On September 11, 2001, 2,977 Americans were killed and 6,000 injured in the worst attack ever perpetrated on American soil. The hijackers were 19 men affiliated with the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. They hailed from four countries; 15 were Saudi Arabian citizens, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one was from Egypt.
The American people demanded an investigation into what, how, and why it happened—where there had been failures and what lessons could be learned to prevent a repeat. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, to head an investigation.
The commission made 41 recommendations on homeland security, emergency response, congressional reform, and foreign policy. Perhaps the most important one, for Kean, mandated intelligence sharing to prevent further terrorist attacks—the most significant intelligence reform in U.S. history.
Kean explained: “If the FBI, the CIA, and 14 other intelligence agencies had been talking to each other, most of us feel that the attack could have been prevented. We reorganized the whole intelligence apparatus, so instead of several agencies, there’s now one head—the Director of National Intelligence—and then people from the various agencies meet together and share information.”
Kean’s comment reminded me of a temporary post I had 22 years earlier as the interim head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Transition Team for President Reagan’s incoming administration. An agency transition team is one of those invisible tools of our government, where a president-elect sends representatives to meet with agency leadership, examine the current policies and federal programs, and recommend changes in policy or operation.
My deputy on the transition team was Angelo Codevilla, best known for his work on the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Codevilla authored 14 books that spanned an immense range of subjects, and many have become classics. He was killed on September 20, 2021, in a tragic automobile accident in California.
As we began our review, Codevilla and I were troubled by worrisome signs that the nation’s espionage machinery was becoming rusty and needed serious updating. One of the first problems we detected was the need for more information sharing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Years later, we learned the CIA had all the terrorists involved in 9/11 on a “watch” list but failed to share that information with the FBI. Over twenty years before 9/11, our team urged that steps be taken immediately to ensure information sharing between the CIA and the FBI.
Many of our recommendations grew from work undertaken earlier by the Heritage Foundation, and most of our proposals had been debated for some time within the intelligence community. CIA director-designate Bill Casey (a friend of mine from Wall Street days) was on our side, which should have given our recommendations some purchase within the agency. However, even the hard-nosed Casey had a difficult time penetrating the circled wagons of the CIA bureaucracy. Some of our recommendations for information sharing, consolidation, and cooperation were finally enacted (although we got no credit) some twenty-two years later with the creation of the National Intelligence Agency. However, at the time the CIA rejected most of our recommendations, including policy changes that would have encouraged information sharing between the CIA and FBI and might have prevented 9/11.
This was the first time a transition team had been assigned to the CIA. Admiral Stansfield Turner was President Jimmy Carter’s man at the CIA. I knew Turner—he had most recently served as president of the Naval War College, where he had done an outstanding job. As for the changes at CIA, I don’t know which may have been at his initiative or could be attributed to President Carter, but I felt that Carter was of the old Cordell Hull school, that “gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”
The work of a transition team is “generally invisible” except, of course, when some insider—on one side or another—leaks information to the media. In our case, I believe the leaker to have been someone within the CIA who did not like the recommendations we were about to issue. The story played in The New York Times on December 8, 1980: “Reagan Urged to Reorganize U. S. Intelligence.”
The “Middendorf-headed Team,” the Times noted, “was about to recommend several sweeping changes in the organization and operations of the nation’s intelligence programs.” We were about to call for a return to an emphasis on covert action abroad and greater attention to counterintelligence at home.
Another article in The New York Times alluded to some tension between the Reagan advisers and the CIA, according to a spokesman for the CIA. It described meetings between transition team members and Admiral Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, as amicable sessions. But Reagan advisers called the encounters “hostile and acrimonious.”
The truth? It depends on which session (or “encounter”) is considered. My meetings with Turner were amicable. However, the discussions between some working members of the team and some agency personnel were not friendly. For one thing, the CIA regarded itself as a professional—not political—and some in the Agency resented the imposition of a transition team by the incoming presidential administration. For another, perhaps more to the point, some of our recommendations may have questioned the Agency’s traditional dominance in intelligence affairs.
We suggested a competitive intelligence analysis system: the CIA might have to defend its conclusions on any given issue against those offered by agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency or the FBI. We saw a path toward broader debate; some in the CIA saw this as a threat. We recommended creating a central records system that could be used by both the CIA, FBI, and other domestic law enforcement agencies to better counter the growing threat of international terrorism. Our critics in the CIA saw this as a threat to civil liberties.
The CIA and FBI both have very different roles in combatting terrorism, responsible for different geographical locations of the world and different tasks. The CIA’s role in counterterrorism is to collect information on foreign countries and individuals that might threaten the security of the U.S. The FBI, on the other hand, has law enforcement authority that can act to prevent domestic and international terrorism.
Evidence supports the theory that the perpetrators of 9/11 should have been barred from entering the country or arrested shortly after they arrived. Once an investigation started, it became clear that the hijackers’ names were familiar to the U.S. intelligence community. Some of our recommendations for information sharing, consolidation, and cooperation were finally enacted with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005. However, in 1980, the CIA rejected most of our recommendations, including policy changes that would have encouraged information sharing between the CIA and the FBI and might have prevented 9/11.
The loss, sacrifice, and heroism of ordinary people in the 9/11 crisis should never be forgotten. But we also need to heed the warnings of that attack and renew our resolve to ensure such a tragedy never happens again.
Ambassador J. William Middendorf is the former Ambassador to the Organization of American States and the European Union. Heserved as Secretary of the Navy under the Nixon and Ford Administrations. This essay is adapted from his latest book:On My 100-Year Watch: Tyrants and Patriots.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.
Center for Maritime Strategy
On September 11, 2001, 2,977 Americans were killed and 6,000 injured in the worst attack ever perpetrated on American soil. The hijackers were 19 men affiliated with the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. They hailed from four countries; 15 were Saudi Arabian citizens, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Lebanon, and one was from Egypt.
The American people demanded an investigation into what, how, and why it happened—where there had been failures and what lessons could be learned to prevent a repeat. In 2002, President George W. Bush appointed Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, to head an investigation.
The commission made 41 recommendations on homeland security, emergency response, congressional reform, and foreign policy. Perhaps the most important one, for Kean, mandated intelligence sharing to prevent further terrorist attacks—the most significant intelligence reform in U.S. history.
Kean explained: “If the FBI, the CIA, and 14 other intelligence agencies had been talking to each other, most of us feel that the attack could have been prevented. We reorganized the whole intelligence apparatus, so instead of several agencies, there’s now one head—the Director of National Intelligence—and then people from the various agencies meet together and share information.”
Kean’s comment reminded me of a temporary post I had 22 years earlier as the interim head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Transition Team for President Reagan’s incoming administration. An agency transition team is one of those invisible tools of our government, where a president-elect sends representatives to meet with agency leadership, examine the current policies and federal programs, and recommend changes in policy or operation.
My deputy on the transition team was Angelo Codevilla, best known for his work on the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Codevilla authored 14 books that spanned an immense range of subjects, and many have become classics. He was killed on September 20, 2021, in a tragic automobile accident in California.
As we began our review, Codevilla and I were troubled by worrisome signs that the nation’s espionage machinery was becoming rusty and needed serious updating. One of the first problems we detected was the need for more information sharing between the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Years later, we learned the CIA had all the terrorists involved in 9/11 on a “watch” list but failed to share that information with the FBI. Over twenty years before 9/11, our team urged that steps be taken immediately to ensure information sharing between the CIA and the FBI.
Many of our recommendations grew from work undertaken earlier by the Heritage Foundation, and most of our proposals had been debated for some time within the intelligence community. CIA director-designate Bill Casey (a friend of mine from Wall Street days) was on our side, which should have given our recommendations some purchase within the agency. However, even the hard-nosed Casey had a difficult time penetrating the circled wagons of the CIA bureaucracy. Some of our recommendations for information sharing, consolidation, and cooperation were finally enacted (although we got no credit) some twenty-two years later with the creation of the National Intelligence Agency. However, at the time the CIA rejected most of our recommendations, including policy changes that would have encouraged information sharing between the CIA and FBI and might have prevented 9/11.
This was the first time a transition team had been assigned to the CIA. Admiral Stansfield Turner was President Jimmy Carter’s man at the CIA. I knew Turner—he had most recently served as president of the Naval War College, where he had done an outstanding job. As for the changes at CIA, I don’t know which may have been at his initiative or could be attributed to President Carter, but I felt that Carter was of the old Cordell Hull school, that “gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.”
The work of a transition team is “generally invisible” except, of course, when some insider—on one side or another—leaks information to the media. In our case, I believe the leaker to have been someone within the CIA who did not like the recommendations we were about to issue. The story played in The New York Times on December 8, 1980: “Reagan Urged to Reorganize U. S. Intelligence.”
The “Middendorf-headed Team,” the Times noted, “was about to recommend several sweeping changes in the organization and operations of the nation’s intelligence programs.” We were about to call for a return to an emphasis on covert action abroad and greater attention to counterintelligence at home.
Another article in The New York Times alluded to some tension between the Reagan advisers and the CIA, according to a spokesman for the CIA. It described meetings between transition team members and Admiral Turner, Director of Central Intelligence, as amicable sessions. But Reagan advisers called the encounters “hostile and acrimonious.”
The truth? It depends on which session (or “encounter”) is considered. My meetings with Turner were amicable. However, the discussions between some working members of the team and some agency personnel were not friendly. For one thing, the CIA regarded itself as a professional—not political—and some in the Agency resented the imposition of a transition team by the incoming presidential administration. For another, perhaps more to the point, some of our recommendations may have questioned the Agency’s traditional dominance in intelligence affairs.
We suggested a competitive intelligence analysis system: the CIA might have to defend its conclusions on any given issue against those offered by agencies such as the Defense Intelligence Agency or the FBI. We saw a path toward broader debate; some in the CIA saw this as a threat. We recommended creating a central records system that could be used by both the CIA, FBI, and other domestic law enforcement agencies to better counter the growing threat of international terrorism. Our critics in the CIA saw this as a threat to civil liberties.
The CIA and FBI both have very different roles in combatting terrorism, responsible for different geographical locations of the world and different tasks. The CIA’s role in counterterrorism is to collect information on foreign countries and individuals that might threaten the security of the U.S. The FBI, on the other hand, has law enforcement authority that can act to prevent domestic and international terrorism.
Evidence supports the theory that the perpetrators of 9/11 should have been barred from entering the country or arrested shortly after they arrived. Once an investigation started, it became clear that the hijackers’ names were familiar to the U.S. intelligence community. Some of our recommendations for information sharing, consolidation, and cooperation were finally enacted with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence in 2005. However, in 1980, the CIA rejected most of our recommendations, including policy changes that would have encouraged information sharing between the CIA and the FBI and might have prevented 9/11.
The loss, sacrifice, and heroism of ordinary people in the 9/11 crisis should never be forgotten. But we also need to heed the warnings of that attack and renew our resolve to ensure such a tragedy never happens again.
Ambassador J. William Middendorf is the former Ambassador to the Organization of American States and the European Union. He served as Secretary of the Navy under the Nixon and Ford Administrations. This essay is adapted from his latest book: On My 100-Year Watch: Tyrants and Patriots.
The views expressed in this piece are the sole opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Center for Maritime Strategy or other institutions listed.