By Amy B. Zegart
In this pathbreaking e-book, Amy Zegart presents the 1st scholarly exam of the intelligence mess ups that preceded September eleven. in the past, these disasters were attributed mostly to person error. yet Zegart indicates how and why the intelligence procedure itself left us vulnerable.
Zegart argues that once the chilly battle ended, the CIA and FBI did not adapt to the increase of terrorism. She makes the case by way of carrying out painstaking research of greater than 300 intelligence reform innovations and tracing the historical past of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing largely from declassified govt files and interviews with greater than seventy high-ranking executive officers. She reveals that political leaders have been good conscious of the rising terrorist threat and the pressing want for intelligence reform, yet didn't in attaining the adjustments they sought. a similar forces that experience stymied intelligence reform for many years are responsible: resistance within U.S. intelligence firms, the rational pursuits of politicians and profession bureaucrats, and center facets of our democracy resembling the fragmented constitution of the government. eventually disasters of edition ended in disasters of functionality. Zegart finds how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed in the course of the Nineties avoided the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three possibilities to disrupt the September eleven plot.
Spying Blind is a sobering account of why of America's most crucial intelligence businesses did not comply with new threats after the chilly conflict, and why they're not likely to evolve within the future.
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Additional resources for Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11
The rustic was once attempting to kill it. —Senior intelligence official23 On December 31, 1991, because the Soviet flag flew over the Kremlin for the final time, the critical Intelligence organisation was once scuffling with for its personal survival. The cave in of the us’ vital enemy led many to query the function and relevance of intelligence in a post–Cold struggle global. Longtime intelligence supporters resembling Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David Boren (D-OK) and previous CIA Director Stansfield Turner believed the CIA needed to adopt new missions to outlive. 24 so much recommended dramatic cutbacks, believing the “peace dividend” might be larger spent on urgent family issues. William Hyland, one of many deans of U. S. overseas coverage circles, famous in may possibly of 1991 that, “The usa hasn't ever been much less threatened via overseas forces than it's this present day. . . . [and] by no means because the nice melancholy has the risk to family health been larger. ”25 Peter Peterson, the chairman of the distinguished Council on international kinfolk, issued the same name in a speech at Columbia collage, arguing that household difficulties in schooling and poverty “now threaten . . . America’s long term nationwide safety greater than the conventional preoccupations of defense and overseas coverage comparable to the threat of Soviet nuclear bombs or traditional assaults on our territory. . . . ”26 a few went even extra. 70 FIGHTING OSAMA Former nationwide safety enterprise leader Lt. normal William Odom and Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), some of the most strong individuals of the Senate, instructed that the CIA be abolished altogether. household coverage issues so ruled the 1992 presidential crusade that Governor invoice Clinton dedicated simply 218 phrases to overseas affairs in his notoriously long, 54-minute,27 4,434-word popularity speech on the Democratic nationwide conference. 28 For the CIA, the message was once transparent: the time had come to finish company as traditional. enterprise as ordinary did result in many respects. the end result, even though, was once now not a greater intelligence company, yet a company hobbled by means of dwindling assets, inner turbulence, and strategic confusion. decided to supply a peace dividend, Congress and the president slashed intelligence budgets each year from 1991 to 1996,29 leading to a whopping 25 percentage workforce relief on the CIA. 30 R. James Woolsey, who served as director of vital intelligence from 1993 to 1995, famous that he “spent a really good deal of time attempting to carry onto sufficient cash to maintain a good body of workers method working and to carry issues jointly. ”31 Woolsey warned in his affirmation hearings that “we have slain a wide dragon” by way of defeating the Soviet Union, “but we are living now in a jungle full of a bewildering number of toxic snakes, and in lots of methods the dragon used to be more uncomplicated to maintain song of. ”32 yet he did not achieve an viewers on the White apartment, assembly with Clinton just a handful of instances in the course of his years as CIA leader. 33 whilst a mentally risky pilot crashed a Cessna plane onto the White condo garden within the fall of 1994, aides joked that it used to be Woolsey attempting to get the president’s consciousness.