Imagine that you have been assigned a highly sensitive mission. It is August 5, 2001. Your employer, the CIA, has been accumulating evidence that suggests the immanence of a major domestic terror attack. The evidence has been pouring in from foreign intelligence services, walk-ins to embassies abroad, NSA electronic surveillance, FBI investigations. But there is a problem. The CIA cannot get the administration to take action. The first obstacle came from Donald Rumsfeld. He refused to take NSA intercepts seriously.
Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence. Could all this be a grand deception? Rumsfeld had asked. Perhaps it was a plan to measure U.S. reactions and defenses.
Tenet had the NSA review all the intercepts, and the agency concluded they were of genuine al-Qaeda communications. On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined “Bin Laden Threats Are Real.”
But, there was still no action. So, ten days later Tenet decided to make a bold attempt to wake up the Government.
On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.
Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.
Tenet and Black laid out the evidence for Rice.
He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment — covert, military, whatever — to thwart bin Laden.
But Rice gave them what they considered ‘the brush off’. Cofer Black would later say, “The only thing we didn’t do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.”
Four days later the President flew to Crawford, Texas for a month long ‘working vacation’. He arrived August 4th. It was at this point that the CIA decided to bypass Rumsfeld, Rice and the rest of the foreign policy establishment and try to get the attention of the President.
They drew up a memo, entitled Bin Laden determined to strike in US. Then they assigned a CIA officer to deliver the message to the President as part of his August 6th Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB). What happened next must have been highly demoralizing.
The alarming August 6, 2001, memo from the CIA to the President — “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US” — has been widely noted in the past few years.
But, also in August, CIA analysts flew to Crawford to personally brief the President — to intrude on his vacation with face-to-face alerts.
The analytical arm of the CIA was in a kind of panic mode at this point. Other intelligence services, including those from the Arab world, were sounding an alarm. The arrows were all in the red. They didn’t know the place or time of an attack, but something was coming. The President needed to know . . .
George W. Bush seems to have made the wrong choice. He looked hard at the panicked CIA briefer. “All right,” he said. “You’ve covered your ass now.” -Ron Suskind, The One Percent Doctrine
