AGA Today
A Fight Against
Terrorism - and Disorganization
By
Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 9, 2006; A01
Early this summer, a new strategy for combating terrorism, described by
its authors as "revolutionary" in concept, arrived on President Bush's
desk. The highly classified National Implementation Plan for the first
time set government-wide goals and assigned responsibility for achieving
them to specific departments and agencies.
Written by officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, under a
directive signed by the president last winter, the 160-page plan aspires
to achieve what has eluded the Bush administration in the five years
since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: bringing order and direction to the
fight against terrorism.
In
the years since Bush stood atop the smoldering ruins of the World Trade
Center and pledged retaliation against "the people who knocked down
these buildings," the federal government has undergone an unprecedented
expansion and reorganization.
Yet the counterterrorism infrastructure that resulted has become so
immense and unwieldy that many looking at it from the outside, and even
some on the inside, have trouble understanding how it works or how much
safer it has made the country.
Huge amounts of money have been spent -- $430 billion so far on overseas
military and diplomatic counterterrorism operations, according to the
U.S. comptroller general, a tripling of pre-9/11 expenditures for
domestic security programs to an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion
this year, and untallied billions more in state and local money.
Institutions historically charged with protecting the nation have
produced a new generation of bureaucratic offspring -- the Pentagon's
Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) and Joint Intelligence Task
Force for Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT), the Treasury Department's
Office of Intelligence and Analysis (OIA), and the FBI's National
Security Service (NSS), to name a few -- many with seemingly overlapping
missions.
New laws have broadened domestic enforcement powers, and the Justice
Department has been radically restructured to emphasize
counterterrorism. The FBI, where counterterrorism now accounts for half
of all investigations, has nearly doubled its budget to $6 billion since
2001 and added 7,000 employees. Twenty-two domestic agencies have been
combined under the new Department of Homeland Security, while separate
counterterrorism divisions now exist in virtually every nook and cranny
of the federal government, from the Transportation Department to the
Food and Drug Administration.
Outside Washington, 42 states have established intelligence "fusion
centers" -- centralized locations where local, state and federal
officials operate joint information-gathering and analysis operations.
The proof that it is all working, White House officials often say, is
that there has been no attack on U.S. soil since 2001.
But critics say that after nearly five years, the fight against
terrorism often seems like a chaotic work in progress.
"It's as if we're at 2002 and not 2006 in terms of where we are," Rep.
Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a member of the House Homeland Security
Committee, said in an interview.
The ad hoc construction, adding layer upon layer with none taken away,
has left intelligence and security agencies competing for turf.
Deadlines for priorities have been missed. DHS, for example, has
repeatedly delayed supplying a congressionally mandated list of the
nation's critical infrastructure, and a blueprint for
information-sharing among federal, state and local entities has been
slow to get off the ground.
Continuity and coherence have been undercut by rapid turnover among top
officials, particularly in the institutions responsible for domestic
security and preparedness.
DHS's cybersecurity division has been run by an acting director since
the last full-time appointee -- the third person to leave the post in a
year -- resigned in October 2004. In April, the FBI's sixth
counterterrorism chief since 2001 tendered his resignation after 10
months on the job. Many with government training and security clearances
resign or retire, only to sign on at far higher salaries with the
burgeoning private-sector security industry.
At
the state and local front lines, officials complain of limited input in
the development of homeland security policies and impenetrable layers of
federal secrecy -- including as many as 90 categories of "sensitive but
unclassified" information -- that limit the usefulness of terrorism
alerts they receive from Washington, according to separate surveys this
spring by the National Governors Association and the Government
Accountability Office.
On
paper, at least, the man in charge of much of the counterterrorism
effort is Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. His
office was created last year under the 2004 Intelligence Reform and
Terrorism Prevention Act to fix two widely acknowledged problems. The
first was the intelligence community's pre-9/11 failure to collect and
share information that might have warned of the al-Qaeda attacks. The
second problem was the confusion and competition spawned by post-9/11
attempts to fix the first.
Negroponte supervises the 16 agencies that make up the federal
intelligence community and is the president's chief intelligence
adviser. Directly under him, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)
is the central repository for terrorism information collected throughout
the community. Its several hundred analysts integrate intelligence,
figure out what it means and redistribute it across the government. The
center's strategic planning division provides what NCTC Director John
Scott Redd has called "the missing piece" between White House policy
decisions and the operational departments and agencies that carry them
out.
"We've done a great deal" in the years since 9/11, said one of a number
of counterterrorism officials interviewed for this article, all of whom
agreed to speak only if their names were not used. "There's a lot more
we need to do. A lot more."
The official added: "The American people ought to have some faith that
we're working on it."
Beyond the Military Approach
It
was only natural that the military would take the lead in fighting
terrorism after Sept. 11. In Afghanistan and other al-Qaeda locales,
U.S. forces produced victories that were substantive and quantifiable,
as well as politically useful to the administration.
Other parts of the government had important roles. But the Defense
Department, buttressed by its intrinsic organizational skills, its
traditional role as the recipient of the lion's share of the
intelligence budget, and the zeal and policymaking influence of Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, quickly grew to dominate much more than
the war-fighting effort.
The Pentagon has clashed repeatedly with the CIA and the State
Department as it has sought to expand its counterterrorism mission. Last
year, both protested a secret Pentagon program that sends Special Forces
units in plain clothes on intelligence-gathering missions to countries
where no war is in progress and with which the United States has
friendly diplomatic relations.
The Pentagon argued that troops report to their commanders and the
defense secretary, not the secretary of state or the CIA director, and
do not need to seek permission from or even to inform local U.S.
ambassadors or CIA station chiefs. And, it said, the military needs its
own "situational awareness" of possible future combat areas.
When the level of animosity peaked last summer, Rumsfeld and then-CIA
Director Porter J. Goss were prodded by Michael V. Hayden, then deputy
director of national intelligence, to negotiate an agreement to
delineate intelligence-gathering responsibilities. Under a separate
memorandum of understanding, the Pentagon and the State Department
agreed that ambassadors would be informed of all military activity in
their countries and given the opportunity to object.
Beyond the turf battles, however, counterterrorism officials grew
concerned that U.S. strategy needed to expand beyond what one called the
"whack, capture, interrogate and whack again" approach of the military.
"Our thinking has matured radically since 2001," he said. "Then, it was
looked at as the al-Qaeda network. Now, it is seen as looser, more
diffuse, and also in our own country, in Western Europe and Canada."
"The military can't be the big hammer" anymore, he said, because
al-Qaeda and its affiliates "are not the nail."
"You'll never win unless you can get to the sources of radicalization,"
he added. ". . . As the threat has changed, we've tried to adapt. But
it's taken some time. As an American taxpayer, I wish we could have
gotten it right in October 2001."
The "changing paradigm" applies at home as well as overseas, said a
senior FBI official. The FBI operated on the assumption that "al-Qaeda
was 'The Sopranos,' with a boss, an underboss, the consiglieri and the
captains who ran the cells," the official said. "It was comfortable for
us to understand."
New initiatives such as the National Implementation Plan were launched
to eliminate overlap and set priorities for what the administration now
calls the "long war." Beyond drawing sharper lines of responsibility,
officials said, the plan is designed to drag the nation's
counterterrorism strategy back from military dominance, better balancing
the military "whack" with diplomacy and the "hearts and minds" campaigns
that are now seen as critical to long-term victory.
Bush was briefed on the plan on June 26. A White House official said the
plan reflects Bush's feeling that the terrorism fight is
"all-encompassing," including military attacks but also "the war of
ideas and the softer side, the long-term battle.
Within half a dozen broad objectives, the document designates lead and
subordinate agencies to carry out more than 500 discrete
counterterrorism tasks, among them vanquishing al-Qaeda, protecting the
homeland, wooing allies, training experts in other languages and
cultures, and understanding and influencing the Islamic psyche.
Achieving agreement among more than 200 department and agency
representatives over 10 months of often-torturous negotiations was "a
heroically ambitious exercise," said a senior administration official
who participated in the process. "A couple of months ago, everybody was
still shaking their heads."
The plan is expected to prompt a rewrite of the president's February
2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, which emphasized the
physical elimination of terrorist networks while making largely symbolic
bows to international partnerships and addressing the "underlying
conditions that terrorists seek to exploit."
Eventually, officials acknowledged, it will also require a
reconfiguration of the intelligence budget, now heavily weighted toward
the military. No one expects that to happen overnight -- early proposals
to shift spending brought a sharp protest from Rumsfeld.
But even at the Pentagon there are signs of turf-war fatigue. "Two years
ago, we didn't have anything," said Brig. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., who
until June was the Joint Chiefs of Staff's deputy director for the
terrorism fight. "Every department of government had its own idea on who
was the enemy. Now we have a strategy and a plan that gives specific
tasks and responsibility," he said.
Others are guardedly optimistic that the plan can be implemented. "It's
going to alleviate a lot of the turf tensions and the growing pains,"
said one senior counterterrorism official. "But they're not going to go
away."
The
Overlaps Persist
In
the lead-up to this year's Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, eight of the
16 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community independently produced
assessments of possible terrorist threats to the Games. The "finished
intelligence products," a counterterrorism official said, all concluded
exactly the same thing -- that the threat was minimal.
"They posted them internally to their own organizations and sent them
out to share" with other community members as the authoritative bottom
line, the official said. "They would all argue, 'We had to do it for our
principal, our Cabinet member' or whatever." Watching the competing
agencies, he said, "is like watching 7-year-olds play soccer -- you've
got 20 kids all following the ball."
Avoiding such duplication and wasted effort, he said, "was the whole
point" of setting up the NCTC as the sole provider of integrated
intelligence analysis. Yet neither congressional mandates nor
presidential directives have been enough to eliminate the overlap.
Before the Intelligence Reform Act, the CIA was in charge of bringing
together "all-source" intelligence and analyzing it for the larger
intelligence community, the White House and policymakers. It was the CIA
that chaired the daily interagency meeting at 5 p.m. to discuss
real-time terrorism information and what to do about it. The agency drew
up the daily "threat matrix" and the CIA director briefed the president
each morning.
But the Sept. 11 commission found that long-standing tensions within and
among the CIA, the FBI and the rest of the community, along with
institutional firewalls constructed during the Cold War, meant that
"information was not shared" and "analysis was not pooled" that might
have warned of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
The CIA's responsibilities for integrating and analyzing all-source
intelligence have now been transferred to the DNI and the NCTC. All
members of the intelligence community -- including the Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) and other Defense Department agencies and the
FBI -- are restricted to analyzing only what they need to accomplish the
"tactical missions" specific to their own assignments. For the CIA, that
means concentrating on building the clandestine network and human
resources that Congress and a series of outside studies have found
lacking, especially in the Middle East.
But the DNI-NCTC structure remains vastly outweighed in power, personnel
and tradition by the growing bureaucracies it hopes to tame. While the
number of NCTC analysts is scheduled to double to 400 by 2008, the FBI
alone has tripled its analytic staff since 2001 to more than 2,700. The
DIA has nearly 8,000 employees collecting and analyzing intelligence,
and the CIA has twice that many.
On
July 11, Negroponte signed an internal document titled "Analytic
Framework for Counterterrorism" for distribution among the 16 agencies.
In a cover note, he pointedly wrote that while he recognized each "must
continue to support its agency leadership and unique operational
activities, as well as to provide a robust analytical capability and
reliable steam of diverse viewpoints," both Congress and the president
had given him the authority and "fully empower the NCTC" to "reduce
unnecessary duplication of effort."
The framework, said one counterterrorism official, directs operational
agencies such as the CIA "to focus their analytical resources" on
"penetrating and eliminating known terrorist organizations," leaving the
NCTC to provide comprehensive threat analyses for the government as a
whole.
Although Hayden's appointment as CIA director in May is likely to hasten
the agency's acceptance of what is known in the community as "the lanes
in the road," intelligence officials have not been shy about expressing
skepticism and resentment.
Many see themselves as demoted to mere intelligence-gatherers, stripped
of their rightful roles as strategic analysts and forward-looking policy
advisers. An internal CIA study, declassified last month a year after it
was written, criticized the NCTC model as promoting "watered-down
analysis, duplication, confusion, and misuse of scarce resources."
Separating those who collect intelligence from those who analyze it
would result in a weaker product, the study said, and was likely to lead
to more strategic failures like those in Iraq.
The addition of new non-operational layers to integrate, analyze and
share information "has made the organizational picture more, not less,
confusing," Paul R. Pillar, a former national intelligence officer for
the Middle East and South Asia, said recently. The question of "who's in
charge of intelligence, when it comes to counterterrorism, is harder to
answer now than it was before."
Teamwork at the NCTC
Three times each day -- at 8 a.m., 3 p.m. and 1 a.m. -- representatives
from across the intelligence community meet to update the nation's
threat matrix. The meetings -- held most days via videoconference -- are
chaired at NCTC headquarters, a nondescript, unlabeled office building
in Northern Virginia, around a massive, football-shaped wooden table.
The table, designed as neutral ground, has 16 seats, pop-up computer
terminals and ceiling-mounted screens that can show al-Jazeera
broadcasts as well as highly classified graphics.
Participants include representatives of the CIA and FBI; the Defense
Intelligence Agency and others under the Pentagon umbrella; the
departments of State, Homeland Security, Treasury and Energy; and other
subsidiary agencies such as the Drug Enforcement and Transportation
Security administrations. Topics include individual suicide bombers,
movements of groups and people, potential targets, reliability of
information on specific threats, and actions being planned or already
taken.
Material for the meetings is gathered by the 24-hour operations center
deep within the ultra-secure building. The room is dark, with a high
ceiling, drop-down video screens and sound-muffling walls; its carpeted
floor is covered with desks where integrated intelligence teams examine
and share incoming data from their separate agencies in 12-hour shifts.
At opposite ends of the room, the CIA and FBI counterterrorism divisions
have satellite offices representing their own headquarters.
The thrice-daily meetings are the substantive and symbolic core of
NCTC's melding of the intelligence community. But most of the center's
activities take place in offices and cubicles where officials plumb 28
databases of raw and processed intelligence from across the community.
The analysts turn out reports, adding context and information about
response actions already taken, that are disseminated to more than 5,500
policy and intelligence officials with the security clearances required
to read them.
Even within the NCTC, however, access to information is not easy. Most
desks are stacked high with half a dozen or more computer processing
units connected to various intelligence agencies that still cannot, or
will not, communicate with one another electronically.
Negroponte deputy Dale Meyerrose, a retired Air Force major general and
expert in creating and integrating communications systems architecture,
is charged with breaking down the technological barriers among what he
calls intelligence "tribes" with a built-in reluctance to divulge their
secrets.
Meyerrose, a recent addition to the DNI's office, does not dispute or
defend the slow pace of information-sharing. "My government's had five
years," he acknowledged in a recent interview behind a code-locked door
inside the high-security DNI headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base.
"I'm very sympathetic to that. But you know what? I've had four months,
and there's nothing I can do about the 4 1/2 years that went before me."
Technology is important, but "it's the transparency of the process that
people are griping about," Meyerrose said. Feuding intelligence agencies
don't argue about a lack of computer interface, he said, they talk in
terms of "The FBI wouldn't tell me this." Rather than imposing new
computer systems from the top down, he has started from the human end,
bringing representatives from different agencies to the same table to
work on specific intelligence issues.
The NCTC operates on the same principle of "co-location," fashioned
under the 2004 intelligence reforms, that pulled the branches of the
armed forces into a combined structure designed to end decades of
destructive and expensive rivalry.
The Defense Reorganization Act of 1986 created unified regional commands
under a single general or admiral directly answerable to the nation's
civilian leadership and named the chairman of the Joint Chiefs the
principal military adviser to the president. By making assignments to
the joint staff from across the military a prerequisite for most
high-level promotions, it created a cadre of senior officers with
perspectives beyond the narrow confines of their individual branches.
Negroponte, a former Foreign Service officer who most recently served as
ambassador to Iraq and to the United Nations, is the intelligence
community's equivalent of the chairman, and the NCTC is his joint staff.
NCTC Director Redd is a retired vice admiral, and everyone else in the
structure is on temporary duty from somewhere else in the intelligence
community, usually for two-year stints. "Everybody still belongs to
their other agency," a senior official said. "We're trying to tell them
that the NCTC is them.
The idea is that familiarity will breed cooperation and that personal
relationships formed through shared tasks will carry through once
individuals return to their home offices. "We are diverse cultures,
working to form habitual relationships," the official said. "It takes
time."
Staff
writers Walter Pincus, Spencer S. Hsu, Dan Eggen and Ann Scott Tyson
contributed to this report.