Date: September 1, 2005 5:29:23 AM PDT
Subject: [Spy News] Assigning Blame
Assigning Blame
A top-secret CIA report recommends that an accountability board review
ex-director George Tenet’s dealings with the National Security Agency prior
to 9/11.
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 7:28 p.m. ET Aug. 31, 2005
Aug. 31, 2005 - As the Bush administration makes plans to commemorate the
fourth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a newly delivered report by
the CIA's inspector general on pre-9/11 intelligence lapses has created a
series of awkward dilemmas for senior intelligence officials.
The still-top-secret CIA report goes beyond one released last year by the
9/11 Commission in sharply criticizing the agency’s performance. It
recommends that a number of current and former senior officials be held
accountable for purported intelligence lapses that preceded the attacks.
One of the report’s most controversial recommendations, NEWSWEEK has
learned, is that an agency “accountability board” be specifically convened
to determine if former CIA director George Tenet should be rebuked on at
least one issue: whether, as overall chief of the U.S. intelligence
community, he failed to sort out disputes between the hypersecretive
National Security Agency and the CIA relating to the collection and sharing
of intelligence on Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda leadership, according to
a former U.S. intelligence community official who has read the report but
who declined to be identified because it is still classified.
That recommendation is particularly sensitive. It puts current CIA Director
Porter Goss in the extraordinary position of having to decide whether to
initiate a formal inquiry into the job performance of his predecessor, who
was such a White House favorite that President Bush pinned a Medal of
Freedom on Tenet after his retirement from the CIA. Tenet currently has no
public comment on the new report, according to a close associate who asked
not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter. Paul
Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said that the agency had "no comment on the
substance of a highly classified document."
The issue at the heart of the Tenet matter—the role in the intelligence
community of the NSA, which eavesdrops on telecommunications through a
sophisticated worldwide electronic-monitoring network—also inevitably raises
questions about the NSA’s former director, Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who has
since been named by Bush to be principal deputy to the new director of
national intelligence, John Negroponte. A spokesman for Hayden's office
declined to comment on the CIA document.
The long-awaited CIA report—and its tough criticisms—have been roiling the
U.S. intelligence community at least since last fall when, according to
several accounts, Inspector General John Helgerson's office finished
drafting it and sent it forward to Goss. But the CIA didn't deliver the
document to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees—which had asked the
CIA to conduct an internal review in response to Congress's own 9/11
inquiry—until last week. Intelligence officials say the delay was necessary
in order to give current and former officials an opportunity to respond to
the report's contentious contents.
In Tenet’s case, some portions of the report were modified after the former
director provided a detailed rebuttal to the inspector general. But
Helgerson’s critique retained many other criticisms, most of which appear to
revolve around the level of attention that Tenet and other top CIA officials
devoted to tracking bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda.
Friends and former associates of Tenet have long argued that no agency in
the U.S. government devoted more time and attention to Al Qaeda than the CIA
while Tenet was in charge. In the months prior to 9/11, Tenet was so
outspoken in warning about the possibility of an Al Qaeda attack that he was
described by former White House aide Richard Clarke as having his “hair on
fire” when he briefed national-security adviser Condoleeza Rice in June
2001.
But questions about Tenet’s leadership and follow-through were raised both
by congressional investigations of 9/11 and last year’s 9/11 Commission
inquiry. The commission's report concluded that, while Tenet famously issued
a “We are at war” directive against Al Qaeda on Dec. 4, 1998, and ordered
that “no resources or people [be] spared” in the effort, the memorandum had
little impact on the overall U.S. intelligence community. It was sent only
to CIA officials—not other U.S. intelligence agencies that Tenet, as
director of central intelligence, had overall responsibility for
supervising. According to the 9/11 Commission, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan,
then the NSA's director, didn’t believe Tenet's directive applied to NSA
because no one had informed him of any shortcomings by his agency.
Story continues below ?
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The former U.S. intelligence official who has reviewed the report said that
the narrow issue upon which the inspector general recommends that Tenet be
held accountable relates to his dealings with the NSA, including how much of
the agency’s electronic eavesdropping resources were devoted to the fight
against Al Qaeda. The official said the issue was a longstanding one because
most NSA-operated spy satellites had historically been targeted on cold-war
targets; there were persistent debates during the late 1990s about how much
of the agency’s resources were needed to direct toward the emerging threat
of Al Qaeda—and how much of its raw signals intelligence, or “sigint,” could
be shared with other agencies of the government.
NSA traditionally has been ultraprotective of its raw sigint intercepts
because it fears that any leakage of information about what targets the
agency is monitoring will lead to those targets changing their encryption
methods—which NSA spends billions to try and break—or communications
systems. The NSA also was very concerned before 9/11 about adhering to legal
restrictions that barred it from collecting or sharing intelligence on “U.S.
persons,” including resident aliens inside the U.S. or possibly even
foreigners with U.S. visas who may have been identified as potential Al
Qaeda operatives. Indeed, in congressional testimony in April 2000, NSA head
General Hayden made clear that he did not believe his agency had any
authority to collect sigint about any Al Qaeda figure if that person were to
enter the United States.
“If, as we are speaking this afternoon, Osama bin Laden is walking across
the Peace Bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario, to Niagara Falls, N.Y., as he
gets to the New York side, he is an American person and my agency must
respect his rights against unreasonable search and seizure as provided by
the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution,” Hayden said in a April 12, 2000,
appearance before the House Intelligence Committee.
Ironically, some of the same issues—the U.S. military’s authority to collect
intel on persons inside the United States—have been central to the recent
controversy over Able Danger, a Pentagon data-mining project that some
former Defense Department officials claim had identified lead 9/11 hijacker
Muhammad Atta as a potential member of a “Brooklyn cell” for Al Qaeda prior
to the attacks. While there is no hard evidence to support claims by Able
Danger participants that they had identified Atta prior to the attacks—and
Pentagon officials have disputed the claim—officials have acknowledged that
there were concerns that the Able Danger program was skirting the law in
collecting intel on persons inside the United States.
The criticisms of Tenet in the CIA inspector general's report respond
directly to a finding in a December 2002 report on 9/11 by the joint House
and Senate Intelligence Committees that concluded that there were
“persistent problems” in utilizing new technologies in the war against Al
Qaeda, marked by a “lack of collaboration” between U.S. intelligence
agencies and a “reluctance to develop and implement new technical
capabilities.” The public version of that report did not delve into any
detail about the disputes between the CIA and NSA, however.
The congressional report also called for U.S. intelligence and
law-enforcement-community officials to be held accountable for their
failures—a conclusion that is a particularly awkward one for Goss. As
chairman of the House Intelligence Committee at the time of the
congressional 9/11 investigation, Goss signed off on the call for
accountability at the CIA and other agencies. Now, as CIA director, he is in
a position to be make that happen by convening "accountability
boards"—committees comprised of senior CIA executives—not just for Tenet but
for other former senior officials criticized by the CIA inspector general,
as well. But many CIA officials and former colleagues of Tenet and former
CIA operations chief James Pavitt argue such boards would be pointless at
this point, serving no purpose other than to embarrass public servants who
served their country honorably, if imperfectly, or to mire in red tape
lower-level officials who are still trying to fight the administration's
global fight against terrorism.
Tenet’s friends hope the inspector general's report, which they view as
flawed, simply fades away. But that is not likely to happen because, at a
minimum, pressure from the 9/11 families and others for the CIA to release a
public, declassified version is likely to mount. Congressional sources said
that Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas
Republican, has already sent a letter to the agency requesting that the
document be declassified. A spokesman for the House Intelligence Committee
said that the panel’s chairman, Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan,
and ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harmon of California, are likely to sign a
letter in the next few days also requesting that the CIA issue a public
version of the report—one more postscript on the events of 9/11.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.
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