APPENDIX

Response to Senators Levin and Collins transcript request from Mr. Wiley referred to on page 69

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Chart entitled "Primary Agencies Handling Terrorist-Related Intelligence (With Terrorist Threat Integration Center)," submitted by Senator Collins Responses to Post-Hearing Questions for the Record from Senator Akaka for:

Mr. Wiley

Responses to Post-Hearing Questions for the Record from Senator Shelby for:

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Mr. Wiley

Hon. England

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CONSOLIDATING INTELLIGENCE ANALYSIS: A REVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT'S PROPOSAL TO CREATE A TERRORIST THREAT

INTEGRATION CENTER

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2003

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS,

Washington, DC.

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:32 a.m., in room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Susan M. Collins, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.

Present: Senators Collins, Coleman, Sununu, Lieberman, Akaka, Lautenberg, and Pryor.

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN COLLINS Chairman COLLINS. The Committee will come to order. Good morning. Today the Committee on Governmental Affairs will review the President's recent proposal to create a new Terrorist Threat Integration Center. The President's announcement of this new center is the latest in the series of actions taken by the administration and by Congress to address the government's serious failure to analyze and act upon the intelligence it gathers related to terrorism.

Some of these failures have become well known. For example, in January 2000 the CIA learned of a meeting of al Qaeda operatives that was taking place in Malaysia. The CIA knew that one of the participants in this meeting, Khalid al-Midhar, had a visa to enter the United States. It failed, however, to list his name on the terrorist watch list and he entered the country just 2 weeks later. AlMidhar returned to Saudi Arabia and in June 2001 he received yet another U.S. visa. Although 12 years had passed, his name was still not on the watch list.

The CIA did not conduct a review of the Malaysian meeting until August 2001. Following that review it finally placed al-Midhar on the terrorist watch list. By then, of course, it was too late. He was already in the United States and within weeks would participate in the September 11 attacks on our Nation.

Failures such as these were not unique to the CIA. In July 2001, an FBI agent in the Phoenix field office warned his superiors that Osama bin Laden appeared to be sending some of his operatives to the United States for flight training. The agent recommended a number of actions the Bureau should undertake, but his recommendations were ignored.

One month later, agents in the FBI's Minneapolis field office detained Zacarias Moussaoui, a former student pilot, based on suspicions that he was involved in a hijacking plot. FBI headquarters denied the Minneapolis agents permission to apply for a court order to search Moussaoui's belongings. According to the joint inquiry conducted by the Senate and the House Intelligence Committees, this decision was based on a faulty understanding of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

These are only a few of the most publicized and notable examples of the government's failure to analyze, share, or act on critical intelligence information. The Joint Congressional inquiry into the September 11 attacks lamented that the U.S. Government does not presently bring together in one place all terrorism related information from all sources. While the Counter Terrorist Center does manage overseas operations and has access to most intelligence community information, it does not collect terrorism related information from all sources domestic and foreign.

In addition, the Congressional inquiry found that information was not sufficiently shared not only between different intelligence community agencies but also within individual agencies, and between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Now some steps have been taken to address these problems. The FBI has begun to place greater emphasis on developing its analytical capability. It has expanded its joint terrorism task forces and it is attempting to improve its relationship and communication with the CIA. More FBI personnel have been assigned to the CIA's Counter Terrorist Center and more CIA agents now work at the FBI's Counterterrorism Division.

In addition, Congress took significant action aimed at improving the analysis and flow of intelligence information_by_creating the new Department of Homeland Security. One of the Department's directorates will be devoted to information analysis and infrastructure protection.

In addition to these steps, the President has announced that he believes a new independent entity is needed. The proposal advanced by the President would create a Terrorist Threat Integration Center that is the focus of our hearing today. The center would ensure that intelligence information from all sources is shared, integrated, and analyzed seamlessly and then acted upon quickly, to quote the President. The new center would include staff from the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.

As of yet, however, we know few details about the proposed integration center. We have many questions regarding its structure, the scope of its authority, how it will interact with other agencies in the intelligence community as well as law-enforcement agencies, and even where it should be located, in which department?

I believe that there are three principles that should guide the center's creation. First, the integration center should not be duplicative. Many government agencies currently conduct intelligence analyses. We should be working to combine these efforts, not duplicate them.

Second, emphasis must be placed on sharing the integration center's analytical product. Good intelligence collection and analysis

currently exists. Too often, however, the information does not get to those people who need it in a timely manner or in a form that is useful. The integration center needs to focus on sharing its product with other Federal agencies and, equally important, with appropriate State and local agencies.

Third, the integration center must be structured in a way that breaks through the bureaucratic barriers that exist still among intelligence agencies and not hide behind them.

I hope that today's hearing will help the President achieve those goals. We will review what we now know about the integration center, and we will ask our very distinguished witnesses today to discuss the elements that are necessary for this new entity to be the successful and efficient center that our President envisions and our country needs.

I would now like to turn to the distinguished Ranking Member of the Committee, Senator Lieberman, for any opening remarks that he might have.

OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LIEBERMAN Senator LIEBERMAN. Thank you, Madam Chairman, for holding this hearing, and also for your excellent opening statement.

I consider the topic of the hearing to be one of the more important offensives, if I can put it that way, in the war against terrorism, which is the consolidation of information and intelligence regarding the threats that are received daily from an array of sources available to our government. The intelligence disconnect, some of which you described in your opening statement, Madam Chairman, that in part led to the September 11 terrorist attacks are an embarrassment that should never have happened in the first place and we must never allow to happen again. I appreciate your leadership here in calling this hearing, the first, I believe, on the President's State of the Union proposal to overcome some of our intelligence failures which is, of course, a matter of urgency.

I also want to join you in welcoming our witnesses, Senator Rudman, particularly, our colleague, our never-ending source of wisdom, even good humor, who has proven, as my wife keeps telling me, that one has ample opportunities outside of public service to continue to serve the public and he has done it really well.

Governor Gilmore, thank you for being here again. Mr. Smith and Mr. Steinberg, the same.

I am disappointed that we are not going to hear from an administration representative today. I gather they could not make it today, but I am hopeful that we will have the opportunity soon because we have a lot of questions for them.

We are now in the midst of a Code Orange, as everyone knows, a high terror alert. That combined with warnings from the directors of the FBI and CIA that another terrorist attack might be imminent, perhaps as early as this week, along with official suggestions that citizens create safe rooms in their homes and stockpile food and water, has understandably created widespread anxiety throughout our country. We must take this moment to allay the fear, but also to galvanize our government and to motivate all Americans to help make our country safe again. Creation of an effective intelligence analysis center is a vital step in that direction.

The disastrous disconnects among our intelligence agencies, the culture of rivalry rather than cooperation, turf battles rather than teamwork that have plagued the intelligence community have been well-documented elsewhere. For some time, a large number of people inside and outside of Congress have been advocates for a central location in our government where all the intelligence collected by the various agencies that make up the intelligence community, as well as open source information and information collected by Federal, State, and local law enforcement agencies can be brought together and analyzed, synthesized, and shared.

The idea is, in the familiar metaphor, to connect all the dots to create a full picture so that we have a kind of early warning on what our adversaries are up to, where they are planning to strike so that we can stop them before their plans are carried out.

Last year, as part of the debate on the Homeland Security bill this Committee approved the creation of such an office. We were greatly aided in our work by Senator Arlen Specter and by the cochairs of the Senate Intelligence Committees, Senator Richard Shelby and Senator Bob Graham. In fact after investigating the September 11 attacks, the Senate and House Intelligence Committees called on Congress and the administration to use the authority provided in the Homeland Security Act to establish an all-sources intelligence division within the Homeland Security Department. And the Intelligence Committee went on to lay out several criteria for this analysis center which I will include in the record, Madam Chairman, rather than reciting here.

We had a bit of a debate during the last session on this. Our Committee originally proposed something very similar to what the Intelligence Committee was asking. The administration originally argued that the Department of Homeland Security's role here should be limited to analyzing intelligence primarily to protect critical infrastructure. The final legislation created a division within the new department that would be a central location for all threat information. Now I take the administration's proposal to have created a broad consensus and common ground that many have been fighting for all along, which is to create an all-sources intelligence analysis center.

There remains a matter of structural disagreement, which I hope this Committee can consider and shed some light on, and hopefully extend the consensus. The President, obviously, would have the new center report to the Director of Central Intelligence rather than the Secretary of Homeland Security. I would like, in the weeks ahead for the administration to tell us how they think, if they do, that this center that they are proposing differs from the one created by the Homeland Security Act and why they have chosen to move in this direction rather than implementing that provision of the act.

It needs to tell us how the so-called TTIC-as an entity reporting to the Director of Central Intelligence-will overcome the institutional rivalries to information sharing that has already hindered the Counter Terrorist Center at the CIA, and other agencies in the intelligence community-from becoming truly all-source intelligence analysis centers.