Terror effort full of fumbles

WASHINGTON -- In 1996, the CIA secretly created a special operational unit devoted to tracking a single man, a Saudi-born exile named Osama bin Laden, then living in the Sudan and considered a major terrorist financier. By early 1997, the office -- known as the bin Laden station -- had concluded that he was also a terrorist organizer, based in Afghanistan, with a military committee planning operations against U.S. interests worldwide.

"Although this information was disseminated in many reports, the unit's sense of alarm about bin Laden was not widely shared or understood within the intelligence and policy communities," the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks reported on Wednesday. "Employees in the unit told us they felt their zeal attracted ridicule from their peers."

What happened over the nearly five years from that moment until the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is the story of bureaucratic miscommunication, diplomatic dead-ends, military hesitation, intelligence failures, political rivalries and policy miscalculations at the highest levels of two presidential administrations -- a trail of fumbles presented in sweeping new detail in two days of commission hearings and four staff reports made public this week.

President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, testified Wednesday that the Bush administration had largely ignored the threat from al-Qaida prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. That prompted members of the commission to divide along sharply partisan lines as they questioned him.

As Republican members openly questioned Clarke's truthfulness and Democrats defended an official who helped direct counterterrorism strategy for nearly a decade, Clarke testified that the Bush administration had not treated counterterrorism as an "urgent issue" before 9/11.

But in a different tone in the hushed hearing room, Clarke began his testimony by telling the victims' families:

"Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you. We tried hard. But that doesn't matter, because we failed. And for that failure, I would ask, once all the facts are out, for your understanding and for your forgiveness."

Clarke's appearance before the commission, which is in the final weeks of an investigation of intelligence and law-enforcement efforts before the 9/11 attacks, overshadowed the drama of testimony earlier in the day from George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser. Tenet and Berger were forcefully questioned about why two administrations in a row have been unable to stop al-Qaida and kill or capture its leader, Osama bin Laden.

Tenet's testimony was generally supportive of the Bush administration. He said the Bush White House was "working hard before Sept. 11 to devise a comprehensive framework to deal with al-Qaida," and he discussed how Bush insisted on having Tenet brief him personally each morning on threats to the United States.

The commission's work is providing the government's first comprehensive account of how the Clinton and Bush administrations assessed and responded to the growing threat presented by the bin Laden network before Sept. 11. Previous government accounts and testimony by national security officials, focused more narrowly on specific failings of intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

In the last years of Bill Clinton's administration, the commission's findings show, there were deep misunderstandings between White House officials, who believed the president had clearly authorized actions that would kill bin Laden, and CIA officers who thought that they were only permitted to kill him in a capture attempt. There were a half-dozen frustrating attempts to use Afghan proxies to attack bin Laden, and a series of successively more ambitious plans for military strikes that proved unworkable, diplomatic pressure that failed and bitter disputes about how best to use unmanned Predator drone aircraft to gather intelligence.

In the first months of the Bush administration, the commission found, there was sharp skepticism about the Clinton approach -- a conviction that it had "run out of gas," as Stephen Hadley, the Bush deputy national security adviser, put it.

There was also hesitation about how and whether to retaliate for the October 2000 attack on the Navy destroyer Cole, more debate among the White House, Pentagon and CIA over arming the Predators with missiles, and repeated delays that kept a new policy for expanded action against al-Qaida from being approved until Sept. 4, 2001 -- just a week before the attacks.

As intercepts of reported threats against unspecified targets jumped alarmingly in the June and July 2001, the deputy director of Central Intelligence, John McLaughlin, told the commission "he felt a great tension" between "the new administration's need to understand these issues and his sense that this was a matter of great urgency." He also reported frustration that some policymakers in the new administration "who had not lived through such threat surges before, questioned the validity of the intelligence or wondered if it was disinformation, though they were persuaded when they probed it."

In all the pages of commission reports, and in all the hours of testimony, one haunting reality comes clear: Whatever the missteps of the government in the months and years before the attacks, there was always a lonely chorus of experts, mostly at lower levels of the intelligence community, warning that the worst could really happen, even if they did not know how, where or when.

As early as mid-1997, the commission found, one CIA officer recognized that the intelligence community alone could not solve the problem of bin Laden. "All we're doing is holding the ring until the cavalry gets here," he warned his supervisor in a memo.

There were some successes: Foiled plots, economic sanctions and a freeze on the Taliban's assets. But through both administrations, and despite internal pressure from critics scattered around the bureaucracy, the efforts against al-Qaida were more notable for their limits than for their reach.

"If officers at all levels questioned the effectiveness of the most active strategy the policymakers were employing to defeat the terrorist enemy," the commission's staff concluded, "the commission needs to ask why that strategy remained largely unchanged throughout the period leading up to 9/11."

Contributing: Philip Shenon and Richard W. Stevenson

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