Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
When Somebody’s Trying to Kill You, You Have to Listen and Act
9/11 was our Pearl Harbor. Twenty-five years later, too many have forgotten the lesson: when an enemy tells you what he intends to do, listen—and act. This time, the enemy is already be among us. AGAIN! -- YNOT!
There is an old habit in government, business, and ordinary life that gets people into trouble.
A warning arrives. Then another. Then another. Each one, by itself, is imperfect.
None contains the entire story.
So everybody waits for the warning that comes gift-wrapped, notarized, signed by the enemy, and accompanied by an appointment on the calendar.
That warning seldom comes. And sometimes, while everybody is waiting for certainty, the thing they were warned about happens.
That is one of the enduring lessons of September 11, 2001.
Not that the United States government possessed a neat little folder marked:
“September 11 — Four Airplanes — New York — Washington — 8:46 A.M.”
It did not. But neither is it true that there were no warnings.
There were warnings. There were many of them.
There were warnings about Osama bin Laden.
Warnings about attacks inside the United States. Warnings about hijackings. Warnings about airplanes. Warnings about aviation schools.
Warnings about suspicious men already inside the country.
Warnings that al-Qaeda was preparing something large.
Warnings that something might happen soon.
And the tragedy is that much of this information existed in different rooms, different agencies, different filing systems, different chains of command, and different human heads.
Everybody had a piece of the elephant. Nobody quite managed to announce that there was an elephant in the room.
Years Before 9/11
The newly declassified intelligence record makes one point especially difficult to dismiss:
The idea of al-Qaeda attacking inside the United States was not invented after September 11.
Years earlier, intelligence reports were already raising the possibility.
In 1998, presidential intelligence briefings discussed reports that Osama bin Laden was planning attacks inside the United States.
Another piece of intelligence discussed the possibility of extremists flying an explosives-packed airplane into an American city.
Another briefing was titled: “Bin Ladin Preparing To Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.”
Now, none of these reports described the September 11 operation.
That distinction matters. Intelligence is not prophecy. It is usually fragments.
Rumors. Intercepts. Human sources. Travel records. Financial transactions. Suspicious behavior. Half-heard conversations.
Patterns that may mean something and may mean nothing.
People occasionally imagine intelligence agencies sitting in dark rooms watching the whole enemy plan unfold on a giant screen.
Real life is generally much less convenient.
It is more like somebody spilling a thousand puzzle pieces across ten government buildings and then asking twenty departments to determine what picture they make.
Unfortunately, some of the departments don’t talk to each other.
Then Came the Summer of 2001
By the summer of 2001, intelligence reporting about al-Qaeda had become intense.
CIA Director George Tenet later described the warning system as “blinking red.”
That is not subtle language. Blinking red generally means somebody would like your attention. It is rarely the color selected to announce that everything is fine.
Reports suggested al-Qaeda was preparing a major operation.
Senior officials were warned. Foreign governments were asked to disrupt terrorist networks. The FBI was issuing alerts. The CIA was pushing harder.
The National Security Council was discussing terrorism.
Something appeared to be coming. The problem was that much of the government still expected the blow to fall overseas.
Human beings have a remarkable talent for preparing to fight the last war.
Governments have entire departments devoted to it.
Then an FBI Agent in Phoenix Noticed Something
In July 2001, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent a memo raising concern about people associated with radical Islamic movements attending American aviation schools.
He suggested that the government take a broader look at flight schools.
That was an interesting observation. Bin Laden. Extremists. American aviation schools.
Those are three pieces of information that, placed side by side today, make a person sit up rather quickly.
But at the time the memo did not trigger a sweeping national investigation.
It became another piece of the puzzle. A very important piece. But still only a piece.
August 6
Then President George W. Bush received perhaps the most famous intelligence briefing of the pre-9/11 period.
Its title was:
“Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US”
There are government reports with wonderfully vague titles. This was not one of them.
The briefing discussed bin Laden’s desire to attack America, al-Qaeda activity inside the United States, and FBI information suggesting suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other attacks.
Again, it did not say: September 11. Four airplanes. World Trade Center. Pentagon. Mohamed Atta.
That information was not there.
But the strategic warning was unmistakable:
Bin Laden wanted to strike inside the United States.
Now comes one of the great recurring human mistakes.
We hear a warning and ask: “Can you prove exactly what is going to happen?”
But that is not really the right question.
The better question is:What reasonable actions should we take if the warning is true?
Because waiting for perfect proof is often just another way of deciding to do nothing.
Then There Was Moussaoui
In August, Zacarias Moussaoui arrived at a flight school in Minnesota.
He wanted Boeing 747 simulator training.
There was something unusual about him.
He didn’t have the normal background of the experienced commercial pilots who typically sought that kind of training.
His instructors became suspicious. The FBI became involved.
Moussaoui was arrested on an immigration violation.
Agents in Minneapolis became concerned that he might be interested in hijacking an aircraft.
Now consider what existed at roughly the same time.
One part of the FBI had warned about extremists attending American aviation schools.
Another FBI office now had a suspicious man seeking unusual training on a Boeing 747.
The CIA was warning of a major al-Qaeda threat.
The president had received a briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”
Those facts did not arrive stapled together. That was the problem.
Meanwhile, Two Future Hijackers Were Already Here
There was another thread.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had attended a meeting in Kuala Lumpur connected to al-Qaeda.
American intelligence knew about them. Intelligence eventually learned that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa. It learned Hazmi had traveled to Los Angeles.
Later, investigators discovered that Mihdhar had entered the United States again in July 2001.
By late August, both men were finally placed on a terrorism watchlist.
There was just one small difficulty. They were already in America.
An FBI search for Mihdhar began. The lead was marked “Routine.”
Under FBI procedure, that meant there could be thirty days to respond.
There were about two weeks left before September 11.
Bureaucracy has a peculiar relationship with urgency.
A man can be associated with al-Qaeda, enter the country, disappear somewhere inside America, and still encounter a form explaining that the appropriate response category is “Routine.”
Mark Twain once observed human folly with considerably more humor than it deserves.
Everyone Knew Something
This is where the story becomes most important.
The CIA knew that al-Qaeda threat reporting was extraordinarily high. The CIA knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi.
The FBI had the Phoenix flight-school memo. The FBI had Moussaoui.
The FBI had been asked to search for Mihdhar.
The FAA had received terrorism warnings.
The White House knew bin Laden wanted to attack inside the United States.
But knowing something is not the same thing as understanding what all the somethings mean together.
Imagine four doctors examining the same patient. One notices chest pain. Another finds an abnormal heartbeat. Another sees a blocked artery. Another notices falling blood pressure. Each carefully writes his finding in a separate notebook. Nobody reads the other notebooks.
The patient dies.
Later everyone holds a meeting to discuss how surprising it was.
That is roughly the institutional problem the 9/11 Commission described.
The agencies possessed information. They did not successfully fuse it.
The Failure Was Not a Lack of Intelligence
We often talk about an intelligence failure. That phrase can be misleading.
It sounds as if nobody had intelligence. But there was plenty of intelligence.
The deeper failure was interpretation, communication, prioritization, imagination, and action.
The warning signs were scattered. Some were strong. Some were weak. Some were wrong. Some were incomplete. That is normal.
The important thing is that when enough weak signals begin pointing in the same direction, somebody has to stop arguing about whether each individual signal is perfect and start asking whether the pattern is dangerous.
By late August 2001, look at the pattern:
Al-Qaeda wants to attack America. Threat reporting is unusually intense.
Bin Laden is determined to strike inside the United States.
There has been intelligence about hijacking aircraft.
There has been intelligence about aircraft being used in unusual attacks.
An FBI agent is worried about extremists attending flight schools.
A suspicious man with extremist connections wants Boeing 747 simulator training.
Known al-Qaeda-associated individuals have entered the United States.
And a major al-Qaeda operation is believed to be coming.
No single item proves September 11.
Together they should have produced a very uncomfortable question:
What if these things are connected?
That question came too late.
The Dangerous Demand for Certainty
There is a lesson here that extends far beyond terrorism.
People confuse uncertainty with ignorance. They are not the same.
Suppose a doctor tells you: “There is a 60 percent chance this pain means something serious.”
You could answer:“Come back when you’re 100 percent sure.”
That is certainly one approach. It may also be your last.
Warnings are useful precisely because they arrive before certainty.
After certainty arrives, it is usually called history.
This applies to national security. Cybersecurity. Business. Engineering. Medicine. Finance. Natural disasters.
And everyday life.
If someone is trying to break into your network, you don’t demand a signed confession before changing the password.
If smoke is pouring out of the kitchen, you don’t commission a twelve-month study to determine whether fire exists.
If intelligence keeps telling you that somebody wants to kill you, you do not need to know the exact hour he plans to arrive before locking the door.
“But We Didn’t Know Exactly”
That defense is understandable. And sometimes legitimate.
Nobody wants governments arresting people or shutting things down because somebody had a hunch.
But there is an enormous space between authoritarian overreaction and bureaucratic paralysis.
Taking a threat seriously does not necessarily mean kicking down doors.
It can mean: sharing information, checking visa records, alerting aviation schools, locating known suspects, examining suspicious travel, reviewing passenger manifests, hardening cockpit doors, increasing air marshals, tightening watchlists, connecting databases, assigning urgent investigative priority, and simply putting the right people in the same room.
These are not acts of panic. They are acts of competence.
The Enemy Does Not Have to Send You His PowerPoint
One of the most dangerous assumptions in any organization is that a threat must announce itself clearly before it deserves action.
Enemies do not generally cooperate that way. They conceal. They misdirect. They compartmentalize. They exploit the fact that large organizations move slowly.
They count on people saying: “That’s somebody else’s department.”
They count on forms. They count on procedure.
They count on information sitting in different databases.
They count on analysts seeing one piece and investigators seeing another.
They count on nobody seeing the whole picture.
A clever enemy doesn’t always defeat the strongest organization.
Sometimes he merely waits for the organization to defeat itself.
September 10, 2001
On September 10, the United States was still the most powerful country on Earth.
It had intelligence agencies. The FBI. The FAA. The Pentagon. NORAD. Diplomats. Satellites. Wiretaps. Databases. Investigators. Analysts. Billions of dollars.
And some of the finest intelligence and law-enforcement professionals in the world.
Yet pieces of the coming attack were scattered across that enormous system.
No one assembled enough of them in time.
The next morning nineteen hijackers boarded four airplanes.
And history changed.
The Lesson Is Not That Every Warning Is True
Most warnings are not catastrophes. Most suspicious people are not terrorists.
Most intelligence reports do not predict historic events.
That is precisely what makes this difficult.
If every warning were correct, intelligence would be easy.
The art is distinguishing noise from signal.
But there is another mistake just as dangerous as believing every alarm.
It is training yourself to ignore alarms because previous ones were wrong.
Eventually one of them isn’t.
Listen
There is a simple lesson buried underneath thousands of pages of commission reports, intelligence assessments, congressional hearings, declassified documents and bureaucratic explanations.
It is almost embarrassingly simple.
When somebody is trying to kill you, listen. Not panic.
Listen. Investigate. Compare notes.
Ask uncomfortable questions. Connect information.
Challenge assumptions. And act proportionately while there is still time to act.
Because warnings rarely arrive saying:
THIS IS THE ONE.
They arrive looking like ordinary problems.
A visa. A flight-school student. A suspicious payment. A memo. A watchlist entry.
A strange intelligence report. A man nobody can find.
A headline in a presidential briefing book.
A dozen disconnected facts sitting on a dozen desks.
Individually, they can look insignificant.
History is what they sometimes become when nobody connects them.
And that may be the most important lesson of September 11:
When somebody’s trying to kill you, you have to listen and act.
You have to take it seriously.
Not after you know everything. Not after the investigation. Not after the commission. Not after the memorials.
