358 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
‘What a wonderful world we live in! We can do whatever we want to do to
the Great Satan!’”
geoeneteRg t , the diRectoR of Central Intelligence during Clinton’s
second term and most of Bush’s first, told the commission “the system
was blinking red” in the Intelligence Community in July of 2001. Yet
some at the Pentagon and White House surmised that the threats might
be merely al-Qaida deception. There were in fact few specifics. Some 9/11
family members pointed to the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief warn-
ing that bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S. There’s the smok-
ing gun, they said. The brief went on, however, to assure the president
that the FBI was conducting 70 “full field” investigations throughout the
nation. Bush recollected that Rice told him there was no actionable intel-
ligence of a domestic threat.^3
The September 11 attacks fell into a void between the foreign and do-
mestic intelligence agencies of an unwieldy government, the 9/11 Com-
mission concluded. No one was looking for a foreign threat to domestic
targets from al-Qaida foot soldiers who had infiltrated into the United
States. But here they were, busy learning how to fly Boeing 767s and
practicing how to butcher anyone who tried to intervene. “The terrorists
exploited deep institutional failings within our government.” Gorton viv-
idly recalls a CIA supervisor telling the commissioners that no one was
looking at the bigger picture. “No analytic work foresaw the lightning that
could connect the thundercloud to the ground.”^4
Besides a failure to communicate, Gorton says 9/11 was caused by a
dearth of something that’s second nature to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs:
Imagination. The blame really had no one face or handful of faces. It
was a systemic “failure of imagination,” as Kean and Hamilton put it.
The lesson was as old as December 7, 1941, when “in the face of a clear
warning, alert measures bowed to routine,” one contemporary historian
wrote.^5
What if al-Qaida decided to launch latter-day kamikaze attacks, with
suicide pilots at the controls of huge jetliners instead of single-engine
Mitsubishi Zeros? The FBI had inklings in July of 2001 that terrorists
were interested in U.S. flight schools. That August, FBI and INS agents
arrested an al-Qaida operative in Minnesota. Zacarias Moussaoui had
Boeing 747 flight manuals and a flight simulator program for his laptop.
Intense publicity surrounding his arrest might have disrupted plans for
the attack, according to Zelikow and Gorton. But no one connected the
dots. Institutionalizing the exercise of imagination requires breaking