NSA Analyst: "We Could Have Prevented 9/11"

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Washington Spectator  Posted: 05/14/2012 4:05 pm

Thomas Drake, a brilliant intelligence analyst, software engineer, and IT management consultant, worked at the CIA in the 1980s, then as a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), and ultimately as an NSA senior executive in 2001. But from 2006 until July 2011, he became the government's and NSA's public enemy.

Why? From his high-level perch at NSA, he saw the failure to act on intelligence that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks, and he saw corruption at the highest levels.
So he blew the whistle. Four times, from the fall of 2001 through 2004. 

Once to both the House and Senate Permanent Select Committees on Intelligence. Once to two Congressional investigations seeking answers to the intelligence failures surrounding 9/11, including what NSA knew, didn't know, could have known, and did or didn't do. Drake was asked to be a material witness for a Congressional investigation, initially led by then-Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA). He was instructed not to tell NSA that he was cooperating with the investigation.

The fourth time was in September 2002, when Drake submitted a complaint through a Department of Defense Inspector General (DoD IG) "Defense Hotline" that allows whistleblowers to report fraud. The call launched an audit of the way NSA awarded multibillion-dollar contracts and managed some of its programs. This time, Drake first alerted supervisors, who either sat on the information or pulled him off key assignments.

When the DoD IG audit went nowhere, he took what he knew -- none of it classified -- to The Baltimore Sun. 

After Drake went to the media, the FBI raided his home in 2007, seizing computers, books, and other material.

Ultimately, he was cast from the intelligence kingdom and charged with 10 felony counts in April 2010, five under the 1917 Espionage Act. "I got in the way of the power structure," he explains. 

Some of his story appeared in newspapers, The New Yorker, blogs, and a 60 Minutes segment, describing how the FBI raided his home and dug for documents to prove he'd passed information to two New York Times' reporters about the White House illegal wiretapping program and other offenses. Although the FBI never found such evidence, the Justice Department indicted him.

I asked Drake if there was more the public had to know. "Definitely," he said, but under the government-initiated plea negotiations, he couldn't say anything new until after his sentencing date last July. Otherwise, the government could have used it against him at the trial.

Once the case against him collapsed, prosecutors agreed to drop all 10 counts against Drake; he plead guilty to a minor misdemeanor for "exceeding authorized use of a computer [!]," with no jail time or fines.

The result, however, was a life severelBaray wrecked. Drake has worked at an Apple store since August 2009.

This is what he told us.

Barbara Koeppel: What did you tell the Saxby Chambliss Congressional subcommittee and the Congressional Joint Inquiry?

Thomas Drake: I can't say fully, because it's classified. But I showed that NSA knew a great deal about the 9/11 threats and Al Qaeda, electronically tracking various people and organizations for years -- since its role is to collect intelligence. The problem is, it wasn't sharing all of the data. If it had, other parts of government could have acted on it, and more than likely, NSA could have stopped, I say stopped 9/11. Later, it could have located Al Qaeda -- at the very time the U.S. was scouring Afghanistan.

It's true that there were systemic failures throughout the intelligence system, but NSA was a critical piece of it. I gave both committees prima facie evidence, with documents. One was an early 2001 NSA internal, detailed multi-year study of Al Qaeda and sympathetic groups' movements that revealed what NSA knew, could have done, and should have done. It was astonishingly well-analyzed current intelligence. Soon after 9/11, some NSA analysts called me about it. Why? Because they were pulling their hair out, knowing they had this information and they couldn't get NSA leadership to share the report with the rest of the intelligence community -- even though it's mandatory! It was actionable information. Remember the time period--we were in the early part of the war in Afghanistan. People needed to act on it, to unravel Al Qaeda networks.

But NSA leaders deliberately decided not to disseminate it. So the analysis -- about what it knew before and after 9/11 -- got buried very deeply, because it would really have made them look bad.

In fact, after the analysts called me to complain, I told my superior, Maureen Baginski, Director of Signals Intelligence (called SIGINT), who was the number-three person at NSA. But instead of acting on it, she got mad at me. She said, "Tom, I wish you'd never brought this to my attention."

BK: Why?

TD: Because she no longer had plausible deniability.
BK: And then?

TD: I said, Mo (that's what we called her), I'm bringing it to your attention because it's information we need to share. This is key to Al Qaeda's position. But she folded. She was going to protect the institution. Screw national security.

BK: Talk more about the Congressional investigations.

TD: The Saxby Chambliss subcommittee began its hearings in February and March 2002. It had subpoena power and contacted me off the record, because it was investigating NSA. I gave both the subcommittee and the subsequent, much larger Joint Inquiry voluminous amounts of information.

BK: What did they do with it?

TD: I don't know. There's a report, but it's classified. I never saw it. And the public got just a small version of the data I gave them. In fact, there's very little oversight in Congress anymore. When there is, it's essentially just talk.

BK: How did NSA react to the investigations?

TD: It did everything it could to obstruct them so it could hide what it knew. I remember hearing from Lt. General Michael Hayden, NSA's director, while the investigations were under way, saying how "convenient" it was for CIA and FBI to be taking the heat, while we remained in the shadows. I'm paraphrasing, but NSA knew a lot.

BK: How did NSA obstruct them?

TD: First, it asked the committee investigators to set up their office at NSA, where the agency could put minders, NSA people who would sit and take notes. But the committee refused.

BK: Other ways?

TD: NSA set up what we called the "war room," to figure out how to respond to the Saxby Chambliss investigation. The joke was, 'Who are we at war with? Congress or terrorists?'

Then in February, Mo asked me to lead an NSA team, to go around the agency pulling together information about what NSA knew that it could give to the subcommittee as its official classified statement, for the record.

So I wrote the statement, which went through multiple drafts. Later, I was in England on another assignment, and I got a frantic call from one of my staff, saying, "Tom, they pulled us off the effort and re-assigned it to someone else." I asked why. "Well, it's confusing, you'll have to ask Mo." When I got back, the first thing I did was ask her why we were taken off. She said, "Data integrity." This was a euphemism.

BK: A euphemism for what?

TD: That there was a problem with the data. But there wasn't a problem. They just didn't want it out there. Congress was asking us to take our clothes off, come clean, say we screwed up, and how we would fix it.

But NSA chose not to do that. Instead, it persisted in the cover-up and didn't tell about the staggering amounts of information it had in its data banks and didn't share. When it's being investigated, it closes ranks. To say they were not cooperating with the 9/11 investigations is an understatement. 

NSA created a secret team that reported to Bill Black, the Agency's deputy director, whose task was to find the agency's 9/11 skeletons. Why? In case you're put on the stand, you want to know where you're vulnerable so you have an answer, or can create one to serve as a cover. The idea is, NSA only tells Congress what it wants them to hear, and Congress will just have to figure out what it really knows. The problem is, how will Congress find something unless it knows what it's looking for and where to find it? And if NSA can keep it hidden, Congress' chances of finding it are slim to none.

BK: Are there other ways it obstructed?

TD: A dramatic one. It happened in early 2002, when Mo warned me, "Be careful, they're looking for leakers." What she meant was, "Back off! Don't say anything more to Congress than you need to." But I wasn't leaking to the press, or outside of channels. I was a material witness in official investigations of NSA!

BK: Then why call it "leaking"?

TD: They were calling it that. For NSA's purpose, it's leaking. Me, I'm serving as a material witness to Congress, which called me to do that. I didn't go to them.

BK: If it wanted to, could NSA follow your trail?

TD: Easily. Bread and butter. That's what they do. In fact, during this whole time, NSA was doing everything it could to figure out and track who was cooperating with the investigators or called as material witnesses.

BK: Why was it so important for NSA to hide what it knew?

TD: Because NSA is a closed, secret culture. Its primary focus is collecting data, even within the intelligence community.

The coin of the realm is what you know. If I share something with you, then I don't have power any more. So why would I give my power away? Because we collect the data, we own it. If we own it, we control it. If we control it, we can say what it means. 

We tell you what we want to, or not. I used to hear that in executive sessions, post-9/11. Other agencies were clamoring for the raw or nearly raw data, to do their own analyses. And NSA was balking because "we don't know what they're going to do with it."

BK: But wouldn't NSA want to prevent a 9/11 or track Al Qaeda?

TD: That's logical thinking. You have to remember, NSA is an institution, and it preserves its integrity before anything else. Rule number one. It's pathological. It's what I call the deep, dark side of this culture, one that has rarely been discussed. Everything is secret. Over decades, people work, communicate, and engage in secret. Obviously, certain state secrets are legitimate, but this goes way beyond that. The agency thinks, if it gives away information, it's fragmenting its identity. In fact, even before 9/11, NSA reprimanded people for cooperating with other parts of the intelligence community.

BK: Do other intelligence agencies operate the same way?

TD: Yes. When I was at CIA, I worked in the Science and Technology directorate on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. I was asked by people at its National Photographic Interpretation Center to look at pictures of WMD targets. I agreed, but I couldn't tell from the photos who was talking to whom without knowing more about the target. So I called my buddies at NSA -- because they have electronic and signals intelligence -- to find out, and they told me what they knew. But the people I worked with at CIA said, "Why did you call them? You have everything you need right here." Well, I didn't. It's so arrogant, to say you can't learn from others. But this is the culture. And it's even worse at NSA.

Barbara Koeppel is a Washington-based investigative reporter. This article has been slightly edited for space; subscribe to The Washington Spectator to read the second part of this report, addressing evidence of corruption that Thomas Drake turned over to investigators.

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Military.com: CIA-CTC Vet Checkmates UBL, At Long Last...

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The Man Who Hunted Osama Bin Missing

July 05, 2011

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- After U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the White House released a photo of President Obama and his Cabinet inside the Situation Room, watching the daring raid unfold.

Hidden from view, standing just outside the frame of that now-famous photograph was a career CIA analyst. In the hunt for the world's most-wanted terrorist, there may have been no one more important. His job for nearly a decade was finding the al-Qaida leader.

The analyst was the first to put in writing last summer that the CIA might have a legitimate lead on finding bin Laden. He oversaw the collection of clues that led the agency to a fortified compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. His was among the most confident voices telling Obama that bin Laden was probably behind those walls.

The CIA will not permit him to speak with reporters. But interviews with former and current U.S. intelligence officials reveal a story of quiet persistence and continuity that led to the greatest counterterrorism success in the history of the CIA. Nearly all the officials insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters or because they did not want their names linked to the bin Laden operation.

The Associated Press has agreed to the CIA's request not to publish his full name and withhold certain biographical details so that he would not become a target for retribution.

Call him John, his middle name.

John was among the hundreds of people who poured into the CIA's Counterterrorism Center after the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing fresh eyes and energy to the fight.

He had been a standout in the agency's Russian and Balkan departments. When Vladimir Putin was coming to power in Russia, for instance, John pulled together details overlooked by others and wrote what some colleagues considered the definitive profile of Putin. He challenged some of the agency's conventional wisdom about Putin's KGB background and painted a much fuller portrait of the man who would come to dominate Russian politics.

That ability to spot the importance of seemingly insignificant details, to weave disparate strands of information into a meaningful story, gave him a particular knack for hunting terrorists.

"He could always give you the broader implications of all these details we were amassing," said John McLaughlin, who as CIA deputy director was briefed regularly by John in the mornings after the 2001 attacks.

From 2003, when he joined the counterterrorism center, through 2005, John was one of the driving forces behind the most successful string of counterterrorism captures in the fight against terrorism: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi bin Alshib, Hambali and Faraj al-Libi.

But there was no greater prize than finding bin Laden.

Bin Laden had slipped away from U.S. forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in 2001, and the CIA believed he had taken shelter in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. In 2006, the agency mounted Operation Cannonball, an effort to establish bases in the tribal regions and find bin Laden. Even with all its money and resources, the CIA could not locate its prime target.

By then, the agency was on its third director since Sept. 11, 2001. John had outlasted many of his direct supervisors who retired or went on to other jobs. The CIA doesn't like to keep its people in one spot for too long. They become jaded. They start missing things.

John didn't want to leave. He'd always been persistent. In college, he walked on to a Division I basketball team and hustled his way into a rotation full of scholarship players.

The CIA offered to promote him and move him somewhere else. John wanted to keep the bin Laden file.

He examined and re-examined every aspect of bin Laden's life. How did he live while hiding in Sudan? With whom did he surround himself while living in Kandahar, Afghanistan? What would a bin Laden hideout look like today?

The CIA had a list of potential leads, associates and family members who might have access to bin Laden.

"Just keep working that list bit by bit," one senior intelligence official recalls John telling his team. "He's there somewhere. We'll get there."

John rose through the ranks of the counterterrorism center, but because of his nearly unrivaled experience, he always had influence beyond his title. One former boss confessed that he didn't know exactly what John's position was.

"I knew he was the guy in the room I always listened to," the official said.

While he was shepherding the hunt for bin Laden, John also was pushing to expand the Predator program, the agency's use of unmanned airplanes to launch missiles at terrorists. The CIA largely confined those strikes to targets along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan. But in late 2007 and early 2008, John said the CIA needed to carry out those attacks deeper inside Pakistan.

It was a risky move. Pakistan was an important but shaky ally. John's analysts saw an increase in the number of Westerners training in Pakistani terrorist camps. John worried that those men would soon start showing up on U.S. soil.

"We've got to act," John said, a former senior intelligence official recalls. "There's no explaining inaction."

John took the analysis to then CIA Director Michael Hayden, who agreed and took the recommendation to President George W. Bush. In the last months of the Bush administration, the CIA began striking deeper inside Pakistan. Obama immediately adopted the same strategy and stepped up the pace. Recent attacks have killed al-Qaida's No. 3 official, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, and Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

All the while, John's team was working the list of bin Laden leads. In 2007, a female colleague whom the AP has also agreed not to identify decided to zero in on a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, a nom de guerre. Other terrorists had identified al-Kuwaiti as an important courier for al-Qaida's upper echelon, and she believed that finding him might help lead to bin Laden.

"They had their teeth clenched on this and they weren't going to let go," McLaughlin said of John and his team. "This was an obsession."

It took three years, but in August 2010, al-Kuwaiti turned up on a National Security Agency wiretap. The female analyst, who had studied journalism at a select U.S. university, tapped out a memo for John, "Closing in on Bin Laden Courier," saying her team believed al-Kuwaiti was somewhere on the outskirts of Islamabad.

As the CIA homed in on al-Kuwaiti, John's team continually updated the memo with fresh information. Everyone knew that anything with bin Laden's name on it would shoot right to the director's desk and invite scrutiny, so the early drafts played down hopes that the courier would lead to bin Laden. But John saw the bigger picture. The hunt for al-Kuwaiti was effectively the hunt for bin Laden, and he was not afraid to say so.

The revised memo was finished in September 2010. John, by then deputy chief of the Pakistan-Afghanistan Department, emailed it to those who needed to know. The title was "Anatomy of a Lead."

As expected, the memo immediately became a hot topic inside CIA headquarters and Director Leon Panetta wanted to know more. John never overpromised, colleagues recall, but he was unafraid to say there was a good chance this might be the break the agency was looking for.

The CIA tracked al-Kuwaiti to a walled compound in Abbottabad. If bin Laden was hiding there, in a busy suburb not far from Pakistan's military academy, it challenged much of what the agency had assumed about his hideout.

But John said it wasn't that far-fetched. Drawing on what he knew about bin Laden's earlier hideouts, he said it made sense that bin Laden had surrounded himself only with his couriers and family and did not use phones or the Internet. The CIA knew that top al-Qaida operatives had lived in urban areas before.

A cautious Panetta took the information to Obama, but there was much more work to be done.

The government tried everything to figure out who was in that compound.

In a small house nearby, the CIA put people who would fit in and not draw any attention. They watched and waited but turned up nothing definitive. Satellites captured images of a tall man walking the grounds of the compound, but never got a look at his face.

Again and again, John and his team asked themselves who else might be living in that compound. They came up with five or six alternatives; bin Laden was always the best explanation.

This went on for months. By about February, John told his bosses, including Panetta, that the CIA could keep trying, but the information was unlikely to get any better. He told Panetta this might be their best chance to find bin Laden and it would not last forever. Panetta made that same point to the president

Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden?

John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent.

Others weren't so sure, especially those who had been in the room for operations that went bad. Not two years earlier, the CIA thought it had an informant who could lead him to bin Laden's deputy. That man blew himself up at a base in Khost, Afghanistan, killing seven CIA employees and injuring six others.

That didn't come up in the meetings with Panetta, a senior intelligence official said. But everyone knew the risk the CIA was taking if it told the president that bin Laden was in Abbottabad and was wrong.

"We all knew that if he wasn't there and this was a disaster, certainly there would be consequences," the official recalled.

John was among several CIA officials who repeatedly briefed Obama and others at the White House. Current and former officials involved in the discussions said John had a coolness and a reassuring confidence.

By April, the president had decided to send the Navy SEALs to assault the compound.

Though the plan was in motion, John went back to his team, a senior intelligence official said.

"Right up to the last hour," he told them, "if we get any piece of information that suggests it's not him, somebody has to raise their hand before we risk American lives."

Nobody did. Inside the Situation Room, the analyst who was barely known outside the close-knit intelligence world took his place alongside the nation's top security officials, the household names and well-known faces of Washington.

An agonizing 40 minutes after Navy SEALs stormed the compound, the report came back: Bin Laden was dead.

John and his team had guessed correctly, taking an intellectual risk based on incomplete information. It was a gamble that ended a decade of disappointment. Later, Champagne was uncorked back at the CIA, where those in the Counterterrorism Center who had targeted bin Laden for so long celebrated. John's team reveled in the moment.

Two days after bin Laden's death, John accompanied Panetta to U.S. Congress. The Senate Intelligence Committee wanted a full briefing on the successful mission. At one point in the private session, Panetta turned to the man whose counterterrorism resume spanned four CIA directors.

He began to speak, about the operation and about the years of intelligence it was based on. And as he spoke about the mission that had become his career, the calm, collected analyst paused, and he choked up.

© Copyright 2011 Associated Press

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