Predictably, nerves frayed. Clarke, who was widely loathed in the CIA, where he was accused of self-aggrandizement, began to lose credibility. He cried wolf, said his detractors; he had been in the job too long. "The guy was reading way too many fiction novels," says a counterterrorism official. "He turned into a Chicken Little. The sky was always falling for Dick Clarke. We had our strings jerked by him so many times, he was simply not taken seriously."
We'll see more self-aggrandizement from him today in the hearings.