Dm B8 Team 5 Fdr- 7-23-04 Memo From Eldridge-kephart-hempel-moore Re Team 5 Staff Report 472

To:

Chris Kojm

From:

Tom Eldridge, Janice Kephart, Walter Hempel, Kelly Moore

Date:

July 23, 2004

Re:

Publication of a staff report on border security by the report's authors: Tom Eldridge, Janice Kephart, Walter Hempel and Kelly Moore. We have three issues we need your help to resolve at our meeting on Monday. First is whether the staff report will be published. Second is reaching agreement about the proper attribution for this work; and third is what should be the editing process for the staff report. First, the staff report is of publication quality, and will provide new and very valuable scholarship on our topic area. It will bolster the Commission Report and provide crucial facts supporting its recommendations. While the report is the definitive history of 9/11, our staff report is the definitive history of terrorist travel pre-9/11, and the post-9/11 border security actions. There is a large audience of government officials, experts in the private sector, and ordinary citizens who will read and use our supplemental staff report on "immigration, non-immigrant visas and border control." Second, is the question of who is responsible for the work contained in this staff report. The staff report we have given you is overwhelmingly the work of the four of us. The four of us have: o developed a timeline and internal deadlines for the production of the report; o revised the outline to include a Preface, an Introduction, a Chronology of the hijacker's entries, and the Saudi flights and removed a section on Lost Opportunities; o drafted the entire report, which is about 235 pages plus graphics; o edited the entire report; o revised the draft and re-edited (several times); o scrubbed the document footnotes; o added graphics. We accomplished this work over the past several months with no guidance or input from our team leader. During this time, our team leader drafted 4.5 pages, and did not respond to our repeated requests to edit these 4.5 pages, requests we made in May and again in June. Those pages are, therefore, not in the current draft you have. After she reviewed the first couple of draft chapters our team leader disengaged from the process completely to devote herself entirely to Commission Report recommendations. (Of course, the four us were able to produce material for the Commission Report and continue to draft the staff report.) For these reasons, it would be inappropriate and unprofessional to attribute our work to her. Third is the question of the editing process. We feel very strongly that it should move forward with editorial control vested in the Front Office working with the authors of the staff report. As we stated in our earlier email, this is not an easy topic to discuss, but this problem must be addressed by the Front Office in a constructive way. The four authors of the staff report are

highly productive. Our research skills are strong. We write well. We meet deadlines. We are objective. Unfortunately, despite these skills and abilities, for several months Team 5 has not operated as a team. We know we should have come to you as a group sooner, but we kept trying to work with our team leader. We even tried an off-site retreat. Unfortunately, we have found that working with our team leader is so counterproductive that we have no alternative but to seek your intervention. There are several reasons for this rupture that we can spell out for you in greater detail if you feel it would be useful to you. In general, they concern the unwillingness and/or inability of our team leader to seek consensus among our team, show proper respect for the views of other team members, provide the team with information about Commission deadlines and work requirements, produce work to us and to others in a timely fashion, and separate personal political views from Commission work. We have many examples we can provide on these topics, but the reality is that she has completely lost the trust and faith of her team, and this loss is irreversible. Please understand that our concerns here are professional and profound, not personal. We lay this out to look forward, not back. We believe the report we have produced should be published, but that will not be possible if our team leader is given editorial control over our work. We need a new approach with a change in responsibilities, one that recognizes appropriately the contribution of each team member, and moves us forward efficiently toward publishing. We are flexible as to the process that would allow us to publish our work, so long as the above principles are respected. What we cannot accept is a system where our team leader—who has utterly failed to show leadership to this point—exercises editorial control over work she did not participate in drafting.

To:

Chris Kojm

From:

Tom Eldridge, Janice Kephart, Walter Hempel, Kelly Moore

Date:

July 23, 2004

Re:

Publication of a staff report on border security by the report's authors: Tom Eldridge, Janice Kephart, Walter Hempel and Kelly Moore. We have three issues we need your help to resolve at our meeting on Monday. First is whether the staff report will be published. Second is reaching agreement about the proper attribution for this work; and third is what should be the editing process for the staff report. First, the staff report is of publication quality, and will provide new and very valuable scholarship on our topic area. It will bolster the Commission Report and provide crucial facts supporting its recommendations. While the report is the definitive history of 9/11, our staff report is the definitive history of terrorist travel pre-9/11, and the post-9/11 border security actions. There is a large audience of government officials, experts in the private sector, and ordinary citizens who will read and use our supplemental staff report on "immigration, non-immigrant visas and border control." Second, is the question of who is responsible for the work contained in this staff report. The staff report we have given you is overwhelmingly the work of the four of us. The four of us have: o developed a timeline and internal deadlines for the production of the report; o revised the outline to include a Preface, an Introduction, a Chronology of the hijacker's entries, and the Saudi flights and removed a section on Lost Opportunities; o drafted the entire report, which is about 235 pages plus graphics; o edited the entire report; o revised the draft and re-edited (several times); o scrubbed the document footnotes; o added graphics. We accomplished this work over the past several months with no guidance or input from our team leader. During this time, our team leader drafted 4.5 pages, and did not respond to our repeated requests to edit these 4.5 pages, requests we made in May and again in June. Those pages are, therefore, not in the current draft you have. After she reviewed the first couple of draft chapters our team leader disengaged from the process completely to devote herself entirely to Commission Report recommendations. (Of course, the four us were able to produce material for the Commission Report and continue to draft the staff report.) For these reasons, it would be inappropriate and unprofessional to attribute our work to her. Third is the question of the editing process. We feel very strongly that it should move forward with editorial control vested in the Front Office working with the authors of the staff report. As we stated in our earlier email, this is not an easy topic to discuss, but this problem must be addressed by the Front Office in a constructive way. The four authors of the staff report are

highly productive. Our research skills are strong. We write well. We meet deadlines. We are objective. Unfortunately, despite these skills and abilities, for several months Team 5 has not operated as a team. We know we should have come to you as a group sooner, but we kept trying to work with our team leader. We even tried an off-site retreat. Unfortunately, we have found that working with our team leader is so counterproductive that we have no alternative but to seek your intervention. There are several reasons for this rupture that we can spell out for you in greater detail if you feel it would be useful to you. In general, they concern the unwillingness and/or inability of our team leader to seek consensus among our team, show proper respect for the views of other team members, provide the team with information about Commission deadlines and work requirements, produce work to us and to others in a timely fashion, and separate personal political views from Commission work. We have many examples we can provide on these topics, but the reality is that she has completely lost the trust and faith of her team, and this loss is irreversible. Please understand that our concerns here are professional and profound, not personal. We lay this out to look forward, not back. We believe the report we have produced should be published, but that will not be possible if our team leader is given editorial control over our work. We need a new approach with a change in responsibilities, one that recognizes appropriately the contribution of each team member, and moves us forward efficiently toward publishing. We are flexible as to the process that would allow us to publish our work, so long as the above principles are respected. What we cannot accept is a system where our team leader—who has utterly failed to show leadership to this point—exercises editorial control over work she did not participate in drafting.