Michael Scheuer

About four o'clock in the morning, George Tennant, who was the DCI at the time, calls my office number and I pick it up and said, yep, Scheuer.

I said, yeah.

And somebody else put him on and he said, can we revive that program?

The president wants to know if we can revive the program on the capture operation.

By Tennant's words, realized they missed an opportunity perhaps to stop the operation.

But

That got to be a habit throughout the rest of my career there.

To me, it's a mystery.

To me, going after Osama bin Laden was hard work, but it could have been accomplished by 97.

And then from 97 till I left in 99, there were 10 more opportunities.

And none of them were taken advantage of.

We knew right away it was Osama bin Laden.

And then I hear Clinton

on the radio or on the television saying, well, my experts, my team, my intelligence community says we can't be sure if it's Osama bin Laden or not, or Al Qaeda or not.

And we just stood there and said, no, what is he talking about?

My impression over the course of my career after over 22 years is that the first thing the seventh floor ever considered when you brought them in operation to approve was what if we fail and how will we get roasted by the media?

It was remarkable to watch this, especially after the man had declared war on us, reiterated it, said, your time is coming.

We hadn't had a friend like that in terms of divulging what their true mission was since General Giap.

And we didn't listen to him and look where it got us.

And look where we are now.