Ashcroft’s striking lack of interest in fighting terrorism was made astonishingly clear to Pickard in other ways in the months before 9/11. In an early-summer conversation with the attorney general, Pickard told Ashcroft that chatter picked up by the CIA about possible attacks was very strong. Ashcroft told him then he was not interested in hearing about terrorism. On July 12, Pickard met with Ashcroft with the goal of convincing him that terrorism was a serious threat that needed his attention, not to mention the critical attention of the bureau. “We’re at a very high level of chatter that something big is about to happen,” Pickard later recalled telling the attorney general that day. “The CIA is very alarmed.” At that point, Ashcroft interrupted him: “I don’t want to hear about that anymore. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
Feeling a desperate need to convince Ashcroft of the urgency posed by terrorism, Pickard continued to try to press his case. As he did, Ashcroft jumped to his feet and angrily told him, “I don’t want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about these threats. I don’t want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore.”
After 9/11, Ashcroft sang a different tune. What he had insisted Pickard not discuss, he now demanded the FBI turn its full attention to: “This must not happen again.”
BY THE TIME the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, known as the 9/11 Commission, issued its final report in July 2004, Mueller had saved the FBI. He succeeded in convincing the commission that the bureau should remain intact and continue to be responsible for domestic intelligence gathering. Congress also stopped demanding that the bureau should forfeit that major function. The commission, in fact, had harsh words for Congress. In the years before 9/11, the commissioners concluded, congressional oversight of intelligence and counterterrorism issues had become “dysfunctional” and divided among too many congressional committees. The legislators were urged to take their oversight responsibility more seriously, to conduct “robust oversight.”
Though Mueller had saved the bureau from being gutted, it was unclear if he was succeeding in transforming it in ways that would make it possible for the FBI to meet the demand that it prevent another attack. Even under the best of internal circumstances, the bureau could not, of course, guarantee that it meet that demand. The pressure to do so was enormous. Every tip that streamed in was supposed to be followed, no matter how insignificant some of them seemed. The fear of missing a big one was agonizing. One FBI official at headquarters shot himself to death at home after receiving an alarming call in the middle of the night from an agent in New York.
In the midst of Mueller’s efforts to transform the bureau, evidence emerged that the bureau had indeed missed clues that, if followed, might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. Information that the average person, let alone a counterterrorism agent, might regard as a blinking red light had not led to investigations. Crucial information had not been communicated from one intelligence agency to another, despite, in at least one instance, an FBI agent assigned to the CIA formally requesting CIA permission to provide crucial information to counterterrorism specialists at the FBI. Inexplicably, he was denied permission. Even more unexplainable, counterterrorism officials at the FBI failed to communicate some crucial information about potential terrorist threats to one another, and sometimes did not communicate it to the acting director, Pickard, despite his known priority regarding such threats.
The bureau’s pre-9/11 failures came to public attention most forcefully in June 2002, when Coleen Rowley, a longtime FBI agent and a lawyer in the bureau’s Minneapolis office, testified in Congress about the refusal of officials at FBI headquarters in August 2001 to seek the judicial emergency search warrant Minneapolis agents formally requested in order to search the laptop and other possessions of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born man who had been arrested in Minnesota for overstaying his visa after he finished a course in flying commercial jetliners at a local flight school. From discussions with European intelligence agencies, Harry Samit, an agent in the Minneapolis office, learned that Moussaoui was a recruiter for a Muslim extremist allied with Osama bin Laden. That information, combined with knowing that Moussaoui recently had paid $8,600 in cash for his flight training, alarmed Samit about the threat Moussaoui might pose. He thought it was imperative to review the files on Moussaoui’s computer as soon as possible. With a sense of growing urgency, he and Rowley made repeated attempts to get the necessary warrant. Each time counterterrorism officials at headquarters refused their request, seeming not to take Samit and Rowley’s concerns seriously. They were turned down again early the morning of September 11. After the fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11, counterterrorism officials at headquarters relented and obtained the warrant that made it possible for Minneapolis agents to inspect Moussaoui’s belongings.
Their suspicions had been justified. On his computer they found, among other information of interest, the German phone number for the roommate of Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the 9/11 plot. They also learned that Moussaoui was the paymaster for the 9/11 hijackers. Moussaoui later pled guilty to conspiring in the 9/11 plot and was sentenced to life in prison. He is the only person who has been tried in a U.S. court on charges of involvement in the September 11 attacks.
In that instance, it was not simply a matter of the bureau not connecting the dots, a criticism that has been leveled against it many times since 9/11. It was a matter of officials at bureau headquarters not listening to the warnings of agents who did connect dots and who repeatedly tried to push through the inertia at Washington headquarters to avert the tragedy they feared might happen. Years later, the Minneapolis agents continued to think of the failure to get permission to investigate Moussaoui earlier as what former New York Times reporter Philip Shenon later called “the terrible missed chance.”
In her testimony before a Senate committee in June 2002, and in an earlier letter to Mueller, Rowley criticized his public claim after September 11 that the bureau had known nothing before September 11 that could have prevented the attacks that day. He stopped making that claim.
That extreme example from the Minneapolis field office, as well as other pre-9/11 missed opportunities, illustrate Mueller’s challenge as he set out to reinvent the FBI. The challenge was complicated not only by continuing emergency circumstances that put the bureau under great pressure, but also by haunting mistakes during the recent past and by ingrained habits from the more distant past. As Shenon concluded in his 2008 book The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation,
“The problem was mostly with the agency’s sclerotic, hierarchical bureaucracy in Washington—at its core, unchanged since the days of J. Edgar Hoover—as well as the FBI’s unmatched arrogance in dealing with other government agencies.”
That analysis was reflected in an investigation of the bureau’s pre-9/11 failures by Glenn Fine, the Department of Justice inspector general. He found “significant deficiencies in the way the FBI handled these issues.” The FBI, he reported, was stymied by bureaucratic obstacles, communication breakdowns, and a lack of urgency. His investigation confirmed that before 9/11 crucial warnings related to possible future terrorist attacks were not acted on. When his report was released, Fine told a reporter he did not “believe it was misconduct on the part of the individuals so much as systemic problems” at the bureau.
While part of the bureau struggled to adapt to the new mandate, the part of the bureau that relies on street agents and informers easily slipped into old Hoover-era habits that were first exposed by the Media burglars, habits that may never have been lost. Unproductive and invasive investigative methods from the Hoover era, such as closely monitoring nonviolent antiwar protesters, were dusted off. An inspector general’s investigation found that FBI officials had made false and misleading statements to Congress in 2002 about the fact that it had placed under investigation several organizations because they opposed the war in Iraq. The groups included pacifist organizations—the Catholic Worker movement, the Thomas Mert
on Center, and the American Friends Service Committee. In the aftermath of 9/11, such protesters were classified as terrorists.
In some parts of the country, mosques were infiltrated by a greatly expanded army of FBI informers, many with the misunderstanding—one actually taught in FBI workshops for a while after 9/11—that most Muslims should be regarded with suspicion and therefore as investigative targets in the effort to prevent another 9/11. Instead of focusing on developing truly knowledgeable sources in Muslim communities, some bureau officials followed what had proven in the past to be an easy but usually time-absorbing, unproductive, and invasive investigative method—blanket surveillance. Muslim communities, including the congregations of some mosques, were saturated with surveillance without regard for whether a given mosque was known as a place where radical jihadists gathered to plot future attacks. The use of such methods also is evidence that the FBI’s historic difficulty in understanding other cultures has persisted at a time when such understanding has been perhaps more important than at any time in the bureau’s history.
The expanded use of invasive surveillance was made possible by the passage, shortly after 9/11, of the Patriot Act, which considerably loosened restraints on the FBI. As the Bush administration was about to leave office, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, a former federal judge in New York, issued new attorney general guidelines for the FBI. As of his rewriting of the guidelines, first put in place in 1976 by Attorney General Levi and modified repeatedly since then, the FBI could operate with even fewer restrictions. Agents could target individuals without a clear basis for suspecting they were planning a crime. Mukasey validated the casting of wide nets that pulled people into investigations on the basis of their race, religion, or political activities, as long as they met any additional criteria that drew suspicion. It was widely assumed that Eric Holder, attorney general in the Obama administration, would revise Mukasey’s FBI guidelines and restore some of the restrictions. Instead, the Obama administration loosened some FBI guidelines more. It also deepened secrecy about national security policies and practices, including secrecy about policies and laws governing its greatly increased use overseas of unmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists and conduct surveillance.
AS THE BUREAU STRUGGLED to transform itself after 9/11, it was forced to embrace new methods and new tools in order to fulfill its greatly expanded intelligence-gathering mission. New data collection and analysis systems were installed. The new equipment and data systems were to be used by agents who, because of wrongheaded decisions by directors in the 1980s and 1990s, had little familiarity with even minimal computer use. The computers in their offices were so old that agents could not send or receive email, and they could not do basic research of bureau files from their computers, let alone conduct searches on the Internet. Millions of dollars were spent on failed attempts to update and integrate the bureau’s computer systems.
Current technology was not the only important element missing at the FBI in 2001. So were crucial language skills. Thousands of hours of Arabic-language phone conversations recorded by the bureau before the 9/11 attacks had not been translated because the bureau had few translators who understood Arabic.
By three years after 9/11, a report by the inspector general revealed that so many recordings believed to be relevant to terrorism had not been translated that, as Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican from Iowa, said at the time, the FBI was still drowning in information about terrorism activities. Even with a great increase in the number of translators of Arabic, Farsi, and other languages, the influx of new material from wiretaps and other intelligence sources vastly outpaced the bureau’s translation capacity. By 2004, more than 123,000 hours of audio recordings collected since 9/11 in languages associated with terrorism had not yet been translated. For all languages, nearly half a million hours of audiotapes, or 30 percent of what had been collected since 9/11, had not been translated. A bureau rule required that audio recordings directly related to active al-Qaeda investigations be transcribed within twelve hours of interception, but because of the backlog, such transcriptions routinely were not made until at least a month after they were recorded. Computer problems also aggravated the translation problems. Without FBI officials realizing it, as computer drives filled with recordings to be translated, older recordings, including many that had not been translated, were automatically deleted, never to be heard. In an understatement, the inspector general’s report said the bureau faced “significant management challenges” in developing quick and accurate translations.
The bureau got more money, more agents, more informers, more translators, more analysts, more computers, and much, much more data to use in its effort to prevent another terrorist attack—an effort that by now has continued for more than a decade.
As this growth took place, the bureau became part of the vastly expanded national security system that has burgeoned since 9/11 in government and private industry, a system that Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William M. Arkin call “Top Secret America.” In their series and book based on their extensive examination of the expansion and quality of the nation’s security system a decade after 9/11, they concluded that “the top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, had become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
The influx of information became enormous. Priest and Arkin reported in 2011 that the National Security Agency, the government’s major surveillance system, “now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every twenty-four hours—telephone calls, radio signals, cell phone conversations, emails, text and Twitter messages, bulletin board postings, instant messages, website changes, computer network pings, and IP addresses.”
As large digital haystacks have grown in the FBI—and in other intelligence agencies—from a constant inward rush of new data from collection systems, other government agencies, and private industry, so has frustration about developing the capacity to extract valuable information from these digital haystacks. The increasing flow of data, and consequent greater demand to analyze data, was developed to increase the capacity of the bureau to discover and piece together crucial information that, if acted upon, might prevent another attack. But some people question whether that endless flow may instead decrease the bureau’s capacity to succeed at that task. The sheer volume is overwhelming at times, much of it duplicative and much of it ignored or never seen. A system meant to send alerts to its users often instead produces a numbing effect.
Assessing the impact of the volume of undifferentiated information intelligence agencies receive daily, Richard Clarke, who served as chief counterterrorism adviser on the National Security Council under both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, said in a 2013 interview, “More is good. A hell of a lot more can be bad.”
THERE HAVE BEEN alarming signs that the systems put in place have not worked well at crucial times. For instance, available clues were not connected, or were not taken seriously, in two major attacks, one that happened and one that failed—the rampage shootings by an Army psychiatrist at Fort Hood that resulted in the deaths of thirteen people, and the failed attempt by a Nigerian radical, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to bomb Detroit as the commercial jet in which he was a passenger landed there on Christmas Day 2009. In the latter case, the would-be attacker’s father had informed officials at the American embassy in Lagos, Nigeria, about his son’s radicalization and interest in attacking the United States. In the end, no steps were taken to prevent him from entering the country. His effort to bomb Detroit failed because he was tackled by a passenger who observed the man trying to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. Explicit information about the Christmas bomber’s plans was missed, Priest and Arkin reported, because, as an official admitted to them, “the system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility
had become hopelessly blurred.” As far as the FBI was concerned, the information in its own files about Abdulmutallab was a secret—a secret that was inaccessible to the FBI.
After the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the handling of the failed Detroit bombing, it issued a report that was a sweeping indictment. The problems included failure of agents to communicate with one another as well as mistakes in computer programing. A counterterrorism analyst at the FBI never received relevant information sent to her about Abdulmutallab because the incorrect configuration of her computer profile blocked reception of the information. Commenting on the glitches that prevented intelligence agencies from stopping the Christmas bomber before he nearly succeeded, former Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican from Missouri, then the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, summarized the persisting problem:
“We cannot depend on dumb luck, incompetent terrorists and alert citizens to keep our families safe.”
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