Since the attacks Sept. 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, questions have been raised about whether Clinton could have done more to stop bin Laden before he struck at the symbols of America's financial and military might. That issue is likely to be scrutinized for years.
Interviews with more than two dozen senior officials who worked in or with the Clinton administration on terrorist issues reveal an answer that lacks black-and-white clarity. The bottom line: The Clinton administration took significant steps against bin Laden but, reluctant to lose American lives and fearing a lack of public support, decided against the most aggressive responses.
Even Clinton's defenders acknowledge that, for much of his tenure, fighting terrorism wasn't his highest priority. In the campaign in 1992, he promised to fix the flagging U.S. economy, and in his first term, he devoted less time to foreign concerns. The inability of the CIA director to see the president face-to-face became the subject of White House jokes. In his second term, when bin Laden emerged as the mastermind of plots against Americans, Clinton was enmeshed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.
After bin Laden's final strike on Americans before Sept. 11 — the bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemeni port in October 2000 — counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke argued for a rain of missiles to retaliate for the deaths of 17 sailors. As a lame duck, the National Security Council staffer argued, what did Clinton have to lose? But, as they had before, Clinton and his most senior advisers decided the intelligence available wasn't good enough to pinpoint bin Laden's whereabouts and justify a missile attack.
"Clearly, we needed to do more: September the 11th happened," Clinton said in a speech Wednesday at Georgetown University without elaborating on what else might have been done. He defends his administration for doing all that was possible.
The issue of what Clinton did, or did not do, represents more than an exercise in finger-pointing. The House and Senate Intelligence Committees are expected to hold hearings to determine what lessons can be learned from the past. History's assessment of Clinton's presidency will depend in part on how he responded to an escalating terrorist threat that exploded soon after he left office — a judgment that could weigh more heavily on his legacy than even his impeachment.
Clinton already has railed to friends about the prospect that critics will try to blame him for the attacks Sept. 11. Officials from his administration are braced for a round of second-guessing as the country's first stunned reaction to the attacks fades.
"We can look back and say Osama bin Laden didn't get weaker, he got stronger" during Clinton's tenure, says Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a Clinton critic. "His network didn't get weaker, it got stronger."
Clinton officials say the administration did everything it could given uncertain intelligence, reluctant allies in the region and a public that hadn't yet been convinced by attacks on American soil that terrorism was the nation's top concern. The attacks Sept. 11 changed everything, they say. Pakistan became a public ally; Congress enacted proposals it had rejected before to expand law enforcement powers; Americans made restoring a sense of safety their first priority.
A series of commissions on terrorism in recent years had issued warnings and offered plans in reports that were gathering dust on shelves until Sept. 11.
"It's a different perspective when things happen far away and when they happen downtown," says former New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman, a Republican who headed Clinton's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and co-chaired a bipartisan commission on terrorism. "I suppose that the Clinton administration could have taken a much harder, tougher line, but I wonder whether or not it would have been supported."
Critics contend that Clinton should have done more to take on terrorism and transform public opinion, even in the absence of a catastrophic attack.
"Admittedly, it's easier to show leadership after Sept. 11, (but) that's what leaders are for," says L. Paul Bremer, the top counterterrorism official in the Reagan administration and head of a congressional commission on terrorism. "Instead of showing strength, they showed weakness. The administration didn't have a very clear strategy to fight terrorism, and it doesn't seem to have been a high priority."
Top Clinton officials and the former president himself strongly dispute any charge of negligence. (Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, declined to be interviewed for this article.)
"This was absolutely a top priority for the Clinton administration," former national security adviser Samuel Berger says. Once bin Laden was identified as a serious threat, he says, "Not a day went by that we did not focus on this, and it was high on the president's list, too."
During Clinton's tenure, officials note, the budget for counterterrorism was tripled, a cross-agency counterterrorism center was established, two anti-terrorism bills were passed and a missile strike was launched.
"We did an incredible amount to get things started in dealing with this war on terrorism," former secretary of State Madeleine Albright says.
But Clinton's actions were complicated by domestic political turmoil, including the Lewinsky scandal and the 2000 election recount. He was hesitant throughout his presidency to deploy troops and risk casualties. Bureaucratic disputes flared among intelligence agencies. And his priorities generally centered on domestic issues, not foreign ones.
"I think I've done what I'm sure the Bush administration has done over their period of time: You replay everything in your mind, and you ask, 'Was there anything else that could have been done?' " Clinton said last month in response to a question at an appearance before the Washington Society of Association Executives. "I tried to take Mr. bin Laden out of the picture for the last 4 years-plus I was in office and before any Americans had been killed by him. I don't think I was either stupid or inattentive, so he is a formidable adversary."
Some Clinton partisans say any criticism that not enough was done before Sept. 11 should be shared with President Bush, who had been in office for 8 months when the attacks took place. Bush also didn't order retaliation for the Cole bombing, although the investigation in Yemen continued on his watch. The argument for retaliation presumably grew stronger as evidence mounted of bin Laden's involvement, they say.
"We started the investigation in October," Albright says. "We arranged the diplomatic aspects of it. The election was in November. We did what we could with the time we had. What has happened since?" Also during Bush's tenure, the FBI and CIA failed to pick up clues that the worst terrorist assault in the nation's history, years in the making, was about to be unleashed.
Most Americans fault both administrations. In a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll early last month, three of four said Clinton didn't do enough as president to capture or kill bin Laden. Although Bush gets sky-high approval ratings for the job he's doing now, six of 10 said he didn't do enough before the devastating attacks, either. The poll was conducted just before the U.S. bombing campaign on Afghanistan began.
"I don't think that this administration looked at it in the beginning any differently than the previous administration," says Brent Scowcroft, who heads a Bush panel studying the intelligence community and chairs Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. "Terrorism was something we tried to deal with, but it's something that affected other countries, not us." The catastrophe on Sept. 11, he says, "was a big wake-up call" for everyone.
Clinton won the White House in 1992 in an election that seemed to prove the limited political benefits of making foreign policy a priority. He denied the first President Bush a second term despite the Persian Gulf War victory over Iraq's Saddam Hussein.
Clinton made it clear he would focus first on the domestic economy — "like a laser," he said — and then would tackle the health care overhaul he had promised during the campaign. He initially left foreign policy largely to the State Department, refusing even to schedule a standing weekly meeting with his first secretary of State, Warren Christopher.
James Woolsey, Clinton's first CIA director, says he never met privately with Clinton after their initial interview. When a small plane crashed on the White House grounds in 1994, "the joke inside the White House was, 'That must be Woolsey, still trying to get an appointment,' " Woolsey recalls.
"Clinton was quite uninterested in foreign policy, which would include intelligence matters as well," says Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist who worked on an intelligence commission appointed by Clinton in 1994. Johnson says Clinton paid little attention to the commission or its final report, issued in 1996. The commission recommended "evolutionary" changes that would reduce staffing at some of the spy services and give the CIA director more power to referee disputes among agencies over money, power and turf.
"I think Clinton was riveted in on 'the economy, stupid,' and didn't really follow foreign policy unless it hit him over the head," Johnson says. "It took really a crisis and a drumbeat in the media suggesting he better pay attention to these things to get him to do so."
There were crises. The World Trade Center was damaged by a truck bomb in February 1993. In October of 1993, Army Rangers deployed in Somalia for a U.N.-sanctioned mission, authorized by the elder Bush, came under deadly fire. Eighteen were killed. A dead soldier's body was dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
Within a few days, the president announced that U.S. participation in the Somali campaign would end by March 31, 1994.
The impact would echo through his time in office.
Aides say the experience in Somalia reinforced Clinton's caution about military action abroad. He was convinced that military missions carried great peril and that the American public wouldn't accept even small numbers of U.S. casualties.
For bin Laden, who provided weapons and warriors for the unrest in Mogadishu, there were lessons from Somalia as well. He had fought against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the mujahedin fighters' success in sending Soviet troops packing had surprised and encouraged him. Experts say he drew similar conclusions — that superpowers could be vanquished, sometimes with surprising ease — from the limited U.S. response in Somalia. "Our boys ... went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war," bin Laden said in a rare interview, conducted in 1998 by ABC at a mountaintop camp in Afghanistan. "Our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier, and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging."
By 1995, U.S. intelligence officials were paying attention to bin Laden because of his multimillion-dollar family fortune, his hostility to the United States and his ties to known terrorist groups. "He was considered a dangerous man," recalls Philip Wilcox, the top counterterrorism official at the State Department at the time. Senior administration officials were intrigued when Sudan, eager to improve its dismal relations with the United States, secretly offered in early 1995 to turn over bin Laden to the Saudi government, which had exiled him 4 years earlier. But the Saudis declined.
"They were afraid it was too much of a hot potato, and I understand where they were," Clinton recalled at his speech to association executives. He said the United States was helpless to take up Sudan on the offer directly: "We couldn't indict him then because he hadn't killed anybody in America. He hadn't done anything to us." (Only in 1996 would bin Laden's links to the first World Trade Center bombing and the Somali battle become known.) In retrospect, some critics call the administration's decision to demur wrongheaded and inexplicable.
"We felt we had to fight him with Marquess of Queensberry rules," says Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Newt Gingrich, then speaker of the House, contemptuously contrasts the administration's by-the-book ruling with the legal gymnastics Clinton later would use during the Lewinsky scandal. "The administration could explain that perjury was not a crime, and could explain the key is how to interpret the word 'is,' then tells you they couldn't find a lawyer who would say, 'Grab him?' " the Georgia Republican says. "You just have to wonder, were these people consciously gathering in a room to remain impotent?"
In response, Wilcox says it's "outrageous" to suggest that the "United States Department of Justice should distort American laws and due process in order to cook up phony charges against people."
But bin Laden soon would be linked to the killing of Americans. Over time, intelligence officials tied him to the bombing in November 1995 of a military headquarters in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five Americans and the bombing in June 1996 of the Khobar Towers military barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 Americans. The FBI investigations that followed were stalemated. FBI Director Louis Freeh, who went to Saudi Arabia several times to press the inquiry, complained that the Saudis refused to share evidence or allow access to suspects. After the first bombing, the Saudis had beheaded several suspects despite FBI requests to interview them. When he retired last spring, Freeh told The New Yorker that the Khobar Towers bombing was "the only unfinished piece of business that I have."
Secret talks by State Department officials with the Taliban, the ruling regime in Afghanistan thought to be harboring bin Laden, went nowhere.
A more devastating terrorist attack 2 years later would prompt the administration to ratchet up its response, at least for a while.
Bin Laden quickly was identified as the prime suspect when truck bombs destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. The toll was much higher than before: 224 people killed, including 12 Americans, and more than 5,000 injured.
"No matter how long it takes or where it takes us," Clinton vowed then, "we will pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done."
Two weeks after the bombings, Clinton ordered Tomahawk cruise missile strikes on a suspected chemical weapons factory in Sudan and a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan. Intelligence reports had indicated bin Laden would be meeting there with 200 to 300 al-Qa'eda agents.
But bin Laden and most of his lieutenants had left before the missiles fell, and the Sudanese and the factory's owner denied the facility produced chemical weapons. Top Clinton officials were stung by the failure of an attack they had hoped would be a triumph. Some analysts scoffed that the attacks made bin Laden a hero in the Islamic world. The experience would make members of the Clinton team even more cautious about moving without the sort of convincing intelligence that, in the end, they would never have.
A list of more ambitious military options was prepared and reviewed, but not even the Pentagon was enthusiastic about implementing them, senior Defense officials say. The city of Kandahar, the Taliban's spiritual center, could be bombed to the ground, but there was no guarantee that bin Laden or his inner circle would be there. Special operations forces could make a helicopter assault by night, but that raised sobering images of President Carter's humiliating attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran.
Clinton and his top aides judged the risks too high and the possibility of success too low unless there was more precise intelligence pinpointing bin Laden's whereabouts. That proved to be impossible to get. Bin Laden was constantly on the move and trusted only an inner circle of aides. The intelligence services had few informants on the ground in Afghanistan; critics say a Clinton administration rule imposed in 1995 that set restrictions on the use of unsavory characters had sent a message to field agents to be cautious in recruitment.
"We did what we could given the support and the intelligence we had, and we consumed all the intelligence we had," Albright says.
"There was never a disagreement among the military people, the intelligence people or the diplomatic people that (if) we had sufficient intelligence to act again," Berger says. "We were ready and willing, but while we had some hopeful moments, we never reached the point where we had a high confidence of success."
The administration did take other steps. Soon after the embassy bombings, Justice Department lawyers concluded that the United States legally could try to kill bin Laden, despite a long-standing executive order banning assassinations, because he was judged to be in a state of war with the United States. In 1998, Clinton moved to clamp down on the financial network that supported the al-Qa'eda network. He and Gore in private sessions pressed the Saudis to cooperate, but they were unsuccessful. In 1999, Clinton authorized CIA agents to work with rebel forces in Afghanistan.
The CIA also secretly began to train Pakistani commandos for a covert operation in Afghanistan. But when Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was overthrown in a military coup later that year, the new government withdrew its cooperation. The plan was never attempted. "We tried to get the Pakistanis involved in this, realizing that it was a difficult thing for them," Clinton said. "They had both the greatest opportunity but the greatest political risk in getting him."
Critics argue, however, that if Clinton were serious about getting bin Laden, he would have pushed the intelligence community harder to pinpoint his location and deployed U.S. troops to accomplish the mission.
Clinton "shares a portion of the blame for Sept. 11 and its tragic aftermath," says retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, author of Fighting for the Future, a book on terrorism and other 21st century threats. He says the president never "threw the screaming fits" demanding better intelligence and more options that would have made it clear within his administration that stopping bin Laden was an overriding priority.
Gingrich complains that, when push came to shove, Clinton never delivered on his defiant rhetoric against terrorism. In behind-the-scenes budget negotiations in 1998, after the embassy bombings, the speaker says he insisted on $1.4 billion in emergency funding for the CIA over administration objections, an account supported by an intelligence official. Former Clinton budget director Jacob Lew says the administration worked with Congress to reach an agreement both sides could support, including the additional agency funding. The emergency allocation wasn't renewed the next year, when Gingrich had left office.
"The Clinton administration understood the need to send a message (by firing the missiles), and I very much supported that," says Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a former CIA operative. "Now, the next step is, did they follow up after they sent the message? And the answer there is a little grayer, a little less laudatory for the administration."
He calls it a case study in "too little, too late, in a way."
After the Cole was bombed and nearly sunk in October 2000, FBI investigators were dispatched to Yemen within hours. But they encountered roadblocks, even after Clinton made two stern phone calls to the president of Yemen demanding more cooperation. Yemeni officials arrested eight people, but none has been put on trial. The debate about what to do in the wake of the Cole attack was emblematic of the push-and-pull that marked the efforts throughout Clinton's term to battle terrorism. Among the factors:
In his final weeks in office, Clinton focused intensely on the tantalizing prospects, ultimately unfulfilled, of reaching a Mideast peace deal. A U.S. attack in the region almost certainly would have destroyed those fragile hopes. Clinton was also at the center of a whirlwind of lobbying for last-minute presidential pardons. His second term ended with no military response to the deaths of the 17 U.S. sailors.
"We were all waiting for the hammer to fall after the Cole," Peters says, "and nothing happened."
