From Financial Times:
The CIA's failure of imagination
The agency sought to prevent biological or nuclear attacks but did not consider fuel-laden aircraft, says Edward Alden
Published: September 14 2001 19:53 | Last Updated: September 14 2001 19:57
This year Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, gave each member of the House Armed Services Committee a a copy of the 1962 study on US intelligence's failure to foresee the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The message, said Mr Rumsfeld, was that the US must always prepare for "the inevitability of surprise". He could not have been prepared for just how right he would be.
Following Tuesday's horrifying attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many in the US have pointed fingers at the vaunted intelligence agencies. Despite an annual budget estimated at $30bn ( 20.4bn), none of the agencies had gleaned the slightest warning of an attack. This is particularly remarkable as evidence emerges that the 18 hijackers and their supporters had been planning the attacks for many months from bases within the US.
Richard Shelby, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called it "a failure of great dimension . . . The bottom line is, we were basically caught flat-footed."
The US has already launched a top-to-bottom review of its intelligence capabilities and critics are focusing on at least three problems. The first is the lack of so-called human intelligence - good old-fashioned spying. This has always been the weakest link in America's intelligence apparatus and was one of the few arenas in which the Soviet Union continually out-performed the US during the cold war.
"What you really need to break these organisations is to penetrate them - and that's very hard," said Richard Betts, of the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you can't penetrate them you're dependent on second-hand sources." Most of the useful information gathered by US agencies comes from satellite photographs and interception of communications. But terrorist groups are not particularly vulnerable to such high-technology eavesdropping and have become more skilled at avoiding it.
The National Commission on Terrorism, a blue-ribbon group of experts that reported to Congress last year, recommended that the CIA end its 1995 prohibition on recruiting terrorists and other "unsavoury sources" as inform-ants. The guidelines, adopted to avoid tarring the CIA through association with criminals or human rights violators, have been a serious obstacle to successful recruiting, said Paul Bremer, the panel chair who was ambassador for counter-terrorism in the Reagan administration.
A second practice that will come under scrutiny is the sharp distinction in US law between spying at home and spying abroad. For civil liberties reasons, the CIA is not allowed to conduct any operations on US soil and must pass any intelligence leads over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, forcing agencies with different cultures and methods to work together. But Tuesday's bombings involved a co-ordinated plot carried out both abroad and within the US. Mr Bremer said: "It's quite obvious we're going to have to have a deep look at the whole issue of the surveillance of terrorists in the US." The Senate has already begun to do so by passing on Thursday legislation to make it easier for the FBI to get warrants to monitor computer transmissions. Some senators also want to remove the legal barriers against domestic surveillance.
Third, there is no single agency with authority over all US intelligence gathering and some critics argue that this leads to fragmented responsibilities. Senator Bob Graham, who chairs the intelligence committee, has suggested co-ordinating future intelligence activities from within the White House, a potentially vast expansion of the power of the president's staff.
But while the pressure for change is mounting, the results may be difficult to obtain. The US government's report on the 1998 terrorist bombing of two US embassies in Africa found that reliable advance warning of terrorist attacks was virtually impossible to achieve. Furthermore, the current recriminations overlook some notable US successes in heading off terrorist strikes. Following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, for instance, US intelligence helped to break up a suspected plot to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York.
US intelligence agencies did many things right in trying to head off something like Tuesday's attack. Over the past five years, no US military programme has received higher priority than counter-terrorism, with budgets more than doubling since 1995. The CIA has been authorised since 1998 to use any available means to pre-empt terrorist operations planned by Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in Tuesday's attacks.
Ultimately, US intelligence's biggest failure in connection with this week's events may have been in expecting the wrong sort of attack. The US has devoted growing resources to preventing chemical, biological or nuclear attacks. It has also fortified government buildings around the world against car bombs. But the possibility of an attack using fuel-laden commercial aircraft was simply never considered. The intelligence lapse that allowed for Tuesday's attack was indeed much like that of Pearl Harbor. The forward to the 1962 study that Mr Rumsfeld shared with members of Congress said: "It is not true that we were caught napping at the time of Pearl Harbor. Rarely has a government been more expectant; we just expected wrong."
Ibexx
PS: It's a fair article, IMHO. |
