Gideon's Spies полностью

In the aftermath, senior officers at both agencies were publicly attacked for their lack of counterterrorism policies and their failure of coordination and cooperation. There emerged a picture of recalcitrant intelligence bureaucracies, too concerned with issues of political expediency to take risks. The CIA, in particular, had failed to grasp the importance of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and the crucial role played by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. From its training camps, thousands of terrorists had graduated to leave their mark on the world stage. First came the destruction in 1998 of the American embassy in Nairobe, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania in which 213 died. Then followed the attack on the American destroyer the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000. Both were very public preludes to the September 11 attacks.

After September 11, among the hundreds of questions dominating Washington’s collective soul-searching, were: Why had the CIA not had more spies on the ground in Africa and the Middle East? Why had it depended too much on electronic surveillance? And why had it not relied upon what Paul Bremer, the counterterrorism chief for President Reagan, had called “third-country intelligence”?

Everyone knew he meant Mossad.

Since then, Halevy had been bombarded with calls from CIA director George Tenet, himself facing intense criticism. Tenet wanted to know how much more Mossad had known about the impending attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Halevy, in his careful, diplomatic way, had pointed out to Tenet that Mossad had sent several warnings in the weeks prior to September that an attack was coming. Halevy had then cited “credible chatter” Mossad agents had picked up in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen. But under mounting pressure from Congress and the White House, Tenet had furiously persisted in challenging Halevy. How much had Mossad known?

A serving Mossad officer later described the “hot line from Langley” as superheated. Sometimes there were a dozen calls a day from Tenet. And then there was all the secure-line high-speed signals traffic. There had never been anything like it. Washington was shocked that a bearded man operating out of a cave somewhere in the Middle East had “done more damage to American prestige than Pearl Harbor.”

In a tense phone call, one which, though he did not know it, would trigger his own downfall, Halevy had snapped at Tenet. Where was your electronic surveillance?

America’s National Security Agency is the most secretive and powerful such service in the world. From Fort George G. Meade in Maryland, it casts an electronic ear over the globe. Its supercomputers hum around the clock, hoping to intercept or identify communications between terrorists. Suspects, names, key words, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses are all sucked up by NSA satellites—either circling or geopositioned around the earth—and downloaded to the computers. There the data are coded into “watch lists,” then fed into the system that takes the lists on secure lines throughout the U.S. intelligence community.

In theory, everyone who had needed to know would have been aware of who was out there posing a real and present danger to the United States. But the reality had been different.

Few know exactly what NSA costs to run, but it is widely reported to be more than several billion dollars a year. Its massive, powerful data crushers are part of the ECHELON surveillance system, which sifts tens of billions of snippets of information, daily, matching them up.

The one drawback with the system is that it still has language difficulties: it cannot recognize the dialects and patois of some of the eighteen languages of the Middle East and the even greater number in India and Pakistan. Some of the material obtained from there has to be scrutinized by old-fashioned methods—linguists trained to interpret what is being said and, equally important, what might have been left out. In the end, the lists depend on being accurate.

Efraim Halevy knew that was the weakness in the American system: any list was only as good as the analysts who put a person’s name on it. And that, he had politely told Tenet in that phone call, was where the Americans had failed.