Experts warn about mass contamination of the nation's food supply and nuclear attacks on major U.S. cities precisely because these remote threats are the ones for which adequate defenses are not yet in place. The Coast Guard is arming itself against a possible terrorist attempt to destroy a major U.S. coastal city by detonating a tanker loaded with liquefied natural gas. The Bush Administration is bracing for another disaster. "We're as vulnerable today as we were on 9/10 or 9/12," says presidential counselor Karen Hughes. "We just know more." Here is what Time has learned about America's vulnerabilities—and how the U.S. is working to bolster its defenses on four crucial fronts.

Learning to Spy Again
Since Sept. 11, no criticism of the CIA has been more damning than the fact that the agency's legions of highly trained spooks were less successful at infiltrating al-Qaeda than was a Marin County, Calif., 19-year-old named John Walker Lindh. "They didn't see it; they didn't analyze it; they didn't locate it or disrupt it," says a U.S. official. "It's just that simple." In Senate hearings last month, CIA Director George Tenet, a Clinton Administration holdover who managed to hold on to his job after 9/11 because he is close to Bush, stubbornly defended the agency's record. "It was not the result of the failure of attention and discipline and consistent effort," he insisted.

And yet intelligence officials acknowledge privately that Sept. 11 laid bare many of the agency's most crippling weaknesses. Six months later, the problems remain—buried under billions of dollars in post-9/11 funding and stubbornly resistant to change. Insiders agree that the CIA's failure to learn of the Sept. 11 plot stemmed in large part from the CIA's inability to gather human intelligence about foreign threats. The agency, a senior Administration official concedes, "got out of the human intelligence business in favor of technical collection" after the fall of the Soviet Union. Today the average overseas assignment for an agency spy-handler is three years, barely enough time to learn one's way around, let alone penetrate a terror cell. And with the passing of the Soviet threat, many CIA officials lost interest in doing dirty human espionage—which means recruiting dangerous characters who can act as spies and infiltrate terror networks such as al-Qaeda's. And even when informants were coaxed into cooperating, the CIA still required almost all "fully recruited" spies to take a polygraph test, something that scares off useful sources and in the past has failed to catch double agents. "We recruited a whole bunch of bad agents," admits a senior intelligence official. "We wasted a lot of taxpayer money that way."

The CIA is larded with Russian specialists left over from the cold war, even as the agency struggles to recruit and train officers with proficiency in other tongues. In last year's graduating class of case officers, just 20% had usable skills in non-Romance languages. When the war in Afghanistan began, the CIA had only one Afghan analyst. As Time reported last month, American intelligence agents in Kabul almost blew the chance to question a top-ranking Taliban minister, who may have had information on the hiding place of Mullah Omar. The spooks had yet to hire a Dari translator.

In response to Time's questions about these shortcomings, two senior intelligence officials said the agency has worked hard to close the language gap and improve recruitment of informants. Since 1998, Tenet has instructed the CIA's espionage arm, the Directorate of Operations, to push its officers to diversify their language skills, boost recruitment and take greater risks. But despite some progress, a senior official admits, "we're not there yet." Robert Baer, a former CIA field operative in India, Tajikistan, Lebanon and Iraq, says the reforms did nothing to "break the cold war mold—it's all about the culture." The Administration has recalled old CIA hands with experience in Central Asia. Says an Administration official: "You ended up going back to retirees because the bench was so light on Afghanistan. We're still trying to get up to speed."

The dearth of qualified intelligence officers on the ground in Afghanistan has forced the U.S. to count on unreliable sources, dramatically increasing the risk of military mistakes, impeding the hunt for al-Qaeda leaders and giving Omar, bin Laden and their henchmen time to slip away. "The U.S. is totally dependent on locals, who have their own agenda," says an expert in the region. A senior intelligence official disputes the scope of the problem, telling Time that "this institution has never produced better human intelligence than it does today—but that doesn't mean that we don't need to do more."

Even when America sets its own agenda, there are serious problems. The U.S. spends more than 90% of its $35 billion annual intelligence budget on spying gadgetry rather than on gathering human intelligence, and most of that money goes not to the CIA but to spy agencies within the Department of Defense, such as the National Security Agency (which does eavesdropping and code breaking) and the National Reconnaissance Office (which flies imagery satellites). The priciest gadgets are not always the ones suited to fighting the terrorist threat. During the past five years, while the U.S. spent billions of dollars to build and launch about half a dozen radar-imaging spy satellites, the CIA and others built 60 Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (uavs) at about $3 million apiece. The Predators, not the satellites, killed terrorists in Afghanistan.

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