"We should have done more," he added.
"All of us who were in the Clinton administration, since September 11, have obviously thought a lot about whether we did everything we could, whether we did enough to deal with the threat posed to this country by Osama bin Laden in the wake of what we now know and what we saw on September 11," Talbott told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg.
"And the answer, of course, is no, we didn't," the longtime F.O.B. said. "Nobody could claim that we did enough - by definition, because the guy remained in action and came back to inflict a terrible harm on this nation. So, sure we should have done more."
Still, despite the stark assessment, Talbott insisted that "on the basis of what we knew at the time, we took the problem very seriously and took a lot of action."
"The Clinton administration, which I was part of for eight years, made a constant and assiduous effort to do something about the problem of international terrorism in general and the Osama bin Laden threat in particular," Talbott told Malzberg.
"The most egregious outrage that we suffered, of course, as a nation during that period was the bombing of the American embassies in East Africa, after which there was a prompt effort to use military action to get at Osama bin Laden's training camps and headquarters."
But, Talbott admitted, "it didn't work." He called for an official probe into the failures that led up to the 9/11 disaster.
"Obviously something went terribly wrong here that allowed this country to be vulnerable to the September 11 attack," he told the talk host. "And there is going to have to be a sober, responsible and very nonpartisan investigation of the whole chain of events so that we can fix the system," he said.
When asked specifically about a report in Sunday's Times of London that claimed the Clinton administration passed up three separate offers by Arab governments to hand over bin Laden, Talbott at first protested, "I don't know the specifics."
But in the next breath the former key Clinton foreign policy adviser suggested that legal technicalities had scuttled the bin Laden deals.
"Judgments had to be made all the time that weighed different factors. One of the factors was [whether] you have the legal basis to do X, Y or Z, particularly if it involves trying to get extradition from another country that might not be willing to extradite."
Other issues that came up, Talbott said, included questions about "the reliability of the sources of information - do we believe who's telling us X, Y or Z."
Also figuring in the mix: concerns about the nature of the country making the bin Laden offer. "What do we know about the regime that's offering to do a deal with us - are they sponsors of terror themselves," he explained.
Still, the former deputy secretary of state refused to be pinned down on the specifics on the Times report.
MALZBERG: Was there ever a scenario where bin Laden was offered to the United States and the State Department and the administration said, "No, because we don't have enough to indict him on"?
TALBOTT: It wasn't that simple and that's as good as you're going to get out of me, I'm afraid, Steve - because the situations that I know about and remember from my time there were simply more complicated than that. ...
What's going on, though, with some folks is that they're taking what we know now, applying it to situations that we faced then when we knew a lot less, and when a lot less had actually happened, and giving it a partisan spin. And that isn't going to get us anywhere as a nation. (End of excerpt)
Talbott appeared on Malzberg's show to discuss his new book, "The Age of Terror," featuring essays by eight different experts on terrorism, which he co-edited.
