Dick Clarke — Richard Clarke — was the White House counterterrorism chief in the period before the September 11 attacks. John Kiriakou, who knew him personally, treats him as the strongest available witness to what the Bush White House was told and refused to hear.[1]
Standing
Kiriakou’s assessment of him is unusually unqualified: Clarke was “one of the most highly respected non-ideological counterterrorism professionals in government — anywhere in government, and I mean even on Capitol Hill.” On the specific question of the attacks, his verdict is that “nobody wanted to disrupt an attack like September 11th as much as Dick Clarke did.”[2]
The demotion
Clarke had been, in Kiriakou’s phrase, “a hero of the Clinton administration.” His explanation for what happened next is about the man rather than the work: when the George W. Bush people came into power, “they saw this guy that’s been in the same position for ten years, he’s gay, he’s a liberal Democrat — it’s time to give him the heave-ho.” They demoted him.[3][4]
The counterterrorism portfolio passed to Condoleezza Rice. Pressed on whether the failure that followed therefore belonged to her, Kiriakou’s answer was short: “Well, that’s on Condi Rice, isn’t it?”[4]
Shouting from the rooftops
Kiriakou pairs Clarke with Cofer Black as the two men who saw it coming and could not get a hearing: “I remember Dick Clarke and Cofer Black both saying that they were shouting this from the rooftops and no one in the Bush White House would listen to them.”[5] He identifies the specific approach — “it was Dick Clarke who had gone to Condi Rice and said, you’re not listening to me, there’s going to be a terrible attack.”[2]
The obstruction Kiriakou describes was not only political. The White House, he says, was not listening, not cooperating, and not funding the work — while inside the CIA “I never saw people work so hard in my entire life trying to disrupt this attack, and having not enough information and nowhere near the budget necessary to really do it.”[6][3]
Clarke against Tenet
The sharpest of Kiriakou’s Clarke material concerns Clarke’s claim that George Tenet withheld from him the CIA’s knowledge of al-Qaeda operatives inside the United States. Kiriakou knows both men personally, and he takes a side without hedging: “if Dick Clarke says that George Tenet was lying to him, then George Tenet was lying to him. And that’s just how George operated — he was an intensely secretive person, even at the cost of a September 11 style attack.” Asked again at the end of the exchange, he repeats it: “if Dick Clarke says Tenet’s a liar, Tenet’s a liar.”[1][7]
He extends the same diagnosis of institutional secrecy beyond Tenet. Relations between the CIA and the FBI, he says, were actively hostile rather than merely uncoordinated — “we hated the FBI and they hated the CIA, and so no information was exchanged” — and he has always been convinced that this is why the hijackers were able to move around the country as they did.[8][9]
Kiriakou’s limit
Asked whether the pattern amounts to a deliberate decision to leave the door open, Kiriakou declines to go that far. He calls it circumstantial rather than hard evidence, agrees it should be looked into, and then closes off the possibility on practical grounds: “who in Congress has the balls to even take something like this up? It’s just not going to happen.”[4][10]