"We stood by while this happened"

And Clinton did not have great affection for the CIA, right?

He certainly got off to a rough start. What he had in his head when he got into office I wouldn't presume to say, but, first of all, he had no roots at the agency. He seems to have looked at the place with some suspicion, or at least distance. And then, worst of all, the first director he selected, James Woolsey, was someone Clinton didn't have a relationship with, and who in turn did not have a relationship with the agency. Woolsey got off to a bad start.

At that point, how did the CIA view Osama bin Laden and the terrorist threat?

They were slow to see what it was made of. They were operating from old ideas and paradigms -- that terrorism was linked to state agendas and sponsored by radical governments. To them, terrorists were typically secular nationalists or leftists looking to call attention to some cause rather than, for instance, inflict mass civilian casualties. The whole structure that we now see in the Sunni radical world --- stateless networks rooted in theological groups like the Muslim Brotherhood aspiring to wreak havoc on large sections of nonbelieving populations -- all that was a completely new idea. It took the CIA three or four years even to articulate a view of it, never mind come to grips with it.

The people who had a sense of what was going on were the governments in North Africa -- Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt -- that were under assault by some of these groups. But these were undemocratic, despotic, corrupt governments. They would complain, and specifically complain about bin Laden, but the Americans dismissed these complaints as these bad governments crying wolf about their domestic opposition.

Right, but wasn't that one of the problems with the fight against terrorism -- that we didn't have good relationships or good intelligence in a lot of these key countries?

Yes, we didn't have an independent agenda. We were dependent on other governments and our intelligence liaisons with them, so our intelligence was shaped by their view of the world. In a case like Pakistan, that turned out to be a pretty unreliable agenda, since Pakistan was busy creating a lot of these Islamist groups for its own purposes. And in the case of Saudi Arabia, it was also unreliable.

To put it in another layer of context, what was happening in the CIA during these years was that the place was shrinking, just like every other place that was part of the Cold War bureaucracy. Budgets were shrinking. People were retiring earlier. There was no new hiring. Someone told me that in 1995, I think, the incoming class of new officers at the CIA was nine people. So they were under intense budgetary pressure and they didn't know what the new world was going to be about. Terrorism was on the list, but there wasn't a focus in resources to get after it in the right way.

It seems as though the Clinton administration started paying attention to terrorism, not after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, but in 1995, after the Oklahoma City bombing and the Tokyo subway attack.

That's a correct reading of it. There was a response to the WTC bombing but it was such an obscure case and it happened within six weeks of the [Clinton] inauguration and it never really galvanized the new administration. But Oklahoma City -- that was the one that shook them.

At what point did they make the connection between Osama bin Laden and the 1993 World Trade Center attack?

The problem was that the FBI was in charge of the WTC case. They accumulated a lot of evidence about how the attackers had been supported and who they were connected to -- the first outlines of bin Laden's international organization and ambitions. But they didn't share this with anybody because the law prohibited them from doing so, but also because their own culture was hermetically sealed.

You had this dysfunctional period lasting right through 1997 and 1998, in which the FBI and the White House were at odds with each other over all kinds of political investigations. Each side looked at each other with intense suspicion. You had the FBI and CIA competing for budgetary resources. There was a rivalry there. You also had the State Department counterterrorism office in total disarray -- five leaders in six years or something. Essentially, you had a counterterrorism bureaucracy falling apart and not communicating.

And even when the CIA became aware of Osama and the fact that he was financing terrorists, he didn't make the list of people to go after. He didn't make it for quite some time. What made them think he wasn't so dangerous?

You know, it's really a mystery, looking back on it. It's hard to understand, especially toward 1997 -- he didn't even make the State Department's official list of foreign terrorist organizations. The explanation you get is that they saw him as a money man and not a killer. They had no evidence that he had ever participated directly in a deadly terrorist operation. One reason why they believed this was that in the years that he lived in Sudan -- right through the spring of 1996 -- he didn't live the way a hardcore terrorist would. He lived openly. He commuted to work. He had an office with air conditioning. He had a farm, he had a house, he had a mosque. And he was a wealthy man, he was a sort of soft figure. They looked at this and concluded he wasn't an operator. Surely, if he was an operator, he'd be hiding.

You say that the CIA could never penetrate al-Qaida, or recruit agents from within. Is that rare?

The CIA had an easier time with leftist terrorist groups like Abu Nidal, but they always had a harder time with religiously motivated groups. For example, they were never able to penetrate Hezbollah during the year that Hezbollah was taking American hostages and wreaking havoc. Al-Qaida is a relatively difficult group to penetrate to the inner circle.

Back to this parallel story of Afghanistan -- why did we fail to recognize the Taliban's threat? Did anyone sound the alarm? Everyone just seemed so relaxed about this bizarre government coming to power, even after they started imposing their oppressive rules.

That's another one that's hard to understand. Probably the biggest single factor was indifference. A sense that there was nothing at stake in Afghanistan, a collective unspoken wish for this whole place to go away and not be a problem. The Taliban brought a brutal kind of order to the country and created a totalitarian kind of stability. There were plenty of people whispering into the ears of American officials, assuring them that the Taliban were tolerable. The Pakistanis, who had created them, wanted us to accept them. The Saudis also wanted us to accept them. The Saudis argued again and again, "Look, we started out this way. We had a particularly evangelical, puritanical view of Islam, and look at us, we've moderated, we've accommodated the world."

Wow.

Yes, the Saudis said, "If you're just patient with these guys, they will moderate too." I don't know how many Americans believed that, but there was no plausible alternative that anyone could think about. Even those who disdained the Taliban and wanted to do anything possible to promote its decline were not prepared to supply more weapons for the civil war, or claim more innocent Afghan deaths. For what?

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