The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York City and Washington, DC resulted from a massive failure of the United States’ intelligence agencies, a prominent defense and security writer said Monday.
Bill Gertz, a Washington Times reporter known for his extraordinary ability to get information from Pentagon leaks and sources, offered his insights about the attacks at a John Locke Foundation luncheon in Raleigh.
“We didn’t have the human intelligence,” said Gertz, whose findings are detailed in his recently released book, Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11.
Gertz blamed the federal government’s intelligence collection and analysis problems on the size of its bureaucracy. The U.S. has more than a dozen agencies involved in intelligence, but Gertz addressed the shortcomings of its two largest: The CIA and the FBI.
He said the two agencies had “turned inward” over recent years, focusing more on self preservation for their jobs and budgets rather than sharing information and helping each other. Gertz called it a “perversion of what they’re supposed to do.”
According to Gertz, the CIA director is supposed to oversee all intelligence, but for practical matters that isn’t true because the director doesn’t control budgets and personnel. Gertz also attributed part of the problem to the CIA mantra that “We may not always be right, but we’re never wrong.”
But Gertz emphasized that the agencies’ greatest inadequacy was in the area of the most basic job of intelligence gathering: Spying. He said the majority of CIA employees are administrative staff and analysts, with an insufficient number of spies “on the ground.”
“You can’t get yourself in the mind of a terrorist,” Gertz said. “(That’s) the core issue in the lack of intelligence.”
He said the agencies also channeled resources too heavily into electronic surveillance, which is useful but doesn’t provide insight about the intentions of the enemy.
One obvious misjudgement was that prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA had none of its intelligence analysts in Afghanistan, where it knew al Qaeda was piecing together most of its terror plans and operations. Gertz said several successive CIA directors, upon taking power, vowed to “reform human intelligence,” but those intentions fell victim to “bureaucratic resistance,” according to Gertz.
He said the FBI’s problems stemmed from its legal inability to spy in the U.S. While the agency had an “incredible intelligence operation” up through the 1970s, Gertz said recent years saw political restraints placed upon it, “mostly from the political left.” The FBI also suffered from a figurative tug-of-war during those years between its two roles of gathering intelligence and law enforcement. Gertz said the final step in removing itself from intelligence gathering occurred during the Clinton Administration, and as a result, “we missed the 9/11 plot.”
Political correctness also hindered the FBI. Gertz said officials were warned by a Minnesota flight instructor that Zacarias Moussaoui was acting suspiciously during his lessons, but they shied away from him because he accused the FBI of an anti-Muslim bias.
“If he had been placed on surveillance,” Gertz said, “I am convinced Moussaoui would have led them [to the 9/11 plot].”
Chesser is associate editor for Carolina Journal.