The Ming Report

SPINNING INTELLIGENCE

February 15, 2005 - It is nine months after the 911 Commission made its report with its key recommendation that the country’s intelligence agencies be brought under one roof and their efforts be better coordinated. After President Bush reluctantly signed on to some of the recommendations Congress passed a pale imitation of the Commission’s recommendations for action to prevent another intelligence failure such as the pattern that proceeded September 11, 2001. Instead of being more closely coordinated the various agencies charged with the gathering and interpretation seem to be more concerned with protecting and defending agency turf than with collecting intelligence, interpreting it, and protecting the nation.

Last month we learned that Secretary Rumsfeld has created his own intelligence and covert operations agency within the Defense Department. Today we learn that the FBI is dramatically increasing its own foreign intelligence operation by expanding the number of legal attachés assigned to our embassies abroad. The current FBI budget request includes some $11.4 million to beef up the existing attaché posts in 52 nations and open a new seven agent post in Tashkent. In addition the budget request asks for money to hire 500 new intelligence analysts for the FBI.

Word of conflicts between FBI spy operations and those of the CIA are beginning to leak out. FBI sources and intelligence officials speak privately of problems that have occurred in Germany – where the only 911 related prosecutions have occurred and where the 911 plot seemingly matured while Mohammed Atta was living in Hamburg. CIA and FBI officials have acknowledged that there have been instances where attachés have failed to inform the CIA of their activities. Uncoordinated spying can be dangerous, officials say, both in operations and in providing faulty confirmations where two agencies getting information from the same source seem to corroborate each other.

Just last week the redacted appendix to the 911 Commission’s citing 52 specific FAA security warnings issued to US airports between April 2001 and the day that the Twin Towers were brought down. That was illustration enough that the Commission’s recommendations were warranted. After President Bush reluctantly gave support to the creation of a National Security Director the Congress passed and he signed the intelligence reform act into law. It established the office but with sharply reduced authority over agency operations and budgets.

The result has been a scramble for turf among the agencies and less, not more coordination of intelligence gathering and analysis. The 911 Commission did not say that the 911 plot would have been prevented had there not been intelligence failures but it did say that the intelligence failures strongly contributed to the fact it did not. The intelligence reform bill that the Congress passed and the President signed did not fully address the problem. It is still there and intelligence still gets the political spin before it is acted upon.