CASE STUDY
Feel Safer Now?
by
Charles Lamson
Within days of September 11, 2001, pundits and politicians alike were trying to explain the intelligence breakdowns that allowed twenty or more terrorists to carry out attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. As in the case of accidents, the dominant impulse was to blame "operator error."
However, there also was a second tendency almost as soon as the investigations began, Informed and uninformed experts started attributing those breakdowns to communication problems. Although the bulk of the information about the hijacking and hijackers still is not available to the public - and is not likely to be available for many, many years - some items have been made public. The story begins at the end of World War II, not in 2001.
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Myriad federal agencies are in some way involved in national safety; from the Department of Agriculture, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The most visible and most important are the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and the National Security Agency (NSA). When World War II ended, a proposal was made to continue the Wartime Office of Secret Service as the "CIA." The head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, fought the creation of the CIA, primarily on the grounds that the two bureaucracies were unnecessarily duplicitive. Hoover lost the battle, but he was able to ensure that the two agencies would have separate intelligence functions; one for targets outside of the United States, and one for internal targets. Even at the time, critics questioned this division of labor, because spies and saboteurs regularly cross national borders.
It did make sense politically. Over time, the two bureaucracies developed different ways of doing business, and different rules for operating, and making decisions, and they even attracted different kinds of employees.
During the same era, the operations of the CIA became progressively more secretive, even after the creation of the even more secret NSA. All of the relevant agencies developed norms of sharing information with one another only on a "need-to-know basis." Throughout the intervening decades, their operations often were criticized. Much of the criticism focused on the FBI, which under Hoover, had engaged in spying and various "dirty tricks" against antiwar groups. Occasionally, Congress would act to restrict their powers; as when it forbade the CIA to attempt to assassinate the leaders of foreign governments, or acted to reduce racial bias in the FBI's decisions about whom to target for its investigations.
Former FBI Director, Louis French concluded that there is so much information available that analyzing intelligence information can be like trying to take a sip of water coming out of a fire hydrant.
No government agency had any relevant information on sixteen of the nineteen hijackers prior to 911. However, some information was available on the remaining three; Khalid al Midhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and his brother, Salim al-Hazmi (all three were aboard the plane that supposedly crashed into the pentagon). The intelligence community began a worldwide effort to monitor people connected with Al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. During 1999. the intelligence community closely monitored a meeting in Malaysia, from which the CIA discovered new information about Al-Midhar (his full name, passport number, and so forth), and learned that he was leaving Malaysia on an airplane with Nawaf al-Hazmi. Eventually, they decided that none of this information was important enough to pass on to the other agencies. The NSA's secret database also included the name Nawaf al-Hazmi, along with information indicating that he was linked to Al-Qaida. A low-level employee, whose job it was to improve communication between the CIA and the FBI, did brief the latter agency, and summarized the briefing for other CIA agents. Later, an overseas CIA agent notified his headquarters that Al-Hazmi had entered the United States. The information was not communicated to the FBI, because he had done nothing "illegal or threatening" (in fact this report evidently was not read by many people in the CIA).
The most egregious example of not connecting the dots - at least according to the U.S. press - involved a presumed "almost-hijacker," Zacharias Moussaoui. He had been in the United States for some time, attending various pilot schools. When he made it clear to a trainer in Egan, Minnesota that he did not want to learn how to take off or land, the instructor became suspicious, and called the local FBI office. When Moussaoui refused to allow agents to search his laptop computer he was arrested on charge of "visa violations" constructed by the FBI, in order to hold him, while conducting an investigation. They learned from French intelligence officials that he had connections to Al-Qaida. Local agents asked the Washington office to obtain a search warrant for Moussaoui's computer. The Washignton office made the request to the special U.S. National Security Court, but did not include the French reports in that request. The request was denied, leading to a heated (and now famous), memo from Minneapolis Special Agent, Coleen Rowly, to the Washington office. Other agencies experienced similar errors. The NSA intercepted a message believed to be recorded via telephone. It was a conversation that referred to a "big event planned for 911." But it was in Arabic, and was not translated until after the attack.
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