What Went Wrong

Forget James Bond. Intelligence gathering is more like taking a metal detector to the city dump. So much comes in, rumor, hearsay, disinformation, so little of it more than trash: once in a blue moon an agent-prospector may get lucky. But even then an agent's warning is likely to be dismissed as what Condoleezza Rice last week called "chatter." "There's always TMI--too much information," says former CIA agent Milt Bearden. Often agents poke fun at the sometimes obsessive quirks of their colleagues. "If a confidential memorandum comes from a guy out in, say, Phoenix, the first thing that goes up the line is, 'That's Harry again. He's like a broken clock twice a day', " one ex-agent says. Even today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass unnoticed through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance, the FBI has gotten specific threats about a car- or truck-bomb attack on an "all-glass" building near the U.S. Capitol, and another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida. Neither was corroborated, or publicized.

Yet every now and then, amid the piles of dross, a nugget of pure gold turns up in intel files. The key for American national security--now and into the future--is to know it when we see it. Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven supervisor in the FBI's Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly airplanes. The agent's suspicions were further fueled when he heard that some of the men at the local Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University were asking a lot of questions about airport security.

Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden unit of the FBI's international terrorism section, was convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on to something bigger. Kurtz's team fired off a lengthy memo raising the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. flight schools to infiltrate the country's civil-aviation system. "He thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden," one colleague recalled. The memo outlined a proposal for the FBI to monitor "civil aviation colleges/universities around the country."

Williams, the agent who sniffed out the link, was described by one former colleague as a "superstar," a former SWAT sniper and family man who coaches Little League and, in 1995, helped track down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeigh's former Army buddy. "Anything he says you can take to the bank," says former agent Ron Myers.

But little of that seemed to make a difference back in Washington, where the Kurtz team suffered a fate even worse than Cassandra's: not only were they not believed, they were ignored altogether. The FBI was concerned about racial profiling. Moreover, it wasn't used to gathering intelligence, especially domestically, given American sensitivities about intrusive government and civil liberties. Its intelligence-assessment system was almost laughably antiquated. And under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a priority of the Clintonites (not that they did a better job of nailing bin Laden), seemed to be getting less attention. When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.

The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden, among other actions. In self- absorbed Washington, the Phoenix memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two units at FBI headquarters but didn't make it to senior levels. Nor did the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a difficult relationship with the FBI--and whose director, George Tenet, one of the few Clinton holdovers, was issuing so many warnings that bin Laden was "the most immediate" threat to Americans he was hardly heeded any longer.