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CIA’s probe into pre-9/11 lapses late

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., watch President Bush sign the intelligence reform bill into law on Dec. 17 in Washington. (File/Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Katherine Pfleger Shrader Associated Press
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., watch President Bush sign the intelligence reform bill into law on Dec. 17 in Washington. (File/Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)

WASHINGTON – The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Friday the release of an internal CIA investigation into pre-Sept. 11 failures may be more than six weeks away – a delay she finds baffling.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., and other lawmakers have been pushing for months for the findings of an inquiry by the CIA’s inspector general, John Helgerson. The report was first requested in December 2002 by a joint House-Senate committee investigating intelligence lapses before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In an interview, Harman said the report was substantially completed in July. Before the November elections, she said, CIA Director Porter Goss told her it would be completed within a couple of weeks.

“I am baffled by this,” Harman said. “It is a congressionally requested report. It should have been there in the summer.”

While Harman made clear she was not alleging that anyone is interfering, “what I fear is that as time goes by there may be some attempts to interfere,” she said.

The report is expected to find that specific senior leaders of the agency should be held personally responsible for failing to appropriately distribute resources and other failures leading up to the suicide hijackings, the New York Times said Friday.

Among them is expected to be former CIA Director George Tenet and one of his deputies, Jim Pavitt, who ran the agency’s clandestine service. Both stepped down last summer.

Harman said her aides contacted the inspector general’s office Friday and were told the report may be more than six weeks away. Among hang-ups, people who are named in the report have been invited to comment, but there are delays because some are overseas, Harman said.

“They have e-mail and computers,” she added. “I don’t think it’s that hard to find people.”

Others in Congress have also questioned the pace of the review. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate’s intelligence panel, wrote Goss in the fall about the report’s progress and “the appearance that the inspector general’s independence is being infringed.”

The CIA declined to comment Thursday and Friday.

In a statement released Thursday, former Tenet spokesman Bill Harlow said no one in the U.S. government was more aggressive dealing with the threat of terrorism before 9/11 than Tenet.

“Mr. Tenet was correctly characterized by many as ‘running around with his hair on fire’ prior to 9/11, when others in government – including Congress and the executive branch – were downplaying his concerns,” Harlow said.

The former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, has said that personal accountability – placed on the agency’s senior leadership – should be at the center of intelligence reform efforts. That includes Tenet and Pavitt, he said.