An anti-terrorism center aimed at closing intelligence-sharing gaps among spy and law-enforcement agencies is scheduled to open Thursday, but crucial questions remain about what secrets will be shared, how they will be shared and who will have access.
Longtime observers of the intelligence community note that infighting and turf battles have doomed previous reform efforts, and some fear that a similar fate awaits the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center.
As late as last week, the FBI still had not named someone to head its involvement in the center but it was expected to do that soon. And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and congressional officials have said it could be at least a year before final arrangements are in place granting key agencies thorough access to each other’s raw terrorism intelligence.
That kind of delay means it would be almost three years after the Sept. 11 attacks before the center could employ the full weight of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence capabilities to protect Americans from another catastrophic terrorist assault. Some have called the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the nation’s largest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.
Congress ordered the creation of a center like the TTIC last year after concluding that important pieces of intelligence about the impending attacks, the specific plotters and Al Qaeda were fumbled before Sept. 11.
The new center, when it is up and running, will involve the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the intelligence units of the Pentagon, which controls 85 percent of the nation’s spy budget.
“I know they’re determined to get it going in the next two to three months on a preliminary basis. [But] it probably will not be fully functional at least for a year, is my guess,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon forum last month.
One congressional official dealing with the creation of the TTIC also said it would be at least a year before key details of information sharing are worked out. But this official said that’s not necessarily a bad thing, given the fierce rivalries among the agencies involved.
“It will have so many enemies — better that it moves slowly and surely,” the official said. “There are enough people out there who have a vested interest in not doing it this way. They will be waiting for missteps so they can step away.”
Although congressional investigators offered some contradictory findings late last year, senior White House aides briefing reporters about the new center said in January that intelligence sharing had greatly improved since the Sept. 11 attacks. Still, they said, the center would provide the “brute force” necessary to institutionalize that sharing while also enhancing analysis.
Congressional officials, and others outside the intelligence community, believe the brute force described by the White House can be applied only through information technology that would give everyone near-equal access to raw intelligence–a move resisted for at least a decade by the intelligence community.
The CIA, responding to a series of written questions from the Tribune, said it did not know what the databases at TTIC would look like, and the early signs on the likelihood of a true information merger do not seem promising.
“The intention right now is not to merge everyone’s databases,” one senior official involved in shaping TTIC said recently. Instead, the official added, the agencies envision allowing only “some CIA people” to gain access to FBI data and “some FBI people” to search CIA data.
Such comments are reinforcing fears on Capitol Hill and elsewhere that the center could end up being little more than a new box on the nation’s intelligence flowchart.
The center is considered crucial because after Sept. 11, leading members of Congress, their investigators and independent commissions all agreed that the nation was caught off guard, in significant part because the historically feuding agencies failed to share and properly analyze crucial intelligence.
Among an array of problems, investigators found that the CIA had tracked two members of the Sept. 11 conspiracy for at least 18 months before the attacks, but repeatedly failed or refused to warn the FBI and other agencies that Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi were likely in the United States. In fact, the two future hijackers were living under their own names in California.
A former senior U.S. official who pushed for TTIC is skeptical that the old rivalries among the agencies will be overcome.
“The TTIC was, in a sense, imposed on everybody, so there is nobody out there who owns it right now, and that doesn’t help,” the former senior official said.
“We were persuasive in getting the president to announce it, which is putting a lot of oomph behind it,” he continued. “But I think there is going to be a lot of foot-dragging.”
Preserving lessons of 9/11
If the new center is not run properly, “a lot of the key lessons” learned following the Sept. 11 attacks “will be lost,” said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), former chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Shelby proposed a center like the TTIC in a White House meeting on Nov. 28, 2001, while the ground where the World Trade Center once stood was still smoldering in Manhattan.
Despite legislation from Congress placing a terrorism intelligence center in the hands of the new Department of Homeland Security, the White House decided to locate its Terrorist Threat Integration Center, at least initially, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
Under the White House plan, unveiled by President Bush in his Jan. 28 State of the Union address, the center will report directly to George Tenet, the governmentwide director of Central Intelligence, who also heads the CIA, and will be led by one of Tenet’s former aides.
That decision has few fans within the ranks of the FBI, which has chafed for decades over the CIA’s reluctance to share its raw or sensitive intelligence. And those feelings have been, at times, mutual.
“They spent their careers catching bank robbers,” a retired CIA officer says of the FBI. “We spent ours robbing banks.”
Such derision draws equally sharp rebukes from many FBI agents, who view their CIA counterparts as insulated from the real world. Beyond that is the natural reluctance of any investigator to share information–and with it the credit for that information–with other agencies, and especially to jeopardize sensitive sources cultivated over years by revealing them to “outsiders.”
Shelby said the center’s goal of dealing a significant blow to the intelligence community’s “culture of information hoarding” rests on how it actually will function.
“Those questions are the key to the whole operation,” Shelby said, adding that the answers will determine whether the center truly represents “all-source” fusion of terrorism intelligence or just replicates the pre-Sept. 11 arrangement of putting officials from different agencies together in the same room.
The CIA said it has not determined what information would be shared, or how, at the new center. And, according to a spokeswoman, the agency still does not know how many analysts will work at TTIC when it opens.
Also crucial to the center’s ultimate success will be analyzing terrorism intelligence–seeking to understand the significance of various pieces of information rather than just gathering them. That is a process that has long been overlooked or undervalued at all of the nation’s spy agencies.
Shelby cites persisting flaws
Despite assurances to the House and Senate intelligence committees “on innumerable occasions” that intelligence sharing since the attacks is seamless and unprecedented, it remains a significant problem, Shelby concluded in an 84-page report on the Sept. 11 lapses, issued a few weeks before the White House unveiled its plans for TTIC.
More than a year after the attacks, congressional intelligence investigators found that the “almost unanimous opinion” among intelligence agencies was that those involved in intelligence-sharing arrangements “still restrict access to information and limit the databases that can be queried” by officials from other agencies.
Still, Shelby said he is confident the center ultimately will seal the divide, because the crucial lessons of Sept. 11 are too important to ignore.
Eleanor Hill, who headed the joint House and Senate investigation into the intelligence failures leading up to the attacks, also said she is optimistic the TTIC eventually can bridge the information gaps.
“But given what happened before Sept 11, I want to see it first,” Hill said.
