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Couldn't We Have Known Sooner?;
U.S. intelligence called into question in attacks

By By Earl Lane

Washington - With the United States spending billions on counterterrorism in recent years, the successful attacks this week on targets in New York and Washington must be considered a serious and disturbing intelligence failure, some analysts said yesterday.

Others said such a conclusion is premature, however, and noted the immense difficulties intelligence agencies face in trying to penetrate the shadowy world of international terrorist groups.

At the same time, there was general agreement that the horrific airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon likely will bring a searching reassessment of the American effort to combat terrorism and the resources being devoted to it.

"The only conclusion you can come to is a negative assessment as far as the intelligence on this incident," said John Reppert, a retired Army brigadier general who is now executive director for research at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. "Airports were not on heightened alert. There were no standard notices about the generic threat from terrorism." U.S. officials have said that they had no warning of the attacks but have developed significant evidence that points toward Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda terrorist network as prime suspects in the attacks.

Specialists said the coordination of the attacks suggests that there was a substantial amount of planning, carried out over several months or more, both abroad and in the United States. Reppert said it is disconcerting that no hint of the operation was picked up beforehand. "This was an action that would have been planned over months, not days, involving multiple parties and multiple locations."

To add to the potential embarrassment, Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday that "a number of suspected hijackers were trained as pilots in the United States." Investigators reportedly are looking at a Florida aviation school where two suspects may have received flight training.

Harvey Kushner, a terrorism specialist at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, said the attacks pointed toward an intelligence failure. "It's bad," he said. "It happened. The intelligence community is supposed to stop such things." But Kushner said the American intelligence community has not had enough human resources - agents on the ground - since the 1970s. "We live in a bad neighborhood," Kushner said. "It's no longer in the Middle East. It is worldwide. To deal with the reality of terrorism, you need to have assets in the field."

Kushner said the resources may have to include more law enforcement officers in the United States as well. "If someone is here illegally and poses a serious threat, I have no problem with our law enforcement agencies gathering information on them," Kushner said.

Bill Harlow, chief of information for the Central Intelligence Agency, rejected the criticism that the agency has neglected use of human agents abroad (human intelligence or "humint," as it is called) in favor of too much reliance on spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping. "We haven't neglected anything," Harlow said. "Do we need more humint? You betcha. But there has been a massive increase in our attention to humint. As you know, it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in a hostile environment, and you just don't penetrate narrowly defined cells of cousins ... It's hard to penetrate easily, but it doesn't mean we aren't trying continuously to do the best we can."

Reuel Marc Gerecht, who worked in the CIA's directorate of operations for nine years, said agency case officers working abroad typically are posted undercover to U.S. embassies and other official facilities. "They are U.S. officials," Gerecht said in a telephone interview from Belgium, where he now lives. "They are not going to go out there and have lunch with a holy warrior. They are essentially going to wait until something good walks through the door."

Reppert, who served three tours abroad as a U.S. military attache, said intelligence officers, even if unable to penetrate terrorist groups, can develop valuable information by working with intelligence organizations in the host country. He predicted some foreign intelligence agencies will be more willing to share information in the wake of the terrorist attacks this week.

And, in fact, a Russian intelligence source said yesterday Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered his Federal Security Service operatives to provide all the information they can to the United States from their sources with connections to bin Laden and the ruling Taliban faction in Afghanistan, where bin Laden is believed to be harbored.

John Pike, a security analyst at the nonprofit GlobalSecurity.org, said the early evidence suggests that the U.S. intelligence agencies did the best they could, given the tightly controlled nature of the bin Laden network. "There is no reason to believe the operation would have had enough unreliable people that informers or humint would have picked up on it," Pike said.

James Phillips, a terrorism expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said it is too soon to judge the performance of the intelligence community. "Right now, it leaps out more as a failure of domestic airline security," Phillips said, given the ease with which the terrorists hijacked four airliners.

A former analyst in the CIA counterterrorism center, which sifts information on threats to U.S. interests, from a broad range of sources, said it is not unusual to receive reports of several threats in a day. Such threats might consist of public statements against the United States by hostile groups, reports of increased activity by known terrorists and any unusual increase in communication among terrorist groups. The challenge, the analyst said, is to determine which threats are real.

James Walsh, a research fellow at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said it is a mistake to think the CIA is all powerful. "At the end of the day, they are just human beings like you and me," Walsh said. "When you look at intelligence failures, it is not just whether you had the data, or integrated it properly or weighted one piece of information more or less than another. It requires human judgment."

Special correspondent Knut Royce contributed to this story.