CIA Director Defends Agency at 9/11 Hearing

A defiant CIA Director George J. Tenet sparred with lawmakers Thursday in his first public response to a year of mounting criticism over pre-Sept. 11 intelligence efforts. He rebuffed attempts to cut his testimony short, shifted blame to budget-cutting policymakers and revealed a new list of terrorist plots his agency had foiled before last fall’s attacks.

Tenet also warned that Al Qaeda remains a serious threat to the United States.

“The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was last summer, the summer before 9/11,” Tenet told lawmakers. Recent attacks in Yemen, Kuwait and Indonesia show that Al Qaeda has “reconstituted, they are coming after us, they want to execute attacks.”

He singled out Los Angeles International Airport, saying that Al Qaeda has a history of revisiting targets. He added that a disrupted plot to detonate a bomb at the airport around New Year’s 1999 probably has “only been delayed.”

The day’s congressional proceedings also produced a wealth of new and embarrassing information about the FBI’s mishandling of terrorist threats in the years before Sept. 11, including several warnings about aviation-related plots that apparently went unheeded.

In a hearing marked by hostile exchanges, Tenet said his agency was engaged in an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda long before last year’s attacks and that his agency’s work has saved thousands of lives.

After being pressured twice to cut short his hour-long opening statement, Tenet refused to relent, telling lawmakers, “I’ve been waiting a year” to tell the CIA’s side of the story.

Tenet’s testimony was in large part a pent-up reply to months of damaging disclosures about CIA and FBI failures to heed persistent warnings about a Sept. 11-style attack and bungled opportunities to uncover the plot. Tenet appeared alongside FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency.

Their appearance was the culmination of a month of public hearings held by lawmakers overseeing an ongoing congressional investigation into intelligence breakdowns.

Tenet, Mueller and Hayden seized the opportunity to answer criticism and defend legions of employees they portrayed as heroically dedicated but ill-equipped and overworked.

The directors’ testimony did not appear to sway key lawmakers, who seem increasingly skeptical of agency excuses and appear to be losing patience with Tenet in particular.

At one point during the hearing, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) peppered Tenet and Mueller with questions about their agencies’ failures to act on information that would have allowed authorities to intercept two of the Sept. 11 hijackers long before the attacks. The CIA had identified the men, Nawaf Al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as Al Qaeda figures at least 18 months before the attacks. The agency failed to notify the FBI or put the men on terrorism “watch lists” even after the CIA learned they held U.S. visas and had entered the country.

Levin expressed outrage after Tenet and Mueller could not produce the names of employees involved in some of the mishaps and admitted that no employee at either agency has been disciplined or fired for any Sept. 11-related failure.

“People who failed in their responsibilities have got to be held accountable,” Levin said. “You don’t even know the names of people who were responsible for failures.”

Tenet scoffed at the suggestion, saying that one employee involved in the watch list matter is a top performer who had inadequate training. “She’s a real hero in this story,” he said, “and the notion that I’m going to take her out and shoot her is about the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

During a break in the hearing, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) said the lack of accountability in the agency “starts at the top. Director Tenet certainly has not stepped up and assumed responsibility for any of the failures that have happened on his watch, and there are many.”

Tenet is under particular pressure in the investigation because he has been director at the CIA for more than five years, and therefore is among the few Bush administration figures responsible for decisions regarding Al Qaeda dating back to the late 1990s, when Osama bin Laden was recognized as a potent enemy of the United States. Mueller, by contrast, was named FBI director just days before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Tenet acknowledged that the agency “made mistakes” leading up to Sept. 11 but has steadfastly refused to say the attacks were an intelligence failure. “The record will show a keen awareness of the threat, a disciplined focus and persistent efforts to ... bring to justice Bin Laden and his lieutenants,” he said.

In the months before Sept. 11, there was an avalanche of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda was planning a major attack, Tenet said, but it was “maddeningly short on actionable details.”

Tenet spent much of the hearing seeking to redirect blame toward Congress and, without saying so explicitly, the Clinton administration. He complained that the agency’s efforts were undermined by short-sighted budget cuts in the 1990s and timid policies that kept the United States from destroying Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan before it was too late.

With the end of the Cold War, Tenet said, budget cuts eliminated nearly one in four CIA positions. “This loss of manpower was devastating,” he said.

Several lawmakers dismissed that line of argument. “It’s not enough to say that we do not have enough money or enough people,” said Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “No one does. It’s always the case.”

A report released Thursday by the congressional joint inquiry staff pinned several Sept. 11 failures on the FBI.

In 1998, the agency received reports that a terrorist organization planned to bring students to the United States to study aviation, and that a member of the group had frequently expressed an intention to target civil aviation in the United States, according to the report.

“Yet another terrorist organization, in 1999, allegedly wanted to do the same thing,” it added. That 1999 alert was serious enough to trigger a request from FBI headquarters to 24 of the FBI’s 56 field offices to investigate “and determine the level of the threat.”

“To date, our review has found that the field offices conducted little to no investigation in response to that request,” said the report. It offered no details of which terrorist organization was suspected of sending members to the United States in either of those cases, but it said the FBI essentially did nothing about either of them.

FBI officials had no comment Thursday. But in his lengthy testimony, Mueller responded that his agents did all they could to investigate terrorist threats, but that they were overwhelmed by work and undercut by ineffective technology.

In its report, the congressional staff said the FBI’s electronic communication system was so bad that many such memos seeking assistance never reached their intended recipients, including the heads of specialized units at FBI headquarters responsible for tracking Al Qaeda.

The report also said it found that the FBI recently determined that it has 68,000 “outstanding and unassigned leads” assigned to its counter-terrorism division that date to 1995.

There was also new information about the so-called Phoenix memo in which an Arizona FBI agent warned headquarters, to no avail, that terrorists might be training at U.S. flight schools. The staff’s report said the memo mentioned the possibility that “there was a coordinated effort underway by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States for civil aviation-related training.” Mueller acknowledged Thursday that three of 10 men named in the memo still are under investigation for possible connections to Al Qaeda.

The memo’s author, FBI Agent Kenneth Williams, also said he believed Bin Laden had sent a top operative to Phoenix to set up a terrorist sleeper cell in the 1980s, and that “this network is still in place.”

The report also contains new information suggesting that the FBI should have been quicker to focus on Zacarias Moussaoui, suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker but arrested in Minnesota before the attacks.

Based on Moussaoui’s “possession of weapons and his preparation through physical training for violent confrontation,” an FBI agent in Minneapolis warned, the field office believed that Moussaoui, a roommate named Hussein al-Attas and “others yet unknown” were conspiring to seize control of an airplane.

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Times staff writer Johanna Neuman contributed to this report.