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C h a p T e r 7 WatChinG threats at hoMe: the fBi Calls The YearS after 9/11 passed quickly; the pace of change, the variety of problems we faced, and the magnitude of the challenge all combined to telescope time. Despite the complexity of the positions we occupied, though, I thought that turnover was good. CIa specializes in recruiting talent—we had plenty of it in the Counterterrorist Center—and keeping managers in management positions rotating made sense, at least to me. we had a requirement to develop a cadre of people who were expert in the counterterrorism business. But there is a parallel need, presumably the same in the private sector as it is in government, to rotate people so that new ideas can emerge, and so that old players stay fresh when they see new challenges. Only four and a half years after returning to CIa, we all had seen the expansion of the most intense CIa program of our generation, with all the ups and downs that went with it. So I was also looking for a new challenge, someplace to keep learning and to see something new. and it came. right place, right time. we had also seen profound changes in how washington dealt with intelligence , as we worked through the intelligence reform legislation that followed the attacks and the endless official studies and inquiries that followed 9/11. Most immediate for us was the establishment of a center announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address in 2003 and established that May—first named the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (referred to among us by its acronym, T-tick) and growing into the national Counterterrorism 146 CHAPTER 7 Center. The creation of this new interagency entity, which was focused on bringing all U.S. government data into one place so a mixed group of analysts would have access to everything, was easily among the toughest, bloodiest bureaucratic issues I witnessed and participated in during a quarter century of government service. The reasons were simple: the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and its successor, nCTC, took over, by statute, the responsibility for providing terrorism analysis to the U.S. government, immediately raising hackles among CIa analysts and managers who had worked on this problem, in some cases for their entire professional lives. It wasn’t just the bureaucratic ignominy of this; it was the message that somehow, in the pre-9/11 days before the government made counterterrorism its top priority, CIa analysis had been somehow fundamentally flawed, so flawed that the government required an entirely new organization to fix the problem. The reaction, unsurprisingly, was human: ferocious defense of CIa turf. There were lessons through the process of nCTC’s growth that transcend infighting in government. To my mind, the question was never whether CIa analysts had erred; the better question was simply whether there was a better, or different, way to do business, especially given the criticisms of the intelligence community on the issue of information sharing among agencies. One center that received all information was almost an inevitable answer to these criticisms. In fact, I thought the post-9/11 analysis by CIa was excellent. More significant, though, was the question whether we could provide better analysis because our analysts were directly embedded in the operations, giving them a sense of the grit of the war that couldn’t be replicated elsewhere. Of course, the counterpoint was equally compelling: facing the global problem of terrorism, our analysts didn’t have equal focus on, or access to, other information, such as homeland security data about the border or FBI investigatory materials. Furthermore, some argued persuasively, the closeness of the agency’s analysts to operators might slant the analysis: who would want to say, from the inside, that a particular area of operational focus was failing? In the end managers get paid to manage, and these arguments, though illuminating in understanding the tensions between centralized and federated analysis, were not entirely relevant. as I watched the problem grow, the answer was simple. Congress passed a law. The president signed it. we work for them, and they have told us to make this work. whether we like it WATCHING THREATS AT HOME 147 is not entirely relevant. In other words, get over it and move on. and if you don’t like it, go run for Congress. They pass the laws; we implement them. Case closed. These fundamental changes came to redirect...

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