The Reason For US Intelligence Failures
by Gary D. Halbert
August 17, 2004
No doubt, you have now heard about the Final Report from the National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States, also known as the “9/11 Commission.” As you will recall, this supposedly bipartisan Commission was established to probe into the intelligence failures that led to the surprise 9/11 terrorist attacks, identify weaknesses in our intelligence agencies and suggest reforms to help avoid similar terrorist attacks in the future. Already, the 9/11 Commission’s report has become a political football in the presidential election.
Let me confess that I have not read the entire 9/11 Commission Report. I have read the Executive Summary and various other significant portions of the Report, but I feel no need to read the entire report (almost 600 pages), which has been discussed ad nauseum in the media. With that said, I want to bring you
www.Stratfor.com’s latest analysis on the 9/11 Commission Report.
The Commission’s Final Report
As you know, much has been said and written about the Commission’s investigation into the intelligence failures that fell short of detecting the 9/11 attacks. The Commission was also charged with investigating how law enforcement agencies, diplomacy, immigration and border control, flow of assets to terrorist organizations, commercial aviation, congressional oversight and resource allocation, and any other relevant factors may have contributed to the lapse in security that led to the attacks.
With all of that territory to cover, it is no surprise that the Commission’s final report consists of almost 600 pages of information. In preparing the report, the Commission reviewed over 2.5 million pages of documents and conducted some 1,200 interviews in 10 countries, including the highly publicized public testimony of 160 witnesses in the US.
The bottom line of the final report has been widely communicated. In a nutshell, it said that the US was woefully unprepared for a massive terrorist attack, though we should have known one was coming. However, contrary to earlier predictions, the Commission’s report did not point fingers at any one person or persons, since the failures were the result of many years of poor management under various Democratic and Republican administrations.
The Commission’s report also recommended remedies for the problems it encountered. Among these recommendations was the creation of a National Counter-Terrorism Center (NCTC), specifically charged with fighting Islamist terrorism, and the appointment of a new National Intelligence Director to head the NCTC and unify the various intelligence agencies, provide for better sharing of information and strengthen congressional oversight.
While the Commission takes on the question of what happened to make the US vulnerable to terrorist attack, a recent report by Stratfor.com sheds light on WHY our intelligence infrastructure was unprepared for an enemy like al Qaeda.
Stratfor.com On Intelligence
As I have frequently pointed out in this E-Letter, Stratfor.com is one of my very best sources of geopolitical information and forecasts. They often have unique perspectives on various domestic and global issues that are a result of their impressive intelligence network. With their permission, I am able to share some of their intelligence with you periodically.
Just about every news outlet has carried the story of what the 9/11 Commission report said, and are now on to covering the political salvos being lobbed back and forth between Bush and Kerry regarding its recommendations. However, I think it is instructive to see what Stratfor.com has to say about why the US intelligence system became the mess it did. After all, those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. So here we go.
It is also significant that this article was written by Dr. George Friedman, Stratfor.com’s founder and CEO. While Stratfor.com’s staff is excellent, I always pay a little more attention to anything George writes himself. Here’s what he had to say about the state of US intelligence capabilities leading up to 9/11:
Quote:
“In trying to think through the root cause of the Sept. 11 attacks, it seems to us, when everything else is boiled away, that there were two fundamental problems. The first was that the U.S. intelligence community was built specifically to deal with the Soviet Union and the threat posed by Soviet intelligence. The end of the Cold War should have led to a rethinking of both mission and organization. There was a bit of the former, but hardly any of the latter.
Second, U.S. leaders did not understand the changes that were taking place in the Islamic world. They viewed al Qaeda as simply a new manifestation of the Arab organizations that had used terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s for limited political aims. The United States failed to realize that al Qaeda was fundamentally different. The second failure was rooted in the first failure -- indeed, it was the first failure that made the second almost inevitable.
The Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the vast apparatus of the U.S. intelligence community were created in the late 1940s with one purpose: to combat the Soviet Union. They were constructed to contain and defeat Soviet power, and specifically to undermine the efforts of Soviet intelligence. In a very real sense, Soviet intelligence -- to which we will refer as the KGB for the sake of convenience -- was the model on which the U.S. intelligence organizations were built….
…U.S. intelligence was created to block the KGB. But on a more subtle level, it was built as a mirror of Soviet intelligence -- designed to do to Soviet agents what they were doing to the United States. Like its Soviet counterpart, the U.S. intelligence apparatus saw its primary mission as penetrating the Soviet leadership, particularly the KGB, and preventing the Soviets from returning the favor. The second purpose was misleading the Soviets about U.S. capabilities and intentions. The third -- much less important for the United States than for the Soviets, but not trivial -- was stealing Soviet military technology. And finally, blocking Soviet attempts to use the intelligence services to recruit and manage assets in Third World countries -- while doing the same itself -- was critical to the United States.
U.S. and Soviet efforts diverged over time in a fundamental way. The United States became much more heavily dependent on technical means of intelligence-gathering than did the Soviets. Where the Soviets would try to recruit well-placed Americans to extract information, the United States would try to tap into Soviet systems of communication to gather the same information. …Obviously, the United States ran agents and the Soviets had technology, but on this point there was a relative divergence of emphasis.”
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This insight from Stratfor.com helps to understand the weakening of the human intelligence capabilities of the CIA during the Clinton Administration. As you will recall, under Clinton the CIA was told to stop dealing with “distasteful people,” presumably in an effort to appease human rights organizations. Since not many spies regularly attend Sunday School, this action limited the available covert resources and thus reduced the agency’s abilities to infiltrate terrorist organizations. However, as Friedman points out, this would not have been viewed as a major problem by an agency that mostly relied upon technological resources for information gathering.