April 24, 2006, 10:46 a.m.
The Clinton Show
Even 24 can’t top the crazy things Clinton tried.

By William Hawkins

On the popular Fox network television series 24, the first half of the long and violent day of covert operative Jack Bauer has been spent hunting down the Chechen terrorists who where trying to unleash nerve gas on Los Angeles. The terrorists had earlier tried to assassinate the Russian president during his meeting with U.S. President Charles Logan in Los Angels to formalize a new antiterrorism alliance. Then it was revealed, in a story line that has taken many twists and turns, that President Logan is the real villain behind the day's events. So Bauer is now trying to foment a regime change in the White House.

This has sent the left-wing blogosphere into joyous fits. Conservative network Fox is running a series that portrays the president as the bad guy! One blogger tried to equate Logan's complicity in the assassination of former president David Palmer (who had discovered Logan's plot) with the alleged outing of CIA employee Valerie Plame (whose husband, Joe Wilson, “discovered” a Bush plot) by members of President George W. Bush's administration. And since Logan's scheme also involved gaining control of Central Asian oil, this led Chusid to link him and Bush as perpetrators of "unnecessary wars."

Prior to these recent developments, Logan was more often compared to another Republican president, Richard Nixon. A columnist in the Los Angeles Times was among those who saw it this way, calling Logan "a petty, fearful, calculating, smarmy president." Logan, who was previously vice president, assumed the presidency last season after Islamic terrorists shot down Air Force One. He was depicted as a weak politician — a contrast to previous presidents in the series, who were portrayed as tough-minded statesmen.

But it seems there is a closer comparison between Logan's plot and reality. It was revealed by new Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter James Risen in his book State of War. And it involves former Democratic president Bill Clinton.

In 24 Logan's plot was too clever by half. He arranges for the Chechens to obtain a large supply of nerve gas from an American lab and arranges for them to ship it back to their homeland. The Chechens are not fools, however, and suspect a trap. They uncover the U.S. agent who has infiltrated their ranks. They also disarm the triggering device that the White House was going to use to detonate the gas once it had arrived in the overseas terrorist lair. The objective was to wipe out the terrorist cell, but also use the group's possession of WMD as a pretext for intervention in Central Asia. For revenge, the Chechens try to use the gas to kill thousands of Americans.

In State of War, Risen reveals that Clinton also had an overly ambitious plot, which eventually backfired, involving assisting an enemy with WMDs. Operation Merlin had the CIA using a Russian atomic scientist, who had defected to the United States, to sell or give nuclear bomb blueprints to Iranian diplomats at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. The catch was that the plans for the TBA 480 "firing set" contained design errors that would send Iran's scientists down the wrong path and delay their development of weapons. The TBA 480 is a Russian device for creating the implosion that sets off the nuclear chain-reaction in a bomb. The Russian scientist, whose defection does not now seem as genuine as was supposed, spotted the flaws and offered to help Iran fix the problems. But even if he had not tipped off the Iranians, other Russian and Chinese experts are known to be helping Tehran, so the design flaws would likely have been spotted at some point.

Risen writes (page 195) that the Clinton-approved plan ended up handing Tehran "one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world, providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from rogue countries such as Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short." It probably did much to advance the day when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can truly boast that his nation had joined the world's nuclear club, as he tried to do on April 12. To fill out the analogy, Ahmadinejad is now threatening to kill thousands of Americans.

Truth can be as strange as fiction, at least when Bill Clinton is involved.

— William R. Hawkins is senior fellow for national-security studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council in Washington, D.C.

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