Washington, DC — Did the Clinton Administration miss the chance to stop Osama Bin Laden in Sudan?
That question, which has bubbled under the surface of the debate over U.S. foreign policy since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon eight weeks ago, erupted publicly this week with the publication by Vanity Fair of charges that "September 11 might have been prevented."
The article, written by British investigative journalist David Rose, is categorical in its conclusions that Clinton policymakers' hard line hostility toward Khartoum blinded them to an opportunity that could have increased the prospects for preventing not only the attacks on September 11 but also the bombings of the American embassies in Africa in 1998.
However, a series of interviews by allAfrica.com suggested that the reality was, at the least, more complex than Rose contends.
According to the article, which appears in the magazine's January issue, the Sudanese government "made repeated efforts" to share with Washington "copious intelligence" on Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network. The information was collected by the Sudanese intelligence agency, Mukhabarat, from the early to the mid-1990s, when Osama Bin Laden was living in Sudan.
Throughout the past decade, until just weeks before the September 11 terror attacks in Washington and New York, Rose says, Khartoum offered its intelligence to the State Department and other U.S. officials, but was always turned down. He cites the former American Ambassador to Sudan, Timothy Carney, as saying that, as a consequence, Washington "lost access to a mine of material on Bin Laden and his organization."
Carney, who was the last U.S. Ambassador to Khartoum - his posting ended in 1997 when the U.S. virtually severed ties with Sudan - contends that the rejection of the offer should be blamed on a Clinton Administration State Department committed to the idea that Sudan was a terrorist state with nothing genuine to offer. The situation was made worse, Rose says, "by CIA reports that were wildly inaccurate, some the result of deliberate misinformation."
According to Carney, as quoted in the Vanity Fair article, an important part of the problem was "inadequate vetting and analysis by the CIA of its own product... Despite dissent from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, U.S. intelligence failed because it became politicized."
"The article's allegations just fall on their face," said Susan Rice, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs from October 1997 until the end of the Clinton administration. Before that, Rice was in charge of Africa at the National Security Council. "They are wild lies. Irresponsible journalism," she told allAfrica.com.
In a face-off on CNN's Late Edition last Sunday, Rice said none of the information Rose describes was "ever provided" and said Rose had been "taken in" by the Sudanese government. "The Sudanese are the primary sources for this article. They are sponsors of terrorism," she said.
Rose stuck to his contention that the Clinton team was too occupied with "trying to undermine the Sudanese government" to weigh the intelligence offers seriously, and he accused Rice of refusing virtually any contact with Khartoum.
But Rice says there were ongoing contacts with the Sudan government throughout the period discussed in the article. "Between 1996 and 2001 we were continually meeting with them. In early 2000, we began discussions about sending a full time counter-terrorism team to Khartoum. They've been on the ground there since May 2000. Sudan never offered to provide, nor did they provide, such information throughout the whole Clinton Administration. Nor do I believe they did to the Bush Administration, prior to September 11."
Rebutting Carney's charges, Rice said: "Ambassador Carney sat in meetings in which this information was not offered and in which we sought to elicit information on terrorism. The record is clear. There are numerous American officials who sat in on these meetings."
J. Stephen Morrison, who was then on the State Department's Policy Planning Staff, and is now director of Africa programs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC, told allAfrica.com that he sides with Ambassador Carney. The hard line, anti-Khartoum approach adopted by the Administration, he says, was "ultimately rigid and extremely vitriolic, to the point of being mindless. It was impossible to get an open debate about it in the Clinton Administration," Morrison complains.
Morrison, who worked on African and global foreign assistance issues, says Sudan's government was signaling some willingness to work toward a rapprochement with the United States: "The question was, do you pocket these overtures and test them, or preemptively declare that they must be bogus?"
But, says Rice: "There was never argument on the counter-terrorism issue. Sudan was a serious sponsor of terrorism. Going back to 1995, the question was, how much pressure to apply, what we might get by pressure and containment. This was something that continued to be discussed and debated, but we never stopped talking to the government of Sudan."
Also weighing in alongside Rice is Ted Dagne, now with the Congressional Research Service, who from 1993 to 1995 was on the professional staff of the House Africa Subcommittee and later was a consultant to Clinton's special envoy to Sudan, Harry Johnson. "I tend to agree with Susan on this one. I think it's far-fetched. The main sources [for Rose'article] are Sudanese intelligence, businessmen connected with Khartoum and a former ambassador who was unhappy with the policy."
He adds: "If the Sudanese government was so interested in helping us [on terrorism], why didn't they give [their documents] to their good friend, Ambassador Carney?"
One of the businessmen cited in the Vanity Fair article was Mansoor Ijaz, a major contributor to the Democratic Party. Writing in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, he says he acted as a conduit for the Sudan Government's offer to share intelligence. "From 1996 to 1998 [both before and after Bin Laden was expelled in May '96], I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R."Sandy" Berger and Sudan's president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt's Islamic Jihad, Iran's Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas."
Ijaz said: "The silence of the Clinton Administration in responding to these offers was deafening."
"He thought campaign contributions bought policies. He was a guy who wanted to be a player. We thought it was more fruitful and appropriate to deal with the Sudanese government," Rice responded.
Rice and others insist, however, that despite their mistrust of Khartoum's motives, they always pressed forward with dialogue. "The problem with the Clinton Administration and Sudan was not lack of dialogue," she told allAfrica.com in an interview last month. "The problem was that we were insisting that they should not just issue pretty statements and charming words, but that they should fundamentally change their behavior. And they didn't."
At the heart of the argument was whether to isolate and "contain" Sudan or to engage it, hoping to foster change and achieve an end to its brutal civil war. Rather than come down on one side or the other, the Clinton Administration followed a twin-track policy, which, for some of those involved, meant falling between two stools. "We had a policy that was largely empty posturing that didn't get us anywhere," said Steve Morrison.
In the early '90s there were bipartisan calls in Congress for the appointment of a special envoy but the State Department opposed such a course. This was partly protection of its turf - the State Department is usually opposed to special envoys. But there was also an argument that such an envoy might send a message that the United States was becoming involved in the peace process, which Khartoum would resist. Prodded, however, by the National Security Council, Clinton did appoint Ambassador Melissa Wells as his special envoy in 1994.
"We had a period of 'constructive engagement' from 1992 to 1996," says Dagne, explaining the roots of his deep suspicion of Sudan's government. "And when Ambassador Don Petterson was in Khartoum [until 1995] he specifically engaged the government on the terrorism issue. They were the ones who were not forthcoming." But, he says, doubts about that policy began to strengthen with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995.
By the mid-1990s, most observers believed that the administration was tilting in favour of isolating Sudan, in spite of opposition from officials like Ambassador Carney, and the chief of the State Department's East Africa desk, David Shinn.
In 1996, relations seriously worsened. Washington closed the embassy in Khartoum and announced that it was transferring all of the personnel there to Nairobi, Kenya. In April, a Sudanese diplomat was expelled from the U.S. for alledgedly being involved in espionage and terrorist activities. In May 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was calling Sudan, "a viper's nest of terrorism."
As the policy increasingly became one of containing, rather than engaging Khartoum, Dagne recalls Ambassador Carney saying: "We should engage moderates." "But," says Dagne, "I said; 'Point out the moderates!' Most in the Khartoum government were hardliners."
There were other concerns and constituencies impacting on the policy debate. Some officials worried that Middle East peace efforts could be put at risk if Arab anger developed over U.S. actions in Sudan. A major counter-terrorism effort still wasn't a high priority, and there was debate over how important it should be. NGOs concerned with humanitarian relief argued that they needed Khartoum's cooperation to avert a worsening humanitarian disaster.
From most accounts by participants in the debate, conversations between Sudanese and U.S. intelligence officials continued, with some occurring during the period in which the Vanity Fair article says intelligence information offered by Sudan was being rejected.
At one "back channel" meeting with Sudanese intelligence officials in a Rosslyn, Virginia hotel early in the spring of 1996, CIA officials sought to have Osama Bin Laden expelled from Sudan. The officials gave Sudanese Major General Elfatih Erwa, then minister of state for defense, a memo dated March 8, 1996 with the title "Measures Sudan Can Take To Improve Relations With The United States." The memo, which was published in the Washington Post on October 3, 2001, listed half a dozen items. Number two on that list was a request for information on Bin Laden.
"Our interest was in getting him out of Sudan," said one U.S. diplomat involved with African issues who was worried that Bin Laden was behind many of the violent Islamist incursions into Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea. In Washington, rumors flew that Anthony Lake, the National Security Advisor during Clinton's first term and a vocal critic of Khartoum, had been targeted for assassination. According to David Rose, Lake was "uprooted with his family from his home and kept under Secret Service guard at Blair House, the presidential guest quarters across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House."
Although most analysts considered the reports of an assassination plot improbable, any possibility of increased engagement with Khartoum receded even further, despite Ambassador Carney's continuing insistence that the U.S. was losing an opportunity to influence a government looking for a way out of the terrorist category.
The United States asked Saudi Arabia to take Bin Laden, hoping, some said, that they would summarily execute him. But the Saudis refused. Sudan, reportedly puzzled that the United States had not asked for extradition, expelled Bin Laden on May 18, 1996, and he went instead to Afghanistan, where he is said to have planned the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam and the near-sinking of the USS Cole in 1999. U.S. officials say they did not have enough evidence to ask for his extradition to the United States from Sudan.
Although there had been bomb threats against the U.S. embassy, Ambassador Carney voiced strong objections when he was ordered to pull all Americans out of the country. (Anyone trying to get to the bottom of this story in Washington encounters both the personal and political. One person close to events in Sudan and the debates in Washington at the time says Carney's current attitude was partly formed because he was "bitter, very bitter, very angry," that the U.S. embassy in Khartoum was closed and he was forced to operate from Nairobi, almost 1,000 miles away).
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On November 22, 1996, President Clinton banned senior Sudanese government officials from entering the United States. In November the following year, comprehensive sanctions were imposed. Some $20m for "non-lethal assistance" - C130 aircraft, boots, old uniforms, communications gear and other surplus gear - was authorized for Eritrea, Uganda and Ethiopia to help keep rebel movements sponsored by Sudan's National Islamic Front (NIF) government at bay.
Commenting on this stage of bilateral relations, Sudanese Ambassador Khidir Haroun Ahmed said that the Clinton Administration had a 'no talk' policy. "They had a policy to overthrow the government," he said in a recent interview.
Yet even late in 1996, despite a toughening stance, there were still carrots being dangled in front of Sudan. Some officials were permitted to visit the United States. Sudan was exempted from the 1996 anti-terrorism act. Occidental Oil was given a green light to enter into a joint venture to build a pipeline to the Red Sea (eventually companies from China and Malaysia were chosen, in reprisal, some felt, for the $20m in U.S. aid given to hostile neighbors).
It was during the period - from mid-1996 through the middle of 1997 - that Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American businessman with high-level Democratic Party connections, says he shuttled between Khartoum and Washington in an effort to bridge the divide. Rose reports that Ijaz brought back a letter from Sudan dated April 5, 1997 (ten months after Bin Laden had been expelled), from Sudan's president to the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, Lee Hamilton, inviting the FBI to visit Khartoum "assess the data in our possession." Ijaz said he tried, but failed to make the administration understand the significance he saw in President al-Bashir's overture. The document is one of several reproduced by Vanity Fair as illustrations to the article.
The great divide of perception between those seeking to engage and those determined to isolate Sudan still dogs relations between the two countries and leaves a question mark hovering over the future.
But regarding the current allegations, at least, Ted Dagne is clear. "The Administration never completely disengaged." Even at the very end of Clinton's term in early 2000, he says, the two sides were talking on a wide range of issues, including terrorism, and were even trying to chart the future.
A draft "Sudan Road Map" was even delivered by Susan Rice to the Foreign Minister of Sudan at a Ouagadougou meeting in the summer of last year, says Dagne: "It discussed what information we needed, what steps might be taken toward normalizing relations, and what reward."
