Top Secret America: Security bureaucracy too big, hidden to know effectiveness Pt 2 of 2

[Turner]

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at
least in the Washington region of it. “In D.C., everyone talks SCIF,
SCIF, SCIF,” said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the
Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction
business. “They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big
boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF.”

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to.
Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored
SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of
national security.

“You can't find a four-star general without a security detail,” said
one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad.
“Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, ‘If he has one,
then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol.”

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid
employees carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the
analysts, the 20- and 30-year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year,
whose job is at the core of everything Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of
conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash,
turning them into clues that lead to individuals and groups trying to
harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and
categorize data. But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and
half the analysts are relatively inexperienced, having been hired in
the past several years, said a senior ODNI official. Contract analysts
are often straight out of college and trained at corporate
headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority
countries — Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan — and is not fluent
in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they
produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former
intelligence officials who try to cull them everyday. The ODNI doesn't
know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process
of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified
analytic websites still in operation that were supposed to have been
closed down for lack of usefulness. “Like a zombie, it keeps on
living” is how one official describes the sites.


The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read
them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in
circulation. “It's the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and
they want to rush to cover it,” said Richard Immerman, who was the
ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic
integrity and standards until early 2009. “I saw tremendous overlap.”

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC),
which is supposed to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-
obtain nuggets of information are fused together, get low marks from
intelligence officials for not producing reports that are original, or
at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI,
National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S.
Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came
out of the NCTC. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired
Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. “I told him that after 41/2
years, this organization had never produced one shred of information
that helped me prosecute three wars!” he said loudly, leaning over the
table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at
Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which
reminds him of his frustration with Washington's bureaucracy.

“Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody
doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?” he said. “Who
orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the
same thing?”
Information overload

He's hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington,
a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration.
Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the
classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World
Intelligence Review, WISe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily
Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning
Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch,
NCTC Spotlight …


It's too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He
threw up his arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and
waved it around, yelling.

“Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?”

“Why does it have to be so bulky?”

“Why isn't it online?”

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is
actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some
policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup
clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and
those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-
creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to
thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

The ODNI's analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution
was another publication, this one a daily online newspaper,
Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff of 22 culls more than two dozen
agencies' reports and 63 websites, selects the best information and
packages it by originality, topic and region.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be
gumming up the national security machinery and blurring the lines of
responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct
the most sensitive information operations, which aspire to manage
foreign audiences' perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities
overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major
military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and
least-defined frontier.

“Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach,” CIA
Director Panetta said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-
warfare.

“Cyber is tremendously difficult” to coordinate, said Benjamin Powell,
who served as general counsel for three directors of national
intelligence until he left the government last year. “Sometimes there
was an unfortunate attitude of bring your knives, your guns, your
fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf.” Why? “Because it's
funded, it's hot and it's sexy.”

Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at
Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 30 more. In the days
after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan's increasingly
strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
where he had trained as psychiatrist and warned commanders that they
should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk “adverse events.” He
had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen
being monitored by U.S. intelligence.

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling
counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up
the road from Walter Reed, the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence
Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats.
Instead, the 902nd's commander had decided to turn the unit's
attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United
States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's
106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great
depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical
Islamic Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on
Hezbollah, Iranian Republican Guard and al-Qaida student organizations
in the United States. The assessment “didn't tell us anything we
didn't know already,” said the Army's senior counterintelligence
officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as
the 902nd in this case, to work on issues others were already tackling
rather than take on the much more challenging job of trying to
identify potential jihadist sympathizers within the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers
effectiveness in other ways, defense and intelligence officers said.
For the Defense Department, the root of this problem goes back to an
ultra-secret group of programs for which access is extremely limited
and monitored by specially trained security officers.


These are called Special Access Programs — or SAPs — and the
Pentagon's list of code names for them runs 300 pages. The
intelligence community has hundreds more of its own, and those
hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits on the
number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this
means that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.

“There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on
all SAPs — that's God,” said James Clapper, undersecretary of defense
for intelligence and the Obama administration's nominee to be the next
director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior
officials use it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to
keep secrets from their commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered
to sign a document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star
commander, with whom he worked closely every day, because the
commander was not authorized to know about it.

Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out
about a program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. “What do
you mean you can't tell me? I pay for the program,” he recalled saying
in a heated exchange.

Still another senior intelligence official with wide access to many
programs said that secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective
projects. “I think the secretary of defense ought to direct a look at
every single thing to see if it still has value,” he said. “The DNI
ought to do something similar.”

The ODNI hasn't done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is
maintain a database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the
intelligence community. But the database doesn't include many
important and relevant Pentagon projects.

How it all works

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day
in Top Secret America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often,
examples emerge. A recent one shows the post-9/11 system at its best
and its worst.


Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was
at full throttle when word emerged that something was seriously amiss
inside Yemen. In response, President Barack Obama signed an order
sending dozens of secret commandos to that country to target and kill
the leaders of an al-Qaida affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with
hard drives, forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged
thousands of intercepts, agent reports, photographic evidence and real-
time video surveillance with dozens of top-secret organizations in the
U.S.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information
reached the National Counterterrorism Center for analysis, it arrived
buried within the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that
are reviewed each day. Analysts had to switch from database to
database, from hard drive to hard drive, from screen to screen, just
to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a
possible terrorist strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped
up their effort. The flood of information into the NCTC became a
torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of
someone in Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to
Yemen. A report of a father in Nigeria worried about a son who had
become interested in radical teachings and had disappeared inside
Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in
Amsterdam bound for Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as
officials would testify later, the system had gotten so big that the
lines of responsibility had become hopelessly blurred.

“There are so many people involved here,” NCTC Director Leiter told
Congress.

“Everyone had the dots to connect,” DNI Blair explained to the
lawmakers. “But I hadn't made it clear exactly who had primary
responsibility.”

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight
253. As it descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite
explosives hidden in his underwear. It wasn't the very expensive, very
large 9/11 enterprise that prevented disaster. It was a passenger who
saw what he was doing and tackled him.

“We didn't follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence,” White
House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said afterward.

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team
to run down every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed
more money and more analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11
enterprise. After the Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also
pleaded for more — more analysts to join the 300 or so he already had.


The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more
body scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly
enough qualified people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has
said he will not freeze spending on national security, making it
likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country.
A $1.7billion NSA data-processing center will be under construction
soon near Salt Lake City. In Tampa, Fla., the U.S. Central Command's
new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will be matched next year
by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year after
that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations
section.

Just north of Charlottesville, Va., the new Joint-Use Intelligence
Analysis Facility will consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts
on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken
ground for its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard.
DHS, in existence for only seven years, already has its own Special
Access Programs, research arm, armored-car fleet and 230,000-person
work force — the third-largest after the departments of Defense and
Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in
Washington, a $3.4billion showcase of security will rise from the
crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest
government complex built since the Pentagon, a major landmark in the
alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as big as
Liberty Crossing.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.