Counter-Counterterrorism: The debacle pre-9/11

National Review, Nov 25, 2002 by Mark Riebling

Fourth, the FBI's new primacy thickened the wall between law enforcement and intelligence. CIA case officers feared that enforced support for FBI probes would open them to stricter judicial scrutiny, which would impede their ability to recruit sources. The Agency's longtime reluctance to share data with the Bureau only deepened. And as terrorism became increasingly a criminal matter, data sharing between cops and spies became more and more difficult. Because the use of secret intelligence in criminal trials raised civil-liberties issues, Reno was compelled to promulgate mazelike guidelines, walling off FBI crime inquiries from espionage probes. The Midhar debacle was a product of these procedures. With perversely perfect illogic, each vaunted new Clinton law against terrorism -- each new occasion for criminal inquiry -- actually discouraged the collation of intelligence on terrorists.

Fifth and finally, giving the FBI the lead role against al-Qaeda violated the basic rule of warfare: Know thine enemy. Though the FBI is the best police force in the world, it is not geared to the assessment of international jihad. Asking veterans of bank robbery and child-porn cases to become scholars of comparative religion, to forecast trends in a clash of civilizations, was a conspicuous case of wishful thinking. In the end, the problem would be not so much bad analysis as the lack of any analysis at all. In July 2000, Freeh's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, Terry Turchie, said, "Since 1995 [when it became the lead counterterrorism agency] the FBI has avoided issuing comprehensive assessments estimating the threat against U.S. interests. Given the range of potential threats . . . from terrorist organizations . . . such assessments would be inherently too broad-based to provide much practical value." In short: The lead agency for counterterrorism would not analyze the terrorist threat.

Placing the FBI in charge of counterterrorism created a strategic vacuum at the heart of national-security operations. The critical stage of intelligence management -- the setting of collection priorities -- requires definition of the probable threat. Lacking any definition more coherent than "the threat of global crime," the FBI could only work case-by-case. That increased, to a virtual certainty, the odds that the nation would be strategically surprised. As strategic-warning specialist Richard Betts has written: "Surprise can be engendered if collectors focus on the wrong threat. Surprise can also be engendered, however, if collectors focus on all threats equally."

So it was before 9/11. "An overall assessment of the risk to America was not prepared," testified Eleanor Hill, the intelligence committee's chief investigator. "As a result, to much of the intelligence community, everything was a priority. The U.S. wanted to know everything about everything all the time." No wonder Freeh found that "analyzing intelligence" was, as he recalled, "like trying to take a sip of water coming out of a fire hydrant." In the months before doomsday, the FBI was warning the Pentagon to prepare simultaneously against attacks from hang gliders, mortars, and weapons of mass destruction. The Bureau was listening for everything, and hearing nothing.