Let me talk first about the analysis the National
Commission on Terrorism made of the terrorist threat and then talk
about our recommendations for dealing with that threat. I should say that
our commission's mandate was to examine America's policies
concerning international terrorism, not those affecting domestic
terrorism. International terrorism is terrorism directed against
Americans either here or abroad. So if an international terrorist
group conducts a terrorist act in the United States, that is
international terrorism. If a purely domestic group attacks
Americans in the United States, that did not fall within our
ambit.
Our
conclusion was that the threat is growing. There is a paradox,
because if you look at the figures put out by the Department of
State, the number of international terrorist incidents has been
falling since the late 1980s. But the number of casualties has been
rising. This is an important phenomenon that draws you to the
conclusion that the motives of the terrorists are changing. What do
I mean by that?
If
you look back to when modern terrorism arose in the late 1960s with
the hijackings and the killings at the Munich Olympics, and then
the terrorism in Western Europe in the 1970s, what we found were
Marxist-Leninist terrorist groups organized along typical Marxist
lines, very tightly cellular, tightly controlled with precise
political, secular objectives such as: Get the United States out of
Europe; push Israel back into the sea; break NATO's connection to
Germany. And these groups thought--and in this they were
wrong--that they had broad public support. The Baader-Meinhoff gang
in Germany, Action Directe in France, the Red Brigades in Italy all
thought they had broad public support for their objectives. So
these groups effectively constrained themselves in the kind of acts
they would conduct. They would conduct terrorist acts to get public
attention to their cause but they did not want to kill so many
people that they alienated people from their cause, because they
thought people could be brought to support their objectives. So the
objective of terrorist acts in the 1970s and into the middle 1980s
was to get attention for the cause.
After an attack, these groups would
release a long screed telling you what their cause was. If you
worked your way through such pronouncements, you would find a
typical Marxist-Leninist analysis of the world. But they were
trying to get attention to their cause and not to alienate people.
There was a self-constraint built into the terrorists' acts and the
number of casualties they were willing to inflict. What we have
seen in the 1990s is that self-constraint seems to be coming off,
and this is shown by the fact that the number of incidents is down
but the number of casualties is up.
The
conclusion our commission reached is that many of these groups now
are working from different motivations. They are not working from
the motivation of trying to persuade people of the wisdom of their
particular political cause. They are acting instead for ideological
or religio-ideological or apocalyptic objectives. People who are
operating on those kinds of terms are not necessarily constrained
in the number of casualties they want to inflict; in fact they may
want to inflict massive casualties. And once you step across that
threshold in terms of your analysis of the motives, you then have
to be very concerned, as we were, about the possibility of
terrorist groups escalating dramatically up the scale to what we
call catastrophic terrorism.
The
kinds of groups that are committing these kinds of acts fall into
several categories: religious terrorists, ideological terrorists,
terrorists who have an apocalyptic vision. There were concerns we
would have millennial terrorists. That fortunately passed without
an incident. But we have groups such as the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan,
which attacked the Tokyo subway system with nerve gas several years
ago. There are the groups which have been operating in a loose way
under Osama bin Laden's direction in the Middle East.
Groups now are increasingly not taking
responsibility for attacks, which is another indication that the
motive is changing. Instead of saying, "We attacked because we want
you to release those guys who are prisoners in a jail in France,"
there is very often no claim now. In fact the largest attacks in
the last 12 or 13 years have all been unclaimed, starting with Pan
Am 103. So motives of revenge, motives of ideology or religion,
motives of apocalypse--these led the commission to believe that we
are facing a serious possibility of escalation of terrorism into
catastrophic terrorism.
Now,
this is paralleled by an unsettling change in the structure of
terrorist groups which makes them more difficult to combat.
Terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s were organized along
classic Marxist-Leninist cellular structures. Such an organization
structure served a terrorist leader's purpose because the leader
wanted carefully to calibrate the amount of violence and death that
was incurred precisely because he was trying to get broader support
for his group. These new groups are much less hierarchical in their
organization; they tend to be ad hoc
groups, like the group that came together in the World Trade Center
bombing of 1993. Today, groups kind of coalesce, come together for
an attack, and go away.
This
presents both opportunities and challenges. The challenge is that
it is very difficult to get information about them because they
don't have the structure. On the other hand, as in the case of the
World Trade Center, they tend to be less professional and that
gives you opportunities after an attack to bring law enforcement
into play. No professional terrorist would have gone back to try to
claim his rental car deposit after conducting the World Trade
Center attack.
So
the commission concluded that the threat is increasing and that
there is a possibility that terrorists will escalate to what we
called in our report catastrophic terrorism. We have in mind what
in military terms are called weapons of mass destruction or what we
call CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear) agents
to conduct catastrophic terrorism. I will come back to that in a
minute because it is a very important conclusion.
What
are the implications for American policy? Basically, we made
recommendations in three areas: in the area of intelligence, in the
area of cutting off support for terrorist groups, and in the area
of catastrophic terrorism. Let me just walk through our main
recommendations in each of those three areas.
INTELLIGENCE
It
is obvious that there is no substitute for good intelligence if you
are going to have an effective counterterrorist policy. I have
worked in and around government for 35 years now, and I have never
seen a field in which intelligence is more central to good policy
and intelligence is more difficult to get than in the field of
terrorism. If you don't have good intelligence on terrorists, you
simply don't have an effective counterterrorist policy and, most of
all, you cannot prevent attacks. After all, the basic objective of
counterterrorism is to stop the attacks before they happen.
We
looked at our program to deal with terrorist intelligence and found
a couple of areas that needed improvement. First of all, we
recommended that the CIA be given a broader mandate to go after
terrorist spies. If you want to find out what a terrorist group is
up to, you have to have a spy in the terrorist group. It is as
simple as that. You can have the most effective chain of spies you
want in a city, but if they are all going to the country club or
the League of Women Voters, they are not going to tell you very
much about terrorism. And if the agents look like me, we are not
likely to be told an awful lot about what is going on in a
terrorist group. You have to have a spy in the terrorist group. In
1995, the CIA put into effect regulations that we found are
hampering the recruitment of spies in terrorist groups. And we
recommended that these restrictions be done away with. We
recommended that the CIA go back to the process that was in place
before 1995 to assess the value of potential assets (as they are
called in the CIA) in terrorist groups.
This
is a very important recommendation. It is one with which the CIA
formally disagrees. As some of you may know, they have said they do
not believe these restrictions are reducing the number of
recruitments they are making among terrorist groups. I think they
are just plain wrong. I don't think they are not telling the truth;
I think they simply don't know what is actually happening out in
the field. And I can go into that in more detail. But in any case,
this was in many ways our most important recommendation.
The
CIA is primarily responsible for collecting terrorist intelligence
abroad and the FBI is responsible here in the United States. So we
also looked at the question of how the FBI collects intelligence
against international terrorists in the United States. We found
that the guidelines under which the FBI agents operate are
adequate, but they are badly written and confusing. These are
guidelines that set out the terms under which the FBI can open what
they call a preliminary inquiry against somebody who may be
suspected of being a terrorist. All of us read them (they run to
about 42 pages), and we had a number of current and former FBI
agents testify that they found them confusing. We recommended that
the attorney general sit down with the director of the FBI and
rewrite these guidelines to put them into more easily understood
English.
The
third area we looked at is how intelligence is shared. This is a
very important issue because it is fine to have good intelligence
in a box over here, but if it does not get to the analyst or the
decisionmakers over there, it doesn't do you very much good. Here
the problem is mostly in the FBI. The FBI's objective is to make
cases against terrorists. They are our investigators and law
enforcers and they want to make cases. This leads to both cultural
and structural obstacles to sharing intelligence. First of all, the
cultural one is that FBI agents understandably want to make the
best case they can and they don't want to indiscriminately share
the intelligence, the information that they have picked up in their
investigation. And secondly, there are legitimate structural
problems with getting that information around. Some of them are
legal, but again some of them are just regulatory. For example, an
FBI field officer who is investigating a possible terrorist in,
say, Los Angeles, will conduct a number of interviews and fill out
what are called 301 forms. The information on that form will rarely
come to FBI headquarters at all. It is even less likely to get to
the other people who are trying to analyze the terrorist threat in
the intelligence community. Nor will it get to decisionmakers.
On
the other hand, the FBI does a very good job of disseminating
information about an immediate threat. There is no problem here. We
are talking about, for example, information which might turn up in
a raid on an apartment in Los Angeles. Say the agents find a
computer with a hard disk with lots information on it. The agents
will download the information and review it to determine what part
of it they can use in the case that they eventually are going to
make. But there may be a whole bunch of other stuff on the disk
that could tell you an awful lot about how that terrorist group is
working if you were an analyst following that terrorist group.
Unfortunately, that information never gets out of that field office
in Los Angeles.
The
CIA for many years faced the same problem. How do you take
intelligence you gather, given the sensitivity of sources and
methods, and get it to the people who need to know about it? The
CIA has solved this problem by having a cadre of reports officers,
as they are called. At most stations overseas there is a reports
officer and there are reports officers back at headquarters whose
job it is to look over intelligence and determine who else needs
this stuff. They ask: "How do I sanitize it or make it less
sensitive so that I can get it out to people who need it?" So our
commission recommended that the FBI establish a similar cadre of
professional reports officers who would be stationed at the major
field offices in the United States and, of course, back here at
headquarters at their counterterrorism center.
There is a related issue that we covered,
which I will not go into in great depth here, which is the problem
of interpreters and translators. There is a crying, desperate need
throughout the intelligence community for more of these
specialists. This is something that needs to be addressed
urgently.
Finally in the intelligence area we looked
at, and made recommendations about, budgets. We did not have a
chance, given the six months we had for this commission, to look
deeply into the whole counterterrorism budget. But we did conclude
that the CIA, the FBI, and particularly the National Security
Agency need more resources. And in the case of the NSA, we believe
there are some structural changes that also need to be made.
SUPPORT FOR TERRORISM
The
second general area we looked at was the question of support for
terrorism. One of the phenomena of the 1990s has been the decline
in overt state support for terrorism. This can be put down to a
success for America's policy and the leadership America has exerted
for almost 15 years now in the fight against terrorism. State
sponsors are less evident. They are still around, and we cited in
particular Iran and Syria in this respect.
In
the case of Iran, we said that while there are obviously
interesting political developments going on inside of Iran, the
fact is that even since Mohammad Khatami was elected president of
Iran, Iranian support for terrorism, particularly in the Middle
East, has increased. Now you can argue about whether he has control
or doesn't have control. This is an interesting argument, but
basically this should not have anything to do with America's policy
toward Iran. After all, he is the president, and the government of
Iran is responsible. They are conducting terrorist attacks. The
commission recommended no further concessions by the American
government toward the Iranians until they have actually stopped
support for terrorism.
Khatami yesterday in Berlin once again
said he welcomes the latest speech by the Secretary of State. In
the last year and a half the U.S. government has repeatedly said we
want better relations with Iran. In her speech in March, the
Secretary changed American policies toward Iran as a gesture to
them. Khatami's response yesterday was to assert that the U.S. had
not done enough. The commission thinks our government has done
enough; and we should tell the Iranians: "Now stop your support of
terrorism." In particular we have cited the evidence that Iran may
have been involved in the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia
which killed 19 American servicemen in 1996.
We
have suggested that the administration should push our allies much
harder to support us in getting Iranians to cooperate on a criminal
investigation into Khobar Towers. In other words, de-politicize the
issue as we did with the Pan Am 103 bombing and say that this is a
criminal issue and although you Europeans may disagree with us on
our approach to Iran, as you disagreed with our approach on Libya,
you ought to be able to bring pressure to bear on the Iranians to
cooperate on the criminal investigation into the Khobar Towers
bombing.
Similarly with Syria, the commission said
we thought there should be no movement toward giving Syria a clean
bill of health until they stop their support for terrorism.
As
state support has decreased or gone underground, terrorist groups
are turning more and more to privatization, like everybody else.
They have gone to raising their own money. They are doing their
IPOs here and there and they are using non-governmental
organizations and front organizations. They are raising money from
dupes or people who are sympathizers but don't realize they are
supporting terrorism. We believe that the American government has
had too narrow an approach to going after this terrorist
fundraising. Our government has focused too much on a particular
law that was passed in 1996. The commission suggested that the
government should take a much broader approach toward going after
terrorist fundraising. It is not an easy field. It's not an easy
one to make good cases on, but it is an area that we think is
important to concentrate on.
CATASTROPHIC TERRORISM
And
finally, we considered the possibility of catastrophic terrorism.
By catastrophic terrorism we mean a terrorist act or a series of
terrorist acts causing tens of thousands of casualties. Here we
came up with three main points. We believe that you cannot put a
probability on the possibility of catastrophic terrorism. But we
have to say it can no longer be excluded. First, because as I
suggested at the outset, the motivation seems to have changed.
Secondly, the technology is more available today than it was ten
years ago and not in the least through the Internet. And so we
looked at this and said there are several things that we think
should be done.
First of all, the most likely threat is
from biological terrorism, at least in terms of creating thousands
of casualties. And we came up with two things that should be done
on biological terrorist threats. First of all, biological agents,
the pathogens which can be turned into deadly things such as
anthrax or smallpox, should be much more tightly controlled than
they are now in the United States. We said the goal should be that
biological agents become as tightly controlled as nuclear agents
have been for the last fifty years. That is the standard and there
a number of things that can be done in the law to bring it up to
that standard.
Secondly, it is not easy to make a
biological agent into a weapon. As it turns out, it is difficult.
You need specialized equipment. It happens that the United States
government already controls much of that specialized equipment for
export. You cannot export a lot of that equipment. But you can sell
it domestically. And we suggested that this anomaly ought to be
fixed. There ought to be controls on the specialized equipment for
domestic sales. We are talking about very specialized fermentation
chambers, aerosol inhalation chambers, cross-flow filtration
systems--very sophisticated equipment that is already banned for
export but is not controlled for domestic sale. We suggested that
the Congress ought to consider requiring that such equipment be
tagged in some way, so that it in some way can be traced. This will
involve a lot of work between Congress and the private sector, as
many things do these days.
Next, we think it is important to
establish a long-term R&D program to look into areas such as
detection technologies in biological and chemical agents,
development of anti-virals for smallpox, etc. The government has a
good short-term R&D program that we looked at, run jointly by
the State Department and Defense Department. It seems to work well,
but tends to be tactical and short-term. We suggested that the
President establish a long-term R&D program, perhaps at one of
the national labs and take the sort of approach that was taken
after the war towards nuclear technology. The long-term R&D
program would focus on technologies which need to be looked at in
the long term with a horizon of seven to ten years out.
Finally, we looked at the question of how
the United States government is organized, if I can use the word
loosely, to respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack. And we
found that it was possible to imagine a situation where there was a
catastrophic attack or a series of attacks or which took place
while we were in hostilities with a foreign power, where the
President would want the Department of Defense as the lead agency
in responding to such an attack. This seems to have gotten
everybody's nerves in this town even more exposed than they were
before, particularly at the Pentagon. But the fact of the matter is
that there is no other institution that has the command and
control, the communications, and the logistic capabilities in this
country of DOD. It seems clear to me that in the event of a
catastrophic attack of some kind where you have tens of thousands
of casualties, where the American people are going to be screaming
for a response, that a President is going to want to consider using
the military in some fashion.
Our
argument is that you had better think about that beforehand, not
afterwards. If you are concerned with civil liberties, that is an
even better reason to think about it beforehand. And the example we
use is Pearl Harbor, which was certainly by anybody's definition a
catastrophic attack on the American people. After Pearl Harbor
America's two great 20th century liberals, Franklin D. Roosevelt
and Earl Warren, locked up Japanese-Americans. Our view is that the
best way to assure that in the wake of a catastrophic event you do
not trample on our constitutional rights and on the civil liberties
we have come to take for granted, is to think about it ahead of
time to make plans and to exercise them ahead of time.
That
is all that we have recommended. That the scenario should be
thought about, it should be planned, and it should be exercised,
and hopefully put on a shelf to gather dust for the next hundred
years. But it is better to get prepared for catastrophic terrorism
than to try to improvise afterwards.
These were the commission's conclusions.
We are saying that we think that America's counterterrorist policy
is more or less on track. We think that there are three or four
major areas where more can be done. We expect the threat to
continue to increase, but if these prudent and balanced
recommendations are followed by the executive branch and by
Congress, fewer Americans will die from terrorism in the years
ahead.
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer,
formerly Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism, served as the
chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism.