Study Cites Spy Agency Failures Leading Up to 9/11

WASHINGTON —  The nation’s spy agencies devoted far too little money and manpower to penetrating Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations before Sept. 11, and they were in such short supply of translators and skilled analysts that they couldn’t make timely use of much of the intelligence they did collect, according to sources familiar with a report scheduled to be released today by a House Intelligence subcommittee.

The report is sharply critical of the CIA, the National Security Agency and, to a lesser extent, the FBI for failings ranging from woeful misallocation of resources to risk-averse bureaucratic cultures that compromised the United States’ counter-terrorism efforts, according to a congressional source familiar with the document.

The report, titled “Counter Terror Intelligence Capabilities and Performance Prior to 9/11,” is the first formal assessment from a congressional panel of intelligence failures leading up to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September.

The document was produced by a special House subcommittee on terrorism that was created after the attacks. The panel spent much of the last year conducting hearings and interviews with intelligence officials.

The document spans several hundred pages, most of it classified material that will not be released to the public. But a 30-page summary set for release today outlines the principal findings, and makes recommendations calling for improvement in information sharing among agencies, a stepped-up commitment to so-called human intelligence--recruitment of spies--and shoring up of the NSA’s ability to translate the millions of electronic communications it intercepts.

Nevertheless, an aide familiar with the document said that even if every recommendation in the report had been put in place, “the authors could not conclude that Sept. 11 could have been prevented.”

The ranking members of the subcommittee that produced the report are Reps. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and Jane Harman (D-Venice).

The subcommittee’s work is separate from a much larger investigation of intelligence failures being conducted jointly by the House and Senate intelligence committees. That ongoing effort--scheduled to be completed by early next year--involves a staff of about 30 investigators who are reviewing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents obtained from the CIA, the FBI and other agencies. The House subcommittee had no such access to agency documents or investigative resources.

Many of the subcommittee’s findings are likely to be disputed by top officials in the nation’s spy community. In congressional testimony earlier this year, CIA Director George J. Tenet insisted that there was no intelligence failure leading up to Sept. 11, and he and other top intelligence officials have said that they have been pursuing Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations aggressively for years.

The subcommittee’s report acknowledges that intelligence officials had recognized Al Qaeda as an important target. In fact, it cites notes from a meeting of intelligence officials three years before last fall’s deadly attacks in which the officials warn that unless there were substantial improvements in the way counter-terrorism data were collected and analyzed, a “catastrophic” attack on American soil was all but inevitable.

The officials involved in the meeting are not identified in the report, the congressional source said.

The inclusion of the impromptu minutes from that meeting was a source of some partisan friction within the Republican-led panel, with some Democrats concerned that it was included at least in part to connect problems in the intelligence community back to the Clinton administration.

The report generally concludes that whatever improvements came of that Sept. 11, 1998, meeting were inadequate.

The report also makes mention of another classified document, which warns that Osama bin Laden would probably pose a long-term threat to the United States, as an example of the vague and therefore relatively useless alarms that the intelligence community routinely sounded.

The report chastises intelligence agencies for devoting far too much of their resources to padding agency bureaucracies at the expense of collecting information.