I had a first-hand brush with the Clinton-era dereliction of duty in the early stages of the developing terrorism attacks specifically involving the CIA’s frustrated efforts to notify the White House of the danger–so dramatically emphasized in the three-hour docudrama, The Path to 9/11, that aired Sept. 10 and 11 on ABC.
The year was 1997. I tagged along with friend Chris Andrew, the famous Cambridge intelligence scholar, to a very private dinner with CIA and British intelligence grandees held in an ultra-secure banqueting facility high atop a Washington, DC hotel. Presiding informally over the 12-person dinner was CIA’s Director of Plans, as the head of the Agency’s clandestine services was called then; the officer who delivered the President’s Daily Brief (PDB); the chairman of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee–that serves as the liaison between MI5 and MI6, the UK titles for their security services and foreign intelligence; and other espionage officers and consultants.
Obviously frustrated with the Clinton White House for its refusal to listen to the CIA, one of the diners suddenly asked, “Does anyone here know White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles? He seems to be competent and a straight shooter,” referring to our very own Charlotte, NC investment banker–now serving as president of the UNC System of colleges and universities after two unsuccessful runs for the US Senate. After a long silence, I meekly raised my hand and offered that I did know Bowles. After a short period of disbelief and confusion–who is this guy anyway?–I was asked to serve as a go-between with Bowles and the CIA to deliver a “package” of urgent information to the White House.
After several telephone exchanges between Bowles and me, arrangements were made to transfer the package. As I recall, the solution was to use Federal Express to avoid official channels. I was not privy to the contents of the package, but it likely contained complaints that the CIA was being ignored, whether about Osama bin Laden or other matters of national security in the wake of the end of the Cold War when the CIA was considered obsolete without the Soviets to fight. There was even talk of moving the Agency into the war on drugs to give them something to do.
Clinton was of the mind-set, as were his brothers and sisters on the Left during the Vietnam era, that the CIA was an evil, imperialistic fiefdom running roughshod over the globe, including starting the war in Indochina. Now it is known (from recently declassified information) that the CIA actually objected to sending troops from the beginning. Yet, popular culture branded the CIA as evil and that was that. And Clinton, enjoying the Reagan peace dividend, marginalized and ignored the CIA, even inflicting “sensitivity training,” forcing most of the old hands out of the Agency and leaving the remaining intrepid souls disoriented and humiliated.
The White House ignored the CIA at the peril of the nation. And there is Hell to pay.
Notes from La-La Land
Like the return of a ghost from the grave, Claude Sitton, editor of the News & Observer from 1968 until 1993, shows back up in the paper with a guest editorial, freely offering his take on the view from Great Britain about America and the Iraq War. For those younger readers, a little background:
Most pundits will tell you that the N&O under Jonathan Daniels–from the late 1940s until 1968–was “liberal” and irritating but basically “fair” in its coverage. After Daniels retired, things took a bad turn when Sitton took over after a stint as national news editor at the New York Times, a position he reportedly earned for his tough anti-establishment coverage of the integration wars in the Deep South in the 1950s and ’60s.
That helps explain the chip he carried on his shoulder and brought to Raleigh. Sitton holed up in his office at the N&O and remained out of touch with the community, lashing out at area leaders for simply being white–channeling his outrage at Selma and Little Rock onto the local citizens here–not caring that Raleigh was not guilty in comparison to the strident racists he encountered elsewhere in his career as a reporter.
Sitton finally left Raleigh after a career of attacking and denigrating anyone who dared achieve anything around here, and headed to Emory University in Atlanta after a going away party at the home of Daniels’ nephew, Frank Daniels Jr. The paper gave Sitton a horse named “Jesse” since he wouldn’t have Jesse Helms to ride anymore. But a lot has happened since Sitton departed, including the sale of the N&O to the McClatchy chain of newspapers, the rise of Raleigh into a world class metropolis, and the near canonization of Jesse Helms by his old friends–and many of his enemies. But judging by his guest editorial, not much seems to have changed with Sitton.
First off, he gets his facts wrong, stating that Britain’s prime ministers have no set term. That is not true. They serve for five years; with the caveat that a vote of confidence election can be called any time Parliament so pleases. This grieves Sitton, who laments that PM’s “are unlike American presidents who hang on–unpopular, incompetent, dishonored or not–barring death or impeachment and conviction.”
Of course, he is referring to President George Bush, who has in Iraq–according to a quote Sitton offers from the UK’s left-wing Independent newspaper–performed “arguably the greatest US foreign policy blunder in a century, more consequential even than Vietnam.” Then Sitton adds a snippet from the editorial page of the Independent stating, “No US president looks likely to detach him or herself from Israel’s arm lock in the near future and for that same reason, the ‘Arab Street’ and the bigger ‘Muslim street,’ which includes about two million Muslims in Britain, are not going to be coaxed out of their growing, paranoid distrust of the America.”
What we have here, besides the usual party line against Bush, is evidence of something local Jewish Defense League leaders in our area told me 20 years ago: Claude Sitton is an anti-Semite. And so it seems when he chooses this quote and joins Old Europe in its shameful record of mistreatment of Jews and hatred of Israel that color its attitude about the war on terror.
Sitton lumbers around Britain in his editorial, quoting Anne Applebaum (not knowing that the Daily Telegraph editorialist is actually an American) and mentioning Niall Ferguson’s book, Empire, agreeing that we are all “the children and successors of empire,” but that: “Bush’s arrogant pursuit of pre-emptive unilateralism, his too-ready and unplanned resort to military force and his rejection of even-handed polices in the Middle East, has wasted the power that status brings.” Sitton’s solution: “Absent a parliamentary form of government, that leaves Americans one choice–endure or impeach.”
That’s actually two choices; but pay no mind to the errant ramblings of a lightweight political parrot like Sitton. Raleigh and the world have left him far behind.