When former President Bill Clinton met with George W. Bush before leaving office, he told his successor that Osama bin Laden, the Middle East and North Korea posed more of a threat to U.S. national security than Iraq, Clinton says.
In the first part of a two-part interview surrounding his new autobiography, My Life, Clinton also tells NPR's Juan Williams that bin Laden dominated intelligence discussions at the White House.
For the last three years of his presidency, Clinton says, he and top national security officials discussed bin Laden "several times a week." U.S. intelligence agencies "didn't succeed in either getting bin Laden or telling us where he was. And I was sometimes frustrated thinking they were recommending that I not do things more than that I do. It was frustrating to me."
Clinton also discusses a proposal to restructure U.S. intelligence agencies. "The best minds in each of our intelligence agencies should be given a common office somewhere and they should have a joint doomsday planning operation," he says.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
