THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VI, Issue # 92, May 7, 2004
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY & U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM
By George J. Tenet
FULL STORY:
By the mid 1990s, the Intelligence Community was operating with a significant erosion in resources and people and was unable to keep
pace with technological change. When I became Director of Central Intelligence, I found that the Central Intelligence Agency was an
agency whose dollars were declining and whose expertise was ebbing. We lost close to 25 percent of our people and billions of
dollars in capital investment.
The pace of technological change challenged the National Security Agency's ability to
keep up with the increasing volume and velocity of modern communications. The
infrastructure to recruit, train, and sustain officers for our clandestine services, the
nation's human intelligence capability, was in disarray.
We were not hiring new analysts, emphasizing the importance of expertise, or giving the
analysts the tools they needed. I also found that the threats to the nation had not
declined or even stabilized, but had grown more complex and dangerous. The rebuilding
of the Intelligence Community across the board became my highest priority. We had to
invest in the transformation of the National Security Agency to attack modern
communications. We had to invest in a future imagery architecture. We had to overhaul
our recruitment, training, and deployment strategy to rebuild our human intelligence capabilities and resources, which are
critical to penetrating terrorist cells. And we had to invest in our people.
And while we were rebuilding across the board, we ensured that investments in
counterterrorism continued to grow while other priorities either stayed flat or were
reduced.
We also needed an integrated operations and collection plan against Al-Qa'ida. We had
one.
I have previously testified about the 1999 strategy that we called "The Plan." The Plan
required that collection disciplines be integrated to support worldwide collection and
disruption and penetration operations inside Afghanistan and other terrorist sanctuaries .
In 1998, after the East Africa bombings, I directed the Assistant Director of Central
Intelligence for Collection to ensure that all elements of intelligence in the Intelligence Community
had the right assets focused on the right problem with respect to Al-Qa'ida and Osama bin
Laden.
We convened frequent meetings with the most senior collection specialists in the Intelligence
Community to develop a comprehensive approach to support the Counterterrorism
Center's operations against bin Laden. The Assistant DCI for Collection told me that, despite progress, we needed a
sustained, longer-term effort, if the Intelligence Community was to penetrate deeply into the Afghan
sanctuary.
We established an integrated community collection cell focused on tracking Al-Qa'ida
leaders, identifying their facilities and activities in Afghanistan. The cell, which often
met daily, included analysts, operations officers, imagery officers, and officers from the
National Security Agency. We used these sessions to drive signals and imagery
collection against Al-Qa'ida and to build innovative capabilities to target bin Laden and
the Al-Qa'ida organization.
We moved to satellite to increase our coverage of Afghanistan. The CIA and NSA designed
and employed a clandestine collection system inside Afghanistan. The imagery agency
intensified its efforts across Afghanistan and more imagery analysts were moved to
cover Al-Qa'ida.
The imagery agency gave Al-Qa'ida interest in targets its highest priority in the intense
daily competition for overhead imagery resources.
We established an integrated community collection cell that focused on tracking Al-Qaida
leaders and identifying and characterizing their facilities. When the Predator
began flying in the Summer of 2000, we opened it in a fused, all-source environment
within the Counterterrorism Center.
Between 1999 and 2001, our human agent base against the terrorist target grew by over
50 percent. We ran over 70 sources and sub-sources, 25 of whom operated inside of
Afghanistan.
We received information from eight separate Afghan tribal networks. We forged
strategic relationships consistent with our plan with liaison services that, because of
their regional access and profile, could enhance our reach. They ran their own agents
into Afghanistan in response to our tasking.
The period of early September, 2000, to 2001 was also characterized by an important
increase in our unilateral capability. Almost half of these assets and programs in place
in Afghanistan were developed in the preceding 18 months.
By September 11, 2001, a map would show that these collection programs and human
networks were operating throughout Afghanistan. This array meant that when the
military campaigned to topple the Taliban and destroy Al-Qa'ida began in October, we
were already on the ground supporting it with a substantial body of data and a large
stable of assets.
As regards our analytical product, I think that there was depth and clarity across a
range of products and a range of venues. I believe that that product got to our
policy-makers, including the most senior policy- makers, in many forms.
How do I assess our performance? The intelligence that we provided our senior
policy-makers about the threat Al-Qa'ida posed, its leadership, its operational span
across over 60 countries, and the use of Afghanistan as a sanctuary was clear and
direct.
The Intelligence Community had the right strategy and was making the right investments
to position itself for future efforts against Al-Qa'ida. We made good progress across
intelligence disciplines. Disruptions, renditions, and sensitive collection activities no doubt
saved lives. However, we never penetrated the 9-11 plot overseas.
While we positioned ourselves very well with extensive human and technical
penetrations to facilitate the take-down of the Afghan sanctuary, we did not discern the
specific nature of the plot.
We made mistakes. Our failure to watchlist Hazmi and Mihdhar in a timely manner or
the FBI's inability to find them in the narrow window of opportunity afforded them at the time showed
systemic weaknesses and the lack of redundancy.
There were at least four separate terrorist identity databases maintained by four separate
U.S. government agencies -- the Department of State, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Department of Defense, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These databases were not
interoperable or broadly accessible. There were dozens of watch lists, many haphazardly
maintained. There were legal impediments to cooperation across the continuum of criminal
intelligence operations. It was not a secret at all that we understood it, but in truth, all of us
took little action to create a common arena of criminal and intelligence data that we could all access.
Most profoundly, we lacked a government-wide capability to integrate foreign and
domestic knowledge, data, operations, and analysis. Warning is not good enough without
the structure to put it into action. We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the
homeland, but we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the
country. Doing so would have complicated the terrorist calculation of the difficulty in
succeeding in a vast open society that, in effect, was unprotected on September 11.
During periods of heightened threat, we undertook smart, disciplined actions. But
ultimately all of us acknowledge that we did not have the data, the span of control, the
redundancy, the fusion, or the laws in place to give us the chance to compensate for the
mistakes that will always be made in any human endeavor.
I want to close on four or five points about the future of intelligence and relevant issues.
First, we've spent an enormous amount of time and energy transforming our collection,
operational, and analytical capabilities. The care and nurturing of these capabilities is
absolutely essential.
It will take us another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country
needs. There is a creative, innovative strategy to get us there, a strategy that requires
sustained commitment, leadership, and funding. The same can be said for our other
disciplines. Something has to be said quite publicly about the importance of intelligence
for the country and how we look at this discipline.
Second, we have created an important paradigm in the way we have made changes in
the Foreign Intelligence and Law Enforcement Communities beginning with the
Counterterrorism Center and evolving through the creation of the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center (TTIC), with the fusion of all-source data in one place against a
critical mission area.
This approach could serve as a model for the Intelligence Community to organize our
most critical missions around centers where there's an emphasis on fusion, the flow of
data, the fluid integration of analytical and operational capabilities.
Third, capabilities are important. The organization around missions where those capabilities
are fully integrated in whatever structure you want to create, I think, is the way ahead in
the future, and that's the way we're moving.
Why? Because the investments that we make together in accounts that we
don't jointly manage, I believe, have enormous power when they're synchronized, and the
Secretary of Defense and I have been working to achieve just that.
Fourth, the DCI has to have an operational and analytical span of control that allows
him or her to inform the President authoritatively about covert action and other sensitive
activities.
Fifth and finally, our oversight committees should begin a systematic series of hearings to
examine the world we will face over the next 20 or 30 years, the operational end state
we want to achieve in terms of structure, and the statutory changes that may need to be
made to achieve these objectives. And none may be required, but I believe some will
be.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
U.S. Intelligence & America's National Security
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Terrorism & U.S. Homeland Security
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
George J. Tenet, U.S. Director of Central Intelligence and head of the Central Intelligence Agency, presented the foregoing
statement, on April 14, 2004, as testimony at the hearings of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United
States (9-11 Commission).
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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