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Preliminary findings of 9/11 commission

By The Associated Press

March 24, 2004

Preliminary findings about U.S. intelligence efforts against al-Qaida before Sept. 11, 2001, contained in a statement issued March 24 by the staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:

Before Sept. 11 no agency did more to attack al-Qaida, working day and night, than did the CIA. But there were limits to what the CIA was able to achieve by disrupting terrorist activities abroad and using proxies to try to capture Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants in Afghanistan. CIA officers were aware of these limitations. One officer recognized as early as mid-1997 that the CIA alone was not going to solve the bin Laden problem. In a memo to his supervisor he wrote, "All we're doing is holding the ring until the cavalry gets here." Deputy Director for Operations Jim Pavitt told commission staff that "doing stuff on the margins" was not the way to get this job done. If the United States was serious about eliminating the al-Qaida threat, it required robust, offensive engagement across the entire U.S. government.

CIA Director George Tenet also understood the CIA's limitations. He told staff that the CIA's odds of success in Afghanistan before Sept. 11 were between 10 and 20 percent. This was not because the CIA lacked the capabilities to attack the target, he said, but because the mission was extremely challenging. Covert action was not "a silver bullet," but it was important to engage proxies and to build various capabilities so that if an opportunity presented itself, the CIA could act on it. "You could get really lucky on any given day," Tenet said.

Indeed, serendipity had led to some of the CIA's past successes against al-Qaida. But absent a more dependable government strategy, CIA senior management relied on proxy forces to "get lucky" for over three years, through both the late Clinton and early Bush administrations. There was growing frustration within the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and in the National Security Council staff with this lack of results. The development of the Predator and the push to aid the Northern Alliance were certainly products of this frustration.

The commission has heard numerous accounts of the tireless activity of officers within the CTC and the bin Laden unit trying to tackle al-Qaida before Sept. 11. Tenet also was clearly committed to fighting the terrorist threat. But if officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policy-makers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy, the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to Sept. 11.

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Full text of commission staff findings:

http://wid.ap.org/documents/911/911commission7.pdf

http://wid.ap.org/documents/911/911commission8.pdf