11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. You can guess who gets to play Jack Ryan in his retelling of that historic morning.īy Sept. I hope Clarke has sold the rights to Hollywood, at least for his opening chapter, because I would pay to see this movie. 11, when Washington suddenly came blinking into a bloody new world. The first - and by far the best - chapter is a heart-stopping account of the turmoil inside the White House on the morning of Sept. It is a rarity among Washington-insider memoirs - it's a thumping good read. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but ''Against All Enemies'' offers more. The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept.

Clarke knows too much, and ''Against All Enemies'' is too good to be ignored. But if President Bush and his advisers were hoping that their loud pre-emptive attacks on ''Against All Enemies'' would make this book go away, they were sadly mistaken. The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden,ĭISCOUNTING the possibility that the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, is secretly a publicist for the Free Press, one must assume that the Bush administration really is angry at its former counterterrorism czar, and isn't simply trying to help him sell more books.

Ghost Wars by Steve Coll