Competitive Adaptation Counter-Terrorism Style 39
group credited with improving inter-agency cooperation during the 1980s did not always
resolve conflicts and streamline policy coordination among participating agencies.
Moreover, political fallout from the Iran-contra arms scandal in 1986 resulted in the
dismissal of the group’s NSC representative, Oliver North, and brought increased
scrutiny from Justice Department lawyers and the NSC counsel, who began to attend the
weekly meetings. As the informal inter-agency meetings grew in size, leaks to the press
occurred, reducing the willingness of group participants to share sensitive information.
Despite broad agreement over the threat to American interests posed by al Qaeda
and other terrorist networks, the Counterterrorism Security Group led by Richard Clarke
became bogged down in a series of disaggreements over counter-terrorism strategy and
operations in the late 1990s, fueled in part by contending institutional interests and
personal mistrust among participants from the NSC and the CIA. “There was a natural
tension between Richard Clarke’s counterterrorism shop at the White House and the
CIA’s Counterterrorist Center,” writes Steve Coll in Ghost Wars, a Pulitzer Prize winning
account of U.S. counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan before 9/11. “The CIA, in
particular, had been conditioned by history to recoil from gung-ho “allies” at the National
Security Council. Too often in the past, as in the case of Oliver North, CIA managers felt
the agency had been goaded into risky or illegal operations by politically motivated
White House cowboys, only to be left twisting after the operations went bad. White
House officials came and went in the rhythm of electoral seasons; the CIA had permanent
institutional interests to protect.”
The agency’s decision in the summer of 2004 to
56
David Tucker, Skirmishes at the Edge of Empire: The United States and International Terrorism
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997): 39-42.
57
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and bin Laden, from the Soviet
Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004): 394-395.
Convention