The Scum at the Top

Commentary on the Rats in Washington

The Insider

By Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff and Tamara Lipper
Newsweek
Cover Story
Page 20
© April 5, 2004

The Town Crier: He came, he bore witness and he sent Washington into a frenzy. How Richard Clarke fueled a firestorm over who's to blame for 9/11, why two presidents missed the warning signs - and what we can learn to keep it from happening again.

What does Richard Clarke have against Condoleezza Rice? In his book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke, the former counterterror chief for the Bush White House, writes that when he first briefed the president's national-security adviser about the Qaeda threat at a January 2001 meeting, "her facial expression gave me the impression she had never heard the term before." That is a stretch; Rice had spoken publicly about Al Qaeda before she came to the White House. Last week a Bush aide went to similar extremes to demonstrate the depth of Rice's concern about the Qaeda threat. When Rice was a director of Chevron Oil Co., the corporation had named an oil tanker in her honor. But a few months after she took her White House job, she called the head of Chevron and asked that her name be taken off the tanker - and not just because the White House was already under fire for being too cozy with the oil industry. If Osama bin Laden wanted to send a message to the new American president, Rice reportedly reasoned, what better way than to blow up a ship named after his national-security adviser?

Clarke's animus against Rice is transparent. Still, the once obscure, now famous bureaucrat cleverly and effectively portrayed his boss last week as slow-footed and almost clueless in the race to head off a terrorist attack. On the short list of memorable Washington witnesses, Clarke ranks just below John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel during Watergate ("We have a cancer - within, close to the presidency, that's growing ..."), and the flamboyant Col. Oliver North of the Iran-contra scandal. While other high-ranking government officials tap-danced and buck-passed before the 9/11 commission, Clarke presented himself as a soulful truth-teller.

He seized the moral high ground shortly after raising his right hand. Clarke apologized to the families who lost loved ones on 9/11. "Those entrusted with protecting you," he gravely intoned, "failed you." After the muffled sobs in the audience died down, the Bush administration, which has not apologized to anyone, was left to make awkward excuses. "The key here is to remember who is responsible," Rice told NEWSWEEK, firmly, but also a little stiffly, as she sat in her corner office in the West Wing at the end of a long week. "Al Qaeda is responsible."

Rice is also having a moment of fame and clearly not enjoying it. She has been speaking to reporters and TV anchors, just about anyone, it seems, except for the 9/11 commissioners publicly and under oath. The Bush administration has been trying to uphold a hoary precedent that White House staffers can't be hauled before Congress to reveal their whisperings into the president's ear. But the textbook separation-of-powers argument has looked like a dodge, given the emotion of the moment. The administration's high-mindedness has been further undercut by a relentless trashing of Clarke, which culminated with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's taking the floor to denounce his "theatrical apology" as an "act of supreme arrogance and manipulation." Frist accused Clarke of trying to sell books ("Against All Enemies" shot to the top of best-seller lists) by grandstanding and even lying.

The mud appears to be sticking. According to the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 25 percent of Americans regard Clarke as a "dedicated public servant," while 50 percent said he was "motivated by personal and political reasons." Clearly, ego as well as principle is at stake. But Clarke's testimony, and the 9/11 commission hearings themselves, offer a fascinating civics lesson on how government really works - and doesn't. The findings of the commission, due by July, may (or may not) find fault, they may (or may not) call for basic changes in the way the government fights terror and they may (or may not) make Americans safer. But the story of Dick Clarke, brave whistle-blower, self-aggrandizing bully, is at once timeless and instructive.

Clarke likes to portray himself as a kind of Zelig of the modern spy and counterterror wars, a bureaucratic fighter who seems to show up at history's pivotal moments. According to his book, it was Clarke, then a young State Department official, who first suggested that the United States arm the Afghan freedom fighters with Stinger missiles to shoot down Soviet helicopters back in 1984. The weapons turned the battle, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan and shortly thereafter the Soviet empire collapsed. (Contacted by NEWSWEEK, a former senior Reagan administration official directly involved in arming the Afghans dismissed Clarke's story as "a lot of hype.")

Moving over to the White House as a national-security staffer in 1992, Clarke became a counterterror expert. Expanding his power as the threat grew during the '90s, he was widely viewed in the bureaucracy as an alarmist. "He was always this guy in a white sheet, going around with a big sign saying the world was coming to an end," says a Defense Department official. "Who listens to people like that?" Clarke's social skills have always been limited. "Dick doesn't really have a second gear," says a friend. "In videoconferences," recalls a former Justice Department staffer, "officials would hide behind their subordinates and keep out of the way of the cameras because they didn't want him to see them. He would yell out at people, 'This is unacceptable! I can't believe you're not doing this!' "

But Clarke also understood how government worked, and he was both bullheaded and nimble about getting his way. In the freewheeling Clinton White House, he was everywhere. Wary of the CIA, Clinton often skipped the president's morning intelligence briefing. He got his intelligence instead from Clarke, who collected it from the various spy agencies. Clarke was not a "principal" on the National Security Council, but he might as well have been, wandering into top-level meetings and even the Oval Office.

The Bush administration brought an end to such informality and openness - and to Clarke's access. Clinton, like many Democratic presidents, enjoyed being the center of a wheel with many spokes. Bush follows the more hierarchical Republican executive model. The Bushies thought they were bringing order to chaos, but for Clarke the new order felt like a demotion, and he squawked. Told that he had to vacate his warren of offices overlooking the Ellipse (the same offices once occupied by Oliver North) in order to make room for the NSC communications and speechwriting staff, Clarke threatened to sue. (He cited an obscure statute that prohibits spending government money on office decorations.) And he engaged in passive-aggressive warfare with his new boss, Condi Rice.

Clarke "resented working for Condi," says a senior administration official who has worked closely with both. "As a result, he would not come to our staff meetings." The official showed NEWSWEEK several internal White House e-mails from the winter and spring of 2001. In one, a staffer pointedly informs Clarke, "Condi noted your absence this morning." In an e-mail to Rice, the staffer quotes Clarke's response: "Oh Barf. Shut up. I'll talk to Condi." Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, Clarke called the complaints "trivial" and said he was sending junior staffers to her meetings to give them "face time" with the national-security adviser. His disputes with Rice were over policy, "never personal," he said.

Clarke was also frozen out by the new management at the Pentagon. During the Clinton administration, he would call midlevel Defense officials and bluster, "The White House wants ..." Bush's Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, forbade underlings to respond to Clarke unless the request came through proper channels. "The White House doesn't do [or want] anything," Rumsfeld acidly declared. "The White House is a building. The Pentagon doesn't do anything either. But I am secretary of Defense and I damned well can do things."

The watchword of the new administration was "ABC" - Anything But Clinton. So almost by definition, the plans and ideas of a carryover appointee like Clarke were viewed with suspicion, as either stale or ineffective. A senior administration official showed NEWSWEEK a copy of Clarke's PowerPoint briefing delivered to Rice and her new team in January 2001. It offered proposals to "deter, defeat, and respond vigorously" to Al Qaeda. Rice instructed Clarke to come up with ideas to "eliminate" Al Qaeda, said this official. The command came from Bush, who was now getting briefed every morning by the director of the CIA, George Tenet. At a meeting attended by Rice and Tenet in May, Bush declared, "I'm tired of swatting at flies. I want a strategy. I want to go on the offense."

It took months for the deputies (the No. 2 officials at State, Defense, etc.) to grind away at a new plan, and when it was finally presented to the principals - Sept. 4, 2001, a week before the 9/11 attacks - it looked pretty much like Clarke's old plan. White House officials protest that the new plan was more thoroughgoing; that it called, for instance, for a new strategy to transform Pakistan from protector of Al Qaeda to a platform for attacking the terrorists in their lairs in Afghanistan.

But everyone agrees that the plan would have taken three to five years to accomplish. The squabbling over plans and progress masks a much deeper problem in the "risk-averse" attitude of the national-security bureaucracy of the past two decades. It is a mind-set rooted in history - in the scandals over assassination plots and spying on American citizens that engulfed the CIA and FBI after Watergate.

Anyone who watched the 9/11 commission hearings would have been puzzled by an apparent misunderstanding. Clinton's national-security adviser, Sandy Berger, testified that the president's orders were perfectly clear: kill bin Laden. And yet the commission staff reported that CIA officials were confused - they thought they were required to make an attempt to capture bin Laden, a much more difficult task.

Why the confusion on such a basic issue? Tenet never went to Berger to seek clarity, a senior intelligence official told NEWSWEEK. "Before 9/11, neither one of these guys wanted it to be clear," said the official. Both Tenet and Berger are cautious, bureaucratic creatures, well versed in the perils of the Washington scandal machine. Bureaucrats, especially those in insular places like the CIA, have long institutional memories. "For many years," Clarke testified last week, the top officials of the CIA's Directorate of Operations "were roundly criticized by the Congress and the media for various covert actions that they carried out at the request of people like me in the White House - not me, but people like me." Covert actions - especially anything as drastic as assassination - was likely to "blow up in their face," said Clarke.

The culture of risk aversion has been just as pronounced in the post-Vietnam military. Asked to stage a commando raid to kill a terrorist, the Joint Chiefs typically respond by piling on the logistical requirements. The generals understand that the politicians, confronted with re-enacting Operation Overlord, will back off. President Clinton wanted to put Special Forces troops into Afghanistan to chase Al Qaeda in the late '90s. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Hugh Shelton, set up a planning exercise with requirements so elaborate that the whole operation collapsed of its own weight. (Ironically, the exercise was called "Operation Infinite Resolve.")

It takes a determined president to overcome such inertia, and Clinton, plagued by his own scandals, was not that man. Nor was Bush, at least at first. It is not clear he understood the seriousness of the threat. Before 9/11, "I didn't feel that sense of urgency ... I was not on point," Bush told Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in December 2001. As a "war president," Bush is more likely to press. Do Bush and his aides discuss the problem of risk aversion? NEWSWEEK asked Rice. "All the time," she replied. "All the time."

Bush aides reject Clarke's charge that they were half-asleep in the summer of 2001, when the terrorist threats began "spiking." "This idea that we weren't at battle stations, that's just not true," says a senior administration official. Vacations were canceled, agencies were alerted and Clarke's antiterror team met every day. Still, the bureaucracy was sluggish. In his book Clarke says that for years he tried to sound the alarm, paying visits to FBI field offices to alert the G-men to the importance of bin Laden. Most were oblivious. Clarke writes: " 'Is there an al Qaeda presence in this city?' I would ask. Often I would get the response, 'What's al Qaeda? Is that that Been Layding guy? He hasn't been here'."

Clarke argues that if Bush's top national-security officials had met more often that summer and pestered their bureaucracies to comb their files, the 9/11 plot might have been thwarted. The CIA had actually known for a year and a half that a pair of Qaeda operatives had flown to the United States after a summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But it wasn't until August 2001 that the CIA notified the FBI. The bureau wasn't able to locate the men - until it saw their names on the passenger list of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the World Trade Center.

At the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft seemed particularly indifferent to the threat. He brushed off regular briefings on national-security warrants to wiretap terror suspects. When two top antiterror officials flew out to his home in rural Missouri one weekend to get his signature on one such warrant, Ashcroft demanded, "How come you guys are bothering me out here?" He signed, but didn't even invite them in for a glass of water.

At the 9/11 hearings, Tenet said he never doubted whether the White House understood the gravity of the threat. Clarke told a different story. He says that in late June, Tenet told him, "These guys aren't getting it." Clarke told Tenet, an old friend, "Come down and brief them the way you used to; come down with your hair on fire." Tenet gave the briefing, but afterward, Clarke says, "I really expected Condi to hold a meeting. She said, 'OK, thank you for that'."

Clarke tried to ring that bell again on Sept. 4, the day the principals finally took up the administration's new plan to go after Al Qaeda. He poured out his frustrations about bureaucratic foot-dragging in a memo to Rice. He urged policymakers "to imagine a day after a terrorist attack, with hundreds of Americans dead at home and abroad, and ask themselves what they could have done earlier."

A few days after September 11, Clarke began sending Rice what one senior administration official described as "cover your a-- memos." They detailed how he had warned of sleeper cells in the United States and prodded domestic agencies like the FAA and the immigration service to be on the lookout. Clarke told the commission that his real break with the Bush White House came over its determination to wage war against Iraq - a conflict that, according to Clarke, was sure to drain resources from the war against Al Qaeda. White House officials insisted to NEWSWEEK that Clarke never brought up Iraq during his time at the White House (he left in January 2003). Not so, maintains Clarke. "I talked to them about Iraq immediately after September 11," he told NEWSWEEK. "When it became clear that I thought this was lunacy, they started excluding me from the meetings about Iraq. I was out of the loop." A senior administration official notes that at a private lunch with Rice two weeks before the start of the Iraq war, Clarke did not raise any objections.

Clarke says his outspokenness earned the particular enmity of Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. Clarke is scathing about Wolfowitz, whom he depicts as obsessed with proving a conspiracy theory propounded by Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who contends that Iraq's Saddam Hussein was behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz commissioned former CIA director Jim Woolsey to fly to England to retrieve fingerprints of WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef, in order to show that Yousef was a "false double" inserted by Iraqi intelligence. The FBI objected to this wild-goose chase, but Wolfowitz insisted. As it turned out, the fingerprints disproved Mylroie's theory - they matched those of the Ramzi Yousef sitting in a U.S. federal prison. (When Clarke tried to tell this story in a draft of his book, it was excised by White House lawyers in a prepublication review for classified information.)

Clarke claims to be unfazed by the current character assault waged by the White House. "I know these people. I've worked with them. I know what they're like. They'll do anything to get elected." He does not expect the White House to apologize any time soon for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks. "You have to feel it from the heart," he says. "If you don't feel it from the heart, you shouldn't do it." (Clarke's own decision, he says, came in a 3 a.m. epiphany on the day he testified.) The attacks on Clarke are hardly over. Senator Frist urged the declassification of Clarke's earlier testimony before a House-Senate inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. At that time - July 2002 - Clarke apparently raised no criticism of the Bush administration's pre-9/11 sense of urgency. "Mr. Clarke has told two entirely different stories under oath," said Frist.

Before he testified in public, Clarke gave 15 hours of private testimony to the 9/11 commission. His public testimony "didn't conflict with what he said before," commission chairman Tom Kean told NEWSWEEK, but in the private testimony the commissioners did not ask about Iraq. In public, Clarke "was a much more angry man," said Kean. "I was surprised by the anger."

Clarke's testimony provoked some partisan wrangling among the commissioners, who up until now had managed to stay above politics, said Kean. "I don't think it will happen again," he added, perhaps wishfully. The commission has to walk a fine line. It wants to issue a tough report, to hold the government accountable and to recommend reforms. (Among the possibilities: the creation of an internal security agency, like Britain's MI5, to supplant the FBI as the domestic antiterror intelligence organization.) NEWSWEEK has learned that the commission is likely to conclude that 9/11 could have been prevented by the simple act of sharing information. In Phoenix in July 2001, an FBI agent wrote a memo warning that some young Arabs taking flying lessons might be terrorists. Had that warning made it to Clarke's counterterror shop, airlines might have begun bolting cockpit doors. But the commission doesn't want to make government bureaucrats even more risk-averse by hounding them. "We're very different from the Church Commission," said Kean, referring to the congressional panel that exposed intelligence abuses in the mid-'70s. "That was formed really to punish the CIA ... We're not out to get any government agency. But we hope to make those agencies better."

And what of Clarke's future? At the hearings, 9/11 commissioner John Lehman, secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, in effect accused him of carrying water for the John Kerry campaign. Clarke responded, "Let me say here, under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one." According to legal experts, Clarke's promise is not enforceable. Of course, the next administration might not want to take on a ferocious infighter like Clarke. On the other hand, if it wants to shake up the bureaucracy, it might need him.

With John Barry, Daniel Klaidman, Pat Wingert and Mark Hosenball in Washington

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