Read Against All Enemies Online
Authors: Richard A. Clarke
To coordinate these efforts, there would be four committees made up of senior and midlevel managers from the departments. The Counterterrorism Security Group would continue, running programs 1â3, 6, 9, and 10. A new Critical Infrastructure Coordination Group would run program 7. A Weapons of Mass Destruction and Preparedness Group would run programs 4 and 5. The existing Continuity of Government Interagency Group would run program 8.
A new position, a “National Coordinator,” was created to chair all four committees. The four committees would report to the Principals Committee. The National Coordinator would also serve as a member of the Cabinet-level Principals Committee, and would have two NSC Staff Senior Directors reporting to him, along with other NSC Staff. Predictably, most departments and agencies saw it as a White House power grab. No one, however, had a better idea. No agency wanted to see one department given all of this responsibility. In 1997 there was no support for creating a new agency because of the disruptiveness of such a move, which would shift everyone's focus from terrorists outside the government to bureaucrats within.
PDD-X went ahead, but with clear limits on the power of the National Coordinator inserted by various agencies and departments. Unlike the Drug Czar, who had a budget of several hundred million dollars, the National Coordinator would not have direct control of any funds. He could only recommend budgets to the President. The Drug Czar had several hundred staff; the National Coordinator would have twelve. Finally, just to make it clear that the National Coordinator was just a White House staff job, the directive contained language noting that he could not order law enforcement agents, troops, or spies to do anything, only their agencies could. Some czar. On balance, however, it was a slight improvement to have a National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. With a title that long, however, it quickly became “Terrorism Czar” to the media. It was clearly an improvement to have ten programs with clear accountability and responsibility focused in the departments and agencies, but the notion that there was a Terrorism Czar was misleading. In fact, what the departments had insisted on and the White House had acquiesced to was that there would not be a czar with a staff, budget, or operational decision making. I now had the appearance of responsibility for counterterrorism, but none of the tools or authority to get the job done.
With everyone satisfied, X, Y, and Z went to the President and became PDD-62, PDD-63, and after a few weeks, PDD-67. The President announced them in his commencement address to the Naval Academy in June 1998. The title of PDD-62 was “Counterterrorism and Protection of the Homeland,” in recognition that the threat was not just overseas. Later, others would claim they began the focus on protecting the homeland. Clinton's directive began, “Because of our military superiority, potential enemies, be they nations or terrorist groupsâ¦are increasingly likely to attack us in unconventional waysâ¦to exploit vulnerabilitiesâ¦against civilians.”
PDD-62 had come at that point in the year, June, when departments begin to prepare their proposed programs for the White House budget review process that culminates at the end of the year in presidential decisions. Those decisions, announced in January or February, then begin a second journey of eight or nine months through the Congress. It is a bit like two pregnancies in a row, lasting sixteen months, with all the potential for miscarriage.
If PDD-62 had given me anything, it was a further invitation to get funding for counterterrorism and security programs. I set to work. By January, the President was set to ask the Congress for $10 billion for counterterrorism, security, weapons of mass destruction preparedness, and infrastructure protection. Before the overall federal budget went to the Congress, however, the White House decided to have a week-long series of “Theme Days.” On each day, the President would go to a location associated with one of his budget priorities and give a speech outlining how the new budget supported the priority. The week began and the first event was held. The White House Communications staff called and informed us that we would have the third day for “all that counterterrorism stuff.” We had about thirty-six hours to find a venue, get an audience, move in what the Communications people called “show-and-tells,” and draft a speech. This kind of unreasonable demand seemed normal in the Clinton White House. Because the White House staff always rose to these challenges and produced good events, the last-minute style lasted throughout Clinton's eight years.
We called the National Academy of Sciences, which was four blocks from the White House, had an auditorium, and could easily assemble scientists to fill it. The theme would be using science and technology to increase our security. We ordered a giant banner that said that, to hang behind the President. Our office staff then set to calling people inside and outside the government who had worked on the initiatives for counterterrorism, homeland protection, weapons of mass destruction preparedness, and cyber security. They were invited to the speech and invited to set up a display in the Academy. I specifically asked the Arlington, Virginia, Fire Department to bring a new prototype Mass Decontamination Vehicle, a truck that could be used to wash down hundreds of people who had been exposed to chemical weapons. My view was that every major city should be given at least one such MDV, so I wrote that announcement into the draft of the President's speech. Attorney General Reno took it out, arguing that cities should decide for themselves what to do with federal assistance for domestic preparedness against weapons of mass destruction. That exchange reflected a struggle over priorities that continues today, causing a waste of billions of dollars of homeland security funds, as localities buy things they do not need and ignore necessary procurement.
Reno and I had disagreed before about how to disburse money to the cities to prepare them for chemical, biological, or radiological disaster. She was concerned that we satisfy the “stakeholders,” which I learned meant not people with backyard grills, but the local authorities. I was concerned that the local authorities would not know what to buy or would justify some purchase that had little to do with chem-bio defense. Moreover, I was concerned that we develop metropolitan-area plans incorporating more than just the core cities. Arlington, for example, had the first MDV and parked it three miles from the White House. Should we ignore that and buy another one for Washington, D.C. before Cleveland got its first MDV? I wanted to use the promise of federal money as a way of coercing cities and suburbs into cooperating in the development of unified disaster plans, as we had with the Metropolitan Medical Strike Teams of doctors and medical staffs. Reno, a former Dade County prosecutor, would not budge. The money was already going into her Department's budget, so she didn't have to budge.
When our Theme Day dawned, I went to the Oval Office to attempt to do a “pre-brief.” For every public event on the President's schedule, there was a preceding ten-minute slot called a pre-brief in which a member of the staff would explain to the President what the event was about and what he should do at it. Although it was abundantly clear that Clinton did not need, and in any event would not accept, pre-briefs, the schedule continued to carry them. One of two things happened during the assigned time slots. Either you were left sitting outside the Oval Office waiting, or you were invited in and the President would discuss with you something other than the upcoming event. On our Theme Day it was the latter. I feared he would discuss the Impeachment, which was dominating the media and Washington chatter.
Instead, the President chose to discuss the problems facing his cousin, a woman who administered public housing in Arkansas. We continued to discuss that topic as we walked to the limousine and drove through Foggy Bottom with sirens wailing. I sat next to him with a notebook filled with PowerPoint slides and backup material to answer any conceivable question about the $10 billion budget proposal. As the motorcade drove into the basement garage of the Academy, the President acknowledged my apparent concern that we talk about the topic at hand. His mood changed from the affable Arkansas country boy to the analytical President, the duality that both charmed and frightened the White House staff close to the President.
“I read the speech, you know,” he said to calm any concern I might have had that he thought this was health care theme day. “The way I see this whole problem, it's like arrows and shields⦔
“Huh?” I asked as we sat in the car and Secret Service agents stood waiting to open the doors.
“Yeah, you know, like some guy invents the bow and arrow and he's ahead for a while until some guy invents the shield that catches all the arrows. Guy puts a wall around the town and the enemy invents the catapult to get over the wall. Offense, defense, action, reaction. Now we got new offensive weapons facing us and we need new defensive ones. Am I right?”
I acknowledged that was one way to look at the problem and we went into the Academy where a full auditorium was awaiting us. As we did, my pager beeped and carried a message: “DC police are towing away the Arlington MVD.” My best show-and-tell had parked in an area that Secret Service decided to have cleared. There was never enough time to get these events done flawlessly.
Sitting in the front row of the auditorium, I noticed that Clinton seemed to be rewriting the speech during the long introductory remarks. When he spoke, however, he used the text we had given him and I followed along with my copy. Then my text endedâand the President did not. He stepped out from behind the podium and leaned on it and smiled at me. My stomach dropped because we had seen him do this before and knew what it meant: he was about to wing it, to ad-lib in a way that would either get us all in trouble or be the best part of the speech, or both.
“What we are seeing here, as any military person in the audience can tell you, goes back to the dawn of timeâ¦an offensive weapon is developed and it takes time to develop the defense⦔ He talked of bows, arrows, castles, moats. Then he noted how things were different, “because of the speed with which change is occurring” and technology is evolving. New offensive technologies were being developed and defenses were not yet available. The President said he had struggled to alert the nation to the dangers of terrorism without frightening people into believing that anything they saw in a new action movie might happen the next day. We were meeting terrorism “in ways I can and in ways I cannot discuss,” but we needed new defensive capabilities and only scientists and engineers like those assembled could create those protections. The President appealed to the audience to use the funds he sought to get our best scientific minds to close the gap between the introduction of the new weapons of terror and the creation of new defenses.