FACTS

No commander in chief since Calvin Coolidge had come to the White House thinking less about the wider world than Bill Clinton. When he spun the globe, it always came back to rest on the United States.

Born in 1946, no older than the CIA, Clinton was shaped by the national resistance to Vietnam and the military draft, perfected as a politician by the local and state affairs of Arkansas, and elected on a promise to revive the American economy. No aspect of foreign policy made the top five items on his agenda. He had no deep thoughts about American strategic interests after the cold war. He saw his time in office as "a moment of immense democratic and entrepreneurial opportunity," in the words of his national security adviser, Tony Lake. The administration was eight months old before Lake pronounced the new foreign policy of the United States: increasing the number of the world's free markets. This was more of a business plan than a policy. Clinton equated free trade and freedom, as if selling American goods would spread American values abroad.

Clinton's national-security team was second-string. He selected the high-minded but scatterbrained congressman Les Aspin for secretary of defense; Aspin lasted less than a year. He chose the high-collared attorney Warren Christopher for secretary of state; Christopher was formal and distant, handling great global issues as if they were case law. And, at the last minute, Clinton picked a high-strung veteran of Richard Nixon's National Security Council staff for director of central intelligence.

R. James Woolsey, Jr., was a fifty-one-year-old lawyer and an experienced arms-control negotiator who had served as undersecretary of the navy under President Carter. His bulging temples and biting wit gave the impression of a highly intelligent hammerhead shark. A month after Clinton's election, Woolsey gave a well-noticed speech saying the United States had fought a dragon for forty-five years, and finally had slain it, only to find itself in a jungle filled with poisonous snakes. No one had articulated a more vivid vision for American intelligence after the cold war. He got the call a few days later, flew to Little Rock, and met Clinton after midnight on December 22. The laid-back president-elect chatted about his youth in Arkansas and asked about Woolsey's boyhood next door in Oklahoma, taking him on a short trip down a 1950s memory lane. At dawn Woolsey learned he would be the next director of central intelligence.

Fifteen minutes before the formal announcement that morning. Dee Dee Myers, Clinton's press secretary, glanced at her notes and said: "Admiral, I didn't know you served in the Bush administration as well."

"Dee Dee, I'm not an admiral," Woolsey said. "I never got above captain in the army."

"Whoops," she said. "We'd better change the press release."

He fled as fast as he could. With the airport fogged in, Woolsey shanghaied a CIA officer to drive him to Dallas so he could fly to California for Christmas. It would be his last act of free will for a long time. He was about to become a prisoner of war at the CIA.

He met precisely twice with the president of the United States in the course of the next two years—an all-time low in the agency's annals. "I didn't have a bad relationship with the president," he said years later. "I just didn't have one at all."

The CIA's top officers served a director who they knew had no clout and a president who they thought had no clue. "We had a fabulous relationship with the White House under Bush—Christmas parties at Camp David, that sort of thing," said Tom Twetten, chief of the clandestine service from the start of 1991 through the end of 1993. "And we went from that to nothing. After about six months under Clinton, it dawns on us that nobody's seen the president or the National Security Council." The CIA was powerless without direction from the president. It was a ship in irons, adrift.

Though Clinton came to office in a state of willful ignorance about the CIA, he quickly turned to the clandestine service to solve his problems overseas, and ordered up dozens of covert-action proposals during his first two years in office. When they failed to produce quick fixes, he was forced to turn to his military commanders, who almost to a man scorned him as a draft dodger. The results were dreadful.

"THERE WAS NO INTELLIGENCE NETWORK"

"No harsher test was there than Somalia," said Frank G. Wisner, Jr., the son of the founder of the CIA's clandestine service.

Somalia was a casualty of the cold war. The wholesale provision of weapons to its competing factions by the United States and the Soviet Union left enormous arsenals for warring clans. The day before giving 1992, President Bush had authorized an American military intervention for humanitarian purposes. Half a million people had died from starvation in Somalia; ten thousand a day were dying as the Bush administration came to a close. Now the clans were stealing food aid and killing one another. The mission of feeding dying people quickly mutated into a military operation against the strongest Somali warlord. General Mohamed Farah Aideed. On inauguration day 1993, after serving for a moment as the acting secretary of state, Wisner moved to the Pentagon as the undersecretary of defense for policy. He looked to Somalia and he found a blank. The Bush administration had closed down the American embassy and the CIA station two years earlier.

"We had no facts," Wisner said. "There was no intelligence network. There was no way of knowing the dynamics." This was Wisner's problem to solve, with the help of the CIA. He set up a Somalia Task Force, which deployed American special-forces commandos, and turned to the agency to serve as its eyes and ears on the ground. That job fell to Garrett Jones, the newly appointed station chief in Somalia. Once a Miami police detective, Jones was dropped into the middle of nowhere, with seven officers beneath him and the task of overthrowing an army of warriors before him. His headquarters was a ransacked room of the ambassador's abandoned residence in Mogadishu. Within days, his best Somali agent shot himself in the head, another was killed by a rocket fired from an American helicopter, his deputy chief of station was shot in the neck by a sniper and nearly died, and Jones found himself leading the manhunt for Aideed and his lieutenants down a series of blind alleys. That path led to the death of 18 American soldiers in a clash that killed 1,200 Somalis.

A postmortem on Somalia came from Admiral William Crowe, who had retired as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to become the leader of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the council of elders created by Eisenhower. The board investigated and concluded that "the intelligence failure in Somalia was right in the National Security Council," Admiral Crowe said. "They expected intelligence to make their decisions for them, not just give them information about what was going on there. They couldn't understand why intelligence didn't advise them correctly on what to do.

"It made for considerable confusion right at the top as to what was going out to Somalia," Crowe said. "The President himself wasn't very interested in the intelligence, which was most unfortunate."

The result was an ever-deepening distrust between the White House and the CIA.

"RETALIATING QUITE EFFECTIVELY AGAINST IRAQI CLEANING WOMEN"

At the start of 1993, terrorism was not an issue at the forefront of most minds at the agency. The United States had undertaken no meaningful action against the sources of terror since it had been caught selling missiles to Iran. The American hostages taken during the Reagan years had all come home from Beirut by 1991, though Bill Buckley came home in a box. In 1992, there was serious talk about shutting down the CIA's counterterrorism center. Things had been quiet. People thought perhaps the problem had solved itself.

Not long after dawn on January 25, 1993, the fifth day of the Clinton administration, Nicholas Starr, a sixty-year-old career CIA officer, was first in line at the stoplight outside the main entrance to the agency's headquarters. The light takes forever to turn green, and cars back up to the horizon on Route 123, waiting to enter the tranquil woods of the

CIA's headquarters. At 7:50 a. m., a young Pakistani stepped out of his car and began firing an AK-47 assault rifle. First he shot Frank Darling, twenty-eight, who worked as a covert-operations communicator, hitting him in the right shoulder, as Darling's wife screamed in horror. The gunman wheeled, shot, and killed Dr. Lansing Bennett, sixty-six, a CIA physician. He turned and hit Nick Starr in the left arm and shoulder, then shot Calvin Morgan, sixty-one, a CIA engineer, and Stephen Williams, forty-eight, later identified in court records as a CIA employee. The killer turned again and blew Darling's head off. And then he drove away. It was all over in half a minute. Grievously wounded, Nick Starr somehow reached the guardhouse at the CIA's gates and raised the alarm.

President Clinton never came to the CIA to pay his respects to the dead and wounded. He sent his wife instead. It is hard to exaggerate how much fury this created at headquarters. When Fred Woodruff, the acting station chief in Tbilisi, Georgia, was shot and killed in an apparently random murder that summer while on a sightseeing trip, Woolsey made a point of flying halfway around the world to receive his mortal remains.

On February 26, 1993, one month after the shooting at the agency's gates, a bomb went off in the subterranean parking garage of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and more than one thousand injured. The FBI thought at first it was Balkan separatists, but within a week, it became clear that the bombers were the acolytes of a blind Egyptian sheik who lived in Brooklyn—Omar Abdel Rahman. His name rang a very loud bell at CIA headquarters. The blind sheik had recruited many hundreds of Arab fighters for the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan under the banner of A1 Gama'a al Islamiyya, the Islamic Group. Tried and acquitted in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat, he had nonetheless remained under house arrest in Egypt until 1986. As soon as he got out of prison in Egypt, he started trying to get into the United States. He succeeded in 1990. But how? The sheik was a known seditionist—and, as it developed, the spiritual leader of a conspiracy to kill Americans by the thousands.

His visa had been issued in the capital of Sudan—"by a member of the Central Intelligence Agency in Khartoum," said Joe O'Neill, the charge d'affaires at the American embassy. "The Agency knew that he was traveling in the area looking for a visa, and never told us." It must have been a mistake, O'Neill thought: "That name should have shown up like a shot." In fact, CIA officers had reviewed seven applications by Abdel Rahman to enter the United States—and said yes six times. "I can't tell you what a terrible thing it is that that had happened," O'Neill said. "It was atrocious."

On April 14, 1993, George H. W. Bush arrived in Kuwait to commemorate the victory in the Gulf War. His wife, two of his sons, and former secretary of state Jim Baker were among his entourage. On that trip, the Kuwaiti secret police arrested seventeen men and charged them with a plot to kill Bush with a car bomb—close to two hundred pounds of plastic explosives hidden in a Toyota Land Cruiser. Under torture, some of the suspects confessed that Iraq's intelligence service was behind the assassination attempt. On April 29, the CIA's technicians reported that the construction of the bomb bore an Iraqi signature. A few days later, the FBI started interrogating the suspects. Two said they had been sent by Iraq. The only part of the puzzle that did not seem to fit was the suspects themselves. Most of them were whisky smugglers, hashish peddlers, and shell-shocked veterans. But the CIA eventually concluded that Saddam Hussein had tried to kill President Bush.

Over the next month. President Clinton weighed a response. At about 1:30 a. m. on June 26, on the Muslim Sabbath, twenty-three Tomahawk missiles landed in and around Iraqi intelligence headquarters, a complex of seven large buildings inside a walled compound in downtown Baghdad. At least one of the missiles struck an apartment building and killed several innocent civilians, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband. General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the bombing was intended to be "proportionate to the attack on President Bush."

The director of central intelligence was enraged by the president's sense of proportion. "Saddam tries to assassinate former President Bush," Woolsey said years later, "and President Clinton fires a couple of dozen cruise missiles into an empty building in the middle of the night in Baghdad, thereby retaliating quite effectively against Iraqi cleaning women and night watchmen, but not especially effectively against Saddam Hussein." Not long thereafter, he noted, "our helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu and—as in Beirut ten years earlier—we left."

With the images of dead Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu still fresh in American minds, Clinton set out to restore the power of the elected president of Haiti, the leftist priest Jean-

Bertrand Aristide. He genuinely viewed Aristide as the legitimate ruler of the Haitian people and he wanted to see justice done. This required undoing the military junta that had ousted Aristide. Many of its leaders had been on the CIAs payroll for years, serving as trusted informants for the clandestine service. This fact was an unpleasant surprise for the White House. So was the revelation that the agency had created a Haitian intelligence service whose military leaders did little but distribute Colombian cocaine, destroy their political enemies, and preserve their power in the capital, Port-au-Prince. The agency was now placed in the awkward position of overthrowing its own agents.

This put Clinton and the CIA in direct conflict. So did the CIA's accurate assessment that Aristide was not a pillar of strength or virtue. Woolsey painted the conflict as ideological. The president and his aides "desperately wanted us at the CIA to say that Aristide was effectively going to be the Thomas Jefferson of Haiti," he recalled. "We somewhat grumpily declined to do that and pointed out both his short side as well as some of the positive things about him. We were not popular because of that." Woolsey was only partly right. The White House found the CIA's analysis of Aristide's weaknesses inconvenient. But it also found the agency's old allies in Haiti appalling.

Furious when the CIA crossed swords with him on Haiti, paralyzed by his inability to formulate a foreign policy, shell-shocked by the shoot-down in Somalia, the president wanted to withdraw from third-world adventures for a while. But as soon as American soldiers and spies started pulling out of the Horn of Africa, where they had gone on a humanitarian mission and wound up killing and being killed, they were called upon to go save lives in Rwanda, where two tribes were at each other's throats.

At the end of January 1994, the White House studiously ignored a CIA study saying half a million people might die in Rwanda. Soon the conflict exploded into one of the great man-made disasters of the twentieth century. "Nobody was really focused on how serious the situation was until things were out of control," said Mort Halperin, then a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff. "There weren't any visuals and there wasn't a lot of information." Reluctant to become involved in nations whose sufferings were not televised, the Clinton administration refused to call the one-sided massacres genocide. The president's response to Rwanda was a decision to narrowly define America's national interest in the fate of faraway failed states whose collapse would not directly affect the United States—places such as Somalia, Sudan, and Afghanistan.

"BLOW IT UP"

Woolsey lost almost every fight he picked, and there were plenty. When it became clear that Woolsey could not restore the CIA's money and power, most of the remaining stars among the cold-war generation began flicking out the lights and going home. The veterans had been the first to vanish. Then the up-and-coming officers in their thirties and early forties bailed out to start new careers. Recruiting new talent, people in their twenties, was harder and harder every year.

The intellectual and operational powers of the CIA were fading away. Headquarters was run by professional clerks who meted out dwindling funds without any understanding of what worked and what did not work in the field. They had no system of distinguishing programs that succeeded from those that did not. Without a scorecard of successes and failures, they had little understanding of how to field their players. As the number of experienced CIA operators and analysts dwindled, the authority of the director of central intelligence was sapped by his own bloated middle management, an ever-growing cadre of special assistants, staff aides, and task forces that overflowed from headquarters into rented offices in the shopping malls and industrial parks of Virginia.

Woolsey found himself presiding over a secret bureaucracy increasingly disconnected from the rest of American government. Like a big-city hospital whose poor practices made its patients sick, the CIA was making mistakes as part of its everyday operations. American intelligence had started to resemble "Frankenstein's creature," wrote James Monnier Simon, Jr., the CIA's chief administrative officer at the turn of the century—"an amalgamation of ill-fitting pieces put together at differing times by different, and sometimes indifferent, workmen," suffering from "a defective nervous system that cripples its coordination and balance."

The problems were too complicated for a quick fix. Like the space shuttle, the agency was a complex system that could explode if a simple component failed. The only person with the power to start to make the pieces fit was the president of the United States. But Clinton did not find the time to understand what the CIA was, how it worked, or where it fit in with the rest of the American government. The president delegated all of that to George Tenet, whom he brought to the White House as the National Security Council's staff director for intelligence.

Fourteen months into the Clinton administration. Tenet was musing over a double espresso and a cigar at a sidewalk cafe two blocks from the White House. What did he think should be done to change the CIA? "Blow it up," Tenet said. He meant, of course, a creative destruction, a rebuilding from the ground up. But it was a vivid choice of words.