US:Following calls from Congress, the US intelligence agency has released a summary of a damning report of its operational and strategic flaws, write Joby Warrickand Walter Pincusin Washington.
Former central intelligence director George Tenet and his top lieutenants failed to marshal sufficient resources and provide the strategic planning needed to counter the threat of terrorism in the years before the attacks of September 11th, 2001, according to a long-secret CIA report.
Despite promises of an all-out war against terrorism in the late 1990s, leaders of the spy agency allowed bureaucratic obstacles and budget shortfalls to blunt its efforts to find and capture al-Qaeda operatives, said the report by the CIA's inspector general.
It also faulted agency leaders for failing to "properly share and analyse critical data".
The 19-page document - a redacted executive summary of a classified report given to congressional intelligence committees two years ago - called for the creation of a special board to assess "potential accountability" for Tenet and other former CIA leaders.
Its stark assessments triggered a sharp response, with Tenet and other intelligence officials denouncing the conclusions. "The IG [inspector general] is flat wrong," Tenet said.
The CIA reluctantly released the report summary after Congress demanded it be made public. Congressional leaders had requested the study to determine whether individual CIA officials should be held accountable for intelligence failures before 9/11 or, alternatively, rewarded for outstanding service. "Agency officers from the top down worked hard" against al-Qaeda but "they did not always work effectively and co-operatively", the investigators concluded.
While finding no single intelligence lapse that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks, the report identified "failures to implement and manage important processes" and "follow through with operations". The report said Tenet bears "ultimate responsibility" for the CIA's lack of a unified, strategic plan for fighting al-Qaeda. The intelligence community "did not have a documented, comprehensive approach" to al-Qaeda and Tenet "did not use all of his authorities" to prepare one.
The report, overseen by CIA inspector general John Helgerson, states Tenet became "actively and forcefully engaged" in counterterrorism efforts before 9/11 and had even declared in 1998 that "we are at war" with global terrorism. But neither he nor his deputies followed through by pushing for adequate resources and sharing of information among intelligence and law enforcement agencies, it said.
Tenet said the report was factually inaccurate and does not place his actions in the context of the times. He emphasised his repeated efforts to sound alarms about al-Qaeda before Congress and inside the White House in the months before the attacks.
"There was in fact a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication to fighting terrorism, dating back to long before 9/11," said Tenet, who served as CIA chief from 1997 to 2004 and now teaches at Georgetown University.
In his recent memoir, At the Centre of the Storm, Tenet recounts his campaign to persuade the Bush administration to take terrorism more seriously. "The bureaucracy moved slowly," he wrote. He said he inherited an intelligence agency "in shambles", with declining budgets and plummeting morale. There was "no coherent, integrated and measurable long-range plan", he wrote. "That's where I focused my energies from day one."
Despite the narrow scope, the unclassified report sheds new light on several controversies in the months before the attacks. It describes, for example, a little-known clash between the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) over surveillance activities and authorities. According to the report, the NSA had long refused to share raw transcripts of intercepted al-Qaeda communications with the CIA but finally relented and allowed one CIA officer to review the intercepts at NSA for a brief period in 2000.
The summary also reveals CIA analysts, before 9/11, had trained their sights on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was later determined to be the chief planner of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the CIA's counter-terrorism centre, "KSM" became a high priority for capture because of his connections to the organiser of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.
But CIA analysts did not recognise he was also a senior al-Qaeda planner, despite "reporting from credible sources", the investigators concluded.