Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 [Hardcover]

Amy B. Zegart (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0691120218 | ISBN-13: 978-0691120218 | Publication Date: August 6, 2007 | Edition: First

In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable.

Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government. Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot.

Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ever since the end of the cold war, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and more than a dozen other intelligence organizations that answer to the president had been struggling to adapt their sources and methods to the new menace. As Amy B. Zegart argues in Spying Blind, they just weren't up to the job.... Zegart, blaming institutional inertia more than individuals, counts more than 20 specific instances where the CIA or the FBI missed chances to stop the 9/11 attacks.
(Christopher Dickey Newsweek )

Don't be fooled by the title of this book. It sounds as if the author is going to tread the same turf as Richard Clarke, Tim Weiner, Bob Woodward and a host of others, including the 9/11 Commission Report, but Amy Zegart in Spying Blind goes several steps beyond her predecessors.... Zegart presents the facts behind this state of affairs in a more scholarly way than we've previously seen, by examining over 300 intelligence reform recommendations and by tracing the history of CIA and FBI counter-terrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001. ... Spying Blind provides a clear and comprehensive overview of a dire situation -- the kind of knowledge that comes in handy when you call or write your congressman or, for that matter, when you vote.
(Mary Welp The Courier-Journal )

Zegart argues that any meaningful improvement in U.S. intelligence coordination and effectiveness will require the president and Congress to take on the Defense Department.... Spying Blind is a thorough examination of those reform failures. In it, Zegart sifts through hundreds of intelligence recommendations...and findings by the 9/11 Commission and congressional committees.
(David J. Garrow Wilson Quarterly )

Review

There is no longer any doubt of the failure of our intelligence agencies in the years following the Cold War. Amy Zegart has examined the reasons for this failure in addition to the well-meaning but mistaken attempts to address the problem. An important book for all those interested in the nation's security.
(Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission and former governor of New Jersey )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press; First edition (August 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691120218
• ISBN-13: 978-0691120218
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #520,698 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I grew up in Louisville Kentucky, and have been a political junkie all my life. I spent my childhood tracking election night tallies and writing my Congressman. When I was 13, I saw Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping on television wearing a Texas cowboy hat during his historic trip to the United States. I was instantly enthralled. My mother, an antique dealer who can find anyone and anything, tracked down a local Taiwanese graduate student and convinced her to teach me Mandarin after school. I continued studying Chinese at Andover, majored in East Asian Studies at Harvard, lived in Beijing and Taiwan, and after graduating from college won a Fulbright Scholarship to study the 1989 Chinese democracy movement and Tiananmen tragedy.

When I left China, I decided to return to American politics. I got my Ph.D. in political science from Stanford, where I became fascinated by why good organizations do dumb things ' particularly in U.S. foreign policy. Intelligence agencies proved as opaque and interesting as Chinese politics; I've been hooked on researching the CIA ever since.

My professional career has included spending four years at McKinsey & Company (it turns out private sector firms also have plenty of organizational deficiencies), serving on the Clinton Administration's National Security Council staff and as a foreign policy advisor to the Bush 2000 presidential campaign. For the past eight years, I have been a public policy professor at UCLA, where I teach courses on U.S. foreign policy and public management to undergraduates and MPP students. I have written two books and a number of academic articles about the design problems of U.S. national security agencies, have provided training to various government agencies'including the Marine Corps and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence'and serve on the Los Angeles Homeland Security Advisory Council.

When I am not digging through declassified documents, I am a minivan-driving soccer mom. My three kids, husband, and I live in chaos in Los Angeles, California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Whatever Happened to the Organization Man?, August 26, 2007

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Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Hardcover)

The central premise of this remarkable book is that the intelligence failures that are associated with 9/11 and the failure of intelligence reform are both symptomatic of profound internal organizational flaws in CIA and the FBI (and by extension the other National Intelligence principals NSA, NGA, and DIA). The sub-premise is that both agencies were unable to adapt to the realities of a Post-Cold War world. This is a controversial premise because the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) generally denies that 9/11 was an intelligence failure and claims to have implemented major reforms. Zegart makes a persuasive argument that her premise is correct.

Social scientist that she is, Zegart constructs a model to guide her analysis of both institutions. This model is based on what she identifies as three organizational characteristics common to both CIA and the FBI: structural fragmentation; dysfunctional cultural norms; and perverse incentive systems. She applies this model to both the institutions failure to adapt to 21st Century challenges and their failure to provide warning of the dreadful attacks of 9/11. Indeed Zegart notes that based on this model the intelligence record of both agencies wasn't very good during the Cold War either.

In the course of developing her case Zegart provides the reader with a number of really useful concepts such as "change is not adaptation" and "rational boundaries." Although somewhat outside of the parameters of her model, Zegart also makes clear that the Defense Department and its allies in the congress also has contributed a good deal to failure of intelligence reform. Like her earlier book "Flawed by Design" Zegart has provided another perceptive and discouraging analysis of the U.S. national Security system.

So is this an accurate and fair book? Well Zegart is a very careful scholar who has done an excellent job documenting her findings. She also appears to have maintained her objectivity and adherence to scientific standards of proof in the course of her analysis.
And, for what it is worth, to this reviewer she seems to have correctly diagnosed a good part of what ails the U.S. Intelligence System.

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb book that REALLY gets at the heart of the matter, August 24, 2007

By 

maskirovka (Alexandria, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Hardcover)

As someone with nearly 20 years experience in the Intelligence Community (IC) as an analyst, I found Amy Zegart's book to be an outstanding read. So many, many things in it rang very true for me about the problems of the IC. I think the bottom line is that while individuals make mistakes, those individuals stand on the "shoulders" of organizational culture and bureaucratic politics. There are a number of things that Zegart explores that strike a painful chord with me:

1. The fact with a few honorable exceptions, the IC agencies routinely sacrifice strategic analysis to the gods of current intelligence. I have concluded that any analyst who wishes to work long-range analytical projects is well-advised to find himself or herself an office where such current intelligence requirements are not levied.

2. Fundamental reform of the IC is not going to take place unless leaders within it are committed to it and are helped from without by the Congress and the President.

3. Simply by virtue of its ninety year history as a law enforcement agency and its success in being one, the FBI is not going to be able to transform itself into an intelligence agency focused on preemption of terrorist attacks (as opposed to investigating them after the fact).

4. The bureaucratic culture of the IC still does not encourage collaboration and sharing between individual agencies (and sometimes, even within agencies).

I could go on, but I probably would wind up depressing myself. My only criticism of Zegart's book is that when lamenting the fact that the CIA was never able to penetrate the leadership of al-Qaeda, she doesn't seem to appreciate the consequences of the US having an agent who is a member of a terrorist organization. Terrorists don't tend to trust those who have not indisputably spilled blood of their enemies. Therefore, the US would have to give such an agent license to commit crimes that conceivably would result in the deaths of Americans. I do not think that the American public would understand, let alone tolerate the revelation that the Intelligence Community had such an agent.

Finally, I wish Zegart had written about the Iraq WMD failures. A lot of that is down to organizational culture and bureaucratic politics.

Bottom line: this is a very insightful book, and people who want to understand why intelligence failures happen would do well to read it and skip books that try to blame the President, the Congress, the media, or some other bogeyman. Books like those are polemics, written not to persuade but to make people with already set opinions feel righteous about their views. Zegart's book gets --as I said in the title-- to the heart of the matter.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good overview and interesting approach, February 9, 2009

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J. M. Clark (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11 (Hardcover)

The book takes a systemic look at failures leading up to 9/11. The author intends each chapter to be able to be read independently which leads to a lot of repetition but otherwise it is an enjoyable read.