III

NATIONAL SECURITY

NATIONAL SECURITY

9/11: Look Back and Learn Spy agencies failed spectacularly to predict the 2001 terrorist attacks, and today the threats have grown worse. Our intelligence apparatus needs radical reinvention.

By Amy B. Zegart

M ore than eighteen years ago, Al-Qaeda operatives hijacked

planes, toppled buildings, terrified an entire nation, and

killed nearly three thousand innocents. That the elaborate

9/11 plot went undetected will forever be remembered as one

of the intelligence community’s worst failures. For many US intelligence offi-

cials, memories of that day remain fresh, searing, and personal. Still hanging

over the entrance to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is a sign that reads,

“Today is September 12, 2001.” It’s a daily reminder of the agency’s determi-

nation to prevent future attacks—but also of the horrifying costs when intel-

ligence agencies adapt too slowly to emerging threats.

For a decade after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the CIA and the FBI were

mired in Cold War structures, priorities, processes, and cultures even as the

danger of terrorism grew. My research has shown that even though many

Amy B. Zegart is a Davies Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, co- chair of Hoover’s Working Group on Foreign Policy and Grand Strategy, and a member of the Hoover task forces focusing on Arctic security, national security, and intellectual property and innovation. She is also the co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

92 HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020

inside and outside US intelligence agencies saw the terrorist threat com-

ing and pressed for change years earlier, they could not get the necessary

reforms enacted. The shock of 9/11 finally forced a reckoning—one that led

to a string of counterterrorism successes, from foiled plots to the operation

against Osama bin Laden.

But now, nearly two decades later, America’s seventeen intelligence agen-

cies need to reinvent themselves once more, this time in response to an

unprecedented number of breakthrough technologies that are transforming

societies, politics, commerce, and the very nature of international conflict.

NO MORE SURPRISES

As former CIA deputy director Michael Morell and I wrote in Foreign Affairs

last year, the threat landscape is changing dramatically—just as it did after

the Cold War—and not because of a single emerging terrorist group or a

rising nation-state. Advances in artificial intelligence, open-source Internet-

based computing, biotechnology, satellite miniaturization, and a host of other

fields are giving adversaries new capabilities; eroding America’s intelligence

lead; and placing even greater demands on intelligence agencies to separate

truth from deception. But the US intelligence community is not responding

quickly enough to these technological changes and the challenges they are

unleashing.

Although 9/11 was a surprise, it should not have been. In the preceding

decade, a dozen high-profile blue-ribbon commissions, think tank studies,

and government reports had all sounded the alarm, warning about the grave

new threat of terrorism and recommending urgent and far-reaching intel-

ligence reforms to tackle it. As I documented in my book Spying Blind: The

CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11, those studies issued a total of 340 recom-

mendations that focused on crucial intelligence shortcomings such as coor-

dination problems, human-intelligence weaknesses, and poor information

sharing within and across agencies. These were exactly the same weaknesses

the 9/11 Commission ultimately identified.

Yet before the attacks, almost none of the recommendations had been fully

implemented. The overwhelming majority, 268 to be exact, produced no action

at all—not even a phone call, a memo, or a meeting. Nine months before the

attacks, the bipartisan Hart–Rudman Commission, which conducted the most

comprehensive assessment of US national-security challenges since the Cold

War’s end, correctly predicted that America’s institutional deficiencies had

left the nation exceptionally vulnerable to a catastrophic terrorist attack. But

these and other external calls for reform went nowhere.

HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020 93

Reform efforts inside the FBI and CIA failed, too. Although intelligence

officials repeatedly warned executive-branch leaders and Congress about the

terrorist threat in reports and unclassified hearings starting as early as 1994,

intelligence agencies failed to overhaul themselves to better identify and stop

looming terrorist dangers. The FBI, for example, declared terrorism its number

one priority back in 1998. Within months, the embassy bombings in Kenya and

Tanzania made Al-Qaeda a household name in the United States. But by 9/11, the

FBI was still devoting only 6 percent of its personnel to counterterrorism issues.

Between 1998 and 2001, counterterrorism spending remained flat, 76 per-

cent of all field agents continued to work on criminal cases unrelated to ter-

rorism, the number of special agents working international terrorism cases

actually declined, and field agents were often diverted from counterterror-

ism and intelligence work

to cover major criminal

cases. A 2002 internal

FBI study found that

two-thirds of the bureau’s

analysts—the people who

were supposed to connect

the dots across leads and cases—were unqualified to do their jobs. And just

weeks before the 9/11 attacks, a highly classified internal review of the FBI’s

counterterrorism capabilities gave failing grades to every one of the bureau’s

fifty-six US field offices.

Meanwhile, CIA Director George Tenet labored mightily to get more than a

dozen US intelligence agencies to work better together, but he faced resis-

tance at every turn. Tenet couldn’t even succeed in getting agencies to use

the same badges to enable easier access to one another’s buildings. Counter-

terrorism efforts remained scattered across forty-six different organizations

without a central strategy, budget, or coordinating mechanism.

TWENTY-THREE LOST CHANCES

In the run-up to the attacks, the CIA and FBI had twenty-three opportunities

to penetrate and possibly stop the 9/11 plot. They missed all twenty-three,

for one overriding reason: both agencies were operating as they previously

had in a bygone era that gave terrorism low priority and kept information

marooned in different parts of the bureaucracy.

For months, the CIA sat on information indicating that two suspected high-

level Al-Qaeda operatives were probably inside the United States. Why didn’t

anyone tell the FBI? In large part because the CIA had never been in the

Hanging over the entrance to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center is a sign that reads, “Today is September 12, 2001.”

94 HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020

habit of notifying the FBI about suspected Al-Qaeda operatives before. There

was no formal training program or well-honed process for putting potential

terrorists on a watch list or notifying other agencies about them once they

entered the country.

And when the agency

finally did tell the

FBI about these two

suspected terror-

ists nineteen days before 9/11, the bureau’s manhunt for them was labeled

“routine,” assigned to a single office, and given to a junior agent who had

just finished his rookie year and had never led an intelligence investigation

before. This, too, wasn’t a mistake. It was standard practice. For the FBI’s

entire history, catching perpetrators of past crimes was far more important

than stopping a potential future disaster.

We now know that these two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf

al-Hazmi, were hiding in plain sight, using their real names in everything

from the San Diego telephone directory to their bank accounts and travel

documents; living for a while with an FBI informant; and contacting several

targets of past and ongoing FBI counterterrorism investigations. All of this

was unknown to the FBI before 9/11.

Today’s threat landscape is vastly more complex than it was in 2001. Ter-

rorists are one item on a long list of concerns, including escalating competi-

tion and conflict with Russia and China, rising nuclear risks in North Korea,

Iran, India, and Pakistan, roiling instability in the Middle East, and authori-

tarians on the march around the world. Supercharging all these threats

are new technologies that are accelerating the spread of information on an

enormous scale and making intelligence both far more important and more

challenging.

Now, as in the run-up to 9/11, early indicators of the coming world are evi-

dent, and the imperative for intelligence reform is clear. The first breakdown

of this new era has already occurred: the intelligence community’s failure to

quickly or fully understand Russia’s weaponization of social media in the 2016

American presidential election. Before the election, intelligence agencies

did not clearly grasp what was happening. Since the election, the revelations

keep getting worse. We now know that Russia’s social-media influence opera-

tion started in 2014, possibly earlier, and included the dispatch of Russian

intelligence operatives to the United States to study how to maximize the

effectiveness of Moscow’s social-media campaign to divide Americans and

give one presidential candidate an advantage over another.

Deception has always been part of espi- onage and warfare—but not like this.

HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020 95

We also know that Russia’s deception efforts in 2016 are already looking

primitive in comparison with what’s to come. Thanks to advances in artificial

intelligence, “deep fake” photographs, videos, and audios are becoming highly

realistic, difficult to authenticate, widely available, and easy to use. Just last

year, the Wall Street Journal reported the first known use of deep fake audio

to impersonate a voice in a cyber heist. An executive at a British-based

energy firm thought he was talking to his boss when in reality it was a digital

imitation, right down to the lilt and slight German accent. The fraudulent call

resulted in the transfer of $243,000.

The potential for deep fake deceptions in global politics gets scary very

quickly. Imagine a realistic-seeming video showing an invasion, or a clan-

destine nuclear program, or policy makers discussing how to rig an election.

Soon, even seeing won’t be believing. Deception has always been part of

espionage and warfare, but not like this.

Meanwhile, old methods of intelligence gathering are now being democra-

tized. Spying used to be expensive and exclusive; when satellites that inter-

cepted signals and images

from space took billions of

dollars and tremendous

know-how to operate, the

United States could afford

to maintain a clear tech-

nological advantage. Now space is becoming commercialized, with satellites so

cheap that middle-schoolers can launch them. Secrets, while still important,

aren’t what they used to be: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the best intelligence

came from social-media photos posted by the troops. And when US Navy

SEALs raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan, a local resident heard

funny noises and inadvertently ended up live-tweeting the operation.

As in the 1990s, many in the intelligence community are sounding alarms and

trying to make changes. A 2018 report by Michael Brown and Pavneet Singh of

the Defense Innovation Unit warned that China’s venture-capital investment

in key American start-up companies was designed to give China the edge in

technologies for commercial and military advantage. In a report last year, Dan

Coats, then the director of national intelligence, told Congress, “For 2019 and

beyond, the innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will

increasingly originate outside the United States, as the overall US lead in science

and technology shrinks; the capability gap between commercial and military

technologies evaporates; and foreign actors increase their efforts to acquire top

talent, companies, data, and intellectual property via licit and illicit means.”

When 9/11 took place, the FBI was still devoting only 6 percent of its per- sonnel to counterterrorism issues.

96 HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020

WHOLESALE REVISIONS

We are seeing the initial stirrings of reform. Congress created a National

Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, led by former Google parent-

company chairman Eric Schmidt and former deputy secretary of defense

Robert O. Work, to “consider the methods and means necessary to advance

the development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and associated

technologies by the United States to comprehensively address the national

security and defense needs of the United States.” (Full disclosure: I am a

special adviser to the commission.) And inside the intelligence community,

there’s a new directorate for digital innovation in the CIA, new artificial-intel-

ligence initiatives in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and new

cloud-computing efforts in the National Security Agency.

But these efforts are nowhere near enough. What’s missing is a wholesale

reimagining of intelligence for a new technological era. In the past, intelli-

gence advantage went to the side that collected better secrets, created better

technical platforms (such as billion-dollar spy satellites), and recruited better

analysts to outsmart the other side. In the future, intelligence will increas-

ingly rely on open information collected by anyone, advanced code and plat-

forms that can be accessed online for cheap or for free, and algorithms that

can process huge amounts of data faster and better than humans.

This is a new world. The US intelligence community needs a serious strate-

gic effort to identify how American intelligence agencies can gain and sustain

the edge while safeguarding civil liberties in a radically different technological

landscape. The director of national intelligence should be leading that effort—

but after Coats’s resignation, that job has yet to be permanently filled.

Years ago, one former intelligence official ruefully told me that his chief

worry was: “By the time we master the Al-Qaeda problem, will Al-Qaeda be

the problem?” He was right.

Reprinted by permission of the Atlantic. © 2020 Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.

New from the Hoover Institution Press is Spin Wars and Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering, by Markos Kounalakis. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.

HOOVer DiGeSt • Winter 2020 97

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