Intel Wars (30 page)

A Washington, D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank, the Bipartisan Policy Center, agreed with this sentiment, stating in a 2010 report written by two noted terrorism experts, that it is “
fundamentally troubling … that there remains no federal government agency
or department specifically charged with identifying radicalization and interdicting the recruitment of U.S. citizens or residents for terrorism.”

Taking its cue from the White House, the U.S. intelligence community has also paid very little attention to the subject. The U.S. intelligence community just does not think that the subject is important enough to warrant serious study or require any action. Today, there is only one intelligence analyst at NCTC who specializes in radicalization, and although her work has received generally high praise from America's foreign partners, she has been virtually ignored by her colleagues here at home.

The U.S. intelligence community has not even tried to seriously block al Qaeda's use of the Internet to spread its message of violence and hatred. Only in the past year or so have U.S. intelligence officials publicly admitted that the Internet is a major driver of terrorist activities. According to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III, “
The Internet has expanded as a platform for spreading extremist propaganda
, a tool for online recruiting, and a medium for social networking with like-minded violent extremists, all of which may be contributing to the pronounced state of radicalization inside the United States.” Director Mueller's views are entirely accurate, but according to current-serving bureau officials, the FBI, like the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, is currently devoting far too few resources to monitoring militant chatter on the Internet.

While the U.S. intelligence community has dawdled in responding to the homegrown terrorist threat, choosing to devote the vast majority of its resources to al Qaeda, America's European intelligence partners have not. For instance, the British intelligence services recognized years ago the inherent danger posed by homegrown terrorists and the fact that their own vast intelligence and law enforcement network may be useless against this new type of threat.
According to a May 2008 secret assessment by the British foreign intelligence service, MI6
, the “internal threat in the UK is growing more dangerous because extremists are conducting non-lethal training without ever leaving the country and, should they turn operational, HMG [Her Majesty's Government] intelligence resources, eavesdropping and surveillance assets would be hard pressed to find them on any ‘radar screen.'”

Washington's allies in Europe are frankly baffled by the near-total lack of interest on the part of their American counterparts as to why Muslim Americans are showing an increased willingness to commit terrorist attacks. A senior European security official attributed the lack of interest within the U.S. government in the whole question of radicalization to the almost complete absence of evidence of any homegrown jihadi terror networks among America's nearly 3 million Muslim citizens found immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks: “When you guys found no [al Qaeda] sleeper cells after 9/11, all interest in the subject disappeared.” The official added, “But things are different now … Many things have changed in the last ten years.”

An important part of the reason why the U.S. government was not paying much attention to why a growing number of Muslim Americans were choosing to become terrorists was that the junior member of the U.S. intelligence community responsible for protecting the United States from terrorist attack—the Department of Homeland Security—was not paying nearly as much attention to the subject as it deserved.

Whether it is merited or not, no branch of the U.S. government seems to attract more derision from American government and intelligence officials than the Department of Homeland Security. Created by an act of Congress a little more than a year after the 9/11 attacks, in November 2002, conceptually DHS was supposed to be the U.S. government's all-powerful guiding brain and central nervous system responsible for bringing under one roof all of the various U.S. government agencies performing domestic intelligence, counterterrorism, and security missions, plus coordinating the efforts of the nation's 17,000 state and local law enforcement agencies, who collectively were responsible for protecting the United States from attack.

The agency that was eventually created was a shadow of what its creators envisioned. Bombarded by telephone calls from senior FBI officials and the bureau's powerful friends in Washington, all of whom demanded that the bureau's independence not be abridged, Congress decided to exempt the FBI from DHS control, which in essence neutered DHS before it was even born. Without control over the FBI, DHS was condemned in perpetuity to be nothing more than a poor cousin of the older and more politically connected bureau.

Although DHS has a congressional mandate to protect the U.S. homeland, the FBI remains, as it was before 9/11, the lead agency of the intelligence community responsible for protecting the United States from terrorist attack. In the years since 9/11, the FBI has used its considerable political clout in the White House and on Capitol Hill to strengthen its control over the homeland security mission at the expense of DHS. Not surprisingly, the current relationship between DHS and the FBI can best be characterized as tense and hypercompetitive. While intelligence analysts from the two agencies work closely together on domestic counterterrorism issues, the higher up the chain of command of both agencies you go, the less cordial the relations become. According to two congressional sources, in closed-door hearings FBI officials have never missed an opportunity to denigrate the Department of Homeland Security as part of their never-ending campaign to further strengthen the bureau's stranglehold on domestic security and counterterrorism functions in the United States.

It is an open secret in Washington that if a reporter wants a negative comment about DHS, there is no shortage of current or retired FBI officials who will happily oblige—albeit on a “not for attribution” basis. For instance, when asked for his assessment of DHS, a recently retired FBI official quipped over a beer at a downtown Washington, D.C., eatery that the “the place is literally falling apart. That's why we call it the Department of Homeland Insecurity.”

During the Bush administration, DHS was so badly managed that even the staunchest of the White House's supporters on Capitol Hill despaired. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), a former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, was so despondent about DHS and its inability to perform its domestic intelligence analysis mission that he told the 9/11 Commission that DHS was a “disaster” that was incapable of conducting its statutory domestic intelligence mission because of its “inability to stand up any kind of intelligence function.”

The department's senior management was renowned for being intensely political, in large part because a large number of Bush administration political appointees were given senior management positions in the agency, none of whom were particularly well qualified for their jobs.

According to two former senior intelligence officials, DHS frittered away its resources during the Bush administration on a host of wasteful and unnecessary programs that did little to protect America from attack. For example, Vice President Dick Cheney was so concerned for his personal safety that he had the U.S. Secret Service, on orders from DHS, maintain continuous helicopter surveillance over his residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington, D.C., at a cost to the taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars each year. Dozens of complaints from local residents about the noise made by these helicopters were studiously ignored by the Secret Service.

Cheney also had the Secret Service order the Internet giant Google to digitally “fuzz” the satellite images of his residence that were available on the company's Google Maps Web site, despite the fact that these same satellite images were widely available elsewhere on the Internet. No one seems to have told the Secret Service that anyone, including foreigners, could purchase these aerial photographs online for a nominal charge from the U.S. Geological Survey. Only after the Obama administration was inaugurated was the practice of “fuzzing” the satellite images of the vice president's residence halted.

Interviews with over a dozen former and current DHS intelligence officials and analysts have confirmed that the agency's intelligence organization has always been somewhat dysfunctional. The DHS's intelligence branch, known as the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, had a troubled track record during the Bush administration. One former DHS official referred to it as “the gang that could not shoot straight.”

Two U.S. intelligence officials independently recalled an incident in 2006, when the Department of Homeland Security's classified daily intelligence summary carried an item that mistakenly identified the Saudi national oil company Aramco as a terrorist organization known to be linked to al Qaeda. How this item appeared in the department's daily intelligence summary without being caught in the editorial process before publication is still a source of considerable embarrassment within DHS, as evidenced by the number of robust “no comment” responses I received from government intelligence officials when I asked about the incident.

The department's intelligence organization has been beset from the beginning by weak leadership at the top and by a cadre of less than stellar middle-level managers, some of whom were castoffs from other intelligence agencies. Its young and relatively inexperienced intelligence analysts were often found to be poorly trained and got very little support from the rest of the intelligence community. DHS has been unable to effectively control the six subordinate intelligence units under its command, such as the intelligence activities of the Transportation Security Agency, Customs Service, and Border Patrol. No wonder that the rest of the U.S. intelligence community has tended to view the DHS intelligence organization like an illegitimate stepchild.

Since taking over as head of DHS intelligence in February 2010, Caryn Wagner has slowly been trying to right the ship. A number of notable improvements have been made in the way the DHS intelligence organization performs its mission, but the problems she faces are considerable. Plagued by a combination of poor management, constantly changing missions, heavy personnel turnover, and the continuing challenge of attracting and retaining talented people, morale among DHS's intelligence workforce has remained at or near rock bottom, and the DHS intelligence organization routinely comes in near the bottom of the surveys of government employees conducted annually by both the Office of Personnel Management and the director of national intelligence.

Nowhere have the problems been more apparent than with the centerpiece of the DHS intelligence organization, the network of seventy-two state- and local-run intelligence fusion centers, which are supposed to be the frontline soldiers in the war against terrorism in the United States. Each of the fifty states has its own intelligence fusion center. Twenty-two of America's largest cities also have their own, which essentially duplicate what the state fusion centers are doing.

For example, there are four intelligence fusion centers in California, all of which are to some degree duplicating each other's work. So why does California have four fusion centers? The answer is bureaucratic power politics. The Los Angeles and San Francisco mayor's offices and police departments demanded their own fusion centers because they said they needed one. It did not hurt that millions of dollars of federal and state money came with the centers, which the L.A. and San Francisco police departments desperately needed to make up for budget shortfalls. No one in Washington or in the state capital in Sacramento apparently bothered to ask if the redundancy was necessary.

California, according to a former DHS intelligence official, is just another example of the fact that “there are too many vested interests now perpetuating an entire layer of inefficient, ineffective resources.” The official asked a trenchant question, “Why did Idaho need a whole FC [fusion center] devoted to terrorism issues? Montana? New Mexico? They all jumped on the bandwagon in a race to get federal and state homeland security dollars. But terrorism only keeps them busy for about fifteen minutes a day.”

DHS is nominally responsible for helping fund the centers. Since 2004, it has pumped over $425 million into them. But because the fusion centers are controlled by the states or municipalities where they are located, DHS has had very little say in how the money it gave them was spent—or misspent, as has often been the case. A number of senior DNI and DHS intelligence officials admit that the money that has been spent on the fusion centers is but a fraction of what is needed to allow these units to perform their mission. DHS's budget is limited, and the states and cities are so strapped because of the current financial crisis that they are being forced to make cutbacks in funding for the fusion centers in order to keep police stations open and cops on the beat. Two California state law enforcement officials admitted in recent interviews that their state's depressed financial status means that they are going to have to cut back on spending on their fusion centers unless DHS can somehow make up the difference.

As originally envisioned, DHS was supposed to feed the fusion centers with high-level intelligence information derived from national sources about terrorist threats to their communities. But state and local intelligence officials interviewed for this book acknowledge that the quality of the intelligence information they received from DHS was usually not germane to their localities. A Las Vegas police official admitted at a recent national conference of state and local law enforcement officers that the daily intelligence bulletins that he got from DHS in Washington rarely had any items that were pertinent to his department's concerns. “I get better intel from the casino security chiefs than from Washington,” he said.