Sandy Berger, ex-Clinton national security adviser, dies

WASHINGTON (AP) — Former national security adviser Sandy Berger, who helped craft President Bill Clinton's foreign policy and got in trouble over destroying classified documents, died Wednesday.

Berger was White House national security adviser from 1997 to 2001, when the Clinton administration carried out airstrikes in Kosovo and against Saddam Hussein's forces in Iraq.

The U.S. and its NATO allies took militarily action against what they viewed as Serbian aggression, first in the conflict over Bosnia, and then in Kosovo.

The Clinton administration responded with a cruise missile barrage against training camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.

The strikes did little to disrupt al-Qaida and became a thread in a long running criticism that Clinton and his team failed to properly respond to a burgeoning terrorist threat.

Berger also played a key role in Operation Desert Fox, the four-day bombing of Iraq in 1998 over Saddam's failure to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions about weapons inspections.

In court, Berger admitted to taking and destroying three copies of a classified report about the government's response to the millennium plot in 2000 by Islamic extremists to attack in Los Angeles and other locations.