'Against All Enemies' and 'Ghost Wars' - Great Reads

NYTimes Book Reviews - By Sept. 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. 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. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden. By the morning of Sept. 11, he was still handling counterterrorism, but was planning to leave for a lower-profile assignment dealing with cybersecurity.

In the first minutes after the attacks, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, told Clarke to act as crisis manager in the White House Situation Room, and he seized the moment. In his account, it was he who recommended to Vice President Dick Cheney that President Bush should not come back to the White House from Florida, and he who gave the order triggering the Continuity of Government procedures, the doomsday rules under which cabinet members and Congressional leaders were whisked to undisclosed locations.

The most controversial incident in ''Against All Enemies'' deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to ''go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.''

Clarke said he was ''taken aback, incredulous.'' He told the president, ''Al Qaeda did this.''

''I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred. . . .'' After the president left, one of Clarke's aides said, ''Wolfowitz got to him.''

Within a few months of the attacks, Clarke's access clearly did begin to dwindle; White House officials played on his lack of firsthand knowledge of Iraq war planning to attack the credibility of his book. But the key allegation in the book -- that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States -- can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop.

''Ghost Wars,'' Steve Coll's objective -- and terrific -- account of the long and tragic history leading up to Sept. 11, is a welcome antidote to the fevered partisan bickering that accompanied the release of Clarke's book.

In particular, Coll has done a great service by revealing how Saudi Arabia and its intelligence operations aided the rise of Osama bin Laden and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia's alleged involvement in terrorism has been the subject of wild conspiracy theories since Sept. 11; Coll gives us a clear and balanced view of Saudi Arabia's real ties to bin Laden. The links he reveals are serious enough to prompt an important debate about the nature of the Saudi-American partnership in the fight against terrorism. ''Saudi intelligence officials said years later that bin Laden was never a professional Saudi intelligence agent,'' he writes, referring to Saudi support for foreign Arab fighters against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Still, ''it seems clear that bin Laden did have a substantial relationship with Saudi intelligence.''