In The Art of Intelligence: Lessons from a Life in the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Henry Crumpton recounts a conversation he had with Cofer Black, the former Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, just days after the 9/11 attacks. In the conversation, Black detailed the many advance warnings the CIA had given to President Bush and administration officials that an Al Queda attack in the United States was imminent. Referring to the infamous daily briefing report given to President Bush on August 8, 2001 titled “Bin Laden Determined To Strike in the U.S.,” Crumpton writes:
I later studied the document and wondered what President Franklin Roosevelt would have done had he received such an assessment about Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor a full month before December 7, 1941.
A more interesting question might be what would President Clinton have done? In his book, Crumpton makes clear that he thinks the Clinton administration’s response to Al Queda was wholly inadequate. But in his account of the successful thwarting of Al Queda’s “Millennium Plot”—a plan to unleash “synchronized operations to kill thousands of people in several countries at the turn of the new century,” Crumpton describes working with multiple foreign intelligence agencies and governments, coordinating raids on Al Queda that took place around the world, and cooperation with multiple federal agencies.
Crumpton does not explicitly note that this massive response to the terrorist threat could only have happened with President Clinton’s approval. But in an Atlantic piece outlining the Bush Administration’s failure to heed the 36 warnings it received about 9/11 before it happened, journalist Peter Beinert writes:
When the Clinton administration received word of a potential attack in December 1999, [former National Security Council counterterrorism “czar” Richard Clarke] notes, President Clinton ordered his national-security adviser to “hold daily meetings with the attorney-general, the CIA, FBI.” As a result, the leaders of those agencies instructed their “field offices to find out everything they can find. It becomes the number one priority of those agencies.” This vigilance, Clarke suggests, contributed to the arrest on December 14 of an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam, who was arriving from Canada with the aim of detonating a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport.
The Bush administration could have done the same in the months before 9/11. As Elizabeth Drew writes in an essay for the New York Review of Books:
What might a president do upon receiving notice that the world’s number one terrorist was “determined to strike in US”? The most obvious thing was to direct [National Security Advisor Condoleezza] Rice or Vice President Cheney to convene a special meeting of the heads of any agencies that might have information about possible terror threats, and order them shake their agencies down to the roots to find out what they had that might involve such a plot, then put the information together. As it happened they had quite a bit: the administration had already been notified about some Arabs seeking flying lessons at a flight school in Arizona; what was so noticeable about them was that they unpeeled large amounts of cash for the lessons, which they limited to just wanting to know how to fly the plane in cruise mode, not learn how to take off and land. In July, an FBI agent stationed in Phoenix wrote to headquarters warning of the “possibility of a coordinated effort by Usama bin Laden” to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation schools.
Then there was Zacarias Moussaoui, sometimes referred to later as the twentieth hijacker, who had aroused suspicion by paying cash for lessons at a flight school in Minnesota, also just wanting to know how to fly a 747 at cruising altitude, not how to take off or land. Moussaoui wasn’t as careful as the others and his questions to his instructors seemed strange: he wanted to know, for example, about flight routes around New York. In August 2001, a manager from the flight school called the FBI. Moussaoui was arrested on August 16 on immigration charges and questioned by FBI agents, but, despite repeated efforts, an FBI agent in Minneapolis couldn’t persuade headquarters in Washington to take the matter seriously and allow a search of Moussaoui’s laptop. An August 23 FBI report to Tenet and other CIA officials was headed, “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” Tenet said later that he didn’t talk about this report with the FBI or the White House because he thought it an FBI matter. French intelligence had been following Moussaoui, a French citizen, for some time and had a thick file on him—but somehow, according to the FBI, useful information didn’t get to that agency’s officials in time.
Had the president ordered a root and branch search of information government agencies had on potential strikes by al-Qaeda in the US, what was known about Moussaoui and the Arizona flight school would have been of great interest.
None of this can undo what happened, but is there anything we can learn from it? As a society, probably not. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission was our best opportunity, but the Commission pulled its punches. As Drew writes:
The commission avoided assigning individual blame in order to get a unanimous report, and it deliberately avoided saying whether the attacks could have been prevented, though it was apparent that some commissioners believed this to be the case, and the evidence gathered in the report strongly suggested as much.
That leaves it up to individuals to educate themselves. It may be impossible to know the truth in real time. But it eventually comes out in books, such as Crumpton’s, and in reporting by journalists like Beinart and Drew and so many others. The terrorist threat has not gone away. One thing that average citizens can do in response is to educate themselves, and put what they learn to use in the voting booth.