THERE was only one person telling the truth to the most frequently asked question of the week, according to Richard Armitage, the barrel-chested, gravel-voiced deputy to Colin Powell.

“I’m the only honest person in Washington. I gave it the Washington read,” he said when asked if he had read the incendiary book that has suddenly clouded President Bush’s re-election campaign.

Mr Armitage had found time to go to the first index page of Against All Enemies, find his name between “Armey, Dick”, and “Army, US”, and see what the author, Richard Clarke, had said about him. His colleagues stretched credibility to claim otherwise. General Powell said that he had not read it. Paul Wolfowitz had been otherwise engaged. Condoleezza Rice had been too busy. And pigs fly.

Mr Armitage’s characteristically frank sense of humour provided rare levity in the hothouse Senate committee room where the causes and lessons of the September 11 attacks are being picked over. But the rest of the week, like Mr Bush’s impolitic joke about missing weapons of mass destruction, was no laughing matter for the Administration.

Mr Clarke’s book is a rare literary phenomenon, a thriller, contemporary history and kiss-and-tell all rolled into one, before being bound with dynamite and fired crashing through the windows of the Oval Office. It has been in bookshops five days, and no conversation in Washington is complete without a reference to it.

The famed Bush loyalty code has ensured that few previous departing White House staffers have caused trouble. To those that have tried, officials have shown contempt and dealt with them by ignoring them. Mr Clarke cannot, however, be ignored, and nor can his accusations. His book, coupled with carefully choreographed media appearances, landed the day before the most high-profile 9/11 hearings and in the midst of presidential campaigning. It has created the perfect storm.

Mr Clarke is a substantial figure, not easily dismissed. He has served four presidents in the Republican and Democratic White Houses, three of them as counter-terrorism czar. He concedes that his proselytising about the threat of al-Qaeda could be wearing for colleagues. But he writes from a position of unparalleled insight, which is why his scathing critique is so potentially devastating.

Seven weeks ago, Mr Bush said that he was running as “a war president”. His re-election campaign is based on two stated themes: that he has made the world safer and that he has made America more secure. Mr Clarke undermines both.

He writes that the Bush Administration was slow to the point of a lack of interest in addressing the pre-9/11 threat from al-Qaeda. Terrorism was “important, but not urgent” to Mr Bush, even though he was briefed before taking office that al-Qaeda was one of the gravest threats to the US.

In the first week of the Administration Mr Clarke asked for a meeting of “principals” — General Powell, the Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, George Tenet, the Director of the CIA, Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Ms Rice, the National Security Adviser — for pressing talks about terrorism and al-Qaeda.

In the Clinton White House, Mr Clarke had been a “principal” himself, but had been downgraded by the Bush team to deputy level. The meeting he asked for was convened, but seven months later, on September 4, 2001.

Mr Clarke does not claim that he could have prevented 9/11. But he was brimming with ideas that might have made a difference, such as arming the Predator drone so it could strike Osama bin Laden from the sky at a moment’s notice. But they needed decisions from on high to unlock bureaucratic gridlock, and Mr Bush and Ms Rice were inattentive. Ms Rice has fought back hard, insisting that from the beginning she had asked for a comprehensive plan to eliminate al-Qaeda rather than just roll it back. Recognising Pakistan to be pivotal, the State Department was reaching out to forge improved links with Islamabad. But then came 9/11.

Mr Clarke’s most damaging charge concerns Mr Bush’s response to the tragedy.

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