How To Fix Our Intelligence

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If the FBI is somewhat open to outside reform, the CIA is ever on guard against it. The agency has always been better than the FBI at doing bureaucratic judo, working the press or finding a CLASSIFIED stamp for documents that it may not want to see the light of day. The commission found and disclosed a number of these last week that suggested the CIA was slow to report, if not detect, the jihadist army that was forming on the horizon in the 1990s. The commission reported that though al-Qaeda was formed in 1988, the CIA "did not describe" the organization comprehensively on paper until 1999. For years the agency believed that bin Laden was a financier rather than an engineer of terrorism--even after it received what a commission report called "new information revealing that bin Laden headed his own terrorist organization, with its own targeting agenda and operational commanders." And though the CIA drafted "thousands" of reports on aspects of al-Qaeda's operation beginning in June 1998--some of them for the "highest officials in the government," the panel said--the agency never produced an "authoritative portrait of [bin Laden's] strategy and the extent of his organization ... or the scale of the threat his organization posed to the United States."

The commission found that the CIA shares some of the FBI's recessive genes: 18 months passed between the time the agency was told that hijacker Khalid al-Midhar had obtained a U.S. visa and the time the CIA put his name and that of his traveling companion, also a hijacker, on a government watch list. Tenet told his top managers in 1998 that the CIA was "at war" with bin Laden, but the word never really filtered down through the agency, much less to other arms of the intelligence community. The CIA had follow-through problems. The German government gave Langley's Counter Terror Center a tip in 1999 about a terrorist suspect named Marwan, along with a phone number in the United Arab Emirates, but the CIA was slow to run it down--and never went to overseas governments for help. Marwan turned out to be Marwan al-Shehhi, the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175, which crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center.

In the face of the commission's preliminary findings, the CIA seemed unable to decide whether to apologize or come out swinging. Tenet acknowledged that the CIA "made mistakes" and warned that it would take an additional five years to rebuild the clandestine service. In what is perhaps the closest anyone in the Bush Administration has come to a formal acknowledgment of responsibility, Tenet said, "We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland, but we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country." But Cofer Black, head of the CIA's clandestine service who holds the storied title of director for operations, was unbowed. "I've heard people say this country wasn't at war. I want to tell you, Mr. Chairman ... we conducted ourselves at war ... We did the best we could under the law and with the resources provided and under our defined rules of engagement."