Monday, October 18, 1999
Thursday, November 11, 1999
Thursday, December 16, 1999
Our taping lapsed through September, while Clinton tackled the annual backlog of deferred activity from his vacation. Congress reconvened in an especially bad mood, anticipating next year’s elections, and Chelsea left for her junior year at Stanford. Nancy Hernreich called to commiserate that there were no two-hour windows in a presidential calendar packed nightly with meetings, dinners, and receptions. Christy and I did receive an invitation to one of the black-tie events, at which the Clintons circulated through formal White House rooms on the main floor beneath the residence, shaking hands. We barely saw them before they retired for the evening. As we gathered our coats to leave, social secretary Ann Stock surprised us with notice that we were requested upstairs in the Solarium.
President Clinton was presiding grandly over his card table. We pulled up seats behind George McGovern in a welcome assignment to coach our revered old boss. The game “Oh Hell” was too screwy for him to keep up with at seventy-seven, McGovern kept protesting, but he more than held his own in raucous banter. He turned to chide director Steven Spielberg for neglecting McGovern’s World War II flyboys in the film Saving Private Ryan. When her ace was trumped, actress Kate Capshaw rebuked the president with merrier abandon than Clinton’s guys permitted themselves at Hearts: “You’re a big, fat old boogeyman!” Hillary once stood to challenge the scorekeeper, appealing one by one to players and bystanders who vouched unanimously for Clinton’s record of her bid on the hand. After a quizzical pause, she slumped from indignation to a smile. “Well, I thought that was the way it was,” she said. On the side, Hillary joined Clinton and me to exchange gallows humor with McGovern, recalling our Texas encounters during his failed presidential campaign twenty-seven years earlier.
The president greeted me alone at this Solarium table in October. Nancy Hernreich, having despaired of night slots for a while, promised to bottle up the West Wing staff while we chanced an afternoon session to catch up on tape. Among his vacation memories was the discovery that England’s Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, had a real career in the British navy as opposed to a royal sinecure. An avid golfer, Andrew played a round with the president on Martha’s Vineyard. Clinton loved hearing singer Phoebe Snow. He described the family search for a future New York house within forty minutes of the city—hoping to cut down on the strain of late-night journeys home. They had picked out an 1880 farmhouse near Chappaqua, with all but one acre of its surrounding land sold off for suburban homes. The Secret Service vetoed smaller plots, citing the minimum footprint for a secure perimeter, and Clinton said he could not afford a bigger one. Mostly, he repeated, “I just wanted to find a place where Hillary will be happy when she wakes up in the morning.” They had sneaked away for two days last week to celebrate their anniversary at Camp David, watching old movies.
From Martha’s Vineyard, he attended the seventh APEC summit in New Zealand. All hell had just broken loose, said Clinton, on the island of East Timor 3,600 miles to the northwest, above Australia. After four hundred years of Portuguese colonial rule, then twenty-four years of bloody repression from the Indonesian army beginning in 1975, the East Timorese people voted 80 percent for independence in a U.N.-supervised referendum on August 30. Shocked, denouncing ingrates and rebels, Indonesia fomented violent clashes, and 300,000 of East Timor’s million people were refugees when the APEC leaders gathered ten days later. On tape, the president described hard diplomacy to secure withdrawal by Indonesia’s President B. J. Habibie, followed by international peacekeepers and relief efforts,* in the midst of parallel talks to stop future nuclear tests by North Korea. Quoting Tony Lake, Clinton called the latter effort “a dog that didn’t bark,” meaning a hard-won success that attracted little attention.
* The APEC nations subsidized peacekeepers and the political transition in the wake of the 1999 upheaval. East Timor gained recognition as an independent country in 2002.
There was a tourist’s detour to Queenstown, New Zealand, which he called an even prettier enlargement of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Some White House staff members jumped off picturesque cliffs, suspended by bungee cords, while others descended into gorgeous caves with all kinds of exotic flowers and animals, including eels. The president said he cherished the rare company of Chelsea, who usually traveled abroad with her mother. They visited with Edmund Hillary, the famed explorer of Mount Everest and Antarctica. Clinton released satellite photographs of the polar ice cap for Hillary’s scientific studies of global warming.
Back at APEC, the president met Russia’s new prime minister, Vladimir Putin, whom he gave a tepid endorsement. Putin was brisk, reserved, and gravely intent upon stamping out the Chechen rebellion, but Clinton was preoccupied for now with the erratic behavior of his boss, Boris Yeltsin. This was his fourth abrupt switch of prime minister in the past sixteen months. Yeltsin’s mental focus was slipping. His heart and lung ailments were a constant intrusion. “I still think we’ve done the right thing to pursue this relationship for Russia,” said the president, “but it’s disintegrating in front of us.”
He sketched APEC consultations with Jiang Zemin and others about the financial crisis in Asia. Pointedly, his business sessions excluded the newest of APEC’s twenty-one member nations, Vietnam. Although they had established full recognition, it remained a politically charged barrier for an American president to bargain directly with an heir of the legendary Ho Chi Minh. Only by quirk of protocol, and proximity in the alphabet, did the U.S. and Vietnamese leaders find themselves next to each other on ceremonial occasions. At one meal, said Clinton, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai turned to him with feeling. “Mr. President,” said Khai, “I can’t tell you how much it means to me knowing that you opposed the war against our country.” He had been born in the old capital of Saigon, and fought French colonialists as a teenager before migrating north to Hanoi for decades of war with the United States. Two of Khai’s brothers had been killed. That conflict was the overwhelming legacy of his generation.
“Yes, I did oppose the war,” Clinton replied. “I thought it was wrong. But at the same time, Mr. Prime Minister, I want you to know that the people who led us in that war had been fighting Communism a long time.” That was their cause. Because of Communism, they could not appreciate the Vietnamese drive for independence, but neither did they have a colonialist or imperialist motive to control Vietnam. “I believe it was an honest mistake,” Clinton told him. Freedom is everything for Americans, and they saw it as a war for freedom. “I know they did,” Khai replied. The two got choked up trying to understand colliding patriotisms, and the president faltered again at the memory. I asked whether Khai invited him to Vietnam. “Yes, he did,” said the president, “and I’m probably going next year.”
Returning home, Clinton exhorted the fifty-fourth General Assembly at the United Nations toward three high goals for the millennium ahead: to overcome the “enduring human failures” of extreme global poverty, ethnic hatred, and cataclysmic war. The structure of his speech, I commented, echoed Dr. King’s 1964 Nobel Prize lecture commending nonviolent methods against mankind’s “triple scourge.” King had summoned hope for the world’s “barefoot and shirtless people.” Clinton said 1.3 billion people, mostly children, still live on less than a dollar per day. The acclaim of the U.N. audience, while strong, did not match the previous year’s emotional wave in the face of impeachment, partly because many delegates simmered against the United States for nonpayment of U.N. dues. He lamented this delinquency as the product of a hardened stance by the Republican Congress.
Two days after his U.N. speech, Clinton vetoed a $792 billion tax cut rammed through Congress on a partisan vote. It was skewed to benefit wealthy Americans, he said, and would have forced cuts in spending for education, Medicare reform, and the environment. This tax cut would turn surpluses back toward deficits. Would our baby boom generation reduce—even eliminate—the enormous debt burden to fall upon our descendants, or would we rationalize deficits again to preserve our disposable income? Clinton said Republicans skirted this question with a political reflex: my tax cut is bigger than yours. Democrats sustained his veto for now, but only voters could uphold it for the long run.
Republicans struck next where Congress could do damage on its own. Last week, the Senate voted down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) by a partisan phalanx. Not a single Democrat voted nay, and only four Republicans voted in favor. The treaty failed to gain even a simple majority, 48–51, falling nineteen votes short of the two-thirds required for ratification. Clinton called this rejection one of the most significant defeats of his presidency. He and his allies had been snookered on parliamentary procedures, so that they could not even stave off humiliation with a face-saving postponement. Republican leaders, who had been marshaling their fifty-five senators quietly, blocked votes on riders and reservations to help kill the treaty outright. Historians likened it to the Senate’s rejection of Woodrow Wilson’s Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which doomed the League of Nations and fixed the course of U.S. isolationism until World War II. Observers sensed a sharp departure from decades of bipartisan U.S. leadership to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons. President Eisenhower had proposed a ban on all nuclear testing in 1958. President Kennedy had achieved the 1963 partial ban against testing in the atmosphere. Twenty-six of the world’s forty-four current and potential nuclear powers already had ratified this test ban treaty since 1996. Now, to justify their refusal to join the treaty, wavering nations like China and Russia could invoke the example of the United States.
Three crucial countries—India, Pakistan, and North Korea—had neither ratified the CTBT nor signified general approval of its terms. One of these—Pakistan—had just suffered a military coup, dire news that had reached Clinton during his anniversary getaway at Camp David. As Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had predicted in the Blair House showdown, Gen. Pervez Musharraf overthrew the elected government when Sharif defused the nuclear brinkmanship in Kashmir. Sharif lost his job, his constitution, and perhaps his life. “You’ll notice that Musharraf is saying a lot of nice things about wanting to restore democracy,” said the president with a sigh, “but he never includes any target dates, partners, or interim steps.” Instead, Musharraf accused Sharif of spoiling the army’s glorious victory over India. This claim was both salve and bombast, but the president said Musharraf did have Pakistani patriotism aroused behind his coup—at least for a while. Our allies must be careful as we prepared to cut off aid to Pakistan. I asked whether he had talked with Sharif or Musharraf. He said no. I asked whether the coup might activate his warning that the United States would downgrade relations with Pakistan. No, he replied. That was specific to the Kashmir crisis, which had abated. “But I am inclined to think we ought to be more friendly toward India, anyway,” he said. Now he had much bigger problems. The instigator of the semi-rogue invasion of Kashmir was in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and two hostile nuclear powers still menaced each other on the Asian subcontinent.
What was worse was that the Senate had torpedoed four decades of U.S. leadership for international cooperation to stop proliferation. At the last minute, said Clinton, there was such an outcry that Senator Lott scrambled to pull back. With Virginia’s John Warner, Indiana’s Richard Lugar, and other responsible Republican senators, Lott maneuvered to leave the CTBT un-ratified short of formal rejection. By then, however, they needed unanimous consent to divert the parliamentary train, and their own hotheads adamantly refused. These were the Fortress America Republicans, united behind Jesse Helms, determined to spike the treaty no matter what. They did not care if the controversy ignited a campaign issue against them next year. The president, citing Senator James Inhofe, called them the “tanks, missiles, and concrete” wing of the Republican Party. To them, legitimate government was confined to those three items, and they begrudged every nickel for peace agreements, U.N. dues, and cooperative politics generally, foreign and domestic. Their attitude was basic: we’ve got more money, taller walls, and bigger nukes than anyone else—so fuck the little people. The president paused. “Oh, gosh,” he said. “I shouldn’t have used that word on the tapes, should I?” He shrugged. It was probably on there more than once.
The president smiled, grim but feisty. He gave credit for smart politics to Texas governor George W. Bush, who was running ahead of John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination. Lately, he said, Bush was attracting glowing public notice with his admonishment for conservative peers. Too often, Bush declared, fellow Republicans sought to balance budgets on the backs of the poor, and too often they confused limited government with disdain for government itself. Such comments made Bush a fresh voice against cynicism, expanding his appeal, and yet he managed not to alienate the right wing of his party. Clinton, admiring his deft skill, said Bush cultivated a runaway double standard in the press. Reporters wrote about his easygoing swagger rather than gaffes or contradictions. They admired his gift for practical jokes while ignoring a career of business favoritism that would have become endless fodder against Clinton or Gore. Bush pronounced “the gova-mint” sourly, like a cussword, and “War-shington” like an alien implant. Beyond attitude, he supported core conservatives on positions from nuclear hegemony to the biggest imaginable tax cuts. Clinton said Bush marketed himself as “Reagan Lite.” Moments later he called the emerging brand “a kinder, gentler Gingrich,” in a parody of the slogan used by Bush’s father. The president seemed to be experimenting with phrases to expose Bush, which was a form of tribute.
I WALKED INTO several moving subplots before our November session. The president, still sleepy from an evening nap, talked on the phone with Hillary from Israel while sharing fried chicken and CNN news reports with Hugh Rodham in the Solarium. There was a crisis over Suha Arafat, wife of Yasir, who had swooped in from her Paris home to occupied Palestine. In Arabic, standing next to Hillary, she told reporters that the Israelis used too much tear gas and that the Palestinian cancer rate was abnormally high. Hillary confined herself to diplomatic remarks, but sensational interpretations were exploding in the New York senatorial campaign. Did Hillary really condemn a secret, cancer-causing Israeli gas? Clinton edited her written statement out loud, changing one phrase from “I didn’t hear it that way” to a conditional “If she said that.” Meanwhile, Hugh changed the channel to preseason basketball between Duke and Stanford, swapping forecasts between the president’s follow-up phone calls with Sandy Berger, John Podesta, and Harold Ickes. Stanford had a promising set of six-foot-eleven freshman twins. Clinton owed cigars from a bet on last week’s Arkansas–Ole Miss football game. Finally hanging up, the president turned winsome. “Because of the Irish and the Jews,” he reflected, “I’m going to die before my time.” Wearily, he told Hugh it was time to work, then excused us to a table in the third-floor hall where we had taped once before.
Part of me missed the Treaty Room, for its stately calm. Before my first question, the president asked to record an odd story he might not use in his memoirs. Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, after thirty years as an eccentric outcast among world rulers, had been making entreaties to normalize relations. Clinton sketched gestures leading up to Qaddafi’s delivery of Libyan suspects for trial in the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. All channels reported Qaddafi to be sober and responsible, but Clinton could not shake images of a flamboyant, deadly lunatic. When he confided his misgivings to Qaddafi’s Egyptian neighbor, President Mubarak waved them aside. “No, he is not crazy,” Mubarak insisted. “All Libyans are crazy. Compared to most, Qaddafi is quite stable.” Clinton had tried to play off the joke until he realized Mubarak intended no humor whatsoever. Even so, he made light of the secret dilemma to a Saudi prince who had known Qaddafi for years. “Mubarak is right,” observed the prince. “All Libyans are crazy.”
We recorded at length on Middle East negotiations. With Arafat and Barak, Clinton held “last sprint” preparations in Oslo toward the final-status talks in February, with a tribute dinner for Yitzhak Rabin attended by his eloquent widow, Leah. The president adjusted his take on Barak. The prime minister seemed blunt because he meant to be precise. He preferred to promise less now and deliver more later, rather than the reverse. To his own surprise, the president no longer believed the last sticking points would be Israeli settlements or the clashing claims to Jerusalem. These issues could be solved. Barak already had specified illegal settlements to be removed versus manageable ones to stay—numbered at thirty and seventeen, respectively. Clinton described how Jerusalem could become a joint prize as well as a city for the world. He predicted the last rub would be which West Bank lands must be surrendered to create a viable Palestinian state. Arafat, while bargaining for more, faced a tricky paradox on Palestinian exiles. Officially, he demanded a welcome place for them all, but he wanted most of them to stay abroad, sending home money rather than their troublesome bodies and demands. At Oslo, all parties agreed to make no inflammatory public statements, but Suha Arafat was a loose cannon. She hardly ever saw her husband. Clinton rolled his eyes. He thought she had deliberately ambushed Hillary’s campaign with her boutique bombshell.
The Middle East carried over into our December session. Barak had opened a quick parallel track with Syria to gain momentum for a settlement with the Palestinians. This was no slight ambition. President Asad of Syria, his health failing rapidly, had ignored talks for nearly four years, and his foreign minister was recovering from an aneurysm. Nevertheless, Clinton gave Asad urgent notice that a treaty was now or never. Then he got permission from Barak to sweeten the invitation by communicating to Asad a secret “pocket” assurance long reserved by Rabin—that Israel was willing indeed to surrender the Golan Heights on reasonable terms. Asad acted decisively before hearing of the sweetener. Barak was serious, Asad concluded, and so was he. At last, it was time to move. Asad sent Foreign Minister Farouk al-Shara straight from his sickbed to meet Barak at the White House on December 15, which was the day before our session. This breakthrough summit was the highest Israeli-Syrian contact since biblical times.
By this morning, the two sides had agreed to lock themselves away under Clinton’s tutelage until they bridged all gaps in their treaty agenda. Their model was the Dayton process on Bosnia. They would assemble within three weeks at a secluded site near Washington, to be selected and prepared by the United States. In the interim, Shara pressed to take home to Syria secret notice of the “pocket” assurance on the Golan Heights, saying it would encourage Asad to approve a comprehensive deal. The president refused. Inevitably, he explained, that concession would leak with terrible repercussions for Barak. No Israeli leader could survive an impression that he would give away this strategic high ground simply for a piece of paper marked “peace.” Clinton told me Shara held a degree in English literature. He could switch from rapture about Shakespeare into character for his home audience in Damascus. Privately at the White House, after Shara delivered a long litany of alleged affronts by Israel, Barak replied succinctly. “All that is true,” he said. “I am not here to repeal the past, but to build on it.” There was no spiral of counterclaims, and the meeting moved forward after a stunned silence. Shara would take that news home to Asad, said Clinton. He understood theatrical rules and constraints.
On the presidential race, Clinton was not surprised to see John McCain pulling even with Bush in the New Hampshire polls. Generally speaking, he said, Republicans were a more orderly party than Democrats. They tended to fall in line behind the anointed favorite and wrap up their nominations early. However, New Hampshire was a rare state that favored upstarts and underdogs—even for the GOP. Pat Buchanan had won the primary handily in 1992, and then got clobbered. Warren Rudman, respected nationally as Mr. Rock-ribbed New Hampshire Republican, was unusual in his enthusiasm for McCain. Most senators, said Clinton, bridled against McCain’s prickly temper and standoffish, holier-than-thou manner. New Hampshire suited McCain the maverick, but his real test would come in the GOP’s establishment states. If his campaign did well in South Carolina, McCain could “get legs” afterward.
Among Democrats, Gore was gaining steadily against former senator Bill Bradley. Clinton called Gore the ultimate nonmaverick. He was growing out of an inevitable gelded image that made it hard for vice presidents to win,* and he drew the lion’s share of amused scorn in the press. Reporters tended to fawn over Bradley, McCain, and even Bush. If Gore could win New Hampshire, said Clinton, the Democratic contest was over. If Gore could stay within ten points of Bush’s current national lead, he would be in good position to win the general election. Clinton thought Gore was adept at jabs at the front-runner. He had blasted Bush’s statement that the military coup in Pakistan was “good news” for America, but he did not pile on Bush for failing a pop quiz on the names of foreign leaders. The president said voters seemed untroubled so far that Bush did not know anything. If he enjoyed a forgiving presumption from his father’s stature, Clinton was unsure how long it would last.
* Only two vice presidents have won elections to succeed a two-term ticket mate: Martin Van Buren after Andrew Jackson in 1836, and George Bush after Ronald Reagan in 1988.
He offered scattered observations on political trends. American reactionaries had excelled at polemics ever since they accused Thomas Jefferson of conspiring to abolish religion, propagate French orgies, and so forth. A year that began with impeachment was ending with sporadic riots converging from left and right against the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. Roving bands attacked the WTO as both a socialist cabal and capitalist sweatshop. With order restored, Clinton gave speeches on hard lessons for the future. Progress would not last automatically, he said. It required continuous intelligent choice. As a matter of common sense, the ever more interdependent world needed structured rules for finance and commerce, but trade could not survive on policy wonks and CEOs alone. Broad public confidence was essential.
Clinton praised Gore’s unabashed advocacy for interracial coalitions. This, too, was a lifetime transition. Republicans, especially in the South, harvested votes like old segregationists as the presumptive party for white people. Democrats must not be timid. Their new coalitions, while wobbly by historical standards, blazed the path ahead for both parties. Democratic candidates only hurt themselves whenever they mumbled and minimized civil rights, said Clinton. They lost the submerged racial vote anyway.
WE THEN RECORDED stories of his ten-day trip through Mediterranean countries into the Balkans. A complex arrangement to pipe oil from Azerbaijan was finalized. In Turkey, the Clintons slipped away to visit earthquake victims in refugee tents, touching off a cultural seminar with foreign dignitaries who found this American ritual pointless and degrading. He described a televised clash in Istanbul with an irascible Yeltsin. The president joined Chelsea in Athens to view the Parthenon at daybreak. We covered fine points about optics and the tapered Doric columns. He said Greece faced security threats from anarchists, fascists, and the last active Stalinist party in Europe. Cadres still seethed, marveled Clinton, that Harry Truman had kept Greece from becoming a Soviet satellite, and a much larger segment resented the United States for condoning a 1967 military coup. Other favored moments included the crowd near Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Sofia, Bulgaria. You came across things so old, he kept saying, such as structures built for Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great. He exchanged bracing salutes with U.S. troops and NATO peacekeepers all the way to bases in Italy.
Notably, from Kosovo, he conveyed the charged atmosphere of one muddy schoolyard packed separately with cheering Albanians, squealing children, sullen Serb politicians, and nervous minority Turks. All went silent the instant a translator relayed his first plea for them to reconcile, and he had plunged ahead to argue why. No one could make them do so, but he had risked many lives to give them the chance. Sadly, they weren’t the only spattered people on earth. He told them he had sat on a chair like this to hear fathers and mothers tell of waking amidst whole families hacked to death with machetes. He said that three-quarters of a million Rwandans were killed without any guns in three months’ time. In Israel, children had shown him photographs of friends blown up on school buses. In Northern Ireland, a girl sang for him who had been blinded and disfigured by a bomb in the flower market. Ethnic hatred was the world’s worst problem, he told them. Its solution was always the same. He was Irish. If his people finally ended the terror among themselves, they would wonder why they hadn’t begun the hard work of reconciliation decades before. Looking back, on tape, Clinton was proud of his exhortation, but he conceded that it had earned frowns and only polite applause.
Chelsea popped into the tiny kitchen with two friends, including a Stanford diver, home for the December holiday. She delivered a monologue on the phenomenon of college grogginess. Students under stress stayed up consecutive nights until they entered a giggling zombie zone, illustrated in her case by a habit of burning candles around the computer, which somehow lit one term paper on fire, and her best addled response was to shake the burning document in the air, fanning the flames, igniting her blanket among other things, and this was only the start. Her computer then refused to print the letter “i,” which was full of meaning itself, and she had to insert them all manually before sprinting out with her paper to beat the semester deadline, freezing in flip-flops and a purple T-shirt, laughing hysterically when her entry card failed to open the teacher’s building because of an overdue library book. Eventually, there was a happy ending, and the president responded with his own memories of a Georgetown religion professor who gave oral exams in twelve different languages.
Back on tape, the president passed lightly over topic thirteen on my list of sixteen for the night. Of the Kennedy Center Honors Gala, he said only that Hillary thought she had died and gone to heaven because she was seated next to Sean Connery. By contrast, he dug into Panama with surprising force. He had declined to attend the recent ceremony restoring local sovereignty over the Panama Canal lands. Stories sniped that Clinton did not want to share glory or blame with the treaty’s author, Jimmy Carter, and was angling instead for a “victory lap” in Northern Ireland. None of this was true. He had no qualms about Carter’s treaty, nor any spot on the next ballot to worry about. He had reserved the date for a priority trip to Syria, not Ireland, and he was tired from fourteen foreign trips already this year. What upset him was Madeleine Albright. He had instructed the secretary of state to represent the nation in Panama. He said her puzzling refusal, communicated by newspaper, damaged the foreign policy of the United States. The president did not care about the excuses. He had made sure she knew he was furious.
The year closed on spies and terrorism. The Justice Department, after fierce debate among the security agencies, indicted nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee on fifty-nine counts of copying classified material to his personal computer. Lee was being handled like a radioactive espionage defendant—no bail, lockdown, solitary confinement—even though the long dragnet had produced no evidence that he offered secrets to China or anyone else. The president said experts were telling him the worst spies sometimes stored their treason for a rainy day. This sounded fishy to me. Clinton shrugged. Nothing would please him more than to establish Lee’s innocence.
Speaking of treason, he jolted me on Pakistan. “Musharraf wants to kill Sharif,” he said. “I believe that’s his goal.” Just as the prime minister had feared his own army, the ascendant general now plotted revenge. Clinton was mounting a concerted pitch for Musharraf to refrain from testing more nuclear weapons and leave Sharif alive. If he met those two conditions, there were things the United States could do to help Musharraf’s government. “I don’t know if it will work.” He sighed. Off tape, at the end, he told me to put Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden on my list for next time. Musharraf had arrested a bin Laden lieutenant near the border with Afghanistan, he said, and was shipping him to Jordan for interrogation. There were intelligence warnings that bin Laden planned attacks on American targets in Jordan over the millennium period just ahead, up through Ramadan.