U.S. Intelligence: Let the Finger-Pointing Begin

Peacetime in Washington is over. Caught up in a period of national mourning, legislators have spent the last several weeks in a state of self-imposed silence, reluctant to cast blame for or even ask many questions about the September 11th attacks.

No longer. Sunday, during consecutive appearances on NBC’s "Meet the Press," Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman urged the White House to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the intelligence lapses leading up to the September 11th attacks.

The panels, McCain and Lieberman agreed, would be formed in the spirit of the Warren Commission, which investigated President Kennedy’s assassination, and the Roberts Commission, which scrutinized the intelligence failure that led to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

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Meanwhile, across Capitol Hill, the House has already established a committee to investigate what failures may have contributed to September’s terrorist attacks.

The inquiries, lawmakers warn, could stretch on for months, even years, before any conclusions can be drawn. Until that day, U.S. intelligence will continue its work — but under what conditions, and by whose rules? In search of answers, TIME.com spoke with Steve Cimbala, professor of political science at Penn State University and an expert on U.S. national security and defense. Cimbala has also served as a consultant to numerous government agencies.

TIME.com: What kind of response can we expect from the intelligence community in the wake of the September 11th attacks?

Professor Cimbala:The U.S. government does two things when confronted with a crisis: One, it reorganizes itself; and two, it throws a lot of money at things and hopes something will change.

In the current, very unfamiliar situation, there’s little doubt about whether to proceed with an investigation. Do we need to investigate our colossal intelligence failures that led to September 11th? Of course we do, But this shouldn’t be just a blame rain dance, where the Beltway types just move the same problems from one box into another.

The real issue here is the mindset of the intelligence community — more specifically, the mindset of the post-cold war intelligence community, which I would characterize as juridical complacency. In other words, a mentality that forced intelligence agents to ask how well an action or appointment will stand up in a committee, or how it will look on paper. That’s opposed to the more archaic mindset, which was, who are the bad guys and how do we find them?

The second problem the government needs to confront is that the worst failure was in counterintelligence. The ideal philosophy in counterintelligence is, "We presume there are bad guys who are out to get us and we need to figure out how to stop them." Unfortunately, that’s not evident anywhere in the intelligence community right now, except perhaps in the cyber-terrorism subsections.

If you look at what happened in September, you’ll see the terrorists did brilliantly in finding and exploiting the weak spots in our counterintelligence. Those failings, unfortunately, run the gamut. I’ve been told, for example, that throughout the 1990s people on terrorist watch lists were just wandering back and forth across the Canadian border like cockroaches.

Events in the recent past really should have clued us in to the problems in our counterintelligence measures; the Robert Hanssen case, for example. Apparently, no one took serious notice.

How enthusiastic will lawmakers be about an investigation?

Lawmakers will all want what I call investigative photo–ops. Everyone will talk about wanting to clean this up, but the truth that no one should forget is that Congress shares a lot of the blame for the intelligence community’s lapses. It was Congress, after all, that imposed all sorts of legal restrictions that made investigations much more difficult. And it was Congress, of course, that cut the budget for intelligence communities.

Is CIA director George Tenet in trouble? Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, for one, is lobbying for the CIA director’s removal, telling reporters last week, "I believe there have been too many failures on his watch."

I don’t think Tenet will last. Mueller will be okay because he’s new. I don’t think that’s necessarily fair — this was a system-wide failure. But it’s just the way things work.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, JFK said to then-CIA director Allen Dulles, "If this were a parliamentary system, I’d have to resign. But it’s not — and that means you do."

Will we see an increase in the intelligence budget?

We probably will, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll see better results. We need human intelligence, not high-tech gadgets. We need more case officers trained in relevant languages and customs of the Milddle East and Asia. And frankly, we need good old espionage.

There’s been a lot of talk about interagency competition between the FBI and the CIA. Could those tensions cause problems in an investigation?

The FBI and CIA have a history of being very competitive and not sharing data, and I think that’s the number one issue for Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. He’s got to get the FBI and CIA talking to one another in a more open, public way.

This is about a culture clash, more than anything. The FBI is about gathering evidence for a criminal prosecution that will stand up in court, while the CIA is about gathering information about foreign intelligence any way they can, using all techniques at their disposal. Their cultures are so different, which makes it tough to share information.

That being said, I do think we can look for real progress in this area over the next few years, simply because the need for change in both agencies is so self-evident.