[p.ix] Historians will undoubtedly view the horrific events of September 11th as a turning point in American history. Before that day, most Americans thought terrorism was something that happened in faraway places like Israel, Lebanon, or Colombia -- not here at home.
Now that we have cleaned up the rubble of that ruinous day, we must examine what went wrong. More importantly, we have to evaluate why our first line of defense, our country's intelligence capabilities, failed to detect the scheme concocted by Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network. Further, we must determine what steps we can take to repair that breach, both in human and in technological resources.
Historically, the United States has had a tradition of resistance to intelligence gathering. Listening to people's private conversations, taking pictures in a clandestine manner, and having spies listen and understand the leaders of other nations does not fit with America's open and free society. It was not until World War II that the United States first organized a professional intelligence community. The British, in contrast, had one since the Napoleonic Wars. At the end of World War II, our limited intelligence operations were shut down and disbanded. Then, two years later, President Harry S. Truman recognized that the Soviet Union was emerging as a major threat and that the Iron Curtain was dividing communist nations from the free world. With this in mind, the National Security Act of 1947 established the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
For 40 years, the CIA intelligence capability focused on one big target: the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. They were an enemy that we knew a lot about. We had maintained relations with Russia since John Quincy Adams was the U.S. ambassador to St. Petersburg. The Russians were substantially similar to us: They had a homogeneous society and spoke a single language. Their goal was clear: geographic, political, and economic superiority. They were also a symmetrical threat: It was our tanks versus their tanks; our nuclear weapons versus their nuclear weapons.
[p.x] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall, no such singular threat exists today. Today, we face dozens of enemies, many of whom cross national boundaries and have no readily identifiable goal. Rather, they twist ancient religious beliefs into misguided zealotry. Instead of a culture we have long known, we face diverse cultures and political states. In Afghanistan, our agents have encountered a multiethnic society that speaks languages such as Pashtu, Dari, Tajik, Uzbek, and Farsi. Instead of symmetric military challenges, we now face any number of small groups which might be comprised of dozens, scores, hundreds, or thousands who do not seem intimidated by the military might of the world's sole remaining superpower.
The fallout from 9/11 has had both short-term and long-term ramifications on the intelligence structure in the United States. Congress, with the full cooperation of the Bush Administration and the intelligence community, has taken some immediate steps to address several areas of concern. Through both the five-year budget plan that the Senate and House Intelligence Committees formulated and the USA PATRIOT Act, we are moving to rectify four critical deficiencies in our post-Berlin Wall intelligence environment. First, we are increasing resources for crucial and currently underfunded areas of our intelligence community. Second, we are addressing some of the carry-overs of the Cold War culture that have kept our services from responding to the diversity of new threats. Third, we are removing some of the legal shackles on our foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement agencies, thereby encouraging a free and effective flow of information. Finally, we are modernizing outdated organizational structures that, for example, made the Director of Central Intelligence more a supplicant than a commander of resources, to reflect the new environment.
The five year budget plan for upgrading our intelligence agencies, which was passed by Congress in November 2001, is a significant step in the right direction. Not only did the legislation make a commitment to reversing the decline in the capability of the National Security Agency -- our primary eavesdropping agency -- it also made the expansion of human intelligence a top priority. Other key objectives include closing the gap between the amount of data we collect and the amount of data we are able to analyze and convert into useful intelligence information, and calling for a significant investment in research and development.
Our intelligence agencies have historically been leaders in science and technology. Much of what we now take for granted in communications technology, for instance, was first developed by the National Security [p.xi] Agency for use in our clandestine services. The CIA developed the U2 aircraft in an amazingly short number of weeks to be able to respond to some of our needs for overflights of the Soviet Union. As in the "space race," our superiority was spurred in part by the competitive Russians, and we had an open-checkbook mentality toward technological supremacy that prevailed during the Cold War. But the competitive stimulus faded and the investment in research dwindled with the collapse of the Soviet Union. We need to return our intelligence agencies to that aggressive, robust research and development era. Without the most sophisticated software tools available, we face the prospect of our satellites and other information-gathering tools going deaf as new and more sophisticated communications technologies come to market.
In truth, the strength of our technological capabilities rely heavily on the people that utilize them. Our challenges in the human intelligence arena are visible within the history of our spy agencies. During the latter part of the Cold War, it became increasingly difficult to get spies inside the Soviet Union. We have all seen movies and read about those all-too-real problems. So we became very technically adept at eavesdropping on and taking pictures of the Soviet Union. Our mix of intelligence resources tended to move away from human beings and towards machines. In the current environment, there is no substitute for having a human being who can get close to a Bin Laden, who can understand what capabilities and intentions he might have, and who can protect us by telling us in advance what his plans are, therefore giving us the opportunity to interdict his operations.
Every three hours, American satellites and other sources collect enough data to fill the Library of Congress. The key is knowing which three or four volumes we need to take off the shelf at the right moment. It is possible that we may find that a critical clue to the September 11th attacks may have been available, but was untranslated and unanalyzed, days, weeks, or even months before the hijackings. One way the intelligence community will marry our information needs, our human skills, and our technological savvy is through the National Virtual Translation Center, which was established in the USA PATRIOT Act. It requires the CIA, the FBI, and other agencies to work together to remedy the chronic problem of developing critical language abilities, and then match those resources against the data collected by the wide range of techniques available. It is not enough to be able to pluck the conversations of terrorists and their supporters out of the air if these conversations are not translated.
[p.xii] The culture that pervaded our intelligence community prior to September 11th has been described as increasingly risk averse. Some of that had to do with activities that occurred in the 1970s and '80s close to home, particularly in Central America. This attitude was encapsulated in a personnel directive, not, as many believe, legislation, which discouraged the recruitment of informants with questionable backgrounds, including human rights violations.
Congress, through the USA PATRIOT Act, has provided the Administration an opportunity to relax this standard. The reason is simple: If we are going to get somebody close enough to a Bin Laden, that person is likely to be someone who is pretty much like Bin Laden. He will have to be someone who has had a similar life experience, so that he can earn a level of trust which will allow him to understand what Bin Laden's intentions might be. In other words, if we are to infiltrate a terrorist cell, we cannot recruit spies from a monastery.
Another diagnosed weakness of the intelligence community stemmed from several laws on the books that restricted information sharing between our law enforcement and intelligence agencies, which limited the ability of our intelligence agencies to perform the kinds of surveillance needed. For example, there are two basic types of wiretaps. One is called a Title III wiretap and is secured by a law enforcement agency to investigate criminal activity that a judge finds to be sufficiently reasonable to justify a wiretap. The second is a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretap, which authorizes agents to listen to the conversations of a non-U.S. citizen who is alleged to be involved in an act of international espionage or terrorism.
The person who is listening to a conversation on a phone tapped under FISA is under a legal obligation to call his law enforcement counterparts and pass along any information related to a domestic security situation. On the other hand, the person who is listening to a conversation under a Title III law enforcement wiretap is legally prohibited from telling his colleagues in the intelligence community any information that carries international implications. The USA PATRIOT Act removes such barriers on both law enforcement and intelligence gathering agencies, allowing these agencies to forge closer working relationships.
While this law works to rectify relationships between the different agencies, the interaction among intelligence organizations needs to be clarified. If you look at a chart of the intelligence community, you would assume that the Director of the CIA exercises central control as the [p.xiii] commander-in-chief of all of our intelligence agencies. In fact, much of his power is actually held by others, such as the Secretary of Defense, with scattered decision-making authority over personnel appointments and budgets. The reality is that the Director of the CIA has frequently been a supplicant rather than a commander.
We also have the issue of the role of intelligence within the broader construct of the executive branch as it relates to terrorism. With the appointment of former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge to the head of the Homeland Security Office, this problem becomes pronounced. Clearly, Ridge needs more authority than the President can give him in an executive order. In order to make Governor Ridge and the Office of Homeland Security more effective, I have been working with Senator Joe Lieberman, D-Connecticut, on legislation that would give the head of the Homeland Security Office Cabinet rank and, among other things, grant him statutory budget control over those parts of the agencies that have counterterrorism missions.
Even as we have tried since September 11th to respond to all of these designated areas of weakness, people continue to ask: How could our government not have known that there were four commercial airliners about to be hijacked and flown into some of the pillars, the icons, of America? How could we not have known that the terrorist network had sent its agents to live among us, in some cases for several months, to attend U.S. flight schools and be trained for this dastardly series of actions? How could we have not known that the money needed to finance these evil deeds was being sent through financial systems that were known and regulated by the United States government?
It is perfectly proper for Americans to ask these questions, and I and others have committed to get the answers to the best of our ability. In February, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees launched an unprecedented joint inquiry to investigate the intelligence failures surrounding September 11th. Within the bounds of our duty to protect classified information, we will ultimately deliver to the American people an accounting for what our government did or did not do to detect, deter, and disrupt the al Qaeda network's plans. I expect our investigation to produce recommendations for additional reforms.
We cannot stay in the mode of attack, respond, attack, respond. We have to become proactive. In our open and free society, there are an infinite number of vulnerabilities. We need, for instance, to examine our entire public health system to be assured that it can protect us against any form of [p.xiv] bioterrorism. We need to look at our total transportation system and our borders.
I have personally been long concerned about the security of our maritime borders, especially at our seaports. The Senate has passed legislation that I, along with Senator Fritz Hollings, D-South Carolina, have developed that would set new federal security standards for things like inspection of cargo and other security measures at our ports, and would provide the federal funding to assist in putting that infrastructure in place.
Ultimately, we must accept the fact that we cannot play defense with terrorists. The only way to win this war is at the source; and that is what we have been doing in Afghanistan and will be doing on a global basis in the months ahead. The war against terrorism will test the patience and determination of all Americans.
But it is not the first time our Nation has faced such a challenge. During one of our periods of greatest testing, the winter of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln rallied the country with these words: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
Now it is our turn to save our Country.