T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-7-02 Jim Angle-Fox News Interview of Rice 005

8/14/2019 T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-7-02 Jim Angle-Fox News Interview of Rice 005

1/14

T H E WHITE H O U S E

Off ice of the Press Secretary RECEIVED

Internal Transcript August 7, 20 02 JUN ,, 7 2 0 0 3

.Terrorist AttacksNational Commission on

INTERVIEW OF NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR CONDOLEEZZA RI(

BY JIM ANGLE OF FOX NEWS

Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building

9:30 A.M. EDT

Q Condi, thanks for joining us.

DR. RICE: It's nice to be with you.

Q Let me ask you f i r s t , t e l l me about the moment thatyo u first learn e e l that America wa s under attack an d what yourthoughts were.

DR. RICE: It was one of those normal Tuesday mornings, and_

I was standing at my desk getting ready for my- st aff meetingdownstairs with my senior people. And my executive assistantwalked in and said tha t a plane had hit the World Trade Center.And immediately, my mind went to perhaps a twin-engine plane of

some kind. And I sa id , wellr t h a t ' s a terrible accident. And I

called the President, who was at an education event in Florida,and said, Mr. President, a plane has hit the World Trade Center.And he said, t h a t ' s strange -- a strange accident. And I saidtha t I would call him back when we had more information.

And so I went downstairs for my senior s t a f f meeting, and Iwas going around the room asking people what was going on in

their area of responsibility. I got about three people in, anda note was handed to me -- said a second plane had hit theWorld Trade Center. And I thought, my God, his is a terroristattack.

And I got up and said, I have to go. And I got up and wentinto the Situation Room proper, and tried t o find th e NationalSecurity Council principals. My first thought was we would come

tothe White House, we would have had a meeting; in retrospect,that would have been the worst possible thing to do. And Icouldn't locate Don Rumsfeld. And a litt le while later, I

447


2/14

realized the plan e had hit the Pentagon. So it was qui te a fewmoments.

Q Now, that obviously tested us as a natio n. It alsotested as individuals . How tough was i t for you, what thoughtswent through your mind, personally, and to what extent did youfind yourself relying on your fa i th in that moment?

DR. RICE: In that moment, I was relying both on fai th,which comes immediately to me, to just ask for God's guidanceand protec t ion , is an almost au toma tic response for the daughterof a Presbyterian minister and granddaughter of a Presbyter ianminister. And so, there was that l i t t le moment of prayer. An dthen, I went about using my longt ime t raining, real ly, assomebody who had planned for an exercise for, of all thin gs,nuclear war, to try to think about the things that we had to doto respond to what had happened to us.

Q You had experiences with violence as a childBirmingham. Did this trigger any m em o r ies - f ro m that?

DR. RICE: It didn't at that moment. At that moment , I wassimply trying to communicate with the President and to get downto the bunker, because apparently a plane was h eaded for theWhit e House. And then there was just a great deal to do. An din fact , the Middle East violence has (interruption in taping)

Q Now, at what point_did you move to the presidentialemergency operat ions center, which is "called "the b u n k e r " , Igather? The Vice President has ta lke d about being sor t ofpicked up by the belt a n d - t a k e n down there by the SecretService. I assume they were somewhat more gent le wit h you, butequally f i rm?

DR. RICE: (Laughter.) They were qui te fir m. They saidyo u have to go to the bunker; the Vice President is alreadythere. I d id stop to make a phone cal l to the Pr es i den t , whohad now ar r ived at the airport in Florida and was t ry ing to comeback. And one of the defense off i c ia l s in the Si tua t ion Roomwhispered to me, he can't come back here.

And I real ized immediately that was r igh t , and I said tohim, Mr. President , you can't come back here, Wa shington ijsunder at tac k. And I then headed for the bunker, ag ain s toppingfor just a second to cal l my aun t an d uncle in Alabama an d say,

448


3/14

le t everybody know t h a t I 'm f i n e , because I knew tha t they wouldbe terribly worried; we're a very close-knit family.

When I got to the bunker, the Vice President was there. Heta lked to the President again, who he told the Presidentyo u c a n ' t come back here. I suspect the President was trying tof ind a way to get back, because he thought i t important to t > e

here. And then , we started the hard work of trying to deal withthe consequences of what we had experienced.

Q What was the first order of business?

DR. RICE: The first order of business for me was to jjetthe State Department to get a cable out to posts to say that theUnited States government was still functioning. The fear ofde c a p i t a t i on that, somehow, they've managed to knock out thecommand authority of the United States is something that otherswould worry about, and so that was the first thing that we did.And then we worried about variousorders that had to be given.Th e President- had to, of course, approve the order for Americanf i g h t e r jets to engage a ny civilian aircraft that was notresponding properly.

We had to deal with raising the defense condition ofAmerican forces; there fore , I talked to President Putin inRuss ia to le t h im know that we were raising the defensec o n d i t i o n , and he was trying to call a t the same time to saytha t he knew we were raising the defense condition -- the

Russians, of course, have their ways of seeing those thingsand to le t us know t h a t he was going to stand down Russianm i l i t a r y exercises so t h a t there would be no potential conflict.

Q That call meant a lot, d idn ' t i t ?

DR . RICE: The call meant a lot. It meant a lots u b s t a n t i v e l y, because i t meant that the United States a ndRuss ia , longtime enemies of the Soviet Union and the UnitedS ta t e s , ha d moved to a fundamentally different phase. As an o ldSovie t specialist, I would have expected the o ld spiral ofa l e r t ; we alert our forces, they alert theirs, and pretty sooneverybody i s a t a very high alert l e v e l .

Instead, here, you had the Russians saying, we know what'shappened to you, we know t h a t _ we have a common security interestin helping you to deal with it, and so we're standing down ourforces. I t was both substantively important, and to me i t was aki t emotional to hear h im say t h a t .

449


4/14

Q And never a concern that the Russians would try totake advantage?

DR. RICE: That ' s the remarkable thing -- never a concernthat the Russians would try to take advantage. In fact, quitethe opposite, knowing that they were~going to t ry to doeverything they could to help us .

Q Now, one of the interesting things you mentioned wasthe concern fo r getting the planes out of the skies, and ifthere were any other airliners out there that had been hijackedbut had not yet reached their targets. You had to face thehorrible possibility tha t you might have to shoot down acivi l ian airliner to stop the hijackers.

DR. RICE: That's right. The terrible truth was that- wedid not know how many hijacked airlines there were. And therewere many erroneous reports of plane's tha t were not respondingproperly. And then we learned that there was a plane that wasnot responding properly! and suddenly it disappeared into theground in Pennsylvania . And t h a t , of course, wa s Flight 93.And the concern at tha t moment - - and I know I fel t it veryintensely and I 'm sure the Vice President did, too -- was, hadwe, in fac t , -shot it down. And it was hard fo r several minutesto get confirmation of what had happened.

A lot was going on at the Pentagon, of course, and I canremember saying repeatedly , did -somebody shoot that plane down?If an American f igh te r engaged tha t aircraft, we should know if

an American f ighter engaged that aircraft.

Fina l ly, when the word came that no American fighter hadreported engagement w i th an aircraft, we learned that, in fact

the passengers, la te r on learned that the passengers haddriven it into the ground rather than le t i t hi t anotherbui ld ing in Washington.

Q That was an amazing sequence of decisions; one, toclear American skies of all planes

DR. RICE: Yes.

Q - - and, two, to contemplate the possibility ofhav ing to shoot one down. How were those decisions made?

450


5/14

I

DR . RICE: The decision to ground all ci vil ian aircraft hadalready been made by the t im e that I got to the bunker and, Ithink, I coordinat ion with the Vic e President and Norm Mineta ,because almost by standard operat ing procedures to something ofthis magnitude wi th ai rplanes to get them al l down, it was anincredible feat. And one of the really unsung heroes of thiswould be the myriad air contr ollers around the country, andespecially in Canada and in Mexico that managed to help us getplanes to runways that could take their weig ht. It was anenormous management task.

There were times when it seemed to be breaking down. Normwas on_the telephone, and he would say, United Flight 736 isdown. And then, he would say, wait a minute, that 's 637. So itwas hard to manage. But when you think about grounding theentire civilian air f leet at that moment, i t was really quiteremarkable.

Q" ~ The President was eager to return.

DR. RICE: Yes.

Q But the think ing here was that Washington was not yetsafe.

DR. RICE: The thinking was that Washington was not justnot safe, but probably still under at t ack . And the President ,to bring the President back into the Wh ite House where he wouldbe -eo-located wi t h th e Vice President , made real ly no sense.But by the t ime that th e President ha d got ten to O f f u t t Air

Force Base, nobody was going to tell the President that hecouldn't come back. The first thing that he said when he got onthe te leconference wit h the -- the video conference with theNational Security Counci l p r in cip als was, I' m coming backtonight. And the way he said it, it was clear that there wasn'tmuch room for argument. (Laughter.)

Q This was not the begin ning of a discu ssion .

DR. RICE: This was not the beginning of a discus sion.

Q Now, when he return ed, obviously one of the concernsof what you ment ioned ear l ier, decapi ta t ion , I gather there wasa concern that you expressed both to the world and to thecountry that we are in cont ro l , the Whit e House is s t i l loperating, the government is functioning. But there's a tricky

451


6/14

balancing act there with a lso expressing the anguish and angerat what ha d happened to us.

DR. RICE: Yes. And the President was very a t t e n t i v e towhat he needed to do at that par t i cu la r moment for the Amer icanpeople. His f i rs t s tatement when he f i rs t landed was just tosay, we know tha t this terr ible thing has happened, we'redeal ing with the consequences, he would say something about thevict ims, but when he talked to us, par t i cu la r ly to Karen Hughesand to me about what he wanted to say that nig ht , he said i tneeded to be reassuring, he didn ' t real ly want to get into along discussion of what we needed to do. But he did want tomake clear that we were going to respond, and we were going torespond forcefully.

The most important policy decision that was made that nightwas to include th e l ine that said, i t ' s the terror is ts , but i t ' salso those who harbor them. Because that mad e clear tha t theterror is t act ing alone was -- i t was not a focus of th i supcoming reta l iat i on, but rather we were" going to go af te rsanctuary. An d that became later -- we had coined i t The BushDoctrine. I t was an extremely important decision made in f a i r l yrapid t ime.

Q It was a fundamenta l shif t in broadening of U.S.pol icy.

DR . RICE: Th e administ rat ion ha d been working forsometime, since coming to off-ice, on how to be more aggress iveagainst Al Qaeda. And the problem that had always been therewa s that they were operat ing out of a sanctuary in A f g h a n i s t a n .

This was not just some lone wolf terror is t group runningfrom p l ace to p l ace , p l o t t i ng and p l ann i ng , t hey had theadvantages of a country. They had a communica t ions ne twork ,they had t raining camps, they ha d ways to run f i n a n c i a lopera t ions . T hey had h i j acked the country in Afgh an is ta n , justas sure as they had hi jacked airplanes. They had h i jacked th i scountry and the Tal iban was as gui l t y as Al Qaeda. And so, weha d spent a lot of t ime th inking about how to do th is . And soi t was no accident that within hours of th i s t e r r ib le a t t a c k , we

were able to make that s tat emen t .

Q Now, the President seemed to be qui t e cer ta in that hewanted to respond in a f a i r l y vigorous way. You've t a lked aboutthe fundamenta l change in pol icy. But if I remember c or rec t ly ,the President said he wanted a more -- a br oade r m i l i t a r y

452


7/14


8/14

But w h a t is clear is t h a t on order t o d e f ea t t h e m , t oel iminate them, you aren ' t g o i n g to be able to do it from theair, and w i t h c ru i se miss i l e s ; you had to h a v e a much moreaggressive policy. And a f t e r 9 / 11 , we had the opportuni ty t oactual ly use the Amer ican mi l i t a ry. And , by the way, to u sethem in a ra th er novel way. I a l so don ' t th ink th ere were planson the shelf to use our 21st century air power wi th 19 th -cen tu rymen on horses. (Laughter.) So tha t was another case ofadaptable plann ing .

Q Now, one of the in t e re s t ing th ings abou t t h i s , t oo , i sthat we were coming at t h i s w i t h no real precedent. There wasnothing to guide us in this area. The President obviouslyneeded t ime, and the Pentagon needed t ime to plan i t s response.While tha t was happening, the President a lso had to t ry toreassure the country- and get i t to go on wi th it s l ife .

DR. RICE: Th e President had so many mult iple roles dur ingthat per iod of t ime, and i t ' s qui te remarkable t ha t he playedthem all wi-th an equal ski l l . There was -- to reassure thecountry as a whole , which he did on the igh~t of the address tothe na t i on , bu t mos t e ffec t ive ly a t t he Na t iona l Prayer Servicewhere you could fee l the country begin to come back to i t se l f ,to recognize t h a t we had to have re so lve t o d ea l w i t h t h i sproblem.

He was , o f course, comfor t ing the fami l i e s . I was w i th h imou t a t t h e Pentagon af ter severa l days when there was a l i t t l eceremony ou t there, and a fami ly was in the h a l l wa y ,_and to seehim be" w i t h fami l i e s of the v i c t i m s and the way t h a t he handledhimself in New Yo r k , and al l the t i me worrying abou t ge t t i n g t hebanking system and th e f inanci a l system back up and running andge t t ing t he a i r l i nes back up and runn ing , he a c t u a l l y hadmeet ings in wh i c h we would s t a r t t he m e et i n g w i t h t he economicteam and w i t h t he av i a t io n people , t ry ing t o f igure ou t whencould we reopen wha t a i rpor t s , and then they would leave theroom and we would s t a r t t a lk in g abou t w ha t were we go ing to doabout al Qaeda and Af g h a n i s t a n a b r o a d. So it -- rea l ly, justjuggling a lo t of di ffe ren t ro le s .

Q How much did our exper iences wi th the hosta ges in I ran

back in the l a t e '70s and 1980 color the a d m i n i s t r a t i o n ' sth inking about the need not to le t the n a t i o n be he ld hos t age ifonly to its fears? _

DR. RICE: Yes. The Presiden t , from the very beginning ofthe a d m i n i s t r a t i o n , al wa ys b e li e ve d t ha t even under t he most

454


9/14


10/14

DR. RICE: We l l , i t certainly validated everything thatthose of us who knew him and the American people wh o had, a f t e ra l l , elected him, saw in him, which is this abili ty to becomposed under pressure, to be really tough and resilient, to bevery focused, to go to the essence of things, not to have a lotof extraneous conversation.

Whenyou're trying to juggle as many roles as he was

juggling during this period of time, the only way to do it is

with a sense of what has priority. And he's set priorities forth e country, he's set priorities for his team, and he thenreally worked with that team to get those priorities delivered.But _there wasn't a lot of trying to sort what should we dofirst , what should we do -- he was always~very clear aboutthose priorities from the very beginning.

Q Now, you knew fairly quickly that it was likely to beal Qaeda because you had been working for months on a new policyregarding al Qaeda.

DR. RICE: Ri g h t . We knew that it was likely to be alQaeda. I remember saying George Tenet saying it looks l ike ,smells l ike, quacks like al Qaeda, bu t we " - i l ge t back to youwith a more -- with a fuller analysis. But there wasn't toomuch doubt. I t wa-s th e kind of big, spectacular, simultaneous,like the two bombings of the embassies - - ha d been nearsimultaneous. So, yes, I think we knew it was al Qaeda.

We had been working very hard on some ideasr many of whichhad been around since '98 or '99, that we wanted to pursue tosee if we could more energetically destroy this group. It washard , because not only did you have the problem of theAfghan i s t an sanctuary, but if you look at the neighborhood inwhich Afghanistan sits , they h ad relations with Pakistan. Well,relat ions with Pakistan were at an incredible low. Our use ofPakistan 's nonproliferation policies toward Pakistan had led usto cut off aid and assistance to Pakistan, but you need Pakistanunder these circumstances.

W e r ea l ly d idn ' t have a developed relationship withUzbekistan. Afghanistan sits on the border with Iran. That's

obviously a complicated situation. So it was not easy, but wehad been working for a while to see if we could have a morecomprehensive and robust strategy.

Q So you're looking at trying to do somethingunprecedented in a rather unfriendly neighborhood.

456


11/14

DR. RICE: Unfriendly neighborhood at the time. There werepeople who said the Russians will never countenance an Americanpresence in Central Asia, under any circumstances. Well , AfterSeptember l l th , an d because of the strong relationship that th ePresident had built with President Putin, the Russians not onlycountenanced that presence, they encouraged us to have that

presence, helping us with s tates in the region.

And so, there were a lo t of pieces that fell into placeafter September llth, but they were well in train beforeSeptember ll th, largely in these relationships that we werebeginning to buil d so that we could draw on them.

Q Now, only a couple of months before September l l th , alQaeda atte mpte d, or planned, to assassinate the President andother leaders at a G8 meeting in Italy.

DR. RICE: We knew that there was some kind of plot for theG8 Genoa meeti ng. It was in Genoa in mid-July. And there was alo t of chat ter. And almost all of the chatter was about thingsthat mi ght happen abroad. But the most specific was about somekind of plot against the G8 leaders in Genoa. And we stillbelieve that, together with the I tal ians, we either disrupted i tor made it so d i f f i c u l t for the security -- within th esecurity environment that they couldn ' t pull it off .

Q Now, was one of the possib i l i t ies in that case flyingan airplane loaded wirth fuel into th e leaders?

DR. RICE: We unders tand that this has come up . But thewa y that those things come up is not usually terribly specific.Everyone knew that there were other incidences in which al Qaedaa ff i l i a t ed people, had ta lked about f lyin g an airplane into thisor in to tha t . Us ing th e airplane i t se l f as a miss i l e was afairly novel concept.

Q There must have been a lo t of what- i fs that have gonethrough your mind since then. What if we had done this, what ifwe had done tha t . What are the ones that stick out in yourmind?

DR. RICE: We ll , you can ' t help but wonder -- youwouldn' t be human when not to sit and thin k could have we havedone this or could we have done something else. I reallybel ieve that we did what we could. And what was appropriate andpossible at the time . And I believe that that was true for

457


12/14

administrat ions that had been trying to deal with terrorismbefore that .

The problem of al Qaeda wa s that it, in an insidious way,wa s able to embed i tse lf into Afgha nista n and into a lot ofother countries. We knew that . It was going to take a whi le toge t them out. In fact, th e Clinton administrat ion ha d been

working on a kind of three- to five-year time frame in whichthey would try to roll back al Qaeda. We thought "that over acouple of years or so, you could actually el iminate al Qaeda.But this was not something that was going to take a mat ter ofdays. Once something is that embedded, it takes digging it out.

The point that we really knew fa r less about than I wish wehad is, we knew not as much about al Qaeda inside America. Andthere are a lot of reason for that, that go to our culture andour history and our openness, and our inst i tut ions. We haven'thad to think about an existent ia l threa t to the United Sta tes

since 1812, and so i t 's not surprising that we woutd" have hadborders and immigrat ion and customs spread across thebureaucracy, that we would never have allowed relations betweenthe FBI and the CIA to develop in the way that we're nowallowing them to develop. These were choices that America'smade in the context of no threa t to the American homeland.

Q And we learned some things rathe r quick ly. We had thenames of some terrorists on watch l ists at the border, but wehad not shared those with the ai r l ines. An d three of thehijackers flew under the i r_own names. Within a day or two, we

were sharing those names with the a i r l i nes .

DR. RICE: We learned that our own vulnerabil i ty came fromth e openness of our system. And the challenge is to keep th eopenness of the system and the generosi ty to people coming fromth e outside , whi le taking reasonable measures to share .intelligence, to make sure that there is coordination among allof the governments, th e reason that a Homeland Securi tydepartment that can be the counterpar t , in some sense, of theDefense Department, there's a reason that President Truman, whenwe decided to take on -- America decided to take on apermanent role in defending the worl d, tha t we had to have theNational Security Act of 1947 that created ne w inst i tut ions.There's a reason that af ter 9/11 , wi th the exposedvulnerabilit ies of the American homeland tha t we need th ereorganization of the agencies into a Department of HomelandSecurity.

458


13/14


14/14

T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-7-02 Jim Angle-Fox News Interview of Rice 005

Documents

Transcript of T3 B11 EOP Produced Documents Vol III Fdr- 8-7-02 Jim Angle-Fox News Interview of Rice 005