By all accounts, bin Laden was poisoned by the conviction that he was in possession of the absolute truth and therefore free to play God by killing innocent people. Since we had been going after his organization for several years, I had known for some time that he was a formidable adversary. After the African slaughter I became intently focused on capturing or killing him and with destroying al Qaeda. One week after the embassy bombings, and after videotaping an address to the people of Kenya and Tanzania, whose losses were far greater than ours, I met with the national security principals. The CIA and FBI both confirmed that al Qaeda was responsible and reported that some of the perpetrators had already been arrested.
I had also received an intelligence report that al Qaeda had plans to attack yet another embassy, in Tirana, Albania, and that our enemies thought America was vulnerable because we would be distracted by the controversy over my personal behavior. We closed the Albanian embassy, sent in heavily armed marines to guard it, and began working with local authorities to break up the al Qaeda cell there. But we still had other embassies in countries with al Qaeda operations.
The CIA also had intelligence that bin Laden and his top staff were planning a meeting at one of his camps in Afghanistan on August 20 to assess the impact of their attacks and plan their next operations. The meeting would provide an opportunity to retaliate and perhaps wipe out much of the al Qaeda leadership. I asked Sandy Berger to manage the process leading up to a military response. We had to pick targets, move the necessary military assets into place, and figure out how to handle Pakistan. If we launched air strikes, our planes would pass over Pakistan’s airspace. Although we were trying to work with Pakistan to defuse tensions on the Indian subcontinent, and our two nations had been allies during the Cold War, Pakistan supported the Taliban and, by extension, al Qaeda. The Pakistani intelligence service used some of the same camps that bin Laden and al Qaeda did to train the Taliban and insurgents who fought in Kashmir. If Pakistan found out about our planned attacks in advance, it was likely that Pakistani intelligence would warn the Taliban or even al Qaeda. On the other hand, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, who was working to minimize the chances of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, was afraid that if we didn’t tell the Pakistanis, they might assume the flying missiles had been launched at them by India and retaliate, conceivably even with nuclear weapons.
We decided to send the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Joe Ralston, to have dinner with the top Pakistani military commander at the time the attacks were scheduled. Ralston would tell him what was happening a few minutes before our missiles invaded Pakistani airspace, too late to alert the Taliban or al Qaeda, but in time to avoid having them shot down or sparking a counterattack on India. My team was worried about one other thing: my testimony before the grand jury in three days, on August 17. They were afraid that it would make me reluctant to strike, or that if I did order the attack, I would be accused of doing it to divert public attention from my problems, especially if the attack didn’t get bin Laden. I told them in no uncertain terms that their job was to give me advice on national security. If the recommendation was to strike on the twentieth, then that’s what we would do. I said I would handle my personal problems. Time was running out on that, too.
FORTY-NINE
On Saturday morning, August 15, with the grand jury testimony looming and after a miserable, sleepless night, I woke up Hillary and told her the truth about what had happened between me and Monica Lewinsky. She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut, almost as angry at me for lying to her in January as for what I had done. All I could do was tell her that I was sorry, and that I had felt I couldn’t tell anyone, even her, what had happened. I told her that I loved her and I didn’t want to hurt her or Chelsea, that I was ashamed of what I had done, and that I had kept everything to myself in an effort to avoid hurting my family and undermining the presidency. And after all the lies and abuse we had endured from the start of my presidency, I didn’t want to be run out of office in the flood tide that followed my deposition in January. I still didn’t fully understand why I had done something so wrong and stupid; that understanding would come slowly, in the months of working on our relationship that lay ahead.
I had to talk to Chelsea, too. In some ways, that was even harder. Sooner or later, every child learns that her parents aren’t perfect, but this went far beyond the normal. I had always believed that I had been a good father. Chelsea’s high school years and her freshman year in college had already been clouded by four years of intensely personal attacks on her parents. Now Chelsea had to learn that her father not only had done something terribly wrong, but had not told her or her mother the truth about it. I was afraid that I would lose not only my marriage, but my daughter’s love and respect as well. The rest of that awful day was dominated by another terrorist act. In Omagh, Northern Ireland, a breakaway faction of the IRA that did not support the Good Friday accord murdered twenty-eight people in a crowded shopping section of the city with a car bomb. All the parties to the peace process, including Sinn Fein, denounced the bombing. I issued a statement condemning the butchery, extending my sympathy to the victims’ families, and urging the parties of peace to redouble their efforts. The outlaw group, which called itself the Real IRA, had about two hundred members and supporters, enough to cause real trouble, but not enough to disrupt the peace process: the Omagh bombing showed the utter insanity of going back to the old ways.
On Monday, after spending what time I could preparing, I went downstairs to the Map Room for four hours of testimony. Starr had agreed not to bring me down to the courthouse, probably because of the adverse reaction he got when he made Hillary do it. However, he insisted on videotaping my testimony, allegedly because one of the twenty-four grand jurors couldn’t attend the session. David Kendall said the grand jury was welcome to come to the White House if Starr would not videotape my “secret” testimony. He refused; I suspected that he wanted to send the videotape to Congress, where it could be released without getting him into more hot water.
The grand jury was watching the proceedings on closed-circuit television back at the courthouse while Starr and his interrogators did their best to turn the videotape into a pornographic home movie, asking me questions designed to humiliate me and to so disgust the Congress and the American people that they would demand my resignation, after which he might be able to indict me. Samuel Johnson once said that nothing concentrates the mind as much as the prospect of one’s own destruction. Moreover, I believed that a lot more was at stake than what might happen to me.
After the preliminaries, I asked to make a brief statement. I admitted that “on certain occasions in 1996 and once in 1997” I engaged in wrongful conduct that included inappropriate intimate contact with Monica Lewinsky; that the conduct, while morally wrong, did not constitute “sexual relations” as I understood the definition of the term that Judge Wright accepted at the request of the Jones lawyers; that I took full responsibility for my actions; and that I would answer to the best of my ability all the OIC’s questions relating to the legality of my actions, but would not say more about the specifics of what had happened.
The principal OIC interrogator then took me through a long list of questions dealing with the definition of “sexual relations” that Judge Wright had imposed. I acknowledged that I had not been trying to be helpful to the Jones lawyers because they, like the OIC, had engaged in repeated unlawful leaks, and since they knew by then that their case had no merit, I believed that their objective in the deposition was to elicit damaging new information from me for the purpose of leaking it. I said that of course I didn’t know that by the time I testified Starr’s office had already become heavily involved. Now Starr’s lawyers were trying to capitalize on the setup by getting me on videotape discussing things in graphic detail that no one should ever have to talk about publicly. When the OIC lawyer continued to complain about my deposition answers on the sex questions, I reminded him that both my lawyer and I had invited Jones’s attorneys to ask specific follow-up questions, and that they declined to do so. I said it was now clear to me that they didn’t do so because they were no longer trying to get a damaging admission that they could leak to the press. Instead, they were working for Starr. They wanted the deposition to lay the basis for forcing my resignation, or impeachment, or perhaps even an indictment. So they didn’t ask follow-up questions “because they were afraid I would give them a truthful answer…. They were trying to set me up and trick me. And now you seem to be complaining that they didn’t do a good enough job.” I confessed that I “deplored” what the Rutherford Institute lawyers had done in Jones’s name—the tormenting of innocent people, the illegal leaking, the pursuit of a bogus, politically motivated suit—“but I was determined to walk through the minefield of this deposition without violating the law, and I believe I did.”
I did acknowledge that I had misled everyone who asked about the story after it broke. And I said over and over again that I never asked anyone to lie. When the agreed-upon four hours had expired, I had been asked many
