WHAT WENT WRONG: The C.I.A. and the failure of American intelligence

After more than two weeks of around-the-clock investigation into the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the American intelligence community remains confused, divided, and unsure about how the terrorists operated, how many there were, and what they might do next. It was that lack of solid information, government officials told me, that was the key factor behind the Bush Administration's decision last week not to issue a promised white paper listing the evidence linking Osama bin Laden's organization to the attacks.

There is consensus within the government on two issues: the terrorist attacks were brilliantly planned and executed, and the intelligence community was in no way prepared to stop them. One bureaucratic victim, the officials said, may be George Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, whose resignation is considered a necessity by many in the Administration. "The system is after Tenet," one senior officer told me. "It wants to get rid of him."

The investigators are now split into at least two factions. One, centered in the F.B.I., believes that the terrorists may not have been "a cohesive group," as one involved official put it, before they started training and working together on this operation. "These guys look like a pickup basketball team," he said. "A bunch of guys who got together." The F.B.I. is still trying to sort out the identities and backgrounds of the hijackers. The fact is, the official acknowledged, "we don't know much about them."

These investigators suspect that the suicide teams were simply lucky. "In your wildest dreams, do you think they thought they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" the official asked. "Just taking out one jet and getting it into the ground would have been a success. These are not supermen." He explained that the most important advantage the hijackers had, aside from the element of surprise, was history: in the past, most hijackings had ended up safely on the ground at a Third World airport, so pilots had been trained to coöperate.

Another view, centered in the Pentagon and the C.I.A., credits the hijackers with years of advance planning and practice, and a deliberate after-the-fact disinformation campaign. "These guys were below everybody's radar—they're professionals," an official said. "There's no more than five or six in a cell. Three men will know the plan; three won't know. They've been 'sleeping' out there for years and years." One military planner told me that many of his colleagues believe that the terrorists "went to ground and pulled phone lines" well before September 11th—that is, concealed traces of their activities.

It is widely believed that the terrorists had a support team, and the fact that the F.B.I. has been unable to track down fellow-conspirators who were left behind in the United States is seen as further evidence of careful planning. "Look," one person familiar with the investigation said. "If it were as simple and straightforward as a lucky one-off oddball operation, then the seeds of confusion would not have been sown as they were."

Many of the investigators believe that some of the initial clues that were uncovered about the terrorists' identities and preparations, such as flight manuals, were meant to be found. A former high-level intelligence official told me, "Whatever trail was left was left deliberately—for the F.B.I. to chase."

In interviews over the past two weeks, a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about Osama bin Laden's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one C.I.A. official asked. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone." A senior military officer told me that because of the visas and other documentation needed to infiltrate team members into the United States a major foreign intelligence service might also have been involved. "To get somebody to fly an airplane—to kill himself," the official added, further suggests that "somebody paid his family a hell of a lot of money."

"These people are not necessarily all from bin Laden," a Justice Department official told me. "We're still running a lot of stuff out," he said, adding that the F.B.I. has been inundated with leads. On September 23rd, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a television interviewer that "we will put before the world, the American people, a persuasive case" showing that bin Laden was responsible for the attacks. But the widely anticipated white paper could not be published, the Justice Department official said, for lack of hard facts. "There was not enough to make a sale."

The Administration justified the delay by telling the press that most of the information was classified and could not yet be released. Last week, however, a senior C.I.A. official confirmed that the intelligence community had not yet developed a significant amount of solid information about the terrorists' operations, financing, and planning. "One day, we'll know, but at the moment we don't know," the official said.

"To me," he added, "the scariest thing is that these guys"—the terrorists—"got the first one free. They knew that the standard operating procedure in an aircraft hijacking was to play for time. And they knew for sure that after this the security on airplanes was going to go way up. So whatever they've planned for the next round they had in place already."

The concern about a second attack was repeated by others involved in the investigation. Some in the F.B.I. now suspect that the terrorists are following a war plan devised by the convicted conspirator Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who is believed to have been the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef was involved in plans that called for, among other things, the releasing of poisons in the air and the bombing of the tunnels between New York City and New Jersey. The government's concern about the potential threat from hazardous-waste haulers was heightened by the Yousef case.

"Do they go chem/bio in one, two, or three years?" one senior general asked rhetorically. "We must now make a difficult transition from reliance on law enforcement to the preëmptive. That part is hard. Can we recruit enough good people?" In recent years, he said, "we've been hiring kids out of college who are computer geeks." He continued, "This is about going back to deep, hard dirty work, with tough people going down dark alleys with good instincts."

Today's C.I.A. is not up to the job. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the C.I.A. has become increasingly bureaucratic and unwilling to take risks, and has promoted officers who shared such values. ("The consciousness of kind," one former officer says.) It has steadily reduced its reliance on overseas human intelligence and cut the number of case officers abroad—members of the clandestine service, now known formally as the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., whose mission is to recruit spies. (It used to be called the "dirty tricks" department.) Instead, the agency has relied on liaison relationships—reports from friendly intelligence services and police departments around the world—and on technical collection systems.

It won't be easy to put agents back in the field. During the Cold War, the agency's most important mission was to recruit spies from within the Soviet Union's military and its diplomatic corps. C.I.A. agents were assigned as diplomatic or cultural officers at American embassies in major cities, and much of their work could be done at diplomatic functions and other social events. For an agent with such cover, the consequence of being exposed was usually nothing more than expulsion from the host country and temporary reassignment to a desk in Washington. Today, in Afghanistan, or anywhere in the Middle East or South Asia, a C.I.A. operative would have to speak the local language and be able to blend in. The operative should seemingly have nothing to do with any Americans, or with the American embassy, if there is one. The status is known inside the agency as "nonofficial cover," or NOC. Exposure could mean death.

It's possible that there isn't a single such officer operating today inside Islamic-fundamentalist circles. In an essay published last summer in The Atlantic Monthly, Reuel Marc Gerecht, who served for nearly a decade as a case officer in the C.I.A.'s Near East Division, quoted one C.I.A. man as saying, "For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." Another officer told Gerecht, "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen."

At the same time, the D.O. has been badly hurt by a series of resignations and retirements among high-level people, including four men whose names are little known to the public but who were widely respected throughout the agency: Douglas Smith, who spent thirty-one years in the clandestine service; William Lofgren, who at his retirement, in 1996, was chief of the Central Eurasia Division; David Manners, who was chief of station in Amman, Jordan, when he left the agency, in 1998; and Robert Baer, an Arabic speaker who was considered perhaps the best on-the-ground field officer in the Middle East. All left with feelings of bitterness over the agency's procedures for running clandestine operations.

"We'll never solve the terrorism issue until we reconstitute the D.O.," a former senior clandestine officer told me. "The first line of defense, and the most crucial line of defense, is human intelligence." Baer, who was awarded a Career Intelligence Medal after his resignation, in late 1997, said, "You wouldn't believe how bad it is. What saved the White House on Flight 93"—the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania—"was a bunch of rugby players. Is that what you're paying thirty billion dollars for?" He was referring to the federal budget for intelligence. He and his colleagues aren't surprised that the F.B.I. had no warning of the attack. "The bureau is wonderful in solving crimes after they're committed," one C.I.A. man said. "But it's not good at penetration. We've got to do it."

Today, the C.I.A. doesn't have enough qualified case officers to man its many stations and bases around the world. Two retired agents have been brought back on a rotating basis to take temporary charge of the small base in Karachi, Pakistan, a focal point for terrorist activity. (Karachi was the site of the murder, in 1995, of two Americans, one of them a C.I.A. employee, allegedly in retaliation for the arrest in Pakistan of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef.) A retired agent also runs the larger C.I.A. station in Dacca, Bangladesh, a Muslim nation that could be a source of recruits. Other retirees run C.I.A. stations in Africa.

One hard question is what lengths the C.I.A. should go to. In an interview, two former operations officers cited the tactics used in the late nineteen-eighties by the Jordanian security service, in its successful effort to bring down Abu Nidal, the Palestinian who led what was at the time "the most dangerous terrorist organization in existence," according to the State Department. Abu Nidal's group was best known for its role in two bloody gun and grenade attacks on check-in desks for El Al, the Israeli airline, at the Rome and Vienna airports in December, 1985. At his peak, Abu Nidal threatened the life of King Hussein of Jordan—whom he called "the pygmy king"—and the King responded, according to the former intelligence officers, by telling his state security service, "Go get them."

The Jordanians did not move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family members instead—mothers and brothers. The Abu Nidal suspect would be approached, given a telephone, and told to call his mother, who would say, according to one C.I.A. man, "Son, they'll take care of me if you don't do what they ask." (To his knowledge, the official carefully added, all the suspects agreed to talk before any family members were actually harmed.) By the early nineteen-nineties, the group was crippled by internal dissent and was no longer a significant terrorist organization. (Abu Nidal, now in his sixties and in poor health, is believed to be living quietly in Egypt.) "Jordan is the one nation that totally succeeded in penetrating a group," the official added. "You have to get their families under control."

Such tactics defy the American rule of law, of course, and the C.I.A.'s procedures, but, when it comes to Osama bin Laden and his accomplices, the official insisted, there is no alternative. "We need to do this—knock them down one by one," he said. "Are we serious about getting rid of the problem—instead of sitting around making diversity quilts?"

I know I should be more careful with the verb “blow” when discussing the Klingons, but it BLOWS ME AWAY (sorry, I really should NEVER use that phrase in connection with the Clintoons!) that former first b**ch, Hitlery, has the balls (which I suspect she DOES!) to say ANYTHING during this time inasmuch it was her fellow criminal, Bill, who laid the groundwork for this outrage.

CNN’s anorexia poster girl Judy Woodruff interviewed Tom Clancy on the evening of 9/11?

Tom brought up the subject of the CLINTON decimation of US HUMAN INTELLIGENCE capabilities – that going all the way back to Sun Tsu, SPIES are a necessary part of the information gathering process. He mentioned that if we’d had a few spies and spooks out there in this increasingly dangerous world, we MIGHT have gotten one of them close to the perpetrator and been able to interdict the MURDER of perhaps 15,000 Americans in the incredible tragedy we witnessed this morning.

I think it’s safe to say that Clancy knows a bit about the subjects on which he writes.

Tom then tagged CNN by name as one of the news agencies which greeted Clinton’s decimation of the intelligence community with approval, continuing to say that they COULD have spoken out TO OPPOSE HIM but failed to do so. Tom’s rather clear implication was that CNN played a role in today’s catastrophe.

Judy VISIBLY RECOILED – and quickly concluded the interview after babbling something about journalists never taking positions on such matters. Her expression made it clear that she was NOT happy with Tom.

Clancy was RIGHT ON THE MARK and until we DO beef up those assets, it’s gonna happen again – and probably sooner than later.

And do you suppose there is some sinister significance to the fact that this happened on 9-11 (911!)? Are these people THAT sick? Don’t bother responding as that was a rhetorical question.

Let’s all pray – and shed a tear or two -- for the lost firefighters, police officers, innocent citizens and their families. Until this is behind us, we must put aside as many of our partisan differences as our principles will allow.

And we must also pray that our precious Constitution does not become one of the first victims of this SICKENING and senseless act.

You fail to understand the nature of bin Laden's objectives: Like the Comintern of old, al-Qaeda's goal is to aggravate the global geopolitical situation. They want more chaos and mayhem, as they expect the liberal democracies of the West to collapse under the pressure.

So, where are the nukes and the Anthrax? Did it strike Ben Ladin as a good idea to blow off one of his best expensive tricks, in order to alert the West, get the dogs baying after his ass in Afganistan, and get the vaccine flowing here in the USA? So a stirred up america is good, but a stirred up and crippled america is against your terrorist ethics?

We should not be surprised that these Islamic fundamentalists have many of the same goals as the Comintern. As Jung pointed out is his "Psychological Types", religious fanatics and socialists are psychological peas in a pod.

This does not answer my original question about psychology. What kind of Islamic fundamentalists sit around engaging in Western decadence for a couple of years, taking flying lessons, spend their last night partying, and then slam themselves into buildings?

Do you really think that it is the CIA's interest to look like a toothless and incompetent agency?

After the multi-trillion dollar failure to predict the military compentency and resolve of the soviets, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Fishman trial investigation, none of which, incidently, can be attributed to loss of human assets in place in the Mid-East, what could they possibly do to appear more incompetent? Obviously, no amount of apparent incompetence has the slightest affect on their public support, or ever will while the press behaves like government whores.

Do oil companies profit when oil prices fall?

Since when do oil prices fall when there is a war in the Mid-East?

The oil reserves in the ANWR aren't jack-squat compared to the vast fields of the Middle East and Central Asia. What oil company would wat to cause a war in the region in which its inventory resides? Think about it.

Think about it yourself. The oil companies jack up the price of oil at the pump every time there's such a crisis, and no amount of fooling around on the geo-political surface of the planet does anything to hurt the supply of geographic resources underground--but it sure re-allocates the ownership of same, and every time it does, one or another oil company is the recipient of new largess. The oil companies are not a monolith. Some profit and others lose from major political upheavals.

You, my friend, should think about who actually profits, rather than who you like to blame.

And who would that be? Is Ben Ladin profiting from a global manhunt for Ben Ladin, by a superpower he could have crippled, but chose not to? Is the taliban about to profit from a highly predictable invasion and overthrow of it's own government? "Create Mayhem", you say? Why so little of it? And why, so predictably, mostly in the terrorists' back yard?

"A lack of resources does not seem to be crippling the CIA in Colombia and other nations where we are intervening militarily under the excuse of the 'war on drugs.' Don't believe for a second that the CIA doesn't have all the money it will ever need. If congress doesn't grant them enough money, they just sell drugs to get it." Dear Hidy, please share with us your 'sources' for this. Perhaps the famous Criptic Institute?...LOL. Or maybe it is Maxine Watersand her drug addled voter forum? But please, share with us.

The Kerry Hearing of the US Congress. The Hitz report of the CIA and the subsequent admissions by its chief author before the US Congress. "The Politics of Heroin" by McCoy, a respected scholar. Ex-CIA, ex-LAcop & ex-DEA agents on record.

The "WHAT WENT WRONG" question that no one seems to answer !

It was reported within a few days of the Sept 11th attacks that the CIA
informed the INS that Mohammed Atta had entered the U.S.

The INS stated there was nothing they could do since atta had already entered the country.
They then promptly notified the FBI that Atta was in the U.S... This was TWO WEEKS prior to Sept 11th.

My "WHAT WENT WRONG" question is this:
How did he manage to buy an airline ticket using his real name, Mohammed Atta, without setting off any warnings.
Articles right after the 11th show that he used his own name to purchase tickets TO Portland, Maine and then to Boston,
from where he bought still a third ticket, using his own name a third time, to then board the fatal flight.

How in the hell did this get by the FBI who had sought him out for TWO WEEKS prior to Sept 11th ?

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