Why America's Anti-Terror Bureaucracy Lives in a Constant State of Paranoia
The following is an excerpt from the new book Chasing Ghosts by John Mueller & Mark Stewart (Oxford University Press, 2015):
In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, recalls Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City at the time, “anybody, any one of these security experts, including myself, would have told you on September 11, 2001, we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this.” As journalist Jane Mayer observes, “[T]he only certainty shared by virtually the entire American intelligence community” in the months after September 11 “was that a second wave of even more devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent.” President George W. Bush recalls that “it seemed almost certain that there would be another attack” and that “we believed more attacks were coming, but we didn’t know when, where, or from whom.” Or, in the words of deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, “There was a pervasive feeling that 9/11 was not the end of the story.” Staffer Dean McGrath recalls that “There was a real, almost fatalistic concern that we were going to be hit again.” In the words of analyst Philip Mudd: “There was a pervasive sense that an event of unimaginable magnitude had happened, but there was also an overwhelming dread that we had witnessed only the start of a series of events.” John Poindexter saw the attacks as “an opening salvo, not a final shot.”
At the time, Michael Morell was the CIA agent in charge of briefing the president, and he later became the agency’s deputy director. In a book published in 2015, he recalls the atmosphere vividly. “We were certain we were going to be attacked again.” There was “an avalanche—literally thousands—of intelligence reports in the months following 9/11 that strongly indicated that al Qa’ida would hit us again,” and some of these indicated that the terrorists might use chemical or biological weapons or “even crude nuclear devices”—a suggestion Morell says he found to be “believable.”
Such fears and concerns were, of course, reasonable extrapolations from the facts then at hand. As journalist Peter Baker puts it, “It would take weeks, months, and even years to tighten security for a country as large and as open as the United States, and it seemed implausible that terrorists would not mount follow-up attacks.” However, that every “security expert” should fervently embrace such alarmist—and, it turned out, erroneous—views, and that the intelligence community should be certain about them, is fundamentally absurd. It was also an entirely plausible extrapolation from facts then at hand that 9/11 could prove to be an aberration rather than a harbinger.
Yet it appears that no one in authority could even imagine that proposition to be true—effectively, they dismissed it out of hand—even though it could have been taken to fit the available information fully as well as the passionately embraced alarmist perspective. Even fourteen years later, Morell does not pause to reflect on why or how those “thousands” of alarming intelligence reports could have been so hopelessly and so spectacularly wrong.
Similarly, in a 2007 book, CIA Director George Tenet says “it was inconceivable to us that Bin Laden had not already positioned people to conduct second, and possibly third and fourth waves of attacks inside the United States.” Under the circumstances it was certainly sensible to use that as a working assumption, but it is patently absurd and irresponsible, and perhaps even dangerous, to completely reject the possibility that the assumption might be wrong. Tenet goes on to assert that “getting people into this country—legally or illegally—was no challenge before 9/11,” and he proclaims that “nothing I had learned in the ensuing three years ever let me to believe that our initial working assumption that al-Qa’ida had cells here was wrong.” But by the time he wrote his book, the FBI, after exhaustive and frantic investigation, had been unable to find a single true cell in the country, and the chief architect of the 9/11 attacks had repeatedly confessed under various forms of interrogation that the most difficult part of the scheme had been to infiltrate operatives into the United States.
The alarm of the early years is perhaps best illustrated by the saga of Cofer Black, head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, who, says a colleague, was “acting wilder and wilder.” Black insisted that unless his staff was increased by hundreds, or even thousands, “people are going to die,” and that Western civilization hung in the balance. When he went home, according to his wife, he would turn off the lights and sit in the dark with a drink and a cigar, sunk in an apocalyptic gloom. Morell says that, “aware of all the intelligence,” he and CIA Director Tenet “would routinely ask each other, ‘Is this the day we get hit again?’ ” So fearful was Morell of a nuclear detonation that he told his wife that “if such an attack were to happen in Washington to put the kids in the car and start driving west and not stop. It was surreal.”
In that “surreal” atmosphere, authorities were looking everywhere, often with considerable imagination, to locate and break up all those terrorist cells they were convinced must be out there somewhere. No one, it appears, was given to question the enterprise or its essential premise. In 2006, the PBS Frontline series telecast an assessment of some terrorism arrests that had taken place the previous year in Lodi, California. Christine Biederman, who was in the fray as an assistant U.S. attorney (AUSA) in the years after 9/11, wrote to the program recalling, “I cannot begin to describe the pressure prosecutors face to produce convictions to justify the massive expenditures in the ‘war on terror.’ Most AUSAs are, like the one interviewed, good soldiers who believe in the ‘war’ the way they believe in God and family and apple pie—because they were raised that way and always have, because these form the core of their belief system and because questioning the mission would trigger all kinds of crises: moral, political, professional and, in the end, financial.”
That sort of dark perspective seems to have been internalized and institutionalized over the years in a great many ways, and it has proved to be notably resistant to counter-information. For example, in early 2005, Richard Clarke, counterterrorism coordinator for the Clinton administration, issued a scenario that appeared as a cover story in the Atlantic. In the article, he darkly envisioned terrorist shootings at casinos, campgrounds, theme parks, and malls in 2005, bombings in subways and railroads in 2006, missile attacks on airliners in 2007, and devastating cyberattacks in 2008.
In his 2005 reflections on post-9/11 fears, Rudy Guiliani added, “It hasn’t been quite that bad”—a bit of an understatement considering that not only had none of the “dozens and dozens” of attacks like 9/11 that he and fellow “security experts” unanimously anticipated failed to come about, but there hadn’t been a successful attack of any magnitude in the United States at all. Nor, of course, in the ensuing years did any of the fanciful scenarios spun out by expert Richard Clarke—or anything remotely like them—materialize. A poll in 2006 of more than 100 of “America’s top foreign-policy experts”—nearly 80 percent of whom had worked in the government—found 79 percent unfazed by the good if unexpected news, declaring it certain or likely that “a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11” would occur in the United States by the end of 2011.
The Threat Matrix
Important in all this have been increases in expenditures on intelligence and policing as the ghost-chasing enterprise continues to be expanded. And central to that enterprise is the “Threat Matrix,” an itemized catalog of all the “threats”—or more accurately, “leads”—needing to be followed up. In Philip Mudd’s description, it is “a synopsis of the threats that had rolled in that day, or significant threats from previous days or weeks that required steady follow-up.” The Threat Matrix, or selected excerpts from it, forms the centerpiece of the briefings on terrorism the FBI director undergoes each day, and it also undergoes scrutiny at the daily 5 p.m. briefing presided over by the director of the CIA attended by a group numbering over thirty. And every morning, it would be used to brief the president.
According to journalist Garrett Graff, the Threat Matrix “tracks all the unfolding terrorist plots and intelligence rumors” and is “filled to the brim with whispers, rumors, and vacuous, unconfirmed information.” Baker calls it “a compendium of potential horrors” from which “almost nothing, it seemed, was left out.” Impelled by what some have called “the 9/11 Commission Syndrome”—an obsession with the career dangers in failing to “connect the dots”—it is in no one’s interest to reduce the length of the list “because it was possible you’d cull the wrong threat and end up, after the next attack, at the green felt witness table before the next congressional inquiry.” As a result, “claims that ordinarily wouldn’t have made it past the intake agent, claims that wouldn’t even be written down weeks earlier, suddenly became the subject of briefs to the President in the Oval Office.” Or, as Mudd puts it, it comprises “threats, fabrications, half-truths, vague warnings, and spurned poison-pen lovers.” Included is
"everything from unvetted walk-ins around the world—people who simply walked into an Embassy, for example, and volunteered information—to nuts who wrote into U.S. government websites, to second-rate sources who made up tales to earn a paycheck. All this was read by the president, in a document intended initially to serve as a working-level draft. What was initially a simple, almost inevitable way of tracing threats—it had to be done somewhere—became a means by which senior policymakers reviewed raw material that many of us, myself included, thought was “below threshold” for them."
Graff supplies an example. One entry in the Threat Matrix is crisply cited as “a threat from the Philippines to attack the United States unless blackmail money was paid.” It turns out that this entry was based on an email that said, “Dear America. I will attack you if you don’t pay me 999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 dollars. MUHAHAHA.” Graff reports that the FBI dutifully traced the email’s author and sent information to Philippine police, who then paid a visit to the would-be extortionist’s parents.
“Much of the material in the matrix was trash,” notes Mudd, and the people reading it “were looking at material not worth their time.” However, he continues, “they saw it differently.” In consequence, the Threat Matrix “took on a life and legend of its own.” Moreover, whatever the ratio of needle to hay, living with the Threat Matrix also seems to take a psychological toll on its daily readers: as presidential adviser Condoleezza Rice recalls, “it had a huge effect on our psyches.” Henry Kissinger stresses that, “Historians rarely do justice to the psychological stress on a policy-maker.” One can only imagine what happens when this rather natural hazard of office is exacerbated every day or week by multiple fusillades of undifferentiated, yet seemingly dire, threats.
As Graff vividly describes the process, the Threat Matrix could become “all-consuming and paralyzing” and comes off as “a catalogue of horrors,” as the “daily looming prognoses of Armageddon,” and as “a seeming tidal wave of Islamic extremist anger that threatened to unhinge American society.” Jack Goldsmith, an avid consumer of the Threat Matrix when he was in the Bush administration, stresses that “[i]t is hard to overstate the impact that the incessant waves of threat reports have on the judgment of people inside the executive branch who are responsible for protecting American lives.” He quotes Tenet: “You simply could not sit where I did and read what passed across my desk on a daily basis and be anything other than scared to death about what it portended.” This, writes Goldsmith, captures “the attitude of every person I knew who regularly read the threat matrix.” Every person.
And it commonly has the effect, by its sheer magnitude, of terrifying them. President Bush recalls that “for months after 9/11, I would wake up in the middle of the night worried about what I had read,” a recollection confirmed by his wife: “I could see the lines cut deeper into his face and could hear him next to me lying awake at night, his mind still working.” Mudd notes that “the backdrop was always threat. It shadowed us every day.” The “voluminous and dominating” threat information “contributed to a pervasive sense that every day might bring a new attack.” As another reader puts it, “Your mind comes to be dominated by the horrific consequences of low-probability events.” Another has arrestingly offered a vivid comparison: “Reading the Threat Matrix every day is like being stuck in a room listening to loud Led Zeppelin music,” and “after a while, you begin to suffer from sensory overload and become paranoid about the threat.” The process even led to suicide in one case: obsessed by the implied imminence and certainty of doom, one overworked reader, Special Agent Brad Doucette, was led to kill himself in 2003.
In essence, it appears to be like being barricaded in an apartment and listening only to the police radio for information about what is going on outside. Or repeatedly giving one’s full attention to scary ghost stories spun out around a late-night campfire. According to Jim Comey of the FBI (who became its director in 2013), it causes you to “imagine a threat so severe that it becomes an obsession.”
Adam Garfinkle characterizes the effect as “institutionalized paranoia.” The consequences of the process are considerable.
Not only was the director of the CIA by his own testimony “scared to death” for much (or all) of his tenure in office, but he was apparently hearing voices, or seeing ghosts. In 2007, he announced that his “operational presumption is that they infiltrated a second wave or a third wave into the United States at the time of 9/11. Can I prove that to you? No. It’s my operational intuition.” Or, “I know one thing in my gut: al-Qaeda is here and waiting.” Thus, one of the key people in charge of keeping the American people safe was also prominently scaring them, based, by his own admission, on nothing. Later, in a 2012 book, Kip Hawley, too, insisted without supplying coherent evidence that al-Qaeda networks currently exist in the United States. Presumably, both are still waiting for that ghostly, and aging, second wave to leap into action.
Reprinted from CHASING GHOSTS: The Policing of Terrorism by John Mueller & Mark G. Stewart with permission from Oxford University Press, Inc. Copyright © 2016 by Oxford University Press.