CIA inquiry urged holding Tenet, others to account for 9/11

WASHINGTON - AFP - A two-year-old CIA inquiry urged holding former CIA director George Tenet and other top agency officials to account for leadership failures before the September 11, 2001 attacks, a summary released Tuesday said.

The CIA's inspector general recommended in June 2005 that CIA set up "accountability boards" to consider disciplinary action against Tenet and other top officials for the failures, but was turned down by then CIA director Porter Goss.

Michael Hayden, the spy agency's current director, said in declassifying the top secret summary that he saw no reason to revisit the inspector general's recommendations.

The report found that Tenet failed to produce a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaeda before the September 11 attacks, and did not make effective use of his authority to marshal support for a counter-terrorism effort that he had proclaimed as a top priority.

Tenet, "by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was every created, despite his specific direction that this should be done," the report said.

It blamed Tenet for not settling a dispute that impeded cooperation between the CIA and the National Security Agency on Al-Qaeda far into 2001, and said an accountability board should review his performance for possible disciplinary action.

Tenet issued a statement calling the report's conclusions "flat wrong." In a separate statement, Hayden also said that "our colleagues referred to in the document, and others who have read it, took strong exception to its focus, methodology, and conclusions."

Names and positions of some of those criticized were censored in the summary. In addition to Tenet, the inspector general recommended accountability boards for the CIA's former executive director AB "Buzzy" Krongard, former deputy director for operations Jim Pavitt, former counter-terrorism center chief Cofer Black, and four other unidentified officials.

The top CIA officials were singled out for not using all funds allocated for counterterrorism activities, and moving some of those monies to other unrelated activities. The counter-terrorism center chief was criticized because a unit set up to follow the activities of Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden was overworked and lacked operational experience, expertise and training.

Poor coordination among its various units resulted in the center failing to understand earlier the pivotal role of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11 attacks, the report said.

"This intelligence was not voluminous and its significance is easier to understand in hindsight, but it was noteworthy even in the pre-9/11 period because it included the allegation that KSM was sending terrorists to the United States to engage in activities on behalf of Bin Laden," it said.

The report also criticized intelligence sharing between the agency and federal law enforcement authorities, which failed most spectacularly in the case of two September 11 hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar.

The CIA learned they had attended a meeting of suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in January, 2000 and that one of them had received a visit to the United States.

The CIA's counter-terrorism center learned that the other flew from Bangkok to Los Angeles in mid-march 2000.

But that information was not received by the FBI, or relayed to the State Department for a terror suspect watch list until August 2001 even though 50 to 60 people had read one or more of the six CIA cables with the travel information.

"That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systemic breakdown -- a breakdown caused by excessive workloads, ambiguities about responsibilities, and mismanagement of the program," the report said.

"Basically, there was no coherent, functioning, watch-listing program," it said. The inspector general's report also found big holes in the agency's analyses of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

The agency produced no comprehensive strategic analysis of Al-Qaeda, no comprehensive report on Bin Laden until 1993, no examination of the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons, limited analysis of the United States as a target, and no comprehensive analysis of the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001, the report said.

AFP