2.
Of the many postmortems conducted after September 11, the one that has received the most attention is The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the F.B.I. and C.I.A. Failed to Stop It by John Miller, Michael Stone, and Chris Mitchell. The authors begin their tale with El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian who was arrested in November of 1990 for shooting Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, in the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel in midtown Manhattan. Nosair’s apartment in New Jersey was searched, and investigators found sixteen boxes of files, including training manuals from the Army Special Warfare School; copies of teletypes that had been routed to the Joint Chiefs of Staff; bomb-making manuals; and maps, annotated in Arabic, of landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, and the World Trade Center. According to The Cell, Nosair was connected to gunrunners and to Islamic radicals in Brooklyn, who were in turn behind the World Trade Center bombing two and a half years later, which was masterminded by Ramzi Yousef, who then showed up in Manila in 1994, apparently plotting to kill the pope, crash a plane into the Pentagon or the CIA, and bomb as many as twelve transcontinental airliners simultaneously. And who was Yousef associating with in the Philippines? Mohammed Khalifa, Wali Khan Amin-Shah, and Ibrahim Munir, all of whom had fought alongside, pledged a loyalty oath to, or worked for a shadowy Saudi Arabian millionaire named Osama bin Laden.
Miller was a network-television correspondent throughout much of the past decade, and the best parts of The Cell recount his own experiences in covering the terrorist story. He is an extraordinary reporter. At the time of the first World Trade Center attack, in February of 1993, he clapped a flashing light on the dashboard of his car and followed the wave of emergency vehicles downtown. (At the bombing site, he was continuously trailed by a knot of reporters — I was one of them — who had concluded that the best way to learn what was going on was to try to overhear his conversations.) Miller became friends with the FBI agents who headed the New York counterterrorist office — Neil Herman and John O’Neill, in particular — and he became as obsessed with Al Qaeda as they were. He was in Yemen, with the FBI, after Al Qaeda bombed the U.S.S. Cole. In 1998, at the Marriott in Islamabad, he and his cameraman met someone known to them only as Akhtar, who spirited them across the border into the hills of Afghanistan to interview Osama bin Laden. In The Cell, the period from 1990 through September 11 becomes a seamless, devastating narrative: the evolution of Al Qaeda. “How did this happen to us?” the book asks in its opening pages. The answer, the authors argue, can be found by following the “thread” connecting Kahane’s murder to September 11. In the events of the past decade, they declare, there is a clear “recurring pattern.”
The same argument is made by Senator Richard Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, in his investigative report on September 11, released this past December. The report is a lucid and powerful document, in which Shelby painstakingly points out all the missed or misinterpreted signals pointing to a major terrorist attack. The CIA knew that two suspected Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had entered the country, but the CIA didn’t tell the FBI or the NSC. An FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo to headquarters that began with the sentence “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama Bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civilian aviation universities and colleges.” But the FBI never acted on the information, and failed to connect it with reports that terrorists were interested in using airplanes as weapons. The FBI took into custody the suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, on account of his suspicious behavior at flight school, but was unable to integrate his case into a larger picture of terrorist behavior. “The most fundamental problem… is our Intelligence Community’s inability to ‘connect the dots’ available to it before September 11, 2001, about terrorists’ interest in attacking symbolic American targets,” the Shelby report states. The phrase “connect the dots” appears so often in the report that it becomes a kind of mantra. There was a pattern, as plain as day in retrospect, yet the vaunted American intelligence community simply could not see it.
None of these postmortems, however, answer the question raised by the Yom Kippur War: was this pattern obvious before the attack? This question — whether we revise our judgment of events after the fact — is something that psychologists have paid a great deal of attention to. For example, on the eve of Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China, the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff asked a group of people to estimate the probability of a series of possible outcomes of the trip. What were the chances that the trip would lead to permanent diplomatic relations between China and the United States? That Nixon would meet with the leader of China, Mao Tse-tung, at least once? That Nixon would call the trip a success? As it turned out, the trip was a diplomatic triumph, and Fischhoff then went back to the same people and asked them to recall what their estimates of the different outcomes of the visit had been. He found that the subjects now, overwhelmingly, “remembered” being more optimistic than they had actually been. If you originally thought that it was unlikely that Nixon would meet with Mao, afterward, when the press was full of accounts of Nixon’s meeting with Mao, you’d “remember” that you had thought the chances of a meeting were pretty good. Fischhoff calls this phenomenon “creeping determinism” — the sense that grows on us, in retrospect, that what has happened was actually inevitable — and the chief effect of creeping determinism, he points out, is that it turns unexpected events into expected events. As he writes, “The occurrence of an event increases its reconstructed probability and makes it less surprising than it would have been had the original probability been remembered.”
To read the Shelby report, or the seamless narrative from Nosair to bin Laden in The Cell, is to be convinced that if the CIA and the FBI had simply been able to connect the dots, what happened on September 11 should not have been a surprise at all. Is this a fair criticism or is it just a case of creeping determinism?
3.
On August 7, 1998, two Al Qaeda terrorists detonated a cargo truck filled with explosives outside the US embassy in Nairobi, killing 213 people and injuring more than four thousand. Miller, Stone, and Mitchell see the Kenyan embassy bombing as a textbook example of intelligence failure. The CIA, they tell us, had identified an Al Qaeda cell in Kenya well before the attack, and its members were under surveillance. They had an eight-page letter, written by an Al Qaeda operative, speaking of the imminent arrival of “engineers” — the code word for bomb makers — in Nairobi. The US ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, had begged Washington for more security. A prominent Kenyan lawyer and legislator says that the Kenyan intelligence service warned US intelligence about the plot several months before August 7, and in November of 1997 a man named Mustafa Mahmoud Said Ahmed, who worked for one of Osama bin Laden’s companies, walked into the US embassy in Nairobi and told American intelligence of a plot to blow up the building. What did our officials do? They forced the leader of the Kenyan cell — a US citizen — to return home, and then abruptly halted their surveillance of the group. They ignored the eight-page letter. They allegedly showed the Kenyan intelligence service’s warning to the Mossad, which dismissed it, and after questioning Ahmed, they decided that he wasn’t credible. After the bombing, The Cell tells us, a senior State Department official phoned Bushnell and asked, “How could this have happened?”
“For the first time since the blast,” Miller, Stone, and Mitchell write, “Bushnell’s horror turned to anger. There was too much history. ‘I wrote you a letter,’ she said.”
This is all very damning, but doesn’t it fall into the creeping-determinism trap? It is not at all clear that it passes the creeping-determinism test. It’s an edited version of the past. What we don’t hear about is all the other people whom American intelligence had under surveillance, how many other warnings they received, and how many other tips came in that seemed promising at the
time but led nowhere. The central challenge of intelligence gathering has always been the problem of “noise”: the fact that useless information is vastly more plentiful than useful information. Shelby’s report mentions that the FBI’s counterterrorism division has sixty-eight thousand outstanding and unassigned leads dating back to 1995. And, of those, probably no more than a few hundred are useful. Analysts, in short, must be selective, and the decisions made in Kenya, by that standard, do not seem unreasonable. Surveillance on the cell was shut down, but, then, its leader had left the country. Bushnell warned Washington — but, as The Cell admits, there were bomb warnings in Africa all the time. Officials at the Mossad thought the Kenyan intelligence was dubious, and the Mossad ought to know. Ahmed may have worked for bin Laden but he failed a polygraph test, and it was also learned that he had previously given similar — groundless — warnings to other embassies in Africa. When a man comes into your office, fails a lie-detector test, and is found to have shopped the same unsubstantiated story all over town, can you be blamed for turning him out?
Miller, Stone, and Mitchell make the same mistake when they quote from a transcript of a conversation that was recorded by Italian intelligence in August of 2001 between two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdel Kader Es Sayed and a man known as al Hilal. This, they say, is yet another piece of intelligence that “seemed to forecast the September 11 attacks.”
“I’ve been studying airplanes,” al Hilal tells Es Sayed. “If God wills, I hope to be able to bring you a window or a piece of a plane the next time I see you.”
“What, is there a jihad planned?” Es Sayed asks.
“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words: ‘Up above,’ ” al Hilal replies. Es Sayed thinks that al Hilal is referring to an operation in his native Yemen, but al Hilal corrects him: “But the surprise attack will come from the other country, one of those attacks you will never forget.”
A moment later al Hilal says about the plan, “It is something terrifying that goes from south to north, east to west. The person who devised this plan is a madman, but a genius. He will leave them frozen [in shock].”
This is a tantalizing exchange. It would now seem that it refers to September 11. But in what sense was it a “forecast”? It gave neither time nor place nor method nor target. It suggested only that there were terrorists out there who liked to talk about doing something dramatic with an airplane — which did not, it must be remembered, reliably distinguish them from any other terrorists of the past thirty years.
In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information that’s rich in detail tends to be short on intentions. In April of 1941, for instance, the Allies learned that Germany had moved a huge army up to the Russian front. The intelligence was beyond dispute: the troops could be seen and counted. But what did it mean? Churchill concluded that Hitler wanted to attack Russia. Stalin concluded that Hitler was serious about attacking, but only if the Soviet Union didn’t meet the terms of the German ultimatum. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, thought that Hitler was bluffing, in the hope of winning further Russian concessions. British intelligence thought — at least, in the beginning — that Hitler simply wanted to reinforce his eastern frontier against a possible Soviet attack. The only way for this piece of intelligence to have been definitive would have been if the Allies had had a second piece of intelligence — like the phone call between al Hilal and Es Sayed — that demonstrated Germany’s true purpose. Similarly, the only way the al Hilal phone call would have been definitive is if we’d also had intelligence as detailed as the Allied knowledge of German troop movements. But rarely do intelligence services have the luxury of both kinds of information. Nor are their analysts mind readers. It is only with hindsight that human beings acquire that skill.
The Cell tells us that, in the final months before September 11, Washington was frantic with worry:
A spike in phone traffic among suspected Al Qaeda members in the early part of the summer [of 2001], as well as debriefings of [an Al Qaeda operative in custody] who had begun cooperating with the government, convinced investigators that bin Laden was planning a significant operation — one intercepted Al Qaeda message spoke of a “Hiroshima-type” event — and that he was planning it soon. Through the summer, the CIA repeatedly warned the White House that attacks were imminent.
The fact that these worries did not protect us is not evidence of the limitations of the intelligence community. It is evidence of the limitations of intelligence.
4.
In the early 1970s, a professor of psychology at Stanford University named David L. Rosenhan gathered together a painter, a graduate student, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists. He told them to check into different psychiatric hospitals under aliases, with the complaint that they had been hearing voices. They were instructed to say that the voices were unfamiliar, and that they heard words like empty, thud, and hollow. Apart from that initial story, the pseudo patients were instructed to answer every question truthfully, to behave as they normally would, and to tell the hospital staff — at every opportunity — that the voices were gone and that they had experienced no further symptoms. The eight subjects were hospitalized, on average, for nineteen days. One was kept for almost two months. Rosenhan wanted to find out if the hospital staffs would ever see through the ruse. They never did.
Rosenhan’s test is, in a way, a classic intelligence problem. Here was a signal (a sane person) buried in a mountain of conflicting and confusing noise (a mental hospital), and the intelligence analysts (the doctors) were asked to connect the dots — and they failed spectacularly. In the course of their hospital stay, the eight pseudo patients were given a total of twenty-one hundred pills. They underwent psychiatric interviews, and sober case summaries documenting their pathologies were written up. They were asked by Rosenhan to take notes documenting how they were treated, and this quickly became part of their supposed pathology. “Patient engaging in writing behavior,” one nurse ominously wrote in her notes. Having been labeled as ill upon admission, they could not shake the diagnosis. “Nervous?” a friendly nurse asked one of the subjects as he paced the halls one day. “No,” he corrected her, to no avail, “bored.”
The solution to this problem seems obvious enough. Doctors and nurses need to be made alert to the possibility that sane people sometimes get admitted to mental hospitals. So Rosenhan went to a research-and-teaching hospital and informed the staff that at some point in the next three months, he would once again send over one or more of his pseudo patients. This time, of the 193 patients admitted in the three-month period, 41 were identified by at least one staff member as being almost certainly sane. Once again, however, they were wrong. Rosenhan hadn’t sent anyone over. In attempting to solve one kind of intelligence problem (overdiagnosis), the hospital simply created another problem (underdiagnosis). This is the second, and perhaps more serious, consequence of creeping determinism: in our zeal to correct what we believe to be the problems of the past, we end up creating new problems for the future.
Pearl Harbor, for example, was widely considered to be an organizational failure. The United States had all the evidence it needed to predict the Japanese attack, but the signals were scattered throughout the various intelligence services. The army and the navy didn’t talk to each other. They spent all their time arguing and competing. This was, in part, why the Central Intelligence Agency was created, in 1947 — to ensure that all intelligence would be collected and processed in one place. Twenty years after Pearl Harbor, the United States suffered another catastrophic intelligence failure, at the Bay of Pigs: the Kennedy administration grossly underestimated the Cubans’ capacity to fight and their support for Fidel Castro. This time, however, the diagnosis was completely different. As Irving L. Janis concluded in his famous study of “groupthink,” the root cause of the Bay of Pigs fiasco was that the operation was conceived by a small, highly
cohesive group whose close ties inhibited the beneficial effects of argument and competition. Centralization was now the problem. One of the most influential organizational sociologists of the postwar era, Harold Wilensky, went out of his way to praise the “constructive rivalry” fostered by Franklin D. Roosevelt, which, he says, is why the President had such formidable intelligence on how to attack the economic ills of the Great Depression. In his classic 1967 work Organizational Intelligence, Wilensky pointed out that Roosevelt would
use one anonymous informant’s information to challenge and check another’s, putting both on their toes; he recruited strong personalities and structured their work so that clashes would be certain.…In foreign affairs, he gave Moley and Welles tasks that overlapped those of Secretary of State Hull; in conservation and power, he gave Ickes and Wallace identical missions; in welfare, confusing both functions and initials, he assigned PWA to Ickes, WPA to Hopkins; in politics, Farley found himself competing with other political advisors for control over patronage. The effect: the timely advertisement of arguments, with both the experts and the President pressured to consider the main choices as they came boiling up from below.
The intelligence community that we had prior to September 11 was the direct result of this philosophy. The FBI and the CIA were supposed to be rivals, just as Ickes and Wallace were rivals. But now we’ve changed our minds. The FBI and the CIA, Senator Shelby tells us disapprovingly, argue and compete with one another. The September 11 story, his report concludes, “should be an object lesson in the perils of failing to share information promptly and efficiently between (and within) organizations.” Shelby wants recentralization and more focus on cooperation. He wants a “central national level knowledge-compiling entity standing above and independent from the disputatious bureaucracies.” He thinks the intelligence service should be run by a small, highly cohesive group, and so he suggests that the FBI be removed from the counterterrorism business entirely. The FBI, according to Shelby, is governed by
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