Why Intelligence Fails—The Anatomy of a Terrorist Attack

“The die is cast”

For the better part of a week, I’ve been stymied. I wanted to write a light-hearted blog post, something breezy. I was waffling between a post about Kevin McCarthy’s defenestration (or ouster, but I’ve always wanted to use the word defenestration), and the depiction of food allergies in film. Then violence erupted in Israel and neither topic interested me anymore. I felt that I had to write something related to Israel and Gaza, that not doing so would be cowardly. So I scrapped my blog post about food allergies in film—Kevin McCarthy couldn’t even win that battle—and wrote a new blog post, heavier in tone, yes, but sadly appropriate for this current moment. I did a lot of research for this piece. If anyone is interested in learning more about 9/11 and our intelligence failure, I recommend reading Tim Weiner’s Enemies: A History of the FBI and his Pulitzer-prize-winning history of the CIA: Legacy of Ashes. Both books were a thrill to read and informed much of my article. The FBI: A History by Rhodri Jeffrey-Jones was also a great help. And I recommend The New Yorker article Missed Messages by Seymour Hersh. It’s a fairly exhaustive report on the intelligence community’s failure to foretell 9/11.

On October 7th, around 6:30 a.m. Israel Summer Time, which is 11:30 p.m. EDT, the weather was a balmy 72 degrees. The early risers were just getting out of bed, stretching their slumber-stiff arms. Some were probably drinking coffee, while others drank tea. Maybe someone lit a cigarette. Maybe someone let their dog out, or maybe they didn’t. It should have been a pleasant day.

But as the sun broke, so too did the barrier between Israel and Gaza. Hamas, a terrorist organization, had battered the 40-mile-long barrier with bulldozers and other blunt instruments. Thousands of militants swelled through the different openings in the border, then proceeded to rage across the land with the violent abandon of a forest fire. These militants attacked small Israeli towns and kibbutzim along the southern border. They did not distinguish civilians from soldiers. They did not distinguish young from old, women from men, babies from adults. Instead, they killed and they raped and they destroyed, driven by an implacable rage. They butchered 1,300 people and slaked a thirst for Jewish blood.

Now Israeli rockets are pummeling Gaza, pummeling Gaza incessantly. So far 3,785 Palestinians have been killed, 1,524 of whom were children. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has demanded 1.1 million people to leave their homes in the north of Gaza and go south, despite the logistical impossibility of doing so. Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defense minister, has ordered “a complete siege” of Gaza. That means no food, water, electricity, or fuel will be allowed to enter Gaza, a tactic that has drawn strong condemnation from the Human Rights Watch and is in violation of International Humanitarian Law. Israel’s president has said, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Half of Gaza’s 2.2 million population are children. And a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces has said, “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”

On Wednesday, the United States vetoed a UN resolution that would have created “a humanitarian pause” in the fighting, giving civilians in Gaza a respite from the bombing and a chance to get medical help and other aid. France voted in favor of the Brazil-sponsored resolution, while Britain abstained. The people of Gaza are in a fatal pincer-hold with Israel in the north and Egypt in the south. The Erez crossing into Israel and the Rafah crossing into Egypt are both closed. The people of Gaza are stuck, pinned down in a narrow strip of land where rockets fall from the sky like rain. Hamas is using civilians as human shields. The Palestinians are being reduced to ash.

To execute their attack on Israel, Hamas militants used all means of transportation—trucks, boats, motorcycles, paragliders, tractors. They fired a salvo of 3,000 rockets on Israel.

Israelis have called the event their 9/11. Proportionally, the loss of life the Israelis experienced is greater than that of 9/11. President Biden likened it to fifteen 9/11s.

9/11 has become a sort of collective memory, with nations all around the world invoking it to draw attention to their own tragedies. Tragedies defy comprehension, and their awful nature can only be approximated by relating them to other tragedies, tragedies like 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Center was a shock to America and to America’s drowsy security system. It changed our country’s psychology forever. From the rubble of the twin towers, the Department of Homeland Security would emerge. Two wars would emerge. The Patriot Act and Stellar Wind would emerge. The ghost of the twin towers continues to cast a dark, 110-story-long shadow over our country.

Once tragedies occur, they appear inevitable, preordained even. They seem like fixed points of darkness, and the years before an event like 9/11 take on a certain poignancy and bend inexorably toward the tragedy. Although tragedies are hard to predict, there are steps that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of their occurrence. Israel’s invocation of 9/11 is appropriate not just because of the awful loss of life, but also because both 9/11 and the attack on October 7th were made possible by failures in the intelligence communities.

Right now, it’s unclear how Israeli intelligence failed—that’s something that can only be understood with time. But it’s clear that they failed—the 1,300 dead are the cold and bloody testimony of that failure. The Guardian opined that the attack “will be remembered as an intelligence failure for the ages.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak said it was “a failure of intelligence, of preparation, up to the top political leadership.”

Until Israel’s failure can be fully understood, it would be wise to reflect on how our own intelligence community let us down on September 11th.

9/11 happened because we didn’t connect the dots, and we didn’t connect the dots because we rejected the very notion that there were dots. But there were dots. There were signs.

Bin Laden had made his aims clear in August of 1996, when he declared a Jihad against America. He railed against the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and America’s support for Israel. In February of 1998, bin Laden issued his fatwa. “The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it,” bin Laden said.

On December 4, 1998, President Clinton’s daily brief was entitled “Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.”

There was a spate of al-Qaeda-related terrorist plots and attacks—a plot to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport (the millennial plot), the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000.

There were the suspicious men enrolling in flight schools across the U.S., men who were evasive when asked about their origins and plans, and who were indifferent to whether or not they received their pilot's license.

There was the Phoenix memo, written by FBI special agent Ken Williams after he and fellow agent George Piro “gathered evidence that al-Qaeda had a network of adherents at American flight schools” (Weiner 417). The memo would get lost in the yawning distances separating the FBI field offices from their headquarters. Director Mueller wouldn’t find out about the memo until after 9/11.

Then there was the August 6th intelligence report, prepared at President Bush’s request, that said that bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S., that he wanted to bring the fight to the U.S., and that the “FBI information…indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”

There was the knowledge that the World Trade Center had been attacked before. On February 26, 1993, a 1,500-pound bomb exploded deep in the concrete bowels of the parking garage underneath Tower One of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed and over a thousand were injured.

Planes had been used as weapons in the past. In 1994, Algerian terrorists had threatened to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower. In 1995, after the Bojinka plot was foiled in Manila, U.S. intelligence learned that one of the conspirators, Abdul Hakim Murad, intended to hijack a plane and crash it into the CIA’s headquarters.

There were warnings of an imminent attack—the “chatter in the system.” In the months before 9/11, the FAA issued five information circulars to the airlines, urging them “to use the highest level of caution.” A circular issued toward the end of July said that “terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you, therefore, to use caution.”

And yet, after 9/11, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice would say, “No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon.” They should have imagined just such a contingency because there were signs. There were the dots. They just needed connecting. But the dots weren’t connected for a whole host of reasons. Here are just a few.

There was a breakdown in communications. Ever since the days of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has been a guarded organization, one cloaked in secrecy. Before 9/11 happened, the FBI was intractable and operated almost like a rogue governmental agency. They didn’t like to share their intelligence. There are 56 FBI field offices, each one of them with a special agent in charge—SAC—and each of these 56 offices reports to the FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. In the years before 9/11, and the reforms that 9/11 provoked, the 56 field offices “worked in isolation. Agents rarely talked to analysts. The terrorism task forces across the country rarely talked to headquarters” (Weiner 399).

Each field office was its own fiefdom and collected intelligence that they didn’t share with other field offices or with the FBI headquarters. Part of this blackout was technological—“the average American teenager had more computer power than most FBI agents. The field offices worked with the digital infrastructures of the 1970s. They could not perform a google search or send e-mails outside their offices” (Weiner 410). At the time, Director Bob Mueller admitted that “We have systems that cannot talk with other bureau systems, much less with other federal agencies.”

But a lot of this isolation was self-imposed and deliberate. It was cultural. Take the case of Ali Mohamed, an eccentric Egyptian who had been dismissed from the CIA after going undercover at a Hezbollah-linked mosque in Germany and immediately announcing to the Iranian cleric in charge that he was undercover. The CIA thereafter terminated its relationship with Mohamed and hoped to prevent his entrance into the United States. They didn’t prevent him, though. He received a US Visa and relocated to California, where he married an American woman and joined the U.S. Army. He would take what he learned in the army—explosives training, intelligence gathering, how to create cells—and teach it to his al Qaeda pupils, one of whom was Osama bin Laden. After Mohamed left the army, he worked security for a defense contractor in California. He applied to be an FBI informant, and the San Francisco FBI field office accepted him.

In 1993, Mohamed was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Vancouver International Airport after he tried to pick up a friend and bin Laden associate who had been caught with two forged Saudi passports. He told the Canadian Police that he was an FBI asset, and after the Canadians called the San Francisco office and confirmed this, he was released.

Back in California, Mohammed told his FBI handler about how he had joined the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He told his handler about a new, shadowy organization called al Qaeda, and about its enigmatic leader, Osama bin Laden. He even spoke about how he had trained the al Qaeda members in warfare and intelligence.

This was the first time the FBI had heard of al Qaeda and bin Laden. But the San Francisco field office did not deem this information important enough to share it with the field office in New York or the FBI Headquarters. “The members of the FBI’s new Radical Fundamental Unit knew nothing about Ali Mohamed and al-Qaeda at the time. They usually had no idea what investigations their colleagues were pursuing. Nor did their supervisors really know what was going on in the field” (Weiner 398).

This breakdown in communications was also visible in the interactions between the FBI and the CIA. The relationship between America’s two dominant intelligence agencies was always fraught. It was always riven by rivalry. The OSS, the CIA’s predecessor, was headed by General William Donovan, and Donovan and J. Edgar Hoover had loathed one another and, to FDR's chagrin, had refused to cooperate. Since the CIA’s inception in 1947, there had existed a deep-seated hostility between the organizations. Hoover and the rest of the FBI resented having to give up their holdings in Latin America. They wanted the FBI to be an international agency. The CIA wrecked that dream. In the 9/11 commission’s report, one gets a sense of how complete the estrangement between the CIA and the FBI was.

“Now, one of the first things that I learned when I came into this town was the FBI and the CIA don't talk. I mean, I don't need a catastrophic event to know that the CIA and the FBI don't do a very good job of communicating,” Commissioner Bob Kerrey said.

Their failure to do “a very good job communicating” prevented the two agencies from sharing intelligence. As Tim Weiner notes,

“The FBI kept hunting for al-Qaeda in Africa. The CIA was preparing to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan. They had between them evidence of his next attack in hand…The chief of the FBI’s national security division…refused to share the el-Hage files with the Agency. After the CIA seized al-Qaeda records in a raid in Azerbaijan, the head of the CIA’s Bin Laden Unit…refused to share them with the FBI.”

This tit-for-tat behavior severely undermined our national security. Historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones writes, “Government officials hoarded their secrets and would not communicate with people outside their own patch.”

Because of this mutual freeze-out, terrorists like Khalid al-Mihdar were able to slip into our country. The CIA had identified al-Mihdar as a member of al Qaeda, and yet, when Al-Mihdar travelled to Los Angeles with another terrorist, the CIA determined that this required no action. And they did not share al-Mihdar’s presence in the country with their colleagues at the FBI, even though the FBI was actively trying to root out any al Qaeda presence in the US.

Al-Mihdar and his companion ensconced themselves in San Diego, and soon they started taking flying lessons.

9/11 happened because of politics.

Bill Clinton appointed Louis J. Freeh as the fifth director of the FBI. Rather than devote all of the FBI’s resources to combat the growing terrorist threat, Freeh investigated allegations that China’s intelligence service had acquired influence in the Clinton White House through illicit campaign contributions. These were allegations that the FBI “spent far more time and energy on…than it did on the any terrorism investigation during the Clinton years” (Weiner 383).

Freeh encouraged the attorney general, Janet Reno, to appoint an independent counsel to investigate the allegation. For his part, Freeh distanced himself from the Clinton White House and refused to communicate with the president at a time when communication was essential. Freeh would call Clinton a liar in public, and he would leak his own memo about his investigation to the press. He “put three hundred agents on the case, making it the largest ever, until 9/11 came along…Clinton’s assistant Sidney Blumenthal later complained that some of the agents had been taken off counterterrorism assignments” (Jeffreys-Jones 222-223).

No administration officials were ever indicted. It was a major distraction, a lurid side-show, that weakened our ability to fight terrorism.

9/11 happened because of a failure to empathize with our enemy.

In Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara lays out eleven lessons he'd learned over the course of his life. Lesson number one was that you must empathize with your enemy. McNamara meant empathize in a strategic sense. He said, “We must try to put ourselves inside their (the enemy’s) skin and look at us through their eyes…Just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.” McNamara attributed our success with the Soviets to our ability to empathize with them. Our failure with the Vietnamese he attributed to our inability to empathize with them.

We failed to empathize with our enemies in the run-up to 9/11. We didn’t understand our enemy, their thoughts, their beliefs, what motivated them, what made them tick. We were blinded by our own prejudices. At the turn of the century, the FBI had one analyst working on al Qaeda (Weiner 391). Before the initial attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993, the FBI had only one translator capable of reading and understanding Arabic.

Bassem Youssef was a highly capable FBI agent whose deep knowledge of Arabic was critical in FBI investigations. But despite his status as a senior expert on Arab-based terrorism, he was assigned to routine translation work. In 2003, he would sue the FBI, “claiming adverse discrimination on account of his ethnicity, and arguing that the national security of America had been impaired because of FBI prejudice that barred a specially qualified agent from doing the work he did best” (Jeffreys-Jones 230). Bassem was an American citizen, born in Cairo, and just the type of hardworking agent the FBI desperately needed in its fight against al Qaeda. Unfortunately, Bassem’s value was dismissed and the country suffered as a result. When Bassem filed his suit, there were only six Muslims at the FBI, and only 21 agents were able to speak Arabic.

The CIA was just as parochial in its attitudes. Tim Weiner writes, “As a consequence of its cultural myopia, the CIA misread the world. Very few of its officers could read or speak Chinese, Korean, Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Farsi—the languages of three billion people, half the planet’s population.”

The FBI and the CIA’s prejudices limited their insights and gave them a very narrow and highly distorted view of the world. This was a vulnerability, a soft spot in our security system that the terrorists were able to exploit.

And 9/11 happened because of hubris, because of a false sense of security provided by our military might.

Who in their right mind would attack the United States? What country would want to experience the full, almost-omnipotent power of our armed forces? No country would. But these terrorists were stateless, deracinated. Their ideology wasn’t rooted in a nation but in a religion. We concerned ourselves with possible foreign threats and forgot to protect our home. Those information circulars that the FAA issued were ignored. Reports of potential terrorist attacks overwhelmed our intelligence agencies. The system was strained to the breaking point. And the twin towers fell.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Condoleezza Rice remarked on how “sophisticated” the attack was and how “President Bush also said that he wondered could it have been Iran, because the attack was so sophisticated, was this really just a network that had done this.”

But the attack wasn’t sophisticated. Anybody who resorts to violence to accomplish their aims is not “sophisticated” and is not capable of carrying out a “sophisticated” attack. The al Qaeda plotters were in the United States. They used their real names and identities. Before carrying out their attack, they flew on many planes together to gather intelligence, breaking a cardinal rule for any plotter not wishing to draw attention to themselves—travel solo. They were not incognito. They did not keep a low profile. They sat together and cased the planes.

Attackers had bombed The World Trade Center in 1993 by renting a van, filling it with explosives, and then detonating the explosives in the subterranean parking garage. After the attack, the chief conspirator tried to collect his $200 van deposit, telling the rental agency the van had been stolen. “Sophisticated.”

There’s been similar rhetoric surrounding Hamas’s attack. There are narratives about how “sophisticated” and “coordinated” the incursion was. Maybe it was “sophisticated.” Maybe it was “coordinated.” Maybe the Israeli intelligence agencies failed, and failed terribly, and hope to soften their failure by emphasizing how much more capable Hamas was than they’d expected.

Israel had been expecting tunnels. They had been expecting an attack in the West Bank. They were worried about Iran and Iran’s nuclear program. They failed to anticipate something as bold as an assault on the border. They failed to “imagine” such a scenario, borrowing Condoleezza Rice’s language.

Cameras run along the barrier wall. Most of them face towards Gaza. Once Hamas broke through, their whereabouts were hard to gauge. The cameras are almost metaphorical. It’s important to have cameras facing out, yes, but it’s also important to have cameras facing in.