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Bill O'Reilly Talks to Author Tom Clancy
Friday, September 21, 2001
This is a partial transcript from The O'Reilly
Factor, September 20, 2001.
BILL O'REILLY, HOST: Thanks for staying with us. I'm Bill O'Reilly. In the second "Personal Story" segment tonight, mega-selling author Tom Clancy. In his novel Debt of Honor, Mr. Clancy wrote of a terrorist attack on the president and Congress by a fanatic in a jet plane. Tom Clancy joins us now from Owings Mills, Maryland. You know, I thought of you, as I told you in the break, about an hour after
that happened, because I'm a big fan, and I have Debt of Honor, the passage,
right here.
It is so close to what really happened. And my question in my mind was, if
Tom Clancy can write about this and put forth a very plausible scenario, and I
know all the intelligence guys in the United States read your books, why weren't
they more -- why wasn't there more urgency to make it more difficult to do what
happened?
TOM CLANCY, AUTHOR: Bill, that's the price you pay for living in a free
society, as we have today. If you want to go be like the Soviet Union, where it
was illegal, for example, to take a photograph of a train station, just -- you
know, you can restrict our civil liberties that far, but you end up being like
the Soviet Union was, and that was a failure.
O'REILLY: But the airline security situation was abysmal, and now we're
going to change it, and now we'll have impenetrable doors, and better screening
devices. But, you know, in your book, you made it -- you laid it out, how this
could happen, and unfortunately it happened. Now...
CLANCY: Well, it was a very different -- it was a very different scenario
in my book. It had very little to do with this and I rather doubt Usama bin
Laden is a Tom Clancy fan.
O'REILLY: But you must know that the way you laid it out was pretty eerie.
Now, when you researched your book, and you research all your books, and
that's why people read them, because they're very realistic and you get into the
nuts and bolts of everything -- did you see, did you see weaknesses that
terrorists could exploit in this country?
CLANCY: No, in my case the terrorist in question was an airline pilot who
worked the air traffic control system. These guys just evaded that completely.
And, in fact, on the continental air defense side of this, the F-15, one or two
F-15's out of Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod actually rolled off into the air
when the first of the towers was hit and was about 70 miles away from New York
when the second tower was hit.
So, the Air Force was on the case about as well as they could possibly have
been, given the circumstances.
O'REILLY: Do you believe that our defenses against terrorism were weak?
CLANCY: You can't mount surface to air missile batteries on office
buildings. You just can't do it, Bill.
O'REILLY: But compared to El Al, for example, our security on the airlines
is nowhere near what theirs was.
CLANCY: Yeah, but do we want to emulate Israel in everything we do? I don't
think so. You just had a fellow on talking about the Mossad and how great they
are. Well, maybe so. The Mossad's been whacking people for 30 years and they're
still at war. So, their tactic is ineffective in achieving the goal, which is a
happy and peaceful state of affairs for the state of Israel. It just hasn't
happened. We do not want to emulate Mossad.
O'REILLY: All right, now, the intelligence agencies have been criticized
here...
CLANCY: No, they're all -- Bill, intelligence agencies are always
criticized by the people who cripple them to begin with.
O'REILLY: All right, but are they crippled? That was my question. Do you
believe they're crippled?
CLANCY: They were crippled in the 1970's when Senator Frank Church held his
hearings about the CIA attempts to kill Castro, which he didn't say was run by
Robert F. Kennedy. I mean, you have to remember, only good things came out of
Camelot, so you can't say the Kennedy's were trying to do this.
O'REILLY: So, as far back as the '70's, you believe that the capability of
U.S. intelligence was being impaired by the politicians.
CLANCY: The CIA's directorate of operations, which generates what we call
human intelligence, and the D.O., the director of operations, they're the actual
field spooks who actually go out into the field and talk to people and get human
intelligence information, they were gutted. First, as a result of the Church
Committee hearings and secondly by Stansfield Turner, who was appointed by Jimmy
Carter in the late '70's.
That capability, Bill, has never been reestablished, and it takes 10 years
to build it up.
O'REILLY: Was there a reason that Turner and Carter -- was their a reason
why Turner and Carter wanted a weaker intelligence?
CLANCY: It's politically correct.
O'REILLY: Simple as that?
CLANCY: I think so. The political left is, you know, they deal in symbols
rather than reality. The general difference between conservatives and liberals
is liberals like pretty pictures and conservatives like to build bridges that
people can drive across.
And conservatives are indeed conservative because if the bridge falls down,
people die. Where as the liberals figure, oh, we can always build a nice
memorial to them and make people forget it happened and it was our fault.
They're very good at making people forget it was their fault, all right.
The CIA was gutted by people on the political left who don't like
intelligence operations, and as a result of that, as an indirect result of that,
we've lost 5,000 citizens last week.
O'REILLY: How about the FBI? They don't seem to be nearly as efficient and
effective as they used to be. Same situation?
CLANCY: Disagree. The FBI is one of our premier agencies and they've
developed a whole lot of information in this case already. They're probably the
best police agency in the whole world. But, you know, a police agency by its
very nature is reactive rather than proactive. It's not an intelligence
gathering organization. It reacts to crimes. It investigates crimes.
O'REILLY: Yeah, but one of the charges of the FBI is to protect us from
internal terrorism, as you know, and...
CLANCY: They're awfully good.
O'REILLY: Well, they were clueless this time. And then they had the big
spy, you know, that was operating for 15 years for Russia and they had all the
problems in the agency with Mr. Clinton and you couldn't get a straight answer
out of them. I don't know, I'm not there.
CLANCY: OK, Bill. Hang on. How perfect is the news media?
O'REILLY: Not perfect at all, but see, our charge is not to protect
anybody.
CLANCY: The trouble with -- the trouble with any human institution is it's
vulnerable to imperfections. There aren't too many perfect people in the world.
O'REILLY: So, you are confident that the FBI is up to protecting us
internally?
CLANCY: Oh, they're the best in the world.
O'REILLY: OK.
CLANCY: Without a doubt.
O'REILLY: Now, I've been banging this drum for more than a year, and I did
a "Talking Points" tonight on it, is that the borders are so chaotic and they're
not secured, and we're very vulnerable from both Canada and Mexico for people
who want to bring stuff in and come in here, and the INS can't control it. Am I
wrong there?
CLANCY: No, it's one of the problems of, you know, one of the consequences
of living in a free and open society. You know, the Statue of Liberty invites
people in. She's not holding a machine gun to keep people away.
O'REILLY: But it's a changing world now. It's not what it was by the turn
of the century. It's now, people want to hurt us.
CLANCY: Bill, if we change our society because of what some lunatics do to
us, then the lunatics win. The object of a terrorist is to create political
change in the society which he targets. If we change, the terrorist wins. If we
keep to our principles and we remember that we are the United States of America,
we win.
O'REILLY: But what if we improve, Mr. Clancy? You wrote a book on drug
trafficking. I'm telling you, if you put the military on the southern border,
you'd stop a lot of that drug trafficking. It might go somewhere else, but you'd
also stop a lot of the chaos down there. There's no will to do that. And I don't
think that infringes on any Americans right at all.
CLANCY: Our border with Mexico is, what, about 2,000 miles? Because of all
the convolutions? How many troops is it going to take to secure this?
O'REILLY: You know, I don't know, but you can, you can do a better job than
they're doing, which is a terrible job. And it's not their fault. Border patrol
is out-manned. They can't do it. INS can't do it. You see what I'm saying? If we
can improve because of this...
CLANCY: But Bill -- Bill, when you have the military perform a police
function, what you get is a disaster.
O'REILLY: Well, we're doing it in three countries now, Kosovo, Bosnia and
Korea. We're guarding their borders.
CLANCY: Korea is a war -- is a true military function. You don't use
soldiers to be cops because soldiers don't know how to be cops. You have
policemen to be policemen, you have soldiers to be soldiers. There are different
function.
The Brits tried to do that in Northern Ireland using the British Army in a
police capacity, and it was a disaster.
O'REILLY: Yeah, but most nations have military presence on their borders,
as you know, and I think we could train our soldiers to go down there and do
that job. Not to take it over, but just to be a presence down there to help the
border patrol.
CLANCY: Do you want American soldiers killing Mexicans who are just coming
to America because they want to work?
O'REILLY: No. I want them stopping them from coming in. If they come in,
round them up and send them right back. And I want them to stop the drug
traffic.
CLANCY: Soldiers don't -- Bill, soldiers don't arrest people, soldiers kill
people. That's their function.
O'REILLY: All right, well, we can change that, though. There are
peace-keeping missions, you know. I mean, you're kind of a black and white guy,
Tom, and I like that a little bit, but I'm saying, we got a big problem with the
border here and if we don't solve it, we're going to have more terrorist stuff,
because they're going to come in through the poorest borders.
CLANCY: Maybe, OK. But if you can master that, figure out how a gal could
be half-pregnant, because it just doesn't work that way. It's never worked that
way.
O'REILLY: So, you don't see anything we can do with the borders at all?
CLANCY: As a practical matter, no. The way you close off the border with
Mexico is make Mexico more prosperous so Americans go down there to work.
O'REILLY: Yeah, we can't make Mexico more prosperous. That's up to Mexico.
But I -- see, I'm not as fatalistic as you are.
Do you expect more terrorist activity in the United States?
CLANCY: Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm -- I am not entirely
convinced that there were only four aircraft targeted last week. There may well
have been one or two more that were targeted for additional suicide missions.
O'REILLY: Yeah, it looks like they grabbed some guys in Detroit that were
backup guys that were supposed to do something, but -- so, you wouldn't be
surprised if something else happens here?
CLANCY: No. We're up against a formidable adversary. I don't know if Usama
bin Laden is the spark plug behind this, but whoever planned these operations
was pretty effective at it. I mean, look, we got hit hard and we got hit hard
because the guys knew what the hell they were doing.
O'REILLY: Yeah, there's no question about that. And we've got to hit hard
back.
Tom, we appreciate it very much. I was going to call you Mr. Clancy, but
you told me to call you Tom, so I will. We appreciate it.
CLANCY: My pleasure, Bill, you have a good one.
O'REILLY: All right, a pleasure.
Archibald Bard
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