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IT'S
EASY TO SAY 'I TOLD YOU SO'
There storm of criticism that hit the
White House last week about what it knew
and didn't know before Sept 11 reminds me
of something that happened to me when I
was working under cover for the CIA in
Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the early
1980's. It was a time when the Bekaa
was the black hole of terrorism.
Almost every lethal terrorist group in the
world, from the Japanese Red Army to Abu
Nidal, kept a base there.
We knew the U.S. was their main enemy, and
that it would only be a matter of time
before one of them would mount an
attack on an American target in
Lebanon. It was not unlike the
situation in early 1998, when Osama bin
Laden told ABC News that he intended to
attack American targets anywhere he could
get them.
But just knowing that one of the groups
would attack us was not good enough.
The U.S. had learned from being under
constant terrorist threat in the Middle
East since the 1967 Israeli-Arab war that
most threats were bogus, and that acting
on them only ended up paralyzing
us. Accordingly, CIA field
officers understood that before CIA
headquarters-or the White House-could
start moving pieces around in reaction to
a threat, it needed to have details:
when, where, and how an attack would
arrive.
With this in mind I started to troll the
Bekaa Valley for sources. It wasn't
easy. Eventually, I ran into a man
who was related to a radical Shite Muslim
leader who had threatened publicly to kill
Americans. It took months before the
man finally opened up. One crisp
fall morning he took me outside and
whispered: "Get out of Lebanon,
they are going to kidnap an American
official."
With this gem in hand I rushed back to the
office to report the threat to Washington
and Beirut. Unfortunately, no
one took it seriously. I dropped the
source and forgot about my report, at
least until four months later when, on
March 16, 1984, the CIA's bureau chief in
Beirut, Bill Buckley was kidnapped.
My first reaction was to yell
"I told you so." If Beirut
station had only listened. But just
as quickly I reminded myself that half the
problem was that my report lacked the
detail that would have made it more
credible. Had it been more specific,
Langley might have taken it more
seriously, maybe even pulled out
Buckley. I kicked myself for not
having gone back to my Shite friend and
press him for more information. But
I only figured this out with 20-20
hindsight.
Something a lot like this seems to be
happening with the reporting on what
President Bush and the intelligence
agencies knew prior to Sept. 11.
Neither the CIA nor the FBI had anything
close to precise information about the
planning for the attack before it
occurred. The CIA's Aug.6, 2001,
briefing to the president that Osama bin
Laden might try to hijack U.S. airliners
was based on fragmentary, unsubstantiated,
and dated information. It was
thinner than my kidnapping report.
As for the FBI, the reports from its gents
in Phoenix and Minneapolis possibly
connecting bin Laden to flight schools
were based on speculation and hunches. (In
any case, neither the CIA nor the White
House saw them.) It looks to me that with
the information he had, the president did
exactly the right thing-instruct that the
threat be passed on to the Federal
Aviation Administration, the airlines and
the airports. Issuing a public alert
would have been foolish. What would
it have said? Keep an eye out for
hijackers who appear sympathetic to Osama
bin Laden? (And how does one spot a
hijacker?)
There is no doubt our intelligence
agencies could have done better-they
should have given the president more
precise information on which he could have
acted. The CIA and the FBI should
have been more aggressive running down
terrorist leads. They should have
pooled their intelligence. The
Immigration and Naturalization Service
should have been checking student visas at
the flight schools. The State
Department should have been interviewing
Saudi applicants. At the end of the
day we will probably conclude it was a
systematic failure, and no one agency's
fault. The joint congressional
investigation will have the last word.
But in any case, we shouldn't be blaming
President Bush for the intelligence
failure. Even if all the CIA
reporting and the two FBI reports had
landed on his desk a the same time, it is
not the president's job to connect the
dots. He can only act based on good,
solid, finished intelligence. In
this case, that wasn't forthcoming.
Based on the information he had available
prior to 9/11, Bush did the right thing.
Mr. Baer, a former CIA officer, is the
author of a memoir, "See No Evil, The
True Story of a Ground Soldier in the
CIA's War on Terrorism: (Crown, 2002)
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