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New York and the Pentagon fiery crashes were the first strategic
surprises of the new century. But they have famous predecessors:
together with Pearl Harbor, the Maginot Line disaster that led to
the fall of France in 1940, and Hitler's Plan Barbarossa that cost
the U.S.S.R. millions of soldiers in 1941, they will be studied
by future intelligence historians.
The bureaucrats
did not see it coming. Forces of evil sure know how to surprise
a democracy.
On September
11, the four concentric circles of American security failed: the
Central Intelligence Agency's foreign intelligence together with
the State Department visa screening; the Federal Bureau of Investigation
and Immigration and Naturalization Service's domestic security,
and the Federal Aviation Administration's airport security.
The roots of
this calamity lie in institutional sclerosis and bureaucratic impotence.
And congressionally mandated blue-ribbon task forces failed to issue
warnings.
A blue-ribbon
panel, the National Commission on Terrorism, said last year that
the FBI was doing a good job of disseminating information concerning
immediate threats.
But what if
FBI intelligence fails to collect, analyze, and share this information?
This could happen, the commission found, because the 42-page guidelines
under which FBI agents can open a terrorism investigation are badly
written and confusing.
The commission
recommended that then Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI
Director Louis Freeh rewrite the guidelines.
Moreover, the
FBI had no procedure for disseminating useful information for analysis
within the agency or sharing it with other government agencies.
The Bureau treats or intelligence as "indictable evidence"
for grand juries, and by law is not allowed to disseminate it to
other government agencies. Information which was gleaned in Tulsa
would often not leave the regional office, even though it might
provide important clues for another investigation. Obviously, this
must change immediately.
According to
Judge Abraham Sofaer of the Hoover Institution, and formerly a State
Department top lawyer, a case in point is the investigation of El
Sayyid Nosair, arrested in 1990 for the murder of radical Rabbi
Meir Kahane in New York. The FBI failed to translate papers found
in Nosair's home because its New York office had no Arabic translator
available. Those papers could have warned the FBI about the 1993
World Trade Center bombing. Moreover, when the translation was so
poorly done that the name of El Qaida was mangled and mistranslated.
Last year,
the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities to Terrorism
Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, chaired by Gov. James Gilmore
(R., Va.), in its Annual Report written by the RAND Corp., stated:
"Based on classified briefings as well as 'open-source' information,
it is clear that the U.S. Intelligence Community's foreign intelligence
collections and analysis against terrorism has been excellent. There
is, however, room for improvement."
Indeed.
Blunders in
counterterrorism work have also been committed by other agencies.
When the mastermind of the Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Yusuf, entered
the U.S. with a false passport, he was caught by the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, but released because the government
lacked space in the local holding facility. Like hundreds of others,
he disappeared and failed to appear for his hearing. It took an
explosion which killed and wounded dozens, thousands of hours of
chase, a manhunt spanning three continents, and millions of dollars
in bounty to hunt him down in Pakistan.
According to
congressional sources, senior INS top managers have failed to recognize
the role that INS enforcement should be playing in the national-security
area, claiming that it is FBI's problem.
As a result
of such attitudes, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, head of the Egyptian
Al Gamat Al Islamiya was allowed into the country — and subsequently
convicted of leading a plot to bomb U.S. landmarks and bridges in
New York.
Musa Abu Marzook,
one of Hamas's top three officials, was permitted to found and operate
a think tank in Chicago and Virginia, and Ali Mohammed and Adih
el Hage, a top Al Qaeda lieutenant and secretary to Bin Laden, were
also allowed into the United States.
In addition,
senior leaders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Jihad,
Tunisian and Algerian radical Islamic organizations, and leaders
and spokespersons for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which calls
for attacks on American targets and for suicide bombings, as well
as for Jihad against Christians and Jews and "other enemies
of Islam" were allowed to receive green cards or U.S. citizenship,
according to congressional testimony.
The Federal
Aviation Administration failed to bring airport security up to speed
by allowing its private contractors to hire semiliterate personnel
for near-minimal wages. Succumbing to the ACLU pressure, the FAA
waived criminal record checks of security personnel.
Every report
on airport safety, every inspection which involved smuggling weapons
into aircraft, indicated major security failures.
Pilots were
allowed to keep doors into their cockpits open at all times. The
doors could have been bulletproofed and locked, thus providing proper
protection from hijacking. Nothing of the kind was in place. When
it was proposed, the Airline Pilots Association lobbied against
it, citing the danger of crew being trapped in the event of a crash.
And the worst airports, including Logan, were known to FAA.
Finally, one
of the largest failures in counterterrorism intelligence rests on
the shoulders of the CIA. In 1995 the guidelines promulgated by
then-Director of Central Intelligence John Deutsch, prohibited the
engagement of foreign intelligence informants who may have previously
been involved in human rights violations.
These broad
guidelines prevent CIA cooperation with numerous intelligence officers
around the world and inhibit the Agency's ability to recruit sources
or informers from terrorist organizations.
The Gilmore
Panel and the National Commission on Terrorism issued a call to
rescind these guidelines. The weekend after the attacks on New York
and the Pentagon, that call was echoed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
The History
Channel will one day air a new episode of History's Blunders,in
which analysts will compare the unprecedented intelligence failure
prior to the terror attacks against New York and Washington not
only with Pearl Harbor, but also with Hitler's disastrous attack
on the Soviet Union in 1941 that cost the Russians millions of casualties.
Turf battles,
lack of cultural and linguistic skills, and "bureaucratic stupidity"
all contributed to a historic failure of the U.S. security's three
circles of defense. The price we paid was huge. Only an organizational
renaissance, a true awakening, such as often occurs in major wars,
may save America from further terrorist attacks.
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