      |
|
|
 |
|
« Back to The American Intelligence Community and Sept. 11. Can We Stop Terrorism?" main page   Transcript for: The American Intelligence Community and Sept. 11. Can We Stop Terrorism?"Ben Wattenberg: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Knowing what a potential enemy is up to--intelligence--is often called the first line of defense. But the September eleventh attacks expose an astonishing gap in America’s ability to defend itself. Could the attacks have been prevented? Did the bureaucratic feuds and turf battles keep the right information from getting to the right people? Did restraints on spying hamper aggressive intelligence gathering? Most important, can we make sure it doesn’t happen again? To find out, Think Tank is joined by Dave McCurdy, Executive Director of the Internet Security Alliance and former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; Richard Gid Powers, historian and author of Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover; and David Corn, Washington Editor for The Nation and author of Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA’s Crusades. The topic before the House: Can we stop terrorism? This week on Think Tank.September eleventh, two thousand and one is already being referred to as another Day of Infamy. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in nineteen forty-one, commanders of both the Army and Navy Installations in Hawaii were tried and held fully accountable. Many are now asking, “What went wrong on nine-eleven?” Many CIA critics have noted that the Agency has become unwilling to take risks. Some insiders claim there are few CIA officers with the Middle Eastern language skills or the cultural knowledge necessary to operate with stealth in the Middle East. And the FBI struggles with its own problems. FBI officials have added terrorists to the popular Most Wanted List, but some say “Too little, too late.” Can the intelligence community adopt to a post nine eleven world? Gentlemen, thank you for joining us. Let’s do a first question around the room fairly quickly. Dave McCurdy, what went wrong? McCurdy: Well, obviously, in nineteen forty-seven, when the CIA and the National Security Agency were created, it was on the premise to a prevent a future Pearl Harbor. And by that measure there was a failure. And I think the failure will probably lead to the inability and the lack of proper coordination and communication of information among the principal agencies. Ben Wattenberg: In other words, we had the information, but we didn’t pass it along. McCurdy: Well, we probably weren’t looking as closely as we should. I’m always amazed by the fact that our agencies, the FBI and CIA and...and the media thrown in, within forty-eight hours, constructed the entire forensic case of what went wrong and who were the perpetrators. If that information was that readily available, why in the world can’t we have the proper focus to use that to detect and prevent and deter those attempts? Ben Wattenberg: Richard Gid Powers, what went wrong? Powers: If you look at previous disasters like, say, the Pearl Harbor attack, you find some terrific analogies. And one of them is that, in retrospect, the signs were there and were very clear. But intelligence analysts have this concept that they use, and you must have heard it many times, a “signal noise” problem. And in retrospect…. Ben Wattenberg: Wh...what is the word? Powers: Signal noise Ben Wattenberg: Signal noise, right. Powers: Problem, sometimes called “signal static” problem. But the idea is that in retrospect the sounds that were signals leap out at you as meaningful. But at the time it’s impossible to distinguish between the static and the signal. How do you come up with a paradigm that can simply be applied to allow you to separate the signal from the noise? I don’t think we’ve come up with it. Ben Wattenberg: David Corn probably has an answer to that. Corn: I don’t know if I can answer that, but I think in addition to the failures that Dave McCurdy listed, which I would all agree with, there was a failure of priority problem and the failure of imagination. Preventing this type of action, historically the reason for the CIA, should have been the number one mission of the intelligence community. But I think historically it’s been drafted to do all sorts of other things, you know, political skullduggery overseas and such and economic intelligence as well. The Europeans have long accused the Americans of spying on trade missions to get better trade deals. I think all that stuff probably should have been put… Ben Wattenberg: Let me ask you a question that just occurred to me. If you had been the Director of the CIA, let’s say for the last two years, do you think this would have happened? Corn: Well, now we’re talking fantasy. Ben Wattenberg: Well, no (laughter). You can...you can answer that. I’m gonna ask McCurdy that next. Corn: Well, he...he was much closer to the job than I was. Uh, I don’t know, you go back seven years, maybe not because in nineteen ninety-five, there was a breakup of an al Qaeda cell in the Philippines and one of the guys was tortured by the Philippino Security Forces. And then they shared with us their information they extracted. And one bit of information was that there was a plan to bring down ten airplanes in the same day, fly one into the CIA Headquarters. And it’s quite amazing if you look at all the terrorism reports in the last two, three years that have come out since then, none of them mention aviation as a primary worry. I would hope that a CIA better run would have picked up on that. Ben Wattenberg: All right, Dave, you were chairman or co-chairman of the House… McCurdy: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Ben Wattenberg: Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. And your job was oversight. And you, I assume you oversaw. McCurdy: Attempted to. Ben Wattenberg: Attempted to oversaw, or oversee. Uh, now this as a hypothetical, suppose you had been CIA Director for the last five years. I’ve known you for many years. You’re very savvy. You know what’s going on. Do you think you would have been able to reform that agency so that that would have gotten to the top of your desk and it never would have happened? Or is this thing so deeply enmeshed in the culture that you just can’t do anything about it? McCurdy: Well, I think Director Tenet, who has actually enjoyed greater access with President Bush than he did with President Clinton, was attempting to keep this as a top priority. I don’t think it was an issue of not being on the desk at all. I think the question is an organizational challenge. In peacetime, a Director of CIA does not have the authority to dictate budgets or priorities of funding and allocation of resources to focus on one particular problem. The Department of Defense, and in this instance what you see in Afghanistan, you understand why their concern is supporting war fighters, intelligence to pick out those targets and… Ben Wattenberg: But the CIA has an enormous budget of its own and in theory… McCurdy: It pales in comparison with the Department of Defense’s on the intelligence and the NSA. Ben Wattenberg: NSA is the National Security Agency. McCurdy: That’s right. Again there is a bias towards technical… Ben Wattenberg: And they do sort of global phone-tapping basically. That’s their biggest… McCurdy: Technology. All kinds of different capabilities, which are critical and are important. But what has been dropped as a priority is human intelligence. We, it’s not in our culture. We don’t do it very well. And I do believe there are some of the restraints in, you know, making sure you check the pedigree of some people you deal with. Uh, you know, it’s obviously been thrown out the window when you have to deal with Pakistan and other supposed allies. Ben Wattenberg: You made that point in that blueprint article for the Democratic Leadership Council that spying is not in our culture. Is that what you’re saying? McCurdy: We’re not very good at it. Ben Wattenberg: Not very good at it. McCurdy: It’s obviously in other people’s culture. I take one exception with what Dave said that when Europeans complain about economic intelligence--I don’t believe the United States is that deeply involve in that. But I tell you the French have made it an art, as have other countries. Our focus has been on these national security issues, but I think there has to be some organizational change in order to keep it as a top priority. Ben Wattenberg: Richard. Powers: Well, if you shift off a little bit and look at the FBI, their priorities under Director Freeh which are now being massively reorganized, were at the top. Foreign counterintelligence, which is really a arcane, in-bred kind of art--looking up people who have infiltrated the FBI, looking for people who have infiltrated the CIA and other spies, organized crime, international organized crime and counterterrorism. And counterterrorism I think had shifted to making the FBI a response agency. I think they were thinking of… Ben Wattenberg: Rather than a prevention agency. Powers: Exactly. Over the years, the FBI had developed into the first responders around the world when an act of terrorism had taken place. And I think that lots of their resources had been moved in that direction. And that’s never gonna happen again and I think in retrospect we look upon it as a misguided impulse. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, what I find so astonishing and I don’t claim that I was out there with a big flag saying, ‘take care of terrorism.’ But the first World Trade Center bombing was nineteen ninety-three, is that right? And it blew a hole into the ground six stories deep. And it was ten feet away from some pillar that, had it been placed properly, the one tower would have collapsed into the other, is that, that’s what I’ve read. And we put some guy on trial and then forget about it. I, it’s just so bizarre. Corn: That goes to a larger point too, is that there are different types of intelligence. There’s the covert intelligence that the CIA conducts and we can talk about the guidelines. I disagree with the...with the Congressman about the...the impacts of those guidelines, Ben Wattenberg: Former Congressman. Corn: Former Congressman. Ben Wattenberg: We don’t have active politicians on Think Tank… Corn: Our intelligence community has long been inept at penetrating closed targets. We couldn’t penetrate the Viet Cong during the Vietnam years. Couldn’t penetrate Castro’s government in the early sixties when we tried. They did a much better job penetrating us. And so I think the notion of penetrating al Qaeda, of course… Ben Wattenberg: You both agree with that? McCurdy: I don’t disagree with that. Corn: Yeah, so I think penetrating al Qaeda obviously is something that should have been done and we should be trying to do this in the future. But what you just talked about raises the, a larger intelligence question, which doesn’t have to be a closed question, which is understanding the forces allayed against us in an open fashion. You know, the fact that they had tried to do that in nineteen ninety-three and all the court documents had been produced was stuff that any one of us could have gone through--and a lot of it wasn’t even analyzed or translated, some of the Arabic material that had been held. Ben Wattenberg: In another government, a democratic government, let’s say the Brits, would we have seen a bunch of resignations after this happened? McCurdy: Perhaps not during the war itself. I think… Ben Wattenberg: Oh, I see, you mean after. McCurdy: I think, now’s not the time for us to have mass resignations. We need all the bodies and the corporate memory and resources focused on accomplishing the mission. Ben Wattenberg: But it’s okay for us to do this kind of show now? McCurdy: I think what this does is raise broader issues… Ben Wattenberg: Right, okay, I just wanna make sure that we’re not doing anything to impede the war effort. McCurdy: No, I do think we need to get an investigation going relatively soon. Not to play the blame game as you might say, but if we’re gonna have a war terrorism with no particular end date, we’re told it could on for years. I don’t think we can wait for years to find out some of the things that went wrong and try to come up with ideas on how to do this better. Because obviously there’s, you know, you know, even, regardless of what happens in Afghanistan, there are still people out there who are gonna be targeting us and we need to have a good hard look at the intelligence committee. Ben Wattenberg: Let me ask you one fundamental question. When...when is the Congress gonna start investigating? McCurdy: During the next Congress. During the next Congress, you’ll see that, that’s right, the next session of the hundred and seventh. Powers: You know you can look back at previous investigations of disasters, Pearl Harbor, the loss of China, the Kennedy Assassination, the Church Committee investigations of the FBI, and in some cases useful lessons are learned. The Challenger would be a good example where useful lessons are learned. In other cases, you just have a royal mess. The loss of China would be an example, Pearl Harbor, another example. And in some cases, these agencies learn lessons too well. And I think the Church Committee investigation of the FBI was one where the FBI decided that if it, that its primary task was not to violate Civil Liberties. And if it didn’t violate Civil Liberties it would get hosannas no matter what happened, no matter what went wrong. And I suppose that there’s probably someone who is ready to offer defense of the FBI that, ‘my God, that was a bad day, but we didn’t violate anybody’s Civil Liberties.’ Ben Wattenberg: You buy that? Corn: Not really. I mean, I think the uh… Ben Wattenberg: I mean The Nation would be one of those magazines that’d be out in front defending every jot and tittle of uh… Powers: The Church Committee Hearings were in nineteen seventy-five, seventy-six. Since then you had Bill Casey running the CIA for eight years under Reagan. Then you had George Bush, former CIA Director, as President and so you can’t tell me that, you know, the lingering effects from thirty years ago are gonna Ben Wattenberg: Well, no, no, but Richard, in making a different point, he...he’s making a....he’s making a very interesting culture uh, cultural point. People go native here in Washington and they don’t want to be criticized by people who say, you know, they’re violating Civil Liberties. And that gradually ascends to become the most important thing they do. Corn: Well, I don’t buy, I don’t perceive the, you know, that may be true in the FBI or the...or the, you know, I think the hearings in the seventies were...were certainly appropriate because the FBI had gone so far off the map. So it still ends up being the FBI’s fault, not the, not Congress’ fault for looking into that. If yet by learning the wrong reason it’s not because they shouldn’t have been looked at. But if the CIA, you know, you had those hearings in the mid seventies. Come the eighties you had them still, you know, going against the Bolin Amendment, and doing all sorts of things and not pretending to be worried about Civil Liberties and the impending investigations. Ben Wattenberg: Well, well, hold...hold...hold on there. There were five Bolin Amendments and there’s an argument about which Bolin Amendment was in effect when they helped the Contras so we’re not gonna get into that but, McCurdy: No, it was during all five of, I was there during all that. You can bring Moynihan on, he’ll tell you that Casey lied to him about this stuff. Ben Wattenberg: Yeah, well, well, you can bring a lot of people on. You can bring a lot of people on about a lot of stuff, but you know there were a...a number of Bolin Amendments, yeah, but McCurdy: I just wanted to raise a, I think Richard has a very good historical perspective and brings it to the table. The fundamental question I was gonna ask though is, if in fact the FBI’s lesson learned is to be risk averse and the CIA has, for a number of reasons, and I actually think it may have, Iran-Contra and those things, may have had made them more risk averse. And when you have two risk-averse agencies and their fundamental charter is that the CIA does foreign intelligence and it ends at the Nation’s boundary and the water’s edge and the FBI, you take over here. But FBI fundamentally says, ‘our mission is to investigate and prosecute after the fact and react.’ Who’s doing the thoughtful pro-active, counterintelligence, counterterrorism, activity on a day-to-day basis? Powers: I suspect there’s gonna be much movement of the military in this. And a little background is that, I think that since the seventies the FBI had taken over many of the functions of the military in being the first responder when what could have been considered an act of war is conducted against American Embassies, against American warships. The FBI did this and it was probably because Presidents did not think that, with the strength of the Soviet Union, the balance of power, that military responses were all that safe and secure. But the United States has discovered now that there is no countervailing force… Ben Wattenberg: We need another committee. Corn: What? No, no, no. But I think that his point, but his point is a very good point. You have that sort of break between the flow of intelligence overseas and the flow of intelligence domestically. Part of that has come out of fears of FBI abuses here in the past, I think warranted fears. Mort Halprin, who was on the NSC staff during the Clinton years has proposed, and I think it’s not a bad idea, having sort of, you know, yet another new agency, but a new agency that’s geared towards looking at terrorism and that follows the path from overseas to here. And I’m an optimist. I think you can do that without having to violate Civil Liberties. I think you can have due process unique to those sort of investigations and you need that seemless flow to prevent these things. Ben Wattenberg: Let’s just move now because you just touched on a point that I wanted to raise. Uh, can you really do away with terror against America, at least on the American homeland? I mean eh, there’s terror and there’s terror. Flying airplanes into two buildings is one thing. But having some seventeen-year-old kid wrap himself in some dynamite and run into a pizzeria, that’s pretty tough to do. Powers: You can’t. I don’t think we can truly stop terror and if, you know, it, and if...if there are a bunch of committed people, you don’t need that many, a couple dozen. You know, you can think of all the targets. We’re an open society. We have open borders. We have a million people coming and going each day. Ben Wattenberg: I mean, all the assassinations of Presidents I guess, maybe Lincoln had a actual conspiracy of many people, but it basically one nut Powers: That’s the risk of being an open society and we’re not willing to give out those trade-ins and, nor do, I don’t think anyone is advocating that. So it is a balance. It’s a balancing act. Uh, it’s risk management. Uh, in this case there were failures that allowed, you know, a more extreme attack to occur. Uh, the actions, the best actions are exactly what the...the administration is doing now. You try to reduce the states that sponsor or harbor terrorists. You drain the swamp as best you can. You reduce it. But you’re not gonna, and...and you try to penetrate the, and eliminate the sleeper cells. But this is a very long-term plan, money flow. That’s just one of the….Okay, now uh, to more specifics and then we have to get out. Do we need more human intelligence as opposed to technical needs? Powers: Well, we do and we also need that imagination that David’s been talking about to analyze it. And that’s really a tough uh, problem because you get innovators and you get routineers in organizations. And routineers raise, rise to the top. And they’re used to analyzing previous problems. The innovators on the other hand are always subject to attack, that we’re coming up with scenario-driven plans, you know, pie in the sky. And there really has to be a way of somehow capturing that imagination, putting it into a bottle. Do you have an answer to that one? Ben Wattenberg: Well...well, let me ask a question. I mean, does that require, I mean Tom Ridge, Governor Ridge, now,= Chairman of...of whatever he’s called, the Homeland Security, would it make sense to have new legislation that says all these forty-eight agencies of government in Agriculture and CIA and Defense and whatever, all report through this one guy and he will have a staff of imagineers, is that the way to solve that? McCurdy: Well, the appointment’s an important step to try to bring the domestic law-enforcement and the first response agencies together to deal with crises and to improve domestic security and that’s an important step. But that doesn’t address the prevention stage and that doesn’t really address the national security defense, intelligence, foreign policy and, law-enforcement a little bit with the FBI had a counterterrorism activity. Uh, there has to be a reorganization there. Human intelligence is going to be a priority. It’s not a question of funding. There’s gonna be ample money there. It’s really a question of what is your focus and are, the underlying lesson I hope that the administration who I think has really matured in this crisis, and the country as a whole is gonna learn and that is as prosperous as rich, as free as we are, this is a global world. It’s a globalized, a shrinking world and our security cannot be just protected by building higher walls. There are higher things and we have to be pro-active, diplomatically from an intelligence standpoint and we have to be engaged uh, like we are currently. Powers: Well, history kind of raises a pessimist flag about the possibility of Ridge’s Office because the CIA was originally supposed to be one guy collecting intelligence from the Army, Navy and so forth and history suggests you only survive if you build a bureaucracy as big and powerful as any of the ones you’re coordinating. Or else you die. McCurdy: And I think, you know, we have very few models of reviving bureaucracies a getting, of getting bureaucracies to not act like (everyone talking). Ben Wattenberg: I mean, that’s the famous word in Washington--czar, as in drug czar. Czar means twelve people. McCurdy: You know, we created the Drug Enforcement Agency because we needed something separate to work on the war on drugs. And, you know, the last thing I would suggest is that we create a new agency or new organization. If they do anything, this ought to be a lesson to all Americans out there watching--You’re government is not organized correctly to deal with twenty-first century problems, whether it’s economically, politically, as we’ve seen in elections, or from the national security standpoint. They oughta clean it up. This horizontal stovepipe approach has to be cut out. Learn lessons from the technology world and industry which thinks horizontally and communicating this way as opposed to this old approach. Ben Wattenberg: A system of systems as they say. McCurdy: Systems of systems, looking at these problems from the result standpoint, outcomes as opposed to organizationally. Ben Wattenberg: All right, we have to go. Let’s just go around the room once, starting one, two, three fairly brief if you will. Uh, medium term, long term, are you optimistic about what’s gonna transpire here. Corn: Uh, I tend to be pessimistic. I tend to think that it’s going to be very hard to reform government in way to get things to work well. Ben Wattenberg: Well, but I mean are we gonna have things like the...like Anthrax and…? Corn: Oh, yeah. I’ve written columns on this and I’ve had people writing the e-mails in which they’re crying. I’m pretty pessimistic. I think we are so vulnerable. We talk about asymmetric warfare. We’re asymmetrically vulnerable to small numbers of people who are highly motivated. Ben Wattenberg: Well said, okay. What do you think? Powers: Well uh, the FBI is transforming itself into a counterterrorist organization. There are still enormous anti-trust cases. There’s political corruption. Uh, there are vast areas of lawlessness in this country that if they aren’t being policed by the FBI, they’re not gonna be policed at all. So that gives me worry. McCurdy: Pure-bred optimist. Uh, I think this country, the fundamentals of the economy are sound. The fundamental principals that, which we are collectively organized as a nation are sound. We are the beacon of light. Yes, we took a hit, but you know it didn’t even dim it by a watt. You know, that, we’re...we’re still the brightest hope out there for the future. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Thank you, fellow optimist, Dave McCurdy, Richard Gid Powers and David Corn. And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
  Web development by Bean Creative. |