Seeing Red
A top counterterrorism veteran puts the Bush White House on the defensive over 9/11 and the decision to invade Iraq
There was one moment during the 9/11 hearings last week when everything seemed to stop--the partisan bickering, the blame game, even the media spectacle. All eyes were on Richard Clarke, the hard-charging former White House counterterrorism czar and the man who sparked a frenzy with his shrewdly timed new book. His opening words, directed to the families of the victims of 9/11 sitting behind him, sent chills throughout the room. "Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you," Clarke intoned. "We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."
The man whom one 9/11 commissioner had already called "the elephant in the room" managed to upstage himself in one of the most riveting episodes of political theater in recent years. His new book about the war on terror, Against All Enemies, was already drawing both praise and flak for its biting accusations that President Bush's efforts against terrorism, and the invasion of Iraq in particular, have "left us less secure." Now, here was the ultimate insider, a dedicated civil servant who worked for four different presidents and spent eight years helping the White House fight terrorism, issuing a full mea culpa, then cataloging the deficiencies he saw in two presidents--Bill Clinton and George W. Bush--and the bureaucracies they commanded. Through it all, Clarke remained cogent and collected, deflecting his Republican critics on the 9/11 commission and blocking out White House attacks on his credibility and motives.
Clarke's appearance nearly overshadowed the most high-profile chapter yet in the fullest public accounting of what went wrong before September 11. A parade of luminaries, including current and former secretaries of state and defense and CIA Director George Tenet, took their turns. Another figure--Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice--stirred up even more attention by her absence. By the time it was over, the hearings, with their echoes of past inquiries into Washington scandals, provided an unusual and often disturbing glance into the inner workings of the secretive world of intelligence and national security.
Giving the spectacle an extra charge was the political backdrop, as an increasingly embattled President Bush crafts his campaign for re-election around his record in the war on terrorism. Bush aides worry about the impact of Clarke's accusations that the president was insufficiently focused on terrorism before 9/11 and has made mistakes since. Campaign strategists say this could, if not countered effectively, become a big area of vulnerability by raising doubts about whether Bush is an effective wartime leader better able to protect the country than John Kerry. Most Americans are still inclined to believe that Bush did all he could to prevent the terrorist attacks and then took appropriate action after 9/11, his advisers say. "It's inside baseball right now," says a top Bush campaign strategist. "We want to put it away quickly."
Attack mode. That, so far, isn't happening. A visibly worried White House lashed out at its former aide, the level of concern reflected by the number of top White House officials who hit television news programs. Most of the attacks were quite personal, with Bush aides suggesting that Clarke bears a grudge for having been passed over for a promotion, is looking to sell books, and may be seeking a job in a Kerry administration. (Clarke stated under oath that he wouldn't take such a job). Some officials cited what they branded disparities in Clarke's accounts, and Vice President Cheney even went on Rush Limbaugh's radio show to declare that Clarke was "out of the loop"--an attack Rice was later forced to retract even as she joined the chorus of Clarke critics (Page 28).
The ferocity of the White House attack prompted comedian Jon Stewart's Daily Show to cover the controversy under the logo "Belittle Richard." But the man the White House had relied on to run the Situation Room immediately after the 9/11 attacks blithely ignored his administration critics. And the attacks on him angered not only Clarke's former colleagues, who leapt to his defense, but also many officials who work on counterterrorism throughout the government. "The personal attacks are inappropriate and uncalled for and way off the mark," fumed a White House aide. Clarke emerged from the tumultuous week as confident as ever. "I don't think they touched me," he told U.S. News. "They still haven't responded to the substance of what I've said."
The White House was most worried about Clarke's assertions that the Bush administration was not urgently addressing the al Qaeda threat during its first eight months in office, focusing instead on other priorities, like missile defense. Clarke had urged stepped-up actions against al Qaeda from the first days Bush was in office, he testified. But the first meeting on terrorism of the Principals Committee, which includes Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, didn't occur until just a week before the terrorist attacks. The White House retorted that it was working on a complete overhaul of the policy, a necessarily lengthy process. Reports by the 9/11 commission staff track closely with Clarke's account of the period and point out that the plan eventually adopted closely resembled Clarke's January proposals. The commission also notes that two veteran officers of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center were so frustrated by the slow pace of policymaking in the summer of 2001 that they considered resigning and going public, which would have been a shocking breach of protocol.
"Battle stations." The summer of 2001 was a frustrating time for Clarke because the CIA was more worried about potentially catastrophic al Qaeda attacks than it had ever been. Clarke compares that period to the run-up to the millennium, when the Clinton administration went on high alert. At the time, Clinton personally became involved and ordered the CIA and FBI directors to come to the White House almost daily and share all kinds of intelligence information. "That did not happen obviously in the summer of 2001, even though the warnings should have justified it," Clarke said, adding that the CIA had identified two future 9/11 hijackers already in the United States as being al Qaeda members but failed to pass the information on to the FBI. "If we had used millennium-era procedures with cabinet-level involvement, that information could have been shaken loose, and it could have included information on those two hijackers." Bush aides retort that they were at "battle stations" and that Clarke had not complained at the time.
Even though Iraq was slightly beyond the scope of the commission, much of Clarke's anger was prompted by Bush's decision to go to war there, despite little evidence of a connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. "Dick is speaking for a silent majority in the government: the counterterrorism professionals, the nonpartisans, who are absolutely appalled at how the administration went after Iraq at the expense of destroying al Qaeda," says Roger Cressey, his former deputy in the White House counterterrorism office and now his business partner. Clarke says the Iraq war pulled scarce intelligence assets like translators, special operations forces, and Predator drones away from the effort to crush al Qaeda in Afghanistan. "After 10 years of working at it, he thought we were finally going after al Qaeda--that we would be relentless and pound every last one of them," says a senior administration official. "And he's so frustrated now that our power has been diffused, rather than focused on what's the real threat."
Almost obscured by the political drama were the 9/11 commission's own revelations. The portrait of the nation's spy agencies that emerges from four new staff reports is that of surprisingly conservative and legalistic bureaucracies scarred by past scandals. Clarke describes them as "risk averse," and the commission's cochair, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, a Republican, agrees, calling the agencies "gun-shy." The commission's staff wrote that CIA operatives in the field were much more aggressive than their bosses in Washington. "Before 9/11, the middle managers were protecting them and protecting their bureaucracy," Clarke says. "Unfortunately, they were not protecting the United States."
On this, the commission doesn't yet place blame, but it provides remarkable insight into the conduct of CIA covert actions. Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, told the commission that the 1998 missile strikes on bin Laden's terrorist training camps in Afghanistan made it clear that the White House wanted bin Laden killed. Perhaps. But CIA officials saw matters differently, insisting that the legal guidance drafted by the Clinton White House authorized killing bin Laden only if he resisted during a capture mission. "We always talked about how much easier it would have been to kill him," a former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit told the commission. In its efforts to catch bin Laden, the CIA relied heavily on Afghan rebels. CIA teams were inserted into Afghanistan occasionally to meet with Afghan agents but not to conduct operations. This left CIA officers dependent on the rebels, whom they didn't fully trust. The commission's staff statement asked: "If officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policymakers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged."
The CIA's role, it seems, remains something of a conundrum. Runaway spy agencies have caused considerable damage in the past, and many Americans have long been uncomfortable with the idea of CIA assassinations, especially before 9/11. Some CIA officers told the commission that they would have been opposed to assassinations.
The commission will continue to explore to what extent such apparent ambivalence may have hobbled the CIA. By the time the government began to attack al Qaeda, after the 1998 bombings of the embassies in Africa, the CIA had trouble even finding bin Laden. The commission was able to describe only three episodes between 1998 and Sept. 11, 2001, when there was enough hard intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts to even consider a cruise missile attack. In each case, the strikes were called off because the intelligence was too sketchy or civilians might be killed. One of the most frustrating incidents occurred in February 1999. U.S. officials received information that bin Laden was at a camp in the Afghan desert, located next to a hunting camp frequented by princes from the United Arab Emirates. CIA Director Tenet testified that the strike never occurred because he didn't trust the intelligence, adding, "You might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process."
The 9/11 commission's next set of hearings convenes on April 13 to address how intelligence is collected and analyzed. But as commissioners prepare their final report, due by July 26, they will have to wrestle with the hard questions about whether anything America could have done would have been enough to prevent 9/11. As Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage put it: "I just don't think we had the imagination required to consider a tragedy of this magnitude." Nobody yet knows whether the nation has mustered the imagination, determination, and ability to prevent the next one.
With David E. Kaplan, Kenneth T. Walsh and Angie C. Marek
This story appears in the April 5, 2004 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.