USS Cole bombing

The USS Cole bombing appears in the book as an earlier warning that the United States’ intelligence system had failed to anticipate attacks. Its significance lies less in a detailed account of the bombing itself—the text supplies no operational narrative—than in how the episode helps frame the difficulty of gathering, sharing, and interpreting information across a divided intelligence community.

The bombing in a sequence of missed warnings

The book places the USS Cole bombing alongside the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassy in Kenya as attacks the intelligence community had failed to anticipate. These earlier failures did not make the flaws of the system seem undeniable to the public and policymakers. That changed after September 11, 2001, when a congressional inquiry concluded that agencies had failed to capitalize on the individual and collective significance of available information and had missed opportunities to disrupt the plot.

The sequence gives the USS Cole bombing a role as part of a recurring pattern, not as an isolated case examined on its own. The author compares the intelligence failure before September 11 to the failure to anticipate the attack on Pearl Harbor: in both instances, information later appeared to have pointed toward danger, yet the system had not converted it into effective anticipation.

Fragmentation and the problem of coordination

The larger institutional background reaches back to the division of intelligence responsibilities among the military services before World War II. The failure to anticipate Pearl Harbor helped prompt calls for a more comprehensive approach. After the war, “Wild Bill” Donovan advocated a centralized, impartial, independent agency; Congress created the CIA in 1947. But the intended unity of command did not take hold. Over time, intelligence work was spread among agencies with overlapping missions, while the CIA director had little practical supervision over the wider community and most intelligence funding came through the Department of Defense. The FBI, responsible for domestic law enforcement, operated largely outside that structure, despite the relevance of foreign terrorist activity inside the United States.

The book does not present centralization as a simple remedy. Dividing work among agencies can foster specialization, independent analysis, and different perspectives. The failure, it argues, was that the community lacked a reliable way to aggregate judgments as well as information. Intelligence gathered by separate groups could not necessarily be brought together into a shared assessment. The proposed alternative is not to place every decision in the hands of a small central authority, but to preserve the benefits of decentralized expertise while making information and judgments easier to combine.

Hindsight and the limits of prediction

The congressional inquiry’s findings are also qualified by the problem of hindsight. A retrospective review of a large volume of information will reveal items that seem relevant after an attack has occurred; that does not by itself establish that analysts could reasonably have recognized their significance beforehand. In her study of the Pearl Harbor intelligence failure, Roberta Wohlstetter described the difficulty of distinguishing warning signals from the surrounding confusion. The book argues that strategic surprise is an intractable problem, and contrasts a large military attack with an attack carried out by nineteen men to emphasize how difficult the latter might be to foresee.

Within that argument, the USS Cole bombing is a marker of the intelligence community’s earlier failures, but not proof that any single agency or analyst could have predicted what came next. The episode contributes to the book’s distinction between collecting information and making it collectively useful: decentralization can preserve local expertise, but without aggregation, scattered knowledge may fail to become shared understanding.