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CIA's failings are systemic

by amy zegart

Four years after 9/11, the CIA has finally finished its highly classified review of what went wrong. Employing stunning powers of analysis, it has apparently concluded that its biggest problem was a handful of former officials: Director George Tenet, clandestine service chief Jim Pavitt and Counterterrorist Center head Cofer Black.

These guys are easy targets. Tenet slam-dunked his way to a presidential medal while presiding over the CIA’s two worst intelligence failures since its creation in 1947: 9/11 and the mistaken weapons of mass destruction estimates that led to the Iraq war. While Pavitt was parsing White House orders about whether the agency could bring back Osama bin Laden’s head on ice, the dots were being connected by junior analysts at Black’s Counterterrorist Center.

House and Senate intelligence committees found that, on average, those analysts had half the experience of analysts in the rest of the CIA. When the B-team is waging the war on terror, you’re in trouble.

Holding these men responsible for the CIA’s failures is comforting but dangerous. Comforting because it makes us feel safer that there is someone to blame. Dangerous because it leads us to believe that, if only a few had done their jobs better, 9/11 could have been prevented. The reality is much worse. It was the system, not individuals, that failed us.

Case in point: Why did the CIA fail to watch-list Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the 9/11 hijackers who first came to the attention of agency officials in January 2000, when they attended what one intelligence official described as “the Al-Qaeda convention” in Malaysia?

The simplest answer is that keeping track of foreign terrorists had never been standard practice or a high priority. For more than 40 years the Cold War had dominated both the thinking and operation of the CIA and its sister agencies. When the threat changed, they were slow to change with it. Before 9/11, there were no well-honed processes for identifying dangerous terrorists and warning other government agencies about them. These kinds of problems were everywhere in the CIA, built into the structure, fabric and culture of an agency whose entire history is one of facing down the same enemy.

And that’s just the CIA. The other 13 intelligence agencies never believed Tenet was their boss, and who can blame them? The secretary of defense controlled 80% of the intelligence budget for decades. Congressional efforts to overhaul this dysfunctional structure were twice torpedoed by the Pentagon and pro-defense lawmakers. Fingering a few CIA officials is easy. Fixing the CIA is not.

Zegart is associate professor at the School of Public Affairs. A longer version of this article recently appeared in Newsday.