for months from his leadership to be “tougher on Benghazi.” But Rogers was trying to stick to the facts. He even told me, “Michael, I have looked at Benghazi from every possible angle, looking for something, anything that would demonstrate political influence on the intelligence process, but it’s just not there.” Still, bringing me before his committee to testify in open session would certainly help the chairman with certain members of his caucus.
During my testimony I explained in detail the views of CIA’s analysts about what had happened in Benghazi and how those views had evolved, I explained in detail the process by which the talking points had been produced, including my own role, and I took on directly the allegations that had been made against me. The session lasted for three and a half hours, with many questions being asked, some multiple times. The hearing got testy at times—perhaps in part because Speaker of the House John Boehner before the hearing had told one of the members of the committee to, in short, “Go after Morell”—but when the dust settled there was not a shred of evidence that politics, in any way, had influenced the production of CIA’s classified analysis or the unclassified talking points. Not a shred. No such evidence exists because it simply never happened.
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Those arguing against me believed that by saying there had been a protest, CIA and I—in conspiracy with the White House—were trying to hide the hand of al Qa‘ida in the attack and thereby protect President Obama’s campaign theme that he was tough on terrorism. Here is what actually happened.
The initial intelligence reporting on what had transpired in Benghazi was understandably limited. The analysts’ job was to tell the president and his national security team what they thought based on the information they had at that moment. Intelligence analysts do not have the luxury of waiting for all-knowing clarity. That is just not how the process works.
While I was flying home from Amman (I was on a trip to see our partners in the Middle East and not involved in any way with the initial production of the Benghazi analysis), the analysts were completing their first full report on what had happened, a piece that would be published and shown to senior policy-makers and to Congress on the morning of September 13.
A short item was published in the early-morning hours of September 12, but it was largely a summary of the few facts we had in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. That update contained a crucial error that would come back to haunt us. In a single sentence, the September 12 item characterized the attack as an organized military assault. When this characterization was not included in the piece the next day (the thirteenth), many critics saw the change as evidence that the intelligence community was politicizing the analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The real story behind the September 12 report involves nothing nearly as nefarious as changing analysis for political purposes. What really happened is that the critical sentence was not written by the analysts. It was added after the analysts had finished their work and gone home for the night. It was written by a senior CIA editor with expertise in military matters but no expertise in Libya or what had just happened in Benghazi. This editor added the sentence because she thought the early-morning update on the twelfth needed a bottom line. She never showed the sentence to the analysts; had she done so, they would have removed it. When the analysts came in the next morning, they complained vehemently about the edit. This is how a simple bureaucratic screw-up became fodder for allegations of a political cover-up.
The September 13 piece—the first piece to go beyond a simple factual update—said four things. First, that the assault on the TMF had been a spontaneous event that evolved from a protest outside the TMF. Second, that the protest and subsequent attack had been motivated by what had happened in Cairo earlier in the day (there was no mention in the piece of the YouTube video defaming the Prophet Muhammad). Third, that there was evidence of extremist involvement in the attack, and by “extremists” the analysts absolutely meant terrorist involvement, because extremist and terrorist are synonyms to terrorism analysts. Indeed, the piece reported that people with ties to al Qa‘ida had been involved in the attack. The bottom line here is important: the analysts thought Benghazi was terrorism from the beginning. And whether or not the assault evolved from a protest, it was still very much a terrorist attack. Fourth and finally, the September 13 piece said that there was no evidence of significant planning on the part of those responsible—not days, weeks, or months ahead of time. Hours perhaps—but no longer than that.
The analysts came to these conclusions on their own—with no interference from the White House, the State Department, or the CIA leadership, including me. In fact, all of these judgments were coordinated across the intelligence community, making them IC judgments, not just CIA ones (so if there was a conspiracy, it was a big one, involving multiple analysts and agencies). Contrary to statements by the media and a few senators, I played no role in the judgment that there had been a protest.
It is important to note that the analysts’ view was fully supported by my boss, Director Petraeus. At an NSC principals meeting the day after the attack, Petraeus outlined the analysts’ view that the attack had evolved spontaneously from a protest. Some of the principals, including Defense Secretary Panetta, pushed back, arguing that demonstrators do not show up at a protest with weapons. Petraeus defended the analysts’ work, arguing that there were so many weapons in Libya that the analysts’ judgment was indeed quite plausible.
It is true that, after all the relevant information became available, the protest judgment turned out to be inaccurate. It turned out that there had been no protest immediately outside the TMF—although some in the intelligence community believe that there was a protest nearby, and others believe that the gathering of the attackers outside the TMF just before the assault could have been interpreted by some on the scene as a protest. But the other initial judgments of the analysts have held up over time.
And the analysts did not just make up the judgment about the protest. Two things led them to that conclusion. First, a dozen or so reports—both intelligence reporting and press reporting—said there had been a protest ongoing at the time of the attack. And second, not a single piece of information in the analysts’ possession at the time they wrote the piece that was published on September 13 said there had not been a protest.
CIA’s analysts have been criticized for not reaching out to the officers who were on the ground that night at the TMF and asking them what happened, asking them if there had been a protest. But that is simply not how intelligence analysts operate. They are analysts, not investigators. They wait for information to come to them; they do not go out and gather it. Additionally, the FBI had just opened an investigation into the deaths of the four Americans, and the Bureau would have been extremely concerned if CIA officers had interviewed the witnesses to a crime before the Bureau did.
I do think that the analysts can be criticized—and therefore the Agency and I can be criticized—for not pushing those in the field harder for more and better information faster. For example, it took the FBI a number of days to write and disseminate intelligence reports from its interviews of the eyewitnesses. We should have pushed hard to get those reports much earlier.
On Friday morning, September 14, my boss David Petraeus led a team to Capitol Hill to brief the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI). He had done a similar briefing the day before at the Senate Intelligence Committee. The talking points that had been prepared for him for these two briefings paralleled what the analysts had written on the thirteenth.
I didn’t accompany the director to the HPSCI, and learned what had transpired only late that afternoon. As I was standing in the director’s conference room between two regular but important meetings—the director’s thrice-weekly update on counterterrorism and his weekly update on Syria—Director Petraeus’s chief of staff handed me a copy of talking points on Benghazi.
He said he was concerned that I was not yet aware of an important issue and that I needed to be brought into the loop—that at the morning HPSCI briefing, the ranking member of the committee, Representative C. A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger, had asked for unclassified talking points that he and others might use that coming weekend should they be asked by the media about the attacks in Benghazi. He added that Director Petraeus had agreed to the request and that a draft of the points was already circulating both inside and outside CIA. He said, “These are the talking points as they now stand.”
I learned later that the talking points had been drafted by the head of the Counterterrorism Center’s Office of Terrorism Analysis (D/OTA), who had been with Petraeus on the Hill. She had produced a draft quickly after returning to headquarters. She had coordinated this draft with substantive experts on both the analytic and operational sides of the Agency and, because of the issues associated with speaking publicly about an ongoing FBI investigation, with attorneys from our Office of General Counsel.
After she made changes that were suggested by substantive experts and by the Office of General Counsel, the D/OTA sent the draft of the talking points to CIA’s Office of Congressional Affairs (OCA), which then took the unusual step of holding a coordination session with officers from CIA’s Office of Public Affairs (OPA). No substantive experts were involved in this process.
This was a significant mistake. The OCA and OPA staffers went well beyond their expertise and responsibilities in editing the points. The officers in these two staffs made a number of changes to the draft, including changing attacks to demonstrations in the first sentence of the D/OTA draft, which had originally read “The attacks in Benghazi were spontaneously inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate.…” Participants in the editing session say they do not have a clear recollection as to why they made this change, but some have said that they believed the sentence to be illogical as written: saying that “attacks” evolved into an “assault” does not make sense, because attack and assault are synonymous. In my view, the most important point here is that the concept of an attack/assault still existed in the first sentence even after this change. Again, contrary to some media and Congressional allegations, I did not make this change. In fact, it occurred before I was even aware that the talking points had been requested.
The group of Public Affairs and Congressional Affairs officials also deleted the phrase “with ties to al Qa‘ida.” They say they did so to ensure that they would not compromise the FBI investigation by prematurely attributing responsibility for the attacks to any one person or group. They had reason to be concerned about this. One of the internal CIA e-mails sent that day came from our general counsel, Stephen Preston. It said, “Folks, I know there is a hurry to get this out but we need to hold it long enough to ascertain whether providing it conflicts with express instructions from NSS/DOJ/FBI that, in light of the criminal investigation, we are not to generate statements as to who did this etc., even internally not to mention for public release.” Again, this change took place before I was aware that the talking points had been requested, which, of course, undercuts yet another of the claims about me—that I was the one to remove the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points. I did not do so.
I do believe that the removal of the “with ties to al Qa‘ida” language was a mistake. It did not attribute responsibility to a particular group or particular individuals in a way that would have put the FBI investigation at risk. Those words would have made the talking points better.
The OCA/OPA version was then shown to Director Petraeus, who asked for a significant addition. The director asked that language be added regarding CIA’s assessments starting months earlier regarding the deteriorating security situation in eastern Libya, as well as the warnings sent out just days before the 9/11 anniversary. Having made these changes, the Office of Public Affairs circulated the draft talking points to its counterparts around government—the State Department, NSC, FBI, National Counterterrorism Center, and others. More changes were suggested.
This was another mistake on the part of the OCA and OPA. They had no business taking the lead in coordinating the points with the rest of the government. The substantive experts in the Office of Terrorism Analysis should have been the lead. Those experts did not even realize their points were circulating among the other national security agencies.
One of the most significant changes suggested at this point was proposed by the FBI, which requested that the phrase “We do know Islamic extremists participated in the violent demonstrations” be amended to “there are indications that Islamic extremists participated in the violent demonstrations.” The FBI did not want the talking points to be so definitive in describing the perpetrators, since the investigation was just getting under way. Finally, the State Department wanted to remove an entire sentence that linked the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Sharia to the attack—because, it reasoned, the only unclassified evidence we had that they were involved was an initial public claim by Ansar al-Sharia taking credit for the attack that had been quickly retracted by the group. All our other evidence indicating the group’s involvement was still classified at that time.
All of this occurred before I first learned of and read a draft of the talking points on that Friday afternoon standing in the director’s conference room. As I skimmed the talking points, with the director’s chief of staff standing there, one thing leaped out at me—the inclusion of the prior-warning language. While they were factually accurate, I thought that including those sentences was ill-advised and I made my views clear to the chief of staff. To begin with, the request had been to give members of Congress language they could use to describe what had happened on September 11, 2012. What CIA had done in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the attack was simply not relevant to the request. More important, I saw the language as an attempt by the Agency to thump its chest, to say, “We did our job,” and to deflect any blame from CIA to elsewhere. I thought we would pay a price for this in the relationships that make up the interagency process in Washington. Contrary to what some of the critics have said, I did not take this position to protect the State Department. I did so to protect the Central Intelligence Agency. And I made this decision well before I even knew that the State Department did not like the warning language—in direct contradiction to what several members of the House Intelligence Committee have implied in questioning my integrity in an “Additional Views” section of its report, released in late 2014.
While he never said a word as I vented about the warning language, the chief of staff’s body language suggested to me that he agreed. In fact, I believe that this is why he’d brought the talking points to my attention in the first place. I believe he thought that I would react exactly the way I did.
In addition to protecting the Agency, I also believed it was unfair to the State Department for us to say that we had warned them, without giving the department an opportunity to say what it had or had not done with those warnings. There would be plenty of time for that discussion to take place. Months later it would become clear that the State Department had not taken adequate steps to protect itself in light of our warnings in the months and weeks leading up to the 9/11 anniversary, but during that second week of September CIA had no way to know that, and I believed it would be unfair to suggest it simply to protect ourselves.
Again, a few members of the House Intelligence Committee have argued that I acted outside my purview when I removed the warning language. Since these were “CIA talking points,” such an argument is absurd. But it is particularly silly given that the primary reason I excised the material was to protect the Central Intelligence Agency.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the warning language had been inserted at the suggestion of my boss, David Petraeus. The director’s chief of staff did not tell me that. Had I known it, I would have walked into the director’s office and discussed it with him that evening. Even though I made it clear that I did not like the warning language, I made no changes to the talking points on Friday evening—this is an inaccuracy in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi, which said I did make a change on Friday—as I told my staff I would look at the talking points after they had been fully coordinated in the interagency review process.
The next morning, Saturday, started with my executive assistant’s informing me of two things. First, the State Department, at the working level, had informed us that it objected to the inclusion of the warning language and, because of this, the talking points were in limbo (this was the first time I became aware that the department did not like the talking points). And second, Denis McDonough, Obama’s deputy national security advisor, wanted to discuss the talking points at the deputies meeting scheduled for that morning, which suggested to me that he had been made aware of State’s concern about the warning language. I mentioned all of this to Director Petraeus and his chief of staff on Saturday morning, telling them that I agreed with the State Department’s position and explaining why. Petraeus didn’t argue the point and didn’t tell me he was the one who’d asked for the language to be inserted in the first place.
By the very the end of the deputies meeting, McDonough had not raised the talking point issue, so I did. I told my colleagues that I had some concerns about the talking points and that I knew other agencies did as well. I did not say what my concerns were. I concluded by saying I would edit the talking points myself and share them with the relevant deputies before sending them to the Hill. McDonough simply said, “Thank you, Michael.”
That Saturday was “Family Day” at CIA—an annual event at which the kin of Agency employees are invited to tour our headquarters complex. Because of the nature of intelligence work, the close relatives of CIA officers are rarely allowed to visit Langley. But once per year, on Family Day, employees can bring loved ones in to view exhibits, try on disguises, look at spy gear, take a polygraph test, and tour the director’s and deputy director’s offices. So while hundreds of folks trooped through my office to say hello, I was thinking about the talking points that were waiting for me on my assistant’s desk. I finally sat down with them late that morning. While I did some significant editorial work, my main substantive contribution was to remove the warning language.
I also took out the word “Islamic” in front of “extremists,” an action for which I have also been criticized (for allegedly trying to downplay the role of al Qa‘ida in the attacks). I removed the word “Islamic” for risk mitigation. Demonstrations were occurring in many countries throughout the Muslim world because of the YouTube video defaming the Prophet Muhammad, and the last thing I wanted was to encourage any American to say anything that could make the situation worse. And I thought, incorrectly, that “extremists” would carry the same message as “Islamic extremists”—that this had been a terrorist attack.
When I coordinated the talking points with my deputies colleagues, no significant changes were made. Throughout the entire process, the White House suggested only three changes and all of them were editorial—not a single one involved an analytic judgment—undercutting the conspiracy theory that the White House played a large role in editing the talking points. Finally, before having our Office of Congressional Affairs send the talking points to the Hill, I asked that the substantive experts and Director Petraeus review and sign off on them. All did so.
One of the narratives in the media has been that I “overruled” my boss on the question of whether or not to include the warning language. Believe me, there was no overruling Director Petraeus on anything. I had a conversation with the director about the warning language, in which he did not oppose my decision to remove it, and he had the opportunity at the end of the process to ask that the warning language be added back in. He did not do so.
While I am the first to admit that the talking points could have been better—they could have been more clearly written and they could have been more robust—the analytic judgments in them were fully consistent with what CIA had written for policy-makers on the morning of the thirteenth. This included the language about the assault on the TMF having evolved from a spontaneous protest. In short, what we were allowing HPSCI members to say publicly was exactly what we had said in our classified publications. Also, and importantly, CIA did not know that the talking points would be used publicly the next day by a senior administration official. We did not know that Susan Rice was going to use them on the Sunday-morning news shows.
It was only much later—in the spring of 2014—that it became clear to me how UN ambassador Susan Rice had come to receive our talking points. They were embedded in a much longer set of White House–produced talking points designed to prepare Ambassador Rice to appear on the Sunday shows the next day. Again, nothing in the CIA talking points was markedly different from the finished intelligence that Rice and other senior officials had been seeing over the previous four days.
But there was something different in the White House–produced points sent to Rice’s staff. There was a phrase in the “Goals” section: “To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.” The White House has argued that its talking points were not about Benghazi but about the broader protests taking place in the region. But that explanation does not hold water—because just one bullet point later in the “Goals” section of the White House talking points is the following: “To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice”—and the only place Americans had been harmed during that period was in Benghazi. My reading of the White House talking points is that they were blaming the Benghazi attack on the video—which is not something CIA did in its talking points or in its classified analysis.
The White House view that its talking points were not about Benghazi had an important consequence. That view meant that the White House talking points did not need to be publicly released in the spring of 2013 along with the other materials related to the executive branch’s public narrative on the Benghazi attacks. This put the entire focus on the CIA talking points.
I had another reaction to the White House talking points as well. I have always believed that there should be a bright red line in any White House between the individuals responsible for national security and those responsible for politics. And the line about how Benghazi was not a failure rooted in broader policy seemed to me to be a political statement, not a national security one.
The reaction to what Ambassador Rice said on those Sunday shows became a slow-moving tidal wave that eventually sank the president’s intention to nominate her as secretary of state. A good bit of what she said was consistent with the CIA points, but she also said that the video had led to the protests in Benghazi. Why she said this I do not know. It is a question that only she can answer. Perhaps she was following the White House talking points. Perhaps she had her own views; policy-makers are permitted to do so. In this regard, perhaps she was “connecting the dots.” After all, the analysts did believe that the incident in Cairo had been caused by the video and that at least one of the motivations for the protest in Benghazi had been the “success” of those who had gotten over the embassy fence in Cairo. The harder statement to explain is why Rice said that there was a “substantial security presence” in Benghazi, as that point was not in either the CIA or the White House talking points.
That Saturday morning, a day before Ambassador Rice went on the Sunday shows and before I edited the talking points, another set of conversations took place that some would come to see as evidence of politicization on the part of the Agency and me. One media outlet accused me of knowing that there had not been a protest when I edited the talking points—because the CIA chief of station in Tripoli had written me a note telling me so on the morning that I edited them. Here is the real story.
Each CIA station chief in the Muslim countries affected by the regional violence had been asked to send in daily situation reports. In the situation report, or SITREP, from Tripoli filed on Saturday, September 15, our chief there noted that the attacks in Benghazi “were not/not an escalation of protests.” The word not was repeated for emphasis. That claim immediately jumped out at me—because I recognized that it was inconsistent with what the analysts thought.
What also jumped out at me, however, was that neither of the chief’s two explanations in the e-mail was compelling. He noted that some press reports said there had been no protest—but that was not convincing because there were also press reports saying just the opposite. And he explained that his officers in Benghazi, when they reached the TMF that night, had not seen a protest. That was also not compelling because his officers had arrived at the TMF almost an hour after the attack started, and a protest, if there had been one, could easily have dissipated by then. Finally, I was struck by the fact that on the previous day the chief’s own station had sent in a report from a CIA source saying there had been a protest at the TMF. Given all of this, I immediately requested that the chief send a more detailed note, with “supporting evidence and logic” for his view.
I took another step that morning. During the Deputies Committee meeting, I told my colleagues about our chief of station’s view regarding the protest; I pointed out that it differed from what the analysts thought and that we would work to resolve this difference, and get back to everyone. This was not the action of someone who was trying to hide the chief’s view—a charge made against me by some in the media and some in Congress.
The chief responded quickly to my tasking and his follow-on note arrived early on the morning of Sunday, September 16. I did two things. First, I tasked the analysts to read it and to tell me in writing by five p.m. that same day whether the chief’s argument changed their judgment in any way regarding the protest question. Second, I forwarded the chief’s e-mail to Director Petraeus, telling him, “Sir—The bottom line is that I do not know what to make of this. We need to have the analysts look at this and see if there is anything here that changes their view. I have asked them to do so.” The director responded to my note, saying, “Look forward to what the analysts have to say.”
That same Sunday afternoon, the analysts responded with a memo to both the director and me. They stuck with their original view, although they indicated that they were keeping an open mind on the question.
I handled this situation exactly the way I should have. Despite the claims of some members of Congress and some media commentators, at CIA our operations officers collect intelligence and our analysts produce the assessments. Period. That is the way it has been for the entire history of the organization. Operations officers are the eyes and ears of CIA; analysts are the voice of the organization. Analysts have access to all the available information; our officers in the field do not.
Some have said that I “sided with the analysts” in this debate and that I made a decision that the Agency was going to “go with the analysts’ view rather than our station chief’s view.” At CIA, directors and deputy directors do not tell the analysts what to think and they do not determine the analytic line of the Agency. The analysts do.
While the analysts establish the official line of the Agency, CIA chiefs of station are free—indeed, they are encouraged—to put on record their own view, particularly if it differs from that of the analysts. Our chiefs can, and do quite frequently, disseminate across the intelligence community and within the policy community assessments that capture their own views on a situation (these assessments are called “aardwolfs”—named after an African mammal that has a keen understanding of its environment). Our chief in Tripoli did not produce such an assessment on the protest issue.
Seven days after the CIA talking points were produced—on September 22—the analysts changed their judgment based on new information they had received in the days since their initial assessment, explaining that armed assailants had been present from the incident’s outset and that this suggested it had been an intentional assault and not the escalation of a peaceful protest. The analysts changed their judgment after the Libyan government recovered the security surveillance footage from the TMF’s multiple video cameras, watched it, saw no protest, informed our station of that on September 18, and turned over the footage a few days later.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, Benghazi became a constant stream of controversy. Take for example a media story at the time—and recently replayed in a book—that alleged that CIA senior leaders had ordered their officers at our Benghazi base to “stand down” and not come to the aid of their State Department colleagues. Here is what really happened. Within minutes of the attack, the TMF called our base and asked for immediate assistance. The Agency officers sprang into action, breaking out their weapons, armor, and vehicles. These are the kind of men who instinctively run toward danger rather than from it, to help those in harm’s way. And that is exactly the kind of response I’d expected from them. It took about fifteen minutes for them to assemble their gear and be ready to deploy. I expected a different kind of response from the chief of base, and he delivered on that expectation. He had to ensure that he was not sending his officers needlessly to their deaths. So he tried to round up assistance from local Libyan militias. In a few minutes it became clear that there would be no assistance from the locals. While these calls were being made, the response team was frustrated that it was not moving out. Although the delay was no more than five to eight minutes, I am sure that to those involved it must have seemed like forever. The delay was in no way ordered by anyone further up in the chain of command. It was totally justified under the circumstances, and it was exactly the right decision by our chief on the ground.
The allegation that there had been some intentional delay gained media traction, however, and Director Petraeus asked me to call in members of the media and conduct press backgrounder. During this session, I carefully recounted—minute by minute—the time between the Annex’s getting the first call for help from the TMF and when the CIA team arrived at the ambassador’s compound, about an hour in total, as the team first stopped short of the TMF and tried to enlist the support of a militia group. I then spent another thirty minutes or so answering questions. Many media outlets ran stories the next day outlining what had really happened, and the stand-down allegation was relegated to the fringe press.
I actually did two media backgrounders that day. The second was with a group of a dozen or so national security reporters, while the first was a one-on-one session with David Ignatius from the Washington Post. I have the greatest respect for Ignatius’s commentary on national security. I have always found it fair and insightful, and therefore I wanted Ignatius to have the opportunity to ask as many questions as he wished and I wanted his questions to help prepare me for the larger group of reporters. We also committed a faux pas when our public affairs office failed to invite Andrea Mitchell from NBC News to the group session. They just forgot. Mitchell was angry and so was I. Mitchell in many ways is the dean of national security reporters and to leave her out was huge mistake. I ran into her several weeks later and apologized, which she accepted in good humor. Years earlier, when I was George Tenet’s executive assistant and Mitchell was doing a story on the Agency, she asked me, “Is it true that George dribbles a basketball in the halls of CIA?” I responded, “Andrea, I will tell you the answer to that question if you tell me what your husband [Alan Greenspan, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board] is going to do with interest rates!”
There was also a controversy over how I answered two questions at a closed hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is over these answers that Senators Chambliss and Burr questioned my integrity. The first question, from Senator Burr, was directed to all the witnesses testifying that day: “Who took ‘al Qa‘ida’ out of the talking points?” Because I did not know the answer at the time, I said I did not know. While this was truthful, Senator Burr told me later in a private meeting before I left government that he would have expected me to say, “I do not know, Senator, but you should know that I myself edited the talking points at one stage in the process.” I agreed with Senator Burr, and I told him so at the time. I wish that the “Minority Views” section of the SSCI report on Benghazi had captured this conversation. It did not.
The second question was “Were the talking points provided to the White House for coordination or for awareness?” I said awareness. That was clearly not right, as the White House had suggested changes—albeit editorial ones—that we accepted. The important thing is that my answer to this question was not meant to mislead. I was careless with my words. What I meant to convey in my answer was that there was no way we would have allowed the White House—or anyone else for that matter—to make a substantive change with which CIA did not agree. Was there a lack of clarity in my response to the question? Yes. Should I have been clearer? Yes. Deliberately misleading Congress? No way.
There was additional uproar over how I sat next to DNI Jim Clapper at a closed House Intelligence hearing the very next day and did not speak when Chairman Rogers asked the DNI, “Who did take out… the al Qa‘ida–linked information in the talking points as they were being formed up?” I did not say anything, again because I did not know who had taken out the reference to al Qa‘ida. Later, Representative Peter King would try to reframe the chairman’s question, saying the DNI had been asked, “Who changed the talking points?”—suggesting the question “How could Morell sit there and not answer when he’d made extensive changes to the talking points?” But King was wrong; the question had been much narrower. But again, I would have served the committee better had I followed the DNI’s answer by saying, “I don’t know who took al Qa‘ida out, but you should know that I took some other stuff out.”
The biggest controversy on Benghazi was the one that arose over Ambassador Rice’s use of the talking points in her public statement. She became a lightning rod, and it was clear that her potential nomination for secretary of state was in jeopardy. In an attempt to end the attacks on her, she wanted to face her accusers directly. A meeting with Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Kelly Ayotte was arranged for November 27. I was asked by Denis McDonough, still deputy national security advisor at the time, to accompany Ambassador Rice to the Hill. He made clear that my job was to show that the talking points were fully consistent with the classified analysis produced by the intelligence community. I said yes to the request.
In retrospect, attending the meeting was a mistake. The meeting was inherently political, and by attending, I inserted myself into a political issue. I’m sure that McCain, Graham, and Ayotte saw it that way. I’m sure they saw me as taking sides in a political fight. That is not where an intelligence officer should be. I was politically naïve to have attended, and I have paid a price for it.
The meeting went forward in a secure Senate conference room. The news media had the hallways leading to the room staked out, and photographers snapped photos of me while reporters yelled questions. A friend e-mailed me later that evening, saying that I’d looked as if I were going to my own execution, and urging me to force a smile in such situations. But once we got started there was nothing to smile about.
Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte were on one side of a table, Ambassador Rice and I on the other. McCain and Graham wasted no time in launching an attack against Ambassador Rice. They repeatedly called Rice a “political hack,” and they sometimes would not let her finish a thought before interrupting her with a new question. Senator Ayotte did not contribute to the vitriol and seemed genuinely interested in getting to the truth.
I was a silent witness, until Rice asked me to explain the consistency between the talking points and the classified intelligence analysis. Then it was my turn to be attacked. I had brought along copies of the talking points and the classified analysis from September 13, and I tried to show the senators that every sentence in the talking points had a virtual match in the classified analysis. McCain and Graham turned on me, attacking my analysts’ capabilities, judgment, and integrity, interrupting me mid-sentence as they had Rice. “Why did it take you so long to admit there was no demonstration?” they asked. “Why didn’t you immediately interview the people on the ground?” “Why didn’t you call this a terrorist attack?”
At one point, while being battered with questions, I made an error. One of the senators asked me who had removed the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points—and I, incorrectly, said it had been the FBI. I was thinking about the one change that the FBI had made—when it asked for a change in the talking points so that they would not be too definitive in describing who might have conducted the attack, because the Bureau was just beginning its investigation. I got the two changes mixed up. I made a mistake. In the car on my way back to headquarters, our director of congressional affairs, who had joined me in the meeting, told me that he thought I had made a mistake. I immediately responded, “If I made a mistake, let’s fix it.” Upon returning to CIA headquarters and looking at the facts, I quickly realized that I had misspoken. The decision to remove al Qa‘ida from the draft talking points had been an internal CIA decision—made long before I knew that the talking points existed. I immediately directed our Office of Congressional Affairs to notify the senators’ staff of my mistake. It did so within a couple of hours. In response to my clarification, the senators issued a press release citing my mistake and using it to blast the administration about unanswered questions on Benghazi.
Even worse, months later, Senator Graham publicly insisted that he’d asked me, “Who changed the talking points?” In fact, I was asked, “Who took al Qa‘ida out of the talking points?” By providing an inaccurate account of what he had asked me, Graham left the impression that there was no way I could have made an honest mistake in answering such a broad question. Graham also insisted that it had taken me twenty-four hours to correct the record and that I’d done so only after receiving an angry call from the FBI for saying that it had made all the changes to the talking points. The facts, as with much about what many people have said about Benghazi, could not be more different. The senators had asked a much more specific question that it was indeed possible to make a mistake in answering: “Who took al Qa‘ida out of the talking points?”—a fact that Graham, McCain, and Ayotte’s own press release issued the day of the meeting with Ambassador Rice makes clear.
Here is what that press release stated: “Around 10:00 this morning in a meeting requested by Ambassador Rice, accompanied by acting CIA Director Mike Morell, we asked Mr. Morell who changed the unclassified talking points to remove references to al-Qaeda. In response, Mr. Morell said the FBI removed the references and did so to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation. We were surprised by this revelation and the reasoning behind it. “However, at approximately 4:00 this afternoon, CIA officials contacted us and indicated that Acting Director Morell misspoke in our earlier meeting. The CIA now says that it deleted the al-Qaeda references, not the FBI. They were unable to give a reason as to why.”
In addition, the FBI never called me to complain about the mistake I’d made while briefing the three senators. Moreover, as the timing of their own press release makes clear, I corrected the record within a couple of hours, not twenty-four.
* * *
At the end of the day, I find three significant ironies in the views of those who were attacking CIA and me. The first is the striking difference between the record of CIA in assessing what happened in Benghazi and the record of those making allegations about the executive branch.
The judgments of analysts, operating with only twenty-four hours of information, have held up over time. Only one of their main judgments regarding what had happened in Benghazi that night—that a protest immediately outside the TMF had evolved into the attack—has been shown to be wrong. They still believe their other judgments.
Contrast that with the conclusions at others:
• The US military was ordered to stand down and not come to the aid of the State Department and CIA officers in Benghazi. Wrong. The House Armed Services Committee report on Benghazi, the House Intelligence Committee report on the issue, and the Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi all specifically concluded that this assertion was false.
• The CIA officers in Benghazi were ordered to stand down and not come to the rescue of their comrades at the TMF. Wrong, as I have already explained. Again, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the House Intelligence Committee said there was no evidence to support this allegation.
• There was a conspiracy between CIA and the White House to spin the Benghazi story in a way that would protect the political interests of the president and Secretary Clinton. Again, wrong. There was no such conspiracy, as I have already explained, and there is no evidence to support such a theory. No committee of Congress that has studied Benghazi has come to this conclusion.
The second irony is that some believe the CIA leadership, including me, should have forced the analysts to accept COS Tripoli’s view that there had not been a protest outside the TMF, while at the same time they firmly reject another view of the COS, who wrote that one of the possible motivations for the attack on the TMF had been the YouTube video. These critics cannot have it both ways—accepting from a source, our COS, what fits their narrative and rejecting from the same source what does not.
Finally, the third and most important irony: my critics have alleged that I misled the American people about what happened in Benghazi, while the truth is that they are the ones misleading the public—in almost everything they say about the issue. For example, in multiple commentaries after my open testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, a small number of members of Congress and a small segment of the media got many facts wrong in talking about me and my role in Benghazi. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”
The best example of this is an op-ed written in the days after my testimony by Michael Mukasey, who was an attorney general in the Bush administration, and who was writing in support of my critics. In only a dozen paragraphs, Mukasey, a former US district judge as well as a former US attorney, made seven factual errors. Here are a handful:
• Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Mr. Morell changed ‘terrorist’ to ‘extremist’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As is clear from the e-mails released by the White House in the spring of 2013, no one changed “terrorist” to “extremist.” The original draft of the talking points, written by our most senior terrorism analyst, said “extremist.”
• Mr. Mukasey wrote, “He [meaning me] substituted ‘demonstration’ for ‘attack’ ” in the talking points. No, I did not. As my sworn testimony and the e-mails make clear, this change was made by others at the Agency and before I ever saw the talking points.
• Mr. Mukasey wrote, “Yet the CIA was asked soon after the attack by the White House to help draft ‘talking points,’ which should have tipped him [again meaning me] off that some extramural talking was planned.” Not even close. No one has ever claimed that the White House asked for the talking points. Again, as all the evidence makes clear, the House Intelligence Committee asked Director Petraeus for the talking points.
Even Representative Trey Gowdy, the leader of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, got his facts wrong in the days immediately following his appointment as chairman of the committee. Gowdy, before being elected to Congress, was a career federal and state prosecutor and a very good one. He rightfully prides himself on uncovering the facts and letting them take him to a conclusion. But even he made mistakes.
In media appearances after his appointment as chairman, Gowdy said that I had changed “attacks” to “demonstrations” in the CIA talking points. This is untrue. He said that I had changed “terrorist” to “extremist” in the talking points. This is untrue. And he said that the initial draft of the talking points had included the warnings that CIA had provided to the State Department. Again, this is untrue. Later drafts included the warning language, but not the initial draft and not the final one. Even the Congress’s best and brightest was getting things wrong about Benghazi.
In a press conference after my testimony, Senators McCain and Graham made a similar number of factual errors in attempting to argue that my appearance had raised more questions than it answered. Senator McCain said that the Tripoli station chief had reported “immediately” after the attack that there had been no protest. This report was not immediate; it came over three days after the attacks. The senator also said I had been the acting director at the time of the attacks. Wrong again. I was deputy director. Dave Petraeus was the director. For his part, Senator Graham said that he knew I had not removed the reference to al Qa‘ida from the talking points, “but he [meaning me] did everything else.” False. Many others within and outside CIA made changes to the talking points.
I do not know why my critics have gotten the details so wrong. Perhaps it was poor staff work. Perhaps it was the inaccurate facts repeated over and over again by some in the media. Some of Gowdy’s inaccurate statements, for example, mirrored those of Michael Mukasey. In any case, such inaccuracies have serious consequences because inaccurate facts lead to inaccurate narratives and inaccurate conclusions—which lead to inaccurate understandings on the part of the American people. The administration’s critics were doing exactly what they accused the administration of doing.
* * *
I was acting director for four months of the Benghazi controversy—from early November 2012 until March—and I directed that two studies be undertaken—one on why our analysis had been wrong with regard to the protest and another on how we could have done a better job on the talking points. Both studies found fault inside the Agency, and both studies offered extensive lessons learned. I sent the first study—on the analysis—to Congress in January 2013. But for months the White House would not allow me to send the second study—on the talking points—to the Hill, citing executive privilege. I finally did so without asking—after the White House had released publicly all the e-mails related to the talking points. But that did not happen until a few weeks before I left government. It should have happened much sooner.
In my opinion two broad lessons can be learned from all this. First, CIA should stay out of the talking point business—especially on issues that are being seized upon for political purposes. Those who want to speak publicly on a national security issue should write their own talking points, and then CIA can advise them on what is accurate and unclassified—but holding the pen in the first instance is fraught with peril. CIA officers are not trained to communicate with the American people, and sometimes we do not do it well. The best example is that to us, “extremists” was synonymous with “terrorists.” That was clearly not the case for many in the public.
Second, when an administration finds itself in a mess like this, the best remedy is transparency, as early and as fully as possible. I know that sounds odd coming from someone who has spent his life at a secretive agency—but we would have been much better off if the administration had released the full surveillance video of the attacks of 9/11/12, had released its own talking points on the issue, and had released the chain of e-mails on the evolution of the CIA talking points as soon as Benghazi started to become politically controversial. And it was a mistake on the part of the administration to withhold materials from Congress on any aspect of Benghazi.
* * *
What is most frustrating to me is that all the hubbub over the talking points and politics has meant that much of the public has missed the key question—in the years ahead, how are we going to keep American diplomats as safe as possible overseas? Benghazi will not be the last US diplomatic post to be attacked by terrorists. There will be many other attempts, and some will be successful. We need to do a better job to protecting those who serve our nation overseas.
I see three keys to mitigating this threat. One: At some spots in the world, the United States will need tactical warning, the same kind of tactical warning we have on a battlefield to protect our soldiers. If we’d had that in Benghazi, we almost certainly would have heard the chatter as the extremists were preparing to attack both the TMF and the Annex. Any advance warning—even one just minutes ahead—could have been the difference between life and death. Two: We must provide the best and latest security for Americans serving overseas. They are putting their lives on the line for their country, and they deserve the very best security. That did not happen in the case of Benghazi. And three: We and our allies must oppose and combat terrorists wherever they pose a threat to us—or they will come after us. All three of these responses cost money, of course—a lot of money. The bottom line is that protecting Americans abroad cannot be done on the cheap.
* * *
My final point has to do with the raw nature of America’s current political system. Politicians are so fixated on scoring points and thinking in terms of partisan advantage that they project these same attitudes and behaviors on public servants. They have a hard time understanding that intelligence professionals are trained to be objective, not political. They have a hard time remembering that we serve Democrats and Republicans with the same professionalism and dedication. Accusing CIA of playing politics with talking points comes naturally to those who think and work only in a political environment and who survive by shaping talking points (or thirty-second spots) regardless of the facts.
* * *
April 14, 2014, House Intelligence Committee hearing on Benghazi. Selected excerpt:
THE CHAIRMAN (MR. MIKE ROGERS, CONGRESSMAN FROM MICHIGAN’S EIGHTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT): Mr. Morell.… At any time did you have any verbal conversations with anybody at the White House about what the nature of those talking points were and what they needed to look like?
Mr. Morell: No, sir.
THE CHAIRMAN: At any time did you have any conversation with anybody at the White House, and I mean anybody, that had anything to do with preparing Susan Rice for going out and being the face for America on that September 16?
Mr. Morell: No, sir. In fact, I didn’t even know she was going to be on the Sunday shows.
* * *
April 14, 2014, House Intelligence Committee hearing on Benghazi. Selected quotes:
MS. JAN SCHAKOWSKY, CONGRESSWOMAN FROM ILLINOIS’S NINTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: Thank you, Mr. Morell. I really appreciate your testimony and, given your three decades of service to our nation and always looking to protecting our security and never in a partisan role or spirit, I believe what you are telling us today.
MR. JAMES LANGEVIN, CONGRESSMAN FROM RHODE ISLAND’S SECOND CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: You have always put the country first and, in my opinion, have always done your duty and been very candid and forthcoming in your testimony before the committee whenever you’ve appeared before me when I was there, since I’ve been on this committee. And the fact that you are here, voluntarily here, today reinforces how seriously you believe in the truth.