COUNTERTERRORISM

Intelligence agencies face growing criticism

By Mark Fritz, Globe Staff, 9/14/2001

ederal terrorism experts warned Congress last year that this country's most fanatical enemies were planning bigger, deadlier attacks, aimed at killing thousands of Americans.

In an eerily prescient pair of reports, two blue-ribbon panels of security experts called for major changes in the way intelligence agencies protect American lives.

In July 2000, the National Commission on Terrorism recommended that the FBI and CIA be given broader powers to prevent the next ''catastrophic'' attack.

''The motives of terrorists seem to be changing, and we have to be concerned about the possibility that terrorist groups will resort to what we call catastrophic terrorism, acts which are designed to kill not hundreds but perhaps tens of thousands of Americans,'' commission chairman L. Paul Bremer told the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, according to transcripts of the session.

Five months later, another commission, chaired by Virginia Governor James Gilmore, made similar predictions and called for the creation of a counterterrorism office that could collect and compare the domestic intelligence of the FBI with the foreign data of the CIA.

''The potential for terrorist attacks inside the borders of the United States is a serious emerging threat,'' the report said. ''Because the stakes are so high, our nation's leaders must take seriously the possibility of an escalation of terrorist violence against the homeland.''

Two other private reports - one by the US Commission on National Security, chaired by former US senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman in February, and the other by the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year - raised the same concerns.

The four hijackings Tuesday have triggered an outcry over the failure of US intelligence agencies to predict and help prevent the tragedy.

The attacks ''were clearly an intelligence failure,'' said Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Agency chief for the Middle East during the Clinton administration.

Some critics have argued that the nation's security was compromised by a 1995 law that required US spymasters to deal only with informants who have no serious criminal backgrounds. The CIA is still smarting from its decision to employ Nazi war criminals such as Klaus Barbie during the Cold War.

''Intelligence is a very messy thing,'' Pollack said. ''If you tell them they can't deal with messy people, you're tying the good hand behind your back.

Pollack, a former CIA official who oversaw espionage of Iran and Iraq, dismisses the agency's current insistence that the rules have had no effect on its ability to gather information.

''If you're looking for terrorism, you have to deal with terrorists,'' said Pollack.

The Bremer terrorism commission said the CIA and FBI also need to do a better job of sharing intelligence with other agencies ''in a timely, useful fashion.''

Of course, some experts note US intelligence has had its successes as well. When saboteurs blew up two US embassies in Africa in 1998, the intelligence community said it had foiled similar plots at other diplomatic outposts. When Osama bin Laden purportedly sent his minions from Canada with a plan to spoil the millennium celebration in this country, US authorities arrested some would-be bombers, while acknowledging that it was likely others had managed to slip through customs.

The CIA has transformed itself over the past decade from an agency that specialized in undermining Communist-run governments to one built to battle terrorism. But after fanatics combined two time-tested terrorist techniques - the bomb-laden vehicle and the hijacked aircraft - the agency has found itself bearing much of the blame for the worst terrorist attack in US history.

Security analysts and seasoned spies say the true reasons for the failure to prevent the attack are complex. The factors range from shoddy airport security to Ivy League graduates spurning jobs as secret agents to the refusal of America's allies to unite against states that sponsor terrorism.

Germany and France, for example, traded with Iran even when that country was holding US hostages and reputedly sponsoring terrorist attacks.

''Many of the countries have appeared to strike deals with countries [that sponsor terrorism],'' said Pollack, who is now deputy director for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

''Our counterterrorism tool kit has a lot of tools in it, and we shouldn't always just think about trying to kiss the perpetrator with a cruise missile,'' said John Parachini, executive director of the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

''If the reports are true, we have some cards to call in with the Persian Gulf states,'' Parachini said. ''We defended them with our blood and bullets during the Persian Gulf War. We've got to be tough on Pakistan. Pakistan has only, like, 40 days of foreign currency on hand. That's a powerful economic weapon.''

Some critics in Congress trace the blame for the attack back to the Carter administration, when CIA director Stansfield Turner cut back on covert operations staff. This, they say, resulted in the loss of so-called human intelligence - HUMINT in espionage parlance - meaning the spies who infiltrate enemy groups and alert their handlers about the enemy's intentions.

Yet most of the people who lost their jobs had specialized in undermining Communist governments, not infiltrating enemies of the United States, said Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies.

''That's absolute gibberish,'' he said. ''US expenditures on counterterrorism, in fact, have skyrocketed in the past five years.

''You see these bar graphs, and they look like staircases going up,'' Leitenberg said. ''We were monitoring Osama bin Laden's phone calls up until a year ago, when they bought encryption devices for their cellphones. These [terrorists] get trained in little schools outside Pakistan. We know where those are. It's the CIA's job to know where they are.''

Parachini has analyzed US intelligence figures that show total spending on counterintelligence increasing from $6 billion in 1998 to nearly $10 billion this year.

Yet some critics say the agency is devoting too much time and resources to countering terrorism that might employ chemical, biological, or nuclear technology at the expense of conventional counterterrorism efforts. ''We are spending big, but not spending smart,'' Parachini said in a report to a House subcommittee last year.

One of the difficulties in attributing the attack solely to a failure of intelligence is that the CIA has not revealed what it knew before the attack. Three weeks ago, bin Laden broadcast via Arab media outlets threats that seemed to presage the attack.

''If the CIA didn't break their behind finding out about this, then that's a whole other story,'' Leitenberg said.

More than two decades of terrorist attacks, from the Lockerbie airline disaster to suicide assaults on US troops in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, have triggered congressional hearings before on beefing up counterterrorism and tightening controls at airports. Not all the recommendations were put into effect.

''What we do know today is there was a tremendous breakdown in airport security,'' Parachini said.

This story ran on page A28 of the Boston Globe on 9/14/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.