Bad Intelligence: America's History of Bungled Spying

On April 1, 2001, Oklahoma State Trooper C. L. Parkins stopped Nawaf Alhazmi, for speeding.

Alhazmi had a California license. Parkins ran it, as cops always do on a traffic stop. Nothing came back. He wrote Alhazmi two tickets totaling $138 and let him continue on his way.

What makes this event striking is that Alhazmi had been identified by the NSA in 1999 as associated with Al Qaeda. He had also been put on a Saudi terror watch list that year. In January 2000, he was photographed and videotaped at an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. A week later, on Jan, 15, he entered the United States. The CIA knew that he had a valid U.S. visa, and though they missed his arrival, they suspected he was here.

Both the NSA and the CIA knew Alhazmi was a terrorist.

But they failed to put him on U.S. terrorist watch lists. Nor did they alert the FBI, Customs and Immigration, and the host of other American police and enforcement agencies. So when Alhazmi flew to Yemen, because he was homesick, and then back to the United States, in June of 2000, no one stopped him. When he moved into the house of an FBI informant in Los Angeles, no one paid particular attention to him.

In May of 2001, he was attacked. He reported it to the police. Once again, his name didn't connect to anything else. On June 30, 2001, he was involved in a minor traffic accident on the George Washington Bridge.

On Aug. 23, 2001, the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, gave the names of 19 men who they suspected would be involved in a terrorist attack to the CIA. Alhazmi's name was among them.

Two and a half weeks later -- five months after the traffic stop in Oklahoma -- on Sept. 11, 2001, Alhazmi got on AA No. 77, the one that was flown into the Pentagon.

The failure to detect and to stop the 9/11 attacks are considered the CIA's greatest failure. Certainly their most visible and spectacular.

There are certain peculiarities about that failure that need to receive a lot of attention. First of all, it hides what the CIA and the other intelligence services were successful at.

They were well aware of Al Qaeda and its intention to hit American targets. They knew many of the players and, as noted, had names and photographs. They were aware that something big was planned for late summer, 2001. They tried very hard to alert the Bush-Cheney administration of the threat.

Yet even where they were right, they were somehow wrong.

That was followed, in rapid order, with their failure to locate and apprehend or kill Osama bin Laden, their complicity in misleading the American public about Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his ties to Al Qaeda, their failure to predict what would happen after an invasion of Iraq and, once it did happen, who we were fighting and why they were fighting us.

A record like that says that we must ask if these were specific errors -- each a unique, explainable accident -- or are they systemic? Is there something fundamentally wrong with the whole idea?

The CIA and the intelligence community has had many visible and often embarrassing failures before these. They have always been able to say, from beneath their veils of secrecy, "Well, the only things you know are when we fail. If you knew the whole truth, you would know of your many successes! But you can't know because it would threaten our National Security! So there!" So it was not possible to examine the facts and see if that was really the case. That's no longer the case. A file compiled 30 years ago that the CIA called "The Family Jewels" was recently released under the Freedom of Information Act. It can be found at http://www.foia.cia.gov/. Even more important is the publication of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the >i>N.Y. Times.