When I took office on January 21, I was immediately confronted by a profound bureaucratic anomaly: Richard Clarke. Typically, NSC senior directors take their instructions in day-to-day matters from my deputy, Steven Hadley. When they have policy proposals, they first seek consensus on what the policy options should be from a staff-level interdepartmental working group that they chair, and then take that consensus (and whatever limited points of disagreement on what the live options are remain) to the NSC deputies committee. After the NSC deputies committee has properly framed the issues, the matter is then discussed by the NSC principals committee--made up of cabinet members--that I chair, which decides what decisions the president needs to make and how the options on those decisions are to be presented to him.

But the Clinton administration was not a normal administration. And Richard Clarke did not have a normal place in it. Rather than reporting to the NSC deputies committee, Richard Clarke chaired the NSC principals committee when it met on terrorism issues. Rather than have the policy options discussed and framed by the deputies, the policy options were framed by Clarke himself, with the departmental staffs of the cabinet members then having to play catch-up. And because Clarke held this special position--deputy president for terrorism affairs, more or less--he could command the appearance of people like the head of the FBI or the CIA at the White House in short notice more-or-less on his own whim.

I took a look at this situation, and I thought about the great foreign-policy disasters of the past. I thought about the Bay of Pigs, where Eisenhower administration holdovers had bullied President Kennedy into approving a hair-brained invasion plan that had not been properly reviewed by Kenney's own people. I thought about Oliver North, where a hairbrained NSC staffer had warped U.S. foreign policy in destructive ways for years. I thought: "Nothing like this is going to happen on my watch. Whatever ideas Richard Clarke has are going to be properly assessed and reviewed."

So I decided, when Richard Clarke asked me for an "urgent" NSC principals meeting to approve his ideas on what to do about Al Qaeda and the Taliban, that he was not going to get one. Had he thought about the broader picture of South Asian and Middle Eastern diplomacy? What effect would his initiatives have on our ability to manage and contain the India-Pakistan conflict? The Taliban were clients of Pakistan's ISI: if we armed the Northern Alliance against the Taliban, would the ISI react by giving nuclear technology to Iran? It seemed to me that Clarke's plans needed to be tested: he needed to convince the security department staffs and the members of the NSC deputies committee that he had thought these issues through, and if he hadn't then his plans needed to be improved by their input.

So I directed my deputy Steven Hadley to treat the problem of Al Qaeda and its Taliban-granted sanctuary in its proper context as part of South Asian/Middle Eastern policy, and to put the comprehensive review of South Asian/Middle Eastern policy in its proper place in the queue of issues: high, but not the highest.

In May, however, I discovered that my subordinate Richard Clarke was undermining my assessment of policy priorities. He and George Tenet had agreed to stuff George W. Bush's daily intelligence briefing--the PDB--with lots of material on Al Qaeda. And so in May George W. Bush asked for a plan to destroy Al Qaeda, and I assured him that such a plan was being worked on--and it was, at the deputies level, as part of the overall South Asian/Middle Eastern policy review.

But I was damned if any NSC senior director who worked for me was going to overturn my judgment on policy priorities by end-running. Richard Clarke was going to wait his turn while the NSC principals dealt with other more important and more urgent issue areas. Richard Clarke stayed in his place in the policy-development queue.

Also, check out deLong's list (via Robert Waldmann and Ryan Lizza) of the contradictory claims made by various Bush administration hit-men in their vain attempt to smear Richard Clarke.