Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 327
EAN: 9780691141039
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0691141037
Label: Princeton University Press
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Princeton University Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 336
Publication Date: 2009-02-17
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Studio: Princeton University Press

In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable.

Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.

Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Zegart Omits and Distorts
Comment: Zegart has written a book about 9/11 that blames it on institutional failings not people. She does this despite referencing sources that show key people, such as Dina Corsi (FBI) and Tom Wilshire (CIA) at the heart of multiple key failures- some of which she cites, but usually without mentioning their names, or examining their role. In her book she mentions Condoleezza Rice twice- once in reference to Rice putting the blame on the FBI, the other putting blame on the Clinton administration. No mention is made of GW Bush abolishing the "existing system of Interagency Working Groups" Feb 2001, putting Rice in charge of coordinating the flow of info, and revoking the right of "heads of other executive departments and agencies, as well as other senior officials" to attend NSC meetings. [...]

So what's going on here? Is this simply shoddy research? Political or career calculus? An attempt to disinform the public and promote a mythical narrative that serves an agenda?

The '9/11' myth about 'Al Qaeda (and no one else) attacked us' serves the agenda of those who used the attacks and the shift in public and Congressional opinion to massively fund the military-industrial complex, establish a domestic surveillance state and justify wars in geo-strategic nations that had nothing to do with the attacks. These are the same people who had received numerous warnings signs (including from at least 11 other nations) about an impending Al Qaeda plot, including info pointing to planes targeting US cities, who knew Al Qaeda operatives were in the US- and did nothing to disrupt the plot, harden security or warn the American people. Zegart does not critically examine 9/11 in this context, but the public record is available for anyone to research. The amount of public information that contradicts and disproves the official 9/11 narrative continues to grow, and it is continually being collected and organized at The Complete 9/11 Timeline [...]

One more thing that gives some insight on Zegart: as recently as June 2007, her bio at UCLA noted that "she studied under Condoleezza Rice" and "served as a foreign policy advisor to the Bush-Cheney 2000 presidential campaign". [...]

For some reason, this information is no longer part of her bio as of this writing: [...]

Also, see this review of Zegart's book by Kevin Fenton, for more detail on some of her egregious and inexcusable omissions and distortions:
Writing Blind or Turning a Blind Eye? The Confused World of Amy Zegart
http://hcgroups.wordpress.com/2009/12/18/writing-blind-or-turning-a-blind-eye-the-confused-world-of-amy-zegart/

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Good overview and interesting approach
Comment: The book takes a systemic look at failures leading up to 9/11. The author intends each chapter to be able to be read independently which leads to a lot of repetition but otherwise it is an enjoyable read.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: Halls of Mirrors
Comment: I am reading this book, which was hailed by everybody who is anybody, and am trying to figure out whether it is written to elucidate or to obfuscate things.
Yes, the book is a catalog of strategic and tactical failures of CIA. May be so. But the unintended (or, worse, intended) consequence is that it excuses our "deciders" for their failures. My personal feeling (and I admit it is cynical) is that one academic (the author of the book -Dr. Zegart) is exonerating another - Dr. Rice, who was the National Security advisor to President Bush during his first 233 days in the office.
Despite the book's catalog of CIA's inadequacies and "missed opportunities", it seems to me the CIA actually delivered a rather striking warning by way of a report on 8/6/2001 to President Bush in Texas under the rubric "Bin Laden Determined to Strike In the United States".
This CIA Report, which was part of President Bush's Daily Brief, referred to the World Trade Center, to the FBI conducting 70 filed investigations of Al Qaeda cells within the US and "pattern of suspicious activity in the US consistent with preparation for hijackings"
Dr. Zegart, like Dr. Rice seems to be affronted by a presumption of a threat so vaguely worded and improperly presented. The centerpiece of the book is actually a critique of this CIA report and its multiple "sins of omissions" (page 109). Likewise Dr. Rice, seemed affronted by a member of 9/11 Commission who questioned her why so little attention was paid to CIA briefing paper. Dr. Rice's answer was "That was not a warning" because " it was not specific as to time, nor place, nor manner of attack."
Behind the dialect of government acronym and techno-babble of the book, pages devoted to how outmoded FBI computers couldn't talk to CIA computers and "omissions" of CIA briefs and inadequacies in the "structure" of country's intelligence are buried very specific and very human causes and effects of failings of our very human leaders.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: She told us so
Comment: Amy Zegart's first book, Flawed by Design, explained why the intelligence community was incapable of doing its job during the Cold War. Spying Blind shows how it was even less capable of dealing with the post-Cold-War world. No conspiracy theory is needed to explain why the FBI and the CIA, which between them had all of the pieces of the 9/11 puzzle in their hands by the summer of 2001, filed to put the puzzle together until the planes hit the World Trade Center: all you need to know is the bureaucratic incentives that put a priority on "need-to-know" over "need-to-share." But the important message isn't about the past but about the future. The agencies that failed to find the 9/11 plot are ready to fail again tomorrow. Only if the new President and the Congress are willing to take on a massive political-bureaucratic battle is there any prospect of reform.

---

Customer Rating:
Summary: The definitive account of the 9/11 intelligence failure
Comment: There have been a number of 9/11 postmortems, many focused on the catastrophic intelligence failure it represented. Nothing written to date by journalists or retired intelligence personnel rises to the level of analytical precision exhibited by Professor Zegart. The fundamental problem was information sharing - as the world knows (or should know) from the 9/11 Commission Report and subsequent disclosures by the government, various agencies of the US intelligence community possessed useful information on key individuals associated with al-Qaeda's September 11 plot, and could have apprehended two or three of them well before 9/11, which would probably have caused the entire plot to unravel. The barriers to information sharing and collaboration across agency boundaries were well known long before 9/11, highlighted in the recommendations of a depressing number of high-level intelligence reform commissions during the 1990s which all said, essentially, the same thing. Yet the institutional culture of the intelligence agencies (CIA in particular) and the FBI proved impervious to reform. Even now, approaching seven years after the disaster of 9/11, a truly collaborative approach to counterterrorism is still in its infancy. Among the many gems to be found in her exhaustive deconstruction of the pre-9/11 intelligence problem, Prof. Zebart thoroughly explodes the notion that the recently-declassified Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) of August 6, 2001 was a "smoking gun" that should have alerted the President and Condoleezza Rice that a major al-Qaeda attack was imminent. In actuality it was anything but a smoking gun, with little to say of any value or relevance to policymakers. Even those of us on the opposite end of the political spectrum from the Current Incumbent must give him a pass with regard to this particular "warning."

Spying Blind is an exceptional work of public policy analysis, and deserves the widest readership.

---