You are, of course, correct about Clarke. Vintage Clarke from Frontline Interview re: John O'Neill and Clarke's fight to get the message that al Qaeda was the most dangerous threat to this country up front and center: Richard Clarke: I would go around the country to FBI offices and ask, "Is there an Al Qaeda presence in Chicago, in San Francisco, in Boston?" And typically the reaction I would get is, "What's Al Qaeda?"
But not with John. John knew what Al Qaeda was; he was among the first people to see the bin Laden threat. He believed there was a bin Laden network in the United States even if he couldn't prove it. So he was constantly trying to prove it, because of what he understood about the Al Qaeda network and the rest of the world, he said, "It's inconceivable that they're not here."
What did he understand that nobody else understood?
I think he understood, first of all, that Al Qaeda wasn't a nuisance -- that what Al Qaeda said in its documents and bin Laden's speeches was the truth. He said to me once, "You know, it's like Mein Kampf. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf when Hitler was just a jerk. No one took him seriously, so no one read the book, or if they read the book, they didn't believe he would try to do what was in the book. [John] said, "Bin Laden's just like this. When you read what this guy says he's going to do, he's serious. He is going to try to do it in the Middle East, and there are a lot of people who support him. A lot of people are giving this guy money. We have to take him seriously, because what he says he's going to do is to go to war with the United States."
Was he, were you, listened to?
Yes, slowly. Certainly after the embassy bombing in Africa in 1998, it was very obvious that what John was saying, what I was saying, was right: that this was more than a nuisance; that this was a real threat. But I don't think everyone came to the understanding that it was an existential threat. The question was, "This group is more than a nuisance, but are they worth going to war with? After all, they've only attacked two embassies. Maybe that's a cost of doing business. This kind of thing happens. Yes, we should spend some time some energy trying to get them, but it's not the number one priority we have." ...
I think if you ask most terrorism experts in the mid-1990s, "Name the major terrorist organizations that might be a threat to the United States," they would have said Hezbollah, which had a relationship with Iran. They would have said Hamas, which is a Palestinian group. Most people would not have said Al Qaeda. Most people wouldn't have known that there was an Al Qaeda.
If you ask them, "Well, what about this man bin Laden?" most people in the mid-1990s would have said, "Ah, yes, the terrorist financier." What O'Neill said was, "No, this man is not a financier. Yes, he's got some of his own money, and he's very good at raising money from other people. But that's not all he's about. The money is money for a purpose. The purpose is building a worldwide terrorist network based out of Afghanistan, initially based out of Sudan, but then moved to Afghanistan. A worldwide terrorist network, the point of which is going after the United States, after governments friendly to the United States, particularly in the Arab world." So O'Neill did see early on that this was more than just another terrorist group. It was a serious threat it was in the process of building. ...
In 1997, he gives the Chicago speech where he says, "We should expect an attack." He's talking in that same period of time -- or a little after -- about cells within the country. How common was this belief at FBI and NSA?
In 1997, I think there were only a handful of us who knew that there were Al Qaeda cells in the United States. When my boss, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, would ask the FBI in a formal meeting, "Is there an Al Qaeda presence in the United States?" their formal answer would be, "We don't know of one, and we don't think there is one." But if you asked O'Neill, or you had asked me, a few others, including some people in the CIA, the answer would have been, "We can't prove it yet, but we see the smoke, and where there's smoke, there's fire." Sure, there were cells. We weren't able to prove it at the time.
But what John O'Neill was trying to do was to get a momentum going in the FBI to look seriously for those cells, to look for the connections which, frankly, most FBI offices were not doing. It was not one of the priorities in most FBI field offices.
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