The CIA and then-Director George Tenet “did not dischargetheir responsibilities in a satisfactory manner” in monitoring al Qaeda before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, according to a once-classified internal review released by the agency Tuesday.
In one glaring error, the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) received a report that Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the 9/11 mastermind, was sending operatives to the U.S. But the CTC “did not recognize the significance” of those reports, said the June 2005 executive summary of a report by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson.
Recommended Stories
His investigation found that by 2001, the CTC had not produced a comprehensive report on Osama bin Laden since 1993. The report said officers in the CTC unit in charge of hunting bin Laden “did not have the operational experience, expertise and training necessary to accomplish their mission in an effective manner.”
Helgerson was particularly critical of Tenet. The report said that while the director was “actively and forcefully engaged in the counter-terrorism efforts,” he failed to follow through with a comprehensive strategy for combating al Qaeda. The report said Tenet “bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created.” The inspector general recommended the creation of an accountability board to determine whether the former director, as well as other CIA managers, should be disciplined. But Tenet’s successor in 2004, Porter Goss, rejected the recommendation.
Tenet this year wrote a fierce defense of his stewardship in his best-selling memoir, “At the Center of the Storm.” He issued a rigorous defense Tuesday, calling Helgerson’s conclusions “flat wrong.”
“The IG fails to understand how intensely I pushed the counter-terrorism issue because he failed to interview either me or policy-makers from either the Clinton or Bush administrations,” Tenet said.
The report, “Office of Inspector General Report on CIA Accountability With Respect to the 9/11 Attacks,” did not find a “single point of failure” in not foiling the plot.
But the report did discover “failures to implement and manage important processes, to follow through with operations and to properly share and analyze critical data.”
One lapse: The CIA failed to tell the FBI that two al Qaeda operatives, who later participated in the 9/11 plane hijackings, had entered the country.
The agency declassified and released the report at the direction of Congress despite protests from CIA Director Michael Hayden. “I thought the release of this report would distract officers serving their country in the front lines of a global conflict,” he told CIA employees in a memo. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed.”
