My life

He insisted on taking the testimony of several of my Secret Service agents, including Larry Cockell, the head of my detail. The Secret Service had resisted this, and former President Bush had written two letters opposing it. Except when the President is on the residence floor of the White House, the Secret Service is always with him or just outside the door of whatever room he is in. Presidents depend on the Secret Service to protect them, and to protect their confidences. The agents overhear all kinds of conversations involving national security, domestic policy, political conflicts, and personal struggles. Their dedication, professionalism, and discretion had served Presidents of both parties and the nation well. Now Starr was willing to put all that at risk—to investigate not espionage, or Watergate-like abuses of the FBI, or Iran-Contra–like willful defiance of the law, but whether I had given false answers and encouraged Monica Lewinsky to do the same in response to questions asked in bad faith, in a case that had been thrown out of court because it had no merit in the first place. By the end of the month, Starr had granted Monica Lewinsky immunity from prosecution in return for her testimony before the grand jury, and had subpoenaed me to testify as well. On the twenty-ninth, I agreed to testify voluntarily and the subpoena was withdrawn. I can’t say I was looking forward to it. Early in August, I met with ten Indian tribal leaders in Washington to announce a comprehensive effort to increase educational, health care, and economic opportunities for Native Americans. My assistant for intergovernmental affairs, Mickey Ibarra, and Lynn Cutler, my liaison to the tribes, had worked hard on the initiative and it was sorely needed. Although the United States was enjoying its lowest unemployment rate in twenty-eight years, the lowest crime rate in twenty-five years, and the smallest percentage of our citizens on welfare in twenty-nine years, Native American communities that had not grown wealthy from gambling operations were still in bad shape. Fewer than 10 percent of Native Americans went to college, they were three times more likely to suffer from diabetes as white Americans, and they still had the lowest per capita income of any American ethnic group. Some of the tribal communities had unemployment rates in excess of 50 percent. The leaders were encouraged by the new steps we were taking, and after the meeting I had some hope that we could help them. The next day the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were hit by bombs that exploded within five minutes of each other, killing 257 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring 5,000 others. The initial evidence indicated that Osama bin Laden’s network, which became known as al Qaeda, had launched the attacks. In late February, bin Laden had issued a fatwa calling for attacks on American military and civilian targets anywhere in the world. In May, he had said his supporters would hit U.S. targets in the Gulf and talked about “bringing the war home to America.” In June, in an interview with an American journalist, he had threatened to bring down U.S. military aircraft with anti-aircraft missiles. By this time, we had been following bin Laden for years. Early in my first term, Tony Lake and Dick Clarke had pressed the CIA for more information about the wealthy Saudi, who had been expelled from his own country in 1991, had lost his citizenship in 1994, and had taken up residence in Sudan. At first, bin Laden seemed to be a financier of terrorist operations, but over time we would learn that he was the head of a highly sophisticated terrorist organization, with access to large amounts of money beyond his own fortune, and with operatives in several countries, including Chechnya, Bosnia, and the Philippines. In 1995, after the war in Bosnia, we had thwarted mujahedin attempts to take over there and, in cooperation with local officials, had also stopped a plot to blow up a dozen planes flying out of the Philippines to the West Coast, but bin Laden’s transnational network continued to grow. In January 1996, the CIA had established a station focused exclusively on bin Laden and his network within its Counterterrorism Center, and shortly thereafter we began to urge Sudan to expel bin Laden. Sudan was then a virtual safe haven for terrorists, including the Egyptians who had tried to kill President Mubarak the previous June and who had succeeded in assassinating his predecessor, Anwar Sadat. The nation’s leader, Hasan al-Turabi, shared bin Laden’s radical views, and the two of them were involved in a whole host of business ventures, running the gamut from legitimate operations to weapons manufacturing and support for terrorists.