Handbook of intelligence studies / edited by

ACHIEVING ALL-SOURCE FUSION
reports was in large measure an over-reaction to the treason and espionage committed by the
CIA’s Aldrich Ames and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Robert Hansen, who
both spied for numerous years for Soviet intelligence and severely compromised American
intelligence operations against the Soviet Union.
The excessive use of compartmentalization of intelligence caused an appreciable drop in
the ability of CIA analysts to adequately do their jobs. The Rumsfeld Commission charged
with investigating the IC’s poor performance in analyzing the proliferation of ballistic missiles
found that compartmentalization caused IC and CIA analysts not to have full access to all the
information available in the IC, which had a substantive negative impact on performing
their analytic duties. Intelligence is so compartmentalized, Rumsfeld complained, that wrong
information is sometimes given to policy makers because analysts do not have access to all the
relevant classified intelligence. 8
While the CIA, NSA, and the State Department are guilty of misdemeanors in hoarding
some of their intelligence – in fairness, they do share most of their collection with their sister
intelligence agencies – the FBI is guilty of serial felonies. Although the FBI is a component of
the IC, it traditionally has not shared intelligence in the IC, which gravely undermined the IC’s
ability to fuse intelligence analysis of al-Qaeda. As an illustration of this point, former National
Security Council counterterrorism officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon lament that:
Every day a hundred or more reports from the CIA, DIA, the National Security Agency, and the
State Department would be waiting in their computer queues when they [policy makers] got to
work. There was never anything from the FBI. The Bureau, despite its wealth of information,
contributed nothing to the White House’s understanding of al-Qaeda. Virtually none of the
information uncovered in any of the Bureau’s investigative work flowed to the NSC. 9
The FBI’s stubborn unwillingness to contribute information into the IC’s intelligence pool
contributed significantly to the 9/11 tragedy. In July 2001 an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona
astutely warned FBI headquarters in Washington, DC about “an inordinate number of individuals
of investigative interest taking flight lessons” and he urged the FBI to collect data on
flight training for foreign students in the US. In mid-August 2001 the Minneapolis, Minnesota
FBI field office similarly warned of another foreign student taking flight lessons, who authorities
now suspect was the planned twentieth hijacker of the 9/11 attacks. 10 Tragically, the FBI
headquarters had neither an analytic bureaucratic culture nor a critical mass of analysts to
“connect the Phoenix and Minneapolis dots.” Had the FBI shared its field appraisals with the
IC pool of information, moreover, an analyst at the CIA’s CTC might have been able to
backstop the FBI’s lack of analytic expertise and put two and two together and anticipate that
al-Qaeda was planning to use commercial aircraft in a domestic attack. Notwithstanding the
public criticisms of the CIA’s intelligence failure on 9/11, the FBI shares a far greater burden of
guilt for falling to “connect the dots” which led to the national catastrophe.
The FBI had long and defensively argued that it needed to hoard information to protect it
from potential contamination and invalidate it for use in criminal prosecutions against al-Qaeda
operatives. The FBI’s bureaucratic culture and operational procedures were geared toward
preserving evidence for criminal prosecutions in a court of law and not to using intelligence to
preemptively make arrests before terrorist attacks occurred. The institutional and intellectual
barrier that separated the FBI’s law and enforcement mission from the IC’s intelligence mission
had come to be known as the “invisible wall.”
The “invisible wall” might well have been less a product of American law than a construct
made by the managerial practices. As Judge Richard Posner points out:
193