Against All Enemies (45 page)

I welcome these hearings because of the opportunity that they provide to the American people to better understand why the tragedy of 9/11 happened and what we must do to prevent a recurrence.

I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11.

To them who are here in the room, to those who are watching on television, your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you, and I failed you. 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….

Terrorism as a Priority in the Clinton and Bush Administrations

My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration—certainly [there was] no higher priority. There were priorities probably of equal importance such as the Middle East peace process, but I certainly don't know of one that was any higher in the priority of that administration….

 

I believe the Bush administration in the first eight months considered terrorism an important issue, but not an urgent issue.

President Bush himself says as much in his interview with Bob Woodward in the book
Bush at War.
He said, “I didn't feel a sense of urgency.”

George Tenet and I tried very hard to create a sense of urgency by seeing to it that intelligence reports on the al Qaeda threat were frequently given to the President and other high-level officials. And there was a process under way to address al Qaeda. But although I continued to say it was an urgent problem, I don't think it was ever treated that way….

 

Almost everything I ever asked for in the way of support from him [Sandy Berger] or from President Clinton, I got. We did enormously increase the counterterrorism budget of the federal government, initiated many programs, including one that is now called Homeland Security.

Mr. Berger is right to note that I wanted a covert action program to aid Afghan factions to fight the Taliban, and that was not accomplished. He's also right to note that on several occasions, including after the attack on the
Cole,
I suggested that we bomb all of the Taliban and al Qaeda infrastructure, whether or not it would succeed in killing bin Laden.

My view was that this administration, while it listened to me, either didn't believe me that there was an urgent problem or was unprepared to act as though there were an urgent problem.

And I thought, if the administration doesn't believe its national coordinator for counterterrorism when he says there's an urgent problem, and if it's unprepared to act as though there's an urgent problem, then probably I should get another job….

 

President Bush was regularly told by the Director of Central Intelligence that there was an urgent threat. On one occasion—he was told this dozens of times in the morning briefings that George Tenet gave him. On one of those occasions, he asked for a strategy to deal with the threat.

Condi Rice came back from that meeting, called me, and relayed what the President had requested. And I said, “Well, you know, we've had this strategy ready since before you were inaugurated. I showed it you. You have the paperwork. We can have a meeting on the strategy anytime you want.”

She said she would look into it. Her looking into it and the President asking for it did not change the pace at which it was considered. And as far as I know, the President never asked again; at least I was never informed that he asked again. I do know he was thereafter continually informed about the threat by George Tenet.

Problems Within the CIA and FBI

Had we a more robust intelligence capability in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we might have recognized the existence of al Qaeda relatively soon after it came into existence. And if we recognized its existence and if we knew its philosophy and if we had a proactive intelligence covert action program—so that's both more on the collection side and more on the covert action side—then we might have been able to nip it in the bud.

But…our HUMINT program, our spy capability, had been eviscerated in the 1980s and early 1990s. And there was no such capability either to even know that al Qaeda existed, let alone to destroy it.

And there is something else that I think we need to understand about the CIA's covert action capabilities. For many years, they were roundly criticized by the Congress and the media for various covert actions that they carried out at the request of people like me and the White House—not me, but people like me. And many CIA senior managers were dragged up into this room and others and berated for failed covert action activities, and they became great political footballs.

Now, if you're in the CIA and you're growing up as a CIA manager over this period of time, and that's what you see going on, and you see one boss after another, one deputy director of operations after another, being fired or threatened with indictment, I think the thing you learn from that is that covert action is a very dangerous thing that can damage the CIA as much as it can damage the enemy….

 

The CIA said in their assessments [in 2001] that the attack would most likely occur overseas, most probably in Saudi Arabia, possibly in Israel. I thought, however, that it might well take place in the United States based on what we had learned in December '99, when we rolled up operations in Washington State, in Brooklyn, in Boston.

The fact that we didn't have intelligence that we could point to that said it would take place in the United States wasn't significant in my view, because, frankly—I know how this is going to sound but I have to say it—I didn't think the FBI would know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States by al Qaeda….

And I think some of [the] systemic things [to improve security] that are obvious…were more practical after 9/11 than they were after the Millennium. Remember, in the Millennium [Terrorist Plot], we succeeded in stopping the attacks. That was good news.

But it was not good news for those of us who also wanted to put pressure on the Congress and pressure on OMB [the Office of Management and Budget] and other places because we were not able to point to—and I hate to say this—body bags. You know, unfortunately, this country takes body bags and requires body bags sometimes to make really tough decisions about money and about governmental arrangements.

And one of the things that I would hope comes out of [the] commission report is a recommendation for a change in the attitude of government about threats, that we be able to act on threats that we foresee, even if acting requires boldness and requires money and requires changing the way we do business, that we act on threats in the future before they happen.

Why I Wrote This Book

The White House has said that my book is an audition for a high-level position in the Kerry campaign. So let me say here, as I am under oath, that I will not accept any position in the Kerry administration, should there be one—on the record, under oath.

Now, as to [the] accusation that there is a difference between what I said to this commission in fifteen hours of testimony, and what I am saying in my book, and what media outlets are asking me to comment on, I think there's a very good reason for that.

In the fifteen hours of testimony, no one asked me what I thought about the President's invasion of Iraq. And the reason I am strident in my criticism of the President of the United States is because by invading Iraq—something I was not asked about by the commission, it's something I chose to write about a lot in the book—by invading Iraq the President of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism.

Clarke was frustrated about how little the Agency knew, complaining to Berger that four years after “we first asked CIA to track down [bin Laden]'s finances” and two years after the creation of the CIA's Bin Ladin unit, the Agency said it could only guess at how much aid Bin Ladin gave to terrorist groups, what were the main sources of his budget, or how he moved his money…

CIA operatives had raided an al Qaeda forgery operation and another terrorist cell in Tirana. These operations may have disrupted a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Tirana, and did lead to the rendition of a number of al Qaeda–related terrorist operatives. After the [East African] embassy bombings, there were arrests in Azerbaijan, Italy, and Britain. Several terrorists were sent to an Arab country. The CIA described working with FBI operatives to prevent a planned attack on the U.S. embassy in Uganda, and a number of suspects were arrested. On September 16, [1998] Abu Hajer, one of Bin Ladin's deputies in Sudan and the head of his computer operations and weapons procurement, was arrested in Germany. He was the most important Bin Ladin lieutenant captured thus far. Clarke commented to Berger with satisfaction that August and September had brought the “greatest number of terrorist arrests in a short period of time that we have ever arranged/facilitated.”…

Clarke commented to Berger that “despite ‘expanded' authority for CIA's sources to engage in direct action, they have shown no inclination to do so.” He added that it was his impression that the CIA thought the tribals unlikely to act against Bin Ladin and hence relying on them was “unrealistic.” Events seemed to bear him out, since the tribals did not stage an attack on Bin Ladin or his associates during 1999….

On September 7, [2000] the Predator flew for the first time over Afghanistan. When Clarke saw video taken during the trial flight, he described the imagery to Berger as “truly astonishing,” and he argued immediately for more flights seeking to find Bin Ladin and target him for cruise missile or air attack. Even if Bin Ladin were not found, Clarke said, Predator missions might identify additional worthwhile targets, such as other al Qaeda leaders or stocks of chemical or biological weapons….

Though Clarke worried that the CIA might be equivocating in assigning responsibility for the USS
Cole
attack to al Qaeda, he wrote Berger on November 7, [2000] that the CIA analysts had described their case by saying that “it has web feet, flies, and quacks.”…

“Continued anti–al Qida operations at the current level will prevent some attacks,” Clarke's office wrote, “but will not seriously attrit their ability to plan and conduct attacks.” The paper backed covert aid to the Northern Alliance, covert aid to Uzbekistan, and renewed Predator flights in March 2001. A sentence called for military action to destroy al Qaeda command-and-control targets and infrastructure and Taliban military and command assets. The paper also expressed concern about the presence of al Qaeda operatives in the United States….

 

Clarke submitted an elaborate memorandum on January 25, 2001. He attached to it his 1998 Delenda Plan and the December 2000 strategy paper. “We
urgently
need…a Principals level review on the
al Qida
network,” Clarke wrote.

He wanted the Principals Committee to decide whether al Qaeda was “a first order threat” or a more modest worry being overblown by “chicken little” alarmists. Alluding to the transition briefing that he had prepared for Rice, Clarke wrote that al Qaeda “is not some narrow, little terrorist issue that needs to be included in broader regional policy.” Two key decisions that had been deferred, he noted, concerned covert aid to keep the Northern Alliance alive when fighting began again in Afghanistan in the spring, and covert aid to the Uzbeks. Clarke also suggested that decisions should be made soon on messages to the Taliban and Pakistan over the al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan, on possible new money for CIA operations, and on “when and how…to respond to the attack on the USS Cole.”

The national security advisor did not respond directly to Clarke's memorandum. No Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda was held until September 4, 2001 (although the Principals Committee met frequently on other subjects, such as the Middle East peace process, Russia, and the Persian Gulf)…

 

The Principals Committee had its first meeting on al Qaeda on September 4. On the day of the meeting, Clarke sent Rice an impassioned personal note. He criticized U.S. counterterrorism efforts past and present. The “real question” before the principals, he wrote, was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat?…Is al Qida a big deal?…
Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US,
” Clarke wrote. “What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

Clarke then turned to the
Cole
. “
The fact that the USS Cole was attacked during the last Administration does not absolve us of responding for the attack,
” he wrote. “Many in al Qida and the Taliban may have drawn the wrong lesson from the Cole: that they can kill Americans without there being a US response, without there being a price…. One might have thought that with a $250m hole in a destroyer and 17 dead sailors, the Pentagon might have wanted to respond. Instead, they have often talked about the fact that there is ‘nothing worth hitting in Afghanistan' and said ‘the cruise missiles cost more than the jungle gyms and mud huts' at terrorist camps.” Clarke could not understand “
why we continue to allow the existence of large scale al Qida bases where we know people are being trained to kill Americans
.”

Turning to the CIA, Clarke warned that its bureaucracy, which was “masterful at passive aggressive behavior,” would resist funding the new national security presidential directive, leaving it a “hollow shell of words without deeds.” The CIA would insist its other priorities were more important. Invoking President Bush's own language, Clarke wrote,”
You are left with a modest effort to swat flies,
to try to prevent specific al Qida attacks by using [intelligence] to detect them and friendly governments' police and intelligence officers to stop them.
You are left waiting for the big attack,
with lots of casualties, after which some major US retaliation will be in order.”…

Rice was briefed on the activities of Abu Zubaydah and on CIA efforts to locate him…. Over the next few weeks, the CIA repeatedly issued warnings—including calls from DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] Tenet to Clarke—that Abu Zubaydah was planning an operation in the near future. One report cited a source indicating that Abu Zubaydah was planning an attack in a country that CIA analysts thought might be Israel, or perhaps Saudi Arabia or India. Clarke relayed these reports to Rice…

The interagency Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) that Clarke chaired discussed the Abu Zubaydah reports on April 19 [2001]. The next day, a briefing to top officials reported “Bin Ladin planning multiple operations.” When the deputies discussed al Qaeda policy on April 30, they began with a briefing on the threat.

On May 29, 2001 Clarke suggested that Rice ask DCI Tenet what more the United States could do to stop Abu Zubaydah from launching “a series of major terrorist attacks,” probably on Israeli targets, but possibly on U.S. facilities. Clarke wrote to Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, “When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.”…

On June 28, 2001 Clarke wrote Rice that the pattern of al Qaeda activity indicating attack planning over the past six weeks “had reached a crescendo.” “A series of new reports continue to convince me and analysts at State, CIA, DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency], and NSA that a major terrorist attack or series of attacks is likely in July,” he noted….

On July 27, 2001 Clarke informed Rice and Hadley that the spike in intelligence about a near-term al Qaeda attack had stopped. He urged keeping readiness high during the August vacation period, warning that another report suggested an attack had just been postponed for a few months “but will still happen.”…

 

By 2001 the government still needed a decision at the highest level as to whether al Qaeda was or was not “a first order threat,” Richard Clarke wrote in his first memo to Condoleezza Rice[,] on January 25, 2001. In his blistering protest about foot-dragging in the Pentagon and at the CIA, sent to Rice just a week before 9/11, he repeated that the “real question” for the principals was “are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat?…Is al Qida a big deal?”

One school of thought, Clarke wrote in this September 4 note, implicitly argued that the terrorist network was a nuisance that killed a score of Americans every 18–24 months. If that view was credited, then current policies might be proportionate. Another school saw al Qaeda as the “point of the spear of radical Islam.” But no one forced the argument into the open by calling for a national estimate or a broader discussion of the threat. The issue was never joined as a collective debate by the U.S. government, including the Congress, before 9/11…

 

Perhaps the most incisive of the advisors on terrorism to the new administration was the holdover Richard Clarke.