-Caveat Lector-
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/books/review/03THOMAST.html?pagewanted=print&position=top
November 3, 2002
'The Age of Sacred Terror': Don't Bother Me
By EVAN THOMAS
here is a scene in this important book that tells a great deal
about the failure of the American government to
prevent the terrorist attacks on 9/11. In 1999, a National
Security Council staffer was meeting with a pair of
F.B.I. officials at the White House. The N.S.C. man was excited and
surprised to learn from some old press clippings
that Ayman al-Zawahiri, the much-feared Egyptian terrorist and deputy
to Osama bin Laden, had visited the United
States on a fund-raising trip in the early 1990's. ''I couldn't believe
it,'' he exclaimed to the F.B.I. men. ''Did you know
that?'' The two gumshoes nodded warily. ''Well,'' the staffer
continued, ''if he was here, someone was handling his
travel and arranging his meetings and someone was giving him money. Do
you know who these people are? Do you
have them covered? There are cells here and we need to know about
them.'' ''Yeah, yeah, we know. Don't worry
about it,'' the F.B.I. officials replied.
What the bureau men really meant was: back off. Leave us alone. The
authors of ''The Age of Sacred Terror'' have
some experience dealing with balky F.B.I. agents. Daniel Benjamin and
Steven Simon were, respectively, the director
and the senior director for counterterrorism on the security council
staff during the Clinton administration. ''There is a
saying bureaucrats use when the White House becomes too intrusive or
inquisitive: 'Don't get in our knickers,' ''
Benjamin and Simon write. Whenever council officials started pushing
the F.B.I. -- or the C.I.A. or the military -- on
ways of dealing with Al Qaeda, the message back was almost invariably:
out of our knickers.
As it turns out, the F.B.I. wasn't paying much attention to Al Qaeda,
and no amount of hand-wringing by overworked
and anonymous White House aides was going to make them. The C.I.A. and
Pentagon were not much more
responsive, according to Benjamin and Simon, whose frustration is
palpable in their revealing, if slightly defensive,
account of the pre-9/11 war on terror. They have written a surprisingly
lively -- and disturbing -- tale of bureaucratic
vexation.
The story begins slowly, with a labored retelling of the terrorists'
progress from the first World Trade Center attack in
1993 to the devastation in 2001. The authors, who now work for research
institutes, are more animated when they
contemplate the cosmic imperatives of religious fanaticism. But their
real expertise kicks in when they describe how the
White House staff tried, with a notable lack of success, to pull the
mulish national security bureaucracy into the hunt
for Al Qaeda.
''There are few more durable illusions in American life than the
omnipotent presidency,'' the authors write. ''Yet anyone
who has worked in the White House knows that the office has remarkably
little real power.'' White House aides, cabinet
secretaries, even the president are hard put to get the bureaucracy to
do their bidding. Inertia and ingrained
prejudices get in the way of any real policy shift that conflicts with
the inbred culture of a government agency. If the
White House pushes too hard, the bureaucracy knows how to push back, by
leaking to reporters or congressional
investigators eager for conflict and scandal.
At first slow to recognize the rise of Al Qaeda, Clinton's national
security staff was, by the late 1990's, in a state of
high agitation. The president himself was fixated on the risk of a germ
warfare attack. Though the authors are coy
about saying so, Clinton apparently gave the O.K. to kill Osama bin
Laden. The security council's energetic, sometimes
abrasive chief for counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, hectored the
bureaucracy to move against the terrorists. In 1998,
Clark and the national security adviser, Sandy Berger, led senior
officials through a ''tabletop'' exercise, war-gaming a
terrorist attack against America. ''Consciousness of the problem of
weapons of mass destruction terror rose almost
vertiginously,'' Benjamin and Simon write.
And yet the C.I.A., F.B.I. and military remained standoffish and
sluggish. The intelligence community knew that bin
Laden was somewhere in Afghanistan. A United States submarine cruised
outside the Persian Gulf, ready to lob a
cruise missile. Twice, the sub activated the gyroscopes of the
missile's guidance system in preparation to launch, but
the intelligence was never good enough to pull the trigger. It took
about six hours to get a cruise missile lined up to
fire, not fast enough to pin down the elusive bin Laden.
The White House did inquire, a little gingerly perhaps, into the
possibility of sending spies or soldiers into Afghanistan to
hunt for the Qaeda chiefs. The C.I.A. seemed reluctant to acknowledge
that it had a unit that could be used for such
special activities. Clinton administration officials assumed that the
C.I.A.'s paramilitary operatives were out-of-shape
has-beens. An unmanned drone, the Predator, was being developed to find
targets and fire missiles at them, but the
agency became bogged down in a squabble with the Air Force over who
would pay for the program. George Tenet,
the director of central intelligence, was also uneasy about getting his
agency back in the assassination business.
The uniformed military wanted to have nothing to do with a covert hit
job. President Clinton pushed them to try a
commando raid. He personally approached Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about ''a bunch
of black ninjas'' rappelling out of helicopters into a Qaeda camp. ''It
would get us enormous deterrence and show
those guys we're not afraid.'' According to the authors, Shelton
''blanched.'' The Pentagon came back with a long list
of excuses: a commando raid could be another Desert 1, the failed 1980
Iranian hostage rescue; a larger incursion
would really be an invasion, requiring tens of thousands of troops,
etc.
The authors reserve their greatest scorn for the F.B.I. ''From the
inside,'' they write, ''the F.B.I. was a disorganized
jumble of competing and unruly power centers; from the outside, it was
a surly colossus.'' The F.B.I. director, Louis
Freeh, was uncooperative in the extreme, while his agents sat on a
''trove of information'' about terrorism, including
''the longstanding interest of jihadists in airplanes.'' The bureau,
Benjamin and Simon argue, neither shared this
information with other investigative agencies nor did much to pursue
leads.
Timid or jaded bureaucrats do not get all the blame. When the president
authorized a cruise missile attack on a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan after American embassies in Africa were
bombed in 1998, the ever-cynical press just
assumed that Clinton was trying to ''wag the dog'' -- that is, divert
attention from the Lewinsky affair. Immersed in
Washington's culture of scandal, reporters refused to believe solid
evidence that the plant really was manufacturing a
deadly nerve agent. And the Bush administration, distracted by its
ideological agenda, loathing all things Clinton, was
indifferent to the warnings of outgoing Clinton staff members. The
authors portray the Bushites dithering over
terrorism right up to 9/11.
All that may be true. But did President Clinton really make full use of
the power of the presidency to goad -- or just
flat- out command -- the bureaucracy into action? Always suspect to the
military as a draft dodger, Clinton had lost
most of his moral authority by the time he was engulfed in the Lewinsky
scandal. Reading between the lines of this
otherwise incisive account, one wonders: if Clinton was so concerned
about terrorism, why wasn't he willing to take
political risks, to take on the bureaucracy and withstand the
inevitable leaks and whining in the press? It's not that the
intelligence community was helpless against terrorism. After 9/11,
Clinton aides were surprised to see that the C.I.A.
was able to field a very effective paramilitary operation in
Afghanistan. Army Special Forces fought with elan, mounting
cavalry charges while using laser targeting devices. The Predator flew
and knocked off Al Qaeda's military chief,
Muhammed Atef.
Is the current administration doing any better than the Clintonians?
Not really, the authors contend. Bush
administration officials are still futzing around with organizational
charts and allowing turf battles to go on ''as though
nothing had happened,'' they write. That judgment is too harsh. A
genuine effort to reform the intelligence community
is under way. Still, it remains true that bureaucratic cultures are
resistant to change. The war in Vietnam and
Congressional investigations into the F.B.I. and C.I.A. during the
Watergate period remain vivid memories in the
military and intelligence communities, where risk aversion is deeply
ingrained. Presidents and cabinet secretaries come
and go, while civil servants worry more about flaps that can get into
the press and damage their careers. Horrible to
say, but it may take a terrorist attack even more devastating than 9/11
to really shake things up.
Evan Thomas is an editor at Newsweek and the author of ''Robert
Kennedy, His Life.''
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