There were also many problems in the Department of Justice and its subagency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with respect to being prepared to deal with this emerging threat of international global terrorism. First of all, the FBI was very much a decentralized organization. To run a counterterrorism, deep counterterrorism policy, you needed strong leadership from the Washington headquarters that could coordinate a national effort. However, a lot of the power in the FBI was distributed to its different field offices. New York had a lot of expertise in counterterrorism, but most other field offices did not. There was not a great deal of sharing of information, of threat information among the FBI, and it was very hard with this decentralized organization to drive a counterterrorism. Second point was in terms of intelligence collection and the FBI was the lead agency for collecting information about terrorism inside the United States. This was not really the bread and butter of FBI and agents and how they made their career. You advance in the FBI by making a criminal prosecution, gathering the evidence, handing over to the prosecutors, and working with them to put people in jail, and that's how you got rewarded and moved up the career ladder. Intelligence is actually a much different kind of activity. It's not following hot leads but rather sifting through large volumes of information, much of which might be irrelevant to find the one nugget for something bad that might be going to occur. So because of the incentive structure, intelligence was not seen as a place you wanted to spend a lot of time, and indeed if you were in the area of intelligence, you would often rotate out of it into another area. So, the FBI was not building capabilities or expertise in counterterrorism intelligence. And one indication of that is in the year 2000, there were over twice as many FBI agents working on drug enforcement as they were on counterterrorism. There's also a skittishness about the intelligence function within the FBI, and that arose from some of the abuses that took place earlier during the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, and many of you may have seen about this in the movie J. Edgar in recent years. But much of this was uncovered in the post-Watergate era, a series of hearings called the Church hearings, which uncovered a lot of abuses that had taken place in the FBI in terms of spying on people considered maybe domestic or political enemies of the state but who were not doing anything illegal, anti-war activists, civil rights activists. Indeed, the FBI had an extensive investigation in file on Martin Luther King. So this was exposed and it was a cause of great public concern, and for that reason, the FBI had many restraints placed on it through attorney general guidelines and by the Congress and also a deep concern that it should not be a spying agency or it could be subject to abuse if it took that too seriously. So for all those good reasons that have their roots in civil liberties, the notion of the FBI as an intelligence-gathering organization had really taken the back seat as we had moved into the 80s and then the 90s. Finally, there is the question of analysis. So, not only do you need to gather intelligence information but it needs to all be put together, you need to have analytical units to do that. Sometimes, that might also require having skilled translators that can take information and put them into a usable form. And again, the FBI was not well-equipped to do that. Analysts were often hired from agent positions, and those skills weren't necessarily transferable. And analysis was made even more difficult by the fact that the FBI had a paper-based, a totally dysfunctional case management system that many new directors through this era tried to keep improving and led to different information technology meltdowns and disasters with literally billions of dollars being spent and the systems still being very dysfunctional. Besides the cultural and institutional flaws that were inhibiting the FBI from playing a strong, effective counterterrorism role. A second point I want to discuss is the so-called wall in the information sharing that developed between the FBI and the Justice Department, and this was seen to inhibit its ability to effectively both gather and share information with other parts of the government that needed it. This resulted from an interpretation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. And the reason this is an issue, I'm going to go into this in much more detail in the second part of the course, but this is important because under this law, for intelligence purposes, the FBI could get a warrant for wiretapping or other surveillance of an agent of a foreign power inside the United States or even possibly a citizen under a lower threshold of evidence that you can get it under the Fourth Amendment, the constitutional standard for criminal warrant. And the concern was if the FBI gathered lots of this information but somehow it got into a criminal case, that that case would be tainted, that that evidence would not be constitutional to have it submitted against the defendant in that case and that might K.O. an important prosecution. So the FBI was in some ways believing that there was this wall that they couldn't share information, and it got blown out of proportion. There were many policy memos and efforts to make sure that information was actually being shared between prosecutors who were running certain cases and people in the FBI that they needed to have in order to strengthen our overall counterterrorism effort. Indeed, this even got to the point where the FBI didn't feel like it could share information with other agencies who weren't even involved in criminal prosecutions such as the CIA. And when that happens, and of course the CIA is not as willing to share reciprocally with the FBI, it was well-documented in the 9/11 commission report how this notion of the wall and the lack of information sharing for this and perhaps other cultural reasons prohibited us from possibly finding out about the 9/11 attacks before they occurred. Over in the CIA, other inherent institutional problems and weaknesses. First of all, the Cold War ended, and it was perceived by the public and the Congress that a peace dividend would be coming and the budgets for many of these national security agencies came down. This had the impact of weakening analytic capabilities and also our covert action. The covert action problem had also been influenced by the aftermath of the Church hearings and some people's careers jeopardized. So, those capabilities to conduct covert actions abroad by the CIA, I think by the latter part of the 1990s, the belief was that the combination of that and the budget cuts had really degraded the capabilities within the agency. Analytically, the bulk of our CIA and intelligence analysts were from the Cold War, they were Sovietologists, they were looking at the conflicts that were bred from the Cold War and had not made this big global shift over to the new and emerging threat of transnational counterterrorism. So for all of these reasons, our intelligence collection and the capabilities of the CIA were not what they needed to be as 9/11 was coming forward. And finally, in the Department of Defense, the department had built a counterterrorism capability, a hostage rescue capability called the Joint Special Operations Command, in order to deal with these kinds of situations that might arise with respect to terrorism. But the problem is that the roll-out first in the aborted Desert One effort to rescue the hostages in Iran and then as I've mentioned a couple of times the Blackhawk Down incident in Somalia in the early parts of the Clinton administration in some ways made people perhaps gun-shy about using this capability and the Department of Defense somewhat hesitant to get involved in these kind of high-risk endeavors that perhaps were not as well-thought-out as they needed to be. These capabilities have been vastly, vastly improved, used, practiced, and have become an important tool for presidents in the years since 9/11, but in the lead up to 9/11 in the late 1990s, there was hesitancy and concern about using them as much. The Department of Defense felt as if its main focus ought to be on states, that that's where our military might could have the most influence. The examples of the bombing air raid on Libya after the discotheque incident in West Berlin during the Reagan administration and also the bombings that took place in the Clinton administration response to the assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush earlier in his administration. They saw those as the quintessential types of things. Here's how we can influence terrorism, but the Department of Defense's familiarity and comfort with trying to identify transnational networks and then trying to use our military capabilities against them where weak. So in summary, as the Clinton administration transpired, it's very clear that both the president and the top levels of the United States government were becoming more and more aware of this emerging threat of transnational terrorism. And then even in the later stages with a focus on this organization Al-Qaeda, the government was beginning to develop programs and policies to try to untangle the different obstructions and lack of capabilities that were preventing it from dealing with this problem, but it was a complicated endeavor. This was a high priority of the president as he is moving forward, but of course there were many, many competing priorities as well on resources and other problems that various agencies were trying to address. So while it was important, there wasn't a critical, huge transformative sense of urgency to drive change. And as I relay, there were many institutional and policy flaws in the key agencies, our key counterterrorism agencies, preventing them from being as strong and effective as they needed to be, and these are many of the weaknesses that Al-Qaeda would eventually exploit in September 2001.
