September 11

When I departed San Francisco International Airport (SFO) the night of September 10, 2001 on an overnight flight bound for Newark New Jersey I fully expected to return the following night, after a day of meetings in New York City on September 11. I even left my clothes and all of my travel stuff in my San Francisco hotel room and kept the room reservation through the end of the week. Needless to do say my plans, like those of so many others, were drastically changed the next day.

“Our psychological needs are met or unmet based on the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what matters most and who controls it” — Annette Simmons., “Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins”

At 8:46 AM American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767 carrying 81 passengers and 11 crew crashed into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center (1 WTC) between the 93rd and 99th floors. At just about that time I was stepping onto Broadway turning north to get to a meeting in the 1600 block that was to begin at 9:00 AM. Like everyone in New York that morning it was hard not to be captivated by the brilliance of the clear blue sky. When I started to make my turn north on Broadway, however, I was distracted by something that caused me to look south into the sky to my right. It was a very large white plum of smoke moving east toward the east river and New York harbor.

At that moment I didn’t think much of the plum of smoke but when I arrived at my meeting a few minutes later I was surprised to see a large group of people in a conference room looking at a TV video projected on a screen at one end of the room. To my shock the group told me a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. My immediate thought was it must have been some small private plan in which the pilot fell asleep or something along that order. I don’t even recall when the news reported it was a commercial aircraft that crashed into the WTC but it was overwhelming. How could that happen? I do recall vividly, however, thinking “it must have been sabotage, no commercial airline pilot could accidentally fly into the World Trade Center!”

The remainder of the day was surreal. Meetings were cancelled and almost everyone was involved in checking on colleagues that may have been working in the WTC that morning. Everyone was also constantly in and out of the conference room looking at the minute by minute news reporting. The only events that interrupted the hush that hung over the group were the horrible gasps when we watched individuals jump to their death to avoid the smoke and fire that was engulfing the floors on which they were trapped. Then the crash of the second plane, when no one needed to be told an attack was underway, and of course that gut wrenching moment when the North Tower imploded to the street below.

Civilian air traffic in an out of New York was completely shut-down on 9/11. It didn’t resume until Thursday, September 13th and even then was very limited. There was no reason for me to return to San Francisco at that point. My family in Atlanta was desperate to see me in person and I was doing everything I could to get to them. I finally realized on the night of 12th the quickest way for me to get home was drive. On that night I really didn’t know when air travel would resume so first thing Thursday morning I made my way over to the National rental car location on 34th street. There were hundreds of people who had come to the same conclusion so the National office was packed. National was only making one-way rentals available to their most frequent customers, of which I was one. Luckily I had a car within thirty minutes of my arrival at National but the next decision was what route out of Manhattan?

Entering and exiting by way of the Lincoln or Holland tunnels was very limited. As a lifelong Yankee fan, however, I knew how to drive up through the Bronx and take the George Washington bridge over to New Jersey. From there it was just a long sad journey down the New Jersey turnpike to Delaware and points south.

The ride south was indeed very sad. I listened to talk radio for the entire twenty four-hours it took me to get home. The strangest part of the radio conversations was the way the content and focus changed as I traveled farther from New York. Until about southern New Jersey and then through northern Virginia, where there was also great loss at the Pentagon, the conversation was all sadness about the loss of friends and family. Often it was also the grief related to those still missing.

As I passed through southern Virginia and got further from the northeast the conversation turned to anger and in many cases revenge. By that time it was a sure thing an attack on the U.S. had occurred and I’m pretty sure it was being reported that Osama Bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorists were the attackers. Americans from all over were dumbfounded that an individual, like Bin Laden, and a band of thugs could have caused such harm to America and Americans. It was around that time I remember thinking to myself, “this had to be the greatest failure of U.S. intelligence in the history of our country!”

“strategic surprise is defined as “the sudden realization that one has been operating on the basis of an erroneous threat assessment that results in a failure to anticipate a grave threat to ‘vital’ national interests.” — Milo Jones, Philippe Silberzahn,

I continued to chew on the “intelligence failure” thought for the remainder of my drive home and for quite some time after. The only comparable event I could think of was the attack on Pearl Harbor but I dismissed it because it was before the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). I thought each branch of the military had their own intelligence groups during World War II but part of the reason for the creation of the CIA was to overcome silos of information among the different branches and focus intelligence efforts on national threats. Not too long ago I found-out that 9/11 was indeed considered by many to be a major intelligence failure but, sadly, not the only one. Following are what are considered to be America’s ten biggest intelligence failures, in no particular order.

1. Pearl Harbor Attack
2. The Bay of Pigs Invasion
3. The Tet Offensive
4. The Yom Kippur War
5. The Iranian Revolution
6. The Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
7. The Collapse of the Soviet Union
8. The Indian Nuclear Test
9. The 9/11 Attacks
10. The Iraq War

While the 9/11 attacks may not have been the “biggest intelligence failure in the history of the U.S.”, they may have been the “most successful clandestine operation in the history of the U.S.”. It all started with the impact of war in Afghanistan on the demise of the Soviet Union and the clandestine efforts of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to orchestrate its demise.

The breakdown of the Soviet Union surprised most scholars of international relations, comparative politics, and Soviet politics. Most explanations attributed the breakdown to the reformist leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, and/or to systemic factors. This conventional wisdom minimizes discussion of the key contribution of the war in Afghanistan. Views have begun to change, however, and scholars are beginning to acknowledge that the war in Afghanistan was indeed the “proximate cause”, if not the “cause in-fact” for the breakdown of the Soviet Union.

All of those developments were in no small part due to the efforts of the CIA supporting and training Mujahideen fighters and inserting them into battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan. We now know that Operation Cyclone was the code name for the CIA’s program to arm and finance the Jihadi warriors, mujahideen, in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, prior to and during the military intervention by the USSR in support of its client, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

As early as January 1979 President Carter told his national Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski and secretary of state Cyrus Vance that it was vital to “repair the United States’ relationships with Pakistan” in light of the unrest in Iran. One initiative Carter authorized to achieve this goal was a collaboration between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The Presidential Finding of July 1979, signed by Jimmy Carter, authorized the CIA to provide non-lethal aid to the mujahideen. Through the ISI, the CIA began providing some $500,000 worth of non-lethal assistance to the mujahideen on July 3, 1979 — several months prior to the Soviet invasion. Immediately after the Soviet invasion at the end of the year, a new finding authorizing lethal aid was signed.

The modest scope of this early collaboration was likely influenced by the understanding, later recounted by CIA Director and Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, “that a substantial U.S. covert aid program” might have “raise[d] the stakes” thereby causing “the Soviets to intervene more directly and vigorously than otherwise intended.” Gates confirmed this in his memoir that the U.S. backed the Mujahadin in the 1970s.

“When you start a war, you lose control. You commit to uncertainty.” -Robert Gates

The seriousness of the blowback from the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan became clear to the United States with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. All of the attack’s participants either served in Afghanistan or were linked to a Brooklyn-based fund-raising group for the Afghan jihad that was later revealed to be al Qaeda’s de facto U.S. headquarters. The blowback, evident in other countries as well, continued to increase in intensity throughout the rest of the decade, culminating on September 11, 2001.

When the United States started sending guns and money to the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, it had a clearly defined Cold War purpose: helping expel the Soviet army, which had invaded Afghanistan in 1979. It made sense that once the Afghan jihad forced a Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Washington would lose interest in the rebels. For the international mujahideen, drawn into the Afghan conflict, however, the fight was just beginning. They opened new fronts in the name of global jihad and became the spearhead of Islamist terrorism.

The first thing that needs to be examined when looking at the failures that caused 9/11, now that the bureaucratic excuses, like information sharing and trained incapacity, appear to be less important is “how did the hijackers get into the United States” to commit their murders in the first place. The success of the September 11 plot depended on the ability of the hijackers to obtain visas and pass an immigration and customs inspection in order to enter the United States. It also depended on their ability to remain in the U.S. undetected while they worked out the operational details of the attack. If they failed on either count — entering and becoming embedded — the plot could not have been executed.

Three thousand innocent civilians lost their lives on September 11, 2001 and thousands of family members lost loved ones they still grieve. Their government, our government, has a solemn responsibility to honestly and completely tell them the cause of the greatest failure of U.S. intelligence in the history of our country.”