While America Slept

The initial findings of a Congressional committee that has been reviewing the performance of America's intelligence agencies before Sept. 11 are profoundly disturbing. While the investigation has not found that the agencies collected information pointing to the date and targets of the attacks, it has discovered reports that Osama bin Laden and his followers hoped to hit sites in the United States and that they might employ commercial airliners as weapons. The response of spy organizations — and the government at large — was anemic.

One of the great unanswered questions has been whether the government had enough intelligence in the months before Sept. 11 to fear an imminent blow within the United States and to take aggressive steps to heighten security, especially at airports. The answer now appears to be affirmative. Investigators working for the Senate and House intelligence committees found numerous reports in the archives of the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy organizations suggesting that the bin Laden network was eager to mount attacks within the United States. There were also warnings that terrorists were considering using airplanes.

The accumulation of alarming evidence led George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to tell his top aides in December 1998 that "we are at war" with Osama bin Laden and "I want no resources or people spared in this effort." That was exactly the right reaction, but the mobilization of resources that followed did not match the threat.

The Congressional investigators learned that almost no one at the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of Mr. Tenet's declaration of war. On Sept. 11, the F.B.I.'s international terrorism unit had just one analyst to deal with Al Qaeda. Even the C.I.A. itself did not make major readjustments to evaluate the threat. The agency increased the number of analysts assigned full time to the bin Laden network from three in 1999 to five in 2001 before the attacks. Despite the indications that airliners might be used as weapons, including one August 1998 report that terrorists might fly a plane into the World Trade Center, intelligence analysts apparently made little effort to assess the aerial threat. The Federal Aviation Administration did not take the threat seriously.