CIA, FBI, and NSA on 9/11

W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 19 -- The public hearings of the Joint Intelligence Committee of both Houses of Congress to examine lessons learned from the 9/11 attacks ended Thursday with testimony from the Big Three of the intelligence community: CIA Director George Tenet; FBI Director Robert Mueller and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden.

Tenet was loaded for bear. Irrespective of the committee's wishes, he was determined to read as much of his statement as he deemed necessary — 50 minutes' worth. When the committee chairman, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., tried to cut him off, Tenet protested that he had "been waiting a year" for the opportunity. He was unwilling to concede much of anything; page 2 of his prepared statement contained the sentence "We made mistakes." He did not read that sentence aloud.

Hayden was less feisty in tone but no less unapologetic. He asserted that the only additional information his agency could have provided regarding the now-infamous Malaysian meeting of terrorist plotters in January 2000 if they had handled everything "perfectly" would have been the last name of the al-Hazmi brothers.

The NSA chief — whose testimony was also notable because anything public from the "No Such Agency" is still such a rare treat — also pointed out that "throughout the summer of 2001 we had more than 30 warnings that something was imminent. We dutifully reported these, yet none of these subsequently correlated with terrorist attacks. The concept of 'imminent' to our adversaries is relative; it can mean soon or simply sometime in the future."

As to whether his agency needs to make any changes, having praised his own pre-9/11 plans for transforming the agency, he recounted: "Shortly after Sept. 11, I had a meeting of my senior leaders. I asked them the following question: Is there any part of our transformation road map that we should now change as a result of the attacks? Unanimously, they responded, 'No, but we need to accelerate these changes.'"

Mueller, by contrast, continued his public attitude of eating humble pie. Unlike the other two directors, he skipped large chunks of his prepared statement so as to accommodate the committee's request for brevity. He recounted once again how 9/11 had forced the FBI to change its priorities dramatically; and how already the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism is twice what it was pre-9/11.

And he, once again, acknowledged "the valid criticisms, many of which have been reiterated by this committee. For example, the Phoenix memo should have been disseminated to all field offices and to our sister agencies and should have triggered a broader analytical approach; and the 26-page request from Minneapolis for a FISA warrant should have been reviewed by attorneys handling the request. These incidents have informed us on needed changes, particularly the need to improve accountability, analytic capacity and resources, information sharing, and technology …"