Did Clarke's zeal backfire?

From mid-1999 on, the raw intelligence about an impending assault of major proportions was on the scale of the information that bombarded listening posts starting in the spring of 2001. It was massive.

The response four years ago is a minor classic in the annals of how things happen in immense organizations. It's not all that complicated. When the intelligence information "spiked," a small group of the most important people running agencies that are supposed to protect the country began getting together regularly. The result from the very top was that after every one of these gatherings, officials returned to their shops determined to force every scrap of useful information out of their organization so that they would have something concrete to report on at the next meeting.

The flip side is that the people who actually do the work have a little extra spring in their step when they know that their activities are of intense interest to the ultimate boss.

One place where the results were enormous happened to be the much-maligned Justice Department and the FBI. With Attorney General Janet Reno apparently matching Clarke's zeal back at her office, raw information flowed as speedily up the ladder as orders for more flowed down, and one result was that Al Qaeda cells planning attacks were thwarted on both coasts.

It's true that the entire operation caught a very lucky break when a customs officer found a car full of high-explosives at the Canadian border, along with a terrorist on his way to attempt a massive bombing at Los Angeles International Airport. That break occurred in the context of a full alert coordinated by Clarke.

After the threat abated, however, Clarke found himself presiding over an after-action report that focused on highly specific recommendations for the future (29 in all) that were tactical, not strategic. He remained unable to persuade President Clinton and his top security officials that after six years of major attacks on US interests and citizens, and after what amounted to a declaration in early 1998 of a new kind of war by Osama bin Laden, the administration should not leave Al Qaeda unscathed in its Afghanistan sanctuary.

When Clarke testified publicly before the 9/11 commission last week, he wondered if the government hadn't been "a victim of its own success" in 1999, and he also wondered if the very absence of victims was the reason existing policy assumptions weren't challenged.

In the spring and summer of 2001, the spike in intelligence information was even greater then the one in 2001. It is a fact that the CIA's information focused on American interests in Saudi Arabia and Israel, in particular, but we now know that the possibility of an attack on the United States was continually mentioned, especially by Clarke.

This time, however, nothing like the alert directed from the top resulted, even though the American experience had been further embittered by the attack on the USS Cole in the fall of 2000. There were warnings and alerts to airlines and embassies and military installations, to be sure, but in context they had the impact of boilerplate bureaucracy; agency heads were not receiving the continuous inspiration of daily White House direction to shake every tree in the forest.

In retrospect, Clarke believes this mattered. Only politics can explain the Bush administration's refusal to agree. This is not, moreover, an idle exercise involving only the past; there remain serious arguments about whether cost and business pressure is preventing the country from doing all it should to monitor air cargo, shipping, and chemical and nuclear plants, even in a post-9/11 atmosphere.

Politics aside, the country got an informational jolt last week that was healthy and overdue. The 9/11 commission is about today every bit as much as yesterday, and full cooperation with it must be a test of the government's credibility now that we know the costs of inattention and a lack of Clarke's zeal.

Thomas Oliphant's e-mail address is oliphant@globe.com.