Report Skewers Spy Agencies’ Failures in Espionage - Interesting News

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Report Skewers Spy Agencies’ Failures

Sleuths neglected collection of intelligence prior to Sept. 11 attacks
July 16, 2002

A House Intelligence subcommittee has concluded that the nation’s spy agencies made catastrophic mistakes in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks by not directing enough time, money and agents to collecting data about terrorist groups. The report said the agencies chronically lacked agents who are fluent in foreign languages and became too reliant on their links to foreign governments’ spy operations.

THE HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE report, titled “Counter Terror Intelligence Capabilities and Performance prior to 9/11,” will not be made public.

WASTED RESOURCES
The Intelligence Committee will release a summary of the report on Wednesday, but NBC News has learned that it says the spy agencies spent too much money to feed bureaucracies, sapping the agencies’ ability to collect and analyze raw data.
The report concerns itself only with the agencies’ pre-Sept. 11 performance, not with their current operations.

The document is the result of nine months of investigation by a special House Intelligence subcommittee, headed by Rep. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., and created by House Speaker Dennis Hastert just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
The report cites notes from a meeting of “senior intelligence managers” that took place three years to the day before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, on Sept. 11, 1998, in which the events of Sept. 11 were more or less predicted.

These unidentified intelligence officials concluded in 1998 that if they did not improve the way in which data was collected and analyzed, the likely result would be a catastrophic intelligence failure, which is what the Sept. 11 attacks were.

WHAT’S WRONG WITH NSA?
The report takes aim at the failings of the National Security Agency, the government’s largest spy agency, which translates and analyzes global telecommunications and radio traffic.

The report found that the NSA’s counterterrorism mission was not given a high enough priority prior to Sept. 11. It also said the NSA must reform the way it runs its programs and uses its budget.

The agency has been chronically short of linguists for reading and assessing foreign intelligence intercepts and lacks enough analysts to make sense of the “needles in a haystack” collected every day by electronic eavesdropping, the report summary says.

The summary also says that lack of staff, lack of funding and risk aversion are only part of the malaise in the U.S. intelligence agencies.

TOP-HEAVY BUREAUCRACIES
There are many cases “where available counterterror resources were misallocated by these agencies,” the summary said. “The classified record of past years is replete with stern warnings” to the spy agencies that they were diverting badly needed resources meant for intelligence collection and analysis in order “to feed growing headquarters bureaucracies.”

With the Central Intelligence Agency, as with the NSA, the House report found that too many agents and too much money were allocated to headquarters bureaucracy, which hurt the agency’s counterterrorism capability prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The CIA’s internal human rights guidelines issued in 1995 also had a “chilling effect” on counterterrorism operations, and these guidelines remain in place despite congressional directions that they be repealed, the report said.

The report says the FBI was afflicted with problems similar to those of the CIA and NSA, including “insufficient linguistic and analytical capability.”

The bureau also paid little attention to tracking the financial transactions of terrorist groups and was “culturally incapable” of sharing information.

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