Three 9/11 Hijackers: Identification, Watchlisting, and Tracking

Staff Statement No. 2

Members of the Commission, working with you, your staff has developed initial findings 

on the identification, watchlisting, and tracking of three individuals who he lped carry out 

the 9/11 attacks upon the United States. Those individuals are Nawaf al Hazmi, Salem al 

Hazmi, and Khalid al Mihdhar. These findings and judgments may help your conduct of 

today’s public hearing and inform the development of your recommendations.

This report reflects the results of work so far. We remain ready to revise our 

understanding of these topics as our work continues. This staff statement represents the 

collective effort of a number of members of our staff. Douglas MacEachin, Ba rbara 

Grewe, Susan Ginsburg, Lloyd Salvetti, Alexis Albion, Thomas Eldridge, Michael 

Hurley, and Lorry Fenner did most of the investigative work reflected in this statement. 

Our staff was fortunate. We could build upon a substantial body of work carried out by 

the Joint Inquiry organized in 2002 by the intelligence committees of the House and 

Senate. We also relied on some high quality work performed by the National Security 

Agency, along with cooperation from the Central Intelligence Agency and the 

Department of State. Again, we were impressed by the high caliber of the professionals 

engaged in public service. 

The Congressional Joint Inquiry highlighted this story as one of failed opportunities to 

put these suspected terrorists on a watchlist to prevent them from entering the United 

States. Therefore the lesson learned, as Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet put 

it, was to do a better job of putting people on the watchlist, to correct what he called “a 

weakness in our internal training and an inconsistent understanding of watchlist 

thresholds.”

We believe the portrayal of this story as a “watchlisting” failure may literally be true. 

But we think this label is profoundly misleading. 

(1) No one can know the might have beens. But we do not think it is likely that 

putting the three future hijackers on a watchlist would, by itself, have prevented 

the 9/11 attacks. As we pointed out earlier today, al Qaeda adapted to the failure 

of some of its operatives to gain entry into the United States. None of these three 

individuals were pilots.

(2) The ‘watchlisting’ label reinforces the sense that watchlisting is a chore off to the 

side from core intelligence work. Of course everyone rightly acknowledges it is a 

necessary chore, something that busy intelligence officials just have to remember 
Staff Statement No. 2 2

to do. Yet they did not see it as an integral part of their own intelligence work. 

The opportunity to prevent the attacks would not have arisen just from preventing 

these people from entering the United States. It would have come from 

intelligence work that used watchlisting as a tool.

(3) The watchlisting label also distorts the analysis of accountability. It tends to cast 

a harsh light on whether one or two people at Headquarters did their job. That 

focus may be unfair. It is certainly too narrow.

We suggest instead that the watchlisting failure was just one symptom of a larger 

intelligence failure. The failure raises questions for the Commission about the CIA’s and 

the Intelligence Community’s management of transnational intelligence operations.

We will do what we can to reconstruct this story, given the appropriate constraints on 

what can be said about such topics in public. It is detailed, but the details are essential.

The Initial Lead and the Hindsight Issue

The lead in this case came from the analysis of communications by the National Security 

Agency, or NSA. The NSA, and the intelligence community, obtains what it calls 

“signals intelligence,” or SIGINT. Some sources relevant to this case are no longer 

operational. We are therefore able to say a little more about it now without disclosing 

any of the details about the methods used to collect such intelligence. 

The Intelligence Community obtained additional sources after the Embassy bombings in 

East Africa. These particular sources were important. They offered insight into a larger 

al Qaeda network in the Middle East and were linked directly to the East Africa 

bombings. 

In late 1999, NSA analyzed communications associated with a man named Khalid, a man 

named Nawaf, and a man named Salem. NSA analysts at the time thought Salem was 

Nawaf’s younger brother. They were right.

We now know Nawaf was in Karachi, Pakistan; Khalid was in Yemen; Nawaf planned to 

leave Karachi on January 2; and they were making plans to meet in Malaysia. Nawaf 

planned to leave Karachi on January 2. By early on December 31, Pakistani time, U.S. 

officials in Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital, were following the situation.

At this point the relevant working-level officials in the Intelligence Community knew 

little more than this. But they correctly concluded that “Nawaf” and “Khalid” may be 

part of “an operational cadre” and that “something nefarious might be afoot.” 

We believe every available resource should have been devoted to learning who these

people were, and trying to spot and track them.
Staff Statement No. 2 3

-- NSA did not think it was its job to initiate this research on its own. It saw itself as 

an agency to support consumers, such as CIA. It tried to respond energetically to 

any request made of them. But it tends to wait to be asked.

-- If NSA had been asked to try to identify these people, NSA would have started by 

checking its own database of earlier information from these same sources. Some 

of this information had been reported and disseminated around the community. 

Some had not. But it was all readily accessible in NSA’s database. NSA’s 

analysts would promptly have discovered who Nawaf was, that his full name was 

Nawaf al Hazmi, and that he was an old friend of Kha lid. 

-- NSA analysts also could then have readily inferred that Salem might be named 

Salem al Hazmi. 

-- But NSA was not asked to do this work, at least not until much, much later.

Some might say that such comments display 20/20 hindsight, elevating the importance of 

these reports out of hundreds of items. This is a reasonable argument. But in this case 

we think our critique is fair, and not distorted by hindsight. Why?

-- At the end of 1999 and in early 2000, the period of the Millennium Alert, the 

danger from al Qaeda was, by all accounts, the number one national security 

priority of the United States. It was a focus of practically daily meetings by the 

top officials of the government.

-- These particular sources of information were especially important ones. Their 

links to al Qaeda were, in the words of one cable, “notorious.” They had been 

linked directly with the East Africa Embassy attacks. The relevant analysts have 

told us that, at the time, these sources were among the very best on al Qaeda. 

The Intelligence Community had reported that Nawaf and Khalid were deploying to meet 

in Kuala Lumpur.

Kuala Lumpur

Following up on intelligence, U.S. officials were active in Yemen and in the United Arab 

Emirates, where Khalid would get his connecting flight. Other information reinforced the 

picture of an emerging operation of some kind, and Salem’s plans to arrive in Yemen 

soon.

Nawaf, Khalid, and now Salem made further arrangements. Nawaf made plans to arrive 

in Malaysia on January 4. The Intelligence Community thought Nawaf was still in 

Pakistan and was not leaving there until the 4th. Other officials could have worked on 

logical flight itineraries and perhaps realized that Nawaf could—and probably did—keep 

to his original plan, leaving Pakistan for Southeast Asia on January 2. He then planned 
Staff Statement No. 2 4

to—and did—leave his Asian stopover (probably Singapore) for Kuala Lumpur on 

January 4.

This detail matters because it meant that a possible opportunity to check and track 

Nawaf’s departure from Pakistan had already been lost. Officials in Pakistan tried to do 

this on the 4th. They had already missed Nawaf. 

On January 3 both CIA Headquarters and U.S. officials around the world began springing 

energetically into action. With the information about Khalid’s travel itinerary, U.S. 

officials in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, and Malaysia performed as well as could 

be hoped. Longstanding efforts to build relationships with friendly foreign services paid 

dividends. 

Though they had missed Nawaf, officials had more success in tracking Khalid. He was 

identified as Khalid al Mihdhar. His Saudi passport was photocopied. It showed he had 

a visa to visit the United States. U.S. officials in Jeddah quickly confirmed that their post 

had issued this visa in April 1999.

Khalid al Mihdhar was tracked as he arrived at Kuala Lumpur on January 5. He and 

other Arabs, still unidentified, were surveilled as they congregated in the Malaysian 

capital. On January 5 CIA headquarters notified officials around the world that “we need 

to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities ... to determine if 

there is any true threat posed ....” This same cable said the FBI had been notified. The 

cable also asserts that Mihdhar’s travel documents also were given to the FBI. The 

weight of available evidence does not support that latter assertion.

At this point the case was considered important enough to mention in the regular updates 

on al Qaeda being given to the top officials in the U.S. government. On January 3 and 5 

the head of CIA’s unit on al Qaeda apparently briefed his bosses on these developments 

as part of his regular daily updates. These updates, which included other ongoing 

operational developments, were usually reviewed every day by Director Tenet and by the 

National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger. On January 5 and 6, the Director of the FBI, 

Louis Freeh, and other top FBI officials were briefed on the operation as one of their 

regular updates and were told, correctly, that CIA was in the lead and that CIA had 

promised to let FBI know if an FBI angle to the case developed.

On January 6 two of the Arabs being tracked in Malaysia left for new destinations, one in 

Thailand and another in Singapore. After the fact, efforts were made to track them. U.S. 

officials in Kuala Lumpur wondered if one of these Arabs was the still mysterious 

Nawaf. Both returned to Kuala Lumpur within the next 24 hours, though the authorities 

did not know it at the time. The two individuals apparently were Nawaf al Hazmi and an 

individual now known as Khallad bin Attash. We’ll discuss Khallad again in a moment. 

On January 7, and then again on January 10, CIA headquarters notified the field that it 

had run searches on the names it had so far about this case and said these searches 

produced no “hits.” Headquarters was trying to support the operations in the field. The 
Staff Statement No. 2 5

field had given them information about people being tracked. Headquarters had checked 

CIA’s own database and had found nothing. 

These headquarters officials had not checked the databases at NSA or specifically asked 

NSA to do so. As mentioned earlier, if NSA had done this job its analysts would quickly 

have identified “Nawaf” as Nawaf al Hazmi. Someone then could have asked the State 

Department to check that name too. State would promptly have found its own record on 

Nawaf al Hazmi. That record would have shown that he too had been issued a visa to 

visit the United States. They would have learned that the visa had been issued at the 

same place—Jeddah—and on almost the same day as the one given to Khalid al Mihdhar. 

But none of this was known at the time.

On January 8, surveillance reported that three of the Arabs under surveillance suddenly 

left Kuala Lumpur on a short flight to Bangkok, traveling together. U.S. officials in 

Kuala Lumpur asked U.S. officials in Bangkok for help. The next day, Headquarters, 

noticing what was going on and working on a Sunday, backed up Kuala Lumpur’s 

message with another message, marked NIACT Immediate. That meant the incoming 

cable would alert the duty officer and insure that it was read and acted upon regardless of 

the hour. 

Kuala Lumpur was able to identify one of the travelers as Khalid al Mihdhar. After the 

flight left they learned that one of his companions had the name Alhazmi. Remember 

that the officials did not have information that would have allowed them to put that last 

name together with the name they did know about—Nawaf. 

About the third person all they had was part of a name. It was part of the name of the 

alias being used by Khallad bin Attash. “Khallad” is a nickname, the Arabic word for 

‘silver,’ and refers to Khallad’s artificial leg. Khallad was then traveling under an alias. 

One reason he may have been traveling around East Asia at this time is that he may have 

been helping to plan possible hijackings on aircraft, perhaps in connection with an early 

idea for what would become the 9/11 plot. Khallad also had completed his work in 

helping plan the destruction of a U.S. warship visiting Yemen, the U.S.S. The Sullivans. 

The attack had just failed -- unnoticed. The boat filled with explosives had sunk. Only 

the terrorists knew what had gone wrong. Almost everything was salvaged and prepared 

for another day. Khallad would later be a principal planner in the next try, nine months 

later. That was the October 2000 attack on another U.S. ship visiting Yemen, the U.S.S. 

Cole, an attack which almost sank the warship and did kill 17 American sailors. 

Bangkok and Beyond

The information came to Bangkok too late to track these travelers as they came in. Had 

authorities in Bangkok already been alerted for Khalid al Mihdhar as part of a general 

regional or worldwide alert, they might have tracked him coming in. Had they been 

alerted to look for a possible companion named Nawaf, they might have noticed him too, 

and even tracked Khallad as well. Instead the authorities were alerted only after Kuala 
Staff Statement No. 2 6

Lumpur sounded the alarm. By that time the travelers had already disappeared into the 

streets of Bangkok. We now know that two other al Qaeda operatives then flew to 

Bangkok to meet with Khallad in order to pass him money. Some of this money was 

reportedly given to Hazmi and Mihdhar for their upcoming work in the U.S. None of this 

was known at the time.

On January 12 the head of the CIA’s al Qaeda unit updated his bosses that surveillance in 

Kuala Lumpur was continuing. He may not have known that in fact the Arabs had 

dispersed and the tracking was falling apart. U.S. officials in Bangkok regretfully 

reported the bad news on January 13. The names they had were put on a watchlist in 

Bangkok, so that Thai authorities might notice if they left the country. 

U.S. intelligence did learn that one of the travelers was using the name that was Khallad’s 

alias. Kuala Lumpur promptly asked for more information and agreement “to share that 

information for watch-listing purposes.” There was no apparent response, and Kuala 

Lumpur did not follow through on its own watchlisting ideas.

On January 14 the head of the CIA’s al Qaeda unit updated his bosses that officials were 

continuing to track the suspicious individuals who had now dispersed to various 

countries. Unfortunately, there is no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being 

undertaken by anyone after the Arabs disappeared into Bangkok.

CIA Headquarters asked NSA to put al Mihdhar on that agency’s watchlist, which had

limited effectiveness. But there was no other effort to consider the onward destinations 

of these Arabs and set up other opportunities to spot them in case the screen in Bangkok 

failed. Just from the evidence in Mihdhar’s passport, one of those possible destinations 

and interdiction points would logically have been the United States. Hence this 

watchlisting effort could have been seen as integral to reviving a faltering tracking effort, 

quite apart from the other interests involved.

Weeks passed. Meanwhile, NSA would occasionally pass new information generally of a 

personal nature, associated with Khalid, Salem, Salem’s brother (Nawaf), and perhaps 

Khallad as well. At this time, though the Intelligence Community did not know it, 

Mihdhar was in San Diego, California.

None of these reports seem to have jogged renewed attention until another matter 

reminded Kuala Lumpur about the case. That post prodded Bangkok a bit, in February, 

about what had happened with those missing Arabs. 

A few weeks later, in early March 2000, Bangkok responded to Kuala Lumpur’s 

question. It was reported that Nawaf al Hazmi, now identified for the first time with his 

full name, had departed on January 15, on a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. We 

have found no evidence that this information was sent to the FBI. 

It was further reported that a person under the name Khallad was using had departed 

Thailand for the last time on January 20. His destination was Karachi.
Staff Statement No. 2 7

As for Khalid al Mihdhar, his arrival on January 8 had been noted, but there was no 

record of his departure. In fact Mihdhar had been on the United flight to Los Angeles 

with Hazmi on January 15. 

We presume this departure information was obtained back in January, on the days that 

these individuals made their departures. Because these names were watchlisted with the

Thai authorities, we cannot yet explain the delay in reporting this news. But, since 

nothing particular was done with this information even in March, we cannot attribute 

much significance to this failure alone.

By March 2000 Mihdhar and Hazmi had already established their residence in San Diego. 

No one knew this at the time, because no follow up was done with any of this information 

until much later.

In January 2001, while working on the Cole attack, the CIA received information that 

Khallad had attended the meeting in Kuala Lumpur. As Director Tenet testified publicly 

before the Joint Inquiry, the Kuala Lumpur meetings “took on greater significance” 

because this information placed the Arabs who were there with a known al Qaeda 

operative. This discovery, however, did not lead to any fresh effort to pick up the trail of 

Mihdhar and Hazmi. By that time Mihdhar had left the United States and returned to 

Yemen. But if a retrospective of existing information had been conducted at this point, 

Hazmi might have been tracked down in the United States. And there would still have 

been time to watchlist Mihdhar before he obtained a new United States visa and reentered 

the U.S. to join in the 9/11 attacks.

Finally, in the summer of 2001, a thoughtful CIA official detailed to the FBI, working 

with an FBI employee detailed to the CIA, did some energetic detective work that at last 

unearthed and reexamined these old puzzle pieces. It became apparent that both Mihdhar 

and Hazmi were in the United States. They were watchlisted in late August 2001. 

It was then too late to catch Mihdhar before he got another visa and returned to the 

United States to rejoin the operation. The connection to Salem al Hazmi, Nawaf’s 

younger brother, had never been made, so there was no effort to track his movements 

while in Yemen, watchlist him before he obtained his visa, or catch him as he entered the 

United States on a Swissair flight to New York in June 2001. The search in the United 

States for Nawaf al Hazmi and Mihdhar began. It had gotten off to a stuttering, 

quarrelsome start by September 11. 

The Watchlisting Issue

The Department of State initiated and sponsored the U.S. government’s only pre-9/11 

watchlist solely dedicated to catching terrorists. This list, called TIPOFF, was created in 

1987 by an unassuming and enterprising public servant named John Arriza, who still 

helps sustain the program, which is now considerably expanded. The program was meant 

to keep terrorists from getting visas, of course. But, as the name implies, it also was a 
Staff Statement No. 2 8

system to tip off intelligence and law enforcement agencies that a suspected terrorist was 

attempting to come to the United States. 

Any overseas post that obtained appropriate derogatory information about an individual 

had been told to enter it into TIPOFF by sending the appropriate cable. If the State 

Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research saw the information, they could and 

often did take the initiative to add the individual into TIPOFF. In 2001 the State 

Department provided more source documents for TIPOFF than any other agency, more 

than 2,000.

In December 1999 CIA Headquarters had repeated this guidance to its posts overseas, 

which technically also included its al Qaeda unit at Headquarters. In 2001 CIA provided 

more than 1,500 source documents to TIPOFF. It was CIA Headquarters that finally 

nominated Hazmi and Mihdhar for inclusion in TIPOFF. 

Sharing of information with the FBI was vital from an intelligence perspective, if the 

individuals were coming into the United States. But FBI did not maintain the terrorist 

watchlist. That was the State Department’s job. FBI could contribute names like 

everyone else. In 2001 the FBI provided about 60 source documents for TIPOFF, fewer 

than were obtained from the public media, and a number approximately equivalent to the 

contribution that year from the Australian intelligence service.

It is worth noting that the Federal Aviation Administration’s own ‘no-fly’ list was totally 

independent from TIPOFF. Few names were on this no-fly list. So, before 9/11, adding 

someone to TIPOFF would not have any particular effect on their ability to board a 

commercial flight inside the United States. So, to be specific, adding Hazmi and 

Mihdhar to TIPOFF did not put them on a no-fly list, and did not keep them from flying 

on September 11.

Therefore, in thinking about the question of accountability, that potential list tends to 

expand to everyone. In effect, though, this means no one. At the time of the Joint 

Inquiry report, the general assumption was that the responsibility rested with some

working-level official at CIA Headquarters. Yet, as we can see, many of the recipients of

those January 2000 cables could have done their part. Kuala Lumpur thought about it. 

And so on.

That is why we think this issue must be examined from a broader perspective, that of the 

overall management of transnational intelligence operations. After all, why would the 

watchlisting make a difference? One purpose would have been to turn Hazmi and 

Mihdhar back when they reached Los Angeles, in effect throwing them back into the sea. 

That would have served one purpose. But it might not have prevented any attacks.

We think it may be more interesting to consider the intelligence mission. Remember why

“TIPOFF” had that name. The intelligence mission was why the suspects were tracked in 

Malaysia rather than being detained and deported. If the FBI had been given the 

opportunity to monitor Hazmi and Mihdhar in California, and had been patient for 
Staff Statement No. 2 9

months, or a year, then some larger results might have been possible, even after Mihdhar 

left. The universe of possibilities expands after Hani Hanjour joined Hazmi in December 

2000, after which the two of them lived in Phoenix for several months before driving 

across the country and linking up with other future hijackers in northern Virginia. Up to 

this point all of these hijackers named so far were involved in the hijacking of American 

Airlines 77, which hit the Pentagon. But in northern Virginia they linked up with a 

hijacker who would join the team assigned to United 175, thus creating a possible 

opportunity to penetrate the other teams associated with the “Hamburg cell” as well. 

These are difficult ‘what ifs.’ It is possible that the Intelligence Community might have 

judged that the risks of conducting such a prolonged intelligence operation were too 

high—the risk of losing track of potential terrorists, for example. It is possible that the 

pre-9/11 FBI would not have been judged capable of conducting such an operation. But 

surely the Intelligence Community would have preferred to have the chance to make 

these choices. That is why we see this as an intelligence story—and a challenge for 

Intelligence Community management.

Management of a Transnational Case

In trying to second-guess the management of intelligence operations, the staff feels 

humbled as we encounter the experience and hard work of so many of the officials we 

have interviewed. Although we have some very seasoned intelligence professionals on 

our staff, we have listened hard to what the serving officials have told us. As you can 

see, these people cared deeply about combating terrorism. They have poured much of 

their life energy into this cause. And we believe that many of them were working in a 

system that was not well designed to take full advantage of their accumulated talents.

From the detail of this case, one can see how hard it is for the Intelligence Community to 

assemble enough of the puzzle pieces gathered by different agencies to make some sense 

from them, and then coordinate needed action—to collect or to disrupt. It is especially 

hard to do all this in a transnational case. This was, and is, a challenge for management.

In this case, there appears to have been at least two strategic errors in management. First, 

the managers of the case failed to get an all source background analysis of the players, 

canvassing what all agencies might know so they could assemble the best possible picture 

for action. This omission is already evident by the end of December 1999.

The second strategic error was that the managers of the case did not systematically set up 

ways to track the hijackers as they moved in predictable directions. Even if they slipped 

through the net in Bangkok, it was foreseeable that a traveler with a U.S. visa in his 

passport might seek to visit the United States. No one had the clear job of insuring that 

all the likely routes were covered.

Who had the job of managing the case to make sure these things were done? One answer 

is that everyone had the job. That was the perspective the Commission heard in its 

interview of the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, James Pavitt. Deputy Director 
Staff Statement No. 2 10

Pavitt has been at or near the top of this Directorate for about six and a half years. He 

stressed that the responsibility resided with all involved. Above all he stressed the 

primacy of the field. The field had the lead in managing operations. The job of 

Headquarters, he stressed, was to support the field, and do so without delay. If the field 

asked for information or other support, the job of Headquarters was to get it—right away. 

This is a traditional perspective on operations and, traditionally, it has great merit. It 

reminded us of the FBI’s pre-9/11 emphasis on the primacy of their Field Offices. When 

asked about how this traditional structure would adapt to the challenge of managing a 

transnational case, one that hopped from place to place as this one did, the Deputy 

Director argued that all involved were responsible for making it work. He underscored 

the responsibility of the particular field location where the suspects were being tracked at 

any given time. On the other hand, he also said that the Counterterrorism Center was 

supposed to “manage all the moving parts,” while what happened on the ground was the 

responsibility of managers in the field. 

With this background, it is easier to understand why the way Headquarters handled this 

case may not have been so unusual. As pointed out this morning, travel intelligence was 

not seen as a central concern. Headquarters tended to support and facilitate, trying to 

make sure everyone was in the loop. From time to time a particular post would push one 

way, or Headquarters would urge someone to do something, but Headquarters never 

really took responsibility for the successful management of this case. Hence the 

managers at Headquarters did not realize that the two strategic errors cited above had 

occurred, and they scarcely knew that the case had fallen apart.

The director of the Counterterrorism Center at the time, Cofer Black, recalled to us that 

this operation as one among many and that, at the time, “it was considered interesting, but 

not heavy water yet.” He recalls the failure to get the word to Bangkok fast enough, but 

has no evident recollection of why the case then dissolved, unnoticed. 

Going the next level down, the director of the al Qaeda unit in CIA at the time recalled to 

us that he did not think it was his job to direct what should or should not be done. He did 

not pay attention when the individuals dispersed and things fell apart. He would not have 

expected NSA to do the retrospective work in its own database. But he was uncertain of 

his own authority to order them to do it. There was no conscious decision to stop the 

operation after the trail was temporarily lost in Bangkok. But he acknowledged that 

perhaps there had been a letdown after the extreme tension and long hours in the period 

of the Millennium Alert.

We believe both Mr. Black and the former al Qaeda unit head are capable veterans of the 

Directorate of Operations, among the best the Agency has produced. Therefore we find 

these accounts more telling about the system than about the people. In this system no one 

was managing the effort to insure seamless handoffs of information or develop an overall 

interagency strategy for the operation.
Staff Statement No. 2 11

Such management of transnational operations, fully integrating all source analysis, might 

require more employees. Deputy Director Pavitt told us, as he has told Congress, that he 

does not think the availability of more money would have prevented the 9/11 attacks. We 

are not sure that is right. Certainly since 9/11 the application of vast new resources 

within older management models has achieved some significant gains. 

But this story is not just about the past. We wonder whether the management of 

transnational intelligence operations has adapted enough to cope with the challenge of the 

war on terrorism. Today’s focus on travel intelligence has spotlighted the transnational 

character of the problem. This particular story is especially tragic. But we do not believe 

this operating style is unique to this case. We are not sure that these problems have been 

addressed. We are not sure they are even adequately acknowledged as a problem.

In an environment driven by reactions to the latest threat report and preoccupied with 

immediate operations, clear, accountable, and strategic management is a challenge. The 

Intelligence Community must overcome it.