CIA boss admits to spy agency's failings
CIA director George Tenet predicted today it will take “another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs” to combat al-Qaida and other terrorist threats.
“The same can be said for the National Security Agency, our imagery agency and our analytic community,” Tenet testified before the commission investigating the September 11 terror attacks.
He said a series of tight budgets dating to the end of the Cold War meant that by the mid-1990s, intelligence agencies had “lost close to 25% of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment.”
A needed transformation is underway, he said, and appealed for a long-term commitment in funding. “Our investments in capability must be sustained,” he added.
Tenet’s appearance was ironic to the core.
Several commissioners lavished praise on him for his foresight and efforts to restructure intelligence gathering.
Yet the panel’s staff issued a report as the Washington hearing opened that was sharply critical of the agency and apparatus he has lead for seven years as the nation’s director of central intelligence.
“While we now know that al-Qaida was formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the intelligence community did not describe this organisation, at least in the documents we have seen, until 1999,” the report said.
As late as 1997, it said, the CIA Counter-Terrorism Centre ”characterised Osama bin Laden as a financier of terrorism.”
At the same time, though, the report said intelligence had recently received information revealing that bin Laden ”head its own terrorist organisation,” and had been involved in a number of attacks.
These included one at a Yemen hotel where US military personnel were quartered in 1992 the shooting down of Army helicopters in Somalia in 1993 and possibly the 1995 bombing of an American training mission to the Saudi Arabian National Guard.
It also noted several “threat reports” produced by the intelligence apparatus had “mentioned the possibility of using an aircraft laden with explosives,” such as the terrorists used on September 11 in attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
“Of these, the most prominent asserted a possible plot to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into a US city,” it said. Others included reports of a plan to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994, and of flying a plane into CIA headquarters.
Yet the counter terrorist centre “did not analyse how a hijacked aircraft or other explosives-laden aircraft might be used as a weapon,” the report said. If it had “it could have identified that a critical obstacle would be to find a suicide terrorist able to fly a large jet aircraft.”
Under questioning, Tenet said he did not speak with President George Bush during August 2001, a period marked by concern over possible terrorist attacks.
“He was on vacation and I was here,” Tenet said, although he also added that he could have picked up the phone and called the president at any time if he had felt a need to do so.
Readily acknowledging that intelligence agencies “never penetrated the 9-11 plot,” Tenet said: “We all understood bin Laden’s intent to strike the homeland but were unable to translate this knowledge into an effective defence of the country.”
He bristled at some of the criticisms, including one that said intelligence services lacked a strategic plan to gather and examine information collected about al-Qaida or that they had no adequate way to integrate and disseminate it.
“That’s flat wrong,” he said.
Tenet testified that when he became the top US intelligence officer in 1997, agencies had lost “close to 25% of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment” in the preceding several years.
The commission report made the same point.
Commission member John Lehman characterised the document as a “damning report of a system that’s broken, that doesn’t function.”
Noting that Bush has recently signalled an interest in overhauling the nation’s intelligence-gathering structure, Lehman said change was coming.
Tenet, who has held his job for seven years across parts of two administrations of different parties, said he would welcome it.
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