This is a great read, perhaps written too much from the FBI side of the house but nonetheless at the top of the list.
It is tough to read the book while knowing what would happen on 9-11. Monday morning quarterbacking always looks brilliant. However, the authors document the flaws at the FBI, CIA national leadership and other agencies, plus the many times that sound instincts were overruled by bureaucratic blunders and second guessing. Colin Powell in his excellent brief on leadership (prepared as the storm gathered) notes that both military and corporate leadership should start with the assumption that the people in the field know more about reality than headquarters staff.
The effectiveness of young, results oriented organizations too often matures into process oriented organizations where results are subordinate to process, career advancement and political correctness. One small example was the CIA leadership refusing authorization for a low risk intelligence field operation, but offering to send a 4 person team to the field office to provide sexual harassment training, to a 2 man field office deep in the Muslim world.
The authors note the seemingly endless stream of lost opportunities to break or at least slow the chain, some incredibly lucky events such as the fire that lead Philippine authorities to the master bomb maker. Warriors and coaches emphasize that winners make their own good luck. As a nation we did a great job of making bad luck with tragic results.
There are heroes, many of them and the authors take the reader into the daily struggle as they attempt to prevent what would become 9-11 but which might have ended with an even more deadly attack.
This would have been an easy 5 stars were it not for some troubling issues. The first is information available to both our leadership and the press in the decade leading up to 9-11 clearly showed that to be a serious threat. When my phone rang shortly after 6 am (Pacific Time) on 9-11, the first words I heard were, "You were right" from a very distraught and close friend. The tragedy was not that we had no information; but rather that so many public warnings over the prior 12 years had been ignored by both the press and our top leadership.
In the late 80's the revised "Great Reckoning" devoted a substantial portion of the book to the rise of militant Muslim fundamentalists, the challenges of asymmetrical warfare with stateless groups whose weapons were made vastly more deadly by the expansion of technology. In the following years the terrorists had struck every continent with the exception of Antarctica. There was within much of the military leadership the shared, unclassified opinion, that the "big one was coming." And finally, as is so often the case, fiction writers like Tom Clancey understood and wrote about the potential of using airliners as weapons.
The authors also note the debilitating impact of restrictions and bureaucratic roadblocks placed on the CIA's use of sources. They fail to note that the restrictions and procedures helped Ames to compromise virtually every US asset in the USSR. The rules and procedures increased the threat to those who would help us and discouraged our agents from recruiting sources.
The authors also gloss over the damage done by Adm Turner who pushed the CIA away from human sources and effective action. They do note the sign over one CIA officer's desk which summarized the Turner/Carter CIA - Big operations, big problems - Little operations, little problems - No operations, no problems. Boldness succumbed to bureaucracy and risk aversion.
The authors note that Clinton did not meet with the CIA Director for years, but offer the comment that he read the reports. However, in the world of very sensitive information, leaked documents and Freedom of Information requests there is no substitute for personal briefings. If the FBI, DOJ and CIA were not working together as a team it is a reflection of both the problems within the organizations and the leadership above.
With these issues noted the book is highly recommended. Also recommended is I.C. Smith's "Inside" which presents another view of many of the same issues and makes a great companion.
The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It
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