Maybe it's just as well that in those frightening days after Sept. 11 the nation didn't know what was in the CIA's files about terrorist plots to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower. Or about the secret memos that had been rocketing back and forth between intelligence agencies with titles like "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Or that CIA chief George Tenet looked around in the summer of 2001 and saw that "the system was blinking red." Or that the FBI's chief of counterterrorism said he wished he had 500 analysts tracking the army of Osama bin Laden in those days--"instead of two." Or that few of the 56 FBI field offices around the country could remember receiving any of the special alarms that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says she ordered up before the Twin Towers came crashing down. Had Americans known then that so many worries and so many warnings over so many years had produced so little response in the government agencies assigned to protect us, the future would have looked far scarier on Sept. 12 than the images that had just been burned into the country's heart and soul.
But there had to come a time when the fog would lift and everyone would have to talk about how much was known and why the system had failed; about what had been fixed since, what had not been and what could not be. The 9/11 commission hearings last week finally picked the lock on the most unsettling parts of the 9/11 attacks: how close the government had come to sensing the plot, how far it remained from being able to stop it and how little Americans knew of either tale until now. "There are a lot of problems leading up to 9/11," panel chairman Thomas Kean told TIME, "and the suspicion is that some of them aren't yet fixed. We can't afford that as a country."
Because it has been an almost open secret in Washington for years that the government knew more about the 9/11 plotters than it publicly admitted, it's easy to forget that the full story was almost never told at all. Congress waited almost a year before it formed the panel in 2002, and the Bush Administration fought its creation, its budget and then its duration. But two years of foot dragging created its own momentum for change: the more the White House fought the commission's requests, the more the commissioners became convinced that radical change was needed. By the time they met in public last week for the 10th time, most of them had come to think that a thorough overhaul of the way the nation organizes, collects and distributes intelligence was necessary. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican, warned the CIA's Tenet last week, "There is a train coming down the track. There are going to be very real changes made."
CAN THE FBI BE SAVED?
Sensing the inevitable, President Bush moved quickly last week to get ahead of the curve. He opened the door, at least in theory, to naming a new, all-powerful Director of National Intelligence to oversee 15 intelligence agencies. "Let the discussions begin," he said. "And I won't prejudge the conclusion."