Richard A. Clarke
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| Richard A. Clarke | |
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| Born | 1951 |
Richard A. Clarke (born 1951) is a former U.S. government official who specialized in intelligence, cyber security and counter-terrorism. Until his retirement in January 2003, Mr. Clarke was a member of the Senior Executive Service. He served as an advisor to four U.S. presidents from 1973 to 2003: Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Most notably, Clarke was the chief counter-terrorism adviser on the U.S. National Security Council for both the latter part of the Clinton Administration and early part of the George W. Bush Administration through the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Clarke came to widespread public attention for his role as counter-terrorism czar in the Clinton and Bush Administrations when in March of 2004 he appeared on the 60 Minutes television news magazine, his memoir about his service in government, Against All Enemies was released, and he testified before the 9/11 Commission. In all three instances, Clarke was sharply critical of the Bush Administration's attitude toward counter-terrorism before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the decision to go to war with Iraq.
Richard Clarke is currently Chairman of Good Harbor Consulting, a strategic planning and corporate risk management firm, an on-air consultant for ABC News, and a contributor to GoodHarborReport.com, an online community discussing homeland security, defense, and politics. He also recently published his first novel, The Scorpion's Gate, in 2005; and a second, Breakpoint, in 2007.
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[edit] Background
Richard Clarke was born in 1951, the son of a Boston factory worker. He studied at the Boston Latin School (graduated 1969) and received a Bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.
[edit] Government career
In 1973, he began work in the federal government as an employee in the U.S. Department of Defense. Starting in 1985, Clarke served in the Reagan Administration as Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence. During the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush, he coordinated diplomatic efforts to support the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the subsequent security arrangements. During the Clinton Administration, Clarke became the counter-terrorism coordinator for the National Security Council. He remained in that position in the first year of the George W. Bush Administration, and later was the Special Advisor to the president on cybersecurity and cyberterrorism. He resigned from the Bush Administration in 2003.
Clarke's positions inside the government have included:
- United States National Security Council, 1992-2003
- Special Advisor 2001-2003
- National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism, 1998-2001
- Chair of the Counter-terrorism Security Group, 1992-2003
- United States Department of State 1985-1992
- Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs, 1989-1992
- Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, 1985-1988
[edit] 9/11 Commission
On March 24, 2004, Clarke testified at the public 9/11 Commission hearings.[2] At the outset of his testimony Clarke offered an apology to the families of 9/11 victims and an acknowledgment that the government had failed: "I also welcome the hearings because it is finally a forum where I can apologize to the loved ones of the victims of 9/11...your government failed you, those entrusted with protecting you failed you and I failed you. We tried hard, but that doesn't matter because we failed."[3]Clark was the only member of the Bush Administration who provided an apology to the family members of victims along with an acknowledgement of the government's failure.[4]
Many of the events Clarke recounted during the hearings were also published in his memoir, Against All Enemies. Among his highly critical statements regarding the Bush Administration, Clarke charged that before and during the 9/11 crisis, many in the administration were distracted from efforts against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization by a pre-occupation with Iraq and Sadaam Hussein. Clarke had written that on September 12, 2001, President Bush pulled him and a couple of aides aside and "testily" asked him to try to find evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected to the terrorist attacks. In response he wrote a report stating there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement and got it signed by all relevant agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA. The paper was quickly returned by a deputy with a note saying "Please update and resubmit".[1] After initially denying that such meeting and request between the President and Clarke took place, the White House later reversed its denial when others present backed Clarke's version of the events.[5][6]
According to the 9/11 Commission, Clarke gave the final okay for the members of the large extended bin Laden family living in the United States to fly to Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2001, a request that originated with the Saudi embassy. During the hearing, Clarke told the Commission that he did not know who within the Bush Administration formally presented the request to him. But when pressed, he said that it was most likely came from the State Department or the Office of the White House Chief of Staff. Clarke said that once the request came to him he refused to approve it immediately, instead deferring the matter to the FBI. [7] He admitted that he alone finally authorized the flight, telling reporters, "I take responsibility for it. I don’t think it was a mistake, and I’d do it again." [8]
[edit] Pre-9/11 memo about Al Qaeda threat
Clarke and his communications with the Bush administration regarding Osama bin Laden and associated terrorist plots targeting the United States were mentioned frequently in National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's public interview by the 9/11 investigatory commission on April 8, 2004. Of particular significance was a memo [9] from January 25, 2001 that Clarke had authored and sent to Rice.
Along with making an urgent request for a meeting of the National Security Council's Principals Committee to discuss the growing al-Qaeda threat in the greater Middle East, the memo also suggests strategies for combating al-Qaeda that might be adopted by the new Bush Administration. [10]
[edit] Criticism
Just before and after Clarke appeared before the 9/11 Commission, defenders of the Bush Administration tried to attack his credibility. They charged that he exaggerated perceived failures in the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies while exculpating the former Clinton administration from its perceived shortcomings.[11]
According to some reports, the White House tried to discredit Clarke in a move described as "shooting the messenger."[12] New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was more blunt, calling the attacks on Clarke "a campaign of character assassination."[13]
Conservatives within and without the Bush Administration vigorously attacked both Clarke's testimony and his tenor during the hearings. In the furor over Clarke's revelations before the 9/11 Commission, Senate Republican Majority Leader Bill Frist immediately took to the Senate floor to make a speech accusing Clarke of telling "two entirely different stories under oath", pointing to congressional hearing testimony Clarke gave in 2002, but Frist later admitted to reporters that he was unaware of any actual discrepancies in Clarke's testimony.[14] Some White House attempts to discredit Clarke were inconsistent, specifically, the day after Clarke's revelations Vice President Dick Cheney went on the Rush Limbaugh radio program to claim that Clarke's account of the events leading to the 9/11 attacks was not credible because Clarke "wasn't in the loop" on pre-9/11 counter-terrorism planning, while at the same time National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was telling reporters that Clarke was the center of all counter-terrorism efforts.[2]
Clarke has also been criticized by conservatives for suggesting the possibility of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda but then, after investigation, concluding that no link had been established. Regarding Hussein's offer of safehaven in Iraq, Clarke wrote in a January 1999 memo to Sandy Berger that he was concerned that “old wily Usama will likely boogie to Baghdad.” (p. 134)[15] Clarke also made statements that year to the press linking Hussein and al-Qaeda to an alleged joint chemical weapons development effort at the Al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.[16]
Since 1999, however, the United States government has admitted that its evidence regarding Al Shifa is inconclusive, and Clarke has concluded that there was no Iraq-al Qaeda link. In Against All Enemies he writes, "It is certainly possible that Iraqi agents dangled the possibility of asylum in Iraq before bin Laden at some point when everyone knew that the U.S. was pressuring the Taliban to arrest him. If that dangle happened, bin Laden's accepting asylum clearly did not," (p. 270). In an interview on March 21, 2004, Clarke made the statement: "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda, ever." Clarke makes clear in his book that he came to his more recent conclusion as a result of several investigations, prompted by the Bush Administration, specifically into the possibility of an Iraqi connection to September 11.
Regarding who was to blame over possible "intelligence failures" leading up to 9/11, Clarke engaged in a duel of words with Michael Scheuer, former chief of the bin Laden Unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the Central Intelligence Agency. When asked to respond to Clarke's claim that Scheuer was "a hothead, a middle manager who really didn't go to any of the cabinet meetings," Scheuer replied:
I certainly agree with the fact that I didn't go to the cabinet meetings. But I'm certainly also aware that I'm much better informed than Mr. Clarke ever was about the nature of the intelligence that was available against Osama bin Laden and which was consistently denigrated by himself and Mr. Tenet.[17]
According to one article, Scheuer believed that Clarke’s "risk aversion and politicking" negatively impacted the hunt for Bin Laden prior to September 11, 2001. Scheuer further asserted that his CIA team had provided information on ten different occasions that could have led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, but recommendations to act upon the information were turned down by Clarke and other senior intelligence officials.[18] Despite this heated exchange, Scheuer agrees with Clarke that the invasion of Iraq was a serious diversion from the war against al-Qaeda.
In response to Clarke's charges against the Bush administration, Fox News, with the Administration's consent, identified and released a background briefing Clarke gave in August 2002 at the Administration's request to minimize the fallout from a Time Magazine story about the President's failure to take certain actions before 9/11,[19] in which briefing on behalf of the White House Clarke stated "there was no plan on Al Qaeda that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration", and that after taking office President Bush decided to "add to the existing Clinton strategy and to increase CIA resources, for example, for covert action, five-fold, to go after Al Qaeda." [20] At the next day's hearing, 9/11 Commission member Thompson challenged Clarke with the 2002 account, and Clarke explained: "I was asked to make that case to the press. I was a special assistant to the president, and I made the case I was asked to make....I was asked to highlight the positive aspects of what the administration had done and to minimize the negative aspects of what the administration had done. And as a special assistant to the president, one is frequently asked to do that kind of thing. I've done it for several presidents." [21]
[edit] Cyberterrorism and Cybersecurity
Clarke spent his last year in the Bush Administration focusing on cybersecurity and the threat of cyberterrorism as Special Advisor to the President on Cybersecurity. At a security conference in 2002, after citing statistics that indicate that less than 0.0025 percent of corporate revenue on average is spent on information-technology security, Clarke was famously heard to say, "If you spend more on coffee than on IT security, then you will be hacked. What's more, you deserve to be hacked."[3]
[edit] Book: Against All Enemies
Main article: Against All Enemies
On March 22, 2004, Clarke's book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror--What Really Happened (ISBN 0-7432-6024-4), was published. The book was critical of past and present presidential administrations for the way they handled the war on terror both before and after September 11, 2001 but focused much of its criticism on Bush for failing to take sufficient action to protect the country in the elevated-threat period before the September 11, 2001 attacks and for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Clarke feels greatly hampered the war on terror, and was a distraction from the real terrorists.
[edit] Additional works
- Defeating the Jihadists: A Blueprint for Action, 2004. In this book Clarke outlines his idea of a more effective U.S. counterterrorism policy. (ISBN 0-87078-491-9)
- The Scorpion's Gate, 2005 (novel). (ISBN 0-399-15294-6)
- Breakpoint, 2007 (novel). (ISBN 0-399-15378-0).
[edit] Affiliations
- Chairman, Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, a strategic planning and corporate risk management firm.
- Contributor, GoodHarborReport.com, an online resource for homeland security, defense and political issues, operated by Good Harbor Consulting, LLC.
- Advisory Board Member, Civitas Group, LLC[22]
- On-air consultant, ABC News.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror--What Really Happened (ISBN 0-7432-6024-4)
- ^ Bumiller, Elizabeth, "Threats and Responses: Was an Official 'In the Loop?' It all Depends", The New York Times, March 25, 2004 [1]
- ^ ["Security Guru: Let's Secure the Net", ZDNet, February 20, 2002 http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,5103462,00.html]
[edit] External links
- "Profile: Richard Clarke". BBC.
- Richard Clarke Bio at Greater Talent Network (Speakers Bureau)
- "Attacks on Richard Clarke [23]" Guardian UK.
- Field, Chris, "On Richard Clarke". March 22, 2004
- NPR: Richard Clarke Book Reaction
- Richard Clarke, at War With Himself from Time magazine
- Clarke's Take on Terror from CBS News
- frontline the man who knew interviews richard a. clarke PBS
- Richard Clarke's 911 Commission Testimony (24 March 2004).
- "Richard Clarke Talks Cybersecurity and JELL-O," an exclusive interview with IEEE Security & Privacy magazine after the 9/11 testimony
- "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" Streaming video of Richard Clarke talk at the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign on March 8, 2005
- "A Dick Clarke Top Seven" by Mansoor Ijaz
- Articles, essays, and reports written by Richard Clarke
- Richard Clarke at the Internet Movie Database
- Richard A. Clarke at the Notable Names Database
