43* by Jeff Greenfield Read Free Book Online

for six hours? No? Then forget it. Once again, the brick wall of logistics had saved Osama bin Laden—at least in the
     short run. It quickly became obvious to Clarke, CIA director George Tenet, his deputy,
     Cofer Black, and others that the only way to attack bin Laden was to use the same
     device that had found him in the first place: the Predator. And that idea triggered
     yet another bureaucratic tug of war:
    Who should have control over an armed Predator? The CIA? No, said the Defense Department, that’s our turf. No, said one high-ranking CIA official, that would subject us to potential political disaster if a hit went awry. Who would bear the financial cost? The White House finally gave the CIA the authority,
     and then the technicians took over and found a weapon that fit the Predator to perfection:
     the Hellfire, a one-hundred-pound missile, armed with a twenty-pound warhead, that
     could fit under each of the Predator’s wings. It had a fifteen-year record of success
     against armored vehicles. Within a month of President Gore’s inauguration, the Predator
     had twice launched Hellfires with impressive accuracy at mock-ups of a known bin Laden
     encampment that had been constructed at a secret U.S. Air Force base somewhere in
     the Southwest. Now the United States had the means to locate Osama bin Laden with
     absolute certainty, and the means to strike him within minutes of finding him.
    The question now was one of political will. With the Defense Department insisting
     it must control this new weapon, with elements within the CIA shunning the power to
     deploy such a weapon, it would be up to the new president to decide whether to deploy
     it, when to deploy it, and who should deploy it.
    And on this spring morning, as Richard Clarke sat with his colleagues at that conference
     table in Room 302 of the Executive Office Building, he could barely repress his sense
     of impending triumph. Later that morning, he would convene a principals meeting, and
     that meeting would feature a surprise guest with a very specific agenda.
    * * *
    It was a small room in a sublevel floor of the White House West Wing, with only twenty-two
     seats: twelve of them around a table for the principals, ten more along the wood-paneled
     walls for the staff. At the head of the table was a “Big Daddy” chair where Richard
     Clarke usually sat, with the presidential seal directly behind him, a not-so-subtle
     way of reminding the participants that this was the real deal, that the president
     himself was right upstairs. The mood in the Situation Room reflected the world outside;
     when times were calm, the conversations would begin with casual chats and jocular
     remarks. (On one Saturday, when Clarke showed up in shorts and a T-shirt, Attorney
     General Janet Reno commented, “You have really muscular legs.”) Other times, as in
     December 1999, when fears of an Al Qaeda Millennium plot were high, then–national
     security advisor Sandy Berger had braced the gathering, saying in effect, “This is
     serious business—everybody pay attention, work your sources, put every scrap of information
     out where everyone else can see it.”
    Now, on this day, Clarke took a seat just to the left of the big chair.
    “Are we expecting a special guest?” asked CIA director Tenet.
    “Very special,” Clarke said.
    Just then, President Gore walked into the room.
    Once before, Al Gore had cut a Gordian knot that had tied up feuding government agencies.
     In 1996, as vice president, he had been tasked with the job of coordinating security
     policy for the Atlanta Olympics. With federal agencies in the midst of a typical bureaucratic
     food fight, Gore had instructed the FBI director to bring the feuding parties to a
     briefing room at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Unbeknownst to the director—or to anyone
     else except Clarke—Gore had come with a choreographed agenda, spelling out bluntly
     what each department would do and what share of the