What follows is an interview by Ryan Goodman with Philip Shenon, author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation. The interview touches on the internal operations and informal powers of the 9/11 commission, and how these dynamics may work with an independent commission to investigate the January 6 attack.

Goodman:

One of the many lessons I drew from The Commission is the potential outsized role of senior staff positions – individuals who received less public scrutiny but who were highly influential in directing the course of the investigation and drafting the final report. Do you think that was potentially unique to the 9/11 Commission due to its particular officeholders and its particular circumstances?

Shenon:

The staff of the 9/11 commission was exceptionally talented. Lots of policy experts and smart lawyers. But when it came to influence, only one staffer had real power – the intelligent and abrasive executive director, Philip Zelikow, the University of Virginia history professor. I’d argue he was more influential than several of the 10 commissioners when it came to writing the final report. At the end of the investigation, many staffers felt their most important and controversial conclusions were not reflected in the report’s findings, especially when it came to demanding accountability in the Bush administration for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11. That was also true about the evidence of possible Saudi government ties to the conspiracy. The choice of an executive director – to run the day-to-day investigation—is vital. I think the 1/6 commission should be on the lookout for someone as smart as Zelikow but more willing to share authority and with fewer conflicts of interest. (Zelikow was close to Condi Rice and had been on the Bush administration’s White House transition team in 2000, with responsibility for national-security issues. That still astonishes me.) Certainly the staffers of the 1/6 commission should have much greater — maybe even guaranteed — access to the 10 commissioners.

Goodman:

One of the comparative advantages of the 9/11 Commission was the ability to obtain information from the government where a congressional Joint Select Committee had previously failed. That included the testimony of the incumbent National Security Advisor Condi Rice and Presidential Daily Briefs. What factors do you think account for the ability to obtain that information and do you think an independent commission that investigates the January 6 attack would have a similar advantage compared to congressional investigations?

Shenon:

The joint House-Senate 9/11 committee (led by the very talented staff director Eleanor Hill and the dogged Senator Bob Graham of Florida) actually got much of the same basic information as the 9/11 commission. But the Congressional report was not so well packaged as the 9/11 commission’s, and the Bush White House refused to release portions of the Congressional findings, so the House-Senate report looked incomplete — and it was, since big blocks of text had to be blacked out. The 9/11 commission got access to Condi Rice, but she was not the least bit forthcoming – and in many ways, I’d argue, misled the investigation about what happened inside the White House in the months before the attacks. The commission, unlike Congress, did get to interview Bush and Cheney privately, which was valuable, although that interview was not recorded. (I certainly think the 1/6 commission should seek interviews, if not depositions or public testimony, with both Trump and Pence, especially since they are both private citizens now.) The 9/11 commission got access to the PDBs, but it turned out that much of the same information was available in other, more widely circulated daily intelligence reports, and those were available to Congress. I think the real advantages that the 9/11 commission had were time (20 months, which was probably still not enough), the perception of greater bipartisanship and high-wattage public hearings. The 1/6 commission will want all of that.