Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action
MISSED SIGNALS
December 30, 2001
This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and
Don Van Natta Jr. and written by Ms. Miller.
nytimes.com
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Inside the White House
situation room on the morning
terrorism transformed America,
Franklin C. Miller, the director
for defense policy, was suddenly
gripped by a staggering fear: "The
White House could be hit. We
could be going down."
The reports and rumors came in a
torrent: A car bomb had exploded
at the State Department. The
Mall was in flames. The Pentagon
had been destroyed. Planes were
bearing down on the capital.
The White House was evacuated,
leaving the national security team
alone, trying to control a nation
suddenly under siege and
wondering if they were next. Mr.
Miller had an aide send out the
names of those present by e-mail
"so that when and if we died,
someone would know who was in
there."
Somewhere in the havoc of the
moment, Richard A. Clarke, then
the White House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long
drumbeat of warnings about terrorists striking on
American soil, many of them delivered and debated in
that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into
the Pentagon, others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is
Al Qaeda."
An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts
shows that for years before Sept. 11, terror experts
throughout the government understood the apocalyptic
designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders never
reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable
as it proved to be that morning.
Dozens of interviews with current and former officials
demonstrate that even as the threat of terrorism mounted
through eight years of the Clinton administration and
eight months of President Bush, the government did not
marshal its full forces against it.
The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport
security was studied but never quite completed. And
though the White House undertook a covert campaign to
kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the
critical mass of political will and on-the-ground
intelligence for the kind of offensive against Al Qaeda it
unleashed this fall.
The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first
detected by United States investigators after the 1993
bombing of the World Trade Center. The inquiry into that
attack revealed a weakness in the immigration system
used by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never
plugged, and it was exploited by one of the Sept. 11
hijackers.
In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin
Laden's operation and his anti-American intentions. And
President Bill Clinton's own pollster told him the public
would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was
declared.
By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so
well recognized that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a
public speech. But that same year, a strategy for
tightening airline security, proposed by a vice-
presidential panel, was largely ignored.
In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the
country with explosives, a secret White House review
recommended a crackdown on "potential sleeper cells in
the United States." That review warned that "the threat of
attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting
terrorism. But most of that plan remained undone.
Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush
administration devised a new strategy, which officials said
included a striking departure from previous policy - an
extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance and
other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new
proposal had wound its way to the desk of the national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and was ready to be
delivered to the president for final approval on Monday,
Sept. 10.
The government's fight against terrorism always seemed to
fall short.
The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way
this country protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former
director of central intelligence. "It's aviation security
delegated to the airlines, who did a lousy job. It's a fighter
aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign intelligence
collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a
visa and immigration policy failure."
The Clinton administration intensified efforts against Al
Qaeda after two United States Embassies in Africa were
bombed in 1998. But by then, the terror network had
gone global - "Al Qaeda became Starbucks," said Charles
Duelfer, a former State Department official - with cells
across Europe, Africa and beyond.
Even so, according to the interviews and documents, the
government response to terrorism remained measured,
even halting, reflecting the competing interests and
judgments involved in fighting an ill-defined foe.
The main weapon in President Clinton's campaign to kill
Mr. bin Laden and his lieutenants was cruise missiles,
which are fired from thousands of miles away. While that
made it difficult to hit Mr. bin Laden as he moved around
Afghanistan, the president was reluctant to put American
lives at risk.
But a basic problem throughout the fight against
terrorism has been the lack of inside information. The
C.I.A. was surprised repeatedly by Mr. bin Laden, not so
much because it failed to pay attention, but because it
lacked sources inside Al Qaeda. There were no precise
warnings of impending attacks, and the C.I.A. could not
provide an exact location for Mr. bin Laden, which was
essential to the objective of killing him.
At the F.B.I., it was not until last year that all field offices
were ordered to get engaged in the war on terrorism and
develop sources. Inside the bureau, the seminars and
other activities that accompanied these orders were
nicknamed "Terrorism for Dummies," a stark
acknowledgment of how far the agency had not come in
the seven years since the first trade center attack.
"I get upset when I hear complaints from Congress that
the F.B.I. is not sharing its intelligence," said a former
senior law enforcement official in the Clinton and Bush
administrations. "The problem is that there isn't any to
share. There is very little. And the stuff we can share is
not worth sharing."
Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the
Central Intelligence Agency said that they had some
success in foiling Al Qaeda plots, but that the structure of
the group made it difficult to penetrate. "It is
understandable, but unrealistic, especially given our
authorities and resources, to expect us to be perfect," said
Bill Harlow, a C.I.A. spokesman.
The reasons the government was not more single-minded
in attacking Al Qaeda will be examined exhaustively and
from every angle by Congress and others in the years
ahead.
In an era of opulence and invincibility, the threat of
terrorism never took root as a dominant political issue.
Mr. bin Laden's boldest attack on American property
before Sept. 11 - the embassy bombings - came in the
same summer that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was
engulfing President Clinton. A full fight against terrorism
might have meant the sacrifice of money, individual
liberties and, perhaps, lives - and even then without any
guarantee of success.
Mr. Clarke, until recently the White House director of
counterterrorism, warned of the threat for years and
reached this conclusion: "Democracies don't prepare well
for things that have never happened before."
The First Warning
A Horrible Surprise At the Trade Center
On Feb. 26, 1993 - a month after Bill Clinton took office,
having vowed to focus on strengthening the domestic
economy "like a laser" - the World Trade Center was
bombed by Islamic extremists operating from Brooklyn
and New Jersey. Six people were killed, and hundreds
injured.
Today, American experts see that attack as the first of
many missed warnings. "In retrospect, the wake-up call
should have been the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,"
said Michael Sheehan, counterterrorism coordinator at
the State Department in the last years of the Clinton
presidency.
The implications of the F.B.I.'s investigation were
disturbingly clear: A dangerous phenomenon had taken
root. Young Muslims who had fought with the Afghan
rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980's had taken
their jihad to American shores.
The F.B.I. was "caught almost totally unaware that these
guys were in here," recalled Robert M. Blitzer, a former
senior counterterrorism official in the bureau's
headquarters. "It was alarming to us that these guys had
been coming and going since 1985 and we didn't know."
One of the names that surfaced in the bombing case was
that of a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden, F.B.I.
officials say. Mr. bin Laden, they learned, was financing
the Office of Services, a Pakistan-based group involved in
organizing the new jihad. And it turned out that the
mastermind of the trade center attack, Ramzi Yousef, had
stayed for several months in a Pakistani guest house
supported by Mr. bin Laden.
But if the first World Trade Center bombing raised the
consciousness of some at the F.B.I., it had little lasting
resonance for the White House. Mr. Clinton, who would
prove gifted at leading the nation through sorrowful
occasions, never visited the site. Congress tightened
immigration laws, but the concern about porous borders
quickly dissipated and the new rules were never put in
effect.
Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget
director and later chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first
term, said senior aides viewed terrorism as just one of
many pressing global problems.
"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would
mention it," Mr. Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the
president's first term, he said, were "Russia, Eastern bloc,
Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations and then
terrorism."
When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials
continued the policy of their predecessors, who had
viewed it primarily as a crime to be solved and prosecuted
by law enforcement agencies. That approach, which called
for grand jury indictments, created its own problems.
The trade center investigation produced promising leads
that pointed overseas. But Mr. Woolsey said in an
interview that this material was not shared with the C.I.A.
because of rules governing grand jury secrecy.
The C.I.A. faced its own obstacles, former agency officials
say. In the wake of the Soviet Union's withdrawal from
Afghanistan in 1989, the agency virtually abandoned the
region, leaving it with few sources of information about
the rising radical threat.
Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's
adviser for policy and strategy in his first term, said he
believed the 1993 attack did not gain more attention
because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."
He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked
into a staff meeting and people asked, what are we doing
today in the war against terrorism?"
Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront
of the national agenda when a truck bomb tore into the
Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on
April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.
President Clinton visited Oklahoma City for a memorial
service, signaling the political import of the event. "We're
going to have to be very, very tough in dealing with this,"
he declared in an interview.
Mr. Panetta said that plans to reorganize the
government's counterterrorism efforts were quickly
revived. Senior officials recognized that the United States
remained vulnerable to terrorism. The bombing proved to
be the work of two Americans, both former soldiers, but if
Oklahoma City could be hit, an attack by terrorists of any
stripe could "happen at the White House," Mr. Panetta
said.
Two months after the bombing, Mr. Clinton ordered the
government to intensify the fight against terrorism. The
order did not give agencies involved in the fight more
money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf battles among
them.
But it did put Mr. bin Laden, who had set up operations
in Sudan after leaving Afghanistan in 1991, front and
center.
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