United States Congress

The United States Congress appears as both the institution that established a centralized intelligence agency after World War II and the body that later examined intelligence failures before September 11, 2001. Its response illustrates the book’s central distinction: dispersed expertise can be valuable, but without ways to share information and combine judgments, decentralization may leave a nation with disconnected pieces rather than a coherent assessment.

Creating a Central Intelligence Agency

Before World War II, intelligence-gathering responsibilities were divided among the military services. Their failure to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor, despite evidence that a major Japanese strike was being prepared, exposed the limitations of that arrangement. The prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union and new technologies—including rockets, atomic bombs, and bacteriological warfare—added to the case for a more comprehensive system.

In April 1946, General Wild Bill Donovan publicly argued for a powerful peacetime successor to the Office of Strategic Services, which he had led during the war. His criticisms alienated the intelligence community and likely damaged his prospects of returning to government service. Nevertheless, in 1947 Congress passed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency. The law sought unity of command and intelligence: fragmentation had left the country vulnerable to surprise, and centralization was expected to help protect it.

Investigating Intelligence Failures

The intended unity did not become a reality. The intelligence community developed into a collection of agencies with overlapping responsibilities, while the director of the Central Intelligence Agency exercised little practical supervision over the whole system. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, responsible for domestic law enforcement, operated almost entirely outside that community even though information about foreign terrorists inside the United States could matter to it.

Before September 11, agencies had also failed to anticipate the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya and the USS Cole in Yemen. The Congressional Joint Inquiry into the September 11 attacks concluded that intelligence agencies had failed to recognize the individual and collective significance of available information and had missed opportunities to disrupt the plot. It argued that information, if understood, could have improved the chances of uncovering and preventing the attacks.

The book places that judgment alongside a caution about hindsight. A retrospective inquiry can identify material that appears relevant once the outcome is known; that does not prove analysts could reasonably have recognized its significance beforehand. Drawing on Roberta Wohlstetter’s account of Pearl Harbor, the discussion emphasizes how difficult it is to distinguish warning signals from the confusion surrounding them. Predicting a terrorist attack by nineteen men could be harder still than anticipating a large naval assault. Even so, the repeated failures across four major attacks from 1993 to 2001 raise the possibility that different organization might at least have improved the chances of assessing the danger.

Centralization, Information, and Judgment

Congress’s inquiry emphasized insufficient information-sharing among agencies. Rather than producing a coherent picture of threats, agencies had generated localized snapshots. Senator Richard Shelby faulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s decentralized structure for keeping information in largely independent fiefdoms, and argued that an agency standing above and apart from disputatious bureaucracies should direct national intelligence.

The book treats that proposal as an incomplete answer. The division of labor among agencies can support specialization, closer analysis, and diverse perspectives: information dismissed as noise by one group may reveal important clues to another. The deeper deficiency was not decentralization by itself but decentralization without a means of aggregating information and judgments. Congress’s call for a central authority addressed coordination, but risking the loss of local knowledge and independent analysis in the process.

The alternative advanced in the book is aggregation rather than simple centralization. Linking agencies’ computer databases could improve the flow of information while preserving their autonomy; remarkably, two years after September 11, the government still lacked a single unified watch list drawing on all parts of the intelligence community. More broadly, the challenge is to let specialists retain the knowledge gained close to their work while making their information and assessments useful to the larger system. Congress’s investigation thus frames a continuing institutional problem: how to connect decentralized knowledge without assuming that a small group at the center will necessarily judge better than the wider community.