The 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004, contains a comprehensive and valuable assessment of what went wrong before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. Some of its recommendations as to how to remedy deficiencies in the US security system are problematic, however. One, the institution of a multi-agency National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) for coordinated joint operational planning, built on the existing Terrorist Threat Integration Center, seems generally sensible. But another more profound structural prescription – the creation of a new post of national intelligence director – does little to answer the pre-9/11 shortfalls that the Commission so ably identified. The intelligence director would have a dedicated budgetary appropriation, preside over three sub-directorates encompassing the entire US intelligence community and five ‘national intelligence centers’ covering substantive priorities, and be situated in the Executive Office of the President. This recommendation, especially if extended by an overzealous Congress, risks diverting attention and resources from better streamlined and targeted measures that would produce more substantive improvements in the United States’ ability to wage an effective global campaign against terrorism.
The Commission cast 9/11 as a security failure writ large. In narrow terms, the disaster was attributable to a rashly casual approach to aviation security. To this oversight the Bush administration responded to some effect. More broadly, however, an intelligence-based warning derived from exploiting proven opportunities to ‘connect the dots’ would have prompted greater awareness of the threat at senior levels of government and, in turn, better aviation security or the apprehension of the hijackers before they could act. The details of the failure to connect the dots are familiar, and the Report articulates them clearly. Key among its observations are the following:
• In March 2000, the presence of suspected terrorists and eventual hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in the US was known by the Central Intelligence Agency, but not communicated to the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 23 August 2001.
• In July 2001, on the basis of his investigation of a Middle Eastern flight-school student in contact with Abu Zubeida – a known major al-Qaeda figure – a special agent in the FBI’s Phoenix field office sent a memorandum to headquarters in Washington recommending that the Bureau investigate the possibility that Islamic terrorist suspects were enrolling in flight schools. This was judged too costly in terms of manpower, and the implied potential threat was never brought to the attention of the White House.
• An August 2001 CIA cable to the Immigration and Naturalization Service warned that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi should be put on the terrorist watch list. Although the Immigration and Naturalization Service informed the CIA and the FBI that they had already been admitted into the US and the FBI was unable to track them down, the inter-agency Counterterrorism and Security Group (CSG), chaired by senior National Security Council (NSC) staff members, was not informed of this mistake.
• Also in August 2001, the FBI’s Minneapolis field office determined from French intelligence that Zacarias Moussaoui, who had been arrested after seeking flight-simulator instruction, was an Islamic extremist. But headquarters blocked the field office’s application for approval under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to examine his laptop computer – which would have revealed his enrolment in a flight school that a known al-Qaeda operative had also attended – for fear that the application would have been rejected as requesting an unreasonable search.
The salient missteps in this chain involved the inability of US agencies to act on time or in coordination with one another, and, especially, to communicate vital information to the NSC, which is responsible for coordinating and implementing American foreign and security policy. This kind of dysfunction stemmed essentially from statutory barriers separating foreign intelligence operations from domestic law-enforcement activity, the inefficiency of several agencies and, with respect to the FBI, a law-enforcement culture attuned to investigating crimes but unsuited to preventing mass-casualty terrorism. The consequence was the NSC’s inability to generate an accurate terrorist threat picture in the summer of 2001.
Senate Intelligence Committee’s proposal
Prompted by the 9/11 Commission Report, the Senate Intelligence Committee in late August put forth a proposed bill for very aggressive reforms of the intelligence community. Under this programme, a new national intelligence director (NID) would head a new National Intelligence Service (NIS), overseeing the 15 agencies constituting the US intelligence community. The CIA would be broken up into separate agencies for clandestine operations, current intelligence and technical means, and the Department of Defense would relinquish primary authority over agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the NIS. The Senate committee’s plan would invest the NID with full budgetary and supervisory authority over all main US intelligence agencies as well as the FBI’s counter-terrorism operations, including the ability to re-programme and transfer funding and line-item discretion. This change would remove much of the community from the Pentagon’s financial oversight.
One of the 9/11 Commission’s concerns was that, as presently tasked, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) – which position the NID would replace – is spread too thinly. In re-orienting the highest-ranking intelligence officer’s duties, the Senate committee’s prime objective seems to be to ensure that he or she is not overburdened with operational duties, and is able to coordinate all national intelligence-generating agencies so that key intelligence from these multiple centres will reach presidential level in a timely fashion.
The Senate committee may have overreacted. The CIA itself is further up along the learning curve of the global counter-terrorism campaign than any successor bureaucracy is likely to be, making it risky to dismantle the Agency and end its role as the central player in US intelligence. Perhaps the most counterproductive aspect of CIA culture is the reluctance of the Operations Directorate’s clandestine case officers to interact fluidly with the Directorate of Intelligence’s analysts. Formally separating these functions, as prescribed by the Senate proposal, would only exacerbate this problem. Further, the 9/11 Commission Report cited CIA deficiencies in paramilitary and human intelligence capabilities as prime considerations in the Clinton administration’s decision not to disrupt al-Qaeda operations in Afghanistan, before 9/11, beyond the 1998 missile strikes. In this light, the DCI’s pre-9/11 energies would have been best expended on more forcefully managing and refocusing the core tasks of the Agency itself – not so much in coordinating the community.
Well before 9/11, there was a bureaucratic mechanism in place for gathering intelligence at the appropriate level in the form of the CSG, which had been enshrined by presidential decision directive as the government’s counter-terrorism crisis-management nerve centre at the NSC. As chairman of the CSG, Richard Clarke made breaking down inter-agency anxieties about sharing information a priority but had not been completely successful. The problem before 9/11, then, was not the absence of a top-level clearinghouse for pooling intelligence on terrorist threats from multiple agencies. Rather, the trouble was that key officials in the individual agencies themselves did not rate intelligence that turned out to be important as sufficiently probative to filter up to the NSC.
Giving full budgetary and supervisory authority to the NID is supposed to ameliorate this problem. But this overhaul, in its implicit rejection of the putative competitive dimension of intelligence judgements, could end up over-centralising the process of generating polished intelligence. The NID would have greater responsibility than the current DCI for the finished intelligence product that informs the NSC’s coordination of foreign policy and, ultimately, the president’s policy decisions. There is an understandable temptation to establish a single arbiter of what is important among several streams or categories of intelligence. But the statutory concentration of authority in one person could institutionalise the very capacity for politically skewing ‘actionable’ intelligence that many have accused former DCI George Tenet and other high-level officials of indulging in with respect to the threats posed by Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Form over substance
Major reforms may offer psychological reassurance to the American public by projecting a grand remedy that suggests comparably grand results. Yet in terms of actually improving the performance of the US intelligence community, aggressive implementation of the 9/11 Commission Report’s recommendations – as urged by the Senate Intelligence Committee – may prove misguided. Another disruptive jolt to a national security architecture already massively reconfigured by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security could throw the intelligence reform process off course rather than re-orient it properly. Worse, it may impede the vital day-to-day process of intelligence collection and analysis.
Major newspapers as well as the Senate committee have jumped on the bandwagon of intelligence reform, adding to the heavy political momentum built by the 9/11 Commission Report. Nevertheless, both the White House and the House of Representatives have raised caution flags. Although a hesitant White House gave in to public pressure in establishing an NCTC soon after the Senate committee proposal was promulgated, it held back on creating a robust new national intelligence director post. Then, in late September, the House introduced its own intelligence reform bill. The House version reflected concerns raised in the June 2004 House report on intelligence authorizations for fiscal year 2005 that a NID would only widen the bureaucratic gap between operations and management. It eliminated the NCTC’s operational and budgetary influence, significantly diminished the authority granted to the NID, and allowed the Pentagon to retain substantial control over agencies customarily under its bureaucratic roof. Under the House proposal, the NID would be empowered only to ‘develop and present to the president’ a budget for the intelligence agencies – fulfilling in effect, an advisory capacity.
Shortly before the House version of the intelligence reform bill was introduced, Henry Kissinger, with the support of a bipartisan group of former high-ranking officials, in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee cautioned Congress against taking ‘irrevocable legislative action’ prompted by any false sense of urgency that the election cycle might have created. Kissinger was generally concerned with creating another layer – in the form of the NID – between the president and existing intelligence institutions. His specific worries included:
• weakening the relationship between intelligence analysts and operations officers;
• potentially compromising democratic principles by institutionally melding domestic intelligence with foreign intelligence;
• suppressing competing views;
• blurring lines of authority between the NID and the NSC;
• the questionable advisability of folding tactical and operational military intelligence into a predominantly civilian multi-agency structure; and
• the inclination of the 9/11 Commission to ignore more incremental and less disruptive means of achieving reform through existing institutions, such as the DCI.
The White House raised similar objections to the Senate bill. Two of the most senior and influential senators on the Appropriations Committee – Chairman Ted Stevens, a Republican from Alaska, and ranking Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia – also counselled against quick pre-election action.
Pause for thought
Despite the energy behind drastic intelligence reform that gathered following the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, it appeared unlikely that Congressional committees would hammer out a compromise bill to put to a vote, let alone pass new legislation, before the presidential election on 2 November. While understandably frustrating to many who would like to see bold remedial action, this delay may be salutary. With pause for consideration, the executive and legislative branches may conclude that simply changing the form of the intelligence community would not necessarily improve the substantive quality of its products. Whatever the final legislative outcome, the 9/11 Commission Report has practically guaranteed that US intelligence bureaucracies will receive surer oversight from the White House and Congress. Oversight, rather than restructuring, would seem the most important means of ensuring that existing intelligence agencies do their jobs properly and send the best possible intelligence through established channels to the highest level of government.
