We can’t even say that the heads of the intelligence services failed. The directors of the CIA and FBI were “running around with their hair on fire” in June and July knowing that a strike was immanent and trying to get anybody in the Administration to see the danger. They did not know what it was. They did not know just who it was. They did not know when it was coming but they did know it was on its way.

Since February 1993 when just a month into the Clinton Administration a sleeper cell detonated a truck bomb in the World Trade Center parking garage America knew that this country was as vulnerable to terrorist attack as were London or Tel Aviv. That crime was solved by solid police work and in the process plots to hit the infrastructure and monuments of New York City were uncovered and foiled. Perhaps, for the future, the case and the embryonic plots were unraveled too quickly.

Yes, the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies were hit hard. Yes, a lack of shipboard vigilance in an alien port let the Cole be struck with a devastating attack. But those attacks took place where American law enforcement was not in control; where the local agencies were less than well trained; and where America was vulnerable because of the location of the targets in the Third World. That feeling that we were secure here at home was heightened when in December 1999 the celebration of the Millennium’s advent was not interrupted by one of the several terrorist plots underway to mark it as a black day for America. Those plots were foiled without the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act. We may have been vulnerable around the world but we were safe here at home, Oklahoma City notwithstanding.

Yes, there was a failure of intelligence but not an intelligence failure. The intelligence services did their job and did it as well as could ever be expected. They accumulated the disparate bits of information that, if woven together, pointed to the existence of an active Al Qaeda operation to attack decisively in New York. The intelligence that read the words of the August 6th PDB and saw only an historical review and not an urgent warning was the intelligence that failed. The intelligence that failed waited another 29 days and then acted only to adopt a policy statement with disaster just a week away. The intelligence that failed could not bring itself to believe that a rabble of third world fanatics could strike a blow in the United States much less one that would be unparalleled in history. And since it could not conceive of such a result it discounted and dismissed the danger rather than sounding the alert. It was an intelligence that was blinded by a falsely placed patriotic pride and cultural arrogance and thus an intelligence that failed.