LEARNING TO SPY; ANNALS OF INTELLIGENCE |
Philip D. Zelikow is a professor of history at the University
of Virginia and an expert on the predicaments of government. He worked on
the National Security Council for the first President Bush and wrote a book on
German reunification with his former colleague Condoleezza Rice. Recently, he
took on a more demanding assignment: he was appointed the executive director of
the 9/11 Commission, and oversaw its staff of eighty-two.
The commission's report, which was released this past summer, tried to
explain why the United States was unable to protect itself from the attacks of
September 11, 2001, and it made recommendations on how to better safeguard the
nation. A particularly delicate task was analyzing why the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, despite its storied history in law enforcement, failed as a
domestic intelligence agency. "There were some things about what the
F.B.I. had become that were just really indefensible," Zelikow told me in
a recent interview. The question facing the commission was simple and
far-reaching: Could the F.B.I. be reformed? Or, as many commission members had
argued at the outset, should a domestic intelligence agency modelled on the
British M.I.5 be established, limiting the bureau's responsibilities to
fighting crime?
The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, had started work a week before
September 11th (he replaced Louis Freeh, who had resigned in June, 2001), and
he quickly realized that the bureau had a major problem. "He understood
that the F.B.I. did not fundamentally have the mind-set, institutional culture,
or organization to collect and disseminate intelligence," Zelikow said.
Zelikow was not referring to the bureau's publicized missteps: from revelations
about sloppy practices at its forensic laboratory in the nineteen-nineties to
the latest embarrassment--a report by the Justice Department's inspector
general, released in late September, which concluded that tens of thousands of
hours of taped material related to terror investigations have not been
translated and, in some cases, have been erased. Rather, Zelikow said,
Mueller--and, subsequently, the commission--was alarmed by the bureau's basic
failure to provide usable intelligence.
"They literally didn't write intelligence reports," Zelikow said.
Instead, agents would describe their interviews in a report called a
"302," and put it in a case file. These reports sometimes were lost
because the bureau's computers were several generations out of date and there
was no reliable cross-indexing system. The other issue, Zelikow said, is that
F.B.I. agents "don't ask questions the way an intelligence agent would ask
questions. The agent is typically interested in the facts of an event. An
intelligence agent is really interested in a person's whole world."
The F.B.I., which began in 1908 as a national detective force of
thirty-four, now employs about twelve thousand agents. The commission, in its
report, pointed out that the bureau "has long favored its criminal justice
mission over its national security mission." F.B.I. agents, trained to
gather evidence in criminal cases, tend to think like policemen--operating
after the fact. Intelligence, almost by definition, deals with ambiguity.
"F.B.I. people generally think that the intelligence people are creative
thinkers who play fast and loose with facts . . . willing to be freewheeling
and speculative without being unduly burdened by rigorous attention to
evidence," Zelikow said. Jamie Gorelick, a commission member and a deputy
attorney general in the Clinton Administration, told me that trying to get the
F.B.I. fully integrated into the national-security apparatus "was probably
the greatest source of frustration for me during my entire tenure at the
Justice Department." The evolution of the bureau into a counter-terrorism
agency that continues to investigate major crimes, such as kidnapping or public
corruption, has become Mueller's biggest challenge.
In private meetings with Mueller, the commissioners had been brutal, but
they were impressed by his willingness to revamp the bureau. Mueller, Zelikow
said, gave the commission "unprecedented access to bureau employees and
bureau files." The commission's recommendation that the bureau be left
intact, the report said, depended on the F.B.I.'s ability to make "an
all-out effort to institutionalize change." The conventional wisdom,
Zelikow said, is that "the F.B.I. was the poster child for the broken
agency," even though the C.I.A.'s performance in assessing and
coordinating intelligence before September 11th was far worse. Mueller and the
bureau were undoubtedly helped by personal contrasts between Mueller and the C.I.A.'s
director, George Tenet, who was less willing to acknowledge management failures.
In Tenet's
testimony, Zelikow said, there were "a variety of important issues on
which there was little or no recollection." Zelikow also said, "We
didn't believe him anymore." (
Tenet,
who announced his resignation in June, said he was "outraged" by that
characterization of his testimony, adding, "I told the truth about
everything I've done." Several commission members have defended him; former
Senator Bob Kerrey called Zelikow's criticism "completely unfair.")
As a signal of the F.B.I.'s commitment to major change, Mueller, in May of
2003, hired a former Russian linguist named Maureen A. Baginski to run the
bureau's new Office of Intelligence. The job is something of a work in
progress, but if the bureau takes the next step and establishes a separate
Directorate of Intelligence--the "service within a service" which
Mueller has asked for and the commission has endorsed--Baginski would head it.
In the event that Congress creates a Cabinet-level "intelligence
czar," Baginski may report simultaneously to Mueller and to the
intelligence chief.
Baginski had spent the previous twenty-four years at the National Security
Agency, the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence service, which
focusses on intercepting intelligence from abroad. In her last post at the
N.S.A., she was the head of Signals Intelligence, or sigint, which oversees the
interception of electronic transmissions--the heart of the N.S.A. operation in
Fort Meade, Maryland. "She became a personal symbol of Mueller's
reinvention of the F.B.I.," Zelikow said.
Mueller had tried a number of fixes in the year and a half before he hired
Baginski, and perhaps his most fundamental reform was to centralize
counter-terrorism investigations at F.B.I. headquarters. Investigations had
formerly been run from the bureau's fifty-six field offices, where the Special
Agents in Charge often set their own agendas. Commission members were startled to
learn that neither Mueller's immediate predecessor, acting director Thomas
Pickard, nor his top deputies had been aware of the detention of Zacarias
Moussaoui, the suspected "twentieth hijacker," by the bureau's
Minneapolis office on August 15, 2001, although Pickard had called every
Special Agent in Charge that summer warning of new threats.
Some reforms had the paradoxical effect of producing more intelligence than
the F.B.I. could absorb. Mueller had tripled the number of intelligence
analysts assigned to counter-terrorism, from a hundred and fifty-nine to four
hundred and seventy-five. (Today, there are nearly fifteen hundred intelligence
analysts, the majority of them assigned to counter-terrorism.) In the past,
analysts were often promoted from support-staff positions; to improve their
calibre, Mueller created the College of Analytical Studies, a seven-week
training program modelled in part on a C.I.A. course, at the bureau's academy,
in Quantico, Virginia.
Passage of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, in October of 2001, greatly expanded the
surveillance powers of law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, and helped to
tear down the "wall," shorthand for restrictions that kept criminal
and intelligence investigators from sharing information. As much a "cultural
edifice," as Zelikow put it, as a legal barrier, the wall took shape in
the nineteen-seventies, after the exposure of F.B.I. abuses of power, such as
the notorious harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Its elimination so
increased the flow of information that one senior F.B.I. official likened it to
"trying to get a drink of water from a fire hydrant." As a result,
Mueller began assigning many more agents to the counter-terrorism center. Larry
Mefford, who until last October was the bureau's head of counter-terrorism and
counter-intelligence, said that the level of stress became intense. "We
had a couple of heart attacks of employees," he said. "I had one
employee commit suicide. His wife said that he was very concerned about missing
something." Mefford, who is now in charge of global security for Wynn
Resorts, added that the task was overwhelming: "We had to reengineer the
F.B.I. We had to fight the war"--on terror. "And we had to justify
everything we were doing."
The Defense Department had started its own ad-hoc domestic-intelligence
operation shortly after September 11th. At first, this was simply an attempt to
collect information about the security of military facilities, but the
operation expanded, and the Pentagon often passed on tips--sometimes picked up
overseas--to state and local officials. "It created a huge problem for the
F.B.I., because the military unilaterally would share raw intelligence that was
totally uncorroborated or, worse yet, absolutely wrong," Mefford said.
"It could be everything from you name it--e-mail threats that came in,
telephonic threats. Or it could be stuff brought from overseas that the
military got totally out of context--that somebody in a bar in Hamburg,
Germany, talked about blowing up a dam near Las Vegas. And, boom--it was in
enforcement circles, and before we could get a handle on it to see if it was
credible or not we had everyone going crazy."
I met with Maureen Baginski, who is forty-nine, several times during the
past year, and one Saturday in June I visited her at the house that she and her
second husband, a microbiologist and Russian linguist, had built four years
ago. The house, about fifty miles from Washington, sits on twelve acres that
the couple have been clearing and turning into a series of gardens overlooking
a creek. A collection of girl action figures given to her by her staff--Xena
the Warrior Princess and Wonder Woman among them--are perched on a bookshelf in
her home office. For Baginski, the house is a place to escape and relax; on
weekends, she sometimes cuts back brush with a chainsaw, a gift from her
husband. On an ordinary workday, she leaves home at 4 a.m., and usually gets
back at around 8:30 p.m.
Sitting at her kitchen table, wearing black jeans and a lavender T-shirt,
Baginski told me that in her first few weeks on the job she had an
"absolute crisis of confidence." She had been startled by how
different the bureau seemed from the N.S.A. She thought of the F.B.I.'s Office
of Intelligence as a "start-up company," and at one point said,
"There was nothing there."
After a month of initial panic, Baginski said that she called in
representatives from every section and told them that she wanted to capitalize
on the F.B.I.'s investigative strengths--its attention to solid evidence, or
what she called "the pedigree of the source," and the willingness of
agents and analysts to acknowledge when they needed more information.
"There's no inherent shame here in not knowing something. That just means
go and get more so you can build. But in the intelligence community they are a
little less comfortable telling you what they don't know."
After ten weeks, Baginski and her staff began to try to reinvent the
bureau's intelligence program. "I draw a very strong parallel to my
challenge at N.S.A.," she said, adding, "I was telling somebody the
other day, 'I guess I'm incapable of new ideas, because I actually do realize
I'm doing exactly the same thing at the F.B.I. that I did there.' "
Baginski started at the N.S.A. in 1979, as a Russian-language instructor.
She had studied Spanish and Russian at the State University of New York at
Albany, not far from where she grew up, the fifth of six children: her father
had run the telecommunications center at suny-Albany after a career as an actor
and a high-school English teacher. In 1976, Baginski spent a year in Moscow as
an exchange student. The harsh conditions of Soviet life made her appreciate
America, she said, and she returned determined to work in public service. After
a short stint teaching, she was hired by the National Security Agency. She rose
quickly to the agency's most senior positions, and, in 1997, Lieutenant General
Kenneth Minihan, the N.S.A.'s director at the time, asked her to become his
executive assistant, a job akin to chief of staff; in October of 2000,
Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, who succeeded Minihan, gave her the job of
heading Signals Intelligence.
Like the F.B.I., the N.S.A. had resisted change, in part from institutional
inertia but also from a lack of resources; during the nineties, after the
collapse of the Soviet Union, Congress had steadily cut the N.S.A.'s budget by
about a third. The agency was, and to some extent remains, obsessed with
classification and compartmentalization; words like "warlord" were
frequently used to describe the territorial proclivities of its managers, who
functioned with much the same autonomy as Special Agents in Charge do within
the F.B.I. The technology used to collect data, for example, was often seen as
being more important than the data--and the overriding impulse was to hold on
to information and not share it. Even such essential functions as collection
and analysis were kept separate. "You have to understand the culture
here," Lieutenant General Hayden told me. "Security is very important--watertight
door, so to speak--so if you spring a leak in one place you don't sink the
whole ship."
Hayden wanted Baginski to remake and reorganize the N.S.A., and Baginski
took on the assignment with great energy. She pushed her technical team to find
new ways to monitor the Internet, something that the N.S.A. had resisted. She
also helped to make "geolocation"--the precise, geographic location
of a target's position--a deadly tool. She urged representatives from the
collection and analytic units to be more responsive to other agencies, such as
the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which over the years had
complained about the N.S.A.'s inattention to their requests. All this, in
hindsight, seems like common sense, but at the time it was the equivalent of an
organizational shakeup. "She was trying to break people out of 'This is
what I do and this is only what I do, and I'm really good at it and leave me
alone,' " Hayden said.
The N.S.A., and its signals-intelligence operation, had been built on a near-legendary
ability to eavesdrop on the world, but by the turn of the twenty-first century
sigint was functioning as if the Soviet Union still existed and the information
age did not. America's enemies no longer had a fixed address, and they had
learned to use new technologies and encryption techniques. Yet, according to
Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at the N.S.A.
at the time and was part of a team that Baginski had asked to assess sigint
capabilities, there were employees in the field who were still focussing on
ancient technologies, such as what was called "manual Morse
code"--people speaking dots and dashes out loud. "About seventy per
cent of our resources were going toward traditional industrial-age stuff"--put
up an antenna, aim it at the sky, and vacuum up everything you could,
Wertheimer said--in inverse proportion to where his team had concluded that
important information would be found. "I wanted them to stop the vacuum
cleaner, to get at the secrets worth knowing," Baginski said. "You
just wind up drowning in data, and you're not necessarily any smarter."
She called it "hunt, not gather," a phrase that later became
associated with everything she tried to change.
Baginski and Hayden were still determined to fix the way that information
was shared inside the N.S.A., and, in early 2001, she announced a test run of
what was called Operation sigint. Among other goals, the experiment focussed on
the Internet, and it aimed to bring intelligence gathered from many sources
into one accessible place. Baginski and her technical team chose five strategic
and tactical areas, including access to a Chinese communications system and
attempts to learn whether Russian organized crime was the source of weapons of
mass destruction in Iran. "They weren't spring-training games, because
they were against real targets," Hayden said.
Throughout Operation sigint, which involved about twenty-five volunteers
from the agency, there was strong internal opposition. Senior supervisors in
particular felt that Baginski was usurping their authority by organizing the
team around "hot issues," which meant that some employees could
circumvent their chain of command. The team had its most difficult time with
the China analysts. When the team discovered that a communications system
targeted by the N.S.A. was about to be phased out, the China analysts admitted
that, although they knew about it, they had no alternative source of
information. The Operation sigint team found a new source. "The country knew
a lot more at the end of the six-month experiment than they would have had we
not done it," Baginski said.
In the Russian project, the group pulled together information from across
intelligence agencies that, in separate pieces, had not been useful: passport numbers,
aliases, frequent-flyer numbers, credit-card and cell-phone numbers. In
particular, the team was told to look for e-mails, even though other analysts
did not believe that their targets used e-mail. In the course of the
experiment, the group learned the truth about a connection between the Russians
and Iranian W.M.D.s. "I can't say true or false, but I can tell you they
got the answer," Wertheimer said.
Senior managers also complained that Baginski could be too abstract in
stating her goals. "What came so easily to her, what was so self-evident
that it didn't need to be said, just didn't work for other people,"
Wertheimer said. This gave her a reputation as a micromanager, because,
inevitably, she'd end up walking people through each step. Others thought that
she took failure personally. Wertheimer told me, "I have sat in the room
when her displeasure was absolutely written all over her face. As sweetly as
she said it, people left grumbling, 'God damn it, we didn't do it right again.
What is it she wants?' "
During the summer of 2001, the intelligence community had been picking up
hints of an impending attack. (On August 6, 2001, the Presidential Daily Brief
was entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.") The UBL (Usama
bin Laden) unit at the N.S.A., a cadre of about ten language analysts, was
aware of a high level of "chatter," but none of it was specific.
After the attacks, Baginski called together her team and the discussion veered
toward data collection: Which phone numbers should be listened to? Which
antennas should point in which direction? "The immediate reaction was,
Let's backpedal," Wertheimer recalled. "She said, 'No, that will not
happen. We have a plan' "--referring to the strategy tested by Operation
sigint.
After a few false starts during the course of September 11th, Baginski took
over, with an approach that will be familiar to any reader of police
procedurals: on a large piece of paper, she wrote the initials "UBL"
and drew a box around them; then she asked her team to come up with any
plausible connections, social and otherwise. As Baginski and her allies saw it,
groups like Al Qaeda have to use banks, computers, and cell phones. "Their
job is to blend in, so they aren't quite the cryptographic challenge"
that, for example, the Chinese Embassy is, Wertheimer said. That means they're
as susceptible as the average person to computer viruses and identity
theft--and to being spied on.
Many analysts were sure that Al Qaeda didn't use the Internet--a theory
based, apparently, on the fact that they had seen no evidence of it. "We
said, 'You are now to presume [they] use e-mail. Find it,' " Wertheimer
said. They started looking for clues in old intercepts. There were unhelpful
detours (including a request for all Arabic-language e-mails), and a moment of
near panic when an associate of the bin Laden family made a call to the East
Coast and mentioned a "string of pearls," which was considered a code
for nuclear weapons. (It turned out that the pearls were intended as a wedding
gift.) But analysts began to build a system that could deliver quicker, more
reliable intelligence.
When the Bush Administration began the bombing campaign in Afghanistan, in
October of 2001, Hayden, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Tenet,
among others, had lists of so-called high-value targets. "Geolocation
became a massive issue for us that it never was before," Wertheimer said.
This was the first war in which the N.S.A. could locate a communications device
within yards; in practical terms, it meant that the N.S.A. staff was going to
provide information that would be used to kill someone. The C.I.A., which was
launching missiles from unmanned Predator aircraft, hit several targets during
the Afghan campaign. Baginski could see fear on the faces of the civilian
analysts. "It's a very hard thing to do when you're thousands of miles
away in Fort Meade, Maryland, and you're going, 'Oh, my God, I wonder if I'm
wrong. I wonder if I've made a mistake, wonder if this is an innocent person,'
" Baginski recalled. "I had long talks with General Hayden about
that--that these guys are not in uniform. These guys are civilians. We are going
to have to walk them through this and let them know that right behind them is
me--that no one is ever going to blame these guys."
Baginski's father had been a bombardier at age twenty-three during the
Second World War and had been deeply affected by the experience. "He had
dropped bombs on humans, and I think that's a pretty heavy burden for a very
deeply religious man to bear," she said. She told the analysts, "I
know what we're asking you to do is hard, and we have absolute confidence in
you and you must know that we will support you." Eventually, Baginski
created a separate geolocation unit of willing participants. "We have to
advance the tradecraft," she said. "It was new--very new." There
were some terrible mistakes, including the December 29, 2001, bombing after a
wedding party, which left dozens of Afghan civilians dead. When that happened,
Baginski tried to reassure the unit. "Just stay focussed," she
recalled saying. Geolocation helped to find bin Laden's military planner,
Mohammed Atef, who was killed in a bombing raid in November, 2001, and, four
months later, Abu Zubaydah, who was the first top Al Qaeda leader to be
captured. There have been other successes, although Osama bin Laden and his
second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahari, are still at large.
In the late spring of 2002, Hayden told Baginski to start coming up with a
plan for Iraq. She was going to be his J-3--chief of operations, he said. It
"tells everybody in the extended enterprise exactly what I think of
her," Hayden told me. But, for the first time in two decades at the
agency, there was a serious debate about going to war. Baginski had questions
about the justifications, and she worried about the strains on her staff. She
nevertheless told them that war was likely "and if anyone had a lack of
comfort with that, then they needed to make a different decision about their
workplace." To me, she said, "When I talked to the workforce, I was
talking to myself at the same time."
The Iraq war was a chance for Baginski and others to create for the military
giant chat rooms, known as "zirconchat," which provided intelligence
about the battlefield almost as fast as it could be collected. The system would
permit a properly equipped soldier in a Humvee to get a live feed on the most up-to-date
intelligence and have instant contact with a large group; as many as two
thousand people could be in touch at any given time. This gave American
soldiers an enormous advantage as they went into combat. "We had more
situational awareness about where the Iraqis were than they had about
themselves," Lieutenant General Hayden said.
By then, however, Baginski was seeking a change for herself. She sensed that
Hayden wanted to slow the pace of institutional reform, and that her efforts
would become increasingly less welcome. "It is not necessarily a bad
decision," she said. "It just wasn't what I thought was right."
In January of 2003, she told Hayden that she wanted to leave after the military
phase of the war was complete--perhaps for private industry or for teaching. On
March 19, 2003, the night the Iraq war began, Baginski recalled that she walked
through her building at the N.S.A. campus in Fort Meade. Computers were on, and
everything seemed to be working. That night, she said, "I knew it was O.K.
to leave. They had taken it beyond me."
Two months earlier, Robert Mueller spent a half day at the N.S.A. "He
talked about his analytical challenge, about trying to change the culture of
the bureau," Hayden recalled. "Did I have someone to recommend to
him? And it wasn't long in the conversation before the name of Maureen came
up." Baginski had her first meeting with Mueller in March of 2003; she
started work two months later, at a salary of a hundred and forty-five thousand
dollars.
Everybody, Baginski said, tends to make intelligence "sound so hard and
mysterious, and it's really not. You need something, you go get raw material,
and you add value to it. You put out a product and you keep adjusting, based on
the feedback that you get. That really is all it is." Yet intelligence
also relies upon effective tools, and until this past spring, when the F.B.I.
finished installing nearly thirty thousand new desktop computers, high-speed
networks, and a counter-terrorist database, agents often had to use
nineteen-eighties-era technology with dial-up modems; it took eleven keystrokes
to complete a search. When the final elements of the F.B.I.'s new computer
system are fully installed--sometime in 2005, after more than a year's delay
and at a cost of nearly six hundred million dollars--whatever is known about a
case should be easily available to analysts.
One day, I asked Baginski what would happen now if someone like Zacarias
Moussaoui were to be picked up, or if an agent in the field wrote a report like
the famous "Phoenix memo," from July 10, 2001, warning of an effort
to enroll Al Qaeda operatives in flight schools in Arizona. The difference, she
said, is that every field office has a field-intelligence person. "And
that field-intelligence person has the responsibility for insuring that the sum
total of investigative product that the F.B.I. has is reviewed for intelligence
value and disseminated. The other big difference is that at headquarters we
have what we call 'operation specialists,' and their job is to then connect the
dots across from Seattle and New York and Jacksonville." All threats, she
said, were immediately shared with relevant internal law-enforcement
authorities. She was sure that a Phoenix-like memo would be seen and acted
upon.
Paul McCabe, a Special Agent who also serves as a spokesman for the bureau's
Minneapolis field office, where Moussaoui was first detained, talked about
changes he had experienced. He mentioned a recent tip that, in the past, would
have gone into a "zero file"--ignored--"because it didn't have
any criminal implications." With the sort of cross-checking that is now
available to analysts, he said, the information had thrown up enough "red
flags" to send it on to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Minneapolis,
where it is still under investigation.
Every day, the intelligence community gets about thirty-five intelligence
reports from the F.B.I., up from four a day when Baginski started and compared
with a couple of hundred from the C.I.A. But the quality of the bureau's
threat-assessment and intelligence reports is still inconsistent. In late May,
during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, of
California, complained that an April, 2004, intelligence report that she had
requested from the L.A. field office was little more than a compilation of
older data and "random comments on ongoing investigations." Baginski
agreed with Feinstein. "It's uneven," she said of the threat
assessments. John Brennan, a C.I.A. veteran and the head of the government's recently
created Terrorist Threat Integration Center, sees improvement. He pointed to
the involvement of the bureau and Baginski in raising the threat level during
the 2003 Christmas holidays, when several international flights to the United
States were grounded because of suspicious names on the passenger manifests.
Brennan said that the bureau's response showed that the F.B.I. was on the right
course. But it was also a reminder that too much information can be
overwhelming.
In early summer, I asked Baginski if there have been any significant
penetrations of Al Qaeda. "I'm confident that we are doing an incredible
job getting into their information space," she said. "I really am.
But I'd have to leave the penetration thing out of it, because it is very
classified stuff." She went on, "Like any sober individual, you can
be very happy with what you know, and then what keeps you up at night, of
course, is what you don't know. So that's what my job is--to keep pushing what
you don't know."
A critic of the bureau, John MacGaffin, who had been the C.I.A.'s No. 2
person for clandestine operations until 1993, and, until 1998, a senior
consultant at the F.B.I, was pessimistic. MacGaffin, who had met with the 9/11
Commission, believed that the key problem was not a failure to connect the dots
but a failure to find enough of them. "The thing that is not better--that
is not more intense and is the sine qua non to doing this right--is
spies," MacGaffin said. "People in the innermost councils of those
who would do us grievous harm. And we do not have those in any adequate--even
approaching adequate--number. And that's the only way you're going to beat
this." He called this a failing of both the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
When I repeated this analysis to Baginski, she said, "He's wrong. He's
wrong. He's wrong," although she would not say in what way. Baginski, who
has met with MacGaffin, added, "I honestly work in a different F.B.I. than
he did."
MacGaffin shrugged off Baginski's response. The F.B.I., he added, not only
failed to understand the reach of Al Qaeda's presence in the United States but
also didn't know if there were sleeper cells here. Philip Zelikow, the 9/11
Commission's director, doubted that domestic sleeper cells pose a great threat.
"The United States is a more hostile environment in which to operate than
it was," he said. "It's more like operating behind enemy lines in
enemy territory."
Mueller, in Zelikow's view, had addressed the most "indefensible"
areas that had plagued the bureau but noted that some technology problems,
which were never fixed under Freeh, Mueller's predecessor, still aren't solved.
Mueller has sought advice from computer entrepreneurs like Larry Ellison, the
head of Oracle,
and, in June of 2002, he brought in a former
I.B.M.
executive, Wilson Lowery, to oversee the upgrading of the bureau's system.
(Lowery had reportedly likened his challenge to "teeing off two hundred
yards behind Tiger Woods.")
Baginski, Zelikow said, is trying to train F.B.I. agents to be better at
collecting intelligence; agents can no longer become assistant Special Agents
in Charge without intelligence training. But, Zelikow added, as "with a
lot of these things, the implementation is ragged." Last summer and in the
fall of 2003, the commission staff visited five of the bureau's field offices
and found gaps between good intentions and reality; for instance, some analysts
reported that they were still being called in to perform the duties of support
staff.
To help make its case for survival, Zelikow said, the bureau provided the
commission with case studies of post-9/11 investigations. Based on information
obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, a key plotter of the 9/11 attacks, Iyman
Faris, an Ohio truck driver, was secretly taken into custody in March, 2003,
and accused of being part of a plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by
severing the suspension cables. Although the bridge operation was not
considered feasible, there were concerns about a second wave of attacks.
"Traditionally, the primary focus would be, Can we put this person in jail
for what he did?" Kevin Brock, who was then the Special Agent in Charge of
the Cincinnati office, told me. In this case, agents wanted Faris's help.
Attempts to gain cooperation, Brock said, are always "a delicate and
fascinating dance"; agents told Faris that he faced a prison sentence of
life without parole and, according to his lawyer, possible incarceration in the
government's detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Alternatively, they said, if he
cooperated his sentence might be reduced, and he and his family might even be
placed in the government's witness-protection program. Faris quickly agreed to
cooperate and was moved to a safe house. A month later, he secretly pleaded
guilty to providing material support to Al Qaeda and, over the next couple of
months, was debriefed by both the bureau and the C.I.A. Unlike sessions
conducted before September 11th, experts on Al Qaeda were monitoring the
interviews. "They were driving the questions," Brock said.
Faris provided information on how Al Qaeda communicated and used the
Internet, and agreed to make contact with other Al Qaeda associates; one of
those associates was charged earlier this year with plotting to blow up
shopping malls in Columbus, Ohio. In June, Faris moved to withdraw his guilty
plea, saying that he had tried to deceive the F.B.I. because he wanted to
gather material for a book. The court rejected this claim, and Faris was given
a prison sentence of twenty years.
Zelikow, along with Baginski and other bureau officials, wouldn't talk about
other specific cases. When I asked Zelikow if the F.B.I. had thwarted any
attacks, he replied, vaguely, that the bureau has had some success, but said,
"The more you know, the more it makes you modest about how much we really
understand. And there are things about the 9/11 plot we still don't fully
understand." Zelikow was struck by a singular difference between the
attacks on New York and Washington and those which have occurred since.
"The operatives were trained in country X and are deployed and act months,
much later, in a country ten thousand miles away," Zelikow said of
September 11th. "That's an international operation, and a fairly complex
one on a micro scale. The singular feature of all the major post-9/11 attacks
is that they are not really that international. They are regional and local,
using assets that are more or less in place in the area. That's a striking
thing."
Zelikow said that all the evidence he has seen suggests that Al Qaeda would
have liked to launch another operation in the United States by now. The fact
that it has not occurred reaffirms his belief that the collective efforts of
the intelligence community have been able to degrade Al Qaeda's ability to
conduct complex international operations. He went on to say that the absence of
an attack before the Presidential election could be seen as "a testament
to incapacity." But he still believed that the United States would be the
target of an attack sometime in the next decade. Kevin Brock, who became Baginski's
deputy earlier this year, said, "What concerns me is that most successful
terrorist operations are born from very simple things to execute. So we also
don't want to get too distracted by trying to overanalyze and try to guess at
every exotic threat scenario that ever pops up."
In early October, a longtime senior official who has access to sensitive
intelligence told me that Al Qaeda may be planning a "Tet-like
offensive" of twenty to thirty simultaneous attacks across the United
States. Brock said, "We all share in the worry that Al Qaeda wants to do
us harm. Nobody disputes that. I can assure you, in my twenty years' experience
I have never seen us turn over more stones than we're turning over right
now."
John Pistole, who, in early October, became Mueller's deputy, has a gloomy
view of what lies ahead. Pistole, who is forty-eight, is a lawyer and the son
of a minister, and a twenty-one-year F.B.I. veteran. The intelligence function,
he said, "is not a finished product here. Clearly, the roads have been laid,
we're building it." But, even with the improvement, he told me,
"every day that goes by brings us a day closer to the next attack."
Earlier intelligence reporting indicated that "certain attacks are being
held in abeyance in order to do a more spectacular attack," and the
F.B.I., along with the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies, was using all
information, including interrogations of detainees and cooperating sources, to
come up with possible scenarios. The C.I.A. regularly briefed the F.B.I. on its
"red cells" exercises, in which it brought together diverse groups
and asked them how they would launch an attack that would cause maximum
economic and psychological damage. The groups included thriller writers and
people whose backgrounds mirrored those of the nineteen hijackers. Some red
cells lasted a year; one looked at how Al Qaeda could generate a disaster like
a forest fire or a power-outage emergency. "If it's something we've never
thought of, and is clearly a top priority, we investigate," Pistole said.
In June, Pistole told the 9/11 Commission, "I think we've probably
prevented a few aviation attacks against both the East and West Coasts,"
but he cautioned that there were "operatives involved in those plots that
we still cannot account for." He told me that there were six cases abroad
where the F.B.I. had obtained information so specific that a foreign service
was "able to go out and locate and arrest people in the process of buying
materials." The F.B.I., he went on, had vastly improved its ability to
track money contemporaneously, to the point where it could see where money was
being spent at that moment, or tell a foreign service where "somebody
using this code is going to come in and pick up some money to launch a
terrorist act."
One F.B.I. counter-terrorism official told me that the bureau had recently
sent informants to the Middle East, and that the C.I.A. had brought some of its
sources to the United States in a joint effort with the F.B.I. to penetrate
radical Islamic circles. There have also, apparently, been attempts by terror
groups to recruit non-Arab-looking individuals and American citizens. I was
told by two sources that the F.B.I. had interviewed a blond Arab-American whom
the Saudis had arrested last summer; he had confessed to plotting to
assassinate George W. Bush and was still in Saudi custody. Other intelligence
agencies have been picking up apparent references to assassination plots
against Bush and people close to him. Baginski, meanwhile, continues to make
repairs in what has been a troubled institution--for instance, those thousands
of untranslated and erased terror-related tapes and documents. Mueller said
that the translation division is being transferred to the planned Directorate
of Intelligence--in other words, the problem is being handed over to Baginski.
But the F.B.I. remains relatively small--the New York Police Department,
with nearly forty thousand officers, is more than three times as large--and its
resources are finite. At one point, Baginski told me that there would almost
certainly be another terrorist attack in the United States. We were in her
office, just down the hall from Mueller's. I had brought lunch, and Baginski
had barely eaten a bite. "But when you ask me based on what evidence, it's
nonspecific, just as it was, quite frankly, in the run-up to September
11th," she said.