Washington – Settling a score, Louis Freeh, director of the FBI under President Clinton and in the first six months of the current Bush presidency, asserts in a new book that Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, was “basically a second-tier player” who had little access to power and was in no position to issue credible warnings in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
“If he was rushing around the executive branch trying to make a case that we were in imminent danger of a terrorist attack on our shores, he wasn’t trying to make that case with me,” Freeh writes of Clarke in a new memoir to be published this week called “My FBI: Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton and Fighting the War on Terror.”
In his own book, “Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,” published last year, Clarke describes himself as a herald of the dangers of terrorism and paints a scathing picture of Freeh and the FBI, blaming the former director and his agency for ignoring the possibility of terrorism in this country.
Freeh says incidents involving the two of them that Clarke describes in his book never occurred and that the Clarke book can be fairly described in a phrase: “bad facts and no access.”
Clarke was traveling over the weekend and did not respond to messages left on his office phone and his cellphone.
Freeh’s accounts in his book of the events leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the bureau’s anti-terrorism activities add little to his public testimony before investigating panels and articles he wrote about the topic.
Far from ignoring terrorist threats, Freeh declares that under his directorship, the FBI was “all but obsessed with terrorism and its proponents.” But the bureau was hamstrung, Freeh says, because Congress never provided sufficient money for a good computer system, a strong counterterrorism staff or Arabic translators. In terms of technology, “we were in the Dark Ages,” he declares.
While “you can always do the job better in hindsight,” Freeh writes, “I’m proud of the way I ran the FBI.”
Freeh also uses his book to fan the flames of his incendiary relationship with Clinton.
“With Bill Clinton,” Freeh writes in a chapter called “Bill and Me,” “the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones, never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting, it was leading him in the wrong direction, and he lacked the discipline to pull back once he found himself stepping into trouble.”
Freeh says he could never communicate with the president because, “with him, it always seemed to be personal.”