Tenet says full reform years away

WASHINGTON -- The nation's intelligence agencies are working toward reform but will not reach the full capability to conduct the spying and covert operations needed to combat Al Qaeda and other terrorist threats for five years, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet warned the 9/11 Commission yesterday.

"It will take us another five years to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs," Tenet testified. He added that "the same can be said for our other disciplines," including the analysis of intercepted communications and images obtained from spy satellites.

Responded commission chairman Thomas Kean: "I wonder if we have five years . . . That worries me a little bit."

Tenet's testimony on the sustained funding that would be needed to rebuild intelligence capabilities and the pace of efforts to change the CIA and its sibling agencies came as the commission's staff delivered its latest report yesterday.

The report provides a highly critical look at the intelligence community's performance leading up to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a conspiracy that the spy agencies failed to penetrate and disrupt. After the Cold War ended, the staff found, the intelligence community was slow to recognize the shift of the threat to the United States from the former Soviet Union to Islamic terrorism. Although Al Qaeda had been formed in 1988, the community did not comprehensively describe the organization until 1999 and characterized Osama bin Laden as merely a terrorist financier as late as 1997.

In addition, although one of the primary missions of the US intelligence community since Pearl Harbor has been to warn of any surprise attack, the CIA's Counterterrorism Center "did not develop a set of telltale indicators" for a plot to fly planes into buildings -- even though terrorists had expressed interest in this tactic dating back to a failed Algerian plot in 1995 to fly a plane into the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

As a result, when FBI agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis reported to superiors their suspicions about terrorist use of aircraft training schools, the news did not trigger a warning in the system.

Republican commission member John Lehman described those staff findings as "a damning report of a system that is broken, that doesn't function" and of "an institutional failure."

But Tenet argued that the failure had to be seen in the context of an agency that had been eroded by a decade of budget cuts following the end of the Cold War even as the threats to the nation had grown "more complex and dangerous." The staff report also cited budget cuts as a major impediment.

"We lost close to 25 percent of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment," Tenet said. "The infrastructure to recruit, train, and sustain officers for our clandestine services, the nation's human intelligence capability, was in disarray. We were not hiring new analysts."

By the eve of the attacks, the CIA had put the "right strategy" in place to position itself for the future against Al Qaeda, Tenet said, but he acknowledged that it failed to identify the plot. He also said the agency made other mistakes, such as failing in a timely manner to tell immigration and law enforcement agencies the names of two suspected operatives who later turned out to be among the 19 hijackers.

The commission signaled that it may be moving away from suggesting stripping the FBI of its domestic surveillance responsibilities to create a unified domestic-foreign spy agency modeled on Britain's MI-5 service. Commission members have raised that possibility in recent weeks.

Several members yesterday discussed a less radical change: keeping the different intelligence services in their current agencies, but empowering a single "intelligence czar" to coordinate them and who would share hiring, firing, and budget-setting authority with their current bosses. The czar would oversee all intelligence operations, including the CIA, FBI, and other agencies, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Later in the day, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller strongly objected to any diminishment to the FBI's primacy in domestic surveillance.

"I think one of the strengths of the FBI is its independence -- always has been, always will be," Mueller said. "I would have some concern about that independence being undercut by having an intelligence czar have a say over who would fill a particular position in the FBI."

Mueller, a former assistant US attorney in Boston who took over the bureau on Sept. 4, 2001, received lavish praise from the commission for his efforts to refocus his agency on counterterrorism, to change its culture to think more about prevention of attacks rather than investigating an attack that has already happened, and to end a backlog in translating terror-related intercepts.

"I think we can and are fixing what has been wrong with the FBI," Mueller said. "We've got to put our house in order, and I think we are putting our house in order. . . . Change cannot be done overnight. Transitions take time."

He also noted that the USA Patriot Act, which was passed in October 2001 and tore down a wall that prevented intelligence agents from sharing information with criminal investigators, has helped remove what had been one of the major impediments to domestic counterterrorist work before the terror attacks.

In a related development yesterday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner called on Jamie Gorelick to resign from the commission, citing a 1995 memo she wrote as a deputy attorney general on keeping those two kinds of information separate. The memo, declassified by Attorney General John Ashcroft before his testimony on Tuesday, spelled out rules that dated back to the 1970s.

"Scrutiny of this policy lies at the heart of the commission's work," said Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin. "Ms. Gorelick has an inherent conflict of interest as the author of this memo and as a government official at the center of the events in question."

Gorelick, a Democrat who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, has declined comment on the memo.

In other testimony yesterday, a panel of four current second-level intelligence officials included the CIA's Deputy Director of Operations, James Pavitt. Never before had the day-to-day head of clandestine operations for the spy agency appeared in public to talk about his work.

Asked by Lehman why his agents had failed to penetrate the 9/11 conspiracy, Pavitt expressed his regret that "19 people . . . simply beat us -- all of us." But he emphasized that the failure was due to "woefully inadequate" resources, not a lack of caring, hard work, or sufficient efforts at recruiting spies overseas.