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CIA boss: Flaws need five years to fix

The CIA intelligence-gathering flaws exposed by the Sept. 11 terror attacks will take five years to correct, agency Director George Tenet said. The chairman of the commission investigating the 2001 hijackings called that time frame frightening.

The panel released statements on Wednesday harshly criticizing the CIA for failing to fully appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaeda before Sept. 11, 2001, and questioning the progress of what commissioners say are the FBI's badly needed reorganization efforts.

Tenet said that in the 1990s the CIA lost 25 percent of its personnel, was not hiring new analysts and faced disarray in its training of clandestine officers who work overseas to penetrate terror cells and recruit secret informants.

Although strides have been made since the attacks, Tenet said it would take five more years to "have the kind of clandestine service our country needs." The National Security Agency, which handles electronic surveillance and US mapping and analytic intelligence agencies also need time and sustained funding to improve, he said.

"You can't build this community in fits and starts," Tenet said. "It won't happen and the country will suffer."

The commission's chairman, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, said he was "frightened" by Tenet's projection, given the terror threats confronting the US.

"I wonder whether we have five years," he said.

FBI Director Robert Mueller recounted a range of steps the FBI has taken since the Sept. 11 attacks to improve its intelligence capabilities, sharpen its focus on terrorism and replace outmoded technology. He urged the panel to let those improvements continue and not risk derailing them by recommending creation of a new intelligence agency outside the FBI.

"We don't want to have historians look back and say, `OK, you won the war on terrorism but you lost your civil liberties,'" Mueller said.

After the hearing, Kean said the commission had requested declassification of a December 1998 president's daily briefing -- an intelligence memo summarizing world events -- prepared for former US president Bill Clinton. They want to compare it with the Aug. 6, 2001, memo given to US President George W. Bush that described Osama bin Laden's determination to strike inside the US.

The question, Kean said, is "whether the president [is] getting decent information, whether the president [is] getting the kind of thing the president needs to make the kind of decisions that the president every day has to make.''

The second part of a two-day hearing opened with the commission staff's report on the CIA. It credited the agency with collecting a vast array of intelligence on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but despite this intelligence, the CIA never produced an authoritative summary of al-Qaeda's involvement in previous terrorist attacks, nor did it fully appreciate bin Laden's role as the leader of a growing extremist movement.
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