Red lights flashing everywhere

I just finished Lawrence Wright’s excellent “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” last night and the single biggest lesson of the book is that the failure of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA to cooperate and share intelligence was comically tragic:

The FBI agents investigating the case sought permission from headquarters to examine Moussaoui’s laptop, which was denied because the agents couldn’t show a probable cause for the search. When the Minneapolis supervisor pressed the matter with headquarters, he was told he was trying to get people “spun up.” The supervisor defiantly responded that he was “trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World Trade Center” – a weird premonition that suggests how such thoughts were surging through the unconscious of those who were reading the threat reports. [p. 351]

There are many other head-shaking examples of bureaucratic inertia and interagency ego. But there are also tales of success, mostly by driven men who found ways around the roadblocks like FBI agent John O’Neill. After the attacks, it’s incredible to think that the U.S. had exactly one lead to Al-Qaeda, a man who was supposed to videotape the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. (He was being held in Yemen for "suspicion.") But thank heaven for one unsung hero, FBI agent Ali Soufan, who managed to break him down after days of interrogation to pull back the curtain on Al-Qaeda. A must read.