 Chapter 3.3 of the 9-11 Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 3.3 and in the Federal Aviation Administration. The Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, within the Department of Transportation had been vested by Congress with the sometimes conflicting mandate of regulating the safety and security of U.S. civil aviation while also promoting the civil aviation industry. The FAA had a security mission to protect the users of commercial air transportation against terrorism and other criminal acts. In the years before 9-11, the FAA perceived sabotage as a greater threat to aviation than hijacking. First, no domestic hijacking had occurred in a decade. Second, the commercial aviation system was perceived as more vulnerable to explosives than to weapons such as firearms. Finally, explosives were perceived as deadlier than hijacking and therefore of greater consequence. In 1996, a Presidential Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, chaired by Vice President Al Gore, reinforced the prevailing concern about sabotage and explosives on aircraft. The Gore Commission also flagged, as a new danger, the possibility of attack by surface-to-air missiles. Its 1997 final report did not discuss the possibility of suicide hijackings. The FAA set and enforced aviation security rules, which airlines and airports were required to implement. The rules were supposed to produce a layered system of defense. This meant that the failure of any one layer of security would not be fatal because additional layers would provide backup security. But each layer relevant to hijackings—intelligence, passenger prescreening, checkpoint screening, and onboard security—was seriously flawed prior to 9-11. Taken together, they did not stop any of the 9-11 hijackers from getting on board four different aircraft at three different airports. The FAA's policy was to use intelligence to identify both specific plots and general threats to civil aviation security so that the agency could develop and deploy appropriate countermeasures. The FAA's 40-person intelligence unit was supposed to receive a broad range of intelligence data from the FBI, CIA, and other agencies so that it could make assessments about the threat to aviation. But the large volume of data contained little pertaining to the presence and activities of terrorists in the United States. For example, information on the FBI's effort in 1998 to assess the potential use of flight training by terrorists and the Phoenix Electronic Communication of 2001 warning of radical Middle Easterners attending flight school were not passed to FAA headquarters. Several top FAA intelligence officials called the domestic threat picture a serious blind spot. Moreover, the FAA's intelligence unit did not receive much attention from the agency's leadership. Neither Administrator Jane Garvey nor her deputy routinely reviewed daily intelligence, and what they did see was screened for them. She was unaware of a great amount of hijacking threat information from her own intelligence unit, which in turn was not deeply involved in the agency's policymaking process. Historically, decisive security action took place only after a disaster had occurred or a specific plot had been discovered. The next aviation security layer was passenger pre-screening. The FAA directed air carriers not to fly individuals known to pose a direct threat to civil aviation. But as of 9-11, the FAA's no-fly list contained the names of just 12 terrorist suspects, including 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, even though government watchlists contained the names of many thousands of known and suspected terrorists. This astonishing mismatch existed despite the Gore Commissions having called on the FBI and CIA four years earlier to provide terrorist watchlists to improve pre-screening. The longtime chief of the FAA's Civil Aviation Security Division testified that he was not even aware of the State Department's tip-off list of known and suspected terrorists, some 60,000 before 9-11, until he heard it mentioned during the Commissions January 26, 2004, public hearing. The FAA had access to some tip-off data, but apparently found it too difficult to use. The second part of pre-screening called on the air carriers to implement an FAA-approved computerized algorithm known as CAPS for Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System, designed to identify passengers whose profile suggested they might pose more than a minimal risk to aircraft. Although the algorithm included hijacker profile data, at that time only passengers checking bags were eligible to be selected by CAPS for additional scrutiny. Selection entailed only having one's checked baggage screened for explosives or held off the airplane until one had boarded. Primarily because of concern regarding potential discrimination and the impact on passenger throughput, selectees were no longer required to undergo extraordinary screening of their carry-on baggage, as had been the case before the system was computerized in 1997. This policy change also reflected the perception that non-suicide sabotage was the primary threat to civil aviation. Checkpoint screening was considered the most important and obvious layer of security. Metal detectors and X-ray machines operated by trained screeners were employed to stop prohibited items. Numerous government reports indicated that checkpoints performed poorly, often failing to detect even obvious FAA test items. Many deadly and dangerous items did not set off metal detectors or were hard to distinguish in an X-ray machine from innocent everyday items. While FAA rules did not expressly prohibit knives with blades under four inches long, the Airlines Checkpoint Operations Guide, which was developed in cooperation with the FAA, explicitly permitted them. The FAA's basis for this policy was, one, the agency did not consider such items to be menacing, two, most local laws did not prohibit individuals from carrying such knives, and three, such knives would have been difficult to detect unless the sensitivity of metal detectors had been greatly increased. A proposal to ban knives altogether in 1993 had been rejected because small cutting implements were difficult to detect and the number of innocent alarms would have increased significantly, exacerbating congestion problems at checkpoints. Several years prior to 9-11, an FAA requirement for screeners to conduct continuous and random hand searches of carry-on luggage at checkpoints had been replaced by explosive trace detection or had simply become ignored by the air carriers. Therefore, secondary screening of individuals and their carry-on bags to identify weapons other than bombs was non-existent except for passengers who triggered the metal detectors. Even when small knives were detected by secondary screening, they were usually returned to the traveler. Reportedly, the 9-11 hijackers were instructed to use items that would be undetectable by airport checkpoints. In the pre-9-11 security system, the air carriers played a major role. As the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation told us, there were great pressures from the air carriers to control security costs and to limit the impact of security requirements on aviation operations so that the industry could concentrate on its primary mission of moving passengers and aircraft. Those counter-pressures in turn manifested themselves as significant weaknesses in security. A long-time FAA security official described the air carrier's approach to security regulation as decry, deny, and delay and told us that while the air carriers had seen the enlightened hand of self-interest with respect to safety, they hadn't seen it in the security arena. The final layer, security onboard commercial aircraft, was not designed to counter suicide hijackings. The FAA-approved common strategy had been elaborated over decades of experience with scores of hijackings beginning in the 1960s. It taught flight crews that the best way to deal with hijackers was to accommodate their demands, get the plane to land safely, and then let law enforcement or the military handle the situation. According to the FAA, the record had shown that the longer a hijacking persisted, the more likely it was to end peacefully. The strategy operated on the fundamental assumption that hijackers issue negotiable demands, most often for asylum or the release of prisoners, and that, as one FAA official put it, the side wasn't in the game plan of hijackers. FAA training material provided no guidance for flight crews should violence occur. This prevailing common strategy of cooperation and non-confrontation meant that even a hardened cockpit door would have made little difference in a hijacking. As the Chairman of the Security Committee of the Airline Pilots Association observed when proposals were made in early 2001 to install reinforced cockpit doors in commercial aircraft, even if you make a vault out of the door, if they have a noose around my flight attendant's neck, I'm going to open the door. Prior to 9-11, FAA regulations mandated that cockpit doors permit ready access into and out of the cockpit in the event of an emergency. Even so, rules implemented in the 1960s required air crews to keep the cockpit door closed and locked in flight. This requirement was not always observed or vigorously enforced. As for law enforcement, there were only 33 armed and trained federal air marshals as of 9-11. They were not deployed on U.S. domestic flights, except when in transit to provide security on international departures. This policy reflected the FAA's views that domestic hijacking was in check, a view held confidently as no terrorist had hijacked a U.S. commercial aircraft anywhere in the world since 1986. In the absence of any recent aviation security incident and without specific and credible evidence of a plot directed at civil aviation, the FAA's leadership focused elsewhere, including on operational concerns and the ever-present issue of safety. FAA Administrator Garvey recalled that every day in 2001 was like the day before Thanksgiving. Heeding calls from improved air service, Congress concentrated its efforts on a passenger bill of rights to improve capacity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction in the aviation system. There was no focus on terrorism. End of Chapter 3.3. Chapter 3.4 of the 9-11 Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Mary Rodey. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 3.4. And in the intelligence community. The National Security Act of 1947 created the position of Director of Central Intelligence, DCI. Independent from the departments of Defense, State, Justice, and other policy departments, the DCI heads the U.S. intelligence community and provides intelligence to federal entities. The sole element of the intelligence community independent from a cabinet agency is the CIA. As an independent agency, it collects, analyzes, and disseminates intelligence from all sources. The CIA's number one customer is the President of the United States, who also has the authority to direct it to conduct covert operations. Although covert actions represent a very small fraction of the agency's entire budget, these operations have a time spin controversial and over time have dominated the public's perception of the CIA. The DCI is confirmed by the Senate, but is not technically a member of the President's cabinet. The Director's power under federal law over the loose, confederated intelligence community is limited. He or she states the community's priorities and coordinates development of intelligence agency budget requests for submission to Congress. This responsibility gives many the false impression that the DCI has line authority over the heads of these agencies and has the power to shift resources within these budgets as the need arises. Neither is true. In fact, the DCI's real authority has been directly proportional to his personal closeness to the President, which has waxed and waned over the years and to others in government, especially the Secretary of Defense. Intelligence agencies under the Department of Defense account for approximately 80% of all U.S. spending for intelligence, including some that supports a national customer base and some that supports specific defense department or military service needs. As they are housed in the Defense Department, these agencies are keenly attentive to the military's strategic and tactical requirements. One of the intelligence agencies in defense with the national customer base is the National Security Agency, which intercepts and analyzes foreign communications and breaks codes. The NSA also creates codes and ciphers to protect government information. Another is the recently renamed National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, NGA, which provides and analyzes imagery and produces a wide array of products, including maps, navigation tools, and surveillance intelligence. A third such agency in defense is the National Reconnaissance Office. It develops, procures, launches, and contains in orbit information-gathering satellites that serve other government agencies. The Defense Intelligence Agency supports the Secretary of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and military field commanders. It does some collection through human sources as well as some technical intelligence collection. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps have their own intelligence components that collect information, help them decide what weapons to acquire, and serve the tactical intelligence needs of their respective services. In addition to those from the Department of Defense, other elements in the intelligence community include the National Security Parts of the FBI, the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the State Department, the Intelligence Component of the Treasury Department, the Energy Department's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, the former of which, through leveraging the expertise of the National Laboratory System, has special competence in nuclear weapons, the Office of Intelligence of the Coast Guard, and today the Directorate of Intelligence Analysis and Infrastructure Protection in the Department of Homeland Security. The National Security Agency The National Security Agency's intercepts of terrorist communications often set off alarms elsewhere in the government. Often too, its intercepts are conclusive elements in the analyst's jigsaw puzzle. NSA engineers build technical systems to break ciphers and to make sense of today's complex signals environment. Its analysts listen to conversations between foreigners, not meant for them. They also perform traffic analysis, studying technical communication systems and codes as well as foreign organizational structures, including those of terrorist organizations. Cold War adversaries used very hierarchical, familiar and predictable military command and control methods. With globalization and the telecommunications revolution and with loosely affiliated but networked adversaries using commercial devices and encryption, the technical impediments to signals collection grew at a geometric rate. At the same time, the end of the Cold War and the resultant cuts in national security funding forced intelligence agencies to cut systems and seek economies of scale. Modern adversaries are skilled users of communications technologies, the NSA's challenges and its opportunities increased exponentially in volume, variety and velocity. The law requires the NSA to not deliberately collect data on U.S. citizens or on persons in the United States without a warrant based on foreign intelligence requirements. Also, the NSA was supposed to let the FBI know of any indication of crime, espionage or terrorist enterprise so that the FBI could obtain the appropriate warrant. Later in the story, we will learn that while the NSA had the technical capability to report on communications with suspected terrorist facilities in the Middle East, the NSA did not seek FISA court warrants to collect communications between individuals in the United States and in foreign countries because it believed that this was an FBI role. It also did not want to be viewed as targeting persons in the United States and possibly violating laws that governed NSA's collection of foreign intelligence. An almost obsessive protection of sources and methods by the NSA and its focus on foreign intelligence and its avoidance of anything domestic would, as will be seen, be important elements in the story of 9-11. Technology as an intelligence asset and liability The application of newly developed scientific technology to the mission of U.S. war fighters and national security decision makers is one of the great success stories of the 20th century. It did not happen by accident. Recent wars have been waged and won decisively by brave men and women using advanced technology that was developed, authorized, and paid for by conscientious and diligent executive and legislative branch leaders many years earlier. The challenge of technology, however, is a daunting one. It is expensive, sometimes fails, and often can create problems as well as solve them. Some of the advanced technologies that gave us insight into the closed off territories of the Soviet Union during the Cold War are of limited use in identifying and tracking individual terrorists. Terrorists, in turn, have benefited from this same rapid development of communication technologies. They simply could buy off the shelf and harvest the products of a 3 trillion a year telecommunications industry. They could acquire, without great expense, communication devices that were varied, global, instantaneous, complex, and encrypted. The emergence of the World Wide Web has given terrorists a much easier means of acquiring information and exercising command and control over their operations. The operational leader of the 9-11 conspiracy, Mohammed Atta, went online from Hamburg, Germany to search U.S. flight schools. Targets of intelligence collection have become more sophisticated. These changes have made surveillance and threat warning more difficult. Despite problems that technology creates, Americans' love affair with it leads them to also regard it as the solution. But technology produces its best results when an organization has the doctrine, structure, and incentives to exploit it. For example, even the best information technology will not improve information sharing so long as the intelligence agency's personnel and security systems reward protecting information rather than disseminating it. The CIA. The CIA is a descendant of the Office of Strategic Services, OSS, which President Roosevelt created early in World War II after having first thought the FBI might take that role. The father of the OSS was William J. Wilde Bill Donovan, a Wall Street lawyer. He recruited into the OSS others like himself well-traveled, well-connected, well-to-do professional men and women. An innovation of Donovan's, whose legacy remains part of U.S. intelligence today, was the establishment of a research and analysis branch. There, large numbers of scholars from U.S. universities poured over accounts from spies, communications intercepted by the armed forces, transcripts of radio broadcasts, and publications of all types, and prepared reports on economic, political, and social conditions in foreign theaters of operation. At the end of World War II, to Donovan's disappointment, President Harry Truman dissolved the Office of Strategic Services. Four months later, the President directed that all federal foreign intelligence activities be planned, developed, and coordinated, so as to assure the most effective accomplishment of the intelligence mission related to the national security under a National Intelligence Authority consisting of the Secretaries of State, War, and the Navy, and a personal representative of the President. This body was to be assisted by a Central Intelligence Group made up of persons detailed from the departments of each of the members and headed by a Director of Central Intelligence. Subsequently, President Truman agreed to the National Security Act of 1947, which, among other things, established the Central Intelligence Agency under the Director of Central Intelligence. Lobbying by the FBI, combined with fears of creating a U.S. Gestapo, led to the FBI's being assigned responsibility for internal security functions and counter-espionage. The CIA was specifically accorded no police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions. This structure built in tensions between the CIA and the Defense Department's intelligence agencies and between the CIA and the FBI. clandestine and covert action. With this history, the CIA brought to the era of 9-11 many attributes of an elite organization, ewing itself as serving on the nation's front lines to engage America's enemies. Officers in its clandestine service, under what became the Directorate of Operations, fanned out into stations abroad. Each chief of station was a very important person in the organization, given the additional title of the DCI's representative in that country. He, occasionally she, was governed by an operating directive that listed operational priorities issued by the relevant regional division of the Directorate, constrained by centrally determined allocations of resources. Because the conduct of espionage was a high-risk activity, decisions on the clandestine targeting, recruitment, handling, and termination of secret sources, and the dissemination of collected information required Washington's approval and action. But in this decentralized system, analogous in some ways to the culture of the FBI field offices in the United States, everyone in the Directorate of Operations presumed that it was the job of headquarters to support the field, and manage field activities. In the 1960s, the CIA suffered exposure of its botched effort to land Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. The Vietnam War brought on more criticism. A prominent feature of the Watergate era was investigations of the CIA by committees headed by Frank Church in the Senate and Otis Pike in the House. They published evidence that the CIA had secretly planned to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. The President had not taken plain responsibility for these judgments. CIA officials had taken most of the blame, saying they had done so in order to preserve the President's plausible deniability. After the Watergate era, Congress established oversight committees to ensure that the CIA did not undertake covert action contrary to basic American law. Case officers in the CIA's clandestine service interpreted legislation, such as the Hughes-Ryan amendment, requiring that the President approve and report to Congress any covert action, as sending a message to them that covert action often leads to trouble and can severely damage one's career. Controversies surrounding Central American covert action programs in the mid-1980s led to the indictment of several senior officers of the clandestine service. During the 1990s, tension sometimes arose, as it did in the effort against Al Qaeda, between policymakers who wanted the CIA to undertake more aggressive covert action and wary CIA leaders who counseled prudence in making sure that the legal bases and presidential authorization for their actions were undeniably cleared. The clandestine service felt the impact of post-Cold War peace dividend with cuts beginning in 1992. As the number of officers declined and overseas facilities were closed, the DCI and his managers responded to developing crises in the Balkans or in Africa by surging or taking officers from across the service to use on the immediate problem. In many cases, the surge officers had little familiarity with the new issues. Inevitably, some parts of the world and some collection targets were not fully covered or not covered at all. This strategy also placed great emphasis on close relations with foreign liaison services, whose help was needed to gain information that the United States itself did not have the capacity to collect. The nadir for the clandestine service was in 1995, when only 25 trainees became new officers. In 1998, the DCI was able to persuade the administration and the Congress to endorse a long-range rebuilding program. It takes five to seven years of training, language study, and experience to bring a recruit up to full performance. Analysis. The CIA Directorate of Intelligence retained some of its original character of a university gone to war. Its men and women tended to judge one another by the quantity and quality of their publications, in this case, classified publications. Apart from their own peers, they looked for approval and guidance to policymakers. During the 1990s and today, particular value is attached to having a contribution included in one of the classified daily newspapers, the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief, or better still, selected for inclusion in the President's Daily Brief. The CIA had been created to wage the Cold War. Its steady focus on one or two primary adversaries, decade after decade, had at least one positive effect. It created an environment in which managers and analysts could safely invest time and resources in basic research, detailed and reflective. Payoffs might not be immediate, but when they wrote their estimates, even in brief papers, they could draw on a deep base of knowledge. When the Cold War ended, those investments could not easily be reallocated to new enemies. The cultural effects ran even deeper in a more fluid international environment with uncertain changing goals and interests. Intelligence managers no longer felt they could afford such a patient, strategic approach to long-term accumulation of intellectual capital. A university culture with its versions of books and articles was giving way to the culture of the newsroom. During the 1990s, the rise of round-the-clock news shows and the internet reinforced pressure on analysts to pass along fresh reports to policymakers at an even faster pace, trying to add context or supplement what their customers were receiving from the media. Weaknesses in all-source and strategic analysis were highlighted by a panel chaired by Admiral David Jeremiah that critiqued the intelligence community's failure to foresee the nuclear weapons tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, as well as by a 1999 panel chaired by Donald Rumsfeld that discussed the community's limited ability to assess the ballistic missile threat to the United States. Both reports called attention to the dispersal of effort on too many priorities, the declining attention to the craft of strategic analysis, and security rules that prevented adequate sharing of information. Another Cold War craft had been an elaborate set of methods for warning against surprise attack, but that too had faded in analyzing new dangers like terrorism. Security. Another set of experiences that would affect the capacity of the CIA to cope with the new terrorism traced back to the early Cold War when the agency developed a concern bordering on paranoia about penetration by the Soviet KGB. James Jesus Angleton, who headed counterintelligence in the CIA until the early 1970s, became obsessed with the belief that the agency harbored one or more Soviet moles. Although the pendulum swung back after Angleton's forced retirement, it did not go very far. Instances of actual Soviet penetration kept apprehensions high. Then in the early 1990s came the Aldrich Ames Espionage case, which intensely embarrassed the CIA. Though obviously unreliable, Ames had been protected and promoted by fellow officers while he paid his bills by selling to the Soviet Union the names of U.S. operatives and agents, a number of whom died as a result. The concern about security vastly complicated information sharing. Information was compartmented in order to protect it against exposure to skilled and technologically sophisticated adversaries. There were therefore numerous restrictions on handling information and a deep suspicion about sending information over new fangled electronic systems like email to other agencies of the U.S. government. Security concerns also increased the difficulty of recruiting officers qualified for counterterrorism. Very few American colleges or universities offered programs in Middle Eastern languages or Islamic studies. The total number of undergraduate degrees granted in Arabic in all U.S. colleges and universities in 2002 was six. Many who had traveled much outside the United States could expect a very long wait for initial clearance. Anyone who was foreign born or had numerous relatives abroad was well advised not even to apply. With budgets for the CIA shrinking after the end of the Cold War, it was not surprising that with some notable exceptions, new hires in the clandestine service tended to have qualifications similar to those of serving officers. They were suited for traditional agent recruitment or for exploiting liaison relationships with foreign services, but were not equipped to seek or use assets inside the terrorist network. Early counterterrorism efforts In the 1970s and 1980s, terrorism had been tied to regional conflicts, mainly in the Middle East. The majority of terrorist groups either were sponsored by governments or, like the Palestine Liberation Organization, were militants trying to create governments. In the mid-1980s, on the basis of a report from a task force headed by Vice President George Bush, and after terrorist attacks at airports in Rome and Athens, the DCI created a counterterrorist center to unify activities across the Directorate of Operations and the Directorate of Intelligence. The counterterrorist center had representation from the FBI and other agencies. In the formal table of organization, it's reported to the DCI, but in fact, most of the center's chiefs belonged to the clandestine service and usually looked for guidance to the head of the Directorate of Operations. The center stimulated and coordinated a collection of information by CIA stations, compiled the results, and passed selected reports to appropriate stations, the Directorate of Intelligence Analysts, other parts of the intelligence community, or to policy makers. The center protected its bureaucratic turf. The Director of Central Intelligence had once had a National Intelligence Officer for Terrorism to coordinate analysis. That office was abolished in the late 1980s and its duties absorbed in part by the counterterrorist center. Though analysts assigned to the center produced a large number of papers, the focus was support to operations. A CIA Inspector General's report in 1994 criticized the center's capacity to provide warning of terrorist attacks. Subsequent chapters will raise the issue of whether, despite tremendous talent, energy, and dedication, the intelligence community failed to do enough in coping with the challenge from Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Confronted with such questions, managers in the intelligence community often responded that they had meager resources with which to work. Cuts in national security expenditures at the end of the Cold War led to budget cuts in the National Foreign Intelligence Program from fiscal years 1990 to 1996 and essentially flat budgets from fiscal year 1996 to 2000, except for the so-called Gingrich Supplemental to the FY 1999 budget and two later smaller supplementals. These cuts compounded the difficulties of the intelligence agencies. Policymakers were asking them to move into the digitized future to fight against computer-to-computer communications and modern communication systems while maintaining capability against older systems, such as high-frequency radios and ultra-high and very high-frequency line-of-sight systems that work like old-style television antennas. Also, demand for imagery increased dramatically following the success of the 1991 Gulf War. Both these developments, in turn, placed a premium on planning the next generation of satellite systems, the cost of which put great pressure on the rest of the intelligence budget. As a result, intelligence agencies experienced staff reductions affecting both operators and analysts. Yet, at least for the CIA, part of the burden in tackling terrorism arose from the background we have described. An organization capable of attracting extraordinarily motivated people but institutionally averse to risk with its capacity for covert action atrophied, predisposed to restrict the distribution of information, having difficulty assimilating new types of personnel, and accustomed to presenting descriptive reportage of the latest intelligence. The CIA, to put it another way, needed significant change in order to get maximum effect in counter-terrorism. President Clinton appointed George Tenet as DCI in 1997, and by all accounts, terrorism was a priority for him. But Tenet's own assessment, when questioned by the Commission, was that in 2004, the CIA's clandestine service was still at least five years away from being fully ready to play its counter-terrorism role. And while Tenet was clearly the leader of the CIA, the intelligence community's confederated structure left open the question of who really was in charge of the entire U.S. intelligence effort. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bob Sebold. The 9-11 Commission Report, Chapter 3.5. And in the State Department and the Defense Department. The State Department. The Commission asked Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage in 2004 why the State Department had so long pursued what seemed and ultimately proved to be a hopeless effort to persuade the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to deport bin Laden. Armitage replied, We do what the State Department does. We don't go out and fly bombers. We don't do things like that. We do our part in these things. Fifty years earlier, the person in Armitage's position would not have spoken of the Department of State as having such a limited role. Until the late 1950s, the Department dominated the processes of advising the President and Congress on U.S. relations with the rest of the world. The National Security Council was created in 1947, largely as a result of lobbying from the Pentagon for a forum where the military could object if they thought the State Department was setting national objectives that the United States did not have the wherewithal to pursue. The State Department retained primacy until the 1960s, when the Kennedy and Johnson administrations turned instead to Robert McNamara's Defense Department, where a mini-state department was created to analyze foreign policy issues. President Richard Nixon then concentrated policy planning and policy coordination in a powerful National Security Council staff overseen by Henry Kissinger. In later years, individual secretaries of state were important figures, but the department's role continued to erode. State came into the 1990s overmatched by the resources of other departments and with little support for its budget, either in the Congress or in the President's Office of Management and Budget. Like the FBI and the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the State Department had a tradition of emphasizing service in the field over service in Washington. Even ambassadors, however, often found host governments not only making connections with the U.S. government through their own missions in Washington but working through the CIA station or a defense attaché. Increasingly, the embassies themselves were overshadowed by powerful regional commanders in chief reporting to the Pentagon. Counterterrorism In the 1960s and 1970s, the State Department managed counterterrorism policy. It was the official channel for communication with the governments presumed to be behind the terrorists. Moreover, since terrorist incidents of this period usually ended in negotiations, an ambassador or other embassy official was the logical person to represent U.S. interests. Keeping U.S. diplomatic efforts against terrorism coherent was a recurring challenge. In 1976, at the direction of Congress, the Department elevated its coordinator for combating terrorism to the rank equivalent to an assistant Secretary of State. As an ambassador at large, this official sought to increase the visibility of counterterrorism matters within the Department and to help integrate U.S. policy implementation among government agencies. The prolonged crisis of 1979 to 1981, when 53 Americans were held hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, ended the State Department leadership in counterterrorism. President Carter's assertive national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, took charge and the coordination function remained thereafter in the White House. President Reagan's second Secretary of State, George Schultz, advocated active U.S. efforts to combat terrorism, often recommending the use of military force. Secretary of Defense, Casper Weinberger opposed Schultz, who made little headway against Weinberger, or even within his own department. Though Schultz elevated the status and visibility of counterterrorism coordination by appointing as coordinator First L. Paul Bremmer and then Robert Oakley, both senior career ambassadors of high standing in the Foreign Service, the department continued to be dominated by regional bureaus for which terrorism was not a first order concern. Secretaries of State after Schultz took less personal interest in the problem. Only congressional opposition prevented President Clinton's First Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, from merging terrorism into a new bureau that would have also dealt with narcotics and crime. The coordinator under Secretary Madeleine Albright told the commission that his job was seen as a minor one within the department. Although the description of his status has been disputed and Secretary Albright strongly supported the August 1998 strikes against bin Laden, the role played by the Department of State in counterterrorism was often cautionary before 9-11. This was a reflection of the reality that counterterrorism priorities nested within broader foreign policy aims of the U.S. government. State Department counselor officers around the world, it should not be forgotten, were constantly challenged by the problem of terrorism, or they handled visas for travel to the United States. After it was discovered that Abdel Rahman, the blind shake, had come and gone almost at will, state initiated significant reforms to its watch list and visa processing policies. In 1993, Congress passed legislation allowing state to retain visa processing fees for border security. Those fees were then used by the department to fully automate the terrorist watch list. By the late 1990s, state had created a worldwide real-time electronic database of visa, law enforcement and watch list information, the core of the post 9-11 border screening systems. Still, as will be seen later, the system had many holes. The Department of Defense The Department of Defense is the behemoth among federal agencies. With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire. The Defense Department is part civilian, part military. The Civilian Secretary of Defense has ultimate control under the president. Among the uniformed military, the top official is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who is supported by a joint staff divided into standard military staff compartments, J-2 intelligence, J-3 operations and so on. Because of the necessary and demanding focus on the differing mission of each service, and their long and proud traditions, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps have often fought ferociously over roles and missions in war fighting and over budgets and posts of leadership. Two developments diminish this competition. The first was the passage by Congress in 1986 of the Goldwater-Nickels Act, among other things, mandated that promotion to high rank required some period of duty with a different service or with a joint, i.e. multi-service command. This had strong and immediate effects, loosening the loyalties of senior officers to their separate services and causing them to think more broadly about the military establishment as a whole. However, it also may have lessened the diversity of military advice and options presented to the president. The Goldwater-Nickels example is seen by some as having lessons applicable to lessening competition and increasing cooperation in other parts of the federal bureaucracy, particularly the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The second related development was a significant transfer of planning and command responsibilities from the service chiefs and their staffs to the joint and unified commands outside of Washington, especially those for strategic forces and for four positions, Europe, the Pacific, the center and the south. Posts in these commands became prized assignments for ambitious officers and the voices of their five commanders in chief became as influential as those of the service chiefs. Counterterrorism The Pentagon first became concerned about terrorism as a result of hostage taking in the 1970s. In June 1976, Palestinian terrorists seized an Air France plane and landed it at Intéby in Uganda, holding 105 Israelis and other Jews as hostages. A special Israeli commando force stormed the plane, killed all the terrorists and rescued all but one of the hostages. In October 1977, a West German special force dealt similarly with a Lufthansa plane sitting on a tarmac in Mogadishu. Every terrorist was killed and every hostage brought back safely. The White House, members of Congress and the news media asked the Pentagon whether the United States was prepared for similar action. The answer was no. The army immediately set about creating the Delta Force, one of whose missions was hostage rescue. The first test for the new force did not go well. It came in April 1980 during the Iranian hostage crisis, when Navy helicopters with marine pilots flew to a site known as Desert One, 200 miles southeast of Tehran to rendezvous with Air Force planes carrying Delta Force commandos and fresh fuel. Mild sandstorms disabled three of the helicopters and the commander ordered the mission aborted, but foul ups on the ground resulted in the loss of eight aircraft, five airmen, and three Marines. Remembered as Desert One, this failure remained vivid for members of the armed forces. It also contributed to the later water nickels reforms. In 1983 came Hezbollah's massacre of the Marines in Beirut. President Reagan quickly withdrew U.S. forces from Lebanon, a reversal later routinely cited by jihadists as evidence of U.S. weakness. A detailed investigation produced a list of new procedures that would become customary for forces deployed abroad. They involved a number of defensive measures, including caution not only about strange cars and trucks, but also about unknown aircraft overhead. Force protection became a significant claim on the time and resources of the Department of Defense. A decade later, the military establishment had another experience that evoked both Desert One and the withdrawal from Beirut. The first president Bush had authorized the use of U.S. military forces to ensure humanitarian relief in war-torn Somalia. Tribal factions interfered with the supply missions. By the autumn of 1993, U.S. commanders concluded that the main source of trouble was a warlord, Mohammed Farah Adid. An army special force launched a raid on Mogadishu to capture him. In the course of a long night, two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down. 73 Americans were wounded, 18 were killed, and the world's television screens showed images of an American corpse dragged through the streets by exultant Somalis. Under pressure from Congress, President Clinton soon ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Blackhawk Down joined Desert One as a symbol among Americans in uniform. Code phrases used to evoke the risks of daring exploits without maximum preparation, overwhelming force, and a well-defined mission. In 1995-1996, the Defense Department began to invest effort in planning how to handle the possibility of a domestic terrorist incident involving weapons of mass destruction. The idea of a domestic command for homeland defense began to be discussed in 1997, and in 1999, the Joint Chiefs developed a concept for the establishment of a domestic unified command. Congress killed the idea. Instead, the Department established the Joint Forces Command located in Norfolk, Virginia, making it responsible for military response to domestic emergencies both natural and man-made. Pursuant to the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici Domestic Preparedness Program, the Defense Department began in 1997 to train first responders in 120 of the nation's largest cities. As a key part of its efforts, Defense created National Guard WMD Civil Support Teams to respond in the event of a WMD terrorist incident. A total of 32 such National Guard Teams were authorized by fiscal year 2001. Under the command of state governors, they provided support to civilian agencies to assess the nature of the attack, offer medical and technical advice, and coordinate state and local responses. The Department of Defense, like the Department of State, had a coordinator who represented the Department on the Interagency Committee concerned with counterterrorism. By the end of President Clinton's administration, this official had become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and low-intensity conflict. The experience of the 1980s had suggested to the military establishment that if it were to have a role in counterterrorism, it would be a traditional military role to act against state sponsors of terrorism. And the military had what seemed an excellent example of how to do it. In 1986, a bomb went off at a disco in Berlin with two American soldiers. Intelligence clearly linked the bombing to Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. President Reagan ordered airstrikes against Libya. The operation was not cost-free. The United States lost two planes. Evidence accumulated later, including the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, clearly showed that the operation did not curb Gaddafi's interest in terrorism. However, it was seen at the time as a success. The lesson then taken from Libya was that terrorism could be stopped by the use of U.S. air power that inflicted pain on the authors or sponsors of terrorist acts. This lesson was applied using Tomahawk missiles early in the Clinton administration. George H. W. Bush was scheduled to visit Kuwait to be honored for his rescue of that country in the Gulf War of 1991. Kuwaiti Security Services warned Washington that Iraqi agents were planning to assassinate the former president. President Clinton not only ordered precautions to protect Bush, but asked about options for a reprisal against Iraq. The Pentagon proposed 12 targets for Tomahawk missiles. Debate in the White House and at the CIA about possible collateral damage paired the list down to three, then to one. Iraqi intelligence headquarters in central Baghdad. The attack was made at night to minimize civilian casualties. In 1993 missiles were fired. Other than one civilian casualty the operation seemed completely successful. The intelligence headquarters was demolished. No further intelligence came in about terrorist acts planned by Iraq. The 1986 attack in Libya and the 1993 attack on Iraq symbolized for the military establishment effective use of military power for counter-terrorism. Limited retaliation with air power aimed at deterrence. What remained was the hard question of how deterrence could be effective when the adversary was a loose transnational network. End of Chapter 3.5 Recording by Bob Siebold. Chapter 3.6 of the 9-11 Commission Report. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to find out how you can volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bob Siebold. The 9-11 Commission Report. Chapter 3.6 and in the White House. Because coping with terrorism was not and is not the sole province of any component of the U.S. government some coordinating mechanism is necessary. When terrorism was not a prominent issue the State Department could perform this role. When the Iranian hostage crisis developed this procedure went by the board National Security Adviser Zvignev Brzezinski took charge of crisis management. The Reagan Administration continued and formalized the practice of having presidential staff coordinate counter-terrorism. After the killing of the Marines in Beirut President Reagan signed National Security Directive 138 calling for a shift from passive to active defense measures and reprogramming or adding new resources to effect the shift. It directed the State Department to intensify efforts to achieve cooperation of other governments and the CIA to intensify use of liaison and other intelligence capabilities and also to develop plans and capability to preempt groups and individuals planning strikes against U.S. interests. Speaking to the American Bar Association in July 1985 the President characterized terrorism as an act of war and declared there can be no place on earth where it is safe for these monsters to rest, to train and practice their cruel and deadly skills. We must act together or unilaterally if necessary to ensure that terrorists have no sanctuary anywhere. The airstrikes against Libya were one manifestation of this strategy. Through most of President Reagan's second term, the coordination of counter-terrorism was overseen by a high-level interagency committee chaired by the Deputy National Security Advisor. But the Reagan Administration closed with a major scandal that cast out over the notion that the White House should guide counter-terrorism. President Reagan was concerned because Hezbollah was taking Americans hostage and periodically killing them. He was also constrained by a bill he signed into law that made it illegal to ship military aid to anti-communist Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua, whom he strongly supported. His National Security Advisor Robert McFarland and McFarland's Deputy Admiral John Poindexter thought the hostage problem might be solved and the U.S. in the Middle East improved if the United States quietly negotiated with Iran about exchanging hostages for modest quantities of arms. Schultz and Weinberger united for once, opposed McFarland and Poindexter. A staffer for McFarland and Poindexter, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, developed a scheme to trade U.S. arms for hostages and divert the proceeds to the Contras to get around U.S. law. He may have had encouragement from Director of Central Intelligence Casey. When the facts were revealed in 1986 and 1987, it appeared to be the 1970s all over again. A massive abuse of covert action. Now, instead of stories about poisoned cigars and mafia hitmen, Americans heard testimony about a secret visit to Tehran by McFarland, using an assumed name and bearing a chocolate cake decorated with icing depicting a key. An investigation by a special council resulted in the indictment of McFarland, Poindexter, North, and 10 others, including several high-ranking officers from the CIA's clandestine service. The investigation spotlighted the importance of accountability and official responsibility for faithful execution of laws. For the story of 9-11, the significance of the Iran-Contra affair was that it made parts of the bureaucracy reflexively skeptical about any operating directive from the White House. As the National Security Advisor's function expanded, the procedures and structure of the Advisor's staff, conventionally called the National Security Council staff, became more formal. The Advisor developed recommendations for Presidential Directives, differently labeled by each President. For President Clinton, they were to be Presidential Decision Directives. For President George W. Bush, National Security Policy Directives. These documents and many others requiring approval by the President worked their way through interagency committees, usually composed of departmental representatives at the Assistant Secretary level or just below it. The NSC staff had senior directors who would sit on these interagency committees, often as chair, to facilitate agreement and to represent the wider interests of the National Security Advisor. When President Clinton took office, he decided right away to coordinate counterterrorism from the White House. On January 25, 1993, Mir Amal Kansi an Islamic extremist from Pakistan shot and killed two CIA employees at the main highway entrance to CIA headquarters in Virginia. Kansi drove away and was captured abroad much later. Only a month afterward came the World Trade Center bombing, and a few weeks after that, the Iraqi plot against former President Bush. President Clinton's first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake, had retained from the Bush administration the staffer who dealt with crime, narcotics and terrorism, a portfolio often known as drugs and thugs, the veteran civil servant Richard Clark. President Clinton and Lake turned to Clark to do the staff work for them in coordinating counterterrorism. Before long, he would chair a mid-level interagency committee eventually titled the Counterterrorism Security Group, or CSG. We will later tell of Clark's evolution as an advisor on and in time, manager of the U.S. counterterrorist effort. When explaining the missile strike against Iraq, provoked by the plot to kill President Bush, President Clinton stated, from the first days of our revolution, America's security has depended on the clarity of the message. Don't tread on us. A firm and commensurate response was essential to protect our sovereignty, to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism, to deter further violence against our people and to affirm the expectation of civilized behavior among nations. In his State of the Union message in January 1995, President Clinton promised comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combating terrorists, whether they strike at home or abroad. In February, he sent Congress proposals to extend federal criminal jurisdiction, to make it easier to deport terrorists and to act against terrorist fundraising. In early May, he submitted a bundle of strong amendments. The interval had seen the news from Tokyo in March that a doomsday called Aum Shrin Rikio had released sarin nerve gas in a subway killing 12 and injuring thousands. The sect had extensive properties and laboratories in Japan and offices worldwide, including one in New York. Neither the FBI nor the CIA had ever heard of it. In April had come the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Immediate suspicions that it had been the work of the Burmaists turned out to be wrong, and the bomberists proved to be American anti-government extremists named Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. President Clinton proposed to amend his earlier proposals by increasing wire tap and electronic surveillance authority for the FBI, requiring that explosives carry traceable taggans, and providing substantial new money not only for the FBI and CIA, but also for local police. President Clinton issued a 5, Presidential Decision Directive 39, which said that the United States should deter, defeat and respond vigorously to all terrorist attacks on our territory and against our citizens. The directive called terrorism both a matter of national security and a crime, and it assigned responsibilities to various agencies. Alarmed by the incident in Tokyo, President Clinton made it the very highest priority for his own staff and for all agencies to prepare to detect and respond to terrorism that involved chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. During 1995 and 1996, President Clinton devoted considerable time to seeking cooperation from other nations in denying sanctuary to terrorists. He proposed significantly larger budgets for the FBI, with much of the increase designated for counter-terrorism. For the CIA, he essentially stopped cutting allocations and supported requests for supplemental funds for counter-terrorism. When announcing his new national security team after being re-elected in 1996, President Clinton mentioned terrorism first in a list of several challenges facing the country. In 1998, after bin Laden's fatwa and other alarms, President Clinton accepted a proposal from his national security adviser Samuel Sandy Berger and gave Clark a new position as national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection and counter-terrorism. He issued two presidential decision directives, numbers 62 and 63, that built on the assignments to agencies that had been made in Presidential Decision Directive 39, laid out 10 program areas for counter-terrorism, and enhanced, at least on paper, Clark's authority to police these assignments. Because of concerns especially on the part of Attorney General Reno, this new authority was defined in precise and limiting language. Clark was only to provide advice regarding budgets and to coordinate the development of interagency-agreed guidelines for action. Clark also was awarded a seat on the Cabinet-level Principles Committee when it met on his issues, a highly unusual step for a White House staffer. His interagency body, the CSG, ordinarily reported to the deputy's committee of sub-cabinet officials unless Berger asked them to report directly to the principles. The Complementary Directive, number 63, defined the elements of the nation's critical infrastructure and considered ways to protect it. And together, the two directives basically left the Justice Department and the FBI in charge at home and left terrorism abroad to the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies under Clark's and Berger's coordinating hands. Explaining the new arrangement and his concerns in another commencement speech, this time at the Naval Academy in May 1998, the president said, first, we will use our new integrated approach to intensify the fight against all forms of terrorism, to capture terrorists no matter where they hide, to work with other nations, to eliminate terrorist sanctuaries overseas, to respond rapidly and efficiently to protect Americans from terrorism at home and abroad. Second, we will launch a comprehensive plan to detect, deter, and defend against attacks on our critical infrastructures, our power systems, water supplies, police, fire and medical services, air traffic control, financial services, telephone systems, and computer networks. Third, we will undertake a concerted effort to prevent the spread and use of biological weapons and to protect our people in the event these terrible weapons are ever unleashed by a rogue state, a terrorist group, or an international criminal organization. Finally, we must do more to protect our civilian population from biological weapons. Clearly, the president's concern about terrorism had steadily risen. That heightened worry would become even more obvious early in 1999, when he addressed the National Academy of Sciences and presented his most somber account yet of what could happen if the United States were hit, unprepared, by terrorists wielding either weapons of mass destruction or potent cyber weapons. End of Chapter 3.6, Recording by Bob Siebel. The 911 Commission Report, Chapter 3.7, and in the Congress. Since the beginning of the Republic, few debates have been as hotly contested as the one over executive versus legislative powers. At the Constitutional Convention, the Founders sought to create a strong executive but check its powers. They left those powers sufficiently ambiguous so that room was left for Congress and the president to struggle over the direction of the nation's security and foreign policies. The most serious question has centered on whether or not the president needs congressional authorization to wage war. The current status of that debate seems to have settled into a recognition that a president can deploy military forces for small and limited operations but needs at least congressional support if not explicit authorization for large and more open-ended military operations. This calculus becomes important in this story, as both President Clinton and President Bush chose not to seek a declaration of war on Bin Laden after he had declared and begun to wage war on us, a declaration that they did not acknowledge publicly, not until after 911 was a congressional authorization sought. The most substantial change in national security oversight in Congress took place following World War II. The Congressional Reorganization Act of 1946 created the modern armed services committees that have become so powerful today. One especially noteworthy innovation was the creation of the Joint House Senate Atomic Energy Committee, which is credited by many with the development of our nuclear deterrent capability and was also criticized for wielding too much power relative to the executive branch. Ironically, this committee was eliminated in the 1970s as Congress was undertaking the next most important reform of oversight in response to the church and pike investigations into abuses of power. In 1977, the House and Senate created select committees to exercise oversight of the executive branch's conduct of intelligence operations. The Intelligence Committees The House and Senate select committees on intelligence share some important characteristics. They have limited authorities. They do not have exclusive authority over intelligence agencies. Appropriations are ultimately determined by the Appropriations Committees. The Armed Services Committees exercise jurisdiction over the intelligence agencies within the Department of Defense and in the case of the Senate over the Central Intelligence Agency. One consequence is that the rise and fall of intelligence budgets are tied directly to trends in defense spending. The President is required by law to ensure the Congressional Intelligence Committees are kept fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States. The committees allow the CIA to some extent to withhold information in order to protect sources, methods and operations. The CIA must bring presidentially authorized covert action, findings and memoranda of notification to the Intelligence Committees and it must detail its failures. The committees conduct their most important work in closed hearings or briefings in which security over classified material can be maintained. Members of the Intelligence Committees serve for a limited time, a restriction imposed by each chamber. Many members believe these limits prevent committee members from developing the necessary expertise to conduct effective oversight. Secrecy, while necessary, can also harm oversight. The overall budget of the intelligence community is classified, as are most of its activities. Thus, the Intelligence Committees cannot take advantage of democracy's best oversight mechanism, public disclosure. This makes them significantly different from other Congressional Oversight Committees, which are often spurred into action by the work of investigative journalists and watchdog organizations. Adjusting to the Post-Cold War Era The unexpected and rapid end of the Cold War in 1991 created trauma in the foreign policy and national security community both in and out of government. While some criticize the Intelligence Community for failing to forecast the collapse of the Soviet Union and use this argument to propose drastic cuts in intelligence agencies, most recognize that the good news of being relieved of the substantial burden of maintaining a security structure to meet the Soviet challenge was accompanied by the bad news of increased insecurity. In many directions, the community faced threats and intelligence challenges that it was largely unprepared to meet. So did the Intelligence Oversight Committees. New digitized technologies and the demand for imagery and continued capability against older systems meant the need to spend more on satellite systems at the expense of human efforts. In addition, denial and deception became more effective as targets learned from public sources what our intelligence agencies were doing. There were comprehensive reform proposals of the Intelligence Community, such as those offered by Senators Boren and McCurdy. That said, Congress still took too little action to address institutional weaknesses. With the Cold War over and the Intelligence Community roiled by the Ames spy scandal, a Presidential Commission chaired first by former Secretary of Defense Les Aspen and later by former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown examined the Intelligence Community's future. After it issued recommendations addressing the DCI's lack of personnel and budget authority over the Intelligence Community, the Intelligence Committees in 1996 introduced implementing legislation to remedy these problems. The Department of Defense and its congressional authorizing committees rose in opposition to the proposed changes. The President and DCI did not actively support these changes. Relatively small changes made in 1996 gave the DCI consultative authority and created a new deputy for management and assistant DCI's for collection and analysis. These reforms occurred only after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence took the unprecedented step of threatening to bring down the Defense Authorization Bill. Indeed, rather than increasing the DCI's authorities over national intelligence, the 1990s witnessed movement in the opposite direction, through, for example, the transfer of the CIA's imaging analysis capability to the new imagery and mapping agency created within the Department of Defense. Congress Adjusts Congress as a whole, like the executive branch, adjusted slowly to the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the growing threat and capabilities of bin Laden were not understood in Congress. As the most representative branch of the federal government, Congress closely tracks trends in what public opinion and the electorate identify as key issues. In the years before September 11, terrorism seldom registered as important. To the extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Congress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda. Several points about Congress are worth noting. First, Congress always has a strong orientation toward domestic affairs. It usually takes on foreign policy and national security issues after threats are identified and articulated by the administration. In the absence of such a detailed and repeated articulation, national security tends not to rise very high on the list of congressional priorities. Presidents are selective in their use of political capital for international issues. In the decade before 9-11, presidential discussion of and congressional and public attention to foreign affairs and national security were dominated by other issues. Among them, Haiti, Bosnia, Russia, China, Somalia, Kosovo, NATO enlargement, the Middle East peace process, missile defense, and globalization. Terrorism infrequently took center stage, and when it did, the context was often terrorists' tactics, a chemical, biological, nuclear or computer threat, not terrorist organizations. Second, Congress tends to follow the overall lead of the president on budget issues with respect to national security matters. There are often sharp arguments about individual programs and internal priorities, but by and large, the overall funding authorized and appropriated by the Congress comes out close to the president's request. This tendency was certainly illustrated by the downward trends in spending on defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs in the first part of the 1990s. The White House, to be sure, read the political signals coming from Capitol Hill, but the Congress largely acceded to the executive branch's funding requests. In the second half of the decade, Congress appropriated some 98% of what the administration requested for intelligence programs. Apart from the Gingrich supplemental of $1.5 billion for overall intelligence programs in fiscal year 1999, the key decisions on overall allocation of resources for national security issues in the decade before 9-11, including counterterrorism funding, were made in the president's Office of Management and Budget. Third, Congress did not reorganize itself after the end of the Cold War to address new threats. Recommendations by the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress were implemented in part in the House of Representatives after the 1994 elections. But there was no reorganization of national security functions. The Senate undertook no appreciable changes. National issues, foreign policy, defense, intelligence, continued to be handled by committees whose structure remained largely unaltered, while issues such as transnational terrorism fell between the cracks. Terrorism came under the jurisdiction of at least 14 different committees in the House alone, and budget and oversight functions in the House and Senate concerning terrorism were also splintered badly among committees. Little effort was made to consider an integrated policy toward terrorism, which might range from identifying the threat to addressing vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure, and the piecemeal approach in the Congress contributed to the problems of the executive branch in formulating such a policy. Fourth, the oversight function of Congress has diminished over time. In recent years, traditional review of the administration of programs and the implementation of laws has been replaced by a focus on personal investigations, possible scandals, and issues designed to generate media attention. The unglamorous but essential work of oversight has been neglected, and few members past or present believe it is performed well. DCI Tenet told us, we ran from threat to threat to threat. There was not a system in place to say, you got to go back and do this and this and this. Not just the DCI, but the entire executive branch needed help from Congress in addressing the questions of counterterrorism strategy and policy, looking past day-to-day concerns. Members of Congress, however, also found their time spent on such everyday matters, or in looking back to investigate mistakes and often missed the big questions, as did the executive branch. Staff tended as well to focus on parochial considerations, seeking to add or cut funding for individual, often small, programs instead of emphasizing comprehensive oversight projects. Fifth, on certain issues, other priorities pointed Congress in a direction that was unhelpful in meeting the threats that were emerging in the months leading up to 9-11. Committees with oversight responsibility for aviation focused overwhelmingly on airport congestion and the economic health of the airlines, not aviation security. Committees with responsibility for the INS focused on the southwest border, not on terrorists. Justice Department officials told us that committees with responsibility for the FBI tightly restricted appropriations for improvements in information technology, in part because of concerns about the FBI's ability to manage such projects. Committees responsible for South Asia spent the decade of the 1990s imposing sanctions on Pakistan, leaving presidents with little leverage to alter Pakistan's policies before 9-11. Committees with responsibility for the Defense Department paid little heed to developing military responses to terrorism and stymied intelligence reform. All committees found themselves swamped in the minutiae of the budget process, with little time for consideration of longer-term questions, or what many members past and present told us was the proper conduct of oversight. Each of these trends contributed to what can only be described as Congress's slowness and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before 9-11. The legislative branch adjusted little and did not restructure itself to address changing threats. Its attention to terrorism was episodic and splintered across several committees. Congress gave little guidance to executive branch agencies, did not reform them in any significant way, and did not systematically perform oversight to identify, address and attempt to resolve the many problems in national security and domestic agencies that became apparent in the aftermath of 9-11. Although individual representatives and senators took significant steps, the overall level of attention in the Congress to the terrorist threat was low. We examined the number of hearings on terrorism from January 1998 to September 2001. The Senate Armed Services Committee held nine. Four related to the attack on the USS Cole. The House Armed Services Committee also held nine. Six of them via special oversight panel on terrorism. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its House counterpart both held four. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in addition to its annual worldwide threat hearing, held eight. Its House counterpart held perhaps two exclusively devoted to counter-terrorism, plus the briefings by its terrorist working group. The Senate and House Intelligence panels did not raise public and congressional attention on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda prior to the joint inquiry into the attacks of September 11th, perhaps in part because of the classified nature of their work. Yet in the context of committees that each hold scores of hearings every year on issues in their jurisdiction, this list is not impressive. Terrorism was a second or third order priority within the committees of Congress responsible for national security. In fact, Congress had a distinct tendency to push questions of emerging national security threats off its own plate, leaving them for others to consider. Congress asked outside commissions to do the work that arguably was at the heart of its own oversight responsibilities. Beginning in 1999, the reports of these commissions made scores of recommendations to address terrorism and homeland security, but drew little attention from Congress. Most of their impact came after 9-11. CHAPTER 4.1 Before the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Although the 1995 National Intelligent Estimate had warned of a new type of terrorism, many officials continued to think of terrorists as agents of states, Saudi-e-Hezbollah acting for Iran against Cobra Towers, or as domestic criminals, Timothy McPhee in Oklahoma City. As we pointed out in Chapter 3, the White House is not a natural locus for program management. Hence, government efforts to cope with terrorism were essentially the work of individual agencies. President Bill Clinton's counterterrorism presidential decision directives in 1995 and May 1998 reiterated that terrorism was a national security problem, not just a law enforcement issue. They reinforced the authority of the National Security Council, NSC, to coordinate domestic as well as foreign counterterrorism efforts through Richard Clark and his interagency counterterrorism security group. Spotlighting new concerns about unconventional attacks, these directives assigned tasks to lead agencies but did not differentiate types of terrorist threats. Thus, while Clark might prod or push agencies to act, what actually happened was usually decided at the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA or the Justice Department. The efforts of these agencies were sometimes energetic and sometimes effective. Terrorist plots were disrupted in individual terrorists were captured, but the United States did not, before 9-11, adopt as a clear strategic objective the elimination of al-Qaeda. Early efforts against bin Laden. Until 1996, hardly anyone in the US government understood that Osama bin Laden was an inspirer and organizer of the new terrorism. In 1993, the CIA noted that he had paid for the training of some Egyptian terrorists in Sudan. The State Department detected his money and aid to Yemeni terrorists who set a bomb in an attempt to kill US troops and aid it in 1992. State Department sources even saw suspicious links with Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind chic, in the New York area, commenting that bin Laden seemed, quote, committed to financing jihad against anti-Islam regimes worldwide, unquote. After the department designated Sudan a state sponsor of terrorism in 1993, it put bin Laden on its tip-off watch list, a move that might have prevented his getting a visa had he tried to enter the United States. As late as 1997, however, even the CIA's counter-terrorist center continued to describe him as an, quote, extremist financier, unquote. In 1996, the CIA set up a special unit of a dozen officers to analyze intelligence on and plan operations against bin Laden. David Cohen, the head of the CIA's directorate of operations, wanted to test the idea of having a, quote, virtual station, unquote, a station based at headquarters, but collecting and operating against a subject much as stations in the field focus on a country. Taking his cue from national security advisor Anthony Lake, who expressed a special interest in terrorist finance, Cohen formed his virtual station as a terrorist financial links unit. He had trouble getting any directorate of operations officer to run it. He finally recruited a former analyst who was then running the Islamic extremist branch of the counter-terrorist center. This officer, who was especially knowledgeable about Afghanistan, had noticed a recent stream of reports about bin Laden and something called al-Qaeda, and suggested to Cohen that the station focus on this one individual. Cohen agreed. Thus was born the bin Laden unit. In May 1996, bin Laden left Sudan for Afghanistan. A few months later, as the bin Laden unit was gearing up, Jamal Ahamed Al-Fadal walked him to a U.S. embassy in Africa, established his bona fides as a former senior employee of bin Laden, and provided a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al-Qaeda. Cooperating evidence came from another walk-in source at a different U.S. embassy. More confirmation was supplied later that year by intelligence and other sources, including material gathered by FBI agents and Kenyan police from an al-Qaeda cell in Nairobi. By 1997, officers in the bin Laden unit recognized that bin Laden was more than just a financier. They learned that al-Qaeda had a military committee that was planning operations against U.S. interests worldwide, and was actively trying to obtain nuclear material. Analysts assigned to the station looked at the information it had gathered, and quote, found connections everywhere, unquote, including links to the attacks on U.S. troops in Aden and Somalia in 1992 and 1993, and to the Manila Airplot in the Philippines in 1994 through 1995. The bin Laden station was already working on plans for offensive operations against bin Laden. These plans were directed at both physical assets and sources of finance. In the end, plans to identify and attack bin Laden's money sources did not go forward. In late 1995, when bin Laden was still in Sudan, the State Department and the CIA learned that the Sudanese officials were discussing with the Saudi government the possibility of expelling bin Laden. U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney encouraged the Sudanese to pursue this course. The Saudis, however, did not want bin Laden giving us the reason, their relocation of his citizenship. Sudan's Minister of Defense Fati Erwa has claimed that Sudan offered to hand bin Laden over to the United States. The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so. Ambassador Carney had instructions only to push the Sudanese to expel bin Laden. Ambassador Carney had no legal basis to ask for more from the Sudanese. Since, at the time, there is no indictment outstanding. The chief of the bin Laden station, whom we will call Mike, saw bin Laden's move to Afghanistan as a stroke of luck. Though the CIA had virtually abandoned Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, case officers had re-established old contacts while tracking down Mir Amal Khanzi, the Pakistani gunman who had murdered two CIA employees in January 1993. These contacts contributed to intelligence about bin Laden's local movements, business activities and security and living arrangements, and helped provide evidence that he was spending large amounts of money to help the Taliban. The chief of the counter-terrorist center, whom we will call Jeff, told Director George Tenet that the CIA's intelligence assets were, quote, near to providing real-time information about bin Laden's activities and travels in Afghanistan, unquote. One of the contacts was a group associated with particular tribes among Afghanistan's ethnic Pashtun community. By the fall of 1997, the bin Laden unit had roughed out a plan for these Afghan tribals to capture bin Laden and hand him over for trial either in the United States or in an Arab country. In early 1998, the Cabinet Level Principles Committee apparently gave the concept its blessing. On their own separate track, getting information, but not direction from the CIA, the FBI's New York field office and the U.S. Attorney for its Southern District of New York were preparing to ask a grand jury to indict bin Laden. The counter-terrorist center knew that this was happening, but the eventual charge conspiring to attack U.S. defense installations was finally issued from the grand jury in June 1998 as a sealed indictment. The indictment was publicly disclosed in November of that year. When bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in May 1996, he became a subject of interest to the State Department's South Asia At the time, as one diplomat told us, South Asia was seen in the department and the government generally as a low priority. In 1997, as Madeline Albright was beginning her tenure as Secretary of State, an NSC Policy Review concluded that the United States should pay more attention, not just to India but also to Pakistan and Afghanistan. With regard to Afghanistan, another diplomat said, the United States at the time had, quote, no policy, unquote. In the State Department, concerns about India-Pakistan tensions often crowded out attention to Afghanistan or bin Laden. Aware of instability and growing Islamic extremism in Pakistan, State Department officials worried most about an arms race and possible war between Pakistan and India. After May 1998, when both countries surprised the United States by testing nuclear weapons, these dangers became daily first order concerns of the State Department. In Afghanistan, the State Department tried to end the civil war that had been continued since the Soviet withdrawal. The South Asia Borough believed that it might have a carrot for Afghanistan's war and factions in a project by the Union Oil Company of California, U-N-O-C-A-L, to build a pipeline across the country. While there was probably never much chance of the pipeline actually being built, the Afghan desk hoped that the prospect of shared pipeline-bent profits might lure faction leaders to a conference table. U.S. diplomats did not favor the Taliban over rival factions. Despite growing concerns, U.S. diplomats were willing at the time, as one official said, to, quote, give the Taliban a chance, unquote. The Secretary Albright made no secret of thinking the Taliban, quote, unquote, despicable. The U.S. ambassador to the United States, Bill Richardson, led a delegation to South Asia, including Afghanistan, in April 1998. No U.S. official of such rank had been to Kabul in decades. Ambassador Richardson went primarily to urge negotiations to end the civil war. In view of bin Laden's recent public call for all Muslims to kill Americans, Richardson asked the Taliban to expel bin Laden. They answered that they did not know his whereabouts. In any case, the Taliban said bin Laden was not a threat to the United States. In sum, in late 1997 and the spring of 1998, the lead U.S. agencies each pursued their own efforts against bin Laden. The CIA's counter-terrorist center was developing a plan to capture and remove him from Afghanistan. Parts of the Justice Department were moving towards indicting bin Laden, making possible a criminal trial in the New York court. Meanwhile, the State Department was focused more on lessening Indo-Pakistani nuclear tensions, ending the Afghan civil war, and ameliorating the Taliban's human rights abuses, than on driving out bin Laden. Another key actor, Marine General Anthony Zini, the commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command, shared the State Department's view. The CIA develops a capture plan. Initially, the DCI's counter-terrorist center and its bin Laden unit considered a plan to ambush bin Laden when he traveled between Kandahar, the Taliban capital, where he sometimes stayed the night, and his primary residence at the time, Tarnak Farms. After the Afghan tribals reported that they had tried such an ambush and failed, the center gave it up on it, despite suspicions that the tribal story might be fiction. Thereafter, the capture plan focused on a nighttime raid on Tarnak Farms. A compound of about 80 concrete or mudbrick buildings surrounded by a 10-foot wall, Tarnak Farms was located in an isolated desert area on the outskirts of the Kandahar airport. CIA officials were able to map the entire site, identifying the houses that belonged to bin Laden's wives, and the one where bin Laden himself was most likely to sleep. Working with the tribals, they drew up plans for the raid. They ran two complete rehearsals in the United States during the fall of 1997. By early 1998, planners at the counter-terrorist center were ready to come back to the White House to seek formal approval. Tenant apparently walked National Security Advisor Sandy Berger through the basic plan on February 13th. One group of tribals would subdue the guards, enter Tarnak Farms stealthily, grab bin Laden, take him to a desert site outside Kandahar, and turn him over to a second group. This second group of tribals would take him to a desert landing zone were already tested in the 1997 Kandahar capture. From there, a CIA plane would take him to New York, an Arab capital, or wherever he was to be arraigned. Briefing papers prepared by the counter-terrorist center acknowledged that hitches might develop. People might be killed and bin Laden supporters might retaliate, perhaps taking U.S. citizens in Kandahar hostage. But their briefing papers also noted that there was a risk in not acting. Sooner or later, they said, bin Laden will attack U.S. interests, perhaps using WMD, weapons of mass destruction. Clark's counter-terrorism security group reviewed the capture plan for Berger, noting that the plan was in a, quote, very early stage of development, the NSC staff then told the CIA planners to go ahead, and, among other things, start drafting any legal documents that might be required to authorize the covert action. The CSG apparently stressed that the rage had target bin Laden himself, not the whole compound. The CIA planners conducted their third complete rehearsal in March, and they again briefed the CSG. Clark wrote Berger on March 7th that he saw the operation as, quote, somewhat embryonic, unquote, and the CIA as, quote, months away from doing anything, unquote. Mike thought the capture plan was, quote, the perfect operation, unquote. It required minimum infrastructure. The plan had now been modified so that the tribals would keep bin Laden in a hiding place for up to a month before turning him over to the United States, thereby increasing the chances of keeping the U.S. hand out of sight. Mike trusted the information from the Afghan network, but had been corroborated by other means, he told us. The lead CIA officer in the field, Gary Shrone, also had confidence in the tribals. In a May 6 cable to a CIA headquarters who pronounced their planning, quote, almost as professional and detailed as would be done by any U.S. military special operations element, unquote. He and the other officers who had worked through the plan with the tribals, judged it, quote, about as good as it can be, unquote. By that, Shrone explained, he meant that the chance of capturing or killing bin Laden was about 40%. Although the tribals thought they could pull off the raid if the operation were approved by headquarters and the policy makers, Shrone wrote that there was going to be a point when, quote, we step back and keep our fingers crossed that the tribals prove as good and as lucky as they think they will be, unquote. Military officers reviewed the capture plan and according to Mike, quote, found their showstoppers, unquote. The commander of Delta Force felt, quote, unquote, uncomfortable with having the tribals hold bin Laden captive for so long, and the commander of Joint Special Operations Forces, Lieutenant General Michael Canavan, was worried about the safety of the tribals inside Tarnac Farms. General Canavan said he had actually thought the operation too complicated for the CIA, quote, out of the league, unquote, and an effort to get results, quote, on the cheap, unquote. But a senior Joint Staff Officer described the plan as, quote, generally not too much different than we might have come up with ourselves, unquote. No one in the Pentagon, so far as we know, advised the CIA or the White House not to proceed. In Washington, Berger expressed doubt about the dependability of the tribals. In his meeting with Tenet, Berger focused most, however, on the question of what was to be done with bin Laden if he were actually captured. He worried that the hard evidence against bin Laden was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted. On May 18th, CIA's managers reviewed a draft of memorandum of notification, MLN, a legal document authorizing the capture operation. In 1986, presidential finding had authorized worldwide covert action against terrorism and probably provided adequate authority. But mindful of the old, quote, unquote, rogue elephant charge, senior CIA managers may have wanted something on paper to show that they were not acting on their own. Discussion of this memorandum brought to the service an unease about paramilitary covert action that had become ingrained, at least among some CIA senior managers. James Pavitt, the Assistant Head of the Directorate of Operations, expressed concern that people might get killed. It appears he thought the operation had at least a slight flavor of a plan for assassination. Moreover, he calculated that it would cost several million dollars. He was not prepared to take that money, quote, out of hide, unquote, and he did not want to go to all the necessary congressional committees to get special money. Despite Pavitt's misgivings, the CIA leadership cleared the draft memorandum and sent it to the National Security Council. Counterterrorist Center officers briefed Attorney General Janet Rino, an FBI Directorate, Louis Free, telling them that the operation had about a 30% chance of success. The Center's Chief, Jeff, joined John O'Neill, the Head of the FBI's New York Field Office, in briefing Mary Jo White, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and her staff. Though Jeff also used a 30% success figure, he warned that someone would surely be killed in the operation. White's impression from the New York briefing was that the chances of capturing bin Laden alive were nil. From May 20 to 24, the CIA ran a final graded rehearsal of the operation, spread over three time zones, even bringing in personnel from the region. The FBI also participated. The rehearsal went well. The Counterterrorist Center plans to breed cabinet-level principals and their deputies the following week, giving June 23 as the date for the raid, with bin Laden to be brought out of Afghanistan no later than July 23. On May 20, Director Tenet discussed the high risk of the operation with Berger and his deputies, warning that people might be killed, including bin Laden. Success was to be defined and has the exfiltration of bin Laden out of Afghanistan. A meeting of principals was scheduled for May 29 to decide whether the operation should go ahead. The principals did not meet. On May 29, Jeff informed Mike that he had just met with Tenet Pavett and the Chief of the Directorate's Near Eastern Division. The decision was made not to go ahead with the operation. Mike cabled the field that he had been directed to, quote, stand down on the operation for the time being, unquote. He had been told he wrote that the cabinet-level officials thought the risk of civilian casualties, quote, collateral damage, unquote, was too high. They were concerned about the tribal safety, and had worried that, quote, the purpose and nature of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation and misrepresentation and probably recriminations in the event of bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive, unquote. Impressions vary as to who actually decided not to proceed with the operation. Mike told us that the SCG saw the plan as flawed. He was said to have described it to a colleague on the NSC staff as, quote, unquote, half-assed, and predicted that the principals would not approve it. Jeff thought the decision had been made at the cabinet level. Pavett thought that it was burgers doing, though perhaps on Tenet's advice. Tenet told us that given the recommendation of his chief operations officers, he alone had decided to, quote, unquote, turn off the operation. He had simply informed Burger, who had not pushed back. Burger's recollection was similar. He said the plan was never presented to the White House for decision. The CIA's management clearly did not think the plan would work. Tenet's deputy director of operations wrote to Burger a few weeks later that the CIA assessed the Tribal's ability to capture bin Laden and deliver him to US officials as low, but working-level CIA officers were disappointed. Before it was cancelled, Sean described it as the, quote, best plan we are going to come up with to capture bin Laden while he's in Afghanistan and bring him to justice, unquote. No capture plan before 9-11 ever again attained the same level of detail in preparation. The Tribal's reported readiness to act diminished, and bin Laden's security precautions and defenses became more elaborate and formidable. At this time, 9-11 was more than three years away. It was the duty of Tenet and the CIA leadership to balance the risks of inaction against jeopardizing the lives of their operatives and agents, and they had reason to worry about failure, millions of dollars down the drain, a shootout that could be seen as an assassination, and, if there were repercussions in Pakistan, perhaps a coup. The decisions of the US government in May 1998 were made, as Burger has put it, from the vantage point of the driver looking through a muddy windshield, moving forward, not through a clear rearview mirror, looking for other options. The counter terrorist center continued to track bin Laden and to contemplate covert action. The most hopeful possibility seemed now to lie in diplomacy, but not diplomacy managed by the Department of State, which focused primarily on India-Pakistani nuclear tensions during the summer of 1998. The CIA learned in the spring of 1998 that the Saudi government had quietly disrupted bin Laden's cells in his country that were planning to attack US forces with shoulder-fired missiles. They had arrested scores of individuals with no publicity. When thanking the Saudis, Director Tenet took advantage of the opening to ask them to help against bin Laden. The response was encouraging enough that President Clinton made Tenet his informal personal representative to work with the Saudis on terrorism, and Tenet visited the Riyadh in May and again in early June. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, who had taken charge from the Ailing King Fahd, promised Tenet an all-out secret effort to persuade the Taliban to expel bin Laden so that he could be sent to the United States or to another country for trial. The kingdom's emissary would be its intelligence chief, Prince Turkey bin Fazl. Vice President Al Gore later added his thanks to those of Tenet, both making clear that they spoke with President Clinton's blessings. Tenet reported that it was imperative to get an indictment against bin Laden. The New York grand jury issued its sealed indictment a few days later on June 10th. Tenet also recommended that no action be taken on other U.S. options, such as the covert action plan. Prince Turkey followed up in meetings during the summer with Mullah Omar and other Taliban leaders. Apparently, employing a mixture of possible incentives and threats, Turkey received a commitment that bin Laden would be expelled, but Mullah Omar did not make good on this promise. On August 5th, Clark chaired a CSG meeting on bin Laden. In the discussion of what might be done, the note-taker wrote, There was a dearth of bright ideas around the table, despite a consensus that the government ought to pursue every avenue that it can address. The problem.