Could it Happen Again?

By Michael Duffy I Washington Sunday, July 27, 2003
    • STEPHEN JAFFEE/AP; CARMEN TAYLOR/KHVS/KHOG TV/AP

    The Terror Hunters: Bush's front line, testifying from left: NSA's Michael Hayden, CIA's George Tenet and FBI's Robert Mueller

    Looking back on it now, it is difficult to choose the precise moment when U.S. government officials—hobbled by old-fashioned rules, saddled with ancient computers that could not talk to one another and riven by silly bureaucratic rivalries—missed their best chance to thwart the plot by 19 hijackers to take over four airplanes, turn them into flying missiles and kill almost 3,000 people nearly two years ago.

    Was it in early 1999, when the National Security Agency, eavesdropping on a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East, first learned (but kept to itself) that a 25-year-old Saudi named Nawaf Alhazmi had links to Osama bin Laden? Or was it in March 2000, when the CIA heard from its spies overseas (but did not tell the FBI) that Alhazmi had flown to Los Angeles a few weeks before? Then there was the bungled meeting between the CIA and the FBI in June 2001, when the CIA hinted at Alhazmi's role but would not put everything it knew on the table. Washington may have had one more chance to change history in late August 2001, when FBI headquarters finally heard that Alhazmi and other bin Laden operatives were loose in the U.S. But against the advice of detectives in the field, agents at FBI headquarters assigned the case a low priority, and nearly two weeks passed before the bureau asked its Los Angeles field office to track down the suspects. That last e-mail was dated Sept. 11, 2001.

    All summer long, the normally rarefied issue of secret intelligence—the good and bad, the lost and found—has preoccupied Washington and perplexed the nation. Before Sept. 11, the government was unable or unready to connect the dots left by a growing army of terrorists bent on killing thousands of Americans. More recently, the government has appeared to be a little too ready to connect dots that may not have been there at all—that is, the prewar case for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Two years ago, the bar for proving a danger to our security was set too high; two years later, partly because of what happened on Sept. 11, the bar has seemed a bit too low. How do we get it right?

    In the terrifying days that followed the attacks of 2001, when very little was comforting, it was almost a relief to hear top Bush Administration officials argue that there was really no way the U.S. government could have foreseen, much less prevented, the deadly attacks on Washington and New York City. Osama bin Laden's plot was too diabolical, they said, too well executed and too perfectly aimed at the blind spots of our homeland defense for anyone to have imagined or foiled it. "We were surprised by what happened here," said Vice President Dick Cheney five days afterward.

    But it is now clear that the real story is much more unsettling. The blunt conclusion of the bipartisan House and Senate joint inquiry into the causes of 9/11, released last week, was that while no one in the government "identified the time, place and specific nature of the attacks," the government lost repeated opportunities to detect, if not disrupt, the hijackers in 2000 and 2001.

    It would not have been easy, and piecing it all together would have required resourcefulness, brilliance and more than a little luck. But it was possible. The question now is not so much, How did it happen?— every schoolkid knows that story—but, What has been done in the two years since 9/11 to prevent it from happening again? What steps has the government taken so that the gathering of intelligence and the profitable use of it is assured and routine? With the joint report as a guide, we have analyzed six critical problems with America's intelligence posture and compiled a progress report on what has been done to fix them in the past two years.

    MAKING TERRORISM THE FOCUS
    A central problem before 9/11 was that neither the Clinton nor the Bush team had a clear, well-defined strategy for fighting terrorism. It just wasn't a priority. Clinton finished his second term focused on securing a Middle East peace, and Bush came into office thinking more about Beijing and Moscow than Afghanistan. And to the extent that either team focused on terrorism, both believed that the chief threat was to U.S. troops overseas, not everyday civilians at home. Those who did worry about al-Qaeda often worried alone. In December 1998, CIA Director George Tenet told his lieutenants, "We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside the CIA or the community." But there is little evidence that Tenet shared this declaration with other government agencies. At the National Security Council, top terrorist hunter Richard Clarke was also on a quest to adopt an all-out action plan against bin Laden, and in 2001 he urged the new Administration to do so. But the Bush team slow-walked its strategy through an interagency review for seven months.

    After 9/11, Bush reorganized his entire presidency around the war on terrorism, and he has not looked back. He has launched two wars, sent special-forces teams to at least half a dozen other countries, pumped billions into old spy networks and new unmanned weapons, and engineered the biggest reorganization of government since the cold war by creating the Department of Homeland Security. At home, he has signed legislation granting sweeping new powers to the Justice Department and other law-enforcement agencies. Overseas, he has authorized a new military doctrine that abandons deterrence for pre-emptive action. The government has focused on these threats in unprecedented ways. As Bush said last week, "We are slowly but surely dismantling the al-Qaeda network."

    STOPPING THE STOVEPIPING
    Apart from the terrorists, the biggest enemy the government faced before 9/11 was itself. Agents at both the FBI and the cia had a longtime habit of stovepiping—keeping information to themselves or sharing it with only a handful of people. That made for good secret-keeping but discouraged critical thinking by the people on the front lines. When an FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz. noticed two months before the attacks that Middle Eastern men were taking flying lessons in his backyard and alerted headquarters that something ghastly might be in the offing, agents in Washington took no action. And a month later, when a group of agents in Minnesota warned that a French-born Moroccan named Zacarias Moussaoui was in the area illegally and trying to learn how to fly a commercial jet, officials at FBI headquarters never put the two warnings together. In the culture of the FBI, agents were not champions at imagining crimes that had not been committed; they were simply supposed to investigate crimes after they occurred.

    The FBI has begun to try to change its narrow way of thinking. Today disrupting a terrorist group gets top priority, and if secrecy is lost, blowing the chances of a successful prosecution, so be it. Director Robert Mueller has replaced nearly all the bureau's mid-level executives, and many of the agents who were over 50 have retired. Agents are being told they can no longer simply construct an edifice of known facts, as they would for a traditional prosecution. They must instead look around corners and try to understand a terrorist's intentions, habits, methods and psychology. And where the agency once turned tips around with the speed of a turtle, it now operates on a hair trigger, often disseminating information about potential suspects and plots before it has been corroborated by multiple sources. Even the wispiest bits of data are quickly fed to the entire intelligence community and in many cases to 18,000 local and state police agencies. "That's a sea change," says a top FBI executive, who adds a comment the rest of the world discovered a decade ago: "The power of information is in letting it go."

    FIXING THE HARDWARE PROBLEM
    Before 9/11, many FBI offices had ancient green-screen computers with no Internet access. Like scriveners from another century, agents wrote their reports out in longhand and often in triplicate. In fact, until a few months ago, many agents were still communicating with one another—and with outsiders—via fax. Some agents kept their best information in shoe boxes under their desks because they didn't trust the computer security system. That's hardly surprising after it turned out that one of their own—FBI security and computer whiz Robert Hanssen—had been working for the Soviets and the Russians for more than a decade.

    In the years leading up to the attack, noted one of the bureau's top computer analysts, the FBI has "lacked effective data-mining capabilities and analytical tools. It has often been unable to retrieve key information and analyze it in a timely manner, and a lot has probably slipped through the cracks as a result."

    In the past two years, Mueller has accelerated a long-overdue computer overhaul called Trilogy, which he says promises "worldwide high-speed data communications networks ... to share all kinds of data, to include video and images, among all of our FBI offices throughout the world." Now all field personnel have late-model desktop computers. It will still take months to replace the computers at the bureau's massive Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. And it is only this year that many FBI agents have finally got e-mail.

    MAKING THE SYSTEM ACCOUNTABLE
    One of the biggest weaknesses exposed by 9/11 was the lack of a single, integrated government clearinghouse for terrorist threats. A single center would ensure that information would be spread around liberally and that someone could ultimately be held accountable. But instead of just one clearinghouse, there are more threat centers than ever before. Each agency—the CIA, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security—has its own analytical or operations center, and some have both. Several agencies still produce separate watch lists of terrorists operating worldwide. Last week Congress grew impatient with what seemed to be an exploding universe of terrorist information and action centers in Washington. "Right now there is more confusion than clarity," said an exasperated Representative Jim Turner of Texas, speaking at a hearing Tuesday afternoon. "Surely, almost two years after Sept. 11 of 2001, we could come up with one consistent watch list."

    And accountability, never a Washington strong suit, remains elusive. It was during the State of the Union address in January that Bush asked for the creation of a single independent center to coordinate all terrorist threats. The center finally opened a few months ago, after weeks of predictable bureaucratic warfare. Housed temporarily at the CIA, it is known around Washington as the TTIC—or TeeTick—for Terrorist Threat Integration Center. Home to 100 agents, analysts and computer whizzes from half a dozen agencies, the TTIC is supposed to be the four-chambered heart through which information passes from original source to all arms and legs of the governments—state, local and federal.

    But who is responsible if, as Connecticut Republican Chris Shays asked at a House hearing last week, "some bit of intelligence is not properly viewed or vetted for what it is and something bad happens as a result? Who takes responsibility?" He didn't really get an answer. Why? Said a witness: "It's not clear on the bureaucratic chart where this lands."

    FOLL0WING THE MONEY
    Ever since 9/11, the fight over turf has been peaceful compared with the fight over money. While people often think the CIA director controls a vast intelligence empire, his realm pales in comparison with that of the Secretary of Defense. The CIA administers only about 15% to 20% of the annual intelligence budget. The rest is in the hands of the Pentagon, which has long had the final say over where the satellites go to spy and where the eavesdropping ships drop anchor and listen. But just when it makes sense to give the cia director more power to track the kind of enemy that conventional armies and navies are not trained to detect or fight, the agency often lacks the clout to do so.

    In the past several years, a growing chorus of intelligence experts, led by former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, has called on Congress and the White House to place all the budget authority in the hands of a single Cabinet-level intelligence chief. But the Bush Administration has ignored these calls, partly because Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has no intention of giving away power without a fight and partly because the White House has no desire to pick a fight with him. It was therefore striking that the Pentagon came under such heavy fire in last week's bipartisan report for resisting requests made by CIA Director Tenet before 9/11, when the agency wanted to use satellites and other military hardware to spot and target terrorists in Afghanistan.

    FACING THE SAUDI PROBLEM
    Perhaps the biggest unsolved mystery left over from the attacks is, How much help—financial and otherwise—does bin Laden get from old friends in Saudi Arabia, and why hasn't the U.S. dealt more harshly with the Saudi problem? Treasury officials have been arguing for months to come down harder on Saudis who were giving cash to known bin Laden charity fronts.

    Last year Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar bin Sultan, was found to have given money directly to the family of a Saudi man in San Diego who befriended and assisted two of the 9/11 hijackers. Yet the Administration acted as if she had merely misplaced her ATM card. Some branches of the Saudi royal family (a clan with 7,000 princes) actively cultivate ties with radical groups to gain political support in their own country, according to a former senior White House aide. Yet in Washington mere mention of a Riyadh connection with the war on terrorism remains a weird taboo. The Administration forced the joint panel to black out 28 straight pages of testimony about Saudi financial support for terrorists.

    In their defense, U.S. officials say they are much harsher with the oil-rich royal family in private than they would ever be in public. And they add that Riyadh is finally beginning, after years of denial, to realize that it must pull its head out of the sand and actively join the war on terrorism. The May 12 bombings of two Western enclaves in Riyadh have moved the Saudi government to take the threat seriously. "Things were progressing on the counterterrorism front with the Saudis before May 12," said the former Bush aide, "and things have continued to get better since then." The former aide argues that the U.S. has an interest in maintaining that momentum and that the White House gains additional leverage with Riyadh by protecting it.

    The authors of the 900-page report issued last week made many other recommendations for the ongoing war on terrorism. They cited a need for more Arabic speakers, deeper penetration of terrorist cells by U.S. agents and stronger cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies—as well as more money for just about everything. And the lawmakers also called on the government to keep the public better informed about the complex dangers and difficult choices we now face than it did in the days and weeks before 9/11.

    Nothing to quarrel with there. But in the war on terrorism, there are always going to be two fronts: one with a shadowy enemy who is constantly trying to exploit our weaknesses, and another with ourselves. In that battle, we face complacency, bureaucracy and our own reluctance to change. Like the war on ter- rorism itself, this battle requires constant vigilance.

    —Reported by Melissa August, Massimo Calabresi, Adam Milch, Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington