Richard Clarke, March 20, 2002:

Frontline: In January 2001, you wrote a memo where you basically stated there are more attacks coming, [that] Al Qaeda cells are here. What was that memo? What was the reason for it looking back at it now? How right did you get it?
I think the intelligence community, the FBI, were unanimous, certainly throughout the year 2000 into 2001, that there was in fact a very widespread Al Qaeda network around the world in probably between 50-60 countries — that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan; that we didn’t really know who those people were. We didn’t have names for very many of them, and we didn’t know where they were; but since bin Laden kept saying the United States was the target, the United States was the enemy, that we had to expect an increasing rate of sophistication of attacks by this large Al Qaeda network against the United States.
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Some also say that due to the Lewinsky scandal, more action perhaps was never undertaken. In your eyes?
The interagency group on which I sat and John O’Neill sat — we never asked for a particular action to be authorized and were refused. We were never refused. Any time we took a proposal to higher authority, with one or two exceptions, it was approved….
But didn’t you push for military action after the Cole?
Yes, that’s one of the exceptions.
How important is that exception?
I believe that, had we destroyed the terrorist camps in Afghanistan earlier, that the conveyor belt that was producing terrorists sending them out around the world would have been destroyed. So many, many trained and indoctrinated Al Qaeda terrorists, which now we have to hunt down country by country, many of them would not be trained and would not be indoctrinated, because there wouldn’t have been a safe place to do it if we had destroyed the camps earlier.
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Without intelligence operatives on the ground in these organizations, how in the end does one stop something like this? If you look back on it now and you had one wish, you could have had one thing done, what would it have been?
Blow up the camps and take out their sanctuary. Eliminate their safe haven, eliminate their infrastructure. They would have been a hell of a lot less capable of recruiting people. Their whole “Come to Afghanistan where you’ll be safe and you’ll be trained,” well, that wouldn’t have worked if every time they got a camp together, it was blown up by the United States. That’s the one thing that we recommended that didn’t happen — the one thing in retrospect I wish had happened.
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A lot of people looked at Sept. 11, and said “Massive intelligence failure. Haven’t seen an intelligence failure like this since Pearl Harbor.” What’s your opinion on that allegation?
I think it’s a cheap shot. I think when people say, no matter what event it is, they say, “Oh, it was an intelligence failure,” they frequently don’t know what the intelligence community said prior to the event. In June 2001, the intelligence community issued a warning that a major Al Qaeda terrorist attack would take place in the next many weeks. They said they were unable to find out exactly where it might take place. They said they thought it might take place in Saudi Arabia.
We asked, “Could it take place in the United States?” They said, “We can’t rule that out.” So in my office in the White House complex, the CIA sat and briefed the domestic U.S. federal law enforcement agencies, Immigration, Federal Aviation, Coast Guard, and Customs. The FBI was there as well, agreeing with the CIA, and told them that we were entering a period when there was a very high probability of a major terrorist attack. Now I don’t think that’s an intelligence failure. It may be a failure of other parts of the government, but I don’t think that was an intelligence failure.

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