History rarely provides opportunities for lessons learned, but the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 intelligence failure could have provided an opportunity to determine some accountability for the failure and methods to improve the performance of intelligence analysis. Thus far, it appears that politicians, pundits, and the mainstream media are not interested in lessons learned or exploring the nexus between history and policy.
My previous post exposed the efforts of the CIA to hide the full scope of its 9/11 intelligence failure. Now, I will explore the methodological and analytical reasons for the 9/11 failure and the inability to learn lessons from a postmortem of the crisis.
In downplaying the possibility of weaponizing commercial aircraft and of targeting the U.S. homeland, the CIA ignored a series of warnings from foreign intelligence services, including the French, German, Israeli, and even the Russian services. The German service warned both the CIA and Mossad in the summer of 2001 that terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack targets in the United States. Mossad issued its own warnings to the FBI and CIA in August 2001 that al Qaeda was planning to attack U.S. targets. The French intelligence service reported to the CIA that Osama bin Laden was discussing with the Taliban the hijacking of U.S. commercial airliners, specifying American Airlines and United Airlines. It’s fair to say there was a “blizzard” of warnings in the weeks prior to 9/11.
Warning intelligence should have identified the appropriate indicators of a surprise attack and created a system for collecting intelligence against such indicators. More attention should have been given to pursuing evidence of individuals taking flight training on large commercial airliners. With such indicators, CIA and FBI may have reacted to reports from FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis regarding such flight training. The FBI briefed then-CIA director George Tenet and National Intelligence Officer for Warnings Charlie Allen on the issue of “Islamic Extremists Learn to Fly,” but the intelligence community never pursued issues for defending commercial aircraft or preventing suicide bombings. (Actually, the CIA suggested in the 1970s that the commercial airlines harden their cockpits, but the airlines turned a deaf ear to the problem due to its cost, which would have been modest.)
Two of the eventual terrorists who piloted the commercial airliners, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were known to the CIA as early as January 2000 thanks to the Malaysian secret service. Nevertheless, the CIA didn’t notify the Department of State to place their names on a terror watchlist and did not notify the FBI to begin surveillance of these men until several weeks before 9/11 attack. Even when the CIA learned that Hazmi and Mihdhar had flown to Los Angeles, the CIA didn’t notify FBI or the State Department that al Qaeda operatives were in the United States.
The 9/11 Commission never used the powers it was given to explore the reasons for the intelligence failure. The commission was not bipartisan per se, but was a balanced group of Democrats and Republicans who used their veto powers to protect the Clinton and Bush administrations, respectively. Members were primarily lawyers with little intelligence experience or insight. The commission needed to be nonpartisan and independent, but it was neither.
Perhaps as a result, the policy steps that followed 9/11 were not reforms, but regressive steps that created a Director of National Intelligence sitting atop a huge, lumbering, bloated bureaucracy that weakened the overall intelligence apparatus. The other bureaucratic step was the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, which created a counter-terrorism bureaucracy that has done great harm at home and achieved very little abroad. Unlike the genuine reforms after Pearl Harbor, such as the National Security Act of 1947 that served U.S. interests in the post-WWII period, the so-called reforms after 9/11 were counterproductive.
Finally, there has never been any accountability for the intelligence officials who were responsible in large measure for the failure. Tenet received his presidential award upon retirement and Allen was named the intelligence director at the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Both Tenet and Allen should have been held accountable; Tenet for diverting money from counter-terrorism to other operational issues, and Allen for ignoring obvious warnings.
CIA’s Office of the Inspector General did an accountability report, but several CIA directors (Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and Leon Panetta) refused to pursue accountability issues or to release an unclassified version of the IG report. Ironically, the only CIA department that faced any consequences from the intelligence failure was the Office of the Inspector General that suffered setbacks from three successive presidents—Obama, Bush, and Trump—simply for doing its job in the right way. A classic example of shooting the messenger.
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