measures, many of which involve costly long-term programs to respond to continuing threats rather than to a single plot.

One subject that received strategic attention from the Intelligence Community in 1990 was threats to the U.S. homeland. The 1993 attack against the World Trade Center was certainly a key event. It did not generate anything close to the level of public attention and level of concern that we see eight years later, and that, of course, is the difference between an attack that kills six people and one that kills 3,000.

But to Intelligence Community analysts, the larger threat to the homeland was apparent in the bombing of the World Trade Center. Truck bombers in '93, after all, had been nothing less than to topple the Twin Towers and kill thousands in the process.

The community's work on this subject over the next couple of years culminated in 1995 in a National Intelligence Estimate, the most formal and fully coordinated form of intelligence assessment, one that is personally approved by the DCI and heads of the community agencies. The sole subject of this Estimate was foreign terrorist threats to the U.S. homeland. The FBI, along with CĨA and other Intelligence Community agencies, participated fully in preparation of this Estimate so that it would reflect the Bureau's information on the foreign terrorist presence in the U.S. as well as the intelligence available to CIA and others.

This Estimate, as was noted in one of your joint inquiry staff reports, addressed civil aviation as an attractive target that foreign terrorists might strike in the United States. This particular aspect of the Estimate was the subject of subsequent efforts involving the DCI Counterterrorism Center, the FBI, the National Intelligence Council, and the FAA to sensitize relevant consumers to that particular threat. The FAA arranged, in fact, a set of special briefings for representatives of the aviation industry, at which senior CIA and FBI counterterrorist specialists like myself presented much of the material in the Estimate as part of an effort to persuade the industry of the need for additional counterterrorist security measures for domestic civil aviation.

I might also add I was proud later on to participate in, along with my Intelligence Community and FBI colleagues, in the work of the Gore Commission, which Mr. Freeh mentioned earlier.

What is the lesson to be drawn from this episode, apart from the direct one that the Intelligence Community, or, at least part of it, and the FBI were working closely with the relevant regulatory agency as early as the mid 1990s to call attention to the foreign terrorist threat to domestic civil aviation? I think it is that we, as a Nation, tend to be more willing to respond with expensive new security measures in response to past tragedies that have already occurred than to projections of threats that have not yet materialized.

The Intelligence Community certainly has an important duty here. As any new intelligence analyst is taught, what matters is not just to make correct predictions and hit the right notes, but to beat the drum loudly enough about impending threats to have some chance of making an impact on policy. In this instance, perhaps the Intelligence Community should have beaten the drum even more loudly than it did, but it is tough to compete with what

had been, right up until September 11, many years of civil aviation operations in this country that had been virtually untouched by terrorism.

The record of the U.S. Intelligence Community changing in response to the threat from international terrorism goes back farther than the end of the Cold War and back before the episodes, the cases that were examined by your staff, back to the 1980s, when the main U.S. concern was with Hizbollah's activities in Lebanon, including the bombing of the embassy and the Marine barracks and the years of hostage-taking, as well as the terrorist activities of certain states.

The Community's principal response at that time, and in many ways still its most important response, was the creation of the DCI Counterterrorist Center or CTC, as it's called in 1986. This step was a bureaucratic revolution. It involved slicing across long-standing lines on the organization chart, bringing analysts and operators to work more closely together than they ever had before, and benefiting from the synergy that comes from having people with different skills and specialties attacking the same high priority problem together.

Further refinements were made in CTC in subsequent years. One for which I am proud to claim personal credit was the creation of a permanent cadre of counterterrorist analysts, replacing an earlier system in which the analysts working on counterterrorism were on loan from other offices which continued to control their promotions and their careers.

There were also reconfigurations within the Center, including the special bin Ladin unit which you've already heard about from Ms. Hill and others. Another refinement in CTC was the increased representation of agencies other than CIA, particularly but not exclusively law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Much has been written and said particularly over the past year about the FBI-CIA relationship.

I find elements of truth in much of this commentary, but I also find most of it was dated. The relationship, although it had problems at the beginning of the 1990s, improved substantially during the course of the decade. This was partly due to a commitment at the top of each agency to make it work. And Director Freeh and Director Tenet both deserve a lot of credit for that. I would also add that the relationship with the southern district of New York, Ms. White's old office, became, as she already noted in her testimony, particularly close on the bin Ladin-related cases.

Along with these changes involving personnel and organizations, CTC's methods and operational strategy also evolved. Efforts to recruit well-placed unilateral sources continue to have high priority, but CTC developed during the 1990s a strategy that recognized that although information about specific terrorist plots was rare, other information about suspected terrorists and their activities was more feasible to acquire. The strategy was to work with many foreign government partners, foreign police intelligence and security services to disrupt terrorist cells using whatever information we could collect about them.

Most terrorists commit other illegal activity besides terrorism. And this became the basis for numerous arrests, interrogations and

other disruption initiatives, some of which my co-panelists already referred to as somewhat akin to nailing Al Capone for tax evasion. This type of disruption work must continue, in my judgment, to be a major part of major counterterrorist efforts. It is slow, it is incremental, it does not yield spectacular highly visible successes, but I am convinced that by impeding the operations of terrorists it has prevented some attacks and saved some lives.

The main lesson I hope the committees draw from this capsule history is there already has been a long and substantial evolution of the Intelligence Committee's approach to tackling international terrorism. Most of the innovations worth trying have already been tried. I'm sure all of us in this room wish there were some one further change or set of changes that would give us assurance that something like September 11 would never happen again. But I am not aware of such a step that would provide that kind of assurance, and I don't believe there is one even though there clearly is room and need for additional improvement as long as our counterterrorist batting average is anything less than 1,000, which means indefinitely.

As we work to avoid recurrence over the source of errors and omissions that have received so much attention in the September 11 case, we should try not to reinvent wheels already invented or, even worse, to undo beneficial adjustments made in the past. We should also be careful not to give the American people any sense that with some new set of changes the problem of international terrorism has somehow been solved.

Mr. Chairman, my written statement discusses other topics you asked me to address. But let me wrap up by attempting to respond to your request for recommendations. I'll mention a few matters that I think are of most direct concern to these committees, while emphasizing even major new efforts or initiatives are apt to yield only modest results. First, it is vital to have sustained, underscore the word "sustained," long-term public support for what the Intelligence Community needs to do in counterterrorism with everything that implies regarding resources.

The main impact that the various attacks on U.S. targets had on the work of the Counterterrorist Center over the past decade and a half was that those were the times when public interest in this subject spiked and resources went up. When public interest was lower as time passed without a major attack, which was the case as the '80s moved into the early '90s, resources were much tighter. The vital painstaking work of taking apart terrorist groups and terrorist infrastructures is long-term work. And it cannot be done with the kinds of ups and downs in support that have occurred some times in the past.

Second, we probably should try to make more extensive use of multiple sources of data including non-traditional sources to detect possible terrorist activity. By this I mean not just using watchlists and checking names while working on individual cases, although that is obviously very important, but rather a broader exploitation for intelligence purposes of such things as travel and immigration data and financial records.

I've always thought that trying to do this involved immense practical difficulties ranging from the use of multiple names to prob

lems in getting some of the information from the private and public sources that own it. I still think it involves that. It would involve looking through huge haystacks with only a chance of finding a few needles. But the standards for return on investment in counterterrorism changed on 9/11, and perhaps this is an avenue that we need to explore further.

Third, and this goes far beyond what the Intelligence Community itself can accomplish, we must nurture foreign relationships to get the cooperation of foreign governments. That is so vital to a host of counterterrorist matters, especially including intelligence mat

ters.

Of course, we need to continue to make every effort to develop unilateral intelligence sources on this topic. But in counterterrorism we will always be, for several geographic cultural and jurisdictional reasons, more dependent on our foreign partners than with just about any other intelligence topic I can think of. That is not a weakness. It is something to cultivate and exploit.

We need our foreign partners for information and we need them to carry out most of the arrests, the raids, the confiscations, the interrogations and the renditions that are involved in dismantling terrorist groups. This means that we need to give them the incentives to cooperate, and if necessary the assistance in developing the capabilities to do so.

Finally, we should take a broad view of counterterrorism and recognize that how much future terrorism occurs against U.S. interests will depend not only on what is done by people at the CIA or the FBI who have counterterrorism as part of their titles, counterterrorism involves not only learning the secrets of the next terrorist plot or erecting security measures around what we think is the next terrorist target, it also involves the motivations for groups to use terrorism and the conflicts and conditions that lead some people to join terrorist groups in the first place, even though there will always be some like bin Ladin who seem determined to do us harm, regardless of motives or conditions.

This broad view obviously gets into many foreign policy issues that go beyond the scope of this hearing. But the lesson for intelligence is that, as more priorities are given to particular counterterrorist accounts, we should not denude ourselves of coverage in other areas that not only are important in their own right but that also bear on possible future terrorism.

The Intelligence Community has an important responsibility not only to go after al-Qa'ida or whatever is the current predominant terrorist threat but to be aware early on of future or nascent terrorist threats, whatever form those threats might take and whatever ideologies they might espouse and what other conditions might lead such threats to emerge.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Those are my remarks.

Chairman Goss. Thank you very much, Dr. Pillar.

We are now going to go to our normal procedure, minus Senator Rudman, of the designated questioners for today's hearing. For our witnesses' information, we've just basically assigned this to different members so that they're well prepared on the matters of the subject of the day. Representative Lahood is recognized for 18 min

Mr. LAHOOD. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to compliment both you and Senator Graham on the way you've conducted these hearings, and want to compliment our witnesses on the extraordinary amount of integrity and hard work that you have brought to your jobs of public service during the time that you served our country, and we thank you for that.

Judge Freeh, past hearings and interviews of FBI officials suggest that the Bureau, while missing many skilled and dedicated agents and analysts, was unable to coordinate activities against terrorism. In particular, the approach the Bureau used against organized crime, deadbeat dads, narcotic traffickers, did not translate well in its effort to fight a global enemy. Individual Bureau offices did not appear to coordinate their activities and headquarters often seemed unable to control them. In addition, the FBI's poor communication infrastructure made it difficult for FBI agents to communicate with each other, let alone with other parts of the Intelligence Community.

Judge, let me just see if I can put it in my own terms. After listening to a lot of testimony, there's a feeling, and I have this feeling, that there's a culture in the FBI, a culture that maybe dates back to Director Hoover all the way through your distinguished tenure as director, that offices don't communicate with one other, that agents within agencies don't communicate with another, that offices don't communicate with Washington D.C. or with higher-up officials, that there's a mindset, if you will, that takes place within the Bureau that says hold things close and don't be in touch with local law enforcement and don't be in touch with other offices.

And I have that feeling after listening to a lot of testimony as a member of this Joint Intelligence Committee. And so, with all due respect to you, sir, I'd like to hear your point of view. Is there a culture in the FBI that dates way, way back that trains agents in the idea that you can collect a lot of information but hold it close and don't share it?

And my concern is that the only way we change that culture, which I believe does exist, is when we recruit 1,000 new agents that the Congress has authorized and we train these people that this idea of holding things close is nonsense. It's not the way we do our job. So I appreciate the chance to have you respond to that kind of I don't know if it's criticism, but an idea that's been purported around here. And I know you've read it and I know you've heard it and I want to give you a chance to respond to it this after

noon.

Judge FREEH. I appreciate that very much. To answer your question in two parts, with respect to information technology, again it was in the portion that I didn't read. The FBI, in terms of its IT infrastructure, its access and ability to use and capacity to do what private industries many other government agencies have done very well for a long time in organizing data, mining data, communicating data, we have a very inferior system. And I will take partial responsibility for that obviously being there the last eight years, although there's a story there that is pretty well set forth in my statement.

On the other issue, which I think is the more pertinent issue, I would respectfully disagree with that. I say that the notion that