Richard Norton-Taylor and Jon Henley in Paris
The CIA, the FBI and the United States’s national security agency spend billions of dollars a year gathering intelligence abroad and combating terrorism at home significantly more than any other country.
Their satellites can spot vehicle number plates and eavesdrop on millions of e-mails and telephone calls, yet they failed to prevent this week’s attacks by terrorists who must have spent a long time in the US preparing them.
“I think the bottom line is that we were caught flat-footed,” said Senator Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate’s intelligence committee, after a meeting with CIA director George Tenet, whose annual budget amounts to about $30-billion.
“This is a stunning security and intelligence failure,” said Mike Yardley, a terrorism expert. “In both those spheres, major errors have evidently occurred. Heads should roll.”
The post-mortem will come after the investigation into the attacks. They were ruthless, but they were also extremely well prepared.
There has been lax security on internal US flights. But a key factor, intelligence sources say, is the failure to infiltrate the network of the prime suspect, Osama bin Laden.
Israel can fire a missile into the offices of its Palestinian opponents. But it has informers and monitors the activities of its potential targets over a relatively small area.
Whoever were the perpetrators of Tuesday’s atrocities their network had not been penetrated. They must have built up a highly secure counter-intelligence system to avoid being picked up by the world’s most sophisticated surveillance systems.
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein learned to avoid being spied on by using motorbike riders to transmit intelligence. Members of the Irish Republican Army passed information orally on the tops of buses.
Human access, or “humint” as it is known in the trade, is the only alternative to “sigint”, signals intelligence or the interception of communications.
Yet a former CIA agent says in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly that Bin Laden had little to fear from the organisation. Quoting a former senior CIA officer responsible for the Middle East, Reuel Gerecht writes: “The CIA probably doesn’t have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. We don’t do that kind of thing.”
Shelby and Senator Bob Graham, Democratic chairperson of the Senate intelligence committee, have mentioned several ways the US intelligence system needed to be upgraded. The priority, Graham said, was to improve the human intelligence system, including the ability to infiltrate cells and small groups and learn what they are doing and what motivates them.
French security chiefs were quoted in Le Monde newspaper as criticising the US’s decision to abandon in-depth personal surveillance in favour of hi-tech methods of gathering intelligence such as the Echelon eavesdropping network that filters fax, telephone and e-mail communications throughout the world.
French authorities believe this is no substitute for on-the-ground intelligence gathering, which they say is what allowed them both to break up the network responsible for the 1995 terrorist attacks by an Islamic group in Paris which left 10 people dead, and to mount the successful mass preventive arrests of suspected Islamic terrorists before the 1998 football World Cup.
French anti-terrorist investigators were reportedly told by the counter-espionage agency, the DST, on Monday that it had received information suggesting an attack on American interests in France was being planned by part of the Bin Laden network.
Last week the US State Department issued a warning of a possible attack by terrorists on Americans abroad.
Some Western intelligence sources defended the FBI and the CIA by saying that it was very difficult in an open society to guard against such a daring attack by skilled suicide pilots. “No intelligence agency can guarantee against an attack,” said one source.
Others, pointing to the parallels that have been drawn with Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, said that the US intelligence community simply could not believe that even the most committed terrorists would attack the US itself. The myth that US was invulnerable to attack dies hard, they added.
However, having succeeded in their aims, the guard of the perpetrators’ network may drop. That is what intelligence agencies always wait for after an attack.