Spying eyes and ears

Congressional leaders make the case for a new emphasis on "human intelligence."

By Jake Tapper

Sep 14, 2001 | On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 11, in a room on the House side of the Capitol, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla. -- the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, respectively -- met for breakfast. Also at the meeting were Sen. John Kyl, R-Ariz., and some other members of the House Intelligence Committee.

They were meeting with the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., Maleeha Lodhi, and the director of Pakistani intelligence, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed. They were talking about the late-August trip Goss, Graham, and Kyl had made to Pakistan.

There they had met with Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf to discuss various security issues -- including the extradition of Osama bin Laden, officially wanted in the U.S. for allegedly plotting the two U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa in 1998. Musharraf had told the delegation that there was really nothing he could do about the matter, however close he and his government have been with the Taliban. "Musharraf insists the Taliban cannot be influenced and the matter is a bilateral problem which should be solved through talks between Kabul and Washington," Agence France Press reported on Aug. 28.

They had also met with Abdul Salam Zaeef, the ambassador to Pakistan from the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling militia. According to an account at the time from the Afghani embassy, as reported in the Afghan Islamic Press, "Zaeef assured the delegation that the Taliban government wanted to settle the issue" -- of extraditing bin Laden -- "through negotiations."

"Zaeef assured (the) U.S. delegation that the Taliban would never allow bin Laden to use Afghanistan to launch attacks on the U.S. or any other country," the Afghan Islamic Press said.

Whatever Graham, Goss, and Kyl had felt about their sojourn to Pakistan -- whatever confidence they may have had in the words of Musharraf and Zaeef -- that all changed, perhaps forever, when a Goss staffer entered the room and handed the former CIA agent a note.

Goss opened it. Two planes had just crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack. He passed the note to Graham.

They all turned on the TV. Soon they were all evacuated from the Capitol building.

Graham, Goss and Kyl are now more assured than ever that they can't rely on the assistance of the Musharrafs and Zaeefs of the world. The U.S. needs to do more on its own, they feel.

This is not a new position. Since the mid-1990s, Graham and Goss in particular have been advocating safeguards against events like Tuesday's. Fighting the entrenched bureaucracy of the intelligence community and the nonchalance of their colleagues and various administrations, the two have been arguing that with the end of the Cold War the U.S. had been lulled into a false sense of security. They wanted more money and more of an emphasis on "human intelligence" -- spies, agents and informants.

Now, the resistance they had previously encountered stands to change. In the horrific wake of Tuesday's terrorist attacks, leaders of the House and Senate intelligence communities anticipate greater support for the measures they've been shouting about from the rooftops for years.

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