Books reviews, current events, and other musings

 

James Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, the first expose of the NSA, has a new book, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies. He reveals how the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA and NSA, mishandled intelligence gather and analysis relating to a terrorist threats to the US and Iraqi WMD.

He starts by retelling the events of 9/11 from perspectives I hadn’t seen elsewhere, such as the first air traffic controller to notice something was wrong and a guy from the highest floor of WTC Tower 1 with any survivors. You can read that first chapter here. He goes on to describe the immediate responses of the federal government, such as high-level officials retreating to Cold War-era secure facilities.

Then he delves into the pressing question explored in the recent 9/11 commission report: why didn’t the US detect the al Qaeda plot? It boils down to incompetence and organizational limitations of the intelligence agencies. The CIA and NSA were slow to respond to the end of the Cold War, which dramatically transformed the nation’s intelligence priorities, and the arrival of new communication technologies. The CIA’s human intelligence resources in Afghanistan and the Arab world were basically worthless.

The most shocking aspect is the Keystone Cops performance of intelligence operatives tracking the future 9/11 hijackers. Signal intelligence picked up the names and travel plans of a couple of the plotters long before the attacks. Due to sloppy tracking – one guy switched to a different flight – they slipped through the cracks. And the CIA didn’t inform the INS or FBI, who could have tracked down those individuals in the US, where they frequently used their real names. The personality conflicts and turf wars between the CIA and FBI were so intense the CIA was reluctant to share information.

After the 9/11 attacks, the CIA beefed up their counterterrorism efforts massively. However, mismanagement continued to plague those efforts. For example, CIA agents who didn’t speak Arabic were told to search hard drives captured in Afghanistan for useful information. Whatever other reforms the US implements, it’s clear that the intelligence agencies won’t function until management gets their act together.

The last third of the book deals with the efforts to justify invading Iraq. Bamford describes the neoconservatives (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.) who long sought the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, for reasons unrelated to terrorism and WMD. They immediately viewed 9/11 as an opportunity to invade Iraq. The White House pressured the CIA and other agencies to prove Iraqi ties to the terrorist attacks and that Iraq possessed WMD.

No such evidence existed, but the CIA eventually caved to the immense pressure from the administration regarding WMD. Clearly, intelligence becomes hopelessly compromised, and agency morale plummets, when forced to support a false conclusion. Also, this unprecedented manipulation of the intelligence agencies is a major abuse of power.

Though the high-level conclusions may be familiar, A Pretext for War provides a broader context and lots of interesting details.