Clarke Known As Abrasive but Efficient

Richard Clarke, the man who threw elbows and banged heads together to get things done under four American presidents, is the last person friends and colleagues expected to go public.

For decades he was the ultimate inside operator, the person who knew how to tackle the toughest national security problems and overcome bureaucratic inertia with behind-the-scenes guts, arrogance, smarts and hard work.

But writing a book and testifying to an official commission with scathing tales of miscalculations, failures and infighting at the highest levels of government? No way.

"This really isn't Dick," said Steven Simon, who worked with Clarke both at the White House and at the State Department. "It strikes me as a pretty clear indicator of the magnitude of his outrage."

Clarke, who left the Bush administration in early 2003, has become in the past week one of the most talked-about figures in America. In a string of public appearances and a new book that was an instant publishing phenomenon, he has forcefully criticized the Bush administration as a failure in the fight against terrorism that went on a tangent to attack Iraq (news - web sites) when it should have been focused on al-Qaida.

The intensity of the Republican campaign to discredit him as a disgruntled partisan who is out to sell books is a testament to how seriously the White House views his criticism.

On Friday, top Republicans in Congress sought to declassify 2-year-old testimony by Clarke, suggesting he may have lied in his criticism of Bush.

Roger Cressey, a business partner who also worked with Clarke in government, said Clarke had expected to be attacked, but "even he is rather surprised at the ferociousness and vindictiveness of it."

When administration officials questioned his claims last week that Bush was fixated on Iraq the day after the Sept. 11 attacks, Clarke countered that he had four witnesses to such a conversation and derided national security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) and Bush for "having a memory lapse, a senior moment."

"This is the president in a very intimidating way, finger in my face, saying `I want a paper on Iraq and this attack,'" Clarke said.

Over four administrations and three decades in government, Clarke became known as "a very hard-driving, arrogant, not especially pleasant or polite fellow who manages to get an extremely impressive amount of work done," according to Gideon Rose, who worked under him on President Clinton (news - web sites)'s National Security Council. "He throws his elbows around the bureaucracy in the service of getting things done."

Leslie Gelb, who hired Clarke for his first State Department job in 1979, said Clarke "has annoyed and angered everybody he's worked with for 30 years. ... But everybody wanted him around because he could actually get the job done."

Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the complaints about Clarke kept rolling in: that he was riding roughshod, he didn't tell me, he didn't pay attention to me. The result: "Every boss would nod in agreement and keep him on the job."

Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, told the Sept. 11 commission that several of his colleagues wanted Clarke fired.

Clarke, 53, did get swatted at in 1992 when the State Department's inspector general concluded that he had looked the other way as Israel resold Patriot missile technology to China.

Inspector General Sherman M. Funk recommended that Clarke be disciplined, but higher-ups rejected the idea. Clarke disputed the charges, claiming the alleged violations by Israel were "specious on their face," but he soon transferred to the White House.

There, he served three presidents: Bush, Clinton and Bush. In spring of 2001, Clarke's frustration with the current Bush administration's low-key approach to terrorism and al-Qaida mastermind Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) boiled over, and he decided to leave his job as the White House terrorism chief for a new government position targeting cyberterror. He and Rice agreed that he would leave Oct. 1, the start of the next budget year.

In his book, Clarke recalls telling Rice and her deputy, "Maybe I'm becoming like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the white whale. Maybe you need someone less obsessive about it."

He hoped his real message got through: "You obviously do not think that terrorism is as important as I do since you are taking months to do anything, so get somebody else to do it who can be happy working at your pace."

Clarke, who left government service 13 months ago, now has his own consulting firm on homeland and cybersecurity.

He is known for coming down hard on those who let him down, but associates say he also has a pleasant side.

"When you get him one-on-one in a room, he's very personable and has a great sense of humor," said Keith Schwalm, a former Secret Service agent who worked with Clarke at the White House and now is vice president of his consulting company . "He likes to drop little hidden jokes all the time. If you don't have his sense of humor, you won't get 'em, and he'll laugh under his breath."

Clarke, who is single, is known as a voracious reader, from science fiction to history to the latest tutorial on al-Qaida, and as someone who enjoys relaxing with friends over dinner. The native New Englander loves seafood, follows the Boston Red Sox and the Washington Capitals, enjoys jazz and has a room in his Sears catalogue home packed with duck decoys and prints. He describes himself as a political independent registered as a Republican.

Despite Clarke's bulldog reputation, "he is a normal person," Simon said. "He likes to go on nice vacations. He likes good wine. He is your fairly typical cultivated upper-middle-class Washingtonian with cultivated upper-middle-class tastes."

"Small talk for him is telling you about his cell phone and its capabilities," says Gelb. "He's all business. That's his life."

Clarke's role was to create a distraction for the only highly visible 911 Commission public hearings.

The question one should ask is who would benefit from this distraction? Why would they want a distraction? What did they want to hide? Who/What are they trying to protect?

If you look at who participated in the promotion of Mr. Clarke's testimony, the only conclusion one can make is that the Clinton administration was in "legacy mode". The coordination of the partisan media (TM-EIB) created a perfect storm of contrived controversy.

The 911 Commission has been compromised by the political left who used it as a hammer this week to bash the Bush administration. This early spring attack was designed to expose an uninterested public to the commission in a negative fashion, so that its summer report can be called partisan when it shows THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION ignored threats which caused al-Qaida to up the ante.

Just a hunch.

I haven't been following this closely, but I was just reading some old articles on Clarke. Has this stuff been posted? This guy sounds like quite the sleazy operator. Not quite the terrorism 'guru' I keep hearing about on the news.

The Man Who Protects America From Terrorism:[Biography]
Tim Weiner
New York Times
Feb 1, 1999. pg. A.3
ProQuest document ID: 38613865
Text Word Count 1423

Abstract (Article Summary)

Mr. Clarke inspires ferocious loyalty from friends and fierce enmity from foes inside the Government. He wins praise for getting things done in secret -- and criticism for exactly the same. At the National Security Council, where he landed in 1992 after losing his State Department job in a bitter battle over Israel's misuse of American military technology, he can operate without outside oversight so long as he has President Clinton's confidence.
The mission of protecting Americans from attack, whether by states or rogue groups, is ''almost the primary responsibility of the Government,'' Mr. Clarke says. He is trying to raise the fear of terrorism in the United States to the right level -- higher, not too high -- as he girds the nation against the possibility of an assault from nerve gas, bacteria and viruses, and from what he calls ''an electronic Pearl Harbor.''
Mr. Clarke has a reserved seat when Cabinet officers gather at the White House on national security issues. ''My name is on the table next to Madeleine Albright and Bill Cohen,'' the secretaries of State and Defense, Mr. Clarke said. His vote carries the weight of those cast by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of Central Intelligence.

And this from the full text article:

Under President Bush, Mr. Clarke served as Assistant Secretary of State for political and military affairs. In 1992, he was accused by the State Department's Inspector General of looking the other way as Israel transferred American military technology to China.
"There was an allegation that we hadn't investigated a huge body of evidence that the Israelis were involved in technology transfers," Mr. Clarke said. "In fact, we had investigated it. I knew more about it than anyone. We found one instance where it was true. The Israelis had taken aerial refueling technology we sold them and sold it to a Latin American country. We caught them, and they admitted they had done it."
He added: "The Administration wanted to put heat on the Israeli Government to create an atmosphere in which the incumbent Government might lose an election. The bottom line was I wasn't going to lie. I wasn't going to go along with an Administration strategy to pressure the Israeli Government."
Sherman Funk, the Inspector General who accused Mr. Clarke, remembered the case differently.
"He's wrong," said Mr. Funk, the State Department's Inspector General from 1987 to 1994. "He's being very disingenuous. Dick Clarke was unilaterally adopting a policy that was counter to the law and counter to the avowed policy of the Government. It was not up to him to make that determination. Almost all the people in his own office disagreed with him. In the end, he had to leave the State Department."
Mr. Clarke joined the National Security Council staff under President Bush. He was one of the only holdovers embraced by the Clinton Administration. After seven years, he has placed proteges in key diplomatic and intelligence positions, creating a network of loyalty and solidifying his power.

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