U.S. Intelligence refocuses
Sunday October 07 09:02 AM EDT
In Hindsight, C.I.A. Sees Flaws That Hindered Efforts on Terror
By JAMES RISEN The New York Times
George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, issued a directive shortly after Sept. 11 demanding improved information sharing throughout the government.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 6 George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, issued a secret directive shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks declaring an abrupt end to business as usual in America's intelligence community.
In the strongly worded memorandum, dated Sept. 16 and titled "We're at War," Mr. Tenet told senior officials at the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies that it was time to end past squabbles over turf and to begin immediately to coordinate their efforts and share information in the new war against terrorism.
Mr. Tenet's order called for an immediate end to peacetime bureaucratic constraints on the C.I.A. while demanding improved coordination and information sharing throughout the government's national security apparatus.
"The agency must give people the authority to do things they might not ordinarily be allowed to do," the memo declared, according to an official who described the document in detail. "If there is some bureaucratic hurdle, leap it."
Mr. Tenet's memorandum addressed what many government officials say were some significant flaws in the nation's defenses against terrorism that were exploited by the hijackers on Sept. 11.
Indeed, as investigators learn more about the terrorist plot and piece together strands of intelligence that were collected both before and after the attack, they are beginning to see the outlines of where the United States went wrong.
A sense of wartime urgency over the need to prod the peacetime C.I.A. as well as the government's broader counterterrorism efforts suffuses the C.I.A. director's memo.
"We don't have time to have meetings about how to fix problems, just fix them," Mr. Tenet commanded, according to the official who described the document.
The unspoken message behind Mr. Tenet's memorandum was that the bureaucracy had grown too rigid in recent years, complicating the ability of intelligence agencies to confront a rapidly evolving threat like that posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, his network. In effect, Mr. Tenet's memo echoed many of the sentiments voiced by the C.I.A.'s critics since Sept. 11.
Some intelligence officials suggested that the memo was part of an effort by Mr. Tenet to pre-empt the inevitable criticism of the C.I.A. over what many consider the worst intelligence lapse since Pearl Harbor.
Mr. Tenet's new directive did not address the controversy surrounding the C.I.A.'s guidelines that require high-level approval before the C.I.A.'s American officers can recruit foreign spies with unsavory backgrounds. Those guidelines, imposed in 1995, have been criticized for placing unnecessary restraints on the C.I.A.'s ability to recruit informants inside terrorist organizations.
Since Sept. 11, key congressional leaders have been pushing the C.I.A. to drop the guidelines in order to unleash its officers in the field. But a United States intelligence official said that since then, the C.I.A. has streamlined the guidelines in order to speed the approval process for the recruitment of new agents.
Now, new agents can be approved by the C.I.A.'s Deputy Director of Operations, the chief of the agency's clandestine espionage service, and the requests no longer have to be sent further up the agency's organization chart, including all the way to the director himself.
There is little appetite in Washington now for a postmortem on the government's failure to detect and defeat the plot. Instead, the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies are running flat out to investigate the attacks, prevent further assaults and go on the offensive against those they blame Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
On Friday, the House of Representatives backed away from an immediate inquiry into what went wrong. Instead, the House legislation calls for a commission that will be more forward-looking, identifying reforms needed to help prevent future attacks.
In hindsight, it is becoming clear that the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other agencies had significant fragments of information that, under ideal circumstances, could have provided some warning if they had all been pieced together and shared rapidly.
"It has been called to my attention that if you go back and sift through the intelligence reporting that was there before Sept. 11, that it is now clear that there are some things that should have rung bells a little bit louder," a senior intelligence official said. "There are a few fragmentary reports. But they are really only significant in hindsight. I wish we had paid more attention."
Bureaucratic and regulatory roadblocks dramatically slowed the government's ability to analyze some information it had already collected.
American officials now look back to intelligence received in June and July as the starting point in their efforts to try to reconstruct the events leading up to Sept. 11.
Officials familiar with the intelligence said the C.I.A. got a series of intercepted communications and other indications that Al Qaeda might be planning a major operation. In some of their communications, the terrorists used code words and double talk to disguise their plans.
The communications clearly showed increased activity, including indications of the movement of Al Qaeda operatives. But the timing and location of any attack were unclear.
"There was a real heightened danger toward the end of June and July," said one intelligence official. "The problem we had at the time was that there were all kinds of indications of a serious intent to do harm, but we didn't know where."
American counterterrorism analysts eventually concluded that an attack might come around the Fourth of July holiday, most likely aimed at American interests overseas.
"We had a floating list of likely places where an attack might take place, some in Europe, some in the Middle East," said one American official. "But the United States was not high on the list then."
The intelligence suggested that Al Qaeda was hoping to exploit the latest crisis between Israel and the Palestinians in a way not done in the past, perhaps for recruiting and propaganda purposes. Mr. bin Laden, born in Saudi Arabia, has typically focused his anti-American statements on the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia, declaring it a violation of Islamic holy places. Now, in keeping with the rest of the Arab world, he shifted focus to the Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000, American officials believe.
When no July attack occurred, some American officials began to believe that whatever had been in the works had somehow been disrupted or aborted.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in an interview last week that "nobody could ever get the fidelity" of the summer warnings. It was as if the C.I.A. could hear Mr. bin Laden broadcasting, but could not quite tune in to the right frequency to grasp his intentions.
Today, officials are still divided about the meaning of the summer intelligence. Some officials speculate that the communications traffic was purposefully devised to throw analysts off the trail of the real operation.
But in August, aware of the need for vigilance, the C.I.A. issued another report reminding senior policy makers at the White House, Pentagon and State Department that Al Qaeda was still committed to attacking American interests.
The August report also cautioned that Mr. bin Laden and his network blamed for the bombings of two American embassies in East Africa in August 1998 and the bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen harbor last October were interested in carrying out strikes in the United States. Officials said that warning was coincidence rather than a move based on any intelligence pointing toward the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"It was more of a background piece, saying that bin Laden was interested in attacking us here," said one senior American intelligence official. "But no one read it as a report saying, watch out, here they come."
At about the same time that the C.I.A.'s August report was being prepared and delivered, the F.B.I. arrested a French citizen, Zacarias Moussaoui, on immigration charges. Officials at a flight school in Minnesota had called authorities after they became troubled that Mr. Moussaoui was trying to learn how to fly large jet aircraft, but had said he did not need to know how to take off or land.
After Mr. Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 17, the F.B.I. asked the C.I.A. and French intelligence officials for information about him. French intelligence reported back that he had extremist beliefs and some troubling connections. Indeed, a French antiterrorist task force had an open file on him, saying he had traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several times. But American officials say the French did not provide any conclusive connections to a terrorist group like Al Qaeda.
The C.I.A. also ran traces on him, but apparently did not find a connection with Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, officials added.
With strong suspicions but little evidence, F.B.I. headquarters decided not to allow its agents in Minneapolis to open a criminal investigation, or to seek a warrant for secret wiretaps and clandestine physical searches.
Only after Sept. 11 did the F.B.I. search his computer, which disclosed that he had collected information about crop-dusting aircraft.
The reluctance to seek a warrant coincided with a secret internal investigation prompted by Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which issues the warrants, about past F.B.I. requests for them.
In March, Judge Lamberth complained to Attorney General John Ashcroft about the way the F.B.I. was making applications to the court, and specifically referred to a request for a wiretap related to a member of Hamas, a militant Middle Eastern group. In response, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department opened an internal review.
F.B.I. and Justice Department officials have insisted that the review did not limit the ability to seek wiretaps. But F.B.I. headquarters nonetheless demanded more evidence from its agents in the field before agreeing to pursue an application for surveillance on Mr. Moussaoui.
The failure to investigate Mr. Moussaoui now seems just the kind of missed opportunity and bureaucratic hurdle that Mr. Tenet deplored in his memo.
Another example came in late August, just as the F.B.I. was debating whether to investigate Mr. Moussaoui. The C.I.A. told the Immigration and Naturalization Service that it should place two men, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, on its watch list to bar entry into the United States. The C.I.A. had earlier determined that Mr. Almihdhar had attended a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 with people later implicated in the bombing of the Cole. Mr. Alhazmi had later traveled with Mr. Almihdhar to the United States, and so the C.I.A. wanted him added to the watch list too.
After the immigration service responded that both men were already in the country, the F.B.I. was notified and began to search for them. Neither was found before Sept. 11, when they apparently boarded American Airlines flight 77, the plane that the hijackers flew into the Pentagon.
Finally, intelligence officials say, in the days leading up to the hijackings there was a report that a member of Mr. bin Laden's family had been told to move to safety before an impending deadline, before some kind of work was done. Officials declined to provide details of the report, which they now say indicated that an attack was imminent.
Intelligence officials said that Mr. Tenet's memo did not detail specific lapses, but was clearly aimed at making sure they did not continue.
The memo may also represent a recognition that the inevitable post- mortems will eventually find that poor coordination in sharing intelligence was at the heart of the Sept. 11 failure. |
