The Right Kind Of Second Guessing

By Stephen Budiansky

Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page B03

There is more than a little historical irony in the furious indignation that has been emanating from the White House for the past10 days.

Vice President Cheney described his "deep sense of anger that anyone would suggest that the president of the United States had advance knowledge" of a planned attack on the United States that he failed to act on. "I thought it was beyond the pale," he said. Democrats, he warned, need to "be very cautious not to seek political advantage by making incendiary suggestions." The president irritatedly dismissed the furor as "second-guessing."

Of course, for years -- nay, decades -- following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, this is precisely what the Republicans tried to do to a Democratic president. And the Republicans sought political advantage not merely by accusing the Roosevelt administration of "dreadful incompetence" (as Thomas Dewey charged during the 1944 presidential campaign), but of something far worse: Many in the GOP suggested that FDR had personally known of the Japanese plan and had done nothing to prevent it, deliberately permitting thousands of Americans to be killed and wounded so that America would shed its isolationism and be drawn into "his war." To this day there are many on the political right who still insist that "FDR knew." The New York Post paid a tribute to the resilience of that theory in the American political consciousness with its irresponsible "Bush Knew" headline 10 days ago.

But most of the criticism in the past week regarding the Sept. 11 intelligence failure has actually been much more restrained. At the same time, while there is obviously much that the public and the Congress have yet to learn about what was known and reported by U.S. intelligence agencies last summer (and even earlier), what has already come out is in some ways far more troubling in its implications than the intelligence failure that occurred on Dec. 7, 1941.

The exhaustive investigation of the Pearl Harbor attack -- conducted by Congress in 1946 after the war ended -- produced a multi-volume report, thousands upon thousands of pages long. But there was no credible evidence of any "conspiracy" or presidential chicanery, nor even any real evidence of dereliction of duty by U.S. intelligence officials.

America's failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor was largely due to the fact that in 1941 the United States barely had an intelligence apparatus to speak of. It was not that warnings were ignored; there were scarcely any warnings available to ignore. Recently declassified documents that I examined while researching the history of World War II signals intelligence have only confirmed that conclusion. In 1941 both the profession and the techniques of strategic intelligence gathering and analysis were in their infancy. The military services for the most part looked down on the whole business of intelligence as rather tawdry -- and, what was worse, useless.

They had a point: Most of the "intelligence" in U.S. naval and military files in the years between the wars consisted of scraps of dubious hearsay collected by amateur spies supplemented by often equally amateurish, and typically years-out-of-date, generic profiles of foreign armies and navies compiled by bored assistant attachÈs clipping articles out of technical journals. Modern methods such as signals intelligence were still largely unappreciated and woefully underfunded. The U.S. Navy's codebreakers did a valiant job with the very limited resources they had, but they had a total of only about 16 people trying to crack the main Japanese naval code throughout the summer and fall of 1941.

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, many longtime critics of the U.S. intelligence agencies suggested that our failing was due to a similar lack of basic intelligence resources -- specifically, an institutional neglect of "humint," or human intelligence; that is, spies who could penetrate al Qaeda and learn of its plans.

But the reports of last week at least raise the possibility that the failure took place at a much higher level, that it was a failure to recognize the significance of warning signs that were there, from a multiplicity of sources -- warnings that, if put together, could very likely have led to more rigorous investigation that could conceivably have broken up the hijacking plot. The FBI's field offices, it turns out, had had their suspicions aroused by several Middle Eastern men who had enrolled in flight schools in Phoenix and Oklahoma. The FBI had begun to investigate some flight schools as early as 1996 specifically because of reports that al Qaeda operatives had hatched a plot to crash a plane into CIA headquarters or other federal buildings. Then last summer came warnings of a vague but major al Qaeda plan to strike the United States. And in July the Phoenix FBI office wrote a memo specifically warning that al Qaeda might be using flight schools to train terrorists and urging a nationwide canvass of Middle Eastern aviation students.

Could those dots have been connected? We don't yet know the answer, but it is neither "second-guessing" nor "beyond the pale" to ask. President Bush's insistence that had he known of a specific plan to attack the United States he would have done whatever was necessary to prevent it is not the issue: Of course he would have. The issue is why more wasn't done to follow up the leads that were already there -- and why, even after Sept. 11, more wasn't done to go back and ruthlessly examine what went wrong and why, so that the same mistakes don't happen again.

The FBI has taken some important corrective action, notably creating a new Office of Intelligence and training analysts to scrutinize evidence with an eye toward strategic threats to America. Yet among the recent revelations is the striking fact that when top officials learned of the existence of the Phoenix memo following Sept. 11, they did not tell the president about it. There has yet to be the sort of from-the-top, independent review of intelligence procedures that is now being called for by some of the administration's critics. By contrast, after the Pearl Harbor attack, Secretary of War Henry Stimson ordered a sweeping review of the system -- and he deliberately sought out an outsider to take on the job. Stimson wanted someone accustomed to handling complex problems who was unintimidated by Washington politics. He found him in Alfred McCormack, a New York lawyer who was known for his steel-trap mind and impatience withreceived wisdom. McCormack immediately demanded full access to all records and did not hesitate to fire the military aides assigned to his staff if they failed to live up to his intellectual standards. He finished his investigation in two months -- probably a Washington record -- and Stimson at once had him commissioned with the rank of colonel to help implement his recommendations.

It was obvious to everyone back then that America needed a much larger intelligence-gathering organization. Butone of McCormack's most important insights was that intelligence also needed strong and independent direction by people with no bureaucratic loyalties, unconstrained by the chain of command, people who could follow leads and act on them rather than just being a passive conduit for whatever happened to come in from the field. One of his crucial innovations was the establishment of a unit called the Special Branch that was specifically tasked with asking questions, pursuing lines of evidence, ordering investigations and making sure that crucial information got to the right military commanders and top civilian officials without delay. McCormack subsequently recruited a team of some of the best minds in the legal profession to fill that office, people who were inquisitive and intelligent and skeptical. It was only half a joke that, within the War Department, the Special Branch was called "the best law office in Washington."

History failed to vindicate the wild GOP charges of a Pearl Harbor conspiracy. It did vindicate those who, in reviewing the lessons of Pearl Harbor, saw that intelligence is worthless without a system to make intelligent use of it. A merciless, independent review of the warnings leading up to Sept. 11 is unlikely to reveal any scandal. But it may well suggest important principles that need to be adopted if intelligence is to do the job we now count so much on it to do.

Stephen Budiansky is the author of "Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II" (Touchstone).