ABC News The Blotter: Summer 2007 Is Eerily Similar to Summer 2001
July 12, 2007 11:57 AM
The summer before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Richard Clarke was the White House Director of Counterterrorism. As the Blotter has reported, senior law enforcement officials said this week there are growing signs of a "Summer of '07" terror attack on the U.S. Now an ABC News consultant, Clarke says these latest intelligence reports bear an eerie resemblance to those officials received in the summer of 2001. Yet again, the intelligence is of a high quality, but doesn't point to a specific date or target. So how should the country respond?
In the summer of 2001, we had numerous, high quality intelligence reports that indicated something was going to happen. We did not know where, when, how or specifically who.
The CIA suggested an attack would likely come in Saudi Arabia, but they did not rule out an attack in the U.S. It was of deep concern, and the president and national security principals were repeatedly informed of that concern. I ordered counterterrorism units to cancel leaves and directed FAA, FBI and other domestic agencies to send out warnings.
Overseas, we urged DOD to put its bases on high Defense Condition status and to move ships from vulnerable harbors in the Middle East. State Department embassies were directed to go on heightened security status.
We did not issue a public alert because we had no "actionable intelligence"; we did not have any specific advice for the public.
How can you conclude that you should step things up when you know so little? There are hundreds of "intelligence reports" every week. Many suggest something dire is about to happen. Almost all of the reports are wrong to some degree. Just because an intelligence agency has been told something and dutifully passes it on as "raw intelligence" does not mean it's true.
But a highly experienced analyst with years of sifting through such reports can tell when there is a difference, what we used to call "a disturbance in the force." The quality of some of the reports is better. The quantity is up. What they say is highly plausible. Some tend to confirm each other and are not "circular reporting" (where one source tells many people and that results in you getting the same report from multiple sources). That's how I felt, how George Tenet felt, in June and July of 2001. Its apparently how some analysts feel now.
Senior government officials are sensitive to the "boy who cried wolf" problem. They also know that police chiefs around the country want to be told whether they should put officers on overtime to guard iconic buildings and transportation nodes. In the absence of intelligence that is specific enough to tell security officials what to do, all that senior officials can do is express a general concern, what Secretary Michael Chertoff called (belatedly) "an informed judgment." What that means is stay alert, get ready. It does not mean an attack is necessarily imminent. For intelligence officials, it also means that they should try harder to follow up leads, contact sources and get "actionable intelligence," information that can be used to stop the attack.
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