Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years (74 page)

The Bush-Cheney view of FEMA was an almost pure expression of their underlying philosophy. For all their talk of limited government, Bush-Cheney did everything they could to expand the power and reach of the presidency. Often, this took the form of curtailing basic rights long considered the people’s last line of defense against tyranny. The suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in the case of detainees, the abrogation of the Geneva Conventions on the rights of combatants, the illegal wiretapping, all supposedly instituted in response to 9/11, had in fact been discussed long before that attack. Natural disasters were a minor concern. They were thinking mainly about a vehicle for White House command and control in case of enemy attack, without the constitutional restraints that they considered outmoded and counterproductive.

When the planes hit on 9/11, FEMA was nominally in charge. But off the national radar, that event also represented the first-ever implementation of a concept known as “continuity of government,” or COG. According to a
Washington Post
report, President Bush “dispatched a shadow government of about one hundred senior civilian managers to live and work outside Washington, activating for the first time long-standing plans to ensure survival of federal rule after catastrophic attack.”
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The
Post
story, which expanded on material published in Cleveland’s
Plain Dealer
months earlier, asserted that the plan was “deployed ‘on the fly’ in the first hours of turmoil on Sept. 11.”
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Actually, the plan went back to Executive Order 12656, issued by President Reagan in 1988, which stipulated that the Constitution could be suspended for any emergency “that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”
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In his book
Rumsfeld
, journalist Andrew Cockburn quotes a former Pentagon official who claims that during the 1990s, Cheney and Rumsfeld formed “a secret government-in-waiting.”
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Most important for the Bush administration, the Cheney-Rumsfeld group had worked for three decades on preparations to control the American population in the event of a disaster. These included the defacto suspension of the Constitution through a number of steps that became more hotly debated as the Bush administration entered its final months. The administration’s response to terror went far beyond the legal boundaries and reflected a sense that Whatever the president wanted to do, he could do. Cheney backed what author Ron Suskind dubbed the “one percent doctrine,” in which if there is even a 1 percent chance of something coming true, it is important to treat it as a certainty.
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A key part of continuity of government was control of segments of the population during periods of unrest. In a 1984 “readiness exercise” implemented by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, the National Security Council staffer who also coordinated the secret and illegal contra supply effort, FEMA simulated rounding up four hundred thousand “refugees” for detainment. This was cast as preparation for a possible “uncontrolled population movement” from Mexico to the United States. In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $385 million contract to Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root for building “temporary immigration detention centers.”
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The implications are obvious. Yet they penetrated only to the furthest edges of popular culture, where paranoia becomes entertainment. In
The
X-Files
movie of 1998, Agent Fox Mulder is warned of FEMA’s ability to “suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency.” According to a
Washington Post
article written just after the movie’s release, officials at FEMA were not amused by what they claimed was an inaccurate portrayal of their mandate. “The history of this thing is serious,” said FEMA spokesman Morrie Goodman. “We’ve tightened security at all our facilities because of this.”
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It is necessary, of course, for the government to have a contingency plan for worst-case scenarios. But in focusing on an all-out response to a hypothetical aggressor, the “Cheney doctrine” paid little mind to the kinds of emergencies that, based on prior experience and study, were certain to come—such as major hurricanes—and to affect the largest numbers of people.

Preparing the Turkey Shoot

Whatever leading role Joe Allbaugh might have anticipated in this kind of “national security” activity vanished after 9/11, when Congress mandated that FEMA be absorbed into a new Department of Homeland Security. FEMA insiders say that the merger was a principal factor in Allbaugh’s decision to leave—and to turn the agency over to Michael Brown.

Allbaugh had initially hired Brown, an old friend from Oklahoma, as FEMA general counsel, presiding over a legal staff of thirty. Allbaugh included him in all key deliberations, and even named him chief operating officer. Brown’s influence was apparent to all. Within six months of his arrival, Allbaugh was ready to promote him. First, though, he had to oust his current acting deputy director, John Magaw—a former director of the U.S. Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whom Clinton had placed in charge of coordinating domestic-terrorism efforts for FEMA.

“One day, Mr. Allbaugh came in and said, ‘I know you’ve got these other things to do. I’m going to ask Mr. Brown to be deputy,’ ” recalled Magaw, who promptly returned to the subordinate position assigned him by Clinton.
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The timing was remarkable. Just a week before September 11, 2001, Allbaugh replaced a key anti-terrorism official with a crony who had close to zero relevant experience.

Before Brown could take over permanently as deputy director, he had to face the Senate. In June 2002, he presented a résumé that was full of exaggerations about his experience and serious omissions about his financial and legal problems. Nevertheless, as with most presidential nominees, Brown was confirmed without ado.

Later, after the Katrina disaster, Michael Brown’s incompetence, and Bush’s pronouncement that “Brownie” was doing “a heckuva job,” would turn him into a laugh line. By and large, the media treated him that way. We learned of his prior job with the International Arabian Horse Association and that his prime qualification was that he had been Joe Allbaugh’s college roommate.
CNN
even handed him its “Political Turkey of the Year” award.
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Yet as it turned on the hapless Brown, the media got its facts wrong. Brown and Allbaugh were not in fact college roommates, and did not even attend the same university. Instead, Michael Brown’s rise to prominence—and therefore the bumbling of the Katrina disaster—tracked back to the Poppy Bush organization.

The Right Stable

Before he joined FEMA, the pinnacle of Brown’s professional experience was as an inspector of Arabian-horse judges. His highest governmental executive position had been as an assistant to a city manager in Edmond, Oklahoma, decades before. (Brown had told the Senate that he was an “assistant city manager,” responsible for police, fire, and emergency services. In truth, he had been “more like an intern,” the town’s PR liaison told
Time
.)
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After passing the Oklahoma bar in 1982, Brown moved to the oil boomtown of Enid, where he was hired by the law firm of Stephen Jones, the flamboyant, nationally known defense attorney. When the firm broke up, thirty-four staffers found immediate work. Brown was one of two not offered employment by the successor firms. “When I saw Brown up there at FEMA, I had a premonition of bad things to come,” Jones recalled when I visited him at his Enid office.
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In the ensuing years, Brown would be sued for failing to pay his rent for shared law offices—a piece of civil litigation he neglected to mention in the Senate confirmation process, even though he was required to do so. He would also be accused by his sister-in-law of changing her father’s will in a way that benefited Brown and his wife while leaving the sister-in-law a virtual pauper.

Brown found haven in another state, as commissioner of judges and stewards with the International Arabian Horse Association (IAHA), which is based in Colorado. He stayed there for a decade, by far his longest term of employment. His official bio on the FEMA Web site didn’t even mention this job, which suggests how irrelevant it was to the responsibilities that had been entrusted to him. Yet it turns out that Brown had his own reasons to be modest about this portion of his career.

Brown supposedly was hired to root out cronyism and corruption in the horse world. Instead, he devoted the bulk of his energies to an Allbaugh-style crusade against the sport’s most successful trainer. That was a man named David Boggs, who had angered powerful people with connections at the top of the Republican Party. Karl Hart, a Florida lawyer and longtime IAHA member who headed the group’s legal review committee, describes Brown’s efforts against Boggs as an “obsessive vendetta.” According to Hart and others, the trainer was envied and even hated by several extremely rich Arabian-horse owners—who also happened to be very large Republican donors. These included the late Bob Magness, a founder of the TCI cable giant; David Murdock, the Dole food company billionaire; and the late Alec Courtelis, a Florida developer.
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Courtelis had been a good friend of, and top fund-raiser for, Poppy Bush, and Poppy was a frequent guest at Courtelis’s horse farm during his presidency. At an April 1990 fund-raising dinner in Florida, Bush introduced Courtelis thus: “Here’s a man who breeds racehorses for the same reason he works so hard for the party: only one place will do for Alec—first place.”

Indeed. The year after Poppy made these remarks, Michael Brown, whose experience also included work as a lobbyist for an Allbaugh venture called Campground Associates, suddenly emerged as the Inspector Javert of the show horse circuit. A year after Brown was installed at the horse association, Poppy rewarded Allbaugh himself by appointing him to the Arkansas-Oklahoma Arkansas River Compact Commission, a modest but telling acknowledgment of service.

At the IAHA, Brown got special treatment. While other staffers had to report to work each day, Brown, on a full salary, was allowed to work from his sprawling home in Lyons, which was more than an hour’s drive north of IAHA’s headquarters in Denver. His lifestyle was so pleasant and relaxed that some in Lyons assumed him to be semi-retired. James Van Dyke, chef-owner at Lyons’s Gateway Café, said Brown had leisurely lunches there almost daily. “He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands,” Van Dyke told me when I visited the village.
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Brown’s single-minded pursuit of David Boggs contrasted sharply with a pronounced reluctance to pursue another case that seemed to have considerable merit—one involving Murdock’s trainer, who was accused of filing false papers for a show horse. Boggs initiated a battery of lawsuits against both the association and Brown, the financial toll of which contributed to the association’s near bankruptcy and eventual merger with another group.

Ironically, it would be the GOP titan Murdock himself who would eventually sink Brown, in his zeal to help the horse inspector’s cause. One day, Murdock mentioned to Hart that he’d written Brown a fifty-thousand-dollar personal check at Brown’s request, ostensibly for a legal-defense fund to deal with the Boggs suits. Hart was surprised, since the association was paying Brown’s legal bills already. Hart took Brown aside at an IAHA board meeting and told him what he knew. Brown panicked. “He grabbed me, literally, and pushed me into a closet,” said Hart. “He said, ‘Is there any way you and I can work this out?’ ”

There wasn’t, and Brown was terminated immediately.

But only a few months later, in February 2001, he resurfaced—first as general counsel and ultimately director at FEMA. While most folks who knew Brown over the years were startled, the IAHA brass was not. As Hart recalled, “Brown had been saying for six months or more that, if Bush was elected, he was going to have a high position in Washington because he was very close to someone who was very active in Bush’s campaign.”

Like Allbaugh, Brown appeared to have well-connected angels looking after him. His bumpy career was punctuated by timely assists from his self-described “longtime friend and family attorney,” Andrew Lester. An Andover prep-school mate of George W.’s brother Marvin, and onetime employee in the Washington office of the Bush-family-connected Dresser Industries, Lester pops up at crucial points in Brown’s life. When Brown lost his job with the Jones law firm, Lester brought him in for a brief stint as his law partner. When horse-association problems engulfed Brown, Lester rushed to his defense. And on September 27, 2005, at a House Select Committee hearing investigating the Katrina blunders, there was the pin-striped Lester conspicuously whispering legal advice in Brown’s ear.

Lester, a regional director for the Federalist Society, an association of rightward lawyers, represented the Oklahoma Republican Party in a 2002 reapportionment battle. He was also short-listed for a federal judgeship under George W. Bush. Over lunch at an Oklahoma City steak house, Lester told me that his support for Brown arises merely from their friendship. He continued to maintain, even in the wake of the Katrina debacle, that Brown was eminently qualified for FEMA.
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