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May 28, 2002, 8:45 a.m. The Real Intelligence Failure Congress’s role. By Mark Riebling

he furor over what our government knew before September 11 has spurred calls for a broad congressional inquiry. But if lawmakers really seek to repair our vulnerabilities — which they say would be the goal of their probe — they must consider their own roles in thwarting the timely collation of vital intelligence.

National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice has said that the FBI and CIA failed to highlight developments which might have provided early warning. The available evidence supports her claim. News reports indicate that clues picked up by the two agencies were never coherently assembled for President Bush, because the two agencies did not pool their data.

Yet the failure of the FBI and CIA to fuse their facts was merely a symptom of the breakdown — not its cause. Ultimate blame belongs with neither agency, but with the congressionally mandated split of counterterrorist duties between them.

By statute, the CIA tracks terrorists overseas, while the FBI hunts them at home. Because terrorists cross borders, this arrangement has never been workable. Former CIA Director Richard Helms has compared it to "cutting a man down the middle."

To keep both halves from walking in opposite directions requires close liaison. In the months before Sept. 11, this liaison suffered at least three disastrous disconnects.

1. In July 2001, a Phoenix FBI agent sent a memo to Bureau headquarters, warning that terrorists might be using U.S. flight schools to train terrorists. The CIA believed two men named in the memo were al Qaeda agents. But because the FBI did not share its memo with other agencies, the CIA did not link Al Qaeda to the flight schools.

2. A Maryland state trooper was unaware that a man he stopped for speeding, on Sept. 9, was on CIA's terror watchlist — because the CIA had not forwarded its full list to the FBI, which is responsible for briefing state law enforcement. Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley has testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that this unnamed traffic violator was among those who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 and flew it into the Pentagon.

3. Administration officials have said that an August 6 CIA report to President Bush, warning of al Qaeda hijackings in the U.S., "was never looked at by the FBI." The Bureau therefore had no chance to insert its suspicions about the flight schools, which it had earlier failed to share with the CIA.

Why didn't the right hand of counterterrorism didn't know what the left was doing?

The standard explanation for interagency breakdown is that bureaucrats are more interested in defending their turf than in protecting the country. Yet no one wants to protect America more than FBI or CIA officials do. The problem is not pettiness of personal spirit, but a clash of institutional missions.

Domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence do not mix. The first requires the presentation of evidence in public; the second, a low profile and the protection of sources. FBI agents fret that anything they feed the CIA will be embargoed by the agency and rendered useable in court. CIA officers worry that sharing intelligence with the FBI may get deep-cover agents killed. These competing imperatives instill mutual distrust.

Before Sept. 11, the most notorious breakdowns had come in spycatching. Retired officials from both agencies have said that the jurisdictional split impaired surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald before November 22, 1963, and that it thwarted attempts to uncover Soviet and Russian spies, including former CIA officer Aldrich Ames.

But in counterterrorism, too, there was glaring proof that the division of duties did not work. In 1990, when Egyptian Sheik Abdul Rahman applied for a U.S. visa, the CIA did not tell the FBI he was suspected of being a terrorist organizer. That information, according to former CIA Counterterrorism Chief Vincent Cannistraro, was relayed only after Rahman's followers bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993.

Following that attack, the Bureau set up a "hotline" to CIA, and then-director R. James Woolsey assured Congress that the two agencies' counterterrorist work was "fully integrated." But skeptics warned that the system was so dysfunctional that disaster was guaranteed. In a 1997 paper, "The Coming Intelligence Failure," Defense Intelligence Agency analyst Russ Travers paper predicted the results with chilling prescience.

"The year is 2001," Travers began. "Bureaucratic politics have forced a division of analytic labor. … We do not provide sufficient warning of a… terrorist attack. The data were there, but we had failed to recognize fully their significance and put them in context. No agency was postured to conduct truly integrated analysis."

Travers urged immediate "consolidation and centralization" of intelligence against terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and other nonconventional threats. Unless this were done, he argued, "[f]rom the vantage point of 2001, intelligence failure is inevitable. … By operating under the premise that we can… parcel out discrete responsibilities to various agencies, we are, in essence, getting the deck chairs on the Titanic nice and neat."

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge must now effect the "consolidation and centralization" which Travers urged. But it is hard to see how Ridge's reforms can be anything but cosmetic. Though he is supposed to coordinate the counterterrorism work of the FBI, CIA, and 38 other agencies with lesser roles, he lacks authority over any of them. Nor is Ridge included in the expansive CIA Daily Briefings — such as the one from last August 6 which seems to have so needed a coordinator's eye.

And even if he were to "start knocking the heads of agency officials" — which his deputies say he won't do — Ridge could not resolve the contradiction between law enforcement and intelligence.

Only legislators can do that. The question which thus ought to keep congressmen pacing their kitchens at night is not what the FBI or the CIA knew, or didn't know — or when President Bush did, or didn't, know it. The mystery which policymakers ought rather to be pondering is why they themselves keep our intelligence house divided, and still expect it to stand.

Why can't we give counterterrorist coverage wholly to one agency? Opponents of centralization have a ready answer. Such concentration of power, they object, would create a police state. The split between FBI and CIA jurisdictions, after all, was originally made on civil liberties grounds. Closing that gap would "imperil the very freedoms we are fighting to defend."

The problem with this objection is that it is not true. Lawrence Houston, who wrote the CIA's charter in 1947, has said repeatedly that the division was made for bureaucratic, not constitutional reasons. The wedge between FBI and CIA is by no means a necessary feature our national-security policy. It is merely the lengthened political shadow of one man.

At the close of World War II, longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wanted a worldwide spy service under his sole authority. He insisted that a geographical division in duties was unworkable, even dangerous. But when he saw that a creation of CIA was inevitable, Hoover did a one-eighty. If the new agency were given any domestic-security functions, he argued, it would become a "Gestapo."

This argument was specious. Hitler's security apparatus was divided much like ours is today: The Gestapo handled domestic law enforcement, while the Abwehr gathered foreign intelligence. The United States was a free society not because it partitioned its national security, but because its Constitution guaranteed rights.

But if Hoover did not have logic on his side, he had congressmen in his pocket. He won. And every time meaningful reform has been proposed, his bogus argument has been resurrected.

Spokesmen for both the FBI and CIA now insist the agencies are "communicating as never before." But that's what they say after every interagency snafu. And while they say it, our efforts to neutralize al Qaeda remain dangerously riven by attempts to both police and to spy. Unless Congress mandates one or the other approach, the road to future tragedies — as to so many intelligence failures in our past — will be paved with good but divided intentions.

— Mark Riebling, editorial director at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, is the author of Wedge: The Secret War between the FBI and CIA.