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ATTACK ON AMERICA; Some security experts blame attack on failure og U.S. intelligence

By Jonathan Wells and Jack Meyers

Some national security specialists said yesterday the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represent a major failure of U.S. intelligence gathering. Terrorism experts formerly with the FBI, the Department of Defense and the CIA were mystified that the highly organized plot that led to yesterday's military-style blitz could have been carried out without any U.S. intelligence personnel getting wind of it.

"There's going to be a hue and cry about the intelligence agencies, the CIA, the FBI, the NSA - 'Where's your information?' " said Robert Fitzpatrick, a former second-in-command in the Boston FBI office who taught terrorism and counter-terrorism at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.

"It's preposterous that with the intelligence community we have today, with our ability to intercept all communications worldwide, that we did not pick up any coded language," Fitzpatrick added. "If in fact foreign intelligence subjects have unique, impenetrable codes, that spells danger, capital D-A-N-G-E-R."

Michele Malvesti, a former Middle East terrorism analyst at the Pentagon and a doctoral candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, said the coordinated attacks represent "a massive intelligence failure" on the part of national security agencies. "The public will demand to know . . . where was the intelligence gap" that failed to detect any early warning of an effort that took 12 to 24 months to plan, Malvesti said. "It's surprising to me we didn't have some indication of this," Malvesti said. "A lot of resources in the intelligence community, especially since the 1996 bombing on Khobar Towers (in Saudi Arabia), have been directed at" information gathering and penetration of terrorist groups, she said. "The symbolism of these attacks is incredible," Malvesti said. "They wanted to reach out and touch us and they showed they could."

Robert Steele, a retired CIA officer, described the U.S. intelligence network as a Cold War antique unsuited for contemporary threats. "Anybody with a brain knows that if you stay off the phone, you are virtually undetectable to the U.S. intelligence apparatus," Steele said. "America is addicted to expensive technology" instead of putting money into analysts and people in the field-gathering information, he said.

Several security and terrorism experts defended the track record of the country's primary intelligence gathering agencies - the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency - and cited the inherent difficulty of penetrating highly secretive and compartmentalized terrorist groups.

John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and intelligence policy organization in Virginia, said the terrorist effort that struck the United States yesterday may have been "undetectable." "My gut hunch is the number of people involved is a dozen, no more than 18. The whole operation could've been planned in one room around a table," said Pike. The people who carried it out could've been set in motion months ago, with little if any communication with the headquarters, he said. "There is nothing to detect," Pike said. The U. S. intelligence gathering effort "is set up to gather information about nations . . . and large transnational organizations like drug cartels," Pike said.

Clark Murdock, a consultant on defense policy and national security and a senior fellow at The Center for Strategic and International Studies, said yesterday's terrorist attack "shows the degree of difficulty in gathering human intelligence on clandestine groups." Murdock suggested that the organization which struck U.S. targets yesterday has "changed the paradigm of the attack."

"It appears to have been four to six teams, each one a suicide team, each one with a pilot," Murdock said. "It was an unprecedented operation. It required fervor, commitment and a willingness to sacrifice." Murdock said those characteristics should "bring home to America the extent to which Americans are hated not for what they do, but for who they are." To a growing number of people in the world, he said, America is the "inventor of globalization, the chief benefactor and the chief enforcer."

Some experts pointed out that the government managed to short-circuit terrorist acts allegedly planned for the millennium celebration and in the wake of the Gulf War, as well as countless other scuttled plots that received little public notice. "The terrible thing is you don't hear about the dogs that don't bark," said Anthony J. Blinken, who served on the staff of the National Security Council from 1994 to 2000 and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Batting a thousand is not possible. Every single day, the United States gets intelligence reports about potential (terrorism) problems. Figuring out what is real and what is not is a daunting task," Blinken said.

Harvey Sapolski, a professor of political science and director of MIT's Security Studies program, said even the best efforts will not detect every threat. "It's hard to be in front of these things," said Sapolski. He noted that Israel, the nation with the most experience combatting terrorism and with much more intrusive security measures than the United States, is hit frequently by terrorists. "I'm sure the (intelligence) could be better but I don't think it can be flawless," said Sapolski.