FORESIGHT-AND HINDSIGHT
In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit
and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly-with
20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places
everything else more deeply into shadow. Commenting on Pearl Harbor, Roberta
Wohlstetter found it "much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the
irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we
can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But
before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings."
As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened
become still clearer. Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to
reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes and
the remaining memories of it become colored by what happened and what was written
about it later. With that caution in mind, we asked ourselves, before we judged
others, whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been
meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have
known or done.
We believe the 9/11 attacks revealed four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy,
capabilities, and management.
IMAGINATION
Historical Perspective
The 9/11 attack was an event of surpassing disproportion. America had suffered
surprise attacks before-Pearl Harbor is one well-known case, the 1950 Chinese attack
in Korea another. But these were attacks by major powers. While by no means as
threatening as Japan's act of war, the 9/11 attack was in some ways more
devastating. It was carried out by a tiny group of people, not enough to man a full
platoon. Measured on a governmental scale, the resources behind it were trivial. The
group itself was dispatched by an organization based in one of the poorest, most
remote, and least industrialized countries on earth. This organization recruited a
mixture of young fanatics and highly educated zealots who could not find suitable
places in their home societies or were driven from them.
To understand these events, we attempted to reconstruct some of the context of the
1990s. Americans celebrated the end of the Cold War with a mixture of relief and
satisfaction. The people of the United States hoped to enjoy a peace dividend, as
U.S. spending on national security was cut following the end of the Soviet military
threat.
The United States emerged into the post-Cold War world as the globe's preeminent
military power. But the vacuum created by the sudden demise of the Soviet Union
created fresh sources of instability and new challenges for the United States.
President George H.W. Bush dealt with the first of these in 1990 and 1991 when he
led an international coalition to reverse Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Other examples
of U.S. leaders' handling new threats included the removal of nuclear weapons from
Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan; the Nunn-Lugar threat reduction program to help
contain new nuclear dangers; and international involvement in the wars in Bosnia and
Kosovo. America stood out as an object for admiration, envy, and blame. This created
a kind of cultural asymmetry. To us, Afghanistan seemed very far away. To members of
al Qaeda, America seemed very close. In a sense, they were more globalized than we
were.
Understanding the Danger
If the government's leaders understood the gravity of the threat they faced and
understood at the same time that their policies to eliminate it were not likely to
succeed any time soon, then history's judgment will be harsh. Did they understand
the gravity of the threat?
The U.S. government responded vigorously when the attack was on our soil. Both Ramzi
Yousef, who organized the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and Mir Amal
Kansi, who in 1993 killed two CIA employees as they waited to go to work in Langley,
Virginia, were the objects of relentless, uncompromising, and successful efforts to
bring them back to the United States to stand trial for their crimes.
Before 9/11, al Qaeda and its affiliates had killed fewer than 50 Americans,
including the East Africa embassy bombings and the Cole attack. The U.S. government
took the threat seriously, but not in the sense of mustering anything like the kind
of effort that would be gathered to confront an enemy of the first, second, or even
third rank. The modest national effort exerted to contain Serbia and its
depredations in the Balkans between 1995 and 1999, for example, was orders of
magnitude larger than that devoted to al Qaeda.
As best we can determine, neither in 2000 nor in the first eight months of 2001 did
any polling organization in the United States think the subject of terrorism
sufficiently on the minds of the public to warrant asking a question about it in a
major national survey. Bin Ladin, al Qaeda, or even terrorism was not an important
topic in the 2000 presidential campaign. Congress and the media called little
attention to it.
If a president wanted to rally the American people to a warlike effort, he would need
to publicize an assessment of the growing al Qaeda danger. Our government could
spark a full public discussion of who Usama Bin Ladin was, what kind of organization
he led, what Bin Ladin or al Qaeda intended, what past attacks they had sponsored or
encouraged, and what capabilities they were bringing together for future assaults.
We believe American and international public opinion might have been different--and
so might the range of options for a president--had they been informed of these
details. Recent examples of such debates include calls to arms against such threats
as Serbian ethnic cleansing, biological attacks, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction,
global climate change, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
While we now know that al Qaeda was formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet
occupation of Afghanistan, the intelligence community did not describe this
organization, at least in documents we have seen, until 1999. A National
Intelligence Estimate distributed in July 1995 predicted future terrorist attacks
against the United States-and in the United States. It warned that this danger would
increase over the next several years. It specified as particular points of
vulnerability the White House, the Capitol, symbols of capitalism such as Wall
Street, critical infrastructure such as power grids, areas where people congregate
such as sports arenas, and civil aviation generally. It warned that the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing had been intended to kill a lot of people, not to achieve any
more traditional political goal.
This 1995 estimate described the greatest danger as "transient groupings of
individuals" that lacked "strong organization but rather are loose affiliations."
They operate "outside traditional circles but have access to a worldwide network of
training facilities and safehavens." This was an excellent
summary of the emerging danger, based on what was then known.
In 1996-1997, the intelligence community received new information making clear that
Bin Ladin headed his own terrorist group, with its own targeting agenda and
operational commanders. Also revealed was the previously unknown involvement of Bin
Ladin's organization in the 1992 attack on a Yemeni hotel quartering U.S. military
personnel, the 1993 shootdown of U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia, and
quite possibly the 1995 Riyadh bombing of the American training mission to the Saudi
National Guard. The 1997 update of the 1995 estimate did not discuss the new
intelligence. It did state that the terrorist danger depicted in 1995 would persist.
In the update's summary of key points, the only reference to Bin Ladin was this
sentence:"Iran and its surrogates, as well as terrorist financier Usama Bin Ladin
and his followers, have stepped up their threats and surveillance of US facilities
abroad in what also may be a portent of possible additional attacks in the United
States." Bin Ladin was mentioned in only two other
sentences in the six-page report. The al Qaeda organization was not mentioned. The
1997 update was the last national estimate on the terrorism danger completed before
9/11.
From 1998 to 2001, a number of very good analytical papers were distributed on
specific topics. These included Bin Ladin's political philosophy, his command of a
global network, analysis of information from terrorists captured in Jordan in
December 1999, al Qaeda's operational style, and the evolving goals of the Islamist
extremist movement. Many classified articles for morning briefings were prepared for
the highest officials in the government with titles such as "Bin Ladin Threatening
to Attack US Aircraft [with antiaircraft missiles]" (June 1998),"Strains Surface
Between Taliban and Bin Ladin" (January 1999), "Terrorist Threat to US Interests in
Caucasus" (June 1999), "Bin Ladin to Exploit Looser Security During
Holidays"(December 1999),"Bin Ladin Evading Sanctions" (March 2000),"Bin Ladin's
Interest in Biological, Radiological Weapons" (February 2001), "Taliban Holding Firm
on Bin Ladin for Now" (March 2001),"Terrorist Groups Said Cooperating on US Hostage
Plot" (May 2001), and "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the US" (August 2001).
Despite such reports and a 1999 paper on Bin Ladin's command structure for al Qaeda,
there were no complete portraits of his strategy or of the extent of his
organization's involvement in past terrorist attacks. Nor had the intelligence
community provided an authoritative depiction of his organization's relationships
with other governments, or the scale of the threat his organization posed to the
United States.
Though Deputy DCI John McLaughlin said to us that the cumulative output of the
Counterterrorist Center (CTC) "dramatically eclipsed" any analysis that could have
appeared in a fresh National Intelligence Estimate, he conceded that most of the
work of the Center's 30- to 40-person analytic group dealt with collection
issues.
In late 2000, DCI GeorgeTenet recognized the deficiency of strategic analysis against
al Qaeda. To tackle the problem within the CTC he appointed a senior manager, who
briefed him in March 2001 on "creating a strategic assessment capability." The CTC
established a new strategic assessments branch during July 2001. The decision to add
about ten analysts to this effort was seen as a major bureaucratic victory, but the
CTC labored to find them. The new chief of this branch reported for duty on
September 10, 2001.
Whatever the weaknesses in the CIA's portraiture, both Presidents Bill Clinton and
George Bush and their top advisers told us they got the picture-they understood Bin
Ladin was a danger. But given the character and pace of their policy efforts, we do
not believe they fully understood just how many people al Qaeda might kill, and how
soon it might do it. At some level that is hard to define, we believe the threat had
not yet become compelling.
It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New
York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that Bin Ladin was a
terrorist leader, with the headline "U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed
Attacks." The head of analysis at the CTC until 1999
discounted the alarms about a catastrophic threat as relating only to the danger of
chemical, biological, or nuclear attack-and he downplayed even that, writing several
months before 9/11:"It would be a mistake to redefine counterterrorism as a task of
dealing with 'catastrophic,''grand,' or 'super' terrorism, when in fact these labels
do not represent most of the terrorism that the United States is likely to face or
most of the costs that terrorism imposes on U.S. interests."
Beneath the acknowledgment that Bin Ladin and al Qaeda presented serious dangers,
there was uncertainty among senior officials about whether this was just a new and
especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat America had lived with
for decades, or was radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced. Such
differences affect calculations about whether or how to go to war.
Therefore, those government experts who saw Bin Ladin as an unprecedented new danger
needed a way to win broad support for their views, or at least spotlight the areas
of dispute, and perhaps prompt action across the government. The national estimate
has often played this role, and is sometimes controversial for this very
reason.
Such assessments, which provoke widespread thought and debate, have a major impact on
their recipients, often in a wider circle of decisionmakers. The National
Intelligence Estimate is noticed in the Congress, for example. But, as we have said,
none was produced on terrorism between 1997 and 9/11.
By 2001 the government still needed a decision at the highest level as to whether al
Qaeda was or was not "a first order threat," Richard Clarke wrote in his first memo
to Condoleezza Rice on January 25, 2001. In his blistering protest about
foot-dragging in the Pentagon and at the CIA, sent to Rice just a week before 9/11,
he repeated that the "real question" for the principals was "are we serious about
dealing with the al Qida threat? . . . Is al Qida a big deal?" One school of
thought, Clarke wrote in this September 4 note, implicitly argued that the terrorist
network was a nuisance that killed a score of Americans every 18-24 months. If that
view was credited, then current policies might be proportionate. Another school saw
al Qaeda as the "point of the spear of radical Islam." But no one forced the
argument into the open by calling for a national estimate or a broader discussion of
the threat. The issue was never joined as a collective debate by the U.S.
government, including the Congress, before 9/11.
We return to the issue of proportion-and imagination. Even Clarke's note challenging
Rice to imagine the day after an attack posits a strike that kills "hundreds" of
Americans. He did not write "thousands."
Institutionalizing Imagination: The Case of Aircraft as Weapons
Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies. For example, before
Pearl Harbor the U.S. government had excellent intelligence that a Japanese attack
was coming, especially after peace talks stalemated at the end of November 1941.
These were days, one historian notes, of "excruciating uncertainty." The most likely
targets were judged to be in Southeast Asia. An attack was coming,"but officials
were at a loss to know where the blow would fall or what more might be done to
prevent it." In retrospect, available intercepts pointed
to Japanese examination of Hawaii as a possible target. But, another historian
observes,"in the face of a clear warning, alert measures bowed " to routine.
It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the
exercise of imagination. Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can
imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons. Indeed, since al Qaeda and other
groups had already used suicide vehicles, namely truck bombs, the leap to the use of
other vehicles such as boats (the Cole attack) or planes is not far-fetched. Yet
these scenarios were slow to work their way into the thinking of aviation security
experts. In 1996, as a result of the TWA Flight 800 crash, President Clinton created
a commission under Vice President Al Gore to report on shortcomings in aviation
security in the United States. The Gore Commission's report, having thoroughly
canvassed available expertise in and outside of government, did not mention suicide
hijackings or the use of aircraft as weapons. It focused mainly on the danger of
placing bombs onto aircraft-the approach of the Manila air plot. The Gore Commission
did call attention, however, to lax screening of passengers and what they carried
onto planes. In late 1998, reports came in of a possible al Qaeda plan to hijack a
plane. One, a December 4 Presidential Daily Briefing for President Clinton
(reprinted in chapter 4), brought the focus back to more traditional hostage taking;
it reported Bin Ladin's involvement in planning a hijack operation to free prisoners
such as the "Blind Sheikh," Omar Abdel Rahman. Had the contents of this PDB been
brought to the attention of a wider group, including key members of Congress, it
might have brought much more attention to the need for permanent changes in domestic
airport and airline security procedures.
Threat reports also mentioned the possibility of using an aircraft filled with
explosives. The most prominent of these mentioned a possible plot to fly an
explosives-laden aircraft into a U.S. city. This report, circulated in September
1998, originated from a source who had walked into an American consulate in East
Asia. In August of the same year, the intelligence community had received
information that a group of Libyans hoped to crash a plane into the World Trade
Center. In neither case could the information be corroborated. In addition, an
Algerian group hijacked an airliner in 1994, most likely intending to blow it up
over Paris, but possibly to crash it into the Eiffel Tower.
In 1994, a private airplane had crashed onto the south lawn of the White House. In
early 1995, Abdul Hakim Murad-Ramzi Yousef 's accomplice in the Manila airlines
bombing plot-told Philippine authorities that he and Yousef had discussed flying a
plane into CIA headquarters.
Clarke had been concerned about the danger posed by aircraft since at least the 1996
Atlanta Olympics. There he had tried to create an air defense plan using assets from
the Treasury Department, after the Defense Department declined to contribute
resources. The Secret Service continued to work on the problem of airborne threats
to the Washington region. In 1998, Clarke chaired an exercise designed to highlight
the inadequacy of the solution. This paper exercise involved a scenario in which a
group of terrorists commandeered a Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with
explosives, and flew it toward a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked officials
from the Pentagon, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and Secret Service what
they could do about the situation. Officials from the Pentagon said they could
scramble aircraft from Langley Air Force Base, but they would need to go to the
President for rules of engagement, and there was no mechanism to do so. There was no
clear resolution of the problem at the exercise.
In late 1999, a great deal of discussion took place in the media about the crash off
the coast of Massachusetts of EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767. The most plausible
explanation that emerged was that one of the pilots had gone berserk, seized the
controls, and flown the aircraft into the sea. After the 1999-2000 millennium
alerts, when the nation had relaxed, Clarke held a meeting of his Counterterrorism
Security Group devoted largely to the possibility of a possible airplane hijacking
by al Qaeda.
In his testimony, Clarke commented that he thought that warning about the possibility
of a suicide hijacking would have been just one more speculative theory among many,
hard to spot since the volume of warnings of "al Qaeda threats and other terrorist
threats, was in the tens of thousands-probably hundreds of thousands."18Yet the
possibility was imaginable, and imagined. In early August 1999, the FAA's Civil
Aviation Security intelligence office summarized the Bin Ladin hijacking threat.
After a solid recitation of all the information available on this topic, the paper
identified a few principal scenarios, one of which was a "suicide hijacking
operation." The FAA analysts judged such an operation unlikely, because "it does not
offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining Rahman and
other key captive extremists. . . . A suicide hijacking is assessed to be an option
of last resort."
Analysts could have shed some light on what kind of "opportunity for dialogue" al
Qaeda desired.
The CIA did not write any analytical assessments of possible hijacking scenarios.
One prescient pre-9/11 analysis of an aircraft plot was written by a Justice
Department trial attorney. The attorney had taken an interest, apparently on his own
initiative, in the legal issues that would be involved in shooting down a U.S.
aircraft in such a situation.
The North American Aerospace Defense Command imagined the possible use of aircraft as
weapons, too, and developed exercises to counter such a threat-from planes coming to
the United States from overseas, perhaps carrying a weapon of mass destruction. None
of this speculation was based on actual intelligence of such a threat. One idea,
intended to test command and control plans and NORAD's readiness, postulated a
hijacked airliner coming from overseas and crashing into the Pentagon. The idea was
put aside in the early planning of the exercise as too much of a distraction from
the main focus (war in Korea), and as too unrealistic. As we pointed out in chapter
1, the military planners assumed that since such aircraft would be coming from
overseas; they would have time to identify the target and scramble
interceptors.
We can therefore establish that at least some government agencies were concerned
about the hijacking danger and had speculated about various scenarios. The challenge
was to flesh out and test those scenarios, then figure out a way to turn a scenario
into constructive action.
Since the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, the intelligence community has devoted
generations of effort to understanding the problem of forestalling a surprise
attack. Rigorous analytic methods were developed, focused in particular on the
Soviet Union, and several leading practitioners within the intelligence community
discussed them with us. These methods have been articulated in many ways, but almost
all seem to have at least four elements in common: (1) think about how surprise
attacks might be launched; (2) identify telltale indicators connected to the most
dangerous possibilities; (3) where feasible, collect intelligence on these
indicators; and (4) adopt defenses to deflect the most dangerous possibilities or at
least trigger an earlier warning.
After the end of the Gulf War, concerns about lack of warning led to a major study
conducted for DCI Robert Gates in 1992 that proposed several recommendations, among
them strengthening the national intelligence officer for warning. We were told that
these measures languished under Gates's successors. Responsibility for warning
related to a terrorist attack passed from the national intelligence officer for
warning to the CTC. An Intelligence Community Counterterrorism Board had the
responsibility to issue threat advisories.
With the important exception of analysis of al Qaeda efforts in chemical, biological,
radiological, and nuclear weapons, we did not find evidence that the methods to
avoid surprise attack that had been so laboriously developed over the years were
regularly applied.
Considering what was not done suggests possible ways to institutionalize imagination.
To return to the four elements of analysis just mentioned:
1. The CTC did not analyze how an aircraft, hijacked or explosivesladen, might be
used as a weapon. It did not perform this kind of analysis from the enemy's
perspective ("red team" analysis), even though suicide terrorism had become a
principal tactic of Middle Eastern terrorists. If it had done so, we believe such an
analysis would soon have spotlighted a critical constraint for the
terrorists-finding a suicide operative able to fly large jet aircraft. They had
never done so before 9/11.
2. The CTC did not develop a set of telltale indicators for this method of attack.
For example, one such indicator might be the discovery of possible terrorists
pursuing flight training to fly large jet aircraft, or seeking to buy advanced
flight simulators.
3. The CTC did not propose, and the intelligence community collection management
process did not set, requirements to monitor such telltale indicators. Therefore the
warning system was not looking for information such as the July 2001 FBI report of
potential terrorist interest in various kinds of aircraft training in Arizona, or
the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui because of his suspicious behavior in a
Minnesota flight school. In late August, the Moussaoui arrest was briefed to the DCI
and other top CIA officials under the heading "Islamic Extremist Learns to
Fly." Because the system was not tuned to comprehend
the potential significance of this information, the news had no effect on warning.
4. Neither the intelligence community nor aviation security experts analyzed systemic
defenses within an aircraft or against terroristcontrolled aircraft, suicidal or
otherwise. The many threat reports mentioning aircraft were passed to the FAA. While
that agency continued to react to specific, credible threats, it did not try to
perform the broader warning functions we describe here. No one in the government was
taking on that role for domestic vulnerabilities.
Richard Clarke told us that he was concerned about the danger posed by aircraft in
the context of protecting the Atlanta Olympics of 1996, the White House complex, and
the 2001 G-8 summit in Genoa.
But he attributed his awareness more to Tom Clancy novels than to warnings from the
intelligence community. He did not, or could not, press the government to work on
the systemic issues of how to strengthen the layered security defenses to protect
aircraft against hijackings or put the adequacy of air defenses against suicide
hijackers on the national policy agenda.
The methods for detecting and then warning of surprise attack that the U.S.
government had so painstakingly developed in the decades after Pearl Harbor did not
fail; instead, they were not really tried. They were not employed to analyze the
enemy that, as the twentieth century closed, was most likely to launch a surprise
attack directly against the United States.
POLICY
The road to 9/11 again illustrates how the large, unwieldy U.S. government tended to
underestimate a threat that grew ever greater. The terrorism fostered by Bin Ladin
and al Qaeda was different from anything the government had faced before. The
existing mechanisms for handling terrorist acts had been trial and punishment for
acts committed by individuals; sanction, reprisal, deterrence, or war for acts by
hostile governments. The actions of al Qaeda fit neither category. Its crimes were
on a scale approaching acts of war, but they were committed by a loose, far-flung,
nebulous conspiracy with no territories or citizens or assets that could be readily
threatened, overwhelmed, or destroyed. Early in 2001, DCI Tenet and Deputy Director
for Operations James Pavitt gave an intelligence briefing to President-elect Bush,
Vice President-elect Cheney, and Rice; it included the topic of al Qaeda. Pavitt
recalled conveying that Bin Ladin was one of the gravest threats to the
country.
Bush asked whether killing Bin Ladin would end the problem. Pavitt said he and the
DCI had answered that killing Bin Ladin would have an impact, but would not stop the
threat. The CIA later provided more formal assessments to the White House
reiterating that conclusion. It added that in the long term, the only way to deal
with the threat was to end al Qaeda's ability to use Afghanistan as a sanctuary for
its operations.
Perhaps the most incisive of the advisors on terrorism to the new administration was
the holdover Richard Clarke. Yet he admits that his policy advice, even if it had
been accepted immediately and turned into action, would not have prevented
9/11. We must then ask when the U.S. government had
reasonable opportunities to mobilize the country for major action against al Qaeda
and its Afghan sanctuary. The main opportunities came after the new information the
U.S. government received in 1996-1997, after the embassy bombings of August 1998,
after the discoveries of the Jordanian and Ressam plots in late 1999, and after the
attack on the USS Cole in October 2000.
The U.S. policy response to al Qaeda before 9/11 was essentially defined following
the embassy bombings of August 1998. We described those decisions in chapter 4. It
is worth noting that they were made by the Clinton administration under extremely
difficult domestic political circumstances. Opponents were seeking the President's
impeachment. In addition, in 1998-99 President Clinton was preparing the government
for possible war against Serbia, and he had authorized major air strikes against
Iraq.
The tragedy of the embassy bombings provided an opportunity for a full examination,
across the government, of the national security threat that Bin Ladin posed. Such an
examination could have made clear to all that issues were at stake that were much
larger than the domestic politics of the moment. But the major policy agencies of
the government did not meet the threat. The diplomatic efforts of the Department of
State were largely ineffective. Al Qaeda and terrorism was just one more priority
added to already-crowded agendas with countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
After 9/11 that changed.
Policymakers turned principally to the CIA and covert action to implement policy.
Before 9/11, no agency had more responsibility-or did more-to attack al Qaeda,
working day and night, than the CIA. But there were limits to what the CIA was able
to achieve in its energetic worldwide efforts to disrupt terrorist activities or use
proxies to try to capture or kill Bin Ladin and his lieutenants. As early as
mid-1997, one CIA officer wrote to his supervisor: "All we're doing is holding the
ring until the cavalry gets here."
Military measures failed or were not applied. Before 9/11 the Department of Defense
was not given the mission of ending al Qaeda's sanctuary in Afghanistan.
Officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations regarded a full U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan as practically inconceivable before 9/11. It was never the subject of
formal interagency deliberation.
Lesser forms of intervention could also have been considered. One would have been the
deployment of U.S. military or intelligence personnel, or special strike forces, to
Afghanistan itself or nearby-openly, clandestinely (secretly), or covertly (with
their connection to the United States hidden). Then the United States would no
longer have been dependent on proxies to gather actionable intelligence. However, it
would have needed to secure basing and overflight support from neighboring
countries. A significant political, military, and intelligence effort would have
been required, extending over months and perhaps years, with associated costs and
risks. Given how hard it has proved to locate Bin Ladin even today when there are
substantial ground forces in Afghanistan, its odds of sucess are hard to calculate.
We have found no indication that President Clinton was offered such an intermediate
choice, or that this option was given any more consideration than the idea of
invasion. These policy challenges are linked to the problem of imagination we have
already discussed. Since we believe that both President Clinton and President Bush
were genuinely concerned about the danger posed by al Qaeda, approaches involving
more direct intervention against the sanctuary in Afghanistan apparently must have
seemed-if they were considered at all-to be disproportionate to the threat.
Insight for the future is thus not easy to apply in practice. It is hardest to mount
a major effort while a problem still seems minor. Once the danger has fully
materialized, evident to all, mobilizing action is easier-but it then may be too
late.
Another possibility, short of putting U.S. personnel on the ground, was to issue a
blunt ultimatum to the Taliban, backed by a readiness to at least launch an
indefinite air campaign to disable that regime's limited military capabilities and
tip the balance in Afghanistan's ongoing civil war. The United States had warned the
Taliban that they would be held accountable for further attacks by Bin Ladin against
Afghanistan's U.S. interests. The warning had been given in 1998, again in late
1999, once more in the fall of 2000, and again in the summer of 2001. Delivering it
repeatedly did not make it more effective. As evidence of al Qaeda's responsibility
for the Cole attack came in during November 2000, National Security Advisor Samuel
Berger asked the Pentagon to develop a plan for a sustained air campaign against the
Taliban. Clarke developed a paper laying out a formal, specific ultimatum. But
Clarke's plan apparently did not advance to formal consideration by the Small Group
of principals. We have found no indication that the idea was briefed to the new
administration or that Clarke passed his paper to them, although the same team of
career officials spanned both administrations.
After 9/11, President Bush announced that al Qaeda was responsible for the attack on
the USS Cole. Before 9/11, neither president took any action. Bin Ladin's inference
may well have been that attacks, at least at the level of the Cole, were risk
free.
CAPABILITIES
Earlier chapters describe in detail the actions decided on by the Clinton and Bush
administrations. Each president considered or authorized covert actions, a process
that consumed considerable time-especially in the Clinton administration- and
achieved little success beyond the collection of intelligence. After the August 1998
missile strikes in Afghanistan, naval vessels remained on station in or near the
region, prepared to fire cruise missiles. General Hugh Shelton developed as many as
13 different strike options, and did not recommend any of them. The most extended
debate on counterterrorism in the Bush administration before 9/11 had to do with
missions for the unmanned Predator- whether to use it just to locate Bin Ladin or to
wait until it was armed with a missile, so that it could find him and also attack
him. Looking back, we are struck with the narrow and unimaginative menu of options
for action offered to both President Clinton and President Bush.
Before 9/11, the United States tried to solve the al Qaeda problem with the same
government institutions and capabilities it had used in the last stages of the Cold
War and its immediate aftermath. These capabilities were insufficient, but little
was done to expand or reform them.
For covert action, of course, the White House depended on the Counterterrorist Center
and the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Though some officers, particularly in the
Bin Ladin unit, were eager for the mission, most were not. The higher management of
the directorate was unenthusiastic. The CIA's capacity to conduct paramilitary
operations with its own personnel was not large, and the Agency did not seek a
large-scale general expansion of these capabilities before 9/11. James Pavitt, the
head of this directorate, remembered that covert action, promoted by the White
House, had gotten the Clandestine Service into trouble in the past. He had no desire
to see this happen again. He thought, not unreasonably, that a truly serious
counterterrorism campaign against an enemy of this magnitude would be business
primarily for the military, not the Clandestine Service.
As for the Department of Defense, some officers in the Joint Staff were keen to help.
Some in the Special Operations Command have told us that they worked on plans for
using Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan and that they hoped for action
orders. JCS Chairman General Shelton and General Anthony Zinni at Central Command
had a different view. Shelton felt that the August 1998 attacks had proved a waste
of good ordnance and thereafter consistently opposed firing expensive Tomahawk
missiles merely at "jungle gym" terrorist training infrastructure.
In this view, he had complete support from Defense Secretary William Cohen. Shelton
was prepared to plan other options, but he was also prepared to make perfectly clear
his own strong doubts about the wisdom of any military action that risked U.S. lives
unless the intelligence was "actionable.
The high price of keeping counterterrorism policy within the restricted circle of the
Counterterrorism Security Group and the highest-level principals was nowhere more
apparent than in the military establishment. After the August 1998 missile strike,
other members of the JCS let the press know their unhappiness that, in conformity
with the Goldwater-Nichols reforms, Shelton had been the only member of the JCS to
be consulted. Although follow-on military options were briefed more widely, the vice
director of operations on the Joint Staff commented to us that intelligence and
planning documents relating to al Qaeda arrived in a ziplock red package and that
many flag and general officers never had the clearances to see its contents.
At no point before 9/11 was the Department of Defense fully engaged in the mission of
countering al Qaeda, though this was perhaps the most dangerous foreign enemy then
threatening the United States. The Clinton administration effectively relied on the
CIA to take the lead in preparing long-term offensive plans against an enemy
sanctuary. The Bush administration adopted this approach, although its emerging new
strategy envisioned some yet undefined further role for the military in addressing
the problem. Within Defense, both Secretary Cohen and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave
their principal attention to other challenges.
America's homeland defenders faced outward. NORAD itself was barely able to retain
any alert bases. Its planning scenarios occasionally considered the danger of
hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft that were
coming from overseas. We recognize that a costly change in NORAD's defense posture
to deal with the danger of suicide hijackers, before such a threat had ever actually
been realized, would have been a tough sell. But NORAD did not canvass available
intelligence and try to make the case. The most serious weaknesses in agency
capabilities were in the domestic arena. In chapter 3 we discussed these
institutions-the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FAA, and
others. The major pre-9/11 effort to strengthen domestic agency capabilities came in
2000, as part of a millennium after-action review. President Clinton and his
principal advisers paid considerable attention then to border security problems, but
were not able to bring about significant improvements before leaving office. The
NSC-led interagency process did not effectively bring along the leadership of the
Justice and Transportation departments in an agenda for institutional change.
The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the
field to national priorities. The acting director of the FBI did not learn of his
Bureau's hunt for two possible al Qaeda operatives in the United States or about his
Bureau's arrest of an Islamic extremist taking flight training until September 11.
The director of central intelligence knew about the FBI's Moussaoui investigation
weeks before word of it made its way even to the FBI's own assistant director for
counterterrorism.
Other agencies deferred to the FBI. In the August 6 PDB reporting to President Bush
of 70 full-field investigations related to al Qaeda, news the President said he
found heartening, the CIA had simply restated what the FBI had said. No one looked
behind the curtain.
The FAA's capabilities to take aggressive, anticipatory security measures were
especially weak. Any serious policy examination of a suicide hijacking scenario,
critiquing each of the layers of the security system, could have suggested changes
to fix glaring vulnerabilities-expanding no-fly lists, searching passengers
identified by the CAPPS screening system, deploying Federal Air Marshals
domestically, hardening cockpit doors, alerting air crew to a different kind of
hijacking than what they had been trained to expect, or adjusting the training of
controllers and managers in the FAA and NORAD.
Government agencies also sometimes display a tendency to match capabilities to
mission by defining away the hardest part of their job. They are often passive,
accepting what are viewed as givens, including that efforts to identify and fix
glaring vulnerabilities to dangerous threats would be too costly, too controversial,
or too disruptive.
MANAGEMENT
Operational Management
Earlier in this report we detailed various missed opportunities to thwart the 9/11
plot. Information was not shared, sometimes inadvertently or because of legal
misunderstandings. Analysis was not pooled. Effective operations were not launched.
Often the handoffs of information were lost across the divide separating the foreign
and domestic agencies of the government.
However the specific problems are labeled, we believe they are symptoms of the
government's broader inability to adapt how it manages problems to the new
challenges of the twenty-first century. The agencies are like a set of specialists
in a hospital, each ordering tests, looking for symptoms, and prescribing
medications. What is missing is the attending physician who makes sure they work as
a team.
One missing element was effective management of transnational operations. Action
officers should have drawn on all available knowledge in the government. This
management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly
assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide.
Consider, for example, the case of Mihdhar, Hazmi, and their January 2000 trip to
Kuala Lumpur, detailed in chapter 6. In late 1999, the National Security Agency
(NSA) analyzed communications associated with a man named Khalid, a man named Nawaf,
and a man named Salem. Working-level officials in the intelligence community knew
little more than this. But they correctly concluded that "Nawaf " and "Khalid"might
be part of "an operational cadre" and that "something nefarious might be afoot." The
NSA did not think its job was to research these identities. It saw itself as an
agency to support intelligence consumers, such as CIA. The NSA tried to respond
energetically to any request made. But it waited to be asked. If NSA had been asked
to try to identify these people, the agency would have started by checking its own
database of earlier information from these same sources. Some of this information
had been reported; some had not. But it was all readily accessible in the database.
NSA's analysts would promptly have discovered who Nawaf was, that his full name
might be Nawaf al Hazmi, and that he was an old friend of Khalid.
With this information and more that was available, managers could have more
effectively tracked the movement of these operatives in southeast Asia. With the
name "Nawaf al Hazmi," a manager could then have asked the State Department also to
check that name. State would promptly have found its own record on Nawaf al Hazmi,
showing that he too had been issued a visa to visit the United States. Officials
would have learned that the visa had been issued at the same place-Jeddah-and on
almost the same day as the one given to Khalid al Mihdhar.
When the travelers left Kuala Lumpur for Bangkok, local officials were able to
identify one of the travelers as Khalid al Mihdhar. After the flight left, they
learned that one of his companions had the name Alhazmi. But the officials did not
know what that name meant.
The information arrived at Bangkok too late to track these travelers as they came in.
Had the authorities there already been keeping an eye out for Khalid al Mihdhar as
part of a general regional or worldwide alert, they might have tracked him coming
in. Had they been alerted to look for a possible companion named Nawaf al Hazmi,
they might have noticed him too. Instead, they were notified only after Kuala Lumpur
sounded the alarm. By that time, the travelers had already disappeared into the
streets of Bangkok. On January 12, the head of the CIA's al Qaeda unit told his
bosses that surveillance in Kuala Lumpur was continuing. He may not have known that
in fact Mihdhar and his companions had dispersed and the tracking was falling apart.
U.S. officials in Bangkok regretfully reported the bad news on January 13. The names
they had were put on a watchlist in Bangkok, so that Thai authorities might notice
if the men left the country. On January 14, the head of the CIA's al Qaeda unit
again updated his bosses, telling them that officials were continuing to track the
suspicious individuals who had now dispersed to various countries.
Unfortunately, there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being undertaken
by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok. No other effort was made to
create other opportunities to spot these Arab travelers in case the screen in
Bangkok failed. Just from the evidence in Mihdhar's passport, one of the logical
possible destinations and interdiction points would have been the United States. Yet
no one alerted the INS or the FBI to look for these individuals. They arrived,
unnoticed, in Los Angeles on January 15. In early March 2000, Bangkok reported that
Nawaf al Hazmi, now identified for the first time with his full name, had departed
on January 15 on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Since the CIA did not
appreciate the significance of that name or notice the cable, we have found no
evidence that this information was sent to the FBI.
Even if watchlisting had prevented or at least alerted U.S. officials to the entry of
Hazmi and Mihdhar, we do not think it is likely that watchlisting, by itself, have
prevented the 9/11 attacks. Al Qaeda adapted to the failure of some of its
operatives to gain entry into the United States. None of these future hijackers was
a pilot. Alternatively, had they been permitted entry and surveilled, some larger
results might have been possible had the FBI been patient. These are difficult
what-ifs. The intelligence community might have judged that the risks of conducting
such a prolonged intelligence operation were too high-potential terrorists might
have been lost track of, for example. The pre- 9/11 FBI might not have been judged
capable of conducting such an operation. But surely the intelligence community would
have preferred to have the chance to make these choices.
From the details of this case, or from the other opportunities we catalogue in the
text box, one can see how hard it is for the intelligence community to assemble
enough of the puzzle pieces gathered by different agencies to make some sense of
them and then develop a fully informed joint plan. Accomplishing all this is
especially difficult in a transnational case. We sympathize with the working-level
officers, drowning in information and trying to decide what is important or what
needs to be done when no particular action has been requested of them.
Who had the job of managing the case to make sure these things were done? One answer
is that everyone had the job. The CIA's deputy director for operations, James
Pavitt, stressed to us that the responsibility resided with all involved. Above all
he emphasized the primacy of the field. The field had the lead in managing
operations. The job of headquarters, he stressed, was to support the field, and do
so without delay. If the field asked for information or other support, the job of
headquarters was to get it-right away.
This is a traditional perspective on operations and, traditionally, it has had great
merit. It reminded us of the FBI's pre-9/11 emphasis on the primacy of its field
offices. When asked about how this traditional structure would adapt to the
challenge of managing a transnational case, one that hopped from place to place as
this one did, the deputy director argued that all involved were responsible for
making it work. Pavitt underscored the responsibility of the particular field
location where the suspects were being tracked at any given time. On the other hand,
he also said that the Counterterrorist Center was supposed to manage all the moving
parts, while what happened on the ground was the responsibility of managers in the
field.
Headquarters tended to support and facilitate, trying to make sure everyone was in
the loop. From time to time a particular post would push one way, or headquarters
would urge someone to do something. But headquarters never really took
responsibility for the successful management of this case. Hence the managers at CIA
headquarters did not realize that omissions in planning had occurred, and they
scarcely knew that the case had fallen apart. The director of the Counterterrorist
Center at the time, Cofer Black, recalled to us that this operation was one among
many and that, at the time, it was "considered interesting, but not heavy water
yet." He recalled the failure to get the word to Bangkok fast enough, but has no
evident recollection of why the case then dissolved, unnoticed.
The next level down, the director of the al Qaeda unit in CIA at the time recalled
that he did not think it was his job to direct what should or should not be done. He
did not pay attention when the individuals dispersed and things fell apart. There
was no conscious decision to stop the operation after the trail was temporarily lost
in Bangkok. He acknowledged, however, that perhaps there had been a letdown for his
overworked staff after the extreme tension and long hours in the period of the
millennium alert.
The details of this case illuminate real management challenges, past and future. The
U.S. government must find a way of pooling intelligence and using it to guide the
planning of and assignment of responsibilities for joint operations involving
organizations as disparate as the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the military,
and the agencies involved in homeland security.
Institutional Management
Beyond those day-to-day tasks of bridging the foreign-domestic divide and matching
intelligence with plans, the challenges include broader management issues pertaining
to how the top leaders of the government set priorities and allocate resources. Once
again it is useful to illustrate the problem by examining the CIA, since before 9/11
this agency's role was so central in the government's counterterrorism efforts.
On December 4, 1998, DCI Tenet issued a directive to several CIA officials and his
deputy for community management, stating:"We are at war. I want no resources or
people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community."
The memorandum had little overall effect on mobilizing the CIA or the intelligence
community.
The memo was addressed only to CIA officials and the deputy for community management,
Joan Dempsey. She faxed the memo to the heads of the major intelligence agencies
after removing covert action sections. Only a handful of people received it. The NSA
director at the time, Lieutenant General Kenneth Minihan, believed the memo applied
only to the CIA and not the NSA, because no one had informed him of any NSA
shortcomings. For their part, CIA officials thought the memorandum was intended for
the rest of the intelligence community, given that they were already doing all they
could and believed that the rest of the community needed to pull its weight.
The episode indicates some of the limitations of the DCI's authority over the
direction and priorities of the intelligence community, especially its elements
within the Department of Defense. The DCI has to direct agencies without controlling
them. He does not receive an appropriation for their activities, and therefore does
not control their purse strings. He has little insight into how they spend their
resources. Congress attempted to strengthen the DCI's authority in 1996 by creating
the positions of deputy DCI for community management and assistant DCIs for
collection, analysis and production, and administration. But the authority of these
positions is limited, and the vision of central management clearly has not been
realized.
The DCI did not develop a management strategy for a war against Islamist terrorism
before 9/11. Such a management strategy would define the capabilities the
intelligence community must acquire for such a war-from language training to
collection systems to analysts. Such a management strategy would necessarily extend
beyond the CTC to the components that feed its expertise and support its operations,
linked transparently to counterterrorism objectives. It would then detail the
proposed expenditures and organizational changes required to acquire and implement
these capabilities.
DCI Tenet and his deputy director for operations told us they did have a management
strategy for a war on terrorism. It was to rebuild the CIA. They said the CIA as a
whole had been badly damaged by prior budget constraints and that capabilities
needed to be restored across the board. Indeed, the CTC budget had not been cut
while the budgets had been slashed in many other parts of the Agency. By restoring
funding across the CIA, a rising tide would lift all boats. They also stressed the
synergy between improvements of every part of the Agency and the capabilities that
the CTC or stations overseas could draw 41 on in the war on terror.
As some officials pointed out to us, there is a tradeoff in this management approach.
In an attempt to rebuild everything at once, the highest priority efforts might not
get the maximum support that they need. Furthermore, this approach attempted to
channel relatively strong outside support for combating terrorism into backing for
across-the-board funding increases. Proponents of the counterterrorism agenda might
respond by being less inclined to loosen the purse strings than they would have been
if offered a convincing counterterrorism budget strategy. The DCI's management
strategy was also focused mainly on the CIA.
Lacking a management strategy for the war on terrorism or ways to see how funds were
being spent across the community, DCI Tenet and his aides found it difficult to
develop an overall intelligence community budget for a war on terrorism.
Responsibility for domestic intelligence gathering on terrorism was vested solely in
the FBI, yet during almost all of the Clinton administration the relationship
between the FBI Director and the President was nearly nonexistent. The FBI Director
would not communicate directly with the President. His key personnel shared very
little information with the National Security Council and the rest of the national
security community. As a consequence, one of the critical working relationships in
the counterterrorism effort was broken.
The Millennium Exception
Before concluding our narrative, we offer a reminder, and an explanation, of the one
period in which the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert to deal
with terrorism-the last weeks of December 1999 preceding the millennium.
In the period between December 1999 and early January 2000, information about
terrorism flowed widely and abundantly. The flow from the FBI was particularly
remarkable because the FBI at other times shared almost no information. That from
the intelligence community was also remarkable, because some of it reached
officials-local airport managers and local police departments- who had not seen such
information before and would not see it again before 9/11, if then. And the
terrorist threat, in the United States even more than abroad, engaged the frequent
attention of high officials in the executive branch and leaders in both houses of
Congress.
Why was this so? Most obviously, it was because everyone was already on edge with the
millennium and possible computer programming glitches ("Y2K") that might obliterate
records, shut down power and communication lines, or otherwise disrupt daily life.
Then, Jordanian authorities arrested 16 al Qaeda terrorists planning a number of
bombings in that country. Those in custody included two U.S. citizens. Soon after,
an alert Customs agent caught Ahmed Ressam bringing explosives across the Canadian
border with the apparent intention of blowing up Los Angeles airport. He was found
to have confederates on both sides of the border.
These were not events whispered about in highly classified intelligence dailies or
FBI interview memos. The information was in all major newspapers and highlighted in
network television news. Though the Jordanian arrests only made page 13 of the New
York Times, they were featured on every evening newscast. The arrest of Ressam was
on front pages, and the original story and its follow-ups dominated television news
for a week. FBI field offices around the country were swamped by calls from
concerned citizens. Representatives of the Justice Department, the FAA, local police
departments, and major airports had microphones in their faces whenever they showed
themselves.
After the millennium alert, the government relaxed. Counterterrorism went back to
being a secret preserve for segments of the FBI, the Counterterrorist Center, and
the Counterterrorism Security Group. But the experience showed that the government
was capable of mobilizing itself for an alert against terrorism. While one factor
was the preexistence of widespread concern about Y2K, another, at least equally
important, was simply shared information. Everyone knew not only of an abstract
threat but of at least one terrorist who had been arrested in the United States.
Terrorism had a face-that of Ahmed Ressam-and Americans from Vermont to southern
California went on the watch for his like.
In the summer of 2001, DCI Tenet, the Counterterrorist Center, and the
Counterterrorism Security Group did their utmost to sound a loud alarm, its basis
being intelligence indicating that al Qaeda planned something big. But the
millennium phenomenon was not repeated. FBI field offices apparently saw no abnormal
terrorist activity, and headquarters was not shaking them up. Between May 2001 and
September 11, there was very little in newspapers or on television to heighten
anyone's concern about terrorism. Front-page stories touching on the subject dealt
with the windup of trials dealing with the East Africa embassy bombings and Ressam.
All this reportage looked backward, describing problems satisfactorily resolved.
Back-page notices told of tightened security at embassies and military installations
abroad and government cautions against travel to the Arabian Peninsula. All the rest
was secret.
