Intelligence

This morning, the Committee on Governmental Affairs will review the President’s recent proposal to create a new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The President’s announcement of this new center is the latest in a series of actions being taken by the Administration and by Congress to address the government’s serious failure to analyze and act upon the intelligence it gathers relating to terrorism.

Some of these failures have been publicly reported. For example, in January 2000, the CIA learned that a meeting of Al Qaeda operatives was taking place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The CIA knew that one of the participants in this meeting, Khalid Al-Midhar, had a visa to enter the United States. However, it failed to place his name on the terrorist watch list, and he entered the country just two weeks later. Al-Midhar returned to Saudi Arabia, and, in June of 2001, he received another U.S. visa. Although one and a half years had passed, his name was still not on the watch list. The CIA did not conduct a review of the Malaysian meeting until August 2001. Following the review, it placed Al-Midhar on the terrorist watch list. By then, of course, it was too late. Al-Midhar was already in the United States and, within weeks, would participate in the September 11th attacks.

Failures such as these were not unique to the CIA. In July 2001, an FBI agent in the Phoenix Field Office warned his superiors that Osama bin Laden appeared to be sending some of his operatives to the United States for flight training. The agent recommended a number of actions the Bureau should undertake. His recommendations were ignored. One month later, agents in the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office detained Zacarias Moussaoui, a former student pilot, based on suspicions that he was involved in a hijacking plot. FBI headquarters denied the Minneapolis agents permission to apply for a court order to search Moussaoui’s belongings. According to the Joint Inquiry conducted by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, this decision was based on a misunderstanding of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

These are only a few of the most notable examples of the government’s failure to analyze, share, or act on critical intelligence information. The joint congressional inquiry into the September 11th attacks lamented that “the U.S. Government does not presently bring together in one place all terrorism-related information from all sources. While the [Counterterrorist Center] does manage overseas operations and has access to most Intelligence Community information, it does not collect terrorism-related information from all sources, domestic and foreign.”
In addition, the congressional inquiry found that, “Information was not sufficiently shared, not only between different Intelligence Community agencies, but also within individual agencies, and between the intelligence and the law enforcement agencies.”

Some steps have been taken to address these problems. The FBI has begun to place greater emphasis on developing its analytical capability. It has expanded its Joint Terrorism Task Forces and is attempting to improve its relationship with the CIA. The number of FBI personnel assigned to the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center has increased, as has the number of CIA personnel assigned to the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division. The CIA has also reorganized and expanded its Counterterrorist Center.

In addition, Congress took significant action aimed at improving the analysis and flow of intelligence information by its creating the Department of Homeland Security. One of the Department’s directorates will be devoted to information analysis and infrastructure protection.

In addition to these steps, the President believes that a new independent entity is needed. According to the President’s proposal, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center would ensure that “intelligence information from all sources is shared, integrated, and analyzed seamlessly – and then acted upon quickly.” The new Center would include elements of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Defense.

As of yet, we know few details about the proposed Integration Center. We have many questions regarding its structure, the scope of its authority, how it will interact with other agencies in the intelligence community, and where it should be located.

I believe that three key principles should guide the Center’s creation.

• First, the Integration Center should not be duplicative. Many government agencies currently conduct intelligence analyses. We should be working toward combining those efforts, not duplicating them.
  
• Second, emphasis must be placed on sharing the Integration Center’s analytical product. Good intelligence collection and analysis currently exists. Too often, however, that information does not get to the people who need it in a timely manner or in a form that is useful. The Integration Center needs to focus on sharing its product with other federal agencies and, equally important, with appropriate state and local agencies.
  
• Third, the Integration Center must be structured in such a way that it breaks through the bureaucratic barriers that exist among intelligence agencies, not hide behind them.

I believe that today’s hearing can help the President achieve those goals. We will review what we know about the Integration Center, and we will ask our distinguished witnesses to discuss the elements that are necessary for this new entity to be the successful and efficient Center our President envisions and our country needs.