Another big failure in communications

That's what Congress and the Bush administration promised seven years ago after revelations that the CIA didn't warn the FBI about two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in time to keep the men from entering the United States. In the future, the government pledged, intelligence agencies would share information seamlessly with each other.

Only it didn't happen. Last month, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded an airplane bound for the United States the same way Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi did in 2001. He had a valid visa, and his name wasn't on the no-fly list — even though his father had warned the CIA weeks earlier that the young Nigerian had fallen in with Islamic radicals.

You'd think the United States, the nation that invented the supercomputer and the database, could have found a way to connect those dots.

“If my credit card company can figure out that I didn't buy a pair of tennis shoes in Columbus, Ohio, the intelligence community ought to be able to figure out that something was wrong with this picture,” said Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice), who has spent years pressing the intelligence agencies to fix their information flow.

It probably won't be clear for a while exactly what lapses in the system allowed Abdulmutallab to board a Detroit-bound plane wearing underwear packed with explosives — whether the fault lies with the CIA, the separate National Counterterrorism Center or some combination of agencies (as another congressman said, inartfully but accurately, “There are plenty of fingers to go around”).

But the underlying problem is already clear. Eight years after 9/11, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are still a collection of competing entities that often cooperate, but sometimes conflict. Two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, have pushed them to work seamlessly together, but fractures still abound.

“It's still hard to get different agencies to work well together,” said an intelligence professional who wouldn't be quoted by name because he was not authorized to speak. “That was the weak link before, and it's the weak link now. It may take another generation to get it right.”

Institutional culture is part of the problem. The CIA exists mainly to collect secret information; the FBI, to catch and prosecute criminals; the State Department, to promote U.S. interests overseas. Their missions are different, so their cultures are different; some friction is unavoidable.

After 9/11, though, Congress and the Bush administration created a new set of institutions to overcome those differences when it came to fighting terrorism: a National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC, working for a new director of national intelligence with the power to oversee all 16 of the nation's intelligence agencies.

But the national intelligence director never got complete power over the other agencies. He doesn't control their budgets, and he can't hire or fire their heads. As a result, he became yet another layer of bureaucracy, trying to coordinate agencies that weren't always inclined to cooperate.

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