Could 9/11 have been prevented?

The role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation needs to be assessed without losing sight of its commendable track record and the constraints under which it functions.

POST-MORTEM discussions of huge catastrophes of the order of 9/11 are invariably clouded by hindsight. Scrutiny of many assassinations like that of Rajiv Gandhi suffers from the same infirmity. There is possibly no end to speculations. Could better intelligence have averted the two tragedies of May 21, 1991 at Sriperumbudur and September 11, 2001 in New York? These two will be remembered for their poignancy as well as cruelty. No firm conclusions are possible. Neither of the two groups that project the two opposite points of view can be ignored. CNN coverage of the recent public hearings in Washington of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (popularly known as the 9/11 Commission) has been vivid beyond belief. Testimony after testimony of the former and present Attorneys-General, National Security Advisers and Federal Bureau of Investigation Directors and the current Central Intelligence Agency Director, apart from being absorbing, confirmed the futility of any pursuit of truth in such matters. The proceedings at the Commission highlighted how an incident as unique as 9/11 could yield itself to diverse and sometimes bizarre perceptions of what went wrong and how such events can be prevented. The story is all too familiar to many of us who have watched government at close quarters in our country.

After any major happening, such as enemy invasion (of the kind we saw in 1962 in the northeastern border with China) or the assassination of a leading public figure, `intelligence failure' is the stick with which an enforcement agency is invariably beaten by those in the Opposition benches. I saw this to my chagrin during the Varma Commission hearings into the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case a decade ago. More recently, the debate that followed the Kargil war was no different. The U.S. has gone through this spectacle several times beginning from the Bay of Pigs fiasco of the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy launched what came to be regarded as a misguided and allegedly CIA-inspired operation against Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which came a cropper.

In the case of 9/11, the charge against the U.S. President and his main sources of information, the CIA and the FBI, was not that no intelligence was available to them on the threat from Al Qaeda, although the last detail, namely, that aircraft could be used as missiles to blow up the Twin Towers, may not have been known. (The perception was that Bin Laden was only planning hijacks of aircraft.) The indictment against the Bush Administration runs to the effect that although relevant facts had been fed to the headquarters, especially the one relating to some foreigners receiving flying training in the U.S., it was not pursued with the seriousness it demanded. The enormity of 9/11 no doubt did not permit immediate finger-pointing. The grief was too intense to allow vested interests to exploit the horrific event for their personal political ends. The subsequent Congress decision to pass a legislation that was ratified by the White House in November 2002 to create a Commission to provide a "full and complete accounting" of the event was no doubt unexceptionable, but it provided the opportunity for partisan mutual criticism by Democrats and Republicans. By all accounts, the staff of the Commission preparing factual reports for each testimony have done a clinical job.

However, now that the Commission is about to wind up and submit its findings by summer and the presidential election itself is due a few months later, the knives are out. The exchanges at the Commission sittings and outside between those hauled up for alleged omissions and negligence and those who have had the benefit of hindsight serve to reinforce our belief that this is a highly politicised world where objective and professional thinking take the back seat even when momentous happenings are investigated. This is especially when political fortunes are at stake and bureaucratic career stakes are high.

As the Commission sittings are drawing to a conclusion, the issue boils down to a verdict on whether 9/11 could have been prevented. The grapevine has it that the Commission seems to believe that this was an entirely avoidable tragedy. A question in corollary is whether the two past and present Presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, were at all sensitive to Al Qaeda presence in the country and whether the CIA and the FBI performed their twin roles of briefing them and doing everything possible to prevent the terrorist attack. By inference from its expansive terms of reference, a related task of the Commission would be to suggest reforms for the future so that the challenges posed by terrorists are handled with dexterity. The issues are deceptively clear. The main difficulty, however, in fixing accountability for a happening of the 9/11 kind is that interactions in such matters between the highest public functionaries take place orally and there is very little documentation. Ultimately, truth will have to be ferreted out by sifting facts emerging from rival claims. At present, it is merely a case of "my word against your word". Under such circumstances, personal integrity is at a discount and truth becomes a casualty.

THE 10-member Commission is chaired by Thomas Keen of the Republican Party. Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton is a Democrat. Originally required to submit its report by May 27, 2004, the deadline has since been extended to August 26. Supported by a $15 million budget and 80 full-time employees, the Commission has interviewed more than 1,000 persons, both at home and abroad. Fourteen public hearings have been held till now. At least four more are scheduled, two each in May and June. The Commission has had access to almost all confidential documents it wanted to see. These included the presidential daily briefs (PDBs), which were scrutinised by a four-person review team that submitted a detailed report for the benefit of the Commission. The various other teams formed by the Commission covered areas such as intelligence collection, analysis and management, terrorist financing, regulation of foreign visitors and response to attacks.

A starting point for the 9/11 Commission was provided by the findings of a so-called Joint Inquiry in February 2002 by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee. That inquiry had concluded that information significant to the attacks on September 11, 2001 was, in fact, available to the intelligence community (a group reference to the CIA, the FBI and a host of intelligence agencies in the U.S.). But the latter did not bring it to a focus nor did it "consider and appreciate" its significance. The joint inquiry specifically referred to an e-mail of July 10, 2001 (exactly two months before the World Trade Centre, attack) emanating from the Phoenix field office to the FBI headquarters drawing attention to a suspected attempt by Bin Laden to send his men to the U.S. for civil aviation-related training. The Phoenix FBI Agent had suggested action nationally to collect data on flying schools and the students enrolled in them. Reportedly, this was not pursued.

Similarly, the FBI headquarters had allegedly frustrated the initiative shown by the Minneapolis field office in wanting to search the personal belongings of Zacharias Moussaoui, a French national who had enrolled himself in a flying school but had been detained for an immigration violation. The search required headquarters clearance for moving courts under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the clearance never came. Readers may recall that Zacharias to this day is regarded as a possible 20th participant in the 9/11 conspiracy. The joint inquiry concluded that there were systemic shortcomings too. These included an unwillingness to share information with others, shortage of resources, both manpower and equipment, and a lack of appreciation of the power and effectiveness of modern technology in combating terrorism.

In its endeavours, the currently active 9/11 Commission goes beyond intelligence collection and analysis. It seeks to explore areas such as terrorist financing, aviation safety, the response on the ground and Congressional oversight of agencies such as the CIA and the FBI. The staff reports that serve as the basis for questioning at the Commission hearings on both the CIA and the FBI have been highly critical. Of course, CIA Director George J. Tenet and FBI Director Robert Mueller as well as his predecessor Louis Freeh took exception, during their appearance before the Commission, to the word "indictment" used by Chairman Thomas Kean while citing the two staff reports.

This response was natural if one reckons the many successes the two organisations have to their credit. While the CIA operations are mostly covert and it is, therefore, not possible to substantiate its achievements, the FBI has had a distinguished record in the area of terrorism. Being a predominantly criminal investigating agency, the FBI's successes have been mostly in the task of prosecutions. To quote only a few, both in the WTC bombing of February 26,1993 and the August 7, 1998 attacks on U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, the FBI managed to arrest the main culprits and bring them to the U.S. where it got them convicted.

THE FBI had also a role in averting the 1993 planned attacks on important landmarks in New York City and the projected 1999 operation against the Los Angeles airport. The criticism, however, is that an active enforcement agency like the FBI can hardly perform quality intelligence work. Its focus is on criminal prosecution rather than analysis of facts available that could be refined into actionable intelligence. Strong doubts have been raised, therefore, on the performance of the FBI's in-house analysts. Unlike in India where the Intelligence Bureau and Central Bureau of Investigation have clearly demarcated roles, the FBI does both domestic intelligence and investigation.

Amidst the welter of facts thrown up by the 9/11 Commission hearings, one should not forget that until the 1993 explosion in the basement of the WTC, the U.S. was generally smug that the venue of terrorist action could be only at places far removed from home. This had introduced an element of complacence amongst intelligence and enforcement agencies, if not total laxity. The FBI focus, till the early 1990s, was on fighting traditional crime. The wisdom of the need to shift the emphasis so as to meet the growing menace of terrorism was slowly beginning to be felt. As FBI Director, Freeh did his best to bring about this change in strategy. The creation of a unit specially to deal with bin Laden, an exchange of staff with the CIA to sharpen analytical skills within the FBI, and setting up small FBI units in U.S. embassies, all followed. The tragedy, however, was that he could not persuade the Congress to allow an expansion of its resources. It is said that on September 11, 2001, only 6 per cent of the FBI sleuths were authorised to do counterterrorism work. Freeh told the Commission during his deposition how he had to divert operatives repeatedly from other divisions to concentrate on the fight against terror. When he asked for a billion-dollar rise in the FBI budget, what he ultimately got was half the amount. This at least partially explained the modest quality of information technology that was available to the agency.

Remarks made by some of the Commissioners during the ongoing 9/11 hearings give the feeling that they are toying with the idea of recommending a new agency that will deal solely with domestic intelligence. The United Kingdom's MI5 is cited as an example in this connection. Interestingly, this comes at a time when the U.K. itself wants to set up an FBI-type organisation. I would also like to recall the Home Ministry-initiated move in our country to set up a Federal Law Enforcement Agency (FLEA) that will concentrate on federal crime (when it is codified), especially the one that has implications for national security. The Directors of both the CIA and the FBI reacted adversely to the creation of a new intelligence outfit. They believe, rightly in my view, that tinkering with a system that has discharged its functions creditably all along would prove ruinous.

A fiasco of the order of 9/11 should not be allowed to cloud the vision of policy makers. This is my argument against divesting, though only partially, the CBI of its existing charter. This is especially at a time when the CBI is the only investigating agency in the country that has measurable credibility. This is not for a moment downplaying the need for the CBI itself to undertake a major exercise to acquire more manpower that is diverse in skills and also upgrade its technology. There is actually a case for the CBI to form an expert body of scientists and Information Technology wizards (from the private sector) that will produce a blueprint for giving the organisation a greater elan in an era of mind-boggling developments. If the CBI does not take note of the current assault on the FBI, it will be looked upon as a poor observer and learner.