Intel failure

Viewpoint: Was CIA ‘too white’ to spot 9/11 clues?

When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks, many asked whether more could have been done. But the true reason why the agency was blind to the signs may be a diversity problem, writes Matthew Syed.

The failure of the CIA to spot the warning signs of the 9/11 plot has become one of the most hotly contested issues in the history of intelligence. There have been commissions, reviews, internal investigations and more.

On the one side are those who say that the CIA missed obvious warning signs. On the other are those who argue that it is notoriously difficult to identity threats in advance, and that the CIA did everything they reasonably could.

But what if both sides are wrong? What if the true reason why the CIA failed to detect the plot is more subtle that either side has realised. And what if this problem extends beyond intelligence and silently afflicts thousands of organisations, governments and teams today?

Intel failure

‘What is going on?’ Trump wonders why FBI never requested access to the DNC’s ‘hacked servers’

Amid an avalanche of self-replicating reports of “Russian hacking,” Donald Trump has questioned how the task of checking whether the DNC’s servers were indeed breached was outsourced by the FBI to a third party.

“The Democratic National Committee would not allow the FBI to study or see its computer info after it was supposedly hacked by Russia,” the president-elect tweeted after the DNC reportedly confirmed that the bureau failed to send their own staff to check the servers.

Trump’s concerns were voiced the same day the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, defended the US intelligence assessment that Russian agents interfered in the US election.

Clapper stopped short of declaring the DNC server hacking an “act of war,” as he told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Russia had stepped up its cyber espionage operations.

Commenting on Clapper’s testimony, John McAfee, the founder of McAfee antivirus software, told RT that Clapper engaged in the “most deceptive propaganda” that was ever delivered to the American public. McAfee added, “our intelligence community is so ignorant and naive that they should all be replaced.”

Intel failure

German terrorism expert: 'Worst fears have come true' in Berlin

Rolf Tophoven: German authorities have known that an attack of this dimension, including the number of dead and injured people, could happen here for a long time. Especially since the attacks of Brussels and Paris it's been clear that Germany isn't just an abstract terrorism target. Security authorities' worst fears have now come true.

Could this attack have been prevented?

No. If a radicalized fanatic decides to use a truck as a weapon, you don't stand a chance, unless you know about him and his plans in advance and arrest him before he can act. It's impossible to check all vehicles in the EU or to seal off all Christmas markets to protect them from any danger. You'd have to close them for that. An attack like this one cannot be prevented with 100 percent certainty.

Intel failure

Frontline Europe: the intelligence war

A recently published French parliamentary report following a six-month probe into the handling of the terrorist attacks that took place on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and at the Bataclan concert hall in November last year in Paris, cited considerable organisational dysfunction within the country’s intelligence agencies.

“We are not pointing a finger at men but at organisations,” insisted Georges Fenech, a centre-right MP who headed the probe.

In one example of a failing that happened during the Bataclan attack, Fenech said a special police unit that showed up first was insufficiently armed to take on the attackers. But when the arriving officers asked a group of soldiers - themselves deployed as part of an anti-terrorism operation - to lend their assault rifles so they could attempt a raid, the soldiers refused. They were under orders not to fire their weapons and had heard no updates.

Intel failure

Post- 9/11 'Bureaucratic Intelligence' Playing Into Hands of Lone Wolf Terrorism

Intelligence services have become increasingly bureaucratic, hindering their fight against terrorism, Dr. Goran Matic of the Faculty of International Politics and Security at Belgrade's Union — Nikola Tesla University told Sputnik Serbia.

French security and intelligence services have been criticizedfollowing the most recent spate of terrorist attacks in Europe for failing to better protect the public from terrorism. 

Matic said that intelligence services continue to collect masses of data, but lack the "human factor" which could lead to a crucial tip-off about a potential attack.

Matic said that France is home to migrant communities which "have not accepted European values and French culture," and that France contributes a large number of the Islamic militants fighting for the internationally-condemned terrorist group Daesh (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria.

Intel failure

PRIEST KILLER WAS "UNDER SURVEILLANCE" YET STILL ATTACKED FRENCH CHURCH

Shocked residents in Saint Etienne du Rouvray in Normandy have paid their respects with candles and flowers after the brutal killing of a catholic priest.

A major police investigation has been launched into the attack which involved two men taking hostages in a church and slitting the throat of the elderly cleric. The two assailants were shot dead by police.

Anger has grown since it became known one of the attackers, 19-year-old Adel Kermiche was on probation and wearing a surveillance tag after two failed attempts to reach Syria.

Intel failure

Could the Carnage in Nice Reshape France’s Spy Agencies?

Earlier this month, a French parliamentary report delivered a sobering assessment of the country’s intelligence agencies: They had failed to collect or analyze information that could have helped prevent the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the coordinated bombings that struck Paris in November.

That report called for a major overhaul of the country’s six intelligence agencies, and with dozens dead from a terror attack on a seaside boulevard in Nice, France is once more asking how authorities who have been handed wide-ranging powers in the aftermath of last year’s attacks failed to prevent yet another massacre.

On Thursday, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-year-old French national of Tunisian descent, plowed a 19-ton truck through a crowd in Nice gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks, killing 84 and injuring more than 200 others, including 52 with critical wounds. The dead included at least two Americans and 10 children.

Intel failure

The intelligence questions for Chilcot

Was there anyone in the room who was aware of any capabilities that the president himself did not know about? By turn, each member of the Revolutionary Command Council hurriedly said no, they did not. So what explained the judgement of British intelligence?

Answering that question is one of the central planks of the Chilcot Inquiry due to report on Wednesday. There was an intelligence failure. The extent and who was to blame has proved controversial and the inquiry may give us the most conclusive answers yet.

The issue can be divided into three areas: ­the reliance by those collecting intelligence on sources who were wrong, a failure of analysis in not challenging the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and finally, failings in the way intelligence was presented to the public, not least in the dossier that left Saddam himself confused.

Intel failure

Colin Powell: U.N. Speech “Was a Great Intelligence Failure”

Colin Powell has called his 2003 speech to the United Nations, laying out the Bush administration’s rationale for war in Iraq, a “blot” on his record. The speech set out to detail Iraq’s weapons program, but as the intelligence would later confirm, that program was nonexistent.

More than 13 years later, the speech continues to haunt the administration — not just for what it got wrong, but for the unintended consequences it may have set in motion.

In one section, for example, Powell mentioned the name Abu Musab al-Zarqawi 21 times. The aim was to establish Zarqawi as the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The problem, according to former members of the intelligence community, is that although Zarqawi once travelled to Afghanistan hoping to meet Osama bin Laden, he was considered a poor recruit for Al Qaeda.

Intel failure

French intelligence tracked but failed to thward Paris attack: media

France changed its military strategy and started airstrikes in Syria last year because of concerns months before the attacks on Paris that ringleader Abdelhamid Abaaoud was plotting to target a concert and take hostages, the Associated Press said citing a French newspaper report.

The report in Friday, May 13's Le Parisien, citing French and Belgian intelligence material and police recordings, lists repeated occasions when authorities allegedly failed to catch Abaaoud, even though he had been considered a major threat by several European intelligence services before the Nov. 13 attacks that left 130 dead in the French capital.

U.S. intelligence was also onto Abaaoud. President Barack Obama's envoy for the anti-Islamic State coalition, Brett McGuirk, said Friday that at as soon as he heard about the Paris attacks "we all assumed this was probably something that was planned by Abaaoud" from the Syrian IS stronghold of Raqqa. Speaking to reporters in Brussels, McGuirk described the Paris attacks as unusually sophisticated.

Intel failure

Panama Papers: Spy agencies widely used Mossack Fonseca to hide activities

Intelligence agencies from several countries, including CIA intermediaries, have abundantly used the services of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to "conceal" their activities, German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) says, citing leaked documents.

Both "secret agents and their informants have used the company's services,"wrote the newspaper, which earlier this month published online materials based on 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm. It has been called the largest leak on corruption in journalistic history.

"Agents have set up shell companies to conceal their activities," the Munich-based newspaper reported, adding that there are CIA mediators among them.

According to SZ, Mossack Fonseca's clients also included some of those involved in the so-called Iran-Contra affair, in which several Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated arms sales to Iran in the 1980s in order to secure the release of US hostages and fund Nicaragua's Contra rebels.

Intel failure

Why Intelligence is Missed

Compared to the French, the Belgian security service, Sûreté de l'État, which falls under the Ministry of Justice, is small and had only 600 personnel to keep tabs on 900 “persons of interest”, many of them potential jihadis who have travelled to Syria and Iraq. Many of these targets required 24-hour surveillance, which is no small task and requires extensive manpower, vehicles and technical support. As the echoes of the Paris bombs still rang in the air, the Belgian service increased its budget a modest 20 per cent to €50 million.

The other Belgian service of note, the General Intelligence and Security Service (GISS), known in Belgium as the Service Général du Renseignement et de la Sécurité (SGR) and falling under the direction of the Ministry of Defense, is equally lacking in manpower and money. Following the Paris attacks last November, it became apparent that the real intelligence failure had not been French but Belgian. Perhaps due in part to their limited intelligence collection capabilities, the Belgian people have suffered as a result. Simply, the Belgians don’t have the people or the infrastructure to properly investigate and monitor hundreds of individuals (440 as of last count out of a Muslim population of over 650,000) suspected of terror links. The Belgians are the weak link in the EU -- and a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Intel failure

As Terrorists Cross Borders, Europe Sees Anew That Its Intelligence Does Not

If another example of the failure of European intelligence services to share and act on information about potential terrorists was needed, Wednesday’s identification of the bombers in the deadly Brussels attacks the day before certainly provides it.

At least one of the attackers, Ibrahim el-Bakraoui, had been deported byTurkey to the Netherlands last year with a clear indication that he was a jihadist.

“Despite our warnings that this person was a foreign terrorist fighter,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told a news conference in Ankara on Wednesday, “the Belgian authorities could not identify a link to terrorism.”

Intel failure

Brussels bomber brothers were on US terror list, says report

The report cited two unnamed US officials as saying that Ibrahim and Khalid El Bakraoui were listed as a "potential terror threat" in US databases but that they would not specify on "which of the many US terrorism databases the brothers were listed."

The National Counterterrorism Center, which coordinates US intelligence on extremist threats, did not respond to requests for comment from AFP.

Prior to the deadly attacks, the Belgian brothers had long rap sheets with criminal convictions related to carjackings, robberies and shoot-outs with police.

Details now emerging show that the three Brussels attackers were known to Belgian authorities but somehow able to slip through security.

Intel failure

Brussels Attacks Highlight Breakdown In Belgian Intelligence

...TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, for years, Belgium was dealing with a homegrown radical group called Sharia4Belgium. It's since been banned, but quite a few lost young men - petty criminals, immigrants nursing resentments - have found their way to the group, and many of them then ended up in Syria. Belgian officials say, 79 of the Belgians who traveled to Syria to fight were linked to Sharia4Belgium. In fact, they say the group is part of the reason why, on a per capita basis, Belgium is the No. 1 source of Western fighters going to Syria and Iraq.

And the numbers, actually, are quite stunning. More than 500 people have left Belgium to join the fight, and about 120 have returned. And I spoke to a US official close to this investigation, and he says part of the problem had been that Belgian police were willing to turn a blind eye to those who were leaving because most of them were criminals, like the el-Brakraoui brothers, and the thinking was, you know, good riddance; they'll probably get themselves killed on the battlefield, and then they won't be our problem anymore.

Intel failure

Brussels Attacks: A Failure of Belgian Intelligence or Tragic Coincidence

In the wake of the deadly terrorist attacks in Brussels which claimed the lives of 34 people and left 230 wounded, many security experts have come to a very distressing conclusion: the Belgian tragedy was a result of the incompetence and complete failure of the country’s intelligence service.

“In such cases all the law enforcement services are put on high alert: the security of the entire strategic and transport infrastructure is intensified and the major purpose of the intelligence services is to prevent repeated attacks. The second objective is to identify and detain all those involved in masterminding and executing the attack,” Anton Tsvetkov, a Russian security official and the director of the organization Officers of Russia told the Russian media.