September 11 and the Adaptation Failure of U.S. Intelligence Agencies

In January 2000, al-Qaida operatives gathered secretly in Malaysia for a planning meeting. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was watching. Among the participants was Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the hijackers who would later help to crash American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon. By the time the meeting disbanded, the CIA had taken a photograph of al-Mihdhar, learned his full name, obtained his passport number, and uncovered one other critical piece of information: al-Mihdhar held a multiple-entry visa to the United States.¹ It was twenty months before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. George Tenet, the director of central intelligence (DCI), later admitted that the CIA should have placed al-Mihdhar on the State Department's watch list denying him entry into the United States.² It did not until August 23, 2001, just nineteen days before the terrorist attacks and months after al-Mihdhar had entered the country, obtained a California motor vehicle photo identification card (using his real name), and started taking flying lessons.

The case of Khalid al-Mihdhar provides a chilling example of the subtle yet powerful effects of organization—that is, the routines, structures, and cultures that critically influence what government agencies do and how well they do it. Why did the CIA take so long to put this suspected al-Qaida operative on the State Department's watch list, especially given Director Tenet's earlier declaration that the United States was "at war" with al-Qaida, and when U.S. intelligence reporting throughout the spring and summer of 2001 revealed a dramatic spike in "chatter" about an upcoming terrorist attack?³ The simplest answer is that keeping track of the whereabouts of foreign terrorists had never been standard practice or a high priority. For more than forty years, the Cold War had dominated both the thinking and operation of the CIA and the thirteen other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community.⁴ When the Soviet Union fell in 1991 and the principal threat to U.S. national security changed, U.S. intelligence agencies were slow to change with it. Before September 11, none of these agencies had formal training programs or well-honed procedures to assist their intelligence officers in identifying dangerous terrorists and warning other U.S. government agencies about them before they reached the United States.⁵ As one CIA employee told congressional investigators a year after the September 11 attacks, he believed it was "not incumbent" even on the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit to place individuals such as al-Mihdhar on the State Department's watch list.⁶

No organization is failure-proof, and no one will ever know whether the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks could have been prevented. Evidence suggests, however, that the U.S. intelligence community showed a stunning inability to adapt to the rise of terrorism after the Cold War ended.

This article attributes the adaptation failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to three factors: the nature of bureaucratic organizations, which makes internal reform exceedingly difficult; the self-interest of presidents, legislators, and government bureaucrats, which works against executive branch reform; and the fragmented structure of the federal government, which erects high barriers to legislative reform.

The first section of the article considers whether the U.S. intelligence community adapted as well as could be expected during the 1990s, given the challenges and constraints that it faced. The second section examines the literature on organizational change and develops a framework for understanding why organizations fail to adapt. The third section, a case study of the CIA, describes how and why the agency adapted poorly to the growing terrorist threat between 1991 and 2001. The fourth section offers three conclusions from the preceding analysis. First, major reform of the U.S. intelligence community is difficult even after catastrophic failure. Second, reform...