By Peter Lance

September 17th, 2010

In a series of speeches marking the fifth anniversary of the 9/11

attacks, President George W. Bush repeatedly asserted that the U.S.

was more protected from the threat of Islamic terror than it had been

on September 11, 2001. “Five years after 9/11, are we safer?” Mr. Bush

asked in a speech before an audience of conservative intellectuals on

September 7. ”The answer is yes, America is safer. We are safer

because we’ve taken action to protect the homeland.”

 Clearly, any definition of “safer” must include an analysis of the

reforms made by all five of the major U.S. intelligence agencies since

9/11, along with an examination of the military progress made by

against Islamic radicals in Afghanistan and Iraq. But an assessment

of the FBI’s counterterrorism record in the last five years can provide

perhaps the best litmus test of whether the homeland is more secure.

After all, the Bureau is the principal agency charged with protecting

America against domestic terror threats—and in the years since 9/11

there have been a number of significant benchmarks allowing us to

judge whether or not the FBI has undergone sufficient reform to

thwart the next attack.

Director Robert Mueller (pictured above) acknowledged the need

for Bureau reform in testimony before Congress on May 8, 2002:

“We must refocus our missions and priorities. New technologies must

be put in place to support new and different operational practices.

And we must improve how we hire, manage, and train our workforce;

collaborate with others; and manage, analyze, share, and protect

information. All will be necessary if we are to successfully evolve post-

9/11. Most would have been necessary even absent 9/11.”

 It was significant that Mueller put “new technologies” at the top

of his reform list, because at that very hearing, he uttered a statement

that would haunt him for years:

“The [9/11] hijackers also apparently left no paper trail. In our

investigation, we have not yet uncovered a single piece of paper––

either here in the U.S. or in the treasure trove of information that has

turned up in Afghanistan and elsewhere––that mentioned any aspect

of the September 11th plot.” And yet, as this book has documented,

the paper trail was significant—from Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 pledge to

return to hit the Towers, to the detailed evidence of the “planes

operation” on Yousef’s Toshiba laptop, which had been in federal

custody since 1995.

What was it that caused the “disconnect” in the Bureau between

the West and East coast offices in their seeming inability to put the

puzzle pieces together on Ali Mohamed? What caused the

“stovepiping” later asserted by former Special Agent Jack Cloonan in

my latest HarperCollins book TRIPLE CROSS? Surely the FBI had a

computer system in place that would have connected the dots on

Yousef and Mohamed, stringing them together in a matrix that

documented al Qaeda’s threat to America?

 The answer is no.

To this day, despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent to

upgrade its information-sharing capabilities, the FBI has yet to make

fully operational a computer database system that would allow agents

to effectively connect al Qaeda operatives worldwide.

In 2002, beginning with a story by reporters Eric Lichtblau and

Charles Piller, the Los Angeles Times published a series of articles

documenting how tthe Bureau was still locked in a “paper-driven

culture.” As the Times reported, the FBI’s system was so antiquated

that, immediately after 9/11, frustrated agents in Tampa were unable

even to e-mail photos of the nineteen hijackers to the Bureau’s

regional offices. They had to resort to overnight mail. The 1980s-era

technology at the Bureau lacked even the capacity to search and link

words like “flight” and “schools.”

The Bureau had pledged to upgrade its information systems via

a project called Trilogy, described by the 9/11 Commission as “a 36

month plan for improving its networks, systems and software.”

Former IBM executive Robert Dies, who was brought in by former

director Louis Freeh to consult, told the commission that his goal was

merely “to get the car out of the garage.”

 The only other reference to Trilogy by the Commission was its

admission that “the project was underway, but by no means fully

implemented” at the time of 9/11. That turned out to be a broad

misstatement of fact.

By May 2004, a review of Trilogy by the National Research Council

(NRC) found that the system failed to support the Bureau’s new

counterterrorism mission and should be “redesigned.” At that point,

the project, launched in November 2000 with a $380 million price tag,

had grown into a $626 million white elephant.

Director Mueller repeatedly cited Trilogy as an essential

component in the FBI’s reform strategy, designed to improve its

ability to thwart terrorism. But the NRC concluded that Trilogy was

“not likely to be an adequate tool for counterterrorism analysis” and

should be rebuilt “from scratch.”

In 2005 the FBI scrapped the final phase of Trilogy, known as

the Virtual Case File system, at a cost of $170 million. In testimony

before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mueller predicted that the

system would not be fully operating until 2009, eight years after the

9/11 attacks.
 By March 2006, Eric Lichtblau, now covering the Bureau for the

New York Times, cited a report by the Justice Department’s inspector

general predicting that it could cost another half billion dollars to

complete the Virtual Case File overhaul.

On March 16th, 2006 Lockheed Martin Corporation announced

it has been awarded a $305 million contract for an overhaul of the

FBI’s information system. The new name was “Sentinel.”

Reporting for the NYT on March 18th, 2010, Lichtblau wrote:

F.B.I. Faces New Setback in Computer Overhaul

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: March 18, 2010

WASHINGTON - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has suspended

work on parts of its huge computer overhaul, dealing the agency the
latest costly setback in a decade-long effort to develop a modernized
information system to combat crime and terrorism.

The overhaul was supposed to be completed this fall, but now will not
be done until next year at the earliest. The delay could mean at least
$30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national
security, Congressional officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/us/19fbi.html

This piece can be accessed at www.peterlance.com

http://web.me.com/netgraph1/peterlance.com/Failure_of_the_FBIs_virt
ual_case_file_system.html

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