October, 2001: Publius

By Greg Rushford
Published in The Rushford Report

Was the CIA’s failure to sound the alarm that would have prevented the surprise terrorist attacks that cost more than 6,000 lives on American soil on September 11 another Pearl Harbor? On page one of this issue, I have written that critics on the outside should be careful of Monday morning quarterbacking. The Congress, the executive branch, the nation’s great newspapers — all slept through the 1990s, despite the abundance of information in the public domain warning of the increasing risks of a massive terrorist assault on our country.

But what about the secret world? Was it asleep also? It will, of course, take awhile to say anything with convincing clarity. But already, it is clear that something is wrong with the state of American intelligence. It is clear that something has been wrong for more than a quarter century.

U.S. officials were warned six years ago by Philippine intelligence officials “of a terrorist plot to hijack commercial planes and slam them into the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters and other buildings,” CNN correspondent Maria Ressa reported on September 18. According to Philippine intelligence investigator Rodolfo Mendoza, officials in Manila learned in 1995 of the plot after finding the hideout of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. While Yousef evaded capture in Manila, his right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad confessed that commercial towers in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City had also been targeted. Murad was later convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and for plotting to fly an airplane into CIA headquarters.

We also know from published reports after September 11 that the CIA had passed the names to the FBI of some 100 members of the bin Laden network who were inside the United States; and also that the FBI was aware that Islamic radicals had been taking flight training at schools in this country.

We know further from a September 22 page one article in the Washington Times by reporter Bill Gertz that intelligence intercepts on September 10 had picked up conversations with bin Laden’s lieutenants that indicated that a “big attack” was coming. But analysts did not sift through the data until the days following the September 11 attacks.

Should they have?

I don’t know. Could be that there is so much intelligence collected that the task of quick analysis is simply impossible. As long ago as 1974, I remember that the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade was shredding or burning more than 30 tons of classified electronic intercepts — every day. Talk about the burdens of having too much to read.

As an investigator for the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975, I learned that the CIA and policy officials who read intelligence reports were already drowning in paper. There were simply too many intelligence publications: spot reports, instant summaries, daily reports, morning and afternoon reports for the Secretary of State, Presidential briefs, memoranda, communications-intelligence summaries, national-intelligence dailies, weekly summaries. CIA analysts complained that they were burdened with having to pour through hundreds of NSA reports every week.

And policy officials in places like the State Department and White House who had to read what the analysts’ wrote, complained about the massive amounts of paper that landed on their desks.

Reviewing its performance after the Greek-sponsored 1974 coup that overthrew Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus, the CIA’s internal post mortem concluded that there was an abundance of messages classified “CRITIC,” or critically important — “the significance of many…was obscure.”

The analysts who wrote such reports also had meetings to attend, superiors to please, and positions of their offices to defend against other offices. They also had to deal with that slippery Washington word, “coordination,” as in coordination with other agencies that were jealous of the same turf. There was precious little time to reflect.

Apparently, not much has changed in 26 years.

The same complaints surfaced about breakdowns in communications between intelligence and military agencies in the 1991 Gulf War. Not long after that, when I interviewed a harried official in the National Security Council, he complained about being flooded with secret paper. His days were occupied in reacting to crises that had landed on his desk, he said. Like his predecessors in the 1960s and 1970s, this official complained about having to read current intelligence reports that were duplicative and redundant. Nothing had changed in a quarter of a century.

“The amount of intelligence washing into these organizations each hour boggles the mind,” wrote private-sector intelligence specialist George Friedman last month. Friedman, who chairs a strategic forecasting firm called Stratfor, added that analysts need to have more control over what information is being collected, as simply “the quantity of collections cannot be the measure of effectiveness.”

Friedman also noted that too much information is compartmentalized, which is a useful counterespionage tool that also hinders analysis. “Compartmentalization can also mean that very few people ever get to see the entire picture,” the Stratfor chairman wrote. “The fact of the matter is that the people who do get to see it, senior analysts, tend to be the ones who are most assimilated to the system, least inclined to rock the boat, most caught up in the Agency and Washington group think.” Complaints about excessive compartmentalization are hardly new. Nor is Friedman’s observation about how higher-echelon bureaucrats are not inclined to be boat rockers.

I remember a brilliant young CIA analyst named Sam Adams who ran up against the system in the 1960s. Adams uncovered evidence in 1966 and 1967 indicating that the U.S. military command in South Vietnam had understated Communist strength, that there were probably more than 500,000 enemy personnel. At the time, the published estimate held that there were fewer than 300,000 enemy forces. Adams’ more accurate figures contradicted the Lyndon Johnson administration’s line that the American public needed reassuring public relations that no more than 300,000. If the higher figures became known to those who had an “incorrect view” of the war, the Saigon command cabled to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the command’s “image of success” would be undermined.

After a huge bureaucratic battle with military intelligence officials, the CIA finally decided to finesse the issue by burying the accurate 500,000 number in a footnote in the National Intelligence Estimate that went to the president. Then, in January 1968 during Vietnam‘s Tet lunar New Year festival, the forces that were buried in that footnote surprised U.S. intelligence by launching simultaneous strikes at nearly every urban center. Our intelligence estimates had — as the CIA later admitted — “so degraded our image of the enemy” that we were unaware the Communists were capable of such attacks.

Sounds a bit like the doubts before September 11 that Osama bin Laden’s forces were capable of launching simultaneous attacks against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and perhaps the White House or the Capitol.

An Air Force General who asked not to be quoted by name told the Washington Post’s Bradley Graham that the idea that terrorists would fly a civilian jet into the Pentagon was “something we had never even thought of.” This recalls the mindset that dogged intelligence before the surprise Arab attack on Israel on October 6, 1973. For more than a week before the attack, the intelligence agencies had observed signs of Arab military mobilization. But nobody believed that Egypt and Syria would have had the audacity to do that. Not only the CIA didn’t believe it, but neither did Israel’s Mossad.

The CIA failed to anticipate India’s nuclear explosion in 1974. In 1998, the agency repeated the same mistake — even though Hindu nationalist politicians had publicly declared their intentions to go nuclear. Once again, nobody believed them. Nobody believed that the Arabs would hit America with an oil embargo in 1973 either — except for perhaps astute readers of newspapers, who took the Arab’s publicly stated intentions at face value. Before the April 1974 coup in Portugal, at least four signs of serious political discontent — including an abortive military coup — surfaced in the press. Yet officials later acknowledged that there had been no detailed analysis of where the trouble was heading. Complaints from officials who say they often get more from the open press than from intelligence reporting continued throughout the 1990s.

You can blame the analysts for missing these things. But perhaps the real “blame” is simply human nature, not to mention the overall political climate. If there had been a prescient National Intelligence Estimate warning of what bin Laden was capable of after 1997, would anyone in Bill Clinton’s Washington have had the will to mobilize?

I am less confident than I was 26 years ago as a young congressional aide about what needs to be done to strengthen the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. One beginning might be to replace Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet with New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. I don‘t have anything against Tenet, who by many accounts is a dedicated man who doesn’t deserve to become a scapegoat.

But Tenet is only a former Senate staffer. The president needs a DCI with the stature to whip into shape the 13 intelligence agencies outside the CIA — including the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office.

Moreover, as a former federal prosecutor, Giuliani also would be in a strong position to push the FBI’s bureaucracy into responding more promptly to CIA reports of possible bin Laden associates who are operating inside the United States. (Giuliani might also be a good replacement for Vice President Dick Cheney on the 2004 GOP ticket.)

What about the Directorate of Operations, the home of the CIA’s clandestine services? Apparently tens of millions of dollars have been spent on covert operations against bin Laden’s al-Qa’ida terrorist network, without much to show for it.

The best analysis that I have seen of the difficulties that the CIA has faced was written by former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht in the July 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

“Westerners cannot visit the cinder-block, mud-brick side of the Muslim world — whence bin Ladin’s foot soldiers mostly come — without announcing who they are,” Gerecht reported. “No case officer stationed in Pakistan can penetrate either the Afghan communities in Peshawar or the Northwest Frontier’s numerous religious schools, which feed manpower and ideas to bin Ladin and the Taliban, and seriously expect to gather useful information about radical Islamic terrorism — let alone recruit foreign agents. Even a Muslim CIA officer with native-language abilities (and the Agency, according to several active-duty case officers, has very few operatives from Middle Eastern backgrounds) could do little more in this environment than a blond, blue-eyed all-American.”

Gerecht pointed to an long-running problem that the intelligence committee I worked for in the mid-1970s complained about: CIA case officers work in U.S. embassies and consulates. They register with the host country’s intelligence services.They are not hard to spot. And undercover operatives with “non-official-cover” who stay away from officialdom are basically people who pose as businessmen. Such “businessmen” live in a world far from the mud-brick homes and mosques that are inhabited by the bin Laden network.

Moreover, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, has not been cooperative with the CIA. Neither has Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service been willing to help. (Even after the September 11 atrocities, the Saudis were reportedly stonewalling U.S. “requests” to base attack planes on Saudi bases.)

“Unless one of bin Ladin’s foot soldiers walks through the door of a U.S. consulate or embassy, the odds that a CIA counter terrorist officer will ever see one are extremely poor,” Gerecht concluded.

You can blame the CIA if you want. But I would blame political leaders more. This isn’t partisan. It was the first President Bush who failed to destroy Iraq’s Republican Army and thus let Saddam Hussein live. Republicans in Congress, like the Democrats, displayed little will to wage serious war against terror before September 11. And where was Bill Clinton? Why was it necessary last month for President George W. Bush to take steps to freeze the assets of the bin Laden network? Why did Clinton — who had seven years since the 1993 World Trade Center bombings — fail to hunt down and kill bin Laden? Why didn’t Clinton make the leadership in places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan offers to help U.S. intelligence that they couldn’t refuse?

Now, Clinton’s successor has already begun to do that.

As George W. Bush told Congress last month, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.”

America has an obvious duty to get to the bottom of what happened inside the U.S. intelligence agencies before our most recent “Pearl Harbor.” But now the terrorists have to worry about what happened to the bad guys after the real Pearl Harbor, when America suddenly became seriously focused. For openers, I would not advise putting your money on Taliban futures.

TOP