U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

74–263 DTP WASHINGTON : 2001

COMBATING TERRORISM: ASSESSING THREATS,

RISK MANAGEMENT AND ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES

HEARING

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY,

VETERANS AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

OF THE

COMMITTEE ON

GOVERNMENT REFORM

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

JULY 26, 2000

Serial No. 106–253

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house

http://www.house.gov/reform

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: (202) 512–1800 Fax: (202) 512–2250

Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–0001

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman

BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York

CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

STEPHEN HORN, California

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia

DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

MARSHALL ‘‘MARK’’ SANFORD, South

Carolina

BOB BARR, Georgia

DAN MILLER, Florida

ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas

LEE TERRY, Nebraska

JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois

GREG WALDEN, Oregon

DOUG OSE, California

PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin

HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho

DAVID VITTER, Louisiana

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

ROBERT E. WISE, JR., West Virginia

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,

DC

CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

JIM TURNER, Texas

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

HAROLD E. FORD, JR., Tennessee

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

KEVIN BINGER, Staff Director

DANIEL R. MOLL, Deputy Staff Director

JAMES C. WILSON, Chief Counsel

ROBERT A. BRIGGS, Clerk

PHIL SCHILIRO, Minority Staff Director

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, VETERANS AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL

RELATIONS

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut, Chairman

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

DAVID M. MCINTOSH, Indiana

MARSHALL ‘‘MARK’’ SANFORD, South

Carolina

LEE TERRY, Nebraska

JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois

HELEN CHENOWETH-HAGE, Idaho

ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois

TOM LANTOS, California

ROBERT E. WISE, JR., West Virginia

JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts

THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

JANICE D. SCHAKOWSKY, Illinois

EX OFFICIO

DAN BURTON, Indiana HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

LAWRENCE J. HALLORAN, Staff Director and Counsel

R. NICHOLAS PALARINO, Senior Policy Analyst

JASON CHUNG, Clerk

DAVID RAPALLO, Minority Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on July 26, 2000 ............................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Bremer, Ambassador Paul, chairman, National Commission on Terrorism;

Michael Wermuth, Rand Corp., senior policy analyst; John Parachini,

Monterey Institute of International Studies, executive director; and

W. Seth Carus, National Defense University, senior research professor . 42

Rabkin, Norman, General Accounting Office, Director, National Security

and International Affairs Division, accompanied by Stephen Caldwell,

Assistant Director; and Raphael Perl, Congressional Research Service,

Specialist in International Affairs ............................................................... 5

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Blagojevich, Hon. Rod R., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Illinois, letter dated July 26, 2000 .......................................................... 97

Carus, W. Seth, National Defense University, senior research professor,

prepared statement of ................................................................................... 82

Parachini, John, Monterey Institute of International Studies, executive

director, prepared statement of ................................................................... 57

Perl, Raphael, Congressional Research Service, Specialist in International

Affairs, prepared statement of ..................................................................... 25

Rabkin, Norman, General Accounting Office, Director, National Security

and International Affairs Division, prepared statement of ....................... 7

Shays, Hon. Christopher, a Representative in Congress from the State

of Connecticut, prepared statement of ........................................................ 3

Wermuth, Michael, Rand Corp., senior policy analyst, prepared statement

of ..................................................................................................................... 47

(1)

COMBATING TERRORISM: ASSESSING

THREATS, RISK MANAGEMENT AND ESTABLISHING PRIORITIES

WEDNESDAY, JULY 26, 2000

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON NATIONAL SECURITY, VETERANS

AFFAIRS, AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM,

Washington, DC.

The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1 p.m., in room

2247, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Christopher Shays

(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Shays and Blagojevich.

Staff present: Lawrence Halloran, staff director and counsel; J.

Vincent Chase, chief investigator; R. Nicholas Palarino, senior policy advisor; Thomas Costa, professional staff member; Jason M.

Chung, clerk; David Rapallo, minority counsel; and Earley Green,

minority assistant clerk.

Mr. SHAYS. The hearing will come to order. Earlier today we

heard testimony in closed session from those familiar with very

specific and very sensitive aspects of the threats posed by terrorists

to U.S. citizens and property at home and abroad. That information

provided some depth and clarity to the subcommittee’s ongoing

oversight of governmentwide terrorism issues.

But terrorism also has a very public face. Using fear and panic

as weapons, terrorists seek to amplify and transform crimes

against humanity into acts of war. The growing and changing

threat of terrorism requires an ongoing public discussion of the appropriate strategy, priorities and resources to protect public health

and national security.

That discussion brings us here this afternoon. As this point in

the evolution of our post cold war response to the new realities of

a dangerous world, we should have a dynamic, integrated assessment of the threat posed by foreign and domestic-origin terrorism.

We should have a truly national strategy to counter the threat.

And to implement that strategy, we should have a clear set of priorities to guide Federal programs and funding decisions.

But for reasons of bureaucratic Balkanization, program proliferation, and a tendency to skew threat assessments toward worst-case

scenarios, we still lack those important elements of a mature, effective policy to combat terrorism. In place of a national strategy, the

administration points to an accumulation of event driven Presidential decision directives wrapped in a budget-driven 5-year plan.

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Congress has also contributed to the fragmentation and shifting

priorities in counterterrorism programs, responding to crises with

new laws and increased funding, but failing to reconcile or sustain

those efforts over time.

Yesterday, the House passed the Preparedness Against Terrorism Act of 2000 (H.R. 4210) to elevate and better focus responsibility for Federal programs to combat terrorism. If enacted into law,

the bill should provide greater structure and discipline to the $11

billion effort to deter, detect and respond to terrorism. But any rearrangement of boxes on the organizational chart will only be effective if those involved are able to distinguish between theoretical

vulnerabilities and genuine risks, and set clear priorities.

So we asked our witnesses this afternoon to join our public oversight of these pressing issues. As the administration and Congress

attempt to refine threat and risk assessments, formulate strategic

goals and target program funding, this subcommittee will continue

to rely on their experience and their insights. We welcome them

and look forward to their testimony, and you have been sworn in

because in our closed door hearing you were all sworn in. So we

can just have you begin.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Christopher Shays follows:]

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Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Rabkin.

STATEMENTS OF NORMAN RABKIN, GENERAL ACCOUNTING

OFFICE, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AND INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS DIVISION, ACCOMPANIED BY STEPHEN

CALDWELL, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR; AND RAPHAEL PERL,

CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE, SPECIALIST IN

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

Mr. RABKIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. With me is Steve

Caldwell, who has been responsible for managing much of the GAO

work, examining the Federal efforts to combat terrorism. We are

pleased to be here this afternoon to discuss the use of threat and

risk assessments to help prioritize and focus Federal resources to

combat terrorism. This is an important issue because over 40 Federal agencies are involved, and the amount of Federal spending for

combating terrorism will rise to $11 billion in the next fiscal year.

I would like to summarize the three main messages of my statement. The first message concerns the nature of the threat. How

likely is it that a terrorist will use a chemical or biological weapon

against the United States? The subcommittee was briefed this

morning about the intelligence communities views on the threat

Americans face from terrorist groups. When thinking about the

threat, it is important to recognize that terrorists would face many

difficulties using dangerous chemical or biological materials. First,

the required components of chemical agents and highly infective

strains of biological agents are difficult to obtain.

Second, in most cases, specialized knowledge is required in the

manufacturing process and in improvising an effective delivery device for most chemical and nearly all biological agents that would

likely be used in terrorist attacks. Finally, terrorists may have to

overcome other obstacles to successfully launch an attack that

would result in mass casualties such as unfavorable meteorological

conditions and personal safety risks.

Our point is that policymakers should keep these inherent difficulties in mind when considering how the United States should

act to prepare for and defend against these threats. Also, intelligence agencies should balance their assessments of the threat

with the discussion of the difficulty in manufacturing and delivering it.

Our second message is the need to use threat and risk assessments to help develop a national strategy and help prioritize and

focus program investments to combat terrorism. Much of the Federal effort to combat terrorism has been based upon vulnerabilities

which are unlimited rather than on an analysis of credible threats

which are limited. Some agencies have used and are still using

worst case scenarios to plan and develop programs. For example,

the Department of Health and Human Services began to establish

a national pharmaceutical and vaccine stockpile that did not match

intelligence agencies estimates of the more likely agents that terrorists might use. On the other hand, the Justice Department has

started to develop a national threat and risk assessment. Justice

is also supporting efforts of State and local governments to assess

the threats they may face and the risks inherent in the choices

they have on how to respond to those threats.

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I would like to add that we remain concerned about whether the

executive branch will develop a comprehensive national strategy

for combating terrorism. In December, 1998, the Attorney General

issued a 5-year plan that has many of the features that we would

like to see in a national strategy. The recent update no longer include time lines, relative priorities or performance measures. In addition, the FBI, through the National Domestic Preparedness Office

and the National Security Council, are also planning to develop national strategies. We also have concerns about who is in charge. As

you know, in May 1998, Presidential Decision Directive 62 established the national coordinator for security, infrastructure protection, and counterterrorism in the National Security Council. However, H.R. 4210, which passed the House yesterday, will create a

President’s council on domestic terrorism preparedness in the

White House with authorities similar to those of a drug czar. In addition, the Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed elevating the NPDO to a higher status within the Justice Department to

be headed by an assistant attorney general.

My final message is how other countries allocate resources and

determine funding priorities to combat terrorism. Foreign countries

also face terrorist threats and have to develop programs and priorities to combat terrorism. In our April 2000 report to the subcommittee, we discussed how five foreign countries, Canada,

France, the United Kingdom, Israel, and Germany, are organized

to combat terrorism, including how they develop programs and direct resources. Our overall conclusions were that first, foreign officials believed that terrorist attacks are unlikely for a variety of

reasons, including the reason that terrorists would face in producing and delivering chemical or biological weapons. Second, because

of limited resources, these foreign governments make funding decisions for programs to combat terrorism based upon the likelihood

of terrorist activity actually taking place, not on overall vulnerability to terrorist attacks.

And finally, also due to resource constraints, these officials said

that they maximize their existing capabilities to address a wide

array of threats before they create new capabilities or programs to

respond to such attacks.

Mr. Chairman, this completes my oral statement, and Mr.

Caldwell and I will be glad to answer your questions.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Rabkin follows:]

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Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Perl.

Mr. PERL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Threat assessment is integrally linked to dramatic changes taking place in the global economy and the technology infrastructure. These changes may influence and affect terrorist goals, tactics, organizations and weaponry.

As the United States grows stronger economically, militarily and

politically, our enemies may be even more tempted to attack our

Nation with asymmetric weaponry. The evolving threat raises important questions regarding the structure, organization, preparedness and ability of governments to respond to a threat that has

been characterized as more difficult, diffuse, and dangerous. We

must ask ourselves, does the way we look at the problem reflect the

real world? The global economy is bringing together deregulation,

trends toward deregulation, open borders and enhanced movement

of people, goods and services. We are witnessing the spread of democracy, the spread of capitalism and free trade and global access

to information and new technologies. These trends provide opportunities for the terrorist as well. This globalization facilitates the

ability of individual terrorist and terrorist groups to operate in a

relatively unregulated environment, and the development of the

world economy and modern communication systems have made it

possible for small groups and even private individuals to fund terrorism at a level available previously only to States. Today, many

of the advantages historically available to counterterrorism forces,

even those with large resources, are potentially neutralized by instantaneous secure communications available to the terrorist

through Internet and other technologies.

Many believe that terrorism is increasingly assuming a national

security dimension. On the other hand, what some have characterized as a new and growing opportunistic relationship between terrorism and organized crime could well result in an increased role

for law enforcement and terrorist threat assessment. A growing

concern is that when faced with a growing number of anonymous

terrorist acts, authorities may be unable to quickly and definitively

assign responsibility, therefore, neutralizing the effectiveness of

any potential deterrent action. Another concern is what are the unintended consequences of our counterterrorism assumptions and

policies. By hardening military targets and Embassies overseas,

U.S. commercial sites or residential sites may become more likely

targets.

Today, simply by implied threats, terrorists can cause the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars by governments, but on

the other hand, ignoring threats by groups that have engaged in

terrorism in the past is generally not thought to be an acceptable

policy option. A major challenge facing us is not to lose the creativity, spontaneity and boldness of individual agency threat assessments in the dynamics of the interagency process; but on the other

hand, in the interagency process, relative data and relevant data

is reviewed and exchanged and working relationships among personnel are strengthened and improved. Some experts have looked

to the drug czar model in seeking to reform government structures

to deal with terrorism. And increasingly, terrorist organizations are

looking to the drug trade for a source of funding.

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The Office of National Drug Control Policy, we have heard a lot

about it today, is unique in the Federal bureaucracy and emerging

international and domestic responsibilities and in providing policy

direction to operations through the budget process. A strong director with a strong personality and strong backing from a President

has been said to command the respect of a 500-pound gorilla in the

interagency community.

Others, however, suggest that the effectiveness of the drug czar’s

office in bringing together the diverse elements of the interagency

community is mixed at best. A substantial challenge lies ahead for

the counterterrorism community. A concept may be increasingly

gaining ground to limit the presence of U.S. personnel at Embassies overseas.

Critical to threat assessment is the need to get smarter, not just

protecting against from threats from outsiders, but smarter about

threats posed by people with legitimate access. This includes acts

of carelessness by insiders. A chain is only as strong as its weakest

link. The need to continue efforts to enhance our vigilance, to minimize potential threats posed by outsiders working at Embassies

and military installations overseas is strong.

Critical to threat assessment is a better understanding of the

countries and cultures where foreign terrorists are bred and operate. Some experts have suggested including know your money in

agency’s budgets. This and the establishment of an interagency

counterterrorism reserve contingency fund may warrant consideration. However, other experts are concerned about lack of accountability such a fund may offer and the fact that money may be spent

for purposes other than intended. One of the most important challenges facing the counterterrorism community is to ensure that our

antiterrorism efforts are fully coordinated. The Oklahoma City

bombing and other events have demonstrated that terrorism is not

limited to those areas where we are prepared for it.

The challenges facing us in assessing threats, allocating resources, and ensuring an effective congressional role in

counterterrorism policy are complex. But inherent in challenges are

opportunities to bring together the diverse elements of the

counterterrorism community. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you, Mr. Perl.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Perl follows:]

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Mr. SHAYS. When I get back, I am going to ask staff to ask questions. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to let them do it while I am

not here. I am going to quickly vote and hustle back here. So we

stand in recess.

[Recess.]

Mr. SHAYS. I will call this hearing to order and I would like to

recognize the committee counsel, Mr. Halloran.

Mr. HALLORAN. Thank you.

Mr. Rabkin, I want to go through some parts of your written

statement and get you to amplify a little bit. In discussing the limitations and technical challenges that terrorists might face in trying

to use chemical or biological weapons and radiological weapons in

particular, you said that they are not often in public statements.

Do you find them included in internal discussions or internal documents?

Mr. RABKIN. A lot of the supporting documentation which is usually classified contains much more of a discussion of these reality

factors. It is just in some public statements there is not much qualification given, just that these groups can make these weapons and

are likely to use them.

Mr. HALLORAN. Is it your judgment that those limitations are realistically reflected in net threat assessments that are used, more

realistic than in the public statements?

Mr. RABKIN. I am not in a position to say that they made a net

assessment. The net intelligence estimates are a term of art that

means certain things. My understanding is that most of these

qualifications are reflected in those kinds of documents.

Mr. CALDWELL. I have one other thing that I want to add. Our

statement says that some officials are not including these qualifications. In some public statements we have seen them. The head of

the Defense Intelligence Agency before the Senate Intelligence

Committee had some of these kinds of qualifiers in there, but we

don’t find them made in statements by DCI and others, and those

hold the most overall weight when people are assessing the threat

of chemical or biological terrorism.

Mr. HALLORAN. On page 6, you say that you have recently seen

some progress in terms of assessing threat assessment? Can you

amplify that a little more?

Mr. RABKIN. First, on a broad and macro level we recommended

that the Justice Department, through the FBI, do a net intelligence

estimate of the threat from chemical and biological terrorism domestically, domestic sources to complement an assessment that had

been done by the CIA regarding that threat from foreign sources.

The Justice Department has started the process for preparing that

estimate.

Also, when we talk about risk assessments being done at a State

and local level, the analytical basis for making these kinds of risk

assessments, taking threats and understanding the vulnerabilities

of the assets that are at risk, some of the countermeasures that are

possible and weighing the costs against the threats, the structure

for doing that has been—the Justice Department has prepared

some materials that would be helpful to State and local governments and are providing those to the government, so at the State

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and local levels, the risk assessments can be done and the funding

decisions that come from them can be more analytically based.

Mr. HALLORAN. So using that tool, the Justice Department might

prevent local risk assessments from being simply laundry lists of

vulnerabilities?

Mr. RABKIN. That is the hope. Certainly, the structure is there.

How it is being used remains to be seen. As a coordinator, the Justice Department can help State and local governments through the

use of best practices and not have them reinvent the wheel. Here

is a tool that can be used if they want to.

Mr. HALLORAN. The FBI testimony which is not classified, they

gave us an unclassified version of it, describes or discusses your

recommendations and says at one point that a net or a comprehensive threat assessment such as you recommend would be inherently

too broad based to provide much value. Instead, the FBI have concentrated on providing more focused threat assessments for major

special events. Do you agree with that?

Mr. RABKIN. I think there is room for both. What we are talking

about provides broad oversight as to whether the threat is increasing, whether there are certain aspects of the threat that are becoming more pronounced than others and can make some of the more

strategic decisions about the level of funding that Congress ought

to be providing, where it is being directed, and whether there is

adequate research and development being conducted, etc.

On a more operational or tactical level, the FBI is right, they

have to remain up to date, not that these broader assessments cannot be routinely updated, but as a particular threat develops for a

particular location or a particular event, I think that the FBI and

other intelligence agencies, by focusing at that level, can deal with

that issue. What we were talking about was much more strategic,

and so therefore, I think there is room for both.

Mr. HALLORAN. Your statement says in your current work, you

continue to find worst case scenarios are being used to develop

planning capabilities, and one example in your statement was the

selection of items for the pharmaceutical stockpiles. Can you give

us some other examples where worst case scenarios are driving

program planning?

Mr. CALDWELL. On the CBRN response teams, we have found

that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has put together

some scenarios to plan which teams and what size and how they

would respond, which is using worst case scenarios, in terms of

mass casualties and things that are not based, in our view, in

terms of validated intelligence, nor the science behind the threat in

terms of some of the difficulties, and whether this kind of attack

would even be feasible. Again, those are potentially being used to

decide which Federal teams need to be beefed up, and so potentially, where resources would be developed.

Mr. HALLORAN. Mr. Perl, in your statement, you talk about the

drug czar model, and you gave two sides of a good argument. What

might be inept about that model when tried to apply to the terrorism issue?

Mr. PERL. What might be inept in the way that the model currently exists would be the need for the office to get ongoing authorization from Congress. There are advantages from the viewpoint of

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congressional control, but in terms of the respect and clout that you

have in the interagency community, there is a concern that this

particular institution outside the community might not be around

in a few years, maybe we can simply wait it out. That would be

one problem.

Another potential problem from the perspective you are asking

me to portray would be the drug czar’s office, and this is something

good, but on the flip side, it could be a problem. The drug czar’s

office has a staff of 124 people plus some detailees. One of the

things that one needs to consider in making these decisions is how

much staff does one need. So, for example, the current structure in

the NSC does not have 123 people working on terrorism.

Now, the size of the budget for the drug czar’s office—for the

drug war and the size for the terrorism war is relatively compatible

in terms of numbers. There is not great differences in terms of resources being committed, and many different segments of the Federal community are involved and the State and local communities

and international interaction. So lack of staffing can be a serious

problem to the effectiveness of an office of that type.

At the same time, people in the drug czar’s office would argue

for more flexibility in staffing, that Congress currently on the appropriations process has put a limit of 124 people, and each additional full-time employee slot needs authorization from Congress.

So from the perspective of people in an office of that type, they

would like usually to have more flexibility. Of course, from the

viewpoint of congressional oversight, this enables the Congress to

control the size of the office and influences kind of its growth.

Mr. HALLORAN. Your work on foreign government or foreign approaches to this problem, did you find a more—in any instances,

a more comprehensive order or unified threat assessment process

than you found here?

Mr. RABKIN. The answer is no.

Mr. CALDWELL. The answer is no. I think when we talked to

countries about how they came up with their decisions in terms of

leveraging existing resources rather than creating new programs

and capabilities, some of that process might have gone into their

decisions on other areas. For example, they make decisions that

they had robust disaster management assets in place or robust

hazardous materials, emergency response capabilities, and perhaps

because they had already made those types of investments, they

decided that those were the ones that they would then leverage to

deal with the terrorist involving chemical or biological materials.

Mr. HALLORAN. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. We are joined by Mr. Blagojevich, but I

would like counsel to ask questions on this side. David Rapallo has

some questions.

Mr. RAPALLO. Mr. Rabkin, on the importance of a threat and risk

assessment, it is comprehensive and includes threats to national,

international and military resources. Is it your position that any

prioritization or any attempt by the administration to put programs in order based on the funding levels is flawed without this

type of assessment?

Mr. RABKIN. I wouldn’t say that it is flawed, but I think it could

benefit any decisionmaking process on where additional dollars are

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going or would help—would be helped by having this kind of an assessment. It would also be helpful over time, as threat changed or

as the overall risk threat level changed, it would be helpful in identifying whether the funding level needed to change accordingly.

Mr. RAPALLO. Would any proposed change that the administration suggests not be as comprehensive?

Mr. RABKIN. I would say until we have a comprehensive assessment which would better guide, and until we have a national strategy in place that would better guide some of these resource decisions, I don’t think that it is wise just to suspend making those decisions. The government has to do what it feels best, the agencies

are in a position, although it may not be well coordinated and focused on a commonly accepted goal, but at least they are moving

forward in some fashion. I don’t think that it would be responsible

just to stop that and wait until we got a strategy, a plan, or better

assessment.

Mr. RAPALLO. One of the later panelists has in his written testimony a quote by CIA Director George Tenet before the Senate, saying chemical and biological weapons pose arguably the most

daunting challenge for intelligence collections and analysis. There

are and will remain significant gaps in our knowledge. As I have

said before, Tenet said before, there is continued and growing risk

of surprise.

I am wondering is a comprehensive threat and risk analysis with

threats to national, international and military targets even possible? And if it is, would that lose too much detail to be useful?

Mr. RABKIN. I think it becomes a question of defining how much

detail is going to be in it, but I think it would be possible. It would

seem to me to be a compilation of what is known about that threat

that Mr. Tenet was talking about. That kind of information is very

helpful in making this kind of an analysis and assessment.

As they fill in the gaps, as they get more—as the intelligence

community gets and analyzes more information about this and

learns more about it, they can use that for the assessment to better

direct the efforts and resources of the rest of the executive branch.

Mr. RAPALLO. Mr. Perl, do you have any thoughts on this that

you would like to add?

Mr. PERL. No.

Mr. RAPALLO. One thing that we don’t complete a threat and risk

assessment for is to identify duplication. Do you see any duplicative efforts as far as intelligence gathering and that sort of thing

related to what we heard this morning?

Mr. RABKIN. I don’t have any evidence of duplication. We have

not looked at whether the intelligence community is duplicating efforts in their data gathering and analysis activities. We have noted

duplication in other areas, first responder training, for example,

and have reported to this committee on that. But not on the intelligence side.

Mr. PERL. You previous question on whether I have any

thoughts, that is, on the previous panels this morning, the issue of

the need for flexibility was raised. The variability of the threat, the

changing nature of it and the need for flexibility in our response.

And one of the concerns is that if one does long-term planning,

there will always be a certain amount of disconnect between real

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immediate threats and the long-term planning. So whatever the

process is, there has to be—it would be important to build in a

process of periodic review and some flexibility in the way funds can

be shifted.

Mr. RAPALLO. You don’t think that exists with the working

groups within the NSC structure?

Mr. PERL. Budget cycles tends to be a little bit longer. The working groups have the ability to move things around, but now when

there are shortfalls, what happens is that the process is usually,

or hopefully from the agency perspective, made up by the supplemental appropriations process. To some degree, I am not suggesting that agencies wouldn’t take actions in the national interest because they may not have the funding for it, but whenever agencies

take actions, funding is a consideration.

Mr. RAPALLO. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Gentlemen, I would like to just throw out one type

of threat. Please tell me how it fits into the overall response to terrorism and that is, the military’s determination that they need to

immunize all military personnel with anthrax. Would a comprehensive sense of what our threat is get us to be able to put that in

some focus?

Mr. RABKIN. The policy decision that Secretary Cohen made to

require that all military personnel be immunized against anthrax

was based on the military context, the likelihood that military

troops would be involved in a situation where state enemies would

use anthrax as a biological weapon. And that the only viable alternative, the only viable option for them to use was vaccination; that

because of the detection period and the kind of time that takes

place and the delay in recognizing symptoms, that that was the

only solution.

The more information that DOD has about who has anthrax and

who is in terms of state enemies and who is likely to use it provides more justification or more information upon which that policy

can be reviewed. Similarly, other information about the safety and

efficacy of the vaccine and the administration period, the troubles

that the manufacturer is having providing an adequate supply of

the vaccine, all of these bits of information that were not available

when the original decision was made, can also be useful in revisiting the decision. So I think as most policy decisions, just about any

policy decision, the more information you have, the more you can

reflect on whether it is an appropriate decision and whether it

needs revisiting.

Mr. SHAYS. Does anyone else want to respond before I followup?

Mr. PERL. I agree, basically it is a question of the probability and

the reality of anthrax being employed, and this is a decision that

the Secretary of Defense has made. I am not qualified to make that

decision. But if it is a high probability, logically, it would seem that

U.S. troops should be vaccinated because this is a very contagious

disease.

Mr. SHAY. That is my followup. Is the vaccine a modern vaccine

or a 1950’s vaccine, and can we reproduce it to cover all of our

troops. But it gets into that fact that we have civilians and to what

extent should civilians who are in these theaters be vaccinated. I

am just trying to get a sense of how a master focus on the threat,

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a master plan focus on the threat, integrates the response that the

military has to have and the whole argument that the military has

to respond to it, that this is a biological agent that can be produced

by a terrorist in those theaters. For instance, the State Department

people, do we require State Department people to take this vaccine?

Mr. PERL. Not to my knowledge.

Mr. RABKIN. It is voluntary at the State Department.

Mr. SHAYS. I am trying to get a sense in your judgment of how

we integrate what the military sees versus—and the threat to their

own military personnel versus all other Americans.

Mr. RABKIN. If we talk about the model that the Department of

Defense used to make the decision, they assess likelihood that the

threat would be used, the consequences if it were used, they looked

at alternatives, is there any alternative available that could be

used other than a vaccine to allow the troops to survive such an

attack and be effective, and the decision was made back in 1997,

I think, based on information and assumptions at that time.

Mr. SHAYS. And they left out some very important aspects. They

left out the aspect whether they should proceed with an older generation vaccine or develop a new one. They left out whether they

should do a vaccine where they knew they could have supply, and

the reason that I am asking is not to critique the Department of

Defense, but to understand if a comprehensive threat analysis

would lead us into the same mistake or whether we would have

been spared the mistake the military has made. The military has

made a mistake. They have approximately 1 month’s supply to 6

months, depending on to what extent they use it.

I am asking, in your judgment, a comprehensive analysis of the

need and a coordinated effort would have enabled us to, in responding to terrorism, come to a different response or to take into consideration things that the military left out?

Mr. RABKIN. I am not ready to agree that the military made a

mistake when it passed the policy. There certainly have been problems in implementing the policy in terms of securing a continuous

supply of the vaccine to be able to administer it as it was intended.

Mr. SHAYS. Let me ask you not to—I’m not trying to make a

major point. You are not prepared to say that they made a mistake,

because you don’t have the knowledge, or that you have the knowledge but just don’t know what the conclusion is. Is this something

that you have any—do you have significant expertise on this issue?

Mr. RABKIN. GAO has done some work on this issue, both in

terms of the safety and efficacy of the vaccine as well as the administration of the program, and I am speaking from that basis, the

work that we have done.

We have not reached the conclusion, Mr. Chairman, that the Department of Defense made a mistake in adopting the policy that it

did. We have reached conclusions about—there are unanswered

questions about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine. There were

improvements needed in education of the troops about the vaccine,

about adverse reporting—reporting of adverse reactions to the vaccine, etc.

But in the context of the threat and risk assessment, I think that

if you apply the model that we are talking about of a threat and

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risk assessment and risk management to the specific issue of military troops facing a potential biological or anthrax threat in a combat situation, I can see how the decision was made. And that model

was used and we may not agree with the way that the decision was

made and the assumptions.

Mr. SHAYS. I guess my problem, in my judgment, after having

countless hearings on this issue, whatever model they used, was a

flawed model, in my judgment. I am not saying that GAO has

made that determination. I just wanted to know if the model that

we will use for the civilian world will be a bit different, and in response to terrorism, because they are running out and they may

not get a supply for a year plus. They are having a facility produce

this that has to be solely dedicated to produce this, because it is

a 1950’s vaccine, so they can’t produce anything else in that plant

or certainly that area than this 1950’s vaccine. I get the sense of

your response.

Mr. PERL. You raise a very interesting question. I am not an expert on chemical and biological warfare per se, but an important

issue here is to what degree does military threat analysis input get

factored into the health community’s decision whether or not to

issue vaccines nationwide.

Mr. SHAYS. Right. Or to what extent is there the likelihood that

anthrax will be introduced into this country and what obligation do

we have to deal with that in this country, and are we preparing

for that?

Mr. RABKIN. That is the issue that I think the threat and risk

assessment process and procedures would have to deal with. Take

the information from the intelligence community about what is the

risk to the United States, to the citizens of the United States for

a terrorist attack using anthrax. If and when they get to the point

that they feel that is an imminent, or enough of a potential that

we need to do something about it, then we start considering alternatives and what is available. What are some of the countermeasures that are potential, and what are the costs and efficacy of

those countermeasures and those policy decisions could be made.

Maybe we need better technology.

Mr. SHAYS. Who would make that decision? I realized in the

process of asking that question I don’t know who would make that

decision.

Mr. RABKIN. Under the legislation passed yesterday, it might be

that council on domestic terrorism preparedness, because part of

their responsibility would be to take information about the threat

and to make risk assessments and to oversee some of the investment decisions that are being made, and it would have representation from the different communities, both the intelligence community, the health response community, the military community. So

that might be an avenue for making that decision.

If you look back at swine flu, for example, and how decisions

were made back in the 1970’s on that issue, it is an interagency— information comes up from the agencies and decisions are made at

the highest level in the executive and legislative branch.

Mr. SHAYS. The difference is, one was to respond to a natural

threat versus one that would be responding to a terrorism threat,

and it introduces some major policy decisions.

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Let me ask you, is there anything that you would like to respond

to that we didn’t ask? Something that you prepared for that you

think is important for us to know?

Mr. RABKIN. One of the issues that we wanted to get across was

the need for a national strategy.

Mr. PERL. I think the committee has done a wonderful job in covering the issues.

Mr. SHAYS. We appreciate you for coming this morning and this

afternoon.

Mr. RABKIN. Thank you for the opportunity to testify.

Mr. SHAYS. We will move now to the second panel. I call our second panel, Ambassador Paul Bremer, chairman, National Commission on Terrorism; former Ambassador at large for

counterterrorism; and Mr. Michael Wermuth, RAND Corp., senior

policy analyst; Mr. John Parachini, Monterey Institute of International Studies, executive director; and Mr. W. Seth Carus, National Defense University, senior research professor.

I am going to ask you to stand and I will swear you in.

[Witnesses sworn.]

Mr. SHAYS. Ambassador, go ahead.

STATEMENTS OF AMBASSADOR PAUL BREMER, CHAIRMAN,

NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORISM; MICHAEL

WERMUTH, RAND CORP., SENIOR POLICY ANALYST; JOHN

PARACHINI, MONTEREY INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL

STUDIES, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR; AND W. SETH CARUS, NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY, SENIOR RESEARCH PROFESSOR

Mr. BREMER. Thank you. The National Commission on Terrorism

delivered its report to Congress and to the President on June 5. We

addressed the threat as we saw it, among other things, and the

main point that we made in that report was that the threat is

changing and becoming more serious, and we paid particular attention to catastrophic terrorism.

I was asked to comment on three areas of interest to this committee: First, the development of threat assessments; second, the

question of whether it would be valuable to have a national threat

assessment; and then a few words on the budget process.

On the development of threat assessments, it is obvious that

good intelligence is the very heart of an effective counterterrorism

policy. You can’t have a counterterrorism policy without good intelligence, particularly if you want to prevent attacks, and we focused

on preventing attacks in our commission. The commission that

Governor Gilmore chairs is looking at dealing with the consequences of attacks. We focused on prevention.

In no area is intelligence more difficult and more dangerous and

important than terrorism. We examined the Federal Government’s

look at intelligence rather in depth, and we had two concerns, both

of which related to the capability and independence of intelligence

analysis.

The first one, Mr. Chairman, was the question of whether or not

the creation of the counterterrorism center at the CIA in the mid

1980’s by putting together people from both the DI side and the DO

side of the agency would, in some way, impinge on the intelligence

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side’s ability to make objective analysis of the terrorist threat.

There was a concern that by being, in effect, co-housed with the operations people, the intelligence people might become either overwhelmed by the tactical operational demands of the operations side

of the counterterrorism center, or become, in effect, less pure in

their intelligence outlook, that their actual analysis would become

tainted in some way by being associated with the operations people.

The second concern we looked at was whether it was wise of the

government to disestablish the National Intelligence Officer for

Terrorism which was done in the early 1990’s. And we were

concerned—— Mr. SHAYS. Where did that office—— Mr. BREMER. That office was a member of the National Intelligence Council [NIC]. It was disestablished in 1991, but don’t

quote me on the year.

The concern there was that the issue would lose its place at the

high table of the intelligence community, the NIC, and would we

lose the capability, therefore, to conduct strategic level analyses of

the terrorist threat?

The results of our study was that we believe that the

counterterrorism center at CIA has, in effect, been successful at integrating the DI side of the House without impinging on its ability

to conduct objective and useful intelligence analysis of the foreign

threat.

In fact, they established a group within the counterterrorist center, which is dedicated solely to doing that, and until recently, that

group was headed by a person from another agency, which gives

it a good life and some independence.

On the question of the national intelligence officer, we talked to

all of the consumers around town and found, in fact, that they were

very satisfied with the outcome of the counterterrorism center at

CIA and did not believe, which sort of surprise me, that we should

reestablish a national terrorist officer. And so we did not recommend that in our commission. We believed that as long as the

CTC core group can keep its independence, there is no reason to

change the setup. We did make some recommendations relating to

how we go about collecting intelligence aboard and which are somewhat beyond the area I was requested to talk about today.

Second, would there be value in having a national threat assessment, the question that you asked this morning and again this

afternoon. We examined the FBI’s handling of intelligence comparable to looking at the CIA’s handling of intelligence abroad, and

concluded that the FBI does a good job of disseminating threat

warnings, immediate threat warnings when they are received.

They get these out to the community quickly.

The FBI is less good on understanding and disseminating more

general intelligence relating to the terrorist threat. Part of this is

a cultural issue. The FBI is a law enforcement agency. Their job,

they are trained to make cases, they are prosecutors and they want

to be sure when they collect evidence as they call, intelligence, as

you might otherwise call it, that they have a good chain of custody

over that evidence and they don’t, therefore, have an instinct to

share it out.

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We made recommendations here also related to the FBI establishing a cadre of officers who would, in fact, disseminate that intelligence.

We took note of the repeated suggestions by the GAO over the

past few years that the Department of Justice produce an integrated national threat assessment. To my knowledge, this has not

been done. I think, Mr. Chairman, that such a threat assessment

could be useful in giving Congress a tool to evaluate whether the

budgets for counterterrorism put forward by the Federal Government are well considered in light of the likely threats and not the

vulnerabilities. And I recognize the difficulty of producing such a

national assessment, and I know that the agencies have a preference for doing a sort of rolling assessment, as you heard this

morning, rather than doing—it seems to me that it is not an either/

or question. I think you basically have to do both. I don’t think that

there is a choice.

I think a national assessment would be good if it could be put

together and give a view as to whether the GAO’s model is the

right model, but it should not be beyond the wit of man to figure

out how to have a national assessment when, taking off my chairman’s hat at the commission and speaking as a taxpayer, when I see a budget of $11 billion and rising, as your colleague used to

say, we are getting into real money now. It seems to me that Congress has a legitimate question to know whether that money is

being well spent.

On funding for counterterrorism, we did not have time, Mr. Chairman, to look deeply into that $11 billion budget. We did reach

some conclusions about the individual budgets of CIA, FBI and

NSA, which are in our report, but it did seem to us that the budget

process at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue is pretty flawed. In

the executive branch the problem is that the national coordinator,

and I don’t know if this is going to be solved in this legislation that

is before the House, the national coordinator lacks budget authority

and political responsibility, and it seems to me whatever solution

there is to the problem of coordinating a national strategy, it must

be directed by somebody who is politically responsible, therefore

nominated and approved with the advice and consent of the Senate

and somebody who has real budget authority.

Down at this end of Pennsylvania Avenue, congressional oversight is fragmented among at least 12 committees in both Houses,

so we recommended that both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue need

to get more focused on this. Basically those are my opening remarks, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

Mr. Wermuth.

Mr. WERMUTH. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will also be brief,

and I can probably be very brief by simply identifying myself with

your opening remarks and passing to the next witness, and will

likewise address threat assessments and the benefit of having an

integrated threat assessment. I agree with Ambassador Bremer

that the international piece works pretty well. We should be fairly

comfortable that the process works well. You can argue and sometimes experts do argue with conclusions that are reached in some

of those contexts, but the process is tested and proven and we can

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have some comfort in that through the national intelligence estimate process that is conducted with the support of the CTC and

the Central Intelligence Agency.

Currency perhaps is another question. Given the fluid and ambiguous nature of potential threats from terrorists, you may ask

whether the process, perhaps, is too lengthy and too cumbersome

to provide a level of currency as threats may change from time to

time in the international context. And as we have heard already

today, and as I am sure you heard in closed session this morning,

I am certainly not as comfortable about how that process works on

the domestic front.

The FBI has that responsibility. You have already heard that the

FBI is taking some steps to fulfill that responsibility more effectively, but as Ambassador Bremer has mentioned and Mr. Rabkin

mentioned, they have not gotten there yet. Likewise, in my written

testimony, I used the term ‘‘cultural issue’’ in describing perhaps

the FBI’s full lack of understanding of how this process works.

There are some collaborative efforts. I think it was probably mentioned in Mr. Turchie’s unclassified testimony about how the FBI,

at least, is swapping fairly senior people with the Central Intelligence Agency in an effort to learn more about good analytical

processes, best practices, if you will, in trying to craft threat assessments that are relevant, that are comprehensive enough to be

able to help lead some of the decisions, both in the executive

branch and in the legislative branch, in terms of priorities and particularly for funding applications. But they are still not there yet,

and I was, likewise, taken by the paragraph that your counsel

mentioned in one of his questions earlier about the fact that the

FBI doesn’t believe that a broad threat assessment will be very

useful.

I just happen to disagree with that and agree with Mr. Rabkin

and Ambassador Bremer that you can have both. You can have a

broader assessment that will help guide some of the broader priorities and resource decisions as well as having the more operational

and tactically focused threat and warning pieces that would go

along with that.

So we really don’t have a fully integrated assessment yet, one

that is seamless from the international into the domestic, recognizing that there are some restrictions and barriers about how you do

all of that. But we really do need one, in my opinion, and we can

do a better job of it, the government can do a better job of it, all

of the agencies, and, in my view, do that without infringing on civil

liberties, without being intrusive or overreaching where the agencies are concerned, and without violating the very clear restrictions

on the foreign intelligence’s community ability or restriction prohibitions on them from collecting intelligence domestically.

As to the Chair’s question, is funding to combat terrorism being

properly directed? I am afraid I have to answer that with a question. How can we tell? You have heard all of the witnesses say it

so far. We don’t have a national strategy. We don’t even have a

comprehensive Federal piece of a national strategy, and no amount

of touting of Presidential decision directives or macro budget submission like came up here on May 18th, the Attorney General’s 5-

year plan, where I am not sure where that stands now, none of

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that amounts to a national strategy. There is no good coordination

mechanism. The NDPO, the National Domestic Preparedness Office, simply has not worked. It was probably misplaced in the first

place, buried that far down in the structure of the FBI without the

kind of political accountability and authority that they needed.

There is no one in charge. Interagency working group meetings,

endless meetings, is simply not sufficient, in my view, to resolve

the problem.

I know, Mr. Chairman, that you have been frustrated before in

hearings, including one that I attended on March 22nd, where you

asked some senior Federal officials who is in charge, and you really

didn’t get a clear answer because it is not clear, even at the Federal level, who is in charge.

So we need to find a way to get our collective Federal act together and then provide the national leadership to bring in the

State entities to craft a nationally oriented strategy that can be

used by every response entity everywhere in the country.

Mr. Chairman, with that I will stop. Thank you again for giving

me the opportunity to participate today.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Wermuth follows:]

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Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Parachini.

Mr. PARACHINI. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for convening this

hearing. There are a number of things ongoing and have been ongoing since 1995, and now is an appropriate time to push back and

evaluate what are we doing right and wrong. I think what is missing from our national discussion on terrorism is a regular national

predecessor. How much is enough remains an open question.

As one renowned scholar in the terrorism field has noted, without a firm understanding of the threat based on rigorous ongoing

reviews of an evolving or changing terrorist behavior and capabilities, continued efforts to address this problem may prove as ineffective as they are misplaced. So a comprehensive threat assessment

that integrates information on both domestic and international terrorist threats are a baseline tool.

At the moment, far too much of the government’s policy on terrorism is driven by perceptions of worst case scenarios. Inordinate

attention to vulnerabilities may be skewing resources in ways that

do not effectively add to the government’s efforts to protect our personnel and the facilities of private businesses and citizens at home

or overseas. Producing a comprehensive and integrated national

threat assessment which takes into account vulnerabilities as well

as the capabilities and motivations of terrorists, will improve our

national understanding of the threat and should inform the President and the Congress, as they decide upon investments, in short

and long-term programs. Policymakers prioritize spending and programming emphasis via a variety of tools, but intelligence is an essential one. The view of the intelligence community should serve as

a critical baseline. Without a regular comprehensive and integrated

threat assessment of security challenges posed by terrorism, policymakers will draw conclusions on raw and finished intelligence that

comes across their desks. A regular terrorism threat assessment

will lessen the possibility that long-term investments in program

decisions are made according to the vicissitudes of raw intelligence

and ensure, that at least on a regular basis, there is an intelligence

community benchmark calibrating that threat.

The OMB annual report on the spending is a useful document,

but it is not a substitute for a national strategy. The various Presidential decision directives are useful, but in themselves a collection

of documents put together at different times do not amount to a national strategy. So a national strategy is needed, and before you

can have a national strategy, at least one of the tools has to be a

comprehensive national threat assessment.

Let me turn to the budget such that I can point out some elements of the OMB’s report that should be improved with a national

threat assessment, and hopefully this committee will work with the

executive branch to improve the dialog on the U.S. terrorism policy.

If you look at the various OMB annual reports on spending, you

will find that the numbers do not track from year to year. That is

one thing of clarification that would be very valuable, I think, for

helping both the Congress provide adequate oversight to the American people and scholars like myself to track what the administration is doing, and it might help the administration keep on track

what they are doing. This is not an easy task. OMB has made a

great effort and the product is sound. It could be better.

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When you look at the overall budget figures thinking about a

more thorough threat assessment, one of the things that comes to

my mind about a national strategy is that we need to shift the emphasis about what we are doing. We are focused too much in my

opinion on the back end of the problem, after an event has happened, and we need to think about a slight emphasis toward the

front end. How can we prevent and preempt an attack from ever

happening in the first place?

The amount of dollars spent for things at the back end are more

than at the front end. We need to shift the emphasis. I realize that

we always want to hedge against the unexpected of something that

we never want to happen, and lives can be saved if we are better

at responding, but we have gone overboard in my opinion, because

we don’t have a good sense of a threat and we are worried about

worst case, and so we spend too much on the back end, on the after

event mop-up, and not enough is spent on providing the intelligence and law enforcement resources to try to prevent these

events from ever happening in the first place.

Let me conclude by indicating two things. In the rapid budget increases that have occurred in the last 3 and 4 years, it is very hard

to evaluate whether budget increases of 300 percent or 500 percent

in various programs within department and agencies are appropriate, out of kilter or out of control. And at least a common threat

assessment on a periodic basis would help provide a benchmark to

help figure that out.

Finally, in the research and development area, which is the most

difficult, because some of the investments that you make now don’t

bear fruit for many years into the future, we have got to have at

least some consensus that we are investing in the right things at

this point in time.

And at least some periodic regular national threat assessment

would be a helpful way to ensure that. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you very much, Mr. Parachini. Your statement

was fairly long. I appreciate you summarizing it. But it’s an excellent statement, and that, of course, as will the others, be in the

record.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Parachini follows:]

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Mr. SHAYS. Mr. Carus.

Mr. CARUS. Thank you.

Mr. SHAYS. Doctor, excuse me. I figure if you’re a doctor, you deserve to be called that.

Mr. CARUS. Well, it’s an honor to be asked to testify before your

committee.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you. It’s an honor to have you here.

Mr. CARUS. My remarks today will concentrate on the threats

and responses associated with potential terrorist use of chemical,

biological, radiological and nuclear weapons, or, for convenience,

CBRN weapons.

Let me emphasize that the remarks I’m going to make are my

personal views and don’t necessarily reflect the views of either the

Department of Defense or the National Defense University where

I work.

Let me extract three of the subjects that I discuss in more detail

in my prepared testimony, first the threat from state use of CBRN

weapons and how it should affect our view of response efforts; second, the potential for terrorist use of such weapons; and finally,

how we should think about developing responses in this arena.

First I think it’s important to keep in mind that the primary

threat from CBRN weapons comes not from terrorists, but from

hostile states. While there is considerable controversy about the

prospects of terrorist use of such weapons, we know for certain that

hostile states have acquired them, including several that the

United States could face as military adversaries. For example,

North Korea, Iran and Iraq are all assessed to have offensive biological and chemical weapons programs. Moreover the Department

of Defense now believes that use of such weapons will be a likely

condition of future warfare. So even if there were no terrorist

threat, Defense would still need to make substantial investments

in CBRN protection and mitigation capabilities.

There are numerous circumstances where it would make sense

for a state to attack or threaten to attack targets within the territory of the United States. An adversary might attack air and sea

ports of embarkation to prevent the United States from responding

to attacks in distant theaters of operation.

Similarly a hostile state might believe that credible threats to

employ such weapons especially against U.S. territory could deter

the United States from intervening in their regions, making it safe

for them to pursue aggression.

Because of the potential for asymmetric use of these weapons by

state adversaries, threat assessments focused exclusively on terrorism provide a skewed view of the challenge and are of little value

in determining the appropriate level of resources required for response. Needed CBRN response capabilities probably will not

change depending on the character of the perpetrator. A terrorist

use of the biological agent may look identical to a covert release engineered by the operatives of the state.

Let me now turn to a second issue, which is the threat posed by

terrorist use of CBRN weapons. We must start with the assumption that our picture of the threat is incomplete and likely to remain so. The available evidence suggests it is extremely difficult to

collect intelligence on some of these threats even when state proVerDate 11-MAY-2000 08:13 Aug 29, 2001 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00083 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 C:\DOCS\74263.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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grams are involved. As CIA Director George Tenet said earlier this

year about chemical and biological weapons, there is a continued

and growing risk of surprise. This reflects the difficult experience

we have trying to uncover Iraq’s programs despite highly intrusive

inspections.

For this reason we must recognize that the absence of evidence

is not proof of the absence of threat. Given the difficulties associated with collection in this arena, we must expect surprises. Hence

the right answer is to develop policies that do not depend on the

ability of the Intelligence Community to accurately assess what is

probably a—what is almost certainly a low probability, but potentially very high consequence of that.

My views reflect some of the lessons of the research during the

past few years on the illicit use of biological agents, and I’ll make

some specific comments about this. While the arguments apply to

other so-called weapons of mass destruction, I’ll admit they’re primarily focused on the problem of bioterrorism. In terms of thinking

about the threat, it’s important to be clear that terrorist groups

have shown limited interest in use of biological weapons, although

there may be slightly more interest today than was true in the

past. Thus, I’ve been able to identify fewer than 25 terrorist groups

that are known to have shown any interest in biological agents.

And only 751 people have ever been harmed in bioterrorism incidents.

Second, while most terrorists are not interested in causing mass

indiscriminate casualties, there have been a few terrorists who did

want to kill large numbers of people, and they were constrained not

by moral or political imperatives, but lacked the technical capabilities to accomplish their objectives. Thus technical limitations have

been the real barrier of past use of biological agents.

Contrary to views observe expressed that biological agents are

trivial, easy to employ, it is still extremely difficult to develop an

effective biological agent.

Finally, there is a prospect that some terrorist groups might acquire more robust capabilities in the future. The number of people

with biological experience is growing, as is access to appropriate facilities. Moreover a dedicated, well-financed group might gain access to the needed technology from a state weapons program.

It is perhaps significant that every country on the list of state

sponsors of terrorism has shown at least some interest in biological

weapons, and some have large and active programs. These considerations suggest it will be difficult to precisely delineate the bounds

of the threat. While a threat clearly exists, there’s is no way to reliably estimate the probabilities of use.

Let me conclude by making a few comments about responses that

are influenced by the preceding remarks. I strongly believe that

policymakers, as I said, must be willing to make decisions regarding investments here, recognizing that they’re not going to be able

to have more than a general sense of what the threat is. As a result, there is a danger that we’re going to spend too little and thus

not have the required response capabilities, or spend too much and

thus divert resources from other underfunded programs. For this

reason I strongly believe that we should emphasize investments

that will prove beneficial even in the absence of a CBRN attack.

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A model for such a program is the Epidemic Intelligence Service,

a component of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

that investigates disease outbreaks in support of State and local

governments. The EIS was created 50 years ago because of concerns that the United States might be subjected to a biological

weapons attack. Since its creation it has never detected a biological

warfare attack on the United States, yet the EIS more than justifies its existence by contributions to the Nation’s health.

As it happens, much of the investment in CBRN response is

being made in areas where it appears similar benefits will accrue.

For example, CDC’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program is devoting considerable resources to enhancing disease surveillance systems in public health laboratories. Strengthening these

components of the public health infrastructure is certain to have a

positive impact on the national capacity for responding to disease

outbreaks. As a result many of the response investments will provide significant benefits even in the absence of the terrorism

threat.

In conclusion, let me make two points. First, our response efforts

must reflect the uncertainties that inevitably will accompany attempts to assess the threat. Second, we should ensure that our responses will have merit even in the absence of terrorist attacks, either because they have a positive impact on the health and wellbeing of the American people, or because they address other

threats such as state use of CBRN weapons. We have more confidence in the quality of our threat assessments. Thank you for

your time.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Carus follows:]

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Mr. BLAGOJEVICH [presiding]. Thank you very much, Doctor, and

all of you, for coming to testify today. I’d like to begin by asking

Dr. Carus a couple of questions.

Doctor, in our closed session earlier today with the FBI, they testified that they avoid all-encompassing national threat and risk assessments because they view them as inherently too broad-based to

be of much practical value.

My question to you is do you believe it would be possible or of

any use at all to attempt a single comprehensive threat and risk

analysis that encompasses all risks to U.S. interests, whether they

be military, international and domestic?

Mr. CARUS. I think there clearly is an ability to create threat assessments that are more encompassing. I do agree with some of the

statements made earlier that that comment reflects a cultural perspective that comes out of the background of the Bureau, which is

not used to making these sort of broad, all-encompassing assessments.

I would point out, however, that while in the national security

arena we’re much more comfortable with making those assessments, they’re not necessarily silver bullets. I mean, as one looks

at the track record of the Intelligence Community there assessing

foreign threats, the estimates are often wrong in significant ways.

So while they help bound the problem, they don’t solve the difficulties of uncertainties about what really is happening. And so, you

know, as I said, they’re not a silver bullet, but they do at least help

bound the problem in a useful way.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. OK. Mr. Parachini, Dr. Carus made a point.

Would you like to give us a counterpoint on that?

Mr. PARACHINI. The one point that I would add is that the beauty of a communitywide intelligence assessment is that it forces all

the different parts of the community to come to a common standard. There are some divisions within the community now on the

magnitude of the CBRN threat, and one of the ways to get a consensus on that is to go through the process of forging a national

threat assessment.

This is a different problem to conduct a national threat assessment on than it was the Soviet Union in the cold war or even

North Korea’s ballistic missile program now. There are not fixed

things that you can look at with a variety of intelligence assets. It’s

a very fluid threat, so it’s hard to get a sense about the nature of

it. That doesn’t mean that you don’t try. That doesn’t mean that

you don’t revisit it. That doesn’t mean that you don’t try and craft

some standard of which evidence is to be evaluated.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. In your initial statement, Mr. Parachini, you

suggest that increasing emphasis should be placed on the front end

of the program through preemption of attacks and prevention of attacks; less emphasis should be placed on the back end of the problem with respect to the postattack consequences of management.

How is it that you can make a proposal like that if the comprehensive threat assessment you recommend has not been done?

Mr. PARACHINI. Well, I think there are bits and pieces of a threat

assessment out there. I think the Intelligence Community has that.

We at the institute have been looking into all of the historically

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viewing the terrorists, the law enforcement officials; reading the

court record, everything the terrorists have written. And the magnitude of the threat we get from looking at the historical record

looks different than that which we read about in the newspapers

or hear from some public officials.

I’m not suggesting that we stop emergency preparedness. I think

that’s very important. I’m just suggesting that we try and have a

few more tools such as diplomatic tools, law enforcement tools, and

intelligence tools which cost less, and that we develop those a little

more and not go overboard and spend so much money that we’re

having a little trouble keeping account of on the domestic preparedness side.

I think what Dr. Carus suggested about dual use investments on

the preparedness side are very good, those things which help contribute to the Nation’s public health, for example, but also give us

the ability to address bioterrorism. Those are the examples of

postevent investments that we should be making.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Ambassador Bremer, I noticed the Congress

and indeed even this committee did not escape the Commission’s

review. Your support—your report suggested that Congress should

reform our system for reviewing and funding counterterrorism programs. And the point you have raised is a good one, which is that

Congress ultimately has responsibility for doling out the money, so

we should say how we want it spent and what we want it spent

on. How can we organize ourselves here in the Congress to better

execute the mandate you’re suggesting?

Mr. BREMER. Well, we in our Commission made—we sort of

wimped out actually, Congressman. We basically thought it was a

bit presumptuous of us, even though we were a creature of Congress, to suggest how Congress organize itself. We suggested it, at

least as a first step, that the appropriations committees in the two

Houses of Congress ought to appoint senior staff members to do

some work from both Houses and from both parties to do some sort

of thinking through together about cross appropriations.

One could also suggest the relevant committees try to hold joint

hearings, but that tends to not get very far up here, in my experience.

I think what we’re really saying is this: The executive branch, in

our view, is not ideally organized to fight terrorism. To some degree that is Congress’s fault because you have these stovepipes in

this town that run from various committees in Congress to various

parts of the Federal—the executive branch, and those stovepipes

tend to channel responsibility and budget authority particularly

along very narrow lines, whereas if you’re going to deal with terrorism as a national problem, whether it’s on the basis of a national

threat assessment or anything else, you’re going to have to start

cross-cutting at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. OK. I will ask Larry Halloran, the majority

counsel, if he has any questions.

Mr. HALLORAN. Did you want to put this letter in first?

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Could I do that? Thank you very much, Larry.

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What I would like to do is offer a letter and make this letter a

part of the record. This is a letter that OMB has asked that we

submit for the record to the subcommittee outlining their role and

explaining their budgetary review process. So I’d like to offer this

for the record.

Mr. HALLORAN. Nobody is going to object.

[The information referred to follows:]

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Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. I got the gavel here. Nobody here to object.

Oh, there he is. Perfect timing. I’m from Chicago. That’s how we

do things.

Mr. SHAYS [presiding]. Is a dead body going to ask a question?

Mr. BLAGOJEVICH. Not until after he votes. I already asked him

to vote for me.

Mr. HALLORAN. Mr. Bremer, you said the Commission recommended—let me paraphrase—in effect that the FBI might need

some sharing lessons. It has been noted in other forums as well.

What—did the Commission come across any circumstances where

the FBI really close-held information that might have been useful

in the response scenario that you’re aware of?

Mr. BREMER. We in the Commission did not come across those,

but I’ve had the personal experience when I was in government of

that happening. And I have to say I think in most cases the FBI

is withholding the information for perfectly legitimate reasons,

which is to protect the integrity of the evidence that they’re collecting to make a case.

Mr. HALLORAN. That gets to my next point that you made and

I think Mr. Wermuth made in his testimony as well is the difference between evidence and intelligence, and that the FBI as lead

agency in domestic counterterrorism may not possess the skill sets

necessary to perform the tasks they’re being given. What other limitations besides a certain degree of justified paranoia does the FBI

bring to the job that may hinder them in doing what they’re being

asked to do in this field?

Mr. BREMER. Some of the things are very mundane. For example,

when an FBI in a field office in the United States interviews a terrorist suspect, he fills out a 301 interrogation form. The 301 form

stays at the field office. It almost never comes to headquarters.

There’s simply no mechanism for it happening. One would imagine

computers that would allow that to happen in these days and ages.

What we suggested was the FBI basically faces a comparable

problem to the CIA. CIA collects intelligence abroad in which they

must protect the sources and methods, but the intelligence has to

be gotten around to the Intelligence Community and to decisionmakers. CIA has resolved that problem across the years by developing a cadre of reports officers. These are specialized officers in

the agency, stationed in the stations abroad and here at home,

whose training and job it is to look over the intelligence and figure

out how to disseminate it, how to make it clean enough to get out

to the community.

FBI does not have a comparable reports officer function, and we

suggest that such a function should be created with a special cadre

in the field offices here, which would begin to break down the cultural barrier of seeing themselves only as investigators trying to

make cases.

Mr. HALLORAN. Anyone else want to comment on that?

OK. In the letter from OMB that Mr. Blagojevich put in the

record, with regard to threat assessments, OMB describes this as

an ongoing process based on some cases of competing views of different analysts, some of whom are witnesses before your committee

today. We believe this approach is preferable to a formal consensus

assessment. Competing assessments of the terrorist threat are

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more likely to stimulate the creative thinking necessary to combat

this unconventional national security challenge.

Do you agree with that?

Mr. BREMER. Well, I actually do agree with the idea of having— I think you can have both again. I do not agree the objective of a

national threat assessment should be consensus. There I disagree

with Mr. Parachini. I do not think that should be the objective, because then I think you get pablum, which is what you basically get

out of any group of people if you tell them they have to agree. But

I don’t see any reason why you can’t have a national threat assessment where they have competing views where they are strongly

felt.

Mr. HALLORAN. Anybody else?

Mr. PARACHINI. In this particular instance there on the threat,

on the biological agents that the various intelligence portion of the

Intelligence Community see as likely, there has been a division.

And there has been—there have been two agencies that have held

different views from other parts of the community. And so my

question to OMB would be, well, when you see that, then how do

you decide to make various spending decisions based on the split

in the community on a key thing? You just go ahead? Which is

what has been done in this instance. Or—and while I take Ambassador Bremer’s point about the danger of consensus is that you get

something that’s not very meaningful, somehow on hard issues you

do have to draw some conclusions. People have to bring their evidence forward, and there has to be some common agreement on

hard problems, like agents in which we need to respond to in which

we’re going to invest billions of dollars in developing vaccines and

antibiotics. Otherwise we’re going to make huge investments on

partial intelligence assessments that may or may not be correct in

10 years’ time.

Mr. BREMER. I don’t think that’s the job of OMB. That is the job

of somebody who’s politically responsible to the Congress and the

American people. He or she is going to have to sit down and look

at those splits, and he or she is going to be held politically responsible to decide, OK, now agency A is right and agency B is wrong.

But that’s not the job of staff. That’s not the job of somebody at

the NSC who is not politically responsible. That is the job of somebody who has budget authority and political accountability up here.

Mr. CARUS. May I interject a common on this?

Mr. SHAYS. Lower your mic, Doctor. Just lower the mic. Thank

you.

Mr. CARUS. Because I think an example that John Parachini

mentioned merits a little bit of elaboration. If you think about

whether or not we should invest money in certain kinds of vaccines, you would come up with a very different answer if you just

looked at the terrorism issue as opposed to just looking at the

broader biological warfare threat issue. If you were just concerned

about terrorists, you probably would say that smallpox is probably

not a very likely threat agent because of the difficulties of obtaining access to it. But if you shift the focus and say what is the overall national threat from states, you would discover that there certainly is at least one state and probably multiple states, including

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fore, from that point of view, the fact that we have a deteriorating

supply of smallpox vaccine should be of great concern.

I think if you go across the board, you would discover that if you

broaden the focus from merely terrorism to the broader issue of potential use of some of these weapons against the United States either overseas or domestically, that you would come up with radically different answers about what’s appropriate investment and

responses.

Mr. HALLORAN. I’m not sure I took your point there. Who else

would use them besides terrorists? State sponsors and individuals?

Mr. CARUS. A state might use them. The Soviet Union had, we

were told, SS–18 ICBMs loaded with smallpox. We are told that

other states that may want to prosecute wars against us, including

places like North Korea, perhaps Iraq, perhaps Iran, may have

smallpox. Clearly they have incentives that have nothing to do

with terrorist modalities for using or threatening to use a weapon

of this kind. As a result, clearly the United States, both in terms

of national security and Department of Defense concerns, as well

as the broader protection of the American people, have a legitimate

concern about the potential use of this particular agent.

Mr. HALLORAN. Thank you.

Let me ask another point if I can start a little debate here in

terms of the extent to which in this—attempt to kind of know the

unknowable, the—that the past is prologue, that we can project

from what has happened, how many people have been injured in

terrorism in the last 10 years, for example, or how much—how

many have ever been exposed to a biological agent or at least intentionally to do harm. To what extent should that inform threat

assessments today? Or is it your perception that it could at least

draw us back from worst-case scenarios to some degree?

Mr. WERMUTH. I don’t think you’d want to rely exclusively on

historical incidents in forming current threat assessments. You

need to have that perspective because it’s an indication of who has

used agents in the past. Aum Shinrikyo, you want to know about

those as a basis for forming some conclusions, but you wouldn’t

want to use that as the basis for the overall threat assessment, because too much is happening from the technological standpoint,

from a biogenetic engineering standpoint. You can use the historical perspective to help form some basis for developing the way you

conduct threat assessments perhaps, but you wouldn’t want to use

them necessarily, particularly the——

Mr. HALLORAN. It certainly could be a measure of the technical

difficulty they face. I think we learned more about the difficulties

of biological weapons from the Aum Shinrikyo, that is, from the potential lethality of a chemical weapons release in a subway system,

did we not?

Mr. WERMUTH. No question about it.

Mr. SHAYS. Would you all comment on the concept of when you

deal with states, deterrence usually has an impact. Does deterrence

have an impact with terrorists?

Mr. BREMER. Mr. Chairman, we looked at this in the Commission

in light of the changing threat because we believe that the threat

is increasing from terrorist groups and less from direct states acting in terrorism. And I think you’re right to say that in the last

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20 years if there has been a decrease in overt state support for terrorism, it’s really the result of a good comprehensive American

leadership in fighting terrorism and in saying to states it can no

longer be a justified way to conduct yourself in international relations to practice terrorism.

It’s a little hard to find those same levers against these groups

because you can’t call back your Ambassador to Usama bin Ladin.

We don’t have an ambassador. You can’t cutoff exports to him. We

don’t knowingly export to him. He’s not very likely to be very

moved by even the most eloquently phrased demarche from the

United Nations.

So you really are pushed away from the classic sort of diplomatic

and economic tools that we’ve used against terrorists for the last

20 years or so. And you therefore, in my view, have to pay more

attention to intelligence, because the way you’re going to be most

effective against that guy is to know what his plans are, and the

way to know what his plans are is to have a spy in his organization.

That’s really the heart of the matter. If you want to save American lives, you have to get good intelligence on what the terrorist

plans are. They are not likely to be, particularly the new kind of

terrorist, very susceptible to the concept of punishment by the rule

of law, because many of them are living for, as in Aum Shinrikyo,

sort of an apocalyptic view of the world that is not very susceptible

to our kind of reasoning. So I come back again and again to the

need for good intelligence being the most effective way to fight

these new terrorists.

Mr. WERMUTH. I would simply add I think there is some deterrent value in at least exhibiting an ability on behalf of ourselves

as a Nation to respond if a terrorist incident does occur, that there

is some deterrence value there. If it looks like we’re well organized,

if it looks like we have a good game plan, if it looks like we are

prepared to react and to administer justice very swiftly and very

surely, I think that can have a deterrent effect on terrorists even

beyond what Ambassador Bremer has mentioned.

Mr. SHAYS. Any comments? Part of the reason I ask is that I find

myself at these hearings thinking of a young man who ran against

my predecessor years ago from Princeton who was able to go to the

library and develop a feasible nuclear weapon that the experts

looked at, and then they embargoed his—classified his basic term

paper, but now we can get on the Internet and get information.

And I just wonder if years to come we just—it won’t be absolutely

easy to make weapons of mass destruction. And then I just think

of how you deal with the logic of that. Then I think of Beirut and

the bombing of—the total destruction of the Marine barracks there.

That individual was willing to drive the truck underneath and blow

it up and himself with it.

So I just wonder, deterrence doesn’t strike me as being particularly effective for someone that is willing to kill themselves. It may

be with the people that are sponsoring them. So I think I’m getting—the bottom line is what I fear is actually true. We used to

respond to terrorism by dealing with the state-sponsored organizations, and now we don’t quite have that same leverage. Not a pretty thing. So your point is in dealing with intelligence. Then I think

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that anyone who is willing to be a counter—a spy within an organization deserves the Medal of Honor, totally away from any resource

dealing with crazy people, constantly in fear that he may be found

or she may be found.

Mr. BREMER. Not even the Medal of Honor, but more importantly

he deserves to get American money. The current arrangement, as

you know, Mr. Chairman, as we discovered in our report, discourages the recruitment of terrorist spies. The current CIA guidelines

discourage the recruitment of terrorist spies, which we think is a

very serious flaw in the current counterterrorist strategy.

Mr. SHAYS. It’s a bit off subject, but it’s certainly something

that’s on subject in this committee. Maybe you could make the

point in a little more depth.

Mr. BREMER. Until 1995, when the CIA wanted to recruit an

asset, as they call it, in any field, they had a procedure to vet that

asset involving both the station and, as appropriate, people in

Washington. In 1995, new guidelines were promulgated—— Mr. SHAYS. By whom?

Mr. BREMER. By the DCI at that time—which had the effect of

making it much more difficult to recruit any kind of an asset. We

reviewed this rather carefully both in Washington and in the field

with serving agents and with retired agents, with junior officers

and station chiefs, and found that despite what the CIA says, the

fact of the matter is these rules have the effect of discouraging the

recruitment of terrorist spies. So we recommend that these guidelines be rescinded in respect to the recruitment of terrorist assets.

Mr. SHAYS. And?

Mr. BREMER. The CIA has publicly stated that they do not believe these guidelines have the effect of discouraging assets.

Now, I have profound respect for the Director of Central Intelligence, and I have told him what I would say to you to his face,

which is I just think he honestly doesn’t know what’s happening

out on point where these people are actually being recruited. The

fact of the matter is young case officers are not encouraged to recruit terrorist spies, and I think that’s a very serious problem.

Mr. SHAYS. I would agree.

What is the significance of overemphasis on a worst-case scenario? I mean, it’s come up a few times. What are the distortions

that result?

Mr. PARACHINI. Well, the most likely event that we’re facing is

some sort of tactical—actually the Intelligence Community has consistently said the most likely event is a high explosive. In the sort

of unconventional weapons, the most likely event is a poisoning.

And the consequences that occur are not in the thousand casualties

or hundred casualties, they’re in the tens.

I think one point the Gilmore Commission has made that is valuable on this, if you gear all of your preparation to this catastrophic

attack, everything becomes a Federal event, and State and local resources are probably appropriate for most of the events that might

occur. One.

Two, we might then start to focus too much of our attention in

the first responder world to the agents that are those in the programs of nation states. That may be appropriate at some level. We

want to take some hedge against that, smallpox and anthrax. But

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the more likely thing to occur is for terrorists in our country or

coming to our country to attack easy dual-use items, to get like

tanks of chlorine or phostine or sodium cyanide, which are dual-use

chemicals that are more readily available. So by doing these worstcase scenarios with these exotic nation state military program

agents, we’re focusing on the wrong thing.

Mr. SHAYS. OK.

Mr. PARACHINI. We have to do some focus on it because we have

to take a hedge against it, but we need to shift the balance.

Mr. CARUS. May I add some comment, sir? I think it shows up

in a great many areas if you’re not careful about disaggregating the

threat and not merely looking at worst-case scenarios. If you look

at the issue of chemical threats, if the only focus is on the most

lethal of military chemical agents, the nerve agents, what you lose

track of is that the capabilities for responding to different kinds of

chemical threats differs depending upon who you’re looking at.

One of the reasons why I think people have overemphasized the

Department of Defense responses is because they focused on this

small category of military chemical agents, when, in, fact most Department of Defense units have little or in many cases no capability for dealing with the broader range of toxic industrial chemicals.

If you focus more on the toxic industrial chemicals, you discover

that the broader-based capabilities of civilian and hazardous material units, whether they’re working for the Department of Defense

or for a local fire department, become much more salient in terms

of understanding the response.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

I think one area, unless it leads to something else, and that is

the statement was made maybe by you, Mr. Wermuth, that national strategy is essential, national threat assessment is part of

that. Or maybe it was—I’m not sure which, but it was—— Mr. WERMUTH. I think it was John Parachini, but I certainly

agree with that.

Mr. SHAYS. I just want to—this morning’s hearing was not particularly satisfying, and I don’t think any of you gentlemen were

there, but the general sense was that I had—that’s not something

I can’t disclose is there wasn’t a buy-in into having a threat assessment, that that’s kind of—it’s an ongoing process, and we evaluate

every day and so on.

I get the sense from that, and I want to get you to respond to

that, that each agency in a sense thinks it has their threat assessment as it relates to them, but they don’t get it all together and

try to figure out how their threat assessment works with other

agency threat assessments, and then a more universal threat assessment.

You all are looking at me like, what, is this guy crazy? You all

were struggling to understand me, but I don’t know if I made the

point well.

Mr. WERMUTH. I think I understood, and I think there’s a certain

amount of validity to that observation. I believe that whether it’s

threat assessments or not or whether it’s simply agencies assuming

some scenarios and then using those scenarios to help inform the

decisions about plans and resources, therein does lie the problem.

If there is no comprehensive assessment that has been done that

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is recognized to be the assessment of the Federal Government, then

agencies are pretty much left on their own to do whether they call

it threat assessments or simply scenario building for helping to establish programmatics and the application of resources.

That certainly is going on. I mean, HHS is an example of that

on one hand; FEMA is another example, as you heard from GAO

testimony before we came up here. So that’s another good reason

for the integrated threat assessment that has all of the players involved.

And I just, from my perspective, make one other comment. You

know, there is an obligation, too, for the government, particularly

the national government, the Federal Government, to inform the

American people about what the levels of threats—and I always

use that plural, because there’s no single threat—what the threats

are. And without that good comprehensive threat assessment— right now the American people are basically informed by the entertainment media and the news media, if you can tell them apart,

with these catastrophic kinds of events. And if that’s not the real

situation, then we ought to do a better job of letting the American

people know what the probabilities of threats are and how they

might be expected to respond in the event that an incident does

occur across an entire spectrum of potential threats.

Mr. SHAYS. OK.

Mr. PARACHINI. I might add that the discussion on national missile defense and the threats we face from the ballistic missile programs of Iran and North Korea are helpful here. There have been

very different views at different stages in this debate on the threat

we face with missiles. Eventually there have been a number of

communitywide assessments. There were then special panels and

commissions that reviewed those assessments. I think all of that

created a basis that was helpful for forging a national consensus

on what to do, and I think if indeed we believe this problem is of

that magnitude of a national security threat, then we should go

through a similar process, because I think it benefited our decisions

on national missile defense considerably. Might also benefit our decisions here.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

Ambassador, when I was thinking of your earlier work as Ambassador-at-large on terrorism—— Mr. BREMER. Counterterrorism.

Mr. SHAYS. Counterterrorism. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. So we don’t

have such an office.

Mr. BREMER. The President used to make that mistake very

often by introducing me as his expert on terrorism. I’m

counterterrorism.

Mr. SHAYS. I’m in good company then. Did you quickly correct

him, or were you a little more subtle?

Mr. BREMER. No, sir, I wasn’t.

Mr. SHAYS. Did that just all of a sudden—was that an office that

was created out of the State Department’s sensing a need, or had

it existed for a long period of time?

Mr. BREMER. No. It has a long and rather sorry story. There was

an office created in the State Department in 1972 to deal with terrorism, which was buried down to the bureaucracy. When Vice

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President Bush chaired a commission at the President’s request in

1985 to examine how we were structured in the government to

fight terrorism, one of the recommendations of that commission

was that there should be a clear agency function for State overseas

and for Justice in the United States—that’s still with us—and that

the State Department should upgrade the office to an ambassadorat-large position reporting to the Secretary of State, and that office

was then created. I was honored to be the first and, in fact, only— the only incumbent, because after the Reagan administration the

office has been progressively downgraded. But in any case, that’s

where it comes from.

Mr. SHAYS. Well, I don’t have any other questions. I would invite

you if you had a question that we should have asked or wish we

had asked, I would invite—— Mr. BREMER. May I make one point? It seems to me there are

a couple of things that—— Mr. SHAYS. Excuse me. You did not have any questions?

Mr. RAPALLO. Maybe just one.

Mr. SHAYS. Let me have you respond, then I’ll go to David.

Mr. BREMER. There are a couple of things that, irrespective of

whether there’s a national threat assessment, Congress could do to

deal with terrorism. One of them, which we recommended in our

report, is to control biological pathogens better. The principle

should be that biological pathogens in this country should be as

tightly controlled as nuclear agents have been for the last 50 years.

Currently that is not the case.

I don’t know where the legislation stands. Maybe one of my colleagues does now. There is legislation floating around to make it,

in effect, illegal to possess biological pathogens unless you’ve got a

legitimate need to have them. That is not against the law right

now.

Second we recommended—as many of my colleagues have said,

it’s not as easy to make a biological weapon as some people would

lead you to believe. You need very specialized equipment, you need

fancy fermenting equipment, you need aerosol inhalation chambers,

you need cross-flow filtration equipment. That equipment is now

controlled for export by the United States, but it is not controlled

for domestic sale. We recommended in our report that Congress

should look into controlling that.

It seems to me these are good things to do irrespective of whether you have a national threat assessment, whether you have three

national threat assessments.

Finally, as Dr. Carus pointed out, it ought to be possible to look

for things which are dual use, and we recommended one, which is

perhaps of interest to you, Mr. Chairman, right now, which is the

question of surveillance by the CDC. You have the West Nile fever

back upon you again in Connecticut. The CDC has a national surveillance system. It is not modernized. It’s not computerized. And

there is virtually no such system overseas.

It seemed to us we would want to know if West Nile fever was

here whether it’s here because you got dead crows or because somebody put it there. We would want to know if there was an outbreak

of ebola that might be coming our way or of anthrax somewhere

else.

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There is no international surveillance system. This is something

we have recommended that the Secretary of State and HHS should

look into. These are things which, it seems to me, are pretty easy

to do. They don’t cost a lot of money. They’re dual use. They’re not

dependent on a precise definition of what the threat is, but they

are good things to do. I would just commend them to your attention

Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SHAYS. It raises the point what committees did you present

your report to?

Mr. BREMER. We actually presented the report to the Speaker

and the Majority Leader. I have testified before a number of committees in both Houses.

Mr. SHAYS. Just totally focused on that report? In other words,

the purpose of the hearing was for that report?

Mr. BREMER. Yes, sir.

Mr. SHAYS. Did you feel it got the kind of dissemination that you

expected? I mean, was it——

Mr. BREMER. It got quite a lot of attention. Some of it was misdirected by some of the early news reports, but we got a very good

reception, I must say, on both sides of the aisle in the report in

general on all the committees I’ve been before.

Mr. SHAYS. Thank you.

Any other comment or question that we—question we should

have asked that you needed to respond to or something that you

prepared for that would be eloquent if you shared it with us? Nothing. OK.

Let me say—and I’m going to recognize David Rapallo—this has

really been an excellent panel. Hopefully we’ll be able to utilize

your contribution in the future as well. It’s been very interesting,

and your statements were interesting; if not interesting in every respect, very informative and important for us to have. I’m talking

about the written one. Your verbal one was very interesting.

Mr. RAPALLO. Just one quick followup for Ambassador Bremer.

On the 95 CIA regulations I want to make sure there’s a complete

explanation, it didn’t just happen in a vacuum. Could you give just

a little description of why they were adopted, the rationale behind

them?

Mr. BREMER. The given rationale was concerns that some assets

who had been engaged by CIA in a country in Central America had

been involved in alleged serious crimes. And there was a view at

that time that the head of the CIA and the DCI, that this put us

at risk by having assets who might have committed crimes or

might have committed human rights violations. And it was in response to those concerns, as I understand it, that these guidelines

were issued.

Mr. SHAYS. But the bottom line is you believe it’s much harder

to recruit.

Mr. BREMER. The DCI at the time and the DCI today maintain

that the intention of these was not to discourage the recruitment

of hard assets. We say we understand that. We’re not challenging

what the intention was, but the effect has been to discourage it.

Mr. SHAYS. David asked the question, that’s on the record, but

important that you tell us your concern as well. Gentlemen, very,

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very interesting. I appreciate your participation as I did the panel

before yours. Thank you very much, and at this point this hearing

is adjourned.

Thank you for your help as well, Recorder.

[Whereupon, at 3:20 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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