The Case for Smart Intelligence

Calls to make it easier for intelligence agencies to spy on US citizens and visitors have emerged with disturbing regularity in the wake of September 11. The myth underlying the rush to usher in a new era of domestic surveillance suggests that if only Congress had not unwisely "shackled" these agencies with well intentioned reforms that limited their ability to collect information, the Pentagon might have five sides and the twin towers would still stand proudly in lower Manhattan's skyline.

It's becoming increasingly clear, however, that September's intelligence failure stemmed not from the inability to collect data, but from law enforcement's inability to analyze and act on information already in hand.

This view cannot be dismissed as partisan carping, because many of the calls for institutional reform have come from Republican senators responsible for oversight of the services, and from veterans of the services themselves. A careful read of military trade publications, mainstream and conservative dailies and news networks clearly indicates that the security establishment should have been aware that terrorists were planning to target urban icons with hijacked commercial airliners, and that efforts to track and apprehend suspects were hampered by bureaucratic paralysis rather than too few clues.

Intelligence lapses are not new -- they date back at least to the Truman administration, when the CIA was organized and shortly thereafter embarrassed by the surprise explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949. Sidetracked by national revolutions, assassination plots, UFOs, LSD experiments and allegations of abetting crack dealers, the Cold War-era agency was sufficiently distracted from its primary function of intelligence gathering and analysis to leave America's leaders ill prepared for such events as the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, and the invasion of Kuwait.

FBI effectiveness during the 1960s and 1970s was similarly compromised by political and personal agendas. (The war against Black nationalists and Vietnam War opponents and J. Edgar Hoover's obsession with bedroom snooping come to mind.) The post-Hoover FBI has made efforts to transform and professionalize itself, but can't seem to free itself from persistent scandals and outdated systems.

Despite recent embarrassments like misplacing 3,135 pages of evidence from the McVeigh case and employing a Russian spy in its highest ranks, the FBI will likely continue lobbying for a vote of confidence to allow it to scan in-transit email for keywords and provide it with back doors to encrypted communications. The idea that the FBI can prevent terrorist attacks if allowed to collect more information about more people is not supported by post-Sept. 11 disclosures. In fact, information about at least some of the hijackers was in its hands prior to the attacks, and with some old fashioned shoe leather and a check of vehicle records, credit files and flight bookings, it might have been able to stop at least some of the terrorists from boarding their flights.

The attackers' methodology should not have come as a surprise. America's security establishment ignored repeated signals that international terrorists were planning to use commercial passenger jets as explosive devices against high profile targets.

* Gerald Carmen, a Reagan-era government official, wrote in the Washington Times, "I recall discussions on the threat of terrorism and the possibility of hijacked planes being used as weapons. This threat was recognized 20 years ago or longer."

* In 1986, American officials were aware of a thwarted plan by Hezbollah terrorists to blow up a hijacked Pan Am flight over Tel Aviv.

* In December 1994 French paratroopers stormed a hijacked Air France airliner after learning that the bin Laden-linked Algerian Groupe Armee Islamique planned to crash the Airbus A-300, full of fuel and dynamite, into the Eiffel Tower.