CIA defends its anti-terror credentials
by Griffin Shea
WASHINGTON, July 22, 2004 (AFP) - The CIA, stung by scathing criticism from the September 11 inquiry, insisted that the agency should still take the lead in defending against future attacks.
With growing political pressure for a massive reorganization of US intelligence services, senior officials at the Central Intelligence Agency spoke to reporters at a rare press conference on Wednesday, one day before the report was made public.
Saying they had not yet seen the commission's final conclusions or recommendations, CIA officials generally praised the report's description of the events leading up to the 2001 attacks that killed 3,000 people.
"The report does a good job of describing the facts of the case, and it's pretty balanced," one official said.
But they were wary of moves to restructure the world's largest and best-financed spy network, which is spread across 15 government agencies, by creating a cabinet-level director of national intelligence.
"There is no inclination that senior levels here reject the idea. Nor is there any inclination to embrace it without asking serious questions," one official said.
"We have to make sure that this isn't some kind of exercise where boxes are moved on a chart."
One official said any changes should "build on the fact that this is the Central Intelligence Agency," saying the statute that created the agency gave it a mandate to coordinate a national intelligence strategy.
Any reforms should keep the agency out of politics, the official said, possibly by setting a fixed term for the director.
CIA director George Tenet resigned earlier this month after a stormy seven years at the helm of the intelligence agency.
The head of the CIA, or an eventual director of national intelligence, should also have broad authority over budgeting, hiring and firing of staff and accountability for military intelligence, the official said. Many of those decisions are currently made at the Pentagon.
The entire US intelligence network should work more closely together by requiring staff to rotate through several agencies before being made eligible for promotion, and by creating new centers for major projects that would pull people from all areas, the official said.
CIA officials said they had already implemented many reforms on their own -- building closer ties with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, overhauling computer systems, and expanding the ranks of spies in the field.
But they also disputed accusations of withholding information from their counterparts at other intelligence agencies, especially the FBI, and of failing to take strong enough steps to develop a national counter-terrorism strategy before September 11.
The official cited one passage from the report that said: "The method for detecting and warning of surprise attacks that the US government had so painstakingly developed in the decades since Pearl Harbor did not fail. There were not really tried."
The official said those systems were designed for the Cold War and would not have detected a terrorist threat.
"They were completely inappropriate for the terrorist threat that we face today," the official said.
The CIA did slip up in failing to add the names of two September 11 hijackers to a watchlist, after they were known to attend an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, the official said, but denied withholding information.
"Our fundamental flaw was not withholding information. It was missing the significance of the information we had and acting on it."
"The CIA was not withholding information from the FBI at any time," the official said.
The report also said the CIA chief "did not develop a management strategy for a war against Islamist terrorists before 9/11," according to passages cited by officials.
But the CIA points to repeated warnings both from the agency and from independent panels that warned of the al-Qaeda threat as early as 1997.
One official said the CIA warned civil aviation authorities years before September 11 that al-Qaeda could be plotting to hijack aircraft, and quoted a 1999 advisory given to the Federal Aviation Administration that said bin Laden "is well prepared to commit kidnappings and hijackings as well as bombings."
After issuing the warning, the official said "the CIA should not be in the business of (telling) other agencies what to do and how to do their business."