Good background piece on Clarke WaPo ..Nov 2001

[SoCalDem]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A36571-2001Nov3


snip....

Clarke, though, is not known for his diplomacy. Former colleagues describe him as effective but abrasive. And with a budget that's still being negotiated and a staff that consists, as he put it, of "mostly me" and 15 to 20 people who are on loan from various agencies, some wonder whether he'll run into the same bureaucratic barriers he did in the past. "For years he was being as aggressive as the rest of government would permit, but it was hard to make people pay attention," said Jonathan Winer, a former State Department official who is now a lawyer at Alston & Bird LLP. "The question is, will he get people to pay attention now?"

Clarke, the son of a chocolate-factory worker, was educated at the Boston Latin School, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has spent his entire career in the military-national security field and was assistant secretary of state under the elder George Bush. Then he became the nation's first counterterrorism chief in the executive branch under President Bill Clinton. The year was 1998 and it was the middle of the dot-com boom, when most high-tech executives seemed to be interested only in the stock market and the newest new thing. Clarke found it challenging to get appointments with top executives, and many workers seemed oblivious to what they believed were largely hypothetical threats. They preferred to devote much of their energy to erecting computer systems that emphasized speed rather than security. Former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, his boss during those years, remembers how Clarke would return from his talks with various industry groups frustrated by their lack of interest. "It was like he was talking a foreign language," Berger said.

Still, Clarke persevered.

He drafted a 159-page "National Plan for Information Systems Protection" that he handed out to government agencies and private companies. He urged Congress to increase its budget for counterterrorism; it has grown to $12 billion in 2001 from about $7.2 billion in 1998, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

Many of his achievements are things that didn't happen.

On the eve of Jan. 1, 2000, while the world was out partying, Clarke was decked out in a tuxedo at a top-secret government communications vault monitoring intelligence reports for signs of bin Laden and his associates. Based on interviews and intercepted communications in the months before, the government had reason to believe that the terrorists planned a series of attacks aimed at killing dozens or even hundreds that night. The night passed without incident. Former national security adviser Anthony Lake said in an interview that Clarke's obsessive focus on his mission and impatience for office politics is at the same time his greatest strength and weakness. "Yes, he may occasionally ruffle feathers, but I think there are a lot of feathers that need ruffling right now," said Lake, now a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University.

In his 2000 book, "Six Nightmares: Real Threats in a Dangerous World and How America Can Meet Them," about threats to America's safety, Lake calls Clarke one of the smartest and most effective civil servants he has ever known. Lake describes him this way: "a bulldog of a bureaucrat, notorious among his colleagues for utter devotion to those he works for, fierce loyalty and support toward those who work for him, and a bluntness toward those at his level that has not earned him universal affection."

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