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8
October 2002 Testimony Before Intelligence Committees
Statement
to Joint Inquiry of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence and House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence
Paul R. Pillar
National Intelligence Officer for Near East and South
Asia
8 October 2002
(as
prepared for delivery)
Mr.
Chairman, I thank the committees for their invitation
to contribute to this hearing on lessons from past US
experiences in countering international terrorism. My
perspectives are those of an intelligence officer who
worked on counterterrorism for much of the 1990s, as chief
of assessments in the DCI Counterterrorist Center and
then as deputy chief of the center, and also as someone
who has looked at counterterrorism more broadly from the
perspective of a policy analyst. I commend the committees
for holding a hearing with the purpose this one has. The
public discussion of counterterrorism over the last year
naturally has focused on the events of last September,
on how the threat that led to it was handled, and in particular
on any errors in the handling of that threat. While that
kind of examination is of course necessary, the question
of what might be done better in the future to reduce the
chances of terrorist strikes against our nation’s interests
cannot be answered solely through examination of a single
incident, however tragic and traumatic. We can begin to
answer it only by understanding what has been tried in
the past, what changes in our approach have already taken
place, and what possibilities and limits have already
been demonstrated.
Persistent
Challenges to Intelligence
The
first lesson is that the principal characteristics of
the terrorist threat we face today, and the challenges
for intelligence that those characteristics pose, have
been with us for quite some time. September 11th
obviously was an extraordinary event in terms of the death
toll and the resulting deep impact it had on our nation,
but the difficulties that operation presented to intelligence,
and to law enforcement, were all too typical of what we
have repeatedly faced in the past. Terrorist groups—or
more specifically the parts of them that do the planning
and preparations for terrorist attacks—are small, highly
secretive, suspicious of outsiders, highly conscious of
operational security, and for these reasons extremely
difficult to penetrate. Terrorist plots can be, and generally
are, kept under wraps through fairly simple precautions
on the part of the terrorists, such as doing their planning
behind closed doors, not communicating through means that
can be intercepted, and living lives that do not draw
attention to themselves.
The
collection challenges go even farther. The intelligence
target is not just a fixed set of known terrorists whose
secrets we have had to try to uncover. It is anyone—even
if not a card-carrying member of a known terrorist group
and even if not having been involved in previous terrorist
activity—who may use terrorist techniques to inflict harm
on US interests.
Along
with the collection challenges are the analytical ones.
The material that counterterrorist analysts have had to
work with has always consisted of voluminous but fragmentary
and ambiguous reporting, much of it of doubtful credibility,
that provides only the barest and blurriest glimpses of
possible terrorist activity. The analysts have long been
faced with blizzards of flags or dots—whatever one may
choose to call them—that could be pieced together in countless
ways. If pieced together in the most alarming ways, the
alarm bell would never stop ringing.
Tactical
and Strategic Intelligence
Although
the task of tactical warning has always run up against
these formidable challenges, the scraps and fragments
that intelligence collects often have enabled analysts
to offer warning of a more strategic nature—that the terrorist
threat from certain kinds of groups, or in certain countries
or regions, or against certain categories of targets,
or in response to certain kinds of events is higher than
it is elsewhere. The result has been a pattern in the
intelligence community’s performance that has been noted,
for example, in the inquiry led by General Wayne Downing
into the bombing of Khobar Towers. That pattern—a lack
of tactical warning of the attacks, but good strategic
intelligence about the underlying terrorist threats—does
not result from different cohorts of intelligence officers
making the same mistake, or the intelligence community
stubbornly refusing to correct some systemic flaw that
these past attacks have revealed. It is what you get when
earnest efforts are made to extract what can be extracted
from this extremely hard intelligence target.
Certainly
the intelligence community must spare no effort to obtain
tactical intelligence on future terrorist attacks against
US interests. Even a small chance of obtaining the rare
tactical nugget that might enable a future plot to be
foiled is worth major effort. But years of experience
teach us that even if high priority is given, as it has
been, to the development of sources for that kind of specific
information, and even if considerable imagination and
resources are applied, as they have been, to that task,
truly well-placed sources in terrorist groups—the kind
that can yield plot-specific information—will always be
rare. And partly because of that, we can expect to obtain
specific information on some, not all, of the terrorist
plots against our nation’s interests. If the US intelligence
community never failed to obtain specific warning of such
plots, then there would never again be any anti-US terrorism.
That is a goal for which we must strive, but it is not
a goal we can realistically expect to attain.
A
corollary lesson is that the United States should avoid
overly heavy reliance on intelligence to provide tactical
warning. The panel led by Admiral William Crowe that studied
the attacks on the embassies in 1998 noted an unfortunate
tendency among security managers toward such excessive
reliance on tactical intelligence. It is an understandable
tendency, since ramping up security measures only when
a threat is present is more affordable and less disruptive
than keeping them in effect continuously. Intelligence
officers share a responsibility for countering that tendency,
by reminding consumers what we don’t know as well as what
we do.
As
important as tactical warning is, and even though it gets
disproportionate attention in most discussions of the
role of intelligence in counterterrorism, it represents
only a fraction of what intelligence has contributed through
the years to counterterrorism, including contributions
that have saved lives. Strategic intelligence can be even
more useful than the tactical as an input to decisions
on security countermeasures, many of which involve costly
long-term efforts to respond to continuing threats rather
than to a single plot.
One
subject that received strategic attention from the intelligence
community in the 1990s was threats to the US homeland.
The 1993 attack against the World Trade Center was a key
event. It did not generate anything close to the level
of public attention and concern that would be seen eight
years later—that’s the difference between an attack that
kills six people and one that kills 3,000. But to intelligence
community analysts the larger threat to the homeland was
apparent. The goal of the World Trade Center truck bombers
had been to topple the twin towers and kill thousands.
The
community’s work on this subject culminated in 1995 in
a National Intelligence Estimate—the most formal and fully
coordinated form of intelligence assessment, one that
is personally approved by the DCI and heads of community
components. This Estimate was probably the single most
conspicuous piece of intelligence analysis that the community
produced on terrorism during the mid-1990s. The sole subject
of the Estimate was foreign terrorist threats to the US
homeland. The FBI, along with CIA and other intelligence
community agencies, participated fully in preparation
of the Estimate, so that it would reflect the Bureau’s
information on the foreign terrorist presence in the U.S.
as well as the intelligence available to CIA and others.
As
was noted in one of the committees’ staff reports, this
Estimate addressed civil aviation as an attractive target
that foreign terrorists might strike in the United States.
This particular aspect of the Estimate was the subject
of subsequent efforts, involving the DCI Counterterrorist
Center, the FBI, the National Intelligence Council, and
the FAA, to sensitize relevant consumers to the threat.
The FAA arranged a set of special briefings for representatives
of the aviation industry, at which senior CIA and FBI
counterterrorist specialists presented much of the material
in the Estimate, as part of an effort to persuade the
industry of the need for additional counterterrorist security
measures for domestic civil aviation.
What
is the lesson to be drawn from this episode, apart from
the direct one that the intelligence community and the
FBI were working closely with the relevant regulatory
agency as early as the mid-1990s to call attention to
the foreign terrorist threat to domestic civil aviation?
I think it has to do with how much our national willingness
to respond with things like expensive new security measures
depends on the reality of past tragedies more than projections
of threats that have not yet materialized. The intelligence
community has a duty here. As any new intelligence analyst
is taught, what matters is not just to make correct predictions
and hit the right notes—which may look good in post-mortems—but
to beat the drum loudly enough about impending threats
to have some chance of making an impact on policy. Maybe
the intelligence community could have beaten the drum
even harder in this instance, but it is tough to compete
with what had been, before September 11th,
many years of civil aviation operations in this country
that had been virtually untouched by terrorism.
Terrorist
Tactics
Threats
to aviation involve a particular terrorist tactic, and
prognostication of tactics, like plot-specific tactical
warning, gets a great deal of attention in discussions
of counterterrorist intelligence. But divining the tactic
that terrorists will use in the next major attack is not
the biggest contribution that US intelligence has made
in past years, and I do not expect it to be in the future.
Terrorists vary their tactics, as they look at security
measures and go to where the vulnerabilities are, and
as they try to keep the good guys off balance and guessing.
Al-Qa’ida alone has used truck bombings, a waterborne
attack, and hijacking. Intelligence has a role in pointing
out any emerging patterns in what terrorists seems to
be considering in the way of tactics and targets. But
over the long term the biggest counterterrorist payoffs
probably will come less from foiling tactics than from
foiling terrorists. Counter one technique and you make
it more difficult for terrorists to use that tactic, perhaps
inducing them to look to other methods. Disrupt a terrorist
cell and you prevent that cell from attacking any target
with any tactic.
Over
the last several years there has been particular attention
given to possible terrorism using chemical, biological,
radiological, or nuclear means—CBRN terrorism, to use
the common abbreviation. In public discussion, there developed
a widespread tendency to equate the danger of terrorism
against US interests, and particularly against the US
homeland, with mass casualty CBRN attacks. Almost every
response exercise, for example, involved a chemical or
biological scenario. I do not belittle the CBRN threat,
which may be increasing—and not just with al-Qa’ida, whose
ambitions in the CBRN area have been well established.
But the attention given to this one particular set of
possible terrorist tactics since the mid-1990s outstripped,
as I wrote prior to 9/11, what terrorists were actually
doing operationally. The U.S. intelligence community was
probably no more guilty, and perhaps less guilty, than
outside commentators of giving disproportionate attention
to this one possible terrorist technique, and in any case
the community needs for other reasons to monitor closely
CBRN developments worldwide. What captures the attention
of those outside the community affects the use of resources
inside it, however, if only in the form of time taken
to answer questions. The broader preoccupation with possible
CBRN terrorism continued through the series of conventional
terrorist attacks against US targets: New York, Riyadh,
Khobar, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Aden, and finally September
11th, which was the most dramatic possible
demonstration that one could achieve mass casualties,
including in the US homeland, without using CBRN. I might
add that the other terrorist attack in the United States
last fall—the anthrax letters—demonstrated that one can
use CBRN without inflicting mass casualties.
Evolution
of the Intelligence Community’s Response
The
record of the US intelligence community changing in response
to the threat from international terrorism goes back farther
than the end of the Cold War—back to the 1980s, when the
main US concern was with Hizballah’s activities in Lebanon,
including the bombing of our embassy and the Marine barracks
and years of hostage-taking, as well as the terrorist
activities of certain states. The community’s principal
response at that time, and in many ways still its most
important response, was the creation of the DCI Counterterrorist
Center, or CTC, in 1986. This step was a bureaucratic
revolution. It involved slicing across longstanding lines
on the organization chart, bringing analysts and operators
to work more closely together than they ever had before,
and benefiting from the synergy that comes from having
people with different skills and specialties attacking
the same high priority problem together. The success of
the concept is reflected in the fact that CTC became a
model for other centers that subsequently were established
to address such issues as proliferation and narcotics.
Further
refinements were made in CTC in subsequent years. One
for which I am proud to claim personal credit was the
creation of a permanent cadre of counterterrorist analysts,
replacing an earlier system in which the analysts working
on counterterrorism were on loan from other offices, which
continued to control their careers. There now are analysts
moving into CIA’s Senior Analytical Service as counterterrorist
experts. There were also reconfigurations within the Center
to increase the synergy further. This particularly included
the creation of a multidisciplinary unit, a sort of center
within a center, focused exclusively on Usama Bin Ladin.
This step was taken well before Bin Ladin became a household
word.
Another
refinement in CTC was the increased representation of
agencies other than CIA, particularly but not exclusively
law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. This was a recognition
of how important the intelligence-law enforcement nexus
is to counterterrorism. A lot has been written and said
over the past year about this relationship. I find elements
of truth in much of it, having to do with cultural distinctions
and the like, but I also find much of it dated. The relationship,
specifically the FBI-CIA relationship, improved greatly
during the 1990s. This was partly due to a commitment
at the top of each agency to make it work. It was also
due to the cross-assignments of personnel about which
you have heard from other witnesses, some of whom were
in those assignments. There were also more informal methods
used to learn about each other’s business. Along with
improved cooperation in Washington, there was an expansion
of collaboration in the field. The increase in the number
of FBI overseas representatives, or legatts, was welcomed
by CIA because it made that collaboration easier. And
there was increased communication between CTC and Justice
Department prosecutors working on key terrorist cases,
and particularly with the Southern District of New York,
where so many of those cases were.
Along
with these changes involving personnel and organization,
CTC’s methods and operational strategy also evolved. An
increasing amount of work was devoted to supporting the
law enforcement missions of determining responsibility
for terrorist attacks and tracking down fugitive perpetrators.
A long-running task force established after the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing to support the FBI’s work on that
case became a sort of model for support work on other
cases. Efforts to recruit well-placed unilateral sources
continued to have high priority, but CTC developed during
the 1990s a strategy that recognized that although information
about specific terrorist plots was rare, other information
about suspected terrorists and their activities was more
feasible to acquire. The strategy was to work with many
foreign government partners to disrupt terrorist cells
using whatever information we could collect about them.
Most terrorists commit other illegal activity besides
terrorism, and this became the basis for many arrests,
interrogations, and other disruption initiatives—akin
to nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. This type of disruption
work must continue to be a major part of US counterterrorist
efforts. It is slow, it is incremental, and it does not
yield many spectacular, highly visible successes. But
I am convinced that by impeding the operations of terrorists
it has prevented some terrorist attacks and has saved
innocent lives.
The
main lesson I hope the committees draw from this capsule
history is that there already has been a long and substantial
evolution of the intelligence community’s approach to
tacking international terrorism. Most of the innovations
worth trying have already been tried. Most of the major
organizational changes that needed to be made have been
made. I’m sure all of us in this room wish there were
some additional change or set of changes that would give
us assurance that something like September 11th
would not happen again. But I am not aware of a step that
would provide that kind of assurance, and I don’t believe
there is one, even though there clearly is room for additional
improvement as long as our counterterrorist batting average
is not 1.000, which means indefinitely. In searching for
ways to avoid recurrence of the sorts of errors and omissions
that have received so much attention in the September
11th case, we should try not to reinvent wheels
already invented or, even worse, to undo beneficial adjustments
made in the past. We should also be careful not to give
the American people any unjustified sense that with new
changes the problem of international terrorism has been
solved.
Counterterrorist
Instruments
I
was asked to comment on general US strategies for countering
terrorism in the past, and the benefits and drawbacks
of counterterrorist instruments.
The
main lines of US counterterrorist policy remained fairly
constant for most of the decade prior to September 11th,
including the longstanding declared principles of making
no concessions to terrorists, bringing terrorists to justice,
isolating and pressuring state sponsors of terrorism,
and bolstering the counterterrorist capabilities of countries
that work with the United States. Beyond those principles,
the strategy could be described as one of making use of
all of the instruments available, in recognition that
each instrument has something to offer but also limitations.
It was mostly a pragmatic effort to use tools whenever
they offered a reasonable chance of being effective and
the risk of using them was low.
I
have already commented on the contributions and limitations
of intelligence. Another major instrument, prosecuting
terrorists through the US criminal justice system, has
both its advantages and its limitations as applied to
counterterrorism. The advantages include the direct one
of taking individual terrorists out of circulation in
a manner consistent with the laws we apply to our own
citizens and the indirect ones of a possible deterrent
effect on other terrorists and the demonstration of US
resolve afforded by a public trial. The limitations include
the uncertainty of the deterrent effect, the higher standards
involved in building a legal case rather than an intelligence
case to prove someone is a terrorist, and the fact that
terrorist leaders are less likely to be caught than the
low-level people who carry out their plans. The criminal
justice system must continue to be a major instrument
of counterterrorism, although probably not enshrined at
a higher level of importance than the other instruments,
as it seems to have been in the past. We also need to
give greater consideration to what the courts of other
nations can do, even with terrorists indictable in the
United States. Taking terrorists out of circulation and
making them pay for their crimes is more important than
who accomplishes those tasks.
The
use of military force offers the advantage of being the
most dramatic possible demonstration of US resolve to
fight terrorism, as well as offering some deterrent value
and possibly some physical destruction of terrorist infrastructure.
The limitations are also readily apparent. Armed force
may provoke rather than deter some terrorists, who may
welcome the use of force for reasons of propaganda, recruitment,
and keeping their own rank-and-file motivated. There are
always the risks of broader diplomatic and political repercussions
from the use of military force for any purpose. And perhaps
most significantly, the terrorists most threatening to
the United States provide few good military targets. The
terrorist preparations that matter most tend to take place
not in camps that can be bombed but in apartments in places
like Hamburg or Beirut or Kuala Lumpur. The significant
success of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan provides
occasion for renewed consideration of the military instrument
in counterterrorism. We should remember, however, that
there has never been another place comparable to Afghanistan
as a training ground for tens of thousands of extremists
over two decades, as the headquarters of a deadly group
like al-Qa’ida, and as the seat of a regime—the Taliban—that
was more closely in partnership with terrorists than any
other in the world.
Other
instruments—offensive, counterterrorist instruments, not
just security countermeasures—also are important and must
continue to be used to the fullest. Diplomacy is important
in many ways, ranging from maintaining international pressure
against state sponsorship of terrorism to getting help
in acting against individual terrorists. The interdiction
of terrorist money produced only meager results for most
of the past decade, but the great increase in freezing
of terrorist assets since September 11th has
shown what can be accomplished when such efforts are backed
up by a determined nation. Our basic approach to the use
of the various counterterrorist instruments must be: use
them all, and use them together.
Recommendations
I
was asked for recommendations for improving the US Government’s
performance in fighting terrorism. I have made some suggestions
in my other writings, but let me focus on a few matters
of most direct concern to these committees. In doing so
I want to underscore that, for the reasons I mentioned
earlier, even major new efforts or initiatives are apt
to yield only modest results.
First,
it is vital to have sustained, long-term public support
for what the intelligence community needs to do in counterterrorism—with
everything that implies regarding resources. The main
impact that the various attacks on US targets had on the
work of the Counterterrorist Center over the past decade
and a half was that those were the times when public interest
in the subject spiked and resources went up. When public
interest waned, as time passed without a major attack,
resources were tighter. That was certainly the case after
the terrorist concerns of the 1980s faded in the public
consciousness and remained the case for most of the first
half of the 1990s. The vital, painstaking work of taking
apart terrorist groups and terrorist infrastructures is
long-term work, and it cannot be done with the kind of
ups and downs in support that have occurred in the past.
Second,
we probably should try to make more extensive use of multiple
sources of data, including nontraditional sources, to
detect possible terrorist activity. By this I mean not
just using watch lists and checking names while working
on individual cases, but rather a broader exploitation
for intelligence purposes of such things as travel and
immigration data. I have always thought that trying to
do this involved immense practical difficulties, ranging
from the use of multiple names to problems in getting
the information from the private and public sources that
own it. I still think so. It would involve looking through
huge haystacks with only a chance of finding a few needles.
But the standards for return on investment in counterterrorism
changed on 9/11, and perhaps this is an avenue we need
to explore further.
Third—and
this goes far beyond what the intelligence community itself
can accomplish—we must nurture foreign relationships to
get the cooperation of foreign governments that is so
vital to a host of counterterrorist matters, especially
including intelligence matters. Of course we need to continue
to make every effort to develop unilateral intelligence
sources. But in counterterrorism, we will always be—for
several geographic, cultural, and jurisdictional reasons—more
dependent on foreign partners than with almost any other
intelligence topic. That is not a weakness; it is something
to cultivate and exploit. We need our partners for information,
and we need them to carry out most of the arrests, the
raids, the confiscations, the interrogations, and the
renditions that are involved in dismantling terrorist
groups. This means we need to give them the incentives
to cooperate, and if necessary the assistance in developing
the capabilities to do so.
Finally,
we should take a broad view of counterterrorism and recognize
how much future terrorism against US interests will depend
not just on what is done by people at the CIA or FBI who
have counterterrorism as part of their titles. Counterterrorism
involves far more than learning the secrets of the next
terrorist plot or erecting security measures around what
we think is the next terrorist target. It also involves
the motivations for groups to use terrorism, and the conflicts
and conditions that lead some people to join terrorist
groups—even though there always will be some, like Bin
Ladin, who seem determined to do us harm regardless of
motives or conditions. This broad view obviously gets
into many foreign policy issues. But the lesson for intelligence
is that as more priority is given to particular counterterrorist
accounts, we should not denude ourselves of coverage in
other areas that bear on possible future terrorism. The
intelligence community has a responsibility not only to
go after the current al-Qa’ida but to be aware, early
on, of the next one–whatever form such a future terrorist
threat might take—and of the conditions that might lead
such a threat to emerge.
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