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The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11
Princeton University Press
August 2007
On Sale: August 10, 2007
352 pages
ISBN: 0691120218
EAN: 9780691120218
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first
scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that
preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been
attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows
how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI
failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case
by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three
hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the
history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to
2001, drawing extensively from declassified government
documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking
government officials. She finds that political leaders were
well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent
need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the
changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied
intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance
inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of
politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our
democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal
government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to
failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding
organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s
prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three
opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's
most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new
threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to
adapt in the future.
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