9/11: The War on Terror (Ep 6)

The Rest Is Classified

In the final episode of their six-part series on 9/11, David McCloskey and Gordon Carrera examine the intelligence failures leading up to the

Key takeaways

• The primary intelligence failure was a lack of penetration into Al-Qaeda's upper echelons, meaning no inside sources or reliable signals intercepts of senior leaders like Bin Laden or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
• Despite having some warning signs, the intelligence community failed to connect the dots due to organizational silos and poor inter-agency communication.

Main topics

• Intelligence failures before 9/11
• The role of organizational silos and inter-agency communication breakdowns

Notable quotes

"We failed to penetrate the plot. And that is not a failure of dot collecting or analysis. It's a collection failure."

"I felt like a junkyard dog which had been unleashed." – Kofa Black, CIA Counterterrorism Center head

Conclusion

Twenty-five years after the attacks, the episode concludes that while intelligence failures were real and

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:03) For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. Speaker 4 (0:24) Could 9-11 have been prevented? And if so, who was to blame for the intelligence failure? And what is the enduring impact 25 years on of that awful day on September the 11th, 2001? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera. And I'm David McCloskey. And David, this is the final episode in our six-part series on 9-11. We've gone through the day itself last time, but this time we're going to look at this really... Speaker 4 (0:54) important, and to some extent still argued over question, which is whether there was an intelligence failure and whether this could have been prevented. And then we're going to look at the legacy, the impact of that day. But first, a message from our sponsors, HP. 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To see how Speaker 4 (2:05) HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com forward slash classified. Trick listeners also benefit from 10 % off HP business technology with the code TRICK10. Speaker 1 (2:21) Before we dive into some of the big questions we're going to grapple with in this episode, you were covering... security and intelligence matters on 9-11 and spent a lot of time interacting with people in the security service. I mean, what was the feeling inside CIA in the immediate aftermath of the attacks? Speaker 4 (2:43) Well, there's always this question after any terrorist attack, actually, which is, did it come out of nowhere? Were these people on the radar? Could it have been prevented? I mean, that is always the question. We've talked about it in the context of... 7-7, the London attacks and the fact little bits were known about some of these attackers and therefore should it have been stopped? So that question almost always comes up straight away. I think though what was different about 9-11 was just the scale of it and the scale of the shock and the sense of what was at stake with that question, including politically for the Bush administration. What did they know? So it's always asked, but the intensity then was enormous. And it's interesting, I was going back and I was looking and I made a documentary about, I think, five years after 9-11 about the CIA. And I went and talked to people who'd been in the CIA at 9-11. It was fascinating to look back now at some of their comments because there were different views. I mean, I spoke to Kofa Black, who was the head of the Counterterrorism Center, and his attitude was like, after 9-11, I felt like a junkyard dog which had been unleashed. And so his attitude was like... Now, at last, we go get them. And that was the kind of gung-ho attitude. There was Mike Scheuer. We've talked about him. He'd been head of Alex Station, the team after Bin Laden in the 90s. I interviewed him and asked him, what did I feel like? And he could remember this moment. He'd moved on from that job. He had a call from a friend who was still working on Bin Laden and said, turn on the television. And his attitude was, hell, we could have stopped this and we didn't. And we... the CIA are going to take the blame when in his view it was the politicians' fault. We can come back to that. And then there was a third CIA officer I talked to, Melissa Marley, and she said she remembers this sense of shock in the place and an immediate sense of failure. And she says she felt a sense of failure because there had been opportunities to stop bin Laden and that that was the job of the CIA and hadn't succeeded at it. And she felt that even when Tenet... address staff in the auditorium the next day, she felt like that question was hanging in the air unacknowledged. Should we, could we have stopped this? Speaker 3 (4:54) So Speaker 4 (4:54) I think even in that, in three interviews, you got three very different perspectives about the intelligence failure and the questions about had something gone wrong? And if so, who was to blame? Speaker 1 (5:04) Maybe first to the issue of the intelligence failure. It's a big question. What is the nature of the intelligence failure here? So I think there has been a lot of ink spilled. on this question in the last 25 years. We have the 9-11 Commission. We have a book by the intelligence scholar Amy Zegart called Spying Blind. Bob Graham, the senator who chaired the congressional inquiry into 9-11, wrote a book called Intelligence Matters, which gets at this question. We also have the recollections of those inside the intelligence community. Michael Scheuer's memoir, Richard Clark, who'd been counterterrorism director at the White House. George Tenet, the CIA director, Michael Morrell. So we have a lot of different perspectives on the nature of the failure. And I think the perhaps most obvious, but I would argue most important place to start, and it is a piece of the failure conversation, is that the American intelligence community in the late 1990s failed to penetrate the upper echelons of Al-Qaeda. We failed to have well-placed sources or signals intelligence intercepts of al-Qaeda senior leadership in the run-up to the 9-11 attack. And we did not penetrate the plot. Speaker 2 (6:23) Yeah. Speaker 1 (6:24) We did not penetrate the plot. And that is not a failure of dot collecting or analysis. It's a collection failure that I think, obviously, I start sort of upstream because... if you had that, 9-11 would have been prevented. Totally. Clearly. If you're inside the Speaker 4 (6:44) operational planning, if you had the kind of intelligence we've talked about when Russia was going to invade Ukraine, where you know what the plan is and you know when it's going to come, in the case of counterterrorism, you can disrupt it. Well, like Operation Overt Speaker 1 (6:57) here with MI5, they were inside the airliner plot Speaker 4 (7:00) and Speaker 1 (7:01) it Speaker 4 (7:02) stopped it. I mean, we talked about how tightly held the planning was. So the truth is you would have needed someone around bin Laden, around Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, an agent that the CIA had recruited or MI6 or a partner, or you'd have needed signals intercept of them. or some kind of maybe technical bugging surveillance operation in Afghanistan to get it. Which actually, realistically, now that we're talking about it, Speaker 1 (7:27) the SIGINT is- It's harder. You probably wouldn't have been able to break up the plot because these guys were not speaking in- anything other than code over the phone and they were using human couriers for the most sensitive Speaker 4 (7:40) - I Speaker 1 (7:40) mean, Bin Speaker 4 (7:40) Laden had used a satellite phone until around 98, then news of it leaks and he stops using it. So you're right, you'd have needed that agent at the top. So there is a kind of question if you go upstream, as you say, which is, well, why didn't they have that or should they have done that? When we did our series on the coast bombing, which Speaker 2 (8:00) was this Speaker 4 (8:01) Al Speaker 1 (8:01) -Qaeda agent who ends up killing himself and seven other CIA officers at Coast Afghanistan in 2009. We talked in the wash up for that episode about how when these failures happen, it's kind of like a plane crash where there's a lot of different stuff that goes wrong, right? And you can point to a lot of structural and organizational factors that feed into the intelligence failure. So they're not the most proximate cause or the sexiest things to talk about, but they do play into... the nature of the intelligence failure. And when the 9-11 Commission produced its report, it organized these failures into four categories. It said there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. And I leave management last because it's kind of the operational side of things, and we'll come to that in a moment. Let's Speaker 4 (8:54) start with Speaker 1 (8:54) imagination. Speaker 4 (8:55) It's Speaker 1 (8:55) a Speaker 4 (8:55) weird one. This is a weird one because that became the big thing. I remember from the 9-11 commission, which was a failure of imagination to imagine that Al Qaeda could do this. Yeah. I mean, the idea you want intelligence as well as imagination, Speaker 1 (9:07) don't you? Speaker 4 (9:08) I don't know. Speaker 1 (9:08) I've always found the line to be a bit galling, to be honest with you, because they bring up a good point, which is that this kind of attack. was not entirely unprecedented. I mean, you had the USS Cole bombing the year before. You have Hezbollah in Lebanon using suicide truck bombs. So, you know, the commission's not entirely wrong that perhaps there could have been more clarity that this was a tactic that al-Qaeda could have used against the U.S. But the reason I find the line to be a bit of a throwaway is that it makes it sound like... national security bureaucracies or spy services need to somehow develop plans to stop all manner of potential hypothetical plots. Speaker 3 (9:56) To Speaker 1 (9:56) me, it feels less like a failure of imagination and more like a failure to actually crack open a plot by having a well-placed source inside Al-Qaeda or, as we'll come to, finding bits and pieces of the operation along the way and linking them together and then unraveling it that way. Speaker 4 (10:15) It's less a failure of imagination than a kind of failure of illumination to illuminate the plot. Speaker 1 (10:20) Yeah, that's Speaker 4 (10:21) right. Speaker 1 (10:21) Now, failure of capabilities, we talked about how starved the American intelligence community was throughout the 1990s. For resources, a lot of the workforce had gone away. I mean, again, it's a deep structural thing that I think does play a role in 9-11. There's an organizational problem, which we'll come to in more detail on the way the CIA and the FBI interact with one another, that does, I think, directly feed in to the failure on 9-11, which is that these two agencies were not particularly good at sharing information with each other. And it meant that in a world where... Speaker 1 (11:00) transnational terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, who are, you know, moving people essentially from a foreign theater into the US, it creates an incredible awkwardness and difficulty for a domestic, essentially law enforcement agency like the FBI, and a foreign intelligence service like the CIA to collaborate. They have different cultures, you know, different tribes, essentially, that do complicate. a fight like counterterrorism. Speaker 4 (11:25) Yeah. And there's issues around information sharing about the wall between law enforcement information and intelligence. So I think that is a, you know, it's a kind of capabilities, a culture, an issue. One Speaker 2 (11:37) of the things that's Speaker 4 (11:37) not there is whether, because I guess the Mike Scheuer point he made to me was that this was a political failure, which I'm not sure the 9-11... commission's categories quite fit into that. But his argument would be... It's policy. It's policy because the White House weren't willing to take the risks to put in place some of those plans to go after bin Laden before 2001. And in 2001, the Bush administration was not really focusing on counterterrorism in the way that some people thought it should. So there's a kind of policy political question behind it, which... I Speaker 1 (12:14) think Speaker 4 (12:14) that's valid. Speaker 1 (12:15) I think it's valid. Speaker 4 (12:16) The Speaker 1 (12:16) CIA didn't think it had the authorities, the covert action authorities, to go and kill bin Laden until the 17th of September, 2001. Speaker 2 (12:25) Yeah. Speaker 1 (12:26) When it gets a finding that is perhaps the most aggressive possible covert action finding you could receive. And that feeds Kofor Black's- Kofor Speaker 4 (12:34) Black famously goes Speaker 1 (12:35) - I'm a Speaker 4 (12:35) junkyard Speaker 1 (12:35) dog who's off the leash. Speaker 4 (12:37) Yeah. And he famously goes and tells Gary Shrun, who he's sending to Afghanistan, I want you to bring me- back bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice. Speaker 1 (12:45) So Speaker 4 (12:45) suddenly, now you can go kill him. Speaker 1 (12:47) Covert action is policy. So the failure of policy here via the covert action mechanism at the CIA is that you did have opportunities. I mean, there's a famous opportunity in the late 1990s where the CIA knows that bin Laden is attending a meeting. They know in advance. And he's attending a meeting with essentially, I believe it's Emirati- Sheikhs. Sheikhs. Potential financiers. And the decision is made to not fire a cruise missile at Speaker 4 (13:24) that meeting. Speaker 1 (13:24) Because you're going to kill the Speaker 4 (13:25) Emirati Sheikhs. Because you're going to Speaker 1 (13:26) kill these Sheikhs. Speaker 4 (13:27) Yeah. Speaker 1 (13:27) Now, you could argue, tell your blue in