David Rosenberg - Inside Pine Gap

The Supreme Court’s decision to allow a disputed election to stand unresolved in the minds of many voters would cast a shadow of illegitimacy on President-elect Bush that would deepen partisan lines in the United States for the next eight years. However, with the disputed presidential election decided by the end of 2000, President-elect George W Bush was handed an economy that was strong and an America that had won ‘hearts and minds’ around the world under the leadership of President Clinton. How President-elect Bush would build on those would partially determine his legacy.

Throughout the presidential transition in 2001, new threats continued to emerge that required monitoring by many resources in the intelligence community. Russia had recovered from the political transition from communism to democracy and the pace of its weapons testing had accelerated as the millennium came to a close. China had experienced a huge surge in technical capability through various means and was developing more reliable and more accurate weapon systems, including ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and SAMs.

Iraq remained under constant surveillance as well, with antiaircraft systems always a threat, albeit a minor one, to allied aircraft that patrolled over the no-fly zones. The United States was also concerned that Saddam Hussein might resurrect his WMD program and didn’t want to miss any developments with this or the L29, an aircraft that could be either piloted or flown as an unmanned aerodynamic vehicle (UAV). This aircraft had been assessed as a possible chemical–biological weapons delivery platform. [1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iraq/l-29.htm

Libya also continued testing its short-range ballistic missiles from the Al Qaryat launch complex while Iran began testing a plethora of missiles based on Chinese and North Korean models with help from those countries’ missile experts. [2] http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_01-02/IranNK ; http://www.nti.org/db/china/miranpos.htm Iran had accelerated its testing of cruise missiles, SAMs, battlefield rockets and a host of ballistic missiles as it strived to develop longer-range missiles.

The list of potential threats was extensive, but perhaps the greatest threat to US forces came from North Korea, a secretive country with a reclusive leader and 1.2 million armed soldiers, making it the fourth-largest standing army on Earth and the world’s most militarised country. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_People's_Army#cite_note-2 North Korea was also actively developing cruise and ballistic missiles that posed a real threat to the region. The threats confronting President Bush were assessed by policy planners to be very real, and these developments were just some of the concerns facing the intelligence community that would have to be addressed throughout the Bush presidency.

The first foreign policy crisis facing President Bush occurred on 1 April 2001 when a United States Navy EP-3E Aries II surveillance aircraft collided in midair with a Chinese J-8II interceptor fighter jet. The badly damaged EP-3E was forced to make an emergency landing on China’s Hainan Island, but the collision between the two aircraft resulted in the death of the Chinese pilot, Lt Cdr Wang Wei. His body reportedly was never recovered. [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hainan_Island_incident The intelligence community immediately mobilised to discover the fate of the twenty-four crew members and the EP-3E. The EP-3E contained sensitive intelligence-gathering and cryptologic equipment that would need to be destroyed quickly by the crew before landing and while on the ground at Hainan. █████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ one reason why the grounded aircraft was dismantled, remaining in China until 3 July. In order to help defuse the situation and return the crew to the United States, President Bush issued China with what was called the ‘Letter of the Two Sorries’, stating that the United States was ‘very sorry’ for the death of Chinese pilot Wang Wei, and ‘very sorry the entering of China’s airspace and the landing did not have verbal clearance’. [5] ibid.

Just five months after the Hainan Island incident an event occurred that shocked the world and placed stressful demands on everyone within the intelligence community. The terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 (now known as 9/11) occurred when members of Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda terrorist network hijacked four passenger aircraft in the United States, crashing two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a third into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth aircraft successfully overpowered the hijackers, forcing the aircraft to crash in an open field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The courageous heroes who foiled the terrorists’ plans onboard United Flight 93 would never know that their heroic actions had just saved one of the most beloved shrines dedicated to democracy, the United States Capitol building. The remaining three planes piloted by suicide terrorists had successfully carried out the most devastating terrorist acts in history, killing approximately 3000 people. An attack of this scale, whether it had occurred on American or Australian soil, was always going to mobilise all members of the intelligence community to identify and locate those responsible.

Al-Qaeda had remained a known threat, but the extent of the organisation had not been completely identified. Unfortunately, when 9/11 occurred, the majority of the leadership in each US intelligence agency believed that they had ‘exclusive ownership’ of the intelligence obtained by ‘their’ agency. This was a problem that had been known for decades and was systemic within the intelligence community. William C Sullivan, a former assistant director of the FBI, described how each intelligence agency erected barriers that ‘led to a condition of total isolation for each organisation… All of these little empires in the intelligence community—the FBI, State Department, NSA, and the others—had built fences around themselves. I had never seen anything like it. We wouldn’t share our information with anyone, and no other agency would give us anything.’ [6] Sullivan, W., with Bill Brown, The Bureau: My Thirty Years in Hoover’s FBI , Pinnacle Books, Inc, New York, 1979, p. 208.

These barriers fractured the structure of the intelligence community, preventing adequate, timely sharing of intelligence and the collaboration that was required to piece together the indicators of an impending terrorist attack. The resultant lack of confirmed, specific intelligence of any Al-Qaeda threats within the United States left the country vulnerable to the catastrophic events that occurred on 11 September. After decades of each intelligence agency compartmenting the intelligence obtained by ‘their’ sources, it took the events of 9/11 for there to be a genuine attempt to break down the barriers within the intelligence community and open up the lines of communication. Hopefully the lessons learned will not be lost on future leaders.