July 2001 was a critical month for the intelligence community—an attack on American soil was imminent. “The CIA’s not stupid. This stuff was building up,” J. Cofer Black, former director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, said an event in Lerner Cinema Wednesday night. “At this point, we realized the sky was really falling.”
Seven years after the attacks of Sept. 11th, 2001, Black, now the Vice Chairman of Blackwater Worldwide , a private security firm that has one of the largest contracts with the State Department, spoke of the dramatic shifts in the intelligence community before and after the 2001 attacks. Addressing one hundred Columbia affiliates, Black attempted to correct perceptions of inadequacy in the American government prior to Sept. 11 and laid out the challenges facing the Obama administration.
“We were grossly overmatched,” Black said of the CIA’s attempts to act on intelligence in the summer prior to Sept. 11. “We didn’t have enough people, we didn’t have enough money.”
Throughout the ’90s, Black worked as a CIA field officer in Sudan, where he monitored intelligence collection and was the target of an al-Qaeda assassination attempt. In 1999, he became the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, followed by a stint as the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism.
Black acknowledged the lack of government readiness prior to the Sept. 11 attacks, but argued it was not so much the deficiency of information as the transition between administrations that bogged down executive response.
“The Clinton administration took about eight years to come to terms with the significance of the [al-Qaeda] problem,” he said, “and left the White House frankly stating it was one of the largest issues you’re going to face.”
Following the January 2001 inauguration, he said, “the Bush team wanted to validate things for themselves. They were heading towards closure, but they were way too slow.”
Black remembered an early briefing with George Tenet, then CIA Director, and Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser. “It was the hardest-hitting briefing I’ve ever given, and that’s saying something,” he said, “It was really, ‘The barbarians are at the gate.’”
The lack of precedent, Black argued, contributed to the slow executive response. “If you don’t have a record of terrorist attacks on your soil, you don’t know how to deal with it. It’s difficult to turn the ship quickly, preempt it,” he said. “The system was overwhelmed, our defenses were very low. At that point, the issue was the border with Canada.”
After Sept. 11, the CIA received more funding and more leeway, allowing for new intelligence-gathering operations in Afghanistan and the overhaul of the Counterterrorist Center.
But Black condemned the effect of bureaucracy on the counterterrorism budget. “Dead bodies resulted in more money, and when there was less money, we waited for more bodies,” he said, “What kind of a system is this?”
Nonetheless, he expressed hope for the future, stressing the necessity for dependability in the Obama administration.
“What we can’t do is miss the ball. We need sustainable relationships with overseas nations,” he said. Furthermore, “sustainable funding and support,” he said, are the “bedrock of taking action.”
The event was hosted by Colubia University International Relations Forum, a non-partisan group.
But not all audience members felt Black’s depiction of the pre-Sept. 11th intelligence community stacked up.
“Obviously failure is a big step for anyone in power to admit,” Eric Sadur, CC ’10 said, “but he really understated that. He said that the people in the CIA are smart people, but also said that it [the CIA’s handling of Sept. 11] was a gross failure. There’s a disconnect there that’s startling.”
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