On Sept. 18, a special congressional committee released a report, which describes for the first time just how many warnings the U.S. government had before the September 2001 attacks by Osama bin Laden. The report is yet another example of the inability of U.S. intelligence agencies to “connect the dots.”
It is also, paradoxically, encouraging, in that it shows that the conventional wisdom that nothing could have been done to prevent the attacks is unraveling. Only in July, the media reported that the House and Senate intelligence committees jointly investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attack had "uncovered no single piece of information that, if properly analyzed, could have prevented the disaster,” according to members of the panel.
The new report shows that the government had received several tips that Osama bin Laden might be planning to attack the United States, and that he might want to use an airplane as a weapon. For example, one after-the-fact CIA draft analysis noted “the idea of hijacking planes for suicide attacks has long been current in jihadist circles.” In April 2000, according to the congressional report, someone walked into the FBI's Newark, N.J., office and announced that he had been in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan where he learned airplane-hijacking techniques. He said that others in the plot had pilot training and their plan was to fly a 747 to Afghanistan, a destination that should have pointed to al Qaeda.
But there was apparently little, if any, effort by intelligence community analysts to produce any strategic assessments of terrorists using aircraft as weapons.
Eleanor Hill, staff director for the join House and Senate intelligence panel, testified that in July 2001 senior government officials were warned in a briefing that, “Osama bin Laden will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties … attack preparations have been made.”
In her statement, Hill told the panel that “between late March and September 2001, the Intelligence Community detected numerous indicators of an impending attack, some of which pointed specifically the United States as a target.” Hill said the National Security Agency reported at least 33 communications indicating imminent terrorist attack, including two communications intercepted on Sept. 10. She noted, however, that “none of the reports indicated provided any specific information on where, when, or how an attack might occur.”
The congressional report nonetheless documents that U.S. officials had been warned about the possibility of an airplane attack for six years.
Among the warnings:
An August 1998 report that Arab nationals planned to fly an explosive-laden plane into the World Trade Center.
A September 1998 report that Osama bin Laden’s forces might fly an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport.
A Fall 1998 report of a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas.
Although the panel's staff unearthed no single intelligence warning foreshadowing the particulars of the Sept. 11 strikes, the investigators say that U.S. agencies failed to commit adequate resources and analysis to understanding and apprehending al Qaeda terrorists. For example, in 1999 the CIA’s Counterterrorism center had only three analysts assigned fulltime to bin Ladin’s terrorist network worldwide. The FBI’s analytic unit had only one individual working on al Qaeda at the time of Sept. 11 attacks.
The report also found that policymakers failed to alert the public to the gravity and immediacy of the threats they were receiving.
What is tragic is not necessarily the congressional panel’s findings, but how little in the way of new, original, solutions are being proposed to fix the problems. Instead, the immediate reaction has been predictable: throw more money at the intelligence community. At the urging of Congress and independent analysts, President George W. Bush within weeks after last September’s attacks authorized $1 billion in new money for the CIA, much of that for covert actions.
In fact, U.S. intelligence agencies are not on tight budgets. The so-called intelligence community encompasses 13 agencies with a combined budget of an estimated $30 billion. That is about 80 percent higher in real terms than the budget in 1980, when the Cold War was raging, and more than the total military budget of every nation on earth other than Russia, Japan, China, Britain and France. In 1996, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency that designs, builds and operates the nation's reconnaissance satellites, was found to have accumulated nearly $4 billion in unspent appropriations for new satellites. “The [intelligence community] is absolutely bloated and awash with money,” says Loch Johnson, a former staff member of both the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence.
Indeed, it is clear that money is not the problem; rather lack of coordination among agencies. Yet that central problem remains basically unaddressed. For example, the legislation being considered by Congress to authorize the creation of the Department of Homeland Security would let each intelligence agency decide what information is important enough to forward to the department — and what it can keep for itself.
As the Heritage Foundation points out in a recent analysis, such an arrangement leaves open the door for the same intelligence-sharing foul-ups that left the government unable to “connect the dots” that pointed to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The new department would be dependent on wholehearted cooperation and voluntary openness from agencies that are legendary for their refusal to share data and analysis with others.
Indeed, the intelligence community continues to be reluctant to share information. In her report, Hill said CIA Director George J. Tenet would not declassify “any references to the intelligence community providing information to the president or the White House.” Hill also said Tenet would not declassify the identity of or information about a key al Qaeda leader involved in the attacks.
Therein lies a crucial weakness in the House and Senate homeland security bills. Without access to the raw intelligence in government databases, analysts in the department will remain dependent on others' judgment of what homeland security officials “need to know.” They would never gain access to all relevant information — the very situation that reigned in the American intelligence community on Sept. 11, 2001.
Information about many of the terrorists and their movements existed in federal databases before that tragic day. Five of the attackers were on the watch lists of different federal agencies, and three of that five were on a CIA watch list. Three of the 13 who were in the United States on visitors' visas had seen their visas expire. Yet, the databases containing this information were not linked. Surely, the U.S. intelligence community would have a much greater chance in future of preventing terrorist attacks if crucial information of this sort wasn't splintered among dozens of federal agencies.
The latest congressional revelations are sure to touch off recriminations. But more important is the lesson they offer for thwarting future attacks: Intelligence agencies need sufficient personnel and a coordinated system focused on picking up threats, evaluating their credibility and acting on them.
Beyond lack of data sharing, the intelligence community had too few experts on the task to effectively connect all of the dots. For example, no analysts were studying the possible use of planes as weapons, despite evidence that terrorists were considering such attacks. Little wonder the FBI failed to act on the Phoenix office memo that urged it to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in U.S. flight schools.
As Thomas Powers wrote in the Oct. 10 New York Review of Books , “What is needed now is the asking of more questions. Once the public insists on knowing how this could have happened, it may start to ask other difficult questions — for example, how did the huge American intelligence apparatus fail to note for so many years the scale and resolution of terror networks and the deepening of the hate that drove them? Does a combination of better police work, tighter borders, and aerial bombing provide the right tools to win the war on terror? Do we understand how we got into this war? How do we know when the war is over and it is safe to stand down?”
Sources:
Joint Inquiry Staff Statement, Part 1, Eleanor Hill, Staff Director, Joint Inquiry Staff, September 18, 2002, http://intelligence.senate.gov/0209hrg/020918/hill.pdf
http://intelligence.senate.gov/0209hrg/020919/witness.htm, Hearing testimony
Unfiltered Intelligence, http://www.heritage.org/Press/Commentary/ed091102.cfm
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