eBook

Spying Blind

Zegart, Amy B

2009,2007,2015

Overview

In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: 9/11 Commission / Al-Qaeda / American Airlines Flight 77 / Americans / Brent Scowcroft / Bureaucrat / Central Intelligence Agency / Chairman / CIA / Clandestine cell system / Cofer Black / Committee / Council on Foreign Relations / Counter-terrorism / Counterintelligence / Criminal investigation / Defense Intelligence Agency / Director of Central Intelligence / Director of National Intelligence / Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation / Directorate of Operations (CIA) / Dissolution of the Soviet Union / Employment / FBI / Federal Bureau of Investigation / Field agent / Foreign policy / George Tenet / George W. Bush / Government agency / Government policy / Human intelligence (intelligence gathering) / Information sharing / Intelligence & Espionage / Intelligence agency / Intelligence service / Intelligence service -- United States / Intelligence services / International relations / Janet Reno / Khalid al-Mihdhar / Law enforcement / Legislation / Legislator / Louis Freeh / National security / Nawaf al-Hazmi / Osama bin Laden / Phoenix Memo / Policy / POLITICAL SCIENCE / POLITICAL SCIENCE / General / Politics / President's Daily Brief / Private sector / Public policy / Robert Baer / Robert Gates / Robert Mueller / Roberta Wohlstetter / Scott Sagan / September 11 attacks / September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001 / Special agent / Strategic intelligence / Task force / Technology / Terrorism / Terrorism -- Government policy -- United States / The New York Times / Transnational terrorism / U.S.A / Uncertainty / United States / United States Department of Homeland Security / United States Department of State / United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence / United States Intelligence Community / United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence / United States. Central Intelligence Agency / United States. Federal Bureau of Investigation / USS Cole bombing / War President / Weapon of mass destruction / What Happened / World War II / Zacarias Moussaoui
• ISBN: 1400830273, 9781400830275, 9780691141039, 9780691120218, 0691120218, 0691141037