Friday, January 29, 2010
New Teams Created to Connect Dots of Terror Plots
The nation’s main counterterrorism center is creating new teams of specialists to pursue clues of emerging terrorist plots as part of a rapid buildup that will sharply increase its analyst corps, perhaps by hundreds of people over the next year, intelligence officials said Friday.
The action by the National Counterterrorism Center is one of the furthest reaching by the government so far to address the failings of several federal agencies in allowing a 23-year-old Nigerian man to board a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day with high explosives sewn into his underwear.
A White House review this month found that no one in the government’s vast intelligence system had sole responsibility for detecting and piecing together disparate threat information, telltale signs that could have prevented the man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding the plane.
In response, the counterterrorism center in the past several days has picked more than three dozen of its most capable analysts from across its ranks to form what it calls pursuit teams to focus on threats from Yemen and other Al Qaeda offshoots that could imperil the United States, officials said.
“We have dedicated teams that don’t have any responsibility for producing intelligence, but simply for following up on these small leads,” Michael E. Leiter, the center’s director, told the House Homeland Security Committee this week in the latest of several recent appearances on Capitol Hill.
“We’ve been very good at chasing down those threats that come out of Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Mr. Leiter told the Senate Homeland Security Committee last week. “We’re going to be better now at chasing down those small bits of information that come out of Yemen or North Africa or East Africa.”
The pursuit teams are just the beginning of an ambitious effort that intelligence officials say could potentially add several hundred additional analysts to the more than 200 specialists who work on terrorism and watch list duties now, officials said. Congress would need to approve financing for the additional hires.
Any increase would be a sharp reversal of fortunes for the counterterrorism center, which just days before the Dec. 25 airliner bombing plot was preparing to cut its workforce up to 20 percent, including terrorism analysts and watch list personnel, Mr. Leiter said.
The proposed increase in analysts is now before the White House’s Office of Management and Budget for review, and exact details are being worked out, officials said. In the meantime, because of the increase in the number of individuals added to the government’s no-fly list since the thwarted holiday plot, Mr. Leiter said he was short of people to process the new names into government databases. “Right now, I don’t have enough people to do that,” he said this week.
Mr. Leiter said that the new pursuit analysts had begun additional training and that the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, was studying how to advance that training even more.
The Obama administration has been trying since the failed attack to restore public confidence by tightening airport screening procedures, revamping visa revocation rules and banning more people from flying on commercial jets to the United States.
Terrorism and national security experts applauded the counterterrorism center’s decision to create the new analytical teams and start their training, but some expressed dismay that such an obvious job had not been created until now.
“It’s so very fundamental and very basic that you’d think it would immediately have been an urgent matter,” said Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who was co-chairman of the commission on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “We have not felt that the homeland security community has had the sense of urgency, and this is an illustration of that.”
At the National Counterterrorism Center just outside Washington, specialists can draw on streams of information from more than 80 databases across the government.
The Christmas Day bombing plot revealed a basic flaw in how two teams of intelligence analysts worked on different parts of the same problem.
One team of about two dozen “watch list analysts” have access to the bits and pieces of information that could detect a potential terrorist, but officials said they focused largely on maintaining the lists themselves.
The second team, a cadre of about 300 “all-source analysts” are supposed to be the deep thinkers charged with preparing long-term assessments of terrorist groups, their financing and recruiting methods and their leadership. While dozens of such analysts were examining the Yemen threat well before Dec. 25, they failed to repeatedly scrutinize the raw intelligence for hints of a possible plot against the United States originating in Yemen.
“There was concern on the intelligence community’s part about potential attacks by Al Qaeda in Yemen, and we were concerned even about the timing of that,” Mr. Leiter said this week. “What we didn’t connect was the individual’s name or where that attack would occur. That was our failure.”
The new pursuit teams will be responsible for identifying threads of information — the warning Mr. Abdulmutallab’s father gave to officials at the United States Embassy in Nigeria, for instance — and tracking and connecting them to other tips, said an intelligence official familiar with the center’s new concept.
They will not be involved in the day-to-day writing of current intelligence products or the more strategic reports, which frees them up to focus on issues that need immediate attention, the official said.
Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, said, “They’ll be taking clues and running them to ground.”
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