Read Online Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror by Michael V. Hayden - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Michael V. Hayden
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were all doing our best. It was all I had to offer.
The closed session with the JIC was a bit bizarre. It was held in the secure hearing room on the House side with a lot of senators denied space on the dais and instead sitting at small tables and on small chairs in the well. They looked like parents sitting in their children’s grade school classroom.
In this session Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama led the charge against NSA for two intercepts that were made on September 10 but not processed, translated, and reported until September 12. One cut contained “The match is about to begin,” while the other observed, “Tomorrow is zero hour.”
The communicants were affiliated with al-Qaeda, but were notsenior-level folks. The phrases were oblique and embedded in lengthy conversations about a variety of things.
They certainly did not predict that an attack would take place and did not contain any details on the time, place, or nature of what might happen. No New York. No Washington. No airplanes as weapons. The longer we studied them, the more they looked like they might have been about the aftermath of the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, head of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, who had been killed on September 9.
In any event, throughout the summer of 2001 we had had more than two dozen warnings like this that something was imminent. We dutifully reported them, yet none of them subsequently correlated with attacks.
Sometimes the absence of an attack was because of what we had reported. In July we tapped a communication between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It was a discussion of a soccer match, and when asked where the match would take place, the Afghan side said, “Somewhere in your region.” We, of course, alerted Americans in the region; some DOD units took appropriate precautions. Later, we intercepted the same communicants, and when asked if the match had taken place, the reply was no, because the spectators were not there.
I tried to explain to the committees how SIGINT works, that “thousands of times a day, our front-line employees have to answer tough questions like: Who are the communicants? Do they seem knowledgeable? Where in the conversation do key words or phrases appear? What is the reaction to these words? What world and cultural events may shape these words?”
I explained that NSA rarely listens to a conversation while it is taking place. Intercepts are collected, stored, and sorted, and then a linguist works his or her way through the queue. That’s what happened with the September 10 intercepts. And the work plan to handle the existing backlog would surely have been affected by shifting priorities as the attacks of 9/11 unfolded.
Now, you might think that the intelligence oversight committeeswould already have a pretty good idea about all this. But you would be wrong. They weren’t even buying the explanation now.
Pretty much exasperated, I actually pulled out the transcripts (not the reports, the transcripts) of the conversations we had intercepted. I read them in their entirety, including the small talk, greetings, and a lengthy discussion about needing batteries. “Real batteries,” I said. “These aren’t code words for anything.”
When I was done, I put the paper down and looked at the dais. “So you tell me. Strategic warning or two Bubbas pumping gas at 7-Eleven?”
We actually took a short break for lunch in the closed hearing, and we hurriedly downed some sandwiches as the members scattered. When we resumed in the afternoon, we started to pick up the “tomorrow is zero hour” theme again. But now George and I were getting notes from our staffs that details of the morning’s (closed) session were playing on CNN, including the ominous September 10 phrases.
As luck would have it, Congresswoman Jane Harman was lamenting the leaking of classified information in general when George and I interrupted our testimony to tell Porter Goss, who was chairing the session,
The closed session with the JIC was a bit bizarre. It was held in the secure hearing room on the House side with a lot of senators denied space on the dais and instead sitting at small tables and on small chairs in the well. They looked like parents sitting in their children’s grade school classroom.
In this session Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama led the charge against NSA for two intercepts that were made on September 10 but not processed, translated, and reported until September 12. One cut contained “The match is about to begin,” while the other observed, “Tomorrow is zero hour.”
The communicants were affiliated with al-Qaeda, but were notsenior-level folks. The phrases were oblique and embedded in lengthy conversations about a variety of things.
They certainly did not predict that an attack would take place and did not contain any details on the time, place, or nature of what might happen. No New York. No Washington. No airplanes as weapons. The longer we studied them, the more they looked like they might have been about the aftermath of the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, head of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, who had been killed on September 9.
In any event, throughout the summer of 2001 we had had more than two dozen warnings like this that something was imminent. We dutifully reported them, yet none of them subsequently correlated with attacks.
Sometimes the absence of an attack was because of what we had reported. In July we tapped a communication between Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. It was a discussion of a soccer match, and when asked where the match would take place, the Afghan side said, “Somewhere in your region.” We, of course, alerted Americans in the region; some DOD units took appropriate precautions. Later, we intercepted the same communicants, and when asked if the match had taken place, the reply was no, because the spectators were not there.
I tried to explain to the committees how SIGINT works, that “thousands of times a day, our front-line employees have to answer tough questions like: Who are the communicants? Do they seem knowledgeable? Where in the conversation do key words or phrases appear? What is the reaction to these words? What world and cultural events may shape these words?”
I explained that NSA rarely listens to a conversation while it is taking place. Intercepts are collected, stored, and sorted, and then a linguist works his or her way through the queue. That’s what happened with the September 10 intercepts. And the work plan to handle the existing backlog would surely have been affected by shifting priorities as the attacks of 9/11 unfolded.
Now, you might think that the intelligence oversight committeeswould already have a pretty good idea about all this. But you would be wrong. They weren’t even buying the explanation now.
Pretty much exasperated, I actually pulled out the transcripts (not the reports, the transcripts) of the conversations we had intercepted. I read them in their entirety, including the small talk, greetings, and a lengthy discussion about needing batteries. “Real batteries,” I said. “These aren’t code words for anything.”
When I was done, I put the paper down and looked at the dais. “So you tell me. Strategic warning or two Bubbas pumping gas at 7-Eleven?”
We actually took a short break for lunch in the closed hearing, and we hurriedly downed some sandwiches as the members scattered. When we resumed in the afternoon, we started to pick up the “tomorrow is zero hour” theme again. But now George and I were getting notes from our staffs that details of the morning’s (closed) session were playing on CNN, including the ominous September 10 phrases.
As luck would have it, Congresswoman Jane Harman was lamenting the leaking of classified information in general when George and I interrupted our testimony to tell Porter Goss, who was chairing the session,
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