They finish mid-sentence. London seems to be the worst hit so far. But how were the chemical weapons unleashed? We now know one thing: The Islamists were far too smart to attack prematurely. They could have pulled off a major domestic attack like this years ago. I wonder how Bush would have responded if they had. Probably with the same deer-in-the-headlights rigidity with which he handled the economy.
Al Qaeda used the time to develop their WMD networks, their training camps, their ground troops. We thought our attack on Afghanistan was at a time we chose. We were dreaming. They do. October 23, , p. The president has issued an emergency freeze on all domestic flights.
I guess the gas could work just as well in a Up here in Ptown, people are walking about in a daze—and the skies are eerily silent, except for a couple of military planes that just flew ominously overhead.
Fox News keeps running the London footage. A work friend of his is missing. When Hitler struck, Londoners went into the tubes to escape the carnage. Al Qaeda has turned that refuge into a mass tomb.
Meanwhile, chaos in NYC. A blogger who was on the path train under the World Trade Center remember ? All I could see was blackness and then the coughing and screaming. I held my breath, but my eyes started watering and I felt as if I was going to puke. A big guy on the up escalator dropped like a professionally demolished skyscraper.
Others on the platform seemed to be going into convulsions. To recap: We now have reports of up to 30 separate gas attacks in subway systems in New York, D. October 24, , p. CNN is reporting that the chemical used—hydrogen cyanide—may have been detonated by up to a hundred suicide bombers around the world.
Talk about asymmetric warfare. The use of suicide bombers is therefore … simply a statement of determination and resolve. Martyrdom as a psychological weapon. The death count is now estimated in the thousands. This could change, of course. Remember the first reports from Hurricane Georgia?
November 21, , p. Yes, the ultimate responsibility lies with Al Qaeda. But without the needless provocation by the president, thousands of Americans would be alive today. Containment could have worked. And so DeLay does to Gore what he once did to Clinton: undermine him in a critical war.
Most Americans understand that the attacks prove how vulnerable we always were. The exit polls show that a clear majority of Gore voters who leaned Republican or independent saw the carnage in the embassies and voted accordingly. Gore has also neutralized the conservative isolationists by playing the anti-gay card so shrewdly. Campaigning against gay marriage helped him win a sliver of the GOP vote—enough to get him Ohio anyway.
But his hawkishness was key. It still is. November 30, , a. The country wants to be united, despite the cynicism of the Republican right and now the defeatist rumblings on the academic far left. Still: No one in the West is to blame for this.
No one. It was merely wrong. It is hard enough to believe that individuals really do want to murder infidels. Who could have foreseen the simultaneous live burial of 10, innocent human beings over two continents?
It was, as the tabloids put it, a terrorist tsunami. And like the actual one the Christmas before last, we did not have the warning signs to see it coming.
December 12, , p. Good news: The Senate vote on ground troops to Afghanistan sends exactly the right message of commitment. Gore is arguing that only by democratizing the Middle East can we win the long-term war. I can see the broad ideological point: We have to offer an alternative to the medieval despotism now gripping the region.
But this is also where my own conservatism kicks in. December 13, , p. My sources tell me that former president Bill Clinton, even after his recent heart attack, will find the strength to sit behind Gore when he gives his address to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs next Saturday. There are even rumors that both president Bushes will show up—as an effort to convey national unity.
Classy of them, especially the younger one. Unlike some in his party. January 12, , a. Reports are coming through overnight that Musharraf has been overthrown in Pakistan in what seems to be an Islamist coup centered in the intelligence services. Not confirmed yet—but it would not be a huge surprise.
But, alas, over the last five years, Al Qaeda has dispersed its leadership across the globe, from Indonesia to Londonistan. Getting Osama would be emotionally satisfying. Entire congressional office buildings were sealed off by government officials in hazmat suits.
The world suddenly looked scary to ordinary citizens—and even worse behind the closed doors of intelligence briefings. The fire hose every morning hit the FBI director, the attorney general, and then the president. This tip turned out to have come from an informant who had misheard a conversation between two men in a bathroom in Ukraine—in other words, from a terrible global game of telephone.
Even disproved plots added to the impression that the U. At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. The mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing? Arrested in Pakistan. The embassy bombers? Caught in Kenya, South Africa, and elsewhere. The hunt for the plotters of and accomplices to the new attacks could have been similarly handled in civilian courts, whose civil-liberties protections would have shown the world how even the worst evils met with reasoned justice under the law.
While civil libertarians warned of a dark path ahead, Americans seemed not only to shrug off the new approach but also to embrace the no-holds-barred response. In an odd case of geopolitical life imitating Hollywood, the Kiefer Sutherland counterterrorism fantasy vehicle 24 premiered just as Bush drew his new lines on the War on Terror.
The Fox show was a huge hit, its graphic violence and torture a key selling point to audiences. The government cut experienced FBI interrogators out of the mix and replaced them with young, untrained military and CIA interrogators.
The spy agency hired outside psychologists who designed brutal and scientifically unsound techniques—including beatings, forced nudity, dietary manipulation, sensory deprivation, chaining prisoners in stress positions for hours at a time, confining them in mock coffins, depriving them of sleep, throwing them against a wall, and waterboarding them—that the U.
None of it was conducted under the ticking-clock scenario celebrated by 24 ; most of these sessions began months and in some cases years after a prisoner was first detained.
Senate investigation later determined was deployed against dozens of detainees in CIA custody. Similar abuses occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where guards sexually abused and humiliated prisoners.
The moral stain from this era was so obvious that al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group that morphed into the brutal ISIS, later used the imagery against us—parading its own prisoners around in the orange jumpsuits from Gitmo.
And yet American leaders continued to embrace the approach anyway. Military-commission proceedings for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly a mastermind of the attacks, and four co-defendants are still in a pretrial phase. At the Pentagon, while there were also problems of command and control, the emergency response was generally effective. The Incident Command System, a formalized management structure for emergency response in place in the National Capital Region, overcame the inherent complications of a response across local, state, and federal jurisdictions.
Operational Opportunities We write with the benefit and handicap of hindsight. We are mindful of the danger of being unjust to men and women who made choices in conditions of uncertainty and in circumstances over which they often had little control. Nonetheless, there were specific points of vulnerability in the plot and opportunities to disrupt it. Operational failures-opportunities that were not or could not be exploited by the organizations and systems of that time-included not watchlisting future hijackers Hazmi and Mihdhar, not trailing them after they traveled to Bangkok, and not informing the FBI about one future hijacker's U.
What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U. Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. Imagination The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat. The terrorist danger from Bin Ladin and al Qaeda was not a major topic for policy debate among the public, the media, or in the Congress.
Indeed, it barely came up during the presidential campaign. Al Qaeda's new brand of terrorism presented challenges to U. Though top officials all told us that they understood the danger, we believe there was uncertainty among them as to whether this was just a new and especially venomous version of the ordinary terrorist threat the United States had lived with for decades, or it was indeed radically new, posing a threat beyond any yet experienced.
As late as September 4, , Richard Clarke, the White House staffer long responsible for counterterrorism policy coordination, asserted that the government had not yet made up its mind how to answer the question: "Is al Qida a big deal? Policy Terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the U. The policy challenges were linked to this failure of imagination. Officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations regarded a full U.
These capabilities were insufficient. Little was done to expand or reform them. The CIA also needed to improve its capability to collect intelligence from human agents. America's homeland defenders faced outward. NORAD itself was barely able to retain any alert bases at all.
Its planning scenarios occasionally considered the danger of hijacked aircraft being guided to American targets, but only aircraft that were coming from overseas. The most serious weaknesses in agency capabilities were in the domestic arena.
The FBI did not have the capability to link the collective knowledge of agents in the field to national priorities. Other domestic agencies deferred to the FBI. FAA capabilities were weak. Any serious examination of the possibility of a suicide hijacking 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 crews to a different kind of hijacking possibility than they had been trained to expect.
Action officers should have been able to draw on all available knowledge about al Qaeda in the government. Management should have ensured that information was shared and duties were clearly assigned across agencies, and across the foreign-domestic divide. There were also broader management issues with respect to how top leaders set priorities and allocated resources. I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community.
This episode indicates the limitations of the DCI's authority over the direction of the intelligence community, including agencies within the Department of Defense. The U. These efforts included warnings and sanctions, but they all failed. From through early , the United States pressed the United Arab Emirates, one of the Taliban's only travel and financial outlets to the outside world, to break off ties and enforce sanctions, especially those related to air travel to Afghanistan.
Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. On the other hand, government officials of Saudi Arabia at the highest levels worked closely with top U. Lack of Military Options In response to the request of policymakers, the military prepared an array of limited strike options for attacking Bin Ladin and his organization from May onward.
When they briefed policymakers, the military presented both the pros and cons of those strike options and the associated risks. Policymakers expressed frustration with the range of options presented. Following the August 20, , missile strikes on al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan, both senior military officials and policymakers placed great emphasis on actionable intelligence as the key factor in recommending or deciding to launch military action against Bin Ladin and his organization.
They did not want to risk significant collateral damage, and they did not want to miss Bin Ladin and thus make the United States look weak while making Bin Ladin look strong. On three specific occasions in , intelligence was deemed credible enough to warrant planning for possible strikes to kill Bin Ladin.
But in each case the strikes did not go forward, because senior policymakers did not regard the intelligence as sufficiently actionable to offset their assessment of the risks. The Director of Central Intelligence, policymakers, and military officials expressed frustration with the lack of actionable intelligence. Some officials inside the Pentagon, including those in the special forces and the counterterrorism policy office, also expressed frustration with the lack of military action.
The combination of an overwhelming number of priorities, flat budgets, an outmoded structure, and bureaucratic rivalries resulted in an insufficient response to this new challenge. Many dedicated officers worked day and night for years to piece together the growing body of evidence on al Qaeda and to understand the threats. Yet, while there were many reports on Bin Laden and his growing al Qaeda organization, there was no comprehensive review of what the intelligence community knew and what it did not know, and what that meant.
But there were limits to what the CIA was able to achieve by disrupting terrorist activities abroad and by using proxies to try to capture Bin Ladin and his lieutenants in Afghanistan. CIA officers were aware of those limitations. To put it simply, covert action was not a silver bullet. It was important to engage proxies in Afghanistan and to build various capabilities so that if an opportunity presented itself, the CIA could act on it. But for more than three years, through both the late Clinton and early Bush administrations, the CIA relied on proxy forces, and there was growing frustration within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and in the National Security Council staff with the lack of results.
The development of the Predator and the push to aid the Northern Alliance were products of this frustration. Throughout the s, the FBI's counterterrorism efforts against international terrorist organizations included both intelligence and criminal investigations. The FBI's approach to investigations was case-specific, decentralized, and geared toward prosecution.
Significant FBI resources were devoted to after-the-fact investigations of major terrorist attacks, resulting in several prosecutions. The FBI attempted several reform efforts aimed at strengthening its ability to prevent such attacks, but these reform efforts failed to implement organization-wide institutional change.
On September 11, , the FBI was limited in several areas critical to an effective preventive counterterrorism strategy. Those working counterterrorism matters did so despite limited intelligence collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to share information both internally and externally, insufficient training, perceived legal barriers to sharing information, and inadequate resources.
Permeable Borders and Immigration Controls There were opportunities for intelligence and law enforcement to exploit al Qaeda's travel vulnerabilities. Neither the State Department's consular officers nor the Immigration and Naturalization Service's inspectors and agents were ever considered full partners in a national counterterrorism effort. Permeable Aviation Security Hijackers studied publicly available materials on the aviation security system and used items that had less metal content than a handgun and were most likely permissible.
Though two of the hijackers were on the U. The hijackers had to beat only one layer of security-the security checkpoint process.
Even though several hijackers were selected for extra screening by the CAPPS system, this led only to greater scrutiny of their checked baggage. Once on board, the hijackers were faced with aircraft personnel who were trained to be nonconfrontational in the event of a hijacking. Additional expenses included travel to obtain passports and visas, travel to the United States, expenses incurred by the plot leader and facilitators outside the United States, and expenses incurred by the people selected to be hijackers who ultimately did not participate.
The conspiracy made extensive use of banks in the United States. The hijackers opened accounts in their own names, using passports and other identification documents. Their transactions were unremarkable and essentially invisible amid the billions of dollars flowing around the world every day. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda could easily have found enough money elsewhere to fund the attack.
Given that lack of preparedness, they attempted and failed to improvise an effective homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge. The events of that morning do not reflect discredit on operational personnel. NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector personnel reached out for information and made the best judgments they could based on the information they received.
Individual FAA controllers, facility managers, and command center managers were creative and agile in recommending a nationwide alert, ground-stopping local traffic, ordering all aircraft nationwide to land, and executing that unprecedented order flawlessly. At more senior levels, communication was poor. Senior military and FAA leaders had no effective communication with each other. The chain of command did not function well.
The President could not reach some senior officials. The Secretary of Defense did not enter the chain of command until the morning's key events were over.
Their actions saved lives and inspired a nation. 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.
He may not have known that in fact Mihdhar and his companions had dispersed and the tracking was falling apart. 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.
They arrived, unnoticed, in Los Angeles on January In early March , 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. 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.
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.
Accomplish-ing 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. 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 Operational Opportunities 1.
January the CIA does not develop a transnational plan for tracking Mihdhar and his associates so that they could be followed to Bangkok and onward, including the United States. August the FBI does not recognize the significance of the information regarding Mihdhar and Hazmi's possible arrival in the United States and thus does not take adequate action to share information, assign resources, and give sufficient priority to the search.
August FBI headquarters does not recognize the significance of the information regarding Moussaoui's training and beliefs and thus does not take adequate action to share information, involve higher-level officials across agencies, obtain information regarding Moussaoui's ties to al Qaeda, and give sufficient priority to determining what Moussaoui might be planning.
August the CIA does not focus on information that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a key al Qaeda lieutenant or connect information identifying KSM as the "Mukhtar" mentioned in other reports to the analysis that could have linked "Mukhtar" with Ramzi Binalshibh and Moussaoui. 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. 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 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. 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.
I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community. She faxed the memo to the heads of the major intelligence agencies after removing covert action sections. Only a handful of people received it. 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 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 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.
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 on in the war on terror. 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.
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.
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 preceding the millennium. In the period between December and early January , information about terrorism flowed widely and abundantly. 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.
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.
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