'Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Connecting the Dots

March 29, 2004
New York Times BOOK REVIEW
'Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars': Connecting the Dots
By JAMES RISEN

AGAINST ALL ENEMIES
Inside America's War on Terror.
By Richard A. Clarke.
304 pp. New York: The Free Press. $27.

GHOST WARS
The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001.
By Steve Coll.
695 pp. New York: The Penguin Press. $29.95.

Discounting the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored.

The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping good read.

The first - and by far the best - chapter is a heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White House on the morning of Sept. 11, when Washington suddenly came blinking into a bloody new world. I hope Clarke has sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. You can guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that historic morning.

By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave the order triggering the Continuity of Government procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed locations.

With Clarke at the helm of a secure videoconference network linking the White House with other key agencies, in quick succession thousands of commercial aircraft were grounded; the country's land and sea borders were closed; the military went to Defcon 3, its highest alert level in nearly 30 years; and the Russians were notified. ''Damn good thing I did that,'' Clarke quotes Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as telling him. ''Guess who was about to start an exercise of all their strategic nuclear forces?''

While Clarke and his aides were holding down the fort in the Situation Room and the president was flying around the country on Air Force One, Vice President Cheney, his wife and aides were holed up in a little-known bunker in the East Wing of the White House called the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. At one point that morning, Clarke went to the bunker to see Cheney; navigating his way into the vault past grim, shotgun-toting guards, he found that Lynne Cheney had turned down the volume on the television hooked up to the secure videoconference so she could listen to CNN.

The most controversial incident in ''Against All Enemies'' deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ''go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.''

Clarke said he was ''taken aback, incredulous.'' He told the president, ''Al Qaeda did this.''

''I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred. . . .'' After the president left, one of Clarke's aides said, ''Wolfowitz got to him.''

Within a few months of the attacks, Clarke's access clearly did begin to dwindle; White House officials played on his lack of firsthand knowledge of Iraq war planning to attack the credibility of his book. But the key allegation in the book - that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States - can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop.

''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective - and terrific - account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept. 11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.

Coll, the managing editor of The Washington Post, has given us what is certainly the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of Al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan. He has followed up that feat by threading together the complex roles played by diplomats and spies from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States into a coherent story explaining how Afghanistan became such a welcoming haven for Al Qaeda.

In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.''

Coll overlaps with Clarke in his detailed recounting of the mush that was the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy. Unlike Clarke, however, Coll doesn't have an ax to grind, and so offers a more evenhanded view of the internal battles between the White House, the C.I.A. and other agencies at a time when terrorism was not Washington's top priority. As a reporter who struggled to cover many of the twists and turns in counterterrorism policy that Coll describes, I find ''Ghost Wars'' provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions.

As Coll seeks to explain why the Clinton team never mounted a serious effort to go after Al Qaeda, even after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, he finds plenty of blame to go around: ''Clinton's National Security Council aides firmly believed that they were the aggressive ones on the Al Qaeda case, pursuing every possible avenue to get at bin Laden over calcified resistance or incompetence within the C.I.A. and Pentagon bureaucracies. From the other side of the Potomac, Clinton's White House often looked undisciplined, unfocused and uncertain.'' ''Ghost Wars'' also corroborates many of Clarke's assertions that counterterrorism policy was largely ignored by the new Bush administration before Sept. 11. Coll notes, as does Clarke, that the Bush team didn't hold its first cabinet-level meeting on Al Qaeda and Afghanistan until Sept. 4, one week before the twin towers fell.

Coll closes with the Sept. 9, 2001, murder of Ahmed Shah Massoud, an Afghan rebel leader who had been cooperating with the C.I.A. in its vain efforts to track bin Laden around Afghanistan. As with so many other warnings before it, the full significance of Massoud's murder was missed until it was too late. Here and elsewhere in ''Ghost Wars,'' Coll's riveting narrative makes the reader want to rip the page and yell at the American counterterrorism officials he describes - including Clarke - and tell them to watch out.
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James Risen is the author, with Milt Bearden, of ''The Main Enemy: The Inside Story of the C.I.A.'s Final Showdown With the K.G.B.'' He covers national security for The Times.