WASHINGTON, 23 July 2004 — The CIA defended itself against criticism in the Sept. 11 commission report yesterday and said it had warned of the possibility of terrorists using hijacked planes before the 2001 attacks took place.
“CIA regularly reported on threats to civil aviation including hijacking,” a CIA official said on condition of anonymity to a group of reporters before the report’s release.
The report criticized the spy agency, already under fire for its flawed intelligence on Iraq’s banned weapons before last year’s invasion, for failing to properly understand the threat of the al Qaeda movement that carried out the attacks.
It slammed the agency’s methods as “Cold War” and bemoaned the lack of any expansion in the CIA’s paramilitary operations in the face of potential terrorist attacks.
The strong defense by CIA appeared intended to forestall further criticism of the agency, whose director, George Tenet, resigned in the face of a barrage of complaints about intelligence failures in Iraq and over Sept. 11.
The official said the CIA in 1999 had provided the Federal Aviation Administration with language to use in briefing US airline officials that read: “Osama Bin Laden remains interested in targeting US interests including on US territory. He is well prepared to consider kidnappings and hijackings as well as bombings.”
“All of those warnings plus other intelligence reports of a similar nature through that period were provided in time to do something about it. It wasn’t too late. The industry could have taken countermeasures and so forth. So we were on time and on target with that,” he said.
The CIA official spoke on Wednesday on condition his remarks not be published until the report was released.
He disputed the commission’s conclusion that Tenet did not develop a management strategy for a war against terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks. “The assertions in this report represent a triumph of theory over fact,” the official said.
He said the commission ignored directives from the CIA director in 1998, 1999, and the panel’s own description of “the plan” that the CIA developed to go after Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in 1999.
“We don’t know how to document the DCI’s (Director of Central Intelligence’s) management strategy for the intelligence community and for CIA more thoroughly than we did during the year and a half of the commission’s work,” the CIA official said.
The commission proposed creating a new position of national intelligence director to oversee all 15 spy agencies.
Another senior CIA official said proposals for change should be considered, but carefully.
“There is no inclination at senior levels here to reject this idea,” the CIA official said, referring to the national intelligence director proposal.
“Nor is there an inclination to embrace it without looking carefully at it and asking a lot of questions.”
