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STATEMENT
OF
REPRESENTATIVE SAXBY CHAMBLISS
CHAIRMAN, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE SUBCOMMITTEE ON
TERRORISM AND HOMELAND SECURITY
BEFORE
THE
HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
SPECIAL OVERSIGHT PANEL ON TERRORISM
SEPTEMBER
5, 2002
Gaps
in Counterterrorism Capabilities at the Central
Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency,
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Prior to
the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001:
Unclassified Findings of the Subcommittee
on Terrorism and Homeland Security Report to the
Speaker of the House and Minority Leader
Thank you,
Jim, and Ranking Member Turner, for holding this
important hearing just six days before the first
anniversary of the tragic events of September
11, 2001. It's
timing, on the eve of our historic joint session
of Congress in New York tomorrow, is propitious
and demonstrates the continued priority this
Congress has put on making America a safer
place. Thank
you also for extending this invitation to me and
my friend and Ranking Member Jane Harman, to
testify before the Armed Services Committee this
morning.
In January 2001, at the
start of the 107th Congress, the
Speaker of the House - with great foresight,
as it turned out - established the Working
Group on Terrorism and Homeland Security within
the Intelligence Committee.
Our initial mandate was to examine the
terrorist threat to the United States, the
counterterrorism capabilities of America's
intelligence and law enforcement communities,
and the viability of our homeland security
architecture.
We were to issue a report at the end of
the 107th recommending ways to
improve House oversight of counterterrorism and
homeland security programs, and to evaluate what
might be done to enhance America's
capabilities to combat the terrorist threat.
Our work was well underway
when Usama bin Ladin and his evil minions struck
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We had held literally dozens of
classified hearings and briefings, and had
traveled abroad to consult with some of our key
allies in the war on terrorism and to get a
first-hand look at some of our capabilities in
action.
While we were generally
impressed with the commitment and hard work of
the men and women fighting the war on the front
lines, we had begun to identify serious and
systemic management deficiencies, especially at
senior levels of the CIA, NSA, and FBI.
In fact, the counterterrorism oversight
work of the Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence in the years and months leading up
to "9-11" had pointed time and time again to
many of these same deficiencies, with little
positive response from the leadership of those
key agencies.
Jane and I will cover some of those
deficiencies in detail in just a moment.
In the immediate aftermath
of 9-11, Speaker Hastert and Minorty Leader
Gephardt met and decided to convert our working
group into a full subcommittee of the
Intelligence Committee, with expanded powers of
jurisdiction.
Our first act was to leverage our
staff's unique counterterrorism expertise to
hold a series of seminars for Members, Senators,
and key staff on the al-Qa'ida network and on
terrorism in general.
We then held a series of what for the
Intelligence Committee were unprecedented public
hearings on various aspects of the terrorist
threat and our ability to deal with it on all
levels. These
public events concluded with an open hearing at
New York's City Hall in which Major Rudy
Giuliani, the leadership of New York City's
emergency response teams, and Governors Jeb
Bush, Roy Barnes, and Frank Keating all
testified.
The Speaker then asked that we accelerate
production of our subcommittee report, but that
we focus on the gaps in intelligence
counterterrorism capabilities at CIA, NSA, and
FBI.
Our classified report was
delivered to the Speaker in July, and an
unclassified executive summary, which you should
have before you, was made public.
It is important to note that our work was
entirely separate from the investigation being
conducted by the bicameral "Joint 9-11
Inquiry" of the intelligence committees of the
House and Senate.
Our full classified report, however, was
made available to the Joint Investigative Staff
and we and our subcommittee staff have made
ourselves available for consultation.
It is my hope and belief that the Joint
Inquiry will build on the Subcommittee's
substantial work in developing its own final
report.
Now, to the key findings of
our report.
First and foremost, we concluded - not
surprisingly - that the 9-11 attacks caught
the Intelligence and Law Enforcement Communities
flat-footed.
There is no way to get around the fact
that this was a massive intelligence failure.
The leadership of the Intelligence
Community, meeting prophetically three years to
the day prior to 9-11, concluded that, and I
quote, "Failure
to improve operations management, resource
allocation, and other key issues . including
making substantial and sweeping changes in the
way the nation collects, analyzes, and produces
intelligence, will likely result in a
catastrophic systemic intelligence failure."
We found that CIA's
counterterrorism capabilities had significantly
eroded over the course of nearly a decade, and
that on 9-11, CIA had failed to penetrate the
al-Qa'ida network sufficiently to get at the
issue of plans and intentions - the key to any
counterterrorism program.
Part of CIA's problem was money.
Resources for intelligence, and
particularly for recruiting spies in the enemy
camp, dried up after the end of the Cold War.
Political support for sometimes
politically risky espionage activities just
wasn't there for a protracted period.
Top CIA managers tried to argue that even
while stations and bases were closing around the
world for lack of funds and arguably less
productive spies were being culled en masse, funds for CIA's Counterterrorism Center were increasing.
Unfortunately, we learned that the
Counterterrorism Center relies on the
Directorate of Operations as a whole to conduct
its counterterrorism - "CT" - operations
worldwide.
So, you can't dismantle the Directorate
of Operations without severely damaging the
Counterterrorism Center's ability to do its
mission.
While a shortage of
resources and support for the intelligence
mission were significant factors in CIA's
general decline, the mismanagement of available
funds was also a major problem that had a
negative effect on the counterterrorism mission
at CIA. We
found, for example, that over a period of years,
the CIA's executive director - presumably
with the support or acquiescence of the Director
and other senior managers - was diverting
significant sums allocated for field operations
of all kinds and for the analysis discipline to
feed an insatiable headquarters bureaucracy.
Now, some of these "non-core mission"
activities that got funded with core mission
dollars were important. But
it seemed to us that good management practice
would have been to strip headquarters bare to
make sure core mission was healthy before a
single dollar would go to lower priority
activities.
Clearly, some people in the CIA hierarchy
had their priorities mixed up and the
counterterrorism mission - along with the
human intelligence and analysis missions -
suffered.
Risk aversion was another
problem at CIA.
Lacking political support and dollars in
sufficient amounts, and facing an increasingly
complex, hard-to-get-at terrorist target, it was
natural for CIA managers to become more
cautious. Equally
natural was the trend at CIA towards
bureaucratization, with the number of CIA
lawyers increasing exponentially in the years
before 9-11.
Unfortunately, lawyers and spies don't
mix very well, and the lawyers spent much of
their time finding reasons why CIA operations
officers should not conduct certain operations
rather than finding ways for them to do so.
The most glaring example of risk aversion
we uncovered - and the catalyst for many of
the shortcomings in the CT mission - were the
internal human rights guidelines promulgated in
1995 by then-CIA Director John Deutch.
The Deutch Guidelines, as
they are commonly and derisively referred to by
the rank-and-file at CIA, stifled CT initiatives
for years by creating an overly burdensome
vetting process that left the rank-and-file with
the impression that only boy scouts could be
recruited when real terrorists, some with blood
on their hands, were the only ones who had the
information that could stop a terrorist attack.
We had to pass a law in 2001 to get CIA
to repeal the guidelines, yet the CIA Director
ignored this law until the day after our report
was released, when the guidelines were finally
formally repealed - in
July 2002!
Why?
Because there remains a big disconnect
between what senior managers at CIA headquarters
think is being done to recruit terrorist spies
and what those in the field actually have to
deal with to recruit terrorist spies.
This situation improved somewhat after
9-11, but many of the pre-911 problems and
perceptions remain.
We also found that CIA
tried to compensate for its diminishing
capability to recruit terrorist spies
unilaterally - without the knowledge of host
governments - by doing more and more of its
operations with foreign liaison services.
Such operations were inherently less
politically risky, since getting caught by the
host service was no longer a problem.
In so doing, however, CIA became overly
dependent on these foreign services, which -
when push comes to shove - always act in their
own interests.
What we discovered after 9-11 about the
way in which al-Qa'ida operatives were
functioning freely in Europe, Africa, the Middle
East, and Southeast Asia clearly demonstrates
the pitfalls of a strategy that relied too much
on others in the spying game.
CIA still remains overly reliant on
liaison for CT operations, which is further
damaging its independent capabilities.
Many of CIA's pre-911
counterterrorism shortcomings, however, can be
traced to things that are much more obvious. The number of CIA operations officers - those who recruit
spies - who are adequately trained in a
foreign language, any foreign language, is embarrassingly low.
The number trained in languages spoken by
terrorists is even lower.
And CIA's ability, through cleared
linguists, to exploit materials captured from
terrorists in anything approaching real time is
slim to none.
Training in the tradecraft of
counterterrorist-related espionage, moreover, is
wholly insufficient.
Finding, meeting, recruiting, and
handling a terrorist as a spy, after all, is
quite a bit different than recruiting some
foreign official on the diplomatic circuit.
Yet, training hasn't kept up with this
reality.
The House Intelligence
Committee has been pressing the Intelligence
Community as a whole - and CIA in particular
- to address its language and other training
shortcomings literally for years.
More funds have been authorized and
appropriated by Congress specifically for this
purpose, and sharp direction has been given in
authorization language.
Yet, CIA - and the rest of the
Community - has been slow to respond.
Slow is actually a generous way of
putting it.
They have ignored their language and
training shortcomings.
There is no excuse for this inaction.
Before I turn the floor
over to Jane to synopsize our findings on the
National Security Agency and the FBI, I'd just
like to say a few words about what we concluded
about Congressional oversight of the nation's
counterterrorism and homeland security
infrastructure.
First, we were somewhat surprised to find
that no less than 14 committees and a myriad of
subcommittees in the House alone claim some
jurisdiction over the executive branch entities
involved in these activities.
Thus, numerous inefficiencies in this
system exist.
There is significant overlap and
duplication of effort, with committees and
subcommittees holding hearings on the same
subject, with the same overburdened witnesses,
time and time again.
We chose to evaluate 8
options for restructuring this oversight morass.
These included creating standing, select,
and ad hoc committees, as well as less formal
caucuses, commissions, and task forces.
Given the importance of protecting the
sources and methods of intelligence, we
concluded that it would be unwise to enlarge
access to the nation's most sensitive secrets.
The establishment of yet another
commission, ad hoc committee, caucus, or task
force would be at best a half-measure that would
risk further bureaucratizing the oversight
process. We
also found that it would probably be too much to
ask for so many important committees with
jurisdictional authority to change their
charters to discontinue oversight of key
counterterrorism and homeland security issues. In the end, we recommended that the Majority and Minority
leadership each establish two or three senior
staff positions to deconflict and disaggregate
jurisdictional issues related to terrorism,
homeland security, and related issues that
don't fall neatly under either category.
In this way, a leadership "strategic
plan" could be devised and implemented from
the top down to streamline what is currently a
very inefficient and burdensome oversight
process.
I'll now yield the floor
to Jane Harman, who has worked diligently at my
side on these issues since the start of the 107th
Congress. She
will quickly run through our findings on the
National Security Agency and the FBI.
Then, if acceptable to the chair, we
thought we'd stay to answer questions for as
long as we can.
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