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© St. Petersburg Times, published October 2, 2001
WASHINGTON -- In the nearly windowless offices of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, which gathers intelligence and runs covert operations abroad, a new, informal slogan has gone up on signs and placards.
In the middle is the image of the American flag. On one side is a picture of the World Trade Center, destroyed. On the other is a picture of the Pentagon, mangled. Across the flag, in quotations, is the rallying cry, "Let's Roll!"
Those were the words apparently spoken by Todd Beamer before he and other passengers took on the hijackers Sept. 11, forcing United Airlines Flight 93 to crash in a Pennsylvania field before reaching its intended target. Today, the phrase is giving America's terrorist hunters inspiration.
Indeed, as critics decry what they characterize as one of the biggest intelligence lapses ever, the men and women at the CIA are working round-the-clock on the "bin Laden account" to figure out what went wrong and to keep it from happening again.
The urgency of the task is beyond doubt. "We believe that there is the likelihood of additional terrorist activity," Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Sunday.
To fight the threat, intelligence officials say, CIA officers have in effect put themselves in Osama bin Laden's shoes. His picture hangs in the offices of the Counterterrorist Center, as do the pictures of other suspected terrorists.
John Gannon, former deputy director for intelligence at the CIA, said the analysts are under "almost hurricane force" pressure to brief the White House and Congress with the latest information on the terrorist networks. "I have no doubt they are all exhausted," he said.
Since the attacks, hundreds of analysts holed up in cubicles adorned with street signs such as Osama bin Lane and Saddam Street and Qadhafi Qourt have been poring over intelligence from all over the world, including electronic intercepts and cables from America's spies. They've been catching catnaps on mattresses strewn in hallways and eating cold pizza. Coffeepots have been percolating nonstop.
The CIA also has been deluged with resumes, and retired officers have offered to return to the job.
"The mood, the morale is very high," said CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield. "People are absolutely determined."
Last week, President Bush gave agency staff a boost during a visit. He declared, "It's important for America to realize that there are men and women who are spending hours on the task of making sure our country remains free."
But the agency is not without its critics.
Among the most vocal is Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which monitors America's vast spy network. Shelby thinks the president should fire CIA director George Tenet for what he says are a series of intelligence failures on his watch, including the attacks in New York and Washington.
Shelby insists that the intelligence community is stuck in the past, clinging to the Cold War mentality and woefully unprepared for the terrorist threat. The bureaucracy, he said, replete with turf battles and parochialism, makes it nearly impossible for agencies to share intelligence.
Shelby suggested that perhaps a new agency should be created to deal exclusively with terrorism. "We've shed enough blood and squandered enough treasure," he said during an intelligence committee hearing last week. "We need an action-oriented approach where success is measured in the amount of terrorist cells destroyed or disabled, not on having new reports."
Established in 1986, the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, employs hundreds of analysts, not only from CIA but from the rest of the intelligence community, including the State Department, the FBI and the ultra-secret National Security Agency. Specialists include the gadgetmakers -- those who assemble electronic surveillance devices and other tools of spycraft -- and covert operators.
Security at the CIA complex in Langley, Va., is as tight as it has ever been, with journalists not permitted inside. But employees and members of Congress who have visited in recent days paint a picture of patriotism and steely determination.
Gannon, the former CIA official, said what CTC analysts are doing now is looking back in search of clues that may have been missed and working to prevent another attack.
Not only are they tracking the bin Laden network but other terrorist groups that may want to exploit the situation in the United States with copycat strikes, or with attacks involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
"Terrorism," Gannon said, "is one of the biggest puzzles you deal with in the intelligence business, and you're always trying to place missing pieces."
In addition, Gannon said, CTC analysts are providing major support to the Bush administration's contingency plans for retaliation.
Some congressional leaders say the center's hard work has already paid off.
In an interview Friday, Florida Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, suggested that the CTC was starting to make inroads against bin Laden and his network.
"They're beginning to get into the element where they can begin to neutralize them," said Goss, a former CIA officer. He refused to elaborate.
The CTC has its origins in the world of hijackings.
After TWA Flight 847 was hijacked from Greece in 1985, resulting in the death of a U.S. Navy diver, former President Ronald Reagan established the center. In the past five years, the number of people working there has doubled and its budget tripled. In 1999, according to the Office of Management and Budget, the budget for the various federal agencies fighting terrorism was $6.7-billion.
The center has had some successes. From 1996 to 1998, for example, it assisted foreign intelligence and law enforcement agents in the arrest of forty alleged terrorist operatives, according to intelligence officials. The CTC is also credited with linking the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 to Libyan agents and uncovering Saddam Hussein's plot to assassinate former President George Bush in 1993.
In 1996, after bin Laden's name surfaced in the investigation of the World Trade Center bombing three years earlier, the CTC created a bin Laden "station."
According to the New York Times, about three years ago the CIA secretly began to send teams of American officers to northern Afghanistan to persuade the leader of the anti-Taliban opposition to capture and perhaps kill bin Laden.
The covert effort, the newspaper said, was based on an attempt to work with Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was then the military leader of the largest anti-Taliban group in the northern mountains of Afghanistan. Massoud was fatally wounded in a suicide bombing two days before the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Since the president's visit to CIA headquarters Wednesday, the agency has been flooded with faxes and e-mails with people offering support.
This e-mail was typical: "You are our children, our peers, our fathers, and mothers. You quietly protect the very fabric of our lives and must know that we have never faced so secretive or dedicated a foe.
"We know that you will succeed at unearthing the perpetrators and appreciate your perseverance, always, and for as long as it takes."
Bush got a pin given to visitors to the Counterterrorist Center: A masked gunman dressed in black with a red circle and line drawn through it.
Goss, meanwhile, said CTC work was not glamorous. "This is slow, steady, hard work, with a lot of thought," he said.
And he took issue with critics of the CIA, who wonder why it did not provide a warning about the Sept. 11 attacks.
Goss, like other officials at the CIA, pointed out that CIA director Tenet had been warning about a terrorist strike inside the United States for years. The CIA, however, acknowledges that it did not have "actionable intelligence," specific information about when and where a terrorist strike would occur in order to stop it.
No matter, said Goss.
Failing to support the CIA is like failing to support the military. "These folks," he said, "are out and about taking chances and taking risks for us."