Word: tenet
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...about terrorist plots to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower. Or about the secret memos that had been rocketing back and forth between intelligence agencies with titles like "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Or that CIA chief George Tenet looked around in the summer of 2001 and saw that "the system was blinking red." Or that the FBI's chief of counterterrorism said he wished he had 500 analysts tracking the army of Osama bin Laden in those days--"instead of two." Or that...
...needed. By the time they met in public last week for the 10th time, most of them had come to think that a thorough overhaul of the way the nation organizes, collects and distributes intelligence was necessary. Former Navy Secretary John Lehman, a Republican, warned the CIA's Tenet last week, "There is a train coming down the track. There are going to be very real changes made...
...capital's forte for a decade or more. Washington has not been sitting on its hands since 9/11, but the repairs it has made in the way the feds gather and share intelligence have come mostly at the margins, little fixes to huge federal bureaucracies--in the words of Tenet, evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. That's partly because Washington has been so distracted, mounting and managing two unfinished wars, that it hasn't had time to take itself apart and figure out what's broken. The other reason is that the two agencies most in need of reform...
...some of the FBI's recessive genes: 18 months passed between the time the agency was told that hijacker Khalid al-Midhar had obtained a U.S. visa and the time the CIA put his name and that of his traveling companion, also a hijacker, on a government watch list. Tenet told his top managers in 1998 that the CIA was "at war" with bin Laden, but the word never really filtered down through the agency, much less to other arms of the intelligence community. The CIA had follow-through problems. The German government gave Langley's Counter Terror Center...
...that big thinking, al-Qaeda was an inconvenience at best. Strategy so overwhelmed tactical thinking in the Bush Administration that practicalities of any sort--except the military details of an Iraq invasion--were bumped down the ladder to deputies. The terrorist threats that were setting George Tenet's and Dick Clarke's hair on fire in early 2001 took a backseat to "brilliant" strategic notions like responding to the Cole by "doing something about" Saddam Hussein. Even the Aug. 6 memo to the President from the CIA, which was titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.," was seen...