Here is a review of a book we have discussed here. The Authors were on C-SPAN this morning.
History of anti-terror conflict changes
Book by former top National Security Council staff describe missteps
In a new history of the conflict with al-Qaida, two central participants from the Clinton White House depict a dysfunctional war in which the U.S. effort was crippled by FBI secrecy and thwarted by reluctant bureaucrats in the Justice, Treasury and Defense departments. Under President Bush, the authors quote his first chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as saying, terrorism moved "to the back burner" until the catastrophe of Sept. 11.
The authors, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, were director and senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff during Bill Clinton's second term. Their book, "The Age of Sacred Terror," was published this week by Random House.
Among many episodes depicting the FBI as "a surly colossus" is a 1999 encounter with agents Michael Rolince and Steve Jennings at the White House. Rolince and Jennings represented the FBI on an interagency panel aimed at sharing information and synchronizing efforts against Muslim militants. One of the authors -- the book does not say which -- discovered intelligence in an old file describing a fund-raising visit to the United States in the early 1990s by Ayman Zawahiri, an Egyptian physician who is thought to be al-Qaida's leader after Osama bin Laden.
"I couldn't believe it," the author told the two agents. "Did you know that?"
Rolince and Jennings, the book says, answered only with "wary nods."
"Well, if he was here, someone was handling his travel and arranging his meetings and someone was giving him money," the author continued. "Do you know who these people are? Do you have them covered?"
"Yeah, yeah, we know," the book quotes the agents as replying. "Don't worry about it. We got it covered."
The authors later learned that one of Zawahiri's American hosts had been Ali Mohamed, a U.S. Army sergeant who already was in custody as the White House conversation took place. But the FBI did not pursue the connection, the authors write, and rejected offers of new authority to monitor activity in radical mosques. What the FBI did learn about al-Qaida it did not share.
"For the NSC staff working on counterterrorism, this was crippling," Benjamin and Simon write, noting that White House received "a hundred or more reports" each day from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and State Department. "There was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information, contributed nothing to the White House's understanding of al-Qaida."
Louis Freeh, the FBI director, is depicted in the book as a man blinded by animus toward Clinton and manipulated by dishonest reports from a Saudi diplomat who sought to deepen Freeh's rift with the White House. Benjamin and Simon write that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, falsely told Freeh that Clinton's political appointees wanted to soft-pedal any Iranian role in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers, a U.S. military barracks. In fact, the authors write, it was the Saudis who feared arousing their powerful neighbor. Bandar, they write, "played Iago to Freeh's Othello, seeking to sow dissension" among the Americans to divert them from asking hard questions of the Saudi government.
Freeh did not return a telephone call. FBI spokesman John Iannarelli said the bureau would have no comment on the book. The Saudi embassy has consistently declined to discuss the case.
Clinton is depicted as eager to do more against al-Qaida. Soon after the twin embassy bombings of August 1998 in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, the authors write, Clinton approached Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the Cabinet Room. "You know, it would scare the (expletive) out of al-Qaida if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp," Clinton is quoted as saying.
Shelton, the authors write, returned with a detailed briefing on why a raid by Special Forces could not work. The authors contend that Gen. Anthony Zinni, chief of U.S. Central Command, was the principal obstacle to putting "boots on the ground" in Afghanistan. Though Clinton and his top advisers believed otherwise, Simon and Benjamin write, neither the Joint Staff nor Central Command did any "formal planning for a mission to capture the al-Qaida leadership."
"Sacred Terror" adds new details to a previously reported rift between the Air Force and the CIA that grounded the most promising new weapon of the war on terror. In a dozen flights of unmanned Predator drones over Afghanistan, the authors write, the CIA believed it had located bin Laden three times. One Predator, however, crashed, and the Air Force and CIA couldn't agree on who would pay for it or for future lost drones. When an armed version was developed, capable of finding bin Laden and shooting at him immediately, the CIA and the Air Force couldn't agree who would control it. For nearly a year, the Predator did not fly. The authors provide a vivid, though unsourced, account of a Sept. 4, 2001, meeting in which Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet said his agency would operate such a weapon "over his dead body."
That meeting, the first of the Bush national security cabinet on terrorism, did decide that the CIA should arm Uzbek and Tajik enemies of the Taliban. But it was left to the CIA and the Office of Management and Budget to decide, the authors write, who would pay for it -- a dispute that left the program unfunded before Sept. 11.
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