The 911 Report by St. Martin's Press

Author:St. Martin's Press
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-312-93554-2
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Building New Capabilities: The CIA

The after-action review had treated the CIA as the lead agency for any offensive against al Qaeda, and the principals, at their March 10 meeting, had endorsed strengthening the CIA’s capability for that role. To the CTC, that meant proceeding with “the Plan,” which it had put forward half a year earlier—hiring and training more case officers and building up the capabilities of foreign security services that provided intelligence via liaison. On occasion, as in Jordan in December 1999, these liaison services took direct action against al Qaeda cells.72

In the CTC and higher up, the CIA’s managers believed that they desperately needed funds just to continue their current counterterrorism effort, for they reckoned that the millennium alert had already used up all of the Center’s funds for the current fiscal year; the Bin Ladin unit had spent 140 percent of its allocation. Tenet told us he met with Berger to discuss funding for counterterrorism just two days after the principals’ meeting.73

While Clarke strongly favored giving the CIA more money for counterterrorism, he differed sharply with the CIA’s managers about where it should come from. They insisted that the CIA had been shortchanged ever since the end of the Cold War. Their ability to perform any mission, counterterrorism included, they argued, depended on preserving what they had, restoring what they had lost since the beginning of the 1990s, and building from there—with across-the-board recruitment and training of new case officers, and the reopening of closed stations. To finance the counterterrorism effort, Tenet had gone to congressional leaders after the 1998 embassy bombings and persuaded them to give the CIA a special supplemental appropriation. Now, in the aftermath of the millennium alert, Tenet wanted a boost in overall funds for the CIA and another supplemental appropriation specifically for counterterrorism.74

To Clarke, this seemed evidence that the CIA’s leadership did not give sufficient priority to the battle against Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. He told us that James Pavitt, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, “said if there’s going to be money spent on going after Bin Ladin, it should be given to him.... My view was that he had had a lot of money to do it and a long time to do it, and I didn’t want to put more good money after bad.”75 The CIA had a very different attitude: Pavitt told us that while the CIA’s Bin Ladin unit did “extraordinary and commendable work,” his chief of station in London “was just as much part of the al Qaeda struggle as an officer sitting in [the Bin Ladin unit].”76

The dispute had large managerial implications, for Clarke had found allies in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). They had supplied him with the figures he used to argue that CIA spending on counterterrorism from its baseline budget had shown almost no increase.77

Berger met twice with Tenet in April to try to resolve the dispute. The Deputies Committee met later in the month to review fiscal year 2000 and 2001 budget priorities and offsets for the CIA and other agencies.

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