9/11: Not a Failure.  A Choice.

July 30, 2003
By Alexis Debat

"Virtually everyone was surprised . . . . Yet officers . . . were fully conscious of the danger from air attack; they realized this form of attack . . . was at least a possibility; and they were adequately informed of [its] imminence."

The conclusions of the congressional investigations into the so-called "9/11 intelligence failure" now sound painfully familiar. But the above is not a quote from the Report of the Joint Inquiry Into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of 9/11 released last week. It is a key excerpt from another report, this time from the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack released in 1946. Too easy, too perfect to be avoided, the parallels between the two most spectacular frustrations of the U.S. quest for absolute security have been overwhelming. Yet few commentators have devoted much attention to the pathologies that paved the way for each of these surprise attacks.

Now that the Joint Congressional Commission Report on the so-called "9/11 Intelligence Failure" is out, it is indeed very tempting to compare the two commissions' findings and look for interesting patterns.

One does not need to look very far. The two reports are stunningly, almost frighteningly similar. They find no specific evidence of misconduct on the part of the intelligence services, save for the exact same circumstantial mistakes such as the failure to possess a sufficient level of intelligence sources in the enemy's ranks. Both instead point, almost 60 years apart, to one major structural failure: the incapacity of the American government to piece together the multitude of intelligence tidbits that, if connected, would have pointed at the nature, if not the location, of the attacks. And both reports fault neither a specific agency nor an official, but the system itself.

Of course, the U.S. government has taken some steps to tackle this faceless and unaccountable system during the last two generations. Indeed, there is one fundamental difference between the Pearl Harbor and the 9/11 investigations: the existence of the CIA.

Even before the release of the Joint Congressional Report in 1946, President Truman and some of his key aides sought to address the issue of intelligence centralization through the creation of a Central Intelligence Agency-directly accountable to the president-as the crucial node for "connecting the dots", with responsibility for coordinating as well as evaluating intelligence collection and analysis.

No less than a bureaucratic miracle, the CIA was imposed despite fierce opposition from the military branches, the FBI, and the State Department, but also, and most importantly, its creation flew in the face of America's political culture going back to the Federalist Papers, that rejected both secrecy (rightly considered an attribute of monarchy) and the centralization of power (considered too corrupting). Despite the loose wording of the 1947 National Security Act, which was careful not to lay out the centralizing powers of the CIA and its director (the DCI) too precisely, the agency remained an anomaly in America's hyper-democratic and bureaucratically federalist culture. It has thus struggled within its "ambiguous mandate", as one recently published CIA History Staff monograph labels it, to fulfill its role of integrator and centralizer.

The CIA has been compelled to perform its duties without the full authority it needed, against the will of its rivals (the military, the FBI, the State Department), and, most importantly, beyond the dialectic that made the agency both the protector (by its mission) and the destructor (by its institutional status) of the American republic.

The agency's real power has fluctuated within the U.S. intelligence "archipelago", depending upon the prerogative of successive presidents. In turn, each chief executive tried to strike a balance between a general grant of jurisdiction and political considerations.  Avoiding being splashed by any of the CIA's mishaps-from the Bay of Pigs to the recent Niger uranium allegations-has always been important to American leaders. (In all fairness, the CIA itself has also been careful not to push too strongly for this central role, knowing that with great responsibility comes great accountability, and preferring to let the system take the blame).

But this diagnosis, as well as the other conclusions of the Joint Commission on the 9/11 "intelligence failure", would be even less frightening if they had come as a surprise. Unfortunately, this latest study replicates almost word for word the conclusions and recommendations of about 20 such reports on the intelligence bureaucracy written in the past 54 years, starting with the Hoover Commission in 1949.

Known as the Eberstadt Report (from its author, Ferdinand Eberstadt, former Chairman of the Army and Navy Munitions Board and protégé of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal), the Hoover Commission Report's chapter on intelligence found the "National Security Organization, established by the National Security Act of 1947, [to be] soundly constructed, but not yet working well." It identified a crucial lack of coordination between the CIA, the military intelligence services, the State Department and the FBI.

In turn, these conclusions were echoed in the subsequent report of the "Intelligence Survey Group" (a.k.a. "Dulles-Jackson-Correa Report", 1949), as well as in the 1954 "Doolittle Report", the second Hoover Commission report (1955), the "Bruce-Lovett Report" (1956), the "Schlesinger Report" (1971), the so-called "Murphy Commission", (Commission on the Organization of the Government for the Conduct of Foreign Policy, 1975), the Church Committee (Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1976), the "Clifford and Cline Proposals" (1976), the "Turner Proposal", (1985), the "Boren-McCurdy Report", (1992), Les Aspin and Harold Brown's "Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the U.S. Intelligence Community" (1996), and finally, Admiral Jeremiah's report (1999).

At the core of these numerous reports lays the same fundamental and bipartisan conclusion: the National Security Act failed to anchor fully the notion of centralization as the essential nerve center of an effective U.S. intelligence system. In turn, these official reviews have all strongly and unanimously recommended major organizational and administrative adjustments to enhance both the CIA's authority and that of its DCI (or a larger "Director of National Intelligence") as the first and most important step to improve the intelligence community's operation. Or, as few today (an exception is former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft) would dare put it: it needs more CIA.

The question, then, is not what has been done since 9/11 to prevent mass casualty terrorism from happening again, but why has so little  been done in the past 54 years to fix a dysfunctional system whose ills have been identified many times over?

Primary at fault is a lack of political will. Despite dozens of "intelligence failures", every President since Harry S Truman has consciously chosen to back down from efforts to centralize the intelligence community, to the detriment of the nation's security. Instead of being empowered with its original functions of "lead integrator", the CIA has been kept as an anomaly and left to compete with-and duplicate the work of-the FBI, the State Department and the various intelligence arms of the Department of Defense. These agencies in turn each collect their pieces of the intelligence puzzle and jealously hold them for use in the Great Intelligence Rat Race.

To put it more plainly, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were less the results of a specific "intelligence failure" than the consequence of a repeated political choice made at the highest levels of the Executive branch to back down from the concept of centralization and refrain from supporting the CIA's authority on the various components of the intelligence community.

Is the system unreformable? Probably not. Despite all their flaws, the Joint Intelligence Committee in the UK and the Secrétariat Général à la Défense Nationale in France show that a measure of centralization can be imposed in the intelligence communities of democratic nations. What is needed on this side of the Atlantic is less the cosmetic overhaul or outright duplication of existing positions and responsibilities suggested in the Congressional report than the political will from the very top-the President, as "Supreme DCI"-to force a different outcome on the political and bureaucratic systems.

 There is, for example, no need for a "Director for National Intelligence", or a "Terrorist Threat Integration Center." Both duplicate respectively the position of Director of Central Intelligence and the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. What is required instead is a substantial political push to give them the concrete authority they need to fulfill their missions.

The real and somewhat frightening conclusion of the 9/11 Joint Commission Report and its 20 predecessors is that the United States is simply not ready to take the steps necessary to fix its intelligence system. To do so would require the kind of sacrifice seemingly incompatible with the Founding Fathers' philosophy and Washington's hopeless bureaucratic culture. As a recent advertisement for a major airline carrier put it: "if you don't make the 9:30 flight, the 10:30, the 11:30, the 12:30, the 1:30, or the 2:30 let’s face it: you don't want to go to New York City."

Dr. Alexis Debat, former advisor to the French minister of Defense on Transatlantic Affairs, is a visiting professor at Middlebury College, Director of the Scientific Committee for the Institut Montaigne (Paris) and a Senior Consultant to ABC News in New York. Dr. Debat is at work on the largest manuscript ever written on the history of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be published next year in Europe and the United States.