Restless Giant, page 46
American intelligence personnel in the late 1990s realized that the World Trade Center in New York City, having been blasted in 1993, was one of a number of possible targets that terrorists might try to hit in the United States. By late 1998, they also knew that radical Muslim terrorists were considering—among a great many other ideas—hijacking of commercial planes and crashing them into buildings.104 As of early 1997, the CIA considered various schemes to capture or kill bin Laden. Clinton mounted diplomatic initiatives—with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the Taliban—aimed at persuading the Taliban to evict bin Laden so that he might be captured and put on trial.105 In early 1998, after Saddam Hussein had begun to expel U.N. arms inspectors, Clinton stepped up America’s military presence in the Persian Gulf region for possible war with Iraq. The president, widely criticized abroad as a war-monger, relented only when Hussein finally permitted U.N. arms inspectors to go through his palaces.
After the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Clinton authorized retaliatory cruise missile attacks on a suspected Al Qaeda guerrilla site in Afghanistan and on a pharmaceuticals plant in Sudan that was believed to be manufacturing chemical weapons. In December 1998, by which time Hussein had totally stopped U.N. arms inspections, Clinton asserted that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. Starting on December 16, American and British planes launched Operation Desert Fox, which featured four days of around-the-clock air attacks on Iraqi sites. Anglo-American raids resumed in January 1999 and continued, off and on, until the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Some of these raids were part of a broader counter-terrorism effort during Clinton’s second term, when Congress and executive officials slowly began to build up resources that they had allowed to dwindle following the end of the Cold War. Though it remained a source of energetic partisan dispute in later years whether funding for counter-terrorism rose or fell during the late 1990s, one apparently reliable estimate concluded that appropriations increased considerably—by 50 percent (to $9.7 billion) between fiscal 1998 and fiscal 2001.106 Some terrorist plans, such as so-called millennium plots to bomb Los Angeles Airport and American and Israeli tourists in Jordan in January 2000, were foiled. But an alert Border Patrol guard, not intelligence tips emanating from Washington, was the key to uncovering the plot in Los Angeles: In general, neither Clinton nor the intelligence bureaucracy succeeded in advancing national security.
Reluctant to risk American or Afghan operatives in efforts to kidnap bin Laden, Clinton was also nervous about being branded a “mad bomber.”107 Because he was acutely aware of a selective ban that Ford had ordered on governmentally backed assassinations in peacetime, he apparently refused to approve of such an effort against bin Laden.108 He was also unwilling to damage relations with the oil-rich Saudi regime, an important ally in the Middle East, and did not demand that the Saudis clamp down on terrorist groups believed to be operating in that hotbed of radical, anti-Western resentments.
Legal restrictions, as well as bureaucratic rivalries and miscommunication within the many American government agencies and departments concerned with intelligence, impeded well-coordinated policy formation against terrorism. The FBI, facing restrictions since 1976 on proactive investigations into the activities of domestic extremist groups, was ill informed about terrorist doings in America.109 Computers and other communications equipment at the FBI, which was supposed to foil domestic threats, were antiquated—to the extent that the agency had difficulty circulating information within its own offices, let alone sharing it with the CIA. Moreover, a little-noticed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed in 1977, had appeared to establish a “wall” of sorts against sharing of certain kinds of information between the CIA, which gathered and interpreted overseas intelligence for foreign policy purposes, and the FBI, a criminal investigation bureau. Relations between the two turf-conscious bureaucracies, never warm, remained cool in the 1990s. So did rivalries between the CIA and fourteen other federal intelligence offices, many of which were managed within the Defense Department. These Pentagon offices, employing more than 30,000 people, were estimated to control 80 percent of the American intelligence effort.110
In part because of blunders in the past—dating at least to the Bay of Pigs disaster—American intelligence agencies, notably the CIA, had allowed their use of covert activity to decline. They relied instead on high-tech methods, such as surveillance by satellites, for collecting information. For this reason, and because the United States trained relatively few operatives who were fluent in the languages of hostile nations, intelligence picked up on the ground was weak.111 Moreover, CIA intelligence-gatherers were often the agency’s chief analysts—a practice that impeded fresh evaluation of data. In 1998, the CIA did not discover that India was about to test nuclear bombs; when India did so, Pakistan followed, intensifying tensions between the two nations. America’s intelligence agencies failed to recognize until later that A. G. Khan, Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, was shipping centrifuges and nuclear goods to Iran, North Korea, and Libya.112
In any event, the Taliban had no desire to turn over bin Laden, whose training of terrorists and issuance of blood-curdling proclamations continued. The Clinton administration’s attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, provoking greater rage from bin Laden and his fellow radicals, were of dubious utility.113 With hindsight, it is arguable that the United States might have done well to develop well-financed social and economic policies aimed at improving the lot of oppressed people in the Middle East (and elsewhere)—policies that in the long run might have helped to diminish the fermentation of anti-Western rage in the Arab and Muslim worlds. The United States might also have engaged more aggressively in a war of ideas, as it had during the Cold War era, so as to encourage democratic yearnings among the people of authoritarian nations. It is especially clear in retrospect that the president (and Congress) could have done more to reform the substantial flaws in America’s intelligence gathering. Later events made it obvious that Clinton, who had poor working relationships with top military leaders (and with FBI director Louis Freeh), failed to lessen the likelihood of successful terrorist acts in the United States.
This is not to say, however, that the Clinton administration deserves especially harsh censure for its policies regarding terrorism. The sources of radical Muslim ideas, some of which emanated from fury against earlier American foreign policies in the Middle East—support of the shah of Iran, the Gulf War, backing of Israel—were deep, and surely not easy to counter in the short run. The threat of terrorism from groups such as Al Qaeda, while worrisome to government officials after 1996, was but one of many absorbing foreign policy and military concerns—anti-missile defense, Kosovo, Bosnia, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestine Liberation Organization—that devoured the administration’s time and energy. Subsequent probes into American intelligence identified memoranda that between the late 1990s and September 2001 had urgently warned top officials about bin Laden and Al Qaeda: One warning titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” was delivered to President George W. Bush in an intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001.114 But these warnings were among an avalanche of information about terrorism that tumbled into the in-boxes of officials who had to evaluate cyber-age data of all sorts.
It is always easier to assign blame after a disaster, such as the extraordinarily well executed hijackings that stunned the world on September 11, 2001, than it is to appreciate the complexities and uncertainties that face officials beforehand. Notwithstanding the tragedies that befell the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, the fact of the matter is that in the late 1990s, Americans, including most media sources, did not pay great attention to terrorist activities. Neither immigration officials nor the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) bolstered security in ways that were likely to succeed in detecting terrorists, or weapons in carry-on baggage. (In September 2001, only twelve suspected terrorists, of thousands so identified by the CIA and FBI, were on the FAA’s “no-fly” list.)115 Dramatic preemptive moves by the United States would likely have had little popular support during the late 1990s or 2000. Prior to 9/11/2001, neither Clinton nor Bush, his successor, dared to mount serious attacks against the Taliban, to order the assassination of bin Laden, or to impose truly tough measures at home concerning travel, immigration, or civil liberties.
The largest obstacle to dealing with threats from terrorism stemmed from what the 9/11 Commission emphasized in its final report of July 2004: a failure of imagination. It was difficult prior to 9/11 for Americans, including most high government officials, to imagine that terrorists had the courage or capacity to mount bold and coordinated attacks in the United States. No suicidal hijacking, for instance, had been carried out anywhere in the world for more than thirty 30 years, and none had ever occurred in the United States. As in 1941, when the Japanese managed a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, most Americans in the late 1990s (and until September 2001) had a false sense of security.
Nor did there seem to be any foolproof way to prevent terrorist activity. Afghanistan, for instance, had proved too confounding a place in the past for either the British or the Soviets to monitor, let alone to control. Some 8,000 miles distant from the United States, it was a landlocked nation where xenophobic jihadism had escalated during the struggles against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and where bitterly turf-conscious warlords controlled substantial areas of the countryside. Nearby countries, such as Pakistan, refused to confront the Taliban or to help in the capture of bin Laden. In that area of the world, as in many others, the sources of anti-western feeling remained almost unfathomably deep—and impossible to combat in the short run.
The advance of globalization, which required relatively open borders, made it tough to keep track of terrorists who jetted freely about and who would stop at nothing to achieve their goals. Technological developments, such as cell phones and the Internet, further facilitated terrorist communications. So did lax immigration procedures in the United States, which prided itself on being an open society, and where tourist visas and false identities were easy to acquire. America’s lengthy borders continued to be thinly policed and porous. Tourists from many countries needed no visas at all: They could enter the United States and stay for ninety days, after which they could disappear. It was simple for immigrants to blend illegally into the background, like the nineteen determined Muslim hijackers, fifteen of them of Saudi extraction, who wreaked such havoc in the United States on 9/11/2001. Most of these radicals had entered the United States with fraudulent passports; one had left and reentered the United States six times in 2000 and 2001.116
Unlike overseas dangers during the Cold War, when the primary sources of international violence—state-sponsored—had been relatively easy to identify, terrorist threats in the post–Cold War era sprang not only from secretive and authoritarian regimes but also from a host of semi-autonomous, stateless groups that were very hard to locate. By 2000, it was believed that agents connected in one way or another with Al Qaeda were operating in as many as sixty nations. Other terrorists seemed to move in and out of a wide range of secretive cells and anti-American groups. It was widely believed that bin Laden’s suicidal terrorists, not the Taliban, called the shots in many areas of Afghanistan.
For all these reasons, the United States remained vulnerable to terrorism when the Clinton administration left office in January 2001. Three additional reasons—beyond those cited above—help account for popular and official neglect that worsened this vulnerability. The first was the surging economy, which had helped to promote pride in American accomplishments and to spread widespread popular complacency about the future course of international developments, terrorism included. In those prosperous, self-indulgent times, neither the Congress nor the administration faced significant popular pressure to stiffen American defenses against violence from overseas.
The second was Clinton’s irresponsible and scandalous personal behavior, news of which burst into the public arena with headline-grabbing momentum in January 1998. The third was the partisan zeal with which the president’s Republican enemies, especially in Congress, thereafter tried to drive him from office.
The political recriminations that ensued riveted millions of Americans, often wrenching their attention from more serious matters, including terrorism. The partisan hassling and its aftermath unavoidably distracted the Congress as well as the president and his top advisers. When the political warfare abated a little after February 1999, at which point the embattled president finally outlasted his many foes, it left his administration in a wounded state. Though with the passage of time Clinton’s personal excesses may occupy a relatively small place in American textbooks, historians and others will necessarily wonder how much better the United States might have prepared against terrorism if the eyes of its political leaders—and of the media—had not been clouded by steamier concerns.
12
Impeachment and Electoral Crisis, 1998–2000
Thanks in large part to the influence of a family friend, who contributed generously to the Democratic Party, Monica Lewinsky secured an internship at the White House in July 1995. Raised in Brentwood—O. J. Simpson’s Los Angeles neighborhood—and a recent graduate of Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, she was then twenty-one years old. Once in the nation’s capital, she lived at the Watergate apartment complex. Four months later, on November 15, she and Bill Clinton had a tryst in the White House, the home, of course, of the president and his wife. This was the second day of the partial shutdown of the federal government that had stemmed from partisan battling over the budget that summer and fall, and the White House staff of 430 had temporarily shrunk to 90.
Their tryst was the first of ten meetings, nine of them involving Lewinsky performing oral sex, that the furtive couple arranged over the next sixteen months, most of them between November 15, 1995, and April 7, 1996, by which point Lewinsky, who had by then become a government employee, had been transferred to the Pentagon. Most of these rendezvous took place either in a small private study just off the Oval Office or in a windowless hallway outside the study. According to Lewinsky, the president telephoned her frequently, fifteen times to engage in phone sex. The couple also exchanged gifts. The last of their serious assignations took place on March 29, 1997, after which they had two meetings at the Oval Office, in August and December 1997, involving kissing.1
There the matter might have rested. Though Lewinsky was a bold and brazen young woman who flirted with the president, lifting up her skirt before him and flashing her thong underwear, and though Clinton was known for his roving eye, no one on the scene imagined that the president was engaging in oral sex next to the Oval Office. Until January 1998, the American public had no idea that such meetings might be taking place. If Clinton’s near-legendary luck had held out—as it might have done if he had been chief executive during pre-Watergate days when reporters had turned a relatively blind eye to the promiscuity of politicians—he would have joined a number of other American presidents who had engaged in extramarital relations without being publicly exposed while in office.
A complex set of developments deprived Clinton of such good fortune. One of these was the partisan zeal of conservative political enemies, who had long regarded him as a schemer and a womanizer. Well before January 1998, when the Lewinsky affair hit the headlines, the president had been forced to hire attorneys to contest two investigations into his conduct. Both had landed him in the glare of often sensational news coverage. One of these was the probe by Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel who in mid-1994 had begun to dig into the Clintons’ involvement in a range of matters, notably the Whitewater River land development project in Arkansas. The other was the civil suit that Paula Corbin Jones had filed in May 1994, alleging that as governor of Arkansas in 1991 he had sexually harassed her in a Little Rock hotel room.2
Though Clinton’s lawyers had fought these probes every step of the way, they had not been able to quash them. In May 1997, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton’s claim that the Constitution immunized him while in office from civil suits such as the one that Jones had initiated. It ruled that the case must go forward.3 Many legal analysts criticized this decision, arguing that it placed all future chief executives at risk of having to contend with time-consuming, potentially frivolous litigation alleging misbehavior that might have taken place before a president took office. The Court’s decision nonetheless stood, forcing Clinton and a battery of high-priced legal help to cope with the suit thereafter.4
Still, neither Starr nor the lawyers helping Jones began to learn much about Clinton’s involvement with Lewinsky until the fall of 1997. At that point Linda Tripp, a co-worker of Lewinsky’s at the Pentagon, became a major actor in the drama that was soon to unfold. Tripp, nearly fifty years old when she met Lewinsky in 1996, nursed a number of grudges, especially against Clinton and his aides, who had earlier moved her out of her secretarial position at the White House and sent her to the Pentagon. When she came across Lewinsky, a fellow exile at the Pentagon, she realized that her young colleague was infatuated with Clinton. Pretending to befriend her, she learned that Lewinsky had enjoyed a sexual relationship with the president.
