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Accountability

CIA Lays Out Errors It Made Before Sept. 11

By Mark Mazzetti in Washington

Part 2: The Accountability Board

The recommendation that the agency establish an “accountability board” to determine possible disciplinary action was rejected in October 2005 by Mr. Goss, who was the C.I.A. director and who argued that that punishing top officials “would send the wrong message to our junior officers about taking risks.”

The report cited the C.I.A.’s failure to pass intelligence about Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hamzi to other agencies as potentially significant. The C.I.A. had identified the men in January 2000 when they visited Malaysia but never notified the State Department to put them on the terrorist watch list.

The report also said that some 50 to 60 C.I.A. officials knew of the intelligence about the two men, a higher number than had been previously reported and that persistent surveillance of them “had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”

In a memoir published this year, Mr. Tenet cited the C.I.A.’s efforts against Al Qaeda as one of the successes of his tenure and portrayed the agency as having been bold in sounding alarms about it in the summer of 2001. In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. Tenet outlined a further defense, that the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism efforts were embodied in “a robust plan, marked by extraordinary effort and dedication” long before Sept. 11, 2001.

But the report released Tuesday included new details about what it calls a strained relationship between the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet and the National Security Agency, which was then led by General Hayden. It said the standoff had prevented C.I.A. officials from gaining access to transcripts of intercepted communications between terrorism suspects, and criticized Mr. Tenet as not interceding to resolve these turf battles.

In describing the period before Sept. 11, the report said the C.I.A. had carried out “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.” It said the principal responsibility for Mr. Mohammed, who became the terrorist mastermind, had been assigned to a branch of the agency responsible for bringing terror suspects to justice, not to the one responsible for assessing threats.

As a result, it said, too little attention had been paid to accusations that Mr. Mohammed was “sending terrorists to the United States to engage in activities on behalf of bin Laden.”

In a note to agency employees on Tuesday, General Hayden made it clear that he continued to oppose the report’s release. “It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed,” he said.

But Philip D. Zelikow, the executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, praised the report and said it was broadly consistent with his panel’s findings.

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