Sunday , April 2, 2000 ; A01
Richard Clarke witnessed the dawn of the millennium in a top-secret government communications vault, monitoring intelligence traffic for any sign of activity by Islamic terrorist groups loyal to Osama bin Laden. It was not until midnight in California--3 a.m. Washington time--that the Clinton administration's counterterrorism chief finally permitted himself a celebratory sip of champagne.
Four weeks before, Clarke had sketched out a plan on the whiteboard in his office at the National Security Council for neutralizing the latest threat from the Afghanistan-based Saudi exile. Approved by President Clinton and his top foreign policy advisers, Clarke's plan became the basis of administration efforts to prevent bin Laden supporters from ringing in the New Year with what officials believed could be dozens, perhaps hundreds, of American deaths in a series of simultaneous attacks from the Middle East to the West Coast.
On the door outside Clarke's third-floor office, someone has pinned a newspaper picture of four men dressed in chemical suits and gas masks tramping across a desolate landscape. The leader of the men is labeled "Clarke." A headline above the photograph reads: "Defenders of the Free World."
During the millennium alert, the CSG was in almost daily session, coordinating intelligence information and getting constant updates on the hunt for suspected terrorists, both in America and abroad. "At the end of the day, somebody had to pull it all together," says Lisa Gordon-Haggerty, Clarke's director for chemical and biological terrorism, "and that person was Dick Clarke."
As the millennium countdown continued, the Clarke team moved its operations to the Y2K Center at 1800 G St. NW, where they set up a secure communications facility. Most of the team was dressed informally, but Clarke wore a tuxedo. Shortly after midnight, he received a congratulatory phone call from Sandy Berger, who was at the Lincoln Memorial with Clinton. "It's still too early to celebrate," Clarke told Berger, referring to fears that the terrorist cell linked to an Algerian arrested near Seattle in mid-December, Ahmed Ressam, might still be planning an attack on the West Coast.
It was too early to celebrate in a larger sense as well. "It's not enough to be in a cat-and-mouse game, warning about his plots," Clarke says, referring to bin Laden. "If we keep that up, we will someday fail. We need to seriously think about doing more. Our goal should be to so erode his network of organizations that they no longer pose a serious threat."
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:scDZAlk8ro8J:www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/terclrk.htm+millennium+terror+threats&hl=en
Interesting article. Thanks.