43* by Jeff Greenfield Read Free Book Online Page B

But this drone was armed, and the Hellfire
     it launched from four miles away hit its target in little more than a minute.
    The kill was confirmed: Osama bin Laden was dead.

Summer 2001
    Now that a Predator drone had removed bin Laden for good, there was a sense among
     some in the counterterrorism world that Al Qaeda’s morale had been crippled, that
     with the head of the snake cut off, the body would soon die.
    But Richard Clarke, for one, was far less optimistic. That same toxic stew of bureaucratic
     inertia, turf wars, risk-averse indecision, and pure ignorance that had delayed the
     strike against bin Laden for so long was a constant factor in the broader terrorism
     arena. The CIA held its information in an iron grip, rarely sharing what it knew with
     the FBI, Customs, or Immigration and Naturalization. For its part, the bureau, hobbled
     by a misunderstood Justice Department edict, operated with a “wall” that barred intelligence-gathering
     agents from sharing what they knew with criminal investigators. Moreover, their computers
     were years, perhaps decades, behind the times, incapable of even performing a simple
     Internet search. With such handicaps, it was a matter of blind luck—and the intuition
     of a customs official at a border crossing in Washington State—that had stopped Al
     Qaeda’s Millennium attack on LAX. When Ahmed Ressam was captured, Clarke and his team
     had reached an inescapable, unsettling conclusion: Foreign terrorist sleeper cells are present in the United States, and attacks on the
     U.S. are likely.
    What Clarke could not have known—what no one could have known—was that a decision
     by President Gore to make life a little more comfortable for Americans would make
     a coming strike immeasurably worse than it might have otherwise been.
    * * *
    “The only thing less reliable than an alarm clock that never rings,” one of Richard
     Clarke’s aides snapped, “is an alarm clock that always rings.” And in the spring and
     summer of 2001, the clock was never silent. Al Qaeda was preparing to strike Israel,
     Bahrain, and Kuwait; they were aiming at the G8 summit of world leaders in Genoa; there were reports
     of a massive strike on U.S. soil planned for the Fourth of July holiday, and the FAA
     was also warning of possible “airline hijackings to free terrorists incarcerated in
     the United Sates,” but the assumption was that those attacks would take place overseas,
     and the agency specifically added that there was “no indication that any group is
     currently thinking” of suicide hijackings.
    Far more significant, however, was a mind-set across the bureaucratic universe that
     ensured that, for all of President Gore’s urgent entreaties to take the terrorism
     threat seriously, such pleas would make little difference. The inherent nature of
     bureaucracy is that it is self-protective, risk-averse, governed by a powerful set
     of rules: protect your turf, cover your ass, resist all pressures to deviate from
     below or above. To reveal what you know is to risk the loss of authority, manpower,
     and funding.
    For example, beginning in President Clinton’s second term, the FBI and the CIA had
     mistakenly interpreted a Justice Department ruling to mean that a “wall” had been
     created between intelligence gathering and criminal investigation. The CIA could not
     share what it had learned about the suspicious activities of a potential terrorist
     with an FBI agent pursuing criminal leads; in fact, even within the bureau itself,
     that nonexistent wall governed behavior. (One agency official warned FBI agents that
     breaching the wall would be “a career-ender.”)
    That wall had permitted two Al Qaeda operatives to escape the attention of the INS
     when they applied for visas to enter the United States. It meant that Tom Wilshire,
     the CIA’s representative to the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Center, was
     specifically not allowed to tell his FBI