There has never been a good time to talk about the failures that led to September 11. Immediately after the attack it seemed almost unpatriotic to ask pesky questions. Then the war in Afghanistan required our attention. And now we’re on to the victory lap. But sometime we had better start figuring out just what went wrong. After Pearl Harbor, the United States responded and defeated its enemies, but it also began a process of completely rethinking its military, intelligence and diplomatic institutions in light of the changed world. Nothing like this is happening in Washington.
To be fair, the press has tried to shine the spotlight on this topic. There have been articles in most of the major newspapers and magazines on the intelligence failures culminating in the attacks of September 11. Some of the most critical, like one by Thomas Powers in the current New York Review of Books, argue that the CIA must be overhauled, beginning with the departure of its director. And Sens. John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have led the calls for congressional hearings on the subject. But none of this has had much effect. No one has much of an appetite for an investigation. The reason for this might well be that September 11 happened not because of intelligence failures, but, even worse, because of policy failures. The former can easily be blamed on others. The latter requires that everyone–both parties, both branches of government–take a long, hard look in the mirror.
None of this is to suggest that the CIA does not need fixing. It is a lumbering giant ill-equipped for the world in which it is operating. It is a hierarchical organization, structured to confront another hierarchichal organization–such as the Soviet Union–not the shadowy, decentralized enemies of today. It is also geared to share its information chiefly with the White House and the military. But now it must partner with the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI. The dot-com era ended too soon, because the CIA desperately needs to turn into a New Economy organization. Finally, there is the awkward question of talent. The CIA has been drawing mediocre recruits for more than a decade.
But all that said, the reality is that within the United States government, the CIA was the only organization that took the threat from Osama bin Laden seriously. It had set up a special task force on him within its Counterterrorist Center. It had lots of information about Al Qaeda and contacts on the ground in Afghanistan. These resources have all proved enormously valuable since September 11 and are a crucial cause of the easy victory in Afghanistan–so far.
As NEWSWEEK pointed out in an exhaustive analysis (Oct. 1, 2001), no one in the White House, under George W. Bush or Bill Clinton, elevated Al Qaeda to a No. 1 priority. No policymaker ever echoed Tenet’s description of bin Laden as the biggest threat to the United States. (Ironically, Tenet is missing from the Vanity Fair glossies.) In fact, during the Clinton administration the CIA actually presented the National Security Council with a list of threats and asked that they be ranked according to priority. That would determine the time, money and effort that the agency would put in. A Clinton administration official recalls, “China, Iran, Iraq–these were all No. 1. Terrorism was a 3.” Despite several warnings and some effort, terrorism never quite made it to the top of the president’s agenda. The Republicans were critical of the Clinton administration, mostly for not being tougher on China or Cuba or Iran or Iraq, or all of them. Their chief strategic push was to have the United States gear up for a confrontation with China, a cause they have quietly shelved for the time being.
September 11 has solved the problem of priorities. But it will still take a sustained shift in attitudes to produce lasting change. Flowcharts aside, the central flaw with the CIA is that it doesn’t take risks. Once associated with Wild Bill Donovan and spymasters like Allen Dulles, it is now a cautious and conservative bureaucracy. This, too, is a product of political failure. An official who has worked at the CIA and the White House explains, “The CIA used to be bold, because it knew that the White House would always protect it. Over the past 25 years the White House has hung the CIA out to dry every time it needed a scapegoat. Since the mid-1970s, every time an administration got into trouble it tried to hang its problems on the CIA.” This was true of Ronald Reagan with Nicaragua and Bill Clinton with the uprising in northern Iraq (in 1996). Now the agency’s first goal is to stay out of trouble–not a path to intelligence success.
There are many fixes to make, but the biggest one lies not in Langley, Va., but on Pennsylvania Avenue.
