Following the instructions of a trusted source, late one night I pulled my car up next to the pedestrian tunnel near the Pentagon parking lot and waited. Soon another car rolled next to mine and I got inside. We drove a short way and parked close to one of the building’s more obscure entrances. My companion, well known to the guards, was able to usher me in without my having to hand over my Pentagon press pass or sign in.
Once inside, we walked through the wide halls that, this late at night, were so empty our footsteps echoed. Although I had been to the Pentagon hundreds of times, I’d never seen the building in this way.
Up stairways, down corridors, and through a series of vaulted rooms we nearly trotted until a final door was unlocked. It opened onto a suite of offices where a general was waiting.
His duffel bag and armored vest lay in the corner. He was on his way to another tour in a war zone and had something on his mind that he wanted to share before he left. We went into a closetlike room and sat in front of his computer. He turned it on and looked into the tennis ball–sized camera mounted on top of the monitor. The camera recorded his face and scanned his iris, transmitting an image to the central database, verifying his identity, and granting him access to predetermined levels of classification. Not a second later, he was in.
What he wanted to show me was something I was not supposed to see: a volume of intelligence reports so large it made him mad just thinking about having to look through them all, which he was supposed to do, every day. As he scrolled down page after electronic page, dozens of icons raced by, each representing a different analytical website produced by a different government agency, many of them military intelligence, a few CIA, and the others a collection from an alphabet soup of names, all of which not even he was familiar with. Post-9/11, government agencies annually published some 50,000 separate serialized intelligence reports under 1,500 titles, the classified equivalent of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Some were distributed daily; others came out once a week, monthly, or annually.1 The senior intelligence officer grew visibly angry as he showed me a listing of just a few of these digital reports: CIA World Intelligence Review, CIA WIRe, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight. He turned to the in-box on his desk, focusing on the printed intelligence reports he received rather than those transmitted electronically. The in-box was full to the point of overflowing. He waved the thickest report around—it was fifty pages and glossy-covered—and slammed it down. “Why does it have to be so bulky? Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?” The data, he scoffed, was outdated by the time it had arrived. A good deal of once valuable, expensively obtained information had been leeched of its value by virtue of the delay in getting it to the relevant people—if, that is, the relevant people even found it among mountains of pages and millions of kilobytes.
Indeed, the print overload was particularly counterproductive, the officer said, because too many long, redundant reports caused decision makers to avoid the electronic pile altogether. Frustrated, senior officials would rely on their personal briefers to tell them what they needed to know; those briefers, also overwhelmed, usually relied on their own particular agency’s analysis, ignoring those from other sources. Thus a post-9/11 goal of breaking down walls to give decision makers a broader analysis, all easily accessible online, was completely defeated.
One of the government’s solutions to this indiscriminate overproduction had been to create, in 2010, yet another publication, an online newspaper named Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of twenty-two culled twenty-nine agencies’ reports and sixty-three analytic websites on the classified networks, selected the best information, and packaged it by originality, topic, and region, producing a daily publication that was dozens of screens long. The director of national intelligence pointed out that, with Intelligence Today, intelligence from every agency was being consolidated and distributed throughout government for the first time. Such an effort had been nine years in coming, he said. But instead of welcoming the innovation, many officials inside the military and intelligence community had rolled their eyes. It was, they complained, another new product, just more to read.
Overproduction may be inevitable in the digital era, when the ability to collect and store raw information has exploded exponentially. “I’m going to be honest, I don’t know how many products we produce,” another senior official responsible for analysis across the entire intelligence community said. Surveying all of the intelligence websites feeding the national security system, he had determined that sixty of them should have been closed down for lack of usefulness. Some agencies had turned their sites into little more than cherished personal projects, the classified equivalent of an unread blog. In any case, “like a zombie, it keeps on living,” the official chuckled darkly.
So who produced all of these pages? Analysts never got the glory that operatives received; no one proposed 007 movies or action-packed spy novels about them. Yet they are at the heart of the work done in Top Secret America. All the billions of bytes of data intelligence agencies collected were useless without people to review and assess their significance. They synthesize the transcripts of interviews with informants, spies, and detainees, the translations of the National Security Agency’s overseas signals intercepts, and the FBI’s telephone wiretaps. Analysts make sense of documents that are stolen and captured or taken from the pockets of terrorists or the trash bins of foreign government buildings. For much of the cold war, analysts specialized in understanding foreign institutions—armies, governments, bureaucracies—but in the age of 9/11, their focus turned to individual terrorists, cells, families, and villages. Imagery analysts scrutinize satellite and aircraft photography and the full-motion video from drones. Technical analysts process even more complex data: heat signatures, noise, or the metadata associated with our ever-moving electronic world. Analysis was greatly enhanced by computers that sorted through the huge volume of captured overseas conversations, names, and topics of discussion and cross-referenced them by geographic location. But in the end, analysis required human judgment, and the usefulness of those judgments depended on the quality of the analyst. Good analysis should drive everything in the intelligence arena, including what kind of information CIA operatives need to steal or ask detainees about, and what kinds of operations should be undertaken to achieve that goal. Good analysis helps commanders devise new, more effective tactics or tweak old ones. It helps policy makers come up with new strategies to achieve, for the United States, a more secure position in the world.
Unfortunately, the quality of analysis in the age of al-Qaeda terrorism took a hit after 9/11 with the exodus several years later of experienced veterans in midcareer into the lucrative private sector. As a result, half of government analysts throughout the intelligence world had been hired in just the past several years. In fact, two-thirds of the analysts at the CIA have less than five years of experience. Two-thirds of FBI analyst positions didn’t even exist before 9/11. The shortage of analysts has led to a greater reliance on outside contractors, and this has led to two additional problems. Corporations poached senior talent from government by offering larger salaries. They also offered to train prospective analysts straight out of college, which meant, in reality, on-the-job training at taxpayer expense. Analysts are among the intelligence community’s lowest-paid employees, the ones who carry their lunches to work to save money, twenty- and thirty-year-olds making $40,000 to $60,000 a year. “There’s only so much we can do to increase the expertise of a new kid we hire out of Georgetown” or out of the government’s intelligence analysis academies, said the head of analysis for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “There’s only so much you can do to make that person a real expert, because that requires time on the target.” And while it was evident that these new hires lack experience, the sheer quantity of hires added to the mess. Furthermore, in contrast to the cold war era, when there was one primary target and analysts were hired out of specialized Soviet studies programs and spoke fluent Russian, a typical analyst hired these days knows very little about the priority countries—Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen—when he or she first comes on board. Most are not fluent in the relevant languages, either. And while the CIA and other agencies have made an effort to recruit native speakers, the number needed far exceeds the number available, particularly in jobs requiring the highest security clearances.
Thus, although there are probably twice as many analysts throughout government today as there were on September 10, 2001, too many of them can do little but move the same intelligence around; they lack the expertise and ability to go beyond what has already been packaged and presented. The analysts simply flood their commanders and policy makers with marginally informative and redundant conclusions.
“It’s the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard H. Immerman, who, until 2009, was the assistant deputy director of national intelligence for Analytic Integrity, the office that oversees analysis for all the agencies but has little power over how individual agencies conduct their work. “I saw tremendous overlap” in what analysts worked on. “There’s no systematic and rigorous division of labor.” Even the analysts at the gigantic National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)2—established in 2003 as the pinnacle of intelligence, the repository of the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information—got low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports that were original, or even just better than those already written by the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agency, or the Defense Intelligence Agency.3
It’s not an academic insufficiency. When John M. Custer III was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired vice admiral John Scott Redd, to say so, loudly. “I told him,” Custer explained to me, “that after four and a half years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!” Redd was not apologetic. He believed the system worked well, saying it wasn’t designed to serve commanders in the field but policy makers in Washington. That explanation sounded like a poor excuse to Custer. Mediocre information was mediocre information, no matter on whose desk it landed.
Two years later, as head of the army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, Custer still got red-faced when he recalled that day and his general frustration with Washington’s bureaucracy. “Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn’t gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he asked. “Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn’t produce the same thing?” The answer in Top Secret America was, dangerously, nobody.
This sort of wasteful redundancy is endemic in Top Secret America, not just in analysis but everywhere. Born of the blank check that Congress first gave national security agencies in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Top Secret America’s wasteful duplication was cultivated by the bureaucratic instinct that bigger is always better, and by the speed at which big departments like defense allowed their subagencies to grow. This included the National Security Agency.
Retired air force general Michael Hayden was in charge of NSA on 9/11. A personable, articulate intelligence officer whom many people easily call “Mike” despite his four stars, he oversaw its subsequent expansion. Under him, NSA had grown larger and more powerful than any other single intelligence-collecting organization. “Doubling down”—doubling the number of employees—“was the rule of thumb,” Hayden recalled, and he’d doubled down like no other previous NSA director. Under Hayden, NSA expanded its work into new parts of the world against new targets, requiring new language skills and technologies. It was the NSA’s responsibility to probe certain parts of the Internet too. But quality did not necessarily follow quantity, Hayden admitted. “Effective we were. Efficient we were not,” he said.
“The redundancy,” he added, “is a truth.”
Arkin and I wanted to see if we could calculate the growth in agencies after 9/11 and then count how many were doing the same work as each other and/or preexisting agencies. The results were stunning.
Looking at only government organizations working at the top secret level on counterterrorism and intelligence, Arkin counted twenty-one new organizations created in just the last three months of 2001, among them the Office of Homeland Security and the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force. In 2002, thirty-four more organizations were created. Some tracked weapons of mass destruction, others joined the cyberwar and collected threat tips. Still others coordinated counterterrorism among different agencies, attempting to tame the growing information load. Those were followed the next year by thirty-nine new organizations, from the formidable Department of Homeland Security to Deep Red, a small naval intelligence cell working on the most difficult terrorism problems.
In 2004, yet another thirty organizations were created or redirected toward the terrorism mission. That was followed by thirty-four more the next year and twenty-seven more the year after that; twenty-four or more each were added in 2007, 2008, and 2009. After two years of investigating, Arkin had come up with a jaw-dropping 1,074 federal government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies involved with programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in at least 17,000 locations across the United States—all of them working at the top secret classification level.
With more work, he discovered that 263 of these organizations had been established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11.4 But the biggest growth had come within the many agencies and large corporations that had existed before the attacks and had since inflated to historic proportions. For example, the Pentagon’s large Defense Intelligence Agency, which collects and analyzes defense-related intelligence from countries around the world, had grown from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 at the end of 2010, DIA officials told me. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces5—“joint” because they included representatives from law enforcement, the military, intelligence, and the private sector—ballooned to 106 total, with over 5,000 agents and analysts involved daily.
As we learned more about Top Secret America, we sometimes thought Osama bin Laden must have been gloating. There was so much for him to take satisfaction from: the chronic elevation of Homeland Security’s color-coded threat warning, the anxious mood and culture of fear that had taken hold of public discussions about al-Qaeda, the complete contortions the government and media went through every time there was a terrorist bombing overseas or a near-miss at home. We imagined bin Laden and his sidekick, Ayman Zawahiri, pleased most by this uncontrollable American spending spree in the midst of an economic downturn. It was evident from the audiotapes secretly released after 9/11 that they both followed the news and would have known that thousands of people had lost their homes, that many more had lost their jobs, that states were cutting back on health care for poor children and on education just to stay afloat and to allow state fusion centers and mini-homeland security offices everywhere to stay open. They would have known, too, that the major American political parties were tearing themselves apart over how to stop deficit spending and reverse the economic free fall, and that they still feared al-Qaeda as a threat more frightening than the Soviet superpower of the cold war.
And this is exactly what a terrorist organization would want. With no hope of defeating a much better equipped and professional nation-state army, terrorists hoped to get their adversary to overreact, to bleed itself dry, and to trample the very values it tried to protect. In this sense, al-Qaeda—though increasingly short on leaders and influence (a fact no one in Top Secret America would ever say publicly, just in case there was another attack)—was doing much more damage to its enemy than it had on 9/11.
Budget figures told just part of the story. As Arkin categorized the functions of the top secret–level organizations, what Hayden referred to as inefficiencies and redundancies came to life. For example, at least thirty-four major federal agencies and military commands, operating in sixteen U.S. cities, tracked the money flow to and from terrorist networks (what the government calls “counterthreat finance”).
Some of the most intense infighting revolved around all things digital. Dueling organizations have fought over who will lead in securing U.S. computer networks, who should supervise and launch offensive cyberwarfare—which includes disrupting enemy websites, attacking enemy financial and electrical systems, and planting deceptive information on networks—and who should be responsible for tracking spies, hackers, and other intruders.
Although a new military Cyber Command was inaugurated in 2010 to coordinate and manage cybersecurity, warfare, and espionage, the Department of Homeland Security created its own cybersecurity apparatus, while the FBI, CIA, NSA, and at least three other major military commands each had large cyberdivisions of their own. In all, twenty-one federal organizations dealing with this same issue had been established after 9/11. And not only did much of their efforts directly overlap, but a good portion of their energy was spent not in improving efficiency but battling for institutional supremacy.
Part of the reason agencies were still haggling over which one would lead the others was the financial windfall to be gained from coming out on top. Such a windfall would be counted in billions of dollars, to be spent internally or—in a pattern increasingly common in Top Secret America—on contracts to private corporations.
“Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf,” recalled Benjamin A. Powell, who served as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the government in 2009. Why? “Because,” Powell explained, “it’s funded, it’s hot, and it’s sexy.” For Washington-based agencies, the Global War on Terrorism was a far-off one, in someone else’s country; the War over Money was tangible, immediate, and waged with every bureaucratic weapon available. Watching the squabbles firsthand, it was often difficult to tell which was the priority, fighting terror or fighting for funds.
Another area bogged down with redundancy was influence operations, called IO. Some of the overlap was due to the disturbing fact that few in government could even agree on what the term IO meant. The White House National Security Council created a new committee to lead the effort to reach out to Muslims in the United States and abroad. Meanwhile, the Strategic Command, where the discipline of influence operations was born, began a Partnership to Defeat Terrorism unit to come up with pro-democracy messages it would broadcast overseas in Muslim countries in which support for U.S. counterterrorist actions was not very strong. And the military Special Operations Command spent tens of millions of dollars to help U.S. embassies throughout the world create pro-America media campaigns, for use by host governments, some of them clandestine in order to obscure the role of the United States.
But that was hardly the end of it. Some of the money devoted to influence operations ended up in the Defense Policy Analysis Office because part of IO involves military deception, DPAO’s job, according to several sources. Elena Mastors, who worked in DPAO for several years trying to come up with a way to influence the thinking of terrorists, concluded that there were simply too many people in the office, and far too many of them didn’t know anything about terrorists associated with Islamic fundamentalism, which is who they were trying to deceive.
“We are too big,” said Mastors, who left DPAO in 2007, disgusted by how many people without any expertise were assigned to the office. “We don’t need all these people doing all this stuff. You just need a group of really smart people…. But it just keeps growing. Someone says, let’s do another study, and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study…. It’s about how many studies can you orchestrate” and “how many people can you fly all over the place” to conferences and seminars.
Nobody was arguing that all influence operations programs needed to be under one roof. But at the same time, it seemed impossible to defend the fact that in Top Secret America even those qualified to do something ended up being squeezed and squashed and distracted by internal rivals. “Everybody’s just on a spending spree,” Mastors said ruefully. “It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t duplication.”
Over time, we discovered that one of DPAO’s missions was to create fissures within terrorist groups and deceive them about U.S. operations. It was supposed to create false online personas who would enter certain chat rooms to gain more information about potential terrorists and to spread false rumors about them. It also disrupted website communications and dreamed up other operations that several senior Pentagon officials described as not very useful.
DPAO was just one small part of the duplicative U.S. government image machine. When the Pentagon decided it needed a better way to communicate its message to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, it created at least ten classified programs that cost $9 million in fiscal year 2005. Within five years, those programs had grown to “a staggering $988 million request” for fiscal year 2010. A 2011 House Appropriations Committee report noted that many items in the Pentagon’s request appeared “alarmingly non-military,” careening into areas where the armed forces had little or no expertise, including “propaganda, public relations, and behavior modification messaging.” This was another characteristic of Top Secret America, that every department and agency believed it needed control over its own influence operations, its own cyberoperations, its own counterterrorism analysts, its own everything. Congress did try to do something to rein in the IO spending by paring down the Pentagon programs in the appropriations budget. At the same time, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, responding to those congressional concerns, put a hold on the new programs until his office could determine if the projects were wastefully redundant or helpful. That pause didn’t last long: General David Petraeus, then commander of the U.S. Central Command in charge of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the larger Middle East, lobbied the armed services committees, saying his programs in this area were critical to the mission’s success. Because Congress was dependent on Petraeus for success in those two war zones, and trusted he knew best, most of the money was restored.
Not only was redundancy resistant to reduction, it had a way of multiplying. When roadside bombs (called IEDs, for improvised explosive devices) became the greatest cause of casualties in Iraq, the army set up an IED task force to investigate ways to stop these crude weapons. The Marine Corps, too, set up a working group. Finally, the Pentagon established a Washington-based joint organization—the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, or JIEDDO, to undertake a militarywide effort to counter this deadly, low-tech terrorist weapon.
JIEDDO is a perfect example of how an ad hoc crisis task force can become a permanent multi-billion-dollar agency. Working from undisclosed office buildings in Crystal City, Reston, and Charlottesville, Virginia, JIEDDO has grown to about four hundred military, civilian, and contractor personnel. In fiscal year 2010, to deal with the surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan, the JIEDDO budget increased from an initial $1.88 billion to $2.98 billion, and then to $3.465 billion. JIEDDO had so much money that it hired 1,200 contractors, according to the Government Accountability Office.6 It also oversees more than three hundred research projects aimed at stopping IED attacks. It has developed its own intelligence agency (which will compete and overlap with other, existing intelligence services—themselves overlapping with each other), its own training facilities, and its own top secret “special activities.” It even has its own air force.
That the army and marines each had their own expensive, noncollaborating IED-related projects going was not the end of the military’s budget-related interest in the subject. The availability of funds for counter-IED projects prompted each of the services to create its own IED Center of Excellence, a common military slogan for a research center. One senior official at the contracting giant SAIC admitted that each of these centers is replicating the same work, even cross-hiring the exact same contractors. If one defense of the overlap was that having multiple, independent efforts might more quickly lead to a solution, the fact that nearly everyone was using the same contractors to provide expertise meant the fresh ideas were limited.
One of the most duplicated tasks of all was that of “fusion,” the collection of information from myriad sources to be organized and analyzed for a fuller picture of terrorist or other threats. Arkin called government agencies for a complete list of all fusion centers in the area, and I visited half a dozen of them to see what they each produced. It was obvious these had proliferated by the dozens after 9/11. Arkin made another one of his charts to show them all. In the Washington region alone there were thirty-one national fusion, or watch, centers. They monitored everything from CNN to the latest top secret satellite images. With the exception of a few places that meshed incoming intelligence reports in order to come up with terrorist targets for soldiers in the field, most fusion centers were simply a kind of super-briefing machine for senior leaders, one that replaced the PowerPoint presentations of the 1990s with flat-screen interactive, geo-located presentations.
For example, at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in Suitland, Maryland, an enormous fusion center collected information for its leaders on the real-time location and ownership of commercial vessels around the world; but there was nothing in particular that the center’s senior people did with the information. Instead, it was the responsibility of a completely different set of four-star commanders with their own separate fusion centers to make operational or military policy decisions regarding those vessels—and they obviously didn’t need another fusion center near Washington advising them when they had their own.
The same was true for the new whiz-bang fusion center at the Special Operations Command in Tampa. Its two-story video wall, and the real-time images from overseas that could be fed into it, allowed commanders standing in the room to monitor the location of Special Operations Forces around the world on a minute-by-minute basis. But those leaders weren’t the ones who made decisions about those troops. They didn’t oversee or conduct operations, nor did they direct intelligence gathering. Those who did make the relevant decisions got their information from elsewhere, so the value of having a center that cost tens of millions of dollars to set up and maintain a real-time view of operations was not at all clear, although it made the commanders feel in the loop.
Most fusion centers look similar, with the same rows or clusters of computer stations facing two or three wall-sized television screens and maps. More elaborate centers have a VIP balcony where senior policy makers, members of Congress, admirals, and generals can watch the inaction from above. The experience is not that different from sitting in a movie balcony watching six very slow-moving films at once.
The issue of wasteful duplication, represented by the many fusion centers, the many agencies doing the same work, the many contracts and research projects on information operations, was not just a question of money down the drain. Sometimes redundancy actually impeded an agency’s mission. Lack of disciplined focus, not lack of resources, was one of the reasons why no one in the army’s gigantic counterintelligence apparatus ever gave proper weight to flashing warning signs of budding extremists within its own organization. A good example of this was army major Nidal Malik Hasan’s alleged murder of thirteen colleagues and wounding of another thirty-two at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009.
In the days after the shootings, one of my good sources sent me a PowerPoint slide Hasan had presented to medical school colleagues the year before. It showed how Muslims in the army could become alienated from the military if they were asked to kill other Muslims. The army, Hasan recommended, should offer these soldiers a way to leave the service, or it would risk “adverse events.”
Some of Hasan’s medical colleagues thought the presentation was bizarre, but some of his instructors thought the study gave them a good opportunity to understand a different mind-set—not Hasan’s, but that of other Muslims in the army he was presumably describing. They did not see him as a threat, just a little odd.
As the doctors and psychiatrists at Walter Reed Hospital pondered the insights Hasan laid out, the one organization charged with identifying actual threats within the army had no idea anything was amiss. Just twenty-five miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group—the largest counterintelligence organization in Top Secret America—had been doing little to train army personnel on indicators of radicalization. They hadn’t even been searching army ranks for violent Islamic extremists, although this was, in fact, the 902nd’s main mandate. Nor did the 902nd have a good working relationship with the FBI counterterrorism units that had begun—and then dropped—an investigation of Hasan after they’d found emails between him and a well-known English-speaking radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar Awlaki, whom U.S. intelligence had identified as a terrorism facilitator and was monitoring.
In fact, instead of figuring out how to find radicalized soldiers, the 902nd, which was directly responsible for finding spies and terrorists within army ranks, was busy creating a program to do what the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security were already mandated to do: the much sexier job of assessing the general terrorist threat in the United States. Working under a program its commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic Threat to the Army, the 902nd special agents and intelligence analysts had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard Corps, and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. Despite the fact that RITA had consumed the attention of the 902nd for a year, the assessment “didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already,” the army’s senior counterintelligence officer told me later, in the aftermath of Hasan’s rampage. It was another case of wasteful duplication, and of another real job—radicalization within army ranks—left unattended.
Lack of coordination had plagued the counterterrorism effort before 9/11 but became a huge problem in the years that followed—and remains so today. Better coordination was supposed to have been addressed in 2004, when the Bush administration and Congress set up yet another organization to take charge of the whole mess. In the middle of that year’s election season, the 9/11 Commission proposed the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to direct and manage every agency and coordinate them all. Democratic presidential hopeful Senator John Kerry immediately endorsed the commission’s recommendations. Bush followed soon afterward.
But the leaders of the intelligence agencies were horrified. Restructuring the entire intelligence universe, in the midst of two wars—a deteriorating battle of attrition in Iraq and a festering insurgency in Afghanistan—and with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden still at large, Somalia crashing toward failed statehood, and the safety of the 2004 Summer Olympics in Greece in question, seemed extremely reckless. The window for concern stretched forward, too: the newly created National Counterterrorism Center and its FBI counterpart, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, had already been hastily moving into their new secret building in northern Virginia to be in place for the election, an event analysts worried might be an occasion for a terrorist attack.
The NSA’s Hayden said the timing for such a massive reorganization was all wrong: “If you’d have asked me and the other leaders of the community… we would have said, ‘Oh, we don’t think this is a real good idea. We’re kind of busy right now. Restructuring is not at the top of our agenda.” Many of those in charge believed that the Central Intelligence Agency, which was supposed to coordinate and help manage the work of all U.S. intelligence agencies in addition to performing its espionage and analysis role, should simply be given more authority and more resources to do a better job as chief manager. But that was not the plan of those on Pennsylvania Avenue, and mainly for political reasons—to soothe the grieving 9/11 families and make it appear to the American people that the president was taking decisive action.
Hayden and his colleagues believed that for the new position to work as intended, its leader would have to be given clear authority to overrule the various agency heads and to manage the overall budget. But the law that Congress was about to pass (the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act) gave the DNI responsibility over all intelligence matters, not authority over all intelligence matters. It was a crippling distinction. Hayden had been right: for the position to work, the DNI had to be the supreme authority. But the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act had been cast poorly; in reality, none of the agencies wanted to give up the power they had over their budgets, personnel, and mission, and neither did the many congressional committees that supervised them and funded them. These committees were the source of real power in Washington. President Bush wanted to satisfy the 9/11 families, who blamed the structure of the intelligence community for the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks. He was not willing, however, to take on entrenched interests. Many senior officials in his administration did not think the reorganization was even necessary.
Still, the week before Christmas 2004, Bush signed into law the most sweeping changes in the intelligence world since the National Security Act of 1947. The law was so obviously problematic that the president of Texas A&M University, Robert Gates, turned down the position of director, in part because the job description didn’t even include the power to hire and fire. Ambassador John D. Negroponte, a respected diplomat but not an expert in the more contentious field of intelligence, was the backup choice.
Even before Negroponte reported for work, turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget (the national intelligence budget) and into another (the military intelligence program) so that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence would have only advisory status, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA promptly reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so that the multiagency National Counterterrorism Center staff, now part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, would not be allowed to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.
They got away with it because the new organization had no power to compel them to share anything. Without authority by law, the success of any DNI has come to depend on personal relationships, most important among them those he is able to establish with the chiefs of the separate intelligence agencies. “The original concept of a DNI was that an empowered DNI… could have overview of the entire thing,” Gates later told me. “My view is that the compromises that were made in passing the Intelligence Reform Act really inhibited the ability of the DNI to carry out what most people thought the DNI should do.”
The DNI, Gates said, was more like the chairman of a powerful committee than the CEO of a company. “He has authorities and he has power, but, at the end of the day, he’s got to sort of lead and persuade people to follow in all these disparate organizations.” That “sort of” hedge was indicative of the fuzziness that accompanied any assessment of the office’s actual leverage. Perhaps not surprisingly, those who accepted the job found it tremendously frustrating. In the time-honored way of Washington, the older institutions, with their congressional backers and special-interest associations, worked to undermine the new kid on the block, and by 2010, there had been five DNIs in less than six years, and many intelligence officials remained unclear about just what the DNI was actually in charge of. Retired admiral Dennis Blair, who served as the director of national intelligence from the beginning of the Obama administration until May 2010, told me that things were improving; that he didn’t really believe there was overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers.” But, in his own case, the fact that the DNI had such little authority was a big reason he no longer had the job.
Blair insisted progress was being made on many issues that have dogged the intelligence community for years. The FBI and CIA were getting along better, he said. The NSA had sped up the time it took to get relevant intercepts and other data to fighters on the ground so they could use it to find targets to strike. The Defense Department and the DNI were trying to coordinate better on budget matters, information sharing, and lines of authority.
When Blair was director, his model for change had been the historic 1986 Goldwater-Nichols7 legislation that had reorganized the Defense Department, forcing the separate military services to work together more effectively. Blair hosted interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. He addressed banal problems no one else wanted to take on but which he considered crucial to making progress—changing the way new technology was purchased, setting up compatible computer networks and standard security classifications, establishing a common set of tradecraft standards so people from one agency could better understand what people from another agency actually did. If analysts used different terms for the same thing, how could an analyst from one agency ever understand an analyst from another? If spies used different vetting procedures for their confidential sources, how could anyone judge the credibility of a source’s information? Blair also established a common type of job evaluation and pushed hard at getting people from different agencies to work together collegially.
But the sheer size of the post-9/11 expansion seemed to overtake the positive changes. “There has been so much growth since 9/11,” said Gates, “that getting your arms around that—not just for the DNI, but for any individual, for the director of CIA, for the secretary of defense—is a challenge.”
Size was a problem for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, too. The agency that was established to manage the growth quickly became a symbol itself of the ever-expanding universe of top secret activities.
When it opened in the spring of 2005, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s eleven employees were stuffed into a secure vault in the New Executive Office Building one block from the White House. They taped butcher paper to the walls to draw up their first ideas about restructuring. A year later, the office took over two floors of the gigantic new Defense Intelligence Agency headquarters at Bolling Air Force Base.
But in April 2008, the DNI moved again, this time to a permanent home, a 500,000-square-foot superstructure in pricey McLean, Virginia, with two parking garages and a suspended glass-enclosed cafeteria. Now, every weekday morning outside a subdivision of mansions, a line of cars wait patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.
Liberty Crossing, as the place is nicknamed, tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can’t conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Walmart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.
Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the adjoining National Counterterrorism Center. The NCTC is supposed to be the agency leading all analysis of terrorism and advising the president and other agency heads on operations. The two organizations share a police force, a canine unit, and thousands of parking spaces.
The practical effect of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s unwieldy expansion was visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center until 2011. Leiter spent much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sat at his feet. The data flow was enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.
There was a long explanation for why these databases were still not connected, and it amounted to this: It’s complicated to do, and some agency heads don’t really want to give up the systems they have. But there was some progress: “All my e-mail is on one computer now,” Leiter explained one day in his office. “That’s a big deal.”
Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. One, from the fall of 2010, showed the post-9/11 system simultaneously at its best and at its worst.
After eight years of effort and growth, counterterrorism operations to locate and kill leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen were at full throttle. Terrorists in Yemen were thought to be actively plotting to strike the American homeland, and, in response, President Obama had signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos there. The commandos had set up a joint operations center in Yemen and packed it with consoles, hard drives, forensic kits, and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence, and real-time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations serving their needs from the United States.
That was the system as it was intended.
But when that dreaded but awaited intelligence about threats originating in Yemen reached the National Counterterrorism Center for analysis, it arrived buried within the daily load of thousands of snippets of general terrorist-related data from around the world that Leiter said all needed to be given equal attention.
Instead of searching one network of computerized intelligence reports, NCTC analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, merely to locate the Yemen material that might be interesting to study further. If they wanted raw material—transcripts of voice intercepts or email exchanges that had not been analyzed and condensed by the CIA or NSA—they had to use liaison officers assigned to those agencies to try to find it, or call people they happened to know there and try to persuade them to locate it. As secret U.S. military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist strike in the United States increased, the intelligence agencies further ramped up their effort. That meant that the flood of information coming into the NCTC became a torrent, a fire hose instead of an eyedropper.
Somewhere in that deluge was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He showed up in bits and pieces. In August, NSA intercepted al-Qaeda conversations about an unidentified “Nigerian.” They had only a partial name. In September, the NSA intercepted a communication about Awlaki—the very same person Major Hasan had contacted—facilitating transportation for someone through Yemen. There was also a report from the CIA station in Nigeria of a father who was worried about his son because he had become interested in radical teachings and had gone to Yemen.
But even at a time of intense secret military operations going on in the country, the many clues to what was about to happen went missing in the immensity and complexity of the counterterrorism system. Abdulmutallab left Yemen, returned to Nigeria, and on December 16 purchased a one-way ticket to the United States. Once again, connections hiding in plain sight went unnoticed.
“There are so many people involved here,” Leiter later told Congress.
“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to lawmakers. “But I hadn’t made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility.”
Waltzing through the gaping holes in the security net, Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253 without any difficulty. As the plane descended toward Detroit, he returned from the bathroom with a pillow over his stomach and tried to ignite explosives hidden in his underwear. And just as the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of security-cleared personnel of the massive 9/11 apparatus hadn’t prevented Abdulmutallab from getting to this moment, it did nothing now to prevent disaster. Instead, a Dutch video producer, Jasper Schuringa, dove across four airplane seats to tackle the twenty-three-year-old when he saw him trying to light something on fire.
The secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, was the first to address the public afterward. She was happy to announce that “once the incident occurred, the system worked.” The next day, however, she admitted the system that had allowed him onto the plane with an explosive had “failed miserably.”
“We didn’t follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan explained later, “because no one intelligence entity, or team, or task force, was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation.”
Incredible as it was, after all this time, after all these reorganizations, after all the money spent to get things right, no one person was actually responsible for counterterrorism.
And no one is responsible today, either.
Blair, acknowledging the problem, created yet another new team to run down every important lead. He also told congressional leaders he needed something from them: more money and more analysts. Leiter, the director of the NCTC, also pleaded for more analysts to join the roughly three hundred he already had working on terrorism. For its part, the Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, for more and better body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can’t find nearly enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit, and instead must resort to hiring more contractors.
In Top Secret America, more is often the solution.
By 2010, in the middle of the longest recession ever, the budget for intelligence had become 250 percent larger than it was on September 10, 2001, without anyone in government seriously trying to figure out where the overlaps and waste were. No one was trying to figure out where all the ineffective programs were, either. The budget had been estimated to be $75 billion a year, which did not include all the military’s spending on counterterrorism and intelligence. Then, out of the blue, the newly appointed director of national intelligence, James Clapper, announced in October that the total was $80.1 billion. That did not even include $58 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. Nor did it include all the billions of dollars spent by the Defense Department on counterterrorism and homeland security through its gigantic Northern Command in Colorado.
Clapper had become DNI after Blair resigned when it became evident that, without a close relationship with Obama, his power had greatly diminished. His departure left a revealing void: even the person who was supposed to be in charge wasn’t in charge at all. Without anyone in charge, there was even less of a chance that Top Secret America could right itself.