Public Agenda Special Edition: Terrorism

Introduction

Overview

Bioterrorism

Public Opinion

Sources and Resources

Perspectives: U.S. Must Rebuild Its Intelligence Capabilities

Retired Admiral Bobby R. Inman has a long and distinguished career in intelligence work and national security, including stints as director of Naval Intelligence, director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and vice chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Admiral Inman, a member of Public Agenda's board of trustees, recently took part in a question-and-answer session about the role of intelligence agencies in the war on terrorism.

Q: The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have been described as one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history. What went wrong?

A: 11 September was a failure of imagination. No one imagined that a group of terrorists could hijack four planes within 25 minutes at three airports, and no one imagined that they would use them as missiles and fly into buildings. I've read the excellent coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about what was going on in the operations centers of American Airlines and United, as they decided how to handle it, and they were focused on where the planes were going to land, the demands that would be made. No one imagined that these planes had become missiles.

Yes, it is an intelligence failure, but that intelligence failure is grounded in a failure of imagination. If you don't know what you're looking for, you don't know where to look.

Q: But why don't we have that imagination in our anti-terrorist organizations?

A: We have a judicial system of which we are justly proud, and fundamental to that is the FBI and state and local law enforcement, carefully assembling evidence, thoroughly examining it, with the goal of getting arrests, grand jury indictments, trials and convictions. Thoroughness is the priority. There is nothing in that that considers timeliness or warning, nothing about imagining what kind of attacks might happen and fitting the mosaic together, looking for indicators. And then moving knowledge of those indicators within the intelligence community to those who can make use of it.

We knew how to do indications and warning during the Cold War. We knew a month ahead of time that the Soviets were going into Afghanistan. It didn't make a difference for the policymakers, because the U.S. didn't have any policy options, other than the embargo. Sometimes you can't do anything with the warning you have.

Q: On Sept. 11, it seemed that there was no structure to deal with the information in the few minutes that were available. There have been news stories about how no one in law enforcement knew how to contact the right people in the Air Force, and that no one thought to warn the Port Authority or New York police.

A: Could you have shot down the hijacked airliners? Probably not the World Trade Center ones; maybe the one at the Pentagon. But you could have provided warning to people in highly visible public buildings to be evacuated.

There are technological things we can do. If a robbery starts, all a bank teller has to do is push a button that sets off a silent alarm. As I understand it, to signal a disturbance on an airliner, the pilot has to dial a code into the transponder and send it. The pilot should be able to simply push a button that says "disturbance."

Also, there was a watch list of terrorist suspects. Two of the people on the watch list bought plane tickets in their own names. Once we have a passenger manifest, we ought to be able to run these against the database that's regularly updated -- and purged. Maybe it should include car rental, too.

Q: You wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times in which you contended that our intelligence capabilities have been deteriorating for decades and that it would take another decade to repair. Is the problem that we don't have the right data or that we don't know how to use the data?

A: Both. After World War II, those who had led the country, through the battles and the amphibious landings, were determined that never again should we be so ill-informed about the outside world. The basic challenge was to create a classified Encyclopedia Britannica on the outside world. The high point was 1958, when we had a very large number of people and compared to what we're spending now, a lot more money.

A plateau was hit and lasted about six years. Then we went to Vietnam, and suddenly we needed tactical intelligence. Rather than having adequate resources -- this is the choice between guns and butter -- the decision was made to shift resources into tactical intelligence. We gave up any coverage of Western Europe, Africa, Latin America, unless we thought the Soviets were involved. We kept pretty good coverage in the Middle East, because of the commitment to Israel, and on the Soviet Union and China. What happened after that I describe in The New York Times article. But the result is what you have is an intelligence structure that's geared for 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week. Back in my day it was 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The surprise of the Indian nuclear tests is a good example. The U.S. had the information, but it came in over the weekend. The analyst worked on the data on Monday.

Q: In the Times article, you also talk about the changes in how both the CIA and the State Department gather information -- that for budgetary reasons, the CIA cut back on its clandestine agents under cover as businesspeople and other jobs, and the State Department cut back on its embassy staff assigned to track local events. Others have said that too many people at the CIA are sitting around reading the newspapers.

A: Which isn't what you need them to do. That ought to be happening in the State Department.

You do need some spies and they need to be extraordinarily competent. And I have a fear that not all of the candidates they were able to recruit in the '70s and '80s are what you need to provide leadership.

In the near term, we are going to have to rely on intelligence provided by other countries who have access on the scene in Afghanistan, and who will be able to help track down Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The next phase is al Qaeda elsewhere. I have hopes for the attack against the money trail. I'm also very encouraged by the arrests in Spain, Germany and the U.K.

Q: So it's all about the budget?

A: It is critical to how prepared you are, how knowledgeable you really need to be about the outside world, and what you do to spend your budget wisely.

Q: Some critics say we're spending money on the wrong kind of intelligence -- that we spend too much on spy satellites and technological intelligence and not enough on human spies. Do you think there's any truth to that criticism?

A: That argument is just totally off base. The main thrust of technical intelligence is to supply timely information to support military operations, and they were very significant in the Gulf War. That's where you get the ability to directly use information to hit targets, and you have to do that in two or three minutes. Sometimes it provides you with intentions and warning, but it's extremely rare.

It's a commitment of resources. When you look at what we're spending as proportion of GDP, compared to the 1950s, we're spending a small percentage.

Q: Did we spend the peace dividend in the wrong place?

A: The peace dividend should have been expended to make us smarter about the outside world so we can respond with a smaller force more swiftly and efficiently.

For all his brilliance, President Clinton really had little interest in intelligence. When that light plane crashed on the White House lawn, the joke was that it was [then-CIA director James] Woolsey trying to get an appointment.

Eisenhower was intensely interested in this area. Kennedy badly distrusted the government, particularly after the Bay of Pigs, but after the Cuban missile crisis, he came around. Johnson was supportive of the intelligence agencies but not of the Foreign Service. And Nixon didn't trust anybody. Reagan was very interested. Despite all the things he said about the size of government, he wanted to support the intelligence agencies.

Q: Many people have also cited the ban on recruiting agents who might have committed human rights violations as a problem.

A: You have to make the judgment as to what is the overriding national interest. If the overriding interest is to identify and bring to justice terrorists who are a threat to our interests, you are probably dealing with some unsavory people whom you aren't inclined to invite to dinner.

Now, are you dealing with the unsavory people solely because you want to know what's going on with the local government, or in the street? That's where you ought to have overt observers, part of the Foreign Service, out talking to the local population.

Q: Yet there was a considerable public backlash, even revulsion, in the 1970s to many of the covert operations that had been conducted in places like Guatemala, Iran and even at home.

A: You really had, in the 1950s and early '60s, the right to do anything you could do to provide intelligence in the U.S. interest.

Very frequently the policymakers came to the CIA for a covert operation when diplomacy wasn't working and they didn't want to use overt force. For the 18 months I was at the CIA, I spent a lot of time looking at the covert operations files. I could not find a single instance where the idea of doing the covert operation originated at the CIA. A lot of the ideas came from an assistant secretary of state who asked, "Can you help?" When asked, CIA was always very eager to gin up some proposal.

There were plans to spy on U.S. citizens. Interestingly, the person who stopped that plan cold was J. Edgar Hoover. He didn't want the competition. There was paranoia in the Nixon White House that the anti-war demonstrators were funded by the Soviet Union through Cuba. They even thought members of the Democratic Party were funded that way. Looking for that evidence to prove that paranoia led to the Watergate break-in.

When I started going out to meet the public, in the late 1970s, on college campuses … I found the basic public concern was, "Are you spying on me?" If you're not, then people would say, "We do need to know what's going on in the outside world," and they're OK with it.

Q: Much of this debate on fighting terrorism does seem to come down to what we as a nation are willing to do to win.

A: There have been proposals for a vast range of things. I am adamantly opposed to releasing restrictions on CIA and conducting assassinations. If you have legitimate information that someone or some organization is a threat that must be countered, you use overt force, you send in the SEALs or commandos, or the Marines. If you use covert force, it plants the seeds for countless unforeseen and unpredictable events.

Q: Such as?

A: I have no evidence to support my long-time belief that [Lee Harvey] Oswald's decision to assassinate President Kennedy was influenced by Cubans and the Cuban government that had knowledge of the assassination attempts against Castro.

Israel started out on a campaign to assassinate Palestinian leaders they couldn't arrest, or that Arafat wouldn't arrest, and they lost a cabinet minister. When you start it, how do you bound it?

There is an important difference, however, between "covert" and "operational secrecy." Covert is about concealing your involvement entirely. But surprise is our greatest ally in the war on terrorism and maintaining operational secrecy is vital to that. When you use force overtly, you should acknowledge it afterward. Even when you fail, you should acknowledge it, as in the hostage rescue in 1980. Relying on covert operations, I think, is a fundamental weakness in our whole foreign policy approach.

Other Interviews:

Daniel Yankelovich: Public Opinion Can Be Volatile in Wartime