Public Agenda Special Edition: Terrorism
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.
http://www.publicagenda.org/specials/terrorism/terror_interview2.htm