[THS] Top Secret America

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25960.htm

Top Secret America
A hidden world, growing beyond control

By Dana Priest and William M. Arkin

July 19, 2010 "Washington Post" -- The top-secret world the government created in
response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy
and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it
employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the
same work.


These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post
that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a
Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After
nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put
in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is
impossible to determine.

[video at url above]

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on
programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about
10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in
Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret
intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001.
Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol
buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy
and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating
in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and
domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each
year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart
of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb
attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists
but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's
security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not
just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the
director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary
Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence
programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the
ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super
Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the
nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super
User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a
tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program
after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in
frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt.
Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the
Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded
145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what
he discovered.

"I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place
to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities," he said in an interview.
"The complexity of this system defies description."

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer
because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing
process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and
waste," Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us
more safe."

The Post's investigation is based on government documents and contracts, job
descriptions, property records, corporate and social networking Web sites, additional
records, and hundreds of interviews with intelligence, military and corporate officials
and former officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited
from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation at work for
describing their concerns.

The Post's online database of government organizations and private companies was
built entirely on public records. The investigation focused on top-secret work because
the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Today's article describes the government's role in this expanding enterprise.
Tuesday's article describes the government's dependence on private contractors.
Wednesday's is a portrait of one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an
extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret America is
available at http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/ .

Defense Secretary Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he does not believe
the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise data is sometimes
difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence units in the Defense Department, he
said he intends to review those programs for waste. "Nine years after 9/11, it makes
a lot of sense to sort of take a look at this and say, 'Okay, we've built tremendous
capability, but do we have more than we need?' " he said.

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last week, said he's
begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency because the levels of spending
since 9/11 are not sustainable. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the
wall. I want to be prepared for that," he said. "Frankly, I think everyone in
intelligence ought to be doing that."

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national intelligence in May,
retired Adm. Dennis C. Blair said he did not believe there was overlap and
redundancy in the intelligence world. "Much of what appears to be redundancy is, in
fact, providing tailored intelligence for many different customers," he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he needed to know.
"I have visibility on all the important intelligence programs across the community, and
there are processes in place to ensure the different intelligence capabilities are
working together where they need to," he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard Hotel waiting to give
a speech, he mused about The Post's findings. "After 9/11, when we decided to
attack violent extremism, we did as we so often do in this country," he said. "The
attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing."

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in McLean, a line of cars idles every weekday
morning as a new day in Top Secret America gets underway. The drivers wait
patiently to turn left, then crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is
not on any public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter, leafless trees can't
conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size of five Wal-Mart stores stacked
on top of one another rising behind a grassy berm. One step too close without the
right badge, and men in black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700 federal
employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty Crossing, the nickname for
the two headquarters of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and its
National Counterterrorism Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and
thousands of parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government agencies and
corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001 attacks. But it is not nearly the
biggest, the most costly or even the most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington County office building, the lobby directory doesn't include the Air
Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a big "Welcome!" sign in the
hallway greeting visitors who know to step off the elevator on the third floor. In
Elkridge, Md., a clandestine program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with
false windows to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is
across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg, Fla., it's in a
modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and
private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices
protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that
eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex,"
which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building nuclear weapons to
deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security enterprise with a more amorphous
mission: defeating transnational violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. That is the reason it is so
difficult to gauge the success and identify the problems of Top Secret America,
including whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is vast,
publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10,
2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic
counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist
threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before
the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress
gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500
employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National Security Agency,
which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled. Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism
Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as
the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the
federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against
al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in
2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied.
Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of
Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37
more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and
coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36
new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more
each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to
9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more
administrative and logistic support: phone operators, secretaries, librarians,
architects, carpenters, construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and,
because of where they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility
began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11
Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an
agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the director clear
legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters, which meant he wouldn't have
power over the individual agencies he was supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John D.
Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense Department shifted
billions of dollars out of one budget and into another so that the ODNI could not
touch it, according to two senior officials who watched the process. The CIA
reclassified some of its most sensitive information at a higher level so the National
Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed to see it, said
former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do with the ODNI's
rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of 11 people
stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block from the White House. A
year later, the budding agency moved to two floors of another building. In April
2008, it moved into its huge permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear
about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress,
especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The
DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration.
The last director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement
reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased
flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every
day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion
e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of
those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence
agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the
office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter
spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk.
Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases
feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it
amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency heads don't really want to give up
the systems they have. But there's some progress: "All my e-mail on one computer
now," Leiter says. "That's a big deal."

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become, just head
west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the military intelligence
giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, find the off-ramp and turn left.
Those two shimmering-blue five-story ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-
Intelligence Agency, which analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth's
geography. A small sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an intelligence agency
contractor specializing in mapping, speech analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is
the government's Underground Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas
underground command centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and
terrorist groups, and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the Washington region
is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc stretching from Leesburg
south to Quantico, back north through Washington and curving northeast to
Linthicum, just north of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport.
Many buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military bases.

Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with neighborhoods, schools and
shopping centers and go unnoticed by most people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices "on the
order of the pyramids," in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two buildings that will
increase the agency's office space by one-third. To the south, Springfield is becoming
home to the new $1.8 billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters,
which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home to 8,500
employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of millions of dollars for this
kind of federal construction across the region.

It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost of this
expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television monitors. "Escort-required"
badges. X-ray machines and lockers to store cellphones and pagers. Keypad door
locks that open special rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable
to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of
responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings has at least one of these
rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive compartmented information facility. Some are
as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field.

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the
Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce
Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start
a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a
big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers,
internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards
have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star
general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to
have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a
status symbol."

Among the most important people inside the SCIFs are the low-paid employees
carrying their lunches to work to save money. They are the analysts, the 20- and 30-
year-olds making $41,000 to $65,000 a year, whose job is at the core of everything
Top Secret America tries to do.

At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations,
coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash, turning them into clues that
lead to individuals and groups trying to harm the United States.

Their work is greatly enhanced by computers that sort through and categorize data.
But in the end, analysis requires human judgment, and half the analysts are relatively
inexperienced, having been hired in the past several years, said a senior ODNI
official. Contract analysts are often straight out of college and trained at corporate
headquarters.

When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the
number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming,
say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI
doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of
trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still
in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness.
"Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they
simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. "It's the soccer ball syndrome.
Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it," said Richard H. Immerman,
who was the ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic
integrity and standards until early 2009. "I saw tremendous overlap."

Even the analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is supposed
to be where the most sensitive, most difficult-to-obtain nuggets of information are
fused together, get low marks from intelligence officials for not producing reports
that are original, or at least better than the reports already written by the CIA, FBI,
National Security Agency or Defense Intelligence Agency.

When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central
Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the NCTC. In
2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him
so. "I told him that after 41/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred
of information that helped me prosecute three wars!" he said loudly, leaning over the
table during an interview.

Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca,
Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with
Washington's bureaucracy. "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and
ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?" he said. "Who
orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"

He's hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior
intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he
began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read
every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily
Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC
Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . .

It's too much, he complained. The inbox on his desk was full, too. He threw up his
arms, picked up a thick, glossy intelligence report and waved it around, yelling.

"Jesus! Why does it take so long to produce?"

"Why does it have to be so bulky?"

"Why isn't it online?"

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually
counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior
officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead
on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis,
re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the
attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

The ODNI's analysis office knows this is a problem. Yet its solution was another
publication, this one a daily online newspaper, Intelligence Today. Every day, a staff
of 22 culls more than two dozen agencies' reports and 63 Web sites, selects the best
information and packages it by originality, topic and region.

Analysis is not the only area where serious overlap appears to be gumming up the
national security machinery and blurring the lines of responsibility.

Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct
information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of
U.S. policy and military activities overseas.

And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands
claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

"Frankly, it hasn't been brought together in a unified approach," CIA Director Panetta
said of the many agencies now involved in cyber-warfare.

"Cyber is tremendously difficult" to coordinate, said Benjamin A. Powell, who served
as general counsel for three directors of national intelligence until he left the
government last year. "Sometimes there was an unfortunate attitude of bring your
knives, your guns, your fists and be fully prepared to defend your turf." Why?
"Because it's funded, it's hot and it's sexy."
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Last fall, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly opened fire at Fort Hood, Tex.,
killing 13 people and wounding 30. In the days after the shootings, information
emerged about Hasan's increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they
should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk "adverse events." He had also
exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S.
intelligence.

But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling
counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from
Walter Reed, the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to
search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902's commander had decided to
turn the unit's attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States,
even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI's 106 Joint Terrorism
Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

The 902nd, working on a program the commander named RITA, for Radical Islamic
Threat to the Army, had quietly been gathering information on Hezbollah, Iranian
Republican Guard and al-Qaeda student organizations in the United States. The
assessment "didn't tell us anything we didn't know already," said the Army's senior
counterintelligence officer at the Pentagon.

Secrecy and lack of coordination have allowed organizations, such as the 902nd in
this case, to work on issues others were already tackling rather than take on the
much more challenging job of trying to identify potential jihadist sympathizers within
the Army itself.

Beyond redundancy, secrecy within the intelligence world hampers effectiveness in
other ways, say defense and intelligence officers. For the Defense Department, the
root of this problem goes back to an ultra-secret group of programs for which access
is extremely limited and monitored by specially trained security officers.

These are called Special Access Programs - or SAPs - and the Pentagon's list of code
names for them runs 300 pages. The intelligence community has hundreds more of
its own, and those hundreds have thousands of sub-programs with their own limits
on the number of people authorized to know anything about them. All this means
that very few people have a complete sense of what's going on.

"There's only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs - that's
God," said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the
Obama administration's nominee to be the next director of national intelligence.

Such secrecy can undermine the normal chain of command when senior officials use
it to cut out rivals or when subordinates are ordered to keep secrets from their
commanders.

One military officer involved in one such program said he was ordered to sign a
document prohibiting him from disclosing it to his four-star commander, with whom
he worked closely every day, because the commander was not authorized to know
about it. Another senior defense official recalls the day he tried to find out about a
program in his budget, only to be rebuffed by a peer. "What do you mean you can't
tell me? I pay for the program," he recalled saying in a heated exchange.

Another senior intelligence official with wide access to many programs said that
secrecy is sometimes used to protect ineffective projects. "I think the secretary of
defense ought to direct a look at every single thing to see if it still has value," he said.
"The DNI ought to do something similar."

The ODNI hasn't done that yet. The best it can do at the moment is maintain a
database of the names of the most sensitive programs in the intelligence community.
But the database does not include many important and relevant Pentagon projects.

Because so much is classified, illustrations of what goes on every day in Top Secret
America can be hard to ferret out. But every so often, examples emerge. A recent
one shows the post-9/11 system at its best and its worst.

Last fall, after eight years of growth and hirings, the enterprise was at full throttle
when word emerged that something was seriously amiss inside Yemen. In response,
President Obama signed an order sending dozens of secret commandos to that
country to target and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda affiliate.

In Yemen, the commandos set up a joint operations center packed with hard drives,
forensic kits and communications gear. They exchanged thousands of intercepts,
agent reports, photographic evidence and real-time video surveillance with dozens of
top-secret organizations in the United States.

That was the system as it was intended. But when the information reached the
National Counterterrorism Center in Washington for analysis, it arrived buried within
the 5,000 pieces of general terrorist-related data that are reviewed each day.
Analysts had to switch from database to database, from hard drive to hard drive,
from screen to screen, just to locate what might be interesting to study further.

As military operations in Yemen intensified and the chatter about a possible terrorist
strike increased, the intelligence agencies ramped up their effort. The flood of
information into the NCTC became a torrent.

Somewhere in that deluge was even more vital data. Partial names of someone in
Yemen. A reference to a Nigerian radical who had gone to Yemen. A report of a
father in Nigeria worried about a son who had become interested in radical teachings
and had disappeared inside Yemen.

These were all clues to what would happen when a Nigerian named Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab left Yemen and eventually boarded a plane in Amsterdam bound for
Detroit. But nobody put them together because, as officials would testify later, the
system had gotten so big that the lines of responsibility had become hopelessly
blurred.

"There are so many people involved here," NCTC Director Leiter told Congress.

"Everyone had the dots to connect," DNI Blair explained to the lawmakers. "But I
hadn't made it clear exactly who had primary responsibility."

And so Abdulmutallab was able to step aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253. As it
descended toward Detroit, he allegedly tried to ignite explosives hidden in his
underwear. It wasn't the very expensive, very large 9/11 enterprise that prevented
disaster. It was a passenger who saw what he was doing and tackled him. "We didn't
follow up and prioritize the stream of intelligence," White House counterterrorism
adviser John O. Brennan explained afterward. "Because no one intelligence entity, or
team or task force was assigned responsibility for doing that follow-up investigation."

Blair acknowledged the problem. His solution: Create yet another team to run down
every important lead. But he also told Congress he needed more money and more
analysts to prevent another mistake.

More is often the solution proposed by the leaders of the 9/11 enterprise. After the
Christmas Day bombing attempt, Leiter also pleaded for more - more analysts to join
the 300 or so he already had.

The Department of Homeland Security asked for more air marshals, more body
scanners and more analysts, too, even though it can't find nearly enough qualified
people to fill its intelligence unit now. Obama has said he will not freeze spending on
national security, making it likely that those requests will be funded.

More building, more expansion of offices continues across the country. A $1.7 billion
NSA data-processing center will be under construction soon near Salt Lake City. In
Tampa, the U.S. Central Command’s new 270,000-square-foot intelligence office will
be matched next year by an equally large headquarters building, and then, the year
after that, by a 51,000-square-foot office just for its special operations section.

Just north of Charlottesville, the new Joint-Use Intelligence Analysis Facility will
consolidate 1,000 defense intelligence analysts on a secure campus.

Meanwhile, five miles southeast of the White House, the DHS has broken ground for
its new headquarters, to be shared with the Coast Guard. DHS, in existence for only
seven years, already has its own Special Access Programs, its own research arm, its
own command center, its own fleet of armored cars and its own 230,000-person
workforce, the third-largest after the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs.

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a
$3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new
headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon, a
major landmark in the alternative geography of Top Secret America and four times as
big as Liberty Crossing.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.