What the Dog Saw [105]
Miller, Stone, and Mitchell make the same mistake when they quote from a transcript of a conversation that was recorded by Italian intelligence in August of 2001 between two Al Qaeda operatives, Abdel Kader Es Sayed and a man known as al Hilal. This, they say, is yet another piece of intelligence that “seemed to forecast the September 11 attacks.”
“I’ve been studying airplanes,” al Hilal tells Es Sayed. “If God wills, I hope to be able to bring you a window or a piece of a plane the next time I see you.”
“What, is there a jihad planned?” Es Sayed asks.
“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words: ‘Up above,’ ” al Hilal replies. Es Sayed thinks that al Hilal is referring to an operation in his native Yemen, but al Hilal corrects him: “But the surprise attack will come from the other country, one of those attacks you will never forget.”
A moment later al Hilal says about the plan, “It is something terrifying that goes from south to north, east to west. The person who devised this plan is a madman, but a genius. He will leave them frozen [in shock].”
This is a tantalizing exchange. It would now seem that it refers to September 11. But in what sense was it a “forecast”? It gave neither time nor place nor method nor target. It suggested only that there were terrorists out there who liked to talk about doing something dramatic with an airplane — which did not, it must be remembered, reliably distinguish them from any other terrorists of the past thirty years.
In the real world, intelligence is invariably ambiguous. Information about enemy intentions tends to be short on detail. And information that’s rich in detail tends to be short on intentions. In April of 1941, for instance, the Allies learned that Germany had moved a huge army up to the Russian front. The intelligence was beyond dispute: the troops could be seen and counted. But what did it mean? Churchill concluded that Hitler wanted to attack Russia. Stalin concluded that Hitler was serious about attacking, but only if the Soviet Union didn’t meet the terms of the German ultimatum. The British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, thought that Hitler was bluffing, in the hope of winning further Russian concessions. British intelligence thought — at least, in the beginning — that Hitler simply wanted to reinforce his eastern frontier against a possible Soviet attack. The only way for this piece of intelligence to have been definitive would have been if the Allies had had a second piece of intelligence — like the phone call between al Hilal and Es Sayed — that demonstrated Germany’s true purpose. Similarly, the only way the al Hilal phone call would have been definitive is if we’d also had intelligence as detailed as the Allied knowledge of German troop movements. But rarely do intelligence services have the luxury of both kinds of information. Nor are their analysts mind readers. It is only with hindsight that human beings acquire that skill.
The Cell tells us that, in the final months before September 11, Washington was frantic with worry:
A spike in phone traffic among suspected Al Qaeda members in the early part of the summer [of 2001], as well as debriefings of [an Al Qaeda operative in custody] who had begun cooperating with the government, convinced investigators that bin Laden was planning a significant operation — one intercepted Al Qaeda message spoke of a “Hiroshima-type” event — and that he was planning it soon. Through the summer, the CIA repeatedly warned the White House that attacks were imminent.
The fact that these worries did not protect us is not evidence of the limitations of the intelligence community. It is evidence of the limitations of intelligence.
4.
In the early 1970s, a professor of psychology at Stanford University named David L. Rosenhan gathered together a painter, a graduate student, a pediatrician, a psychiatrist, a housewife, and three psychologists. He told them to check into different psychiatric hospitals