We Made Mistakes - Cia Boss

The director of the CIA, George Tenet, today told the commission investigating the September 11 attacks the intelligence services had made mistakes.

It would take the US five years to get the "clandestine service our country needs", he warned.

Mr Tenet said there had been some "disarray" in the intelligence agencies ahead of the 2001 attacks.

They had not been recruiting the human analysts they needed while the "threats had grown more complex and dangerous", he said.

After the al-Qaida attacks on the US embassy in east Africa in 1998, the group had been a high priority in counter-terrorism operations, he added.

He had started to overhaul the CIA, and the organisation had been focused on the "right problems".

But he said that while the CIA knew of Osama Bin Laden's desire to attack the US at home, "We never translated this into an effective defence of the country."

Since the attacks, great efforts had been made to increase the cohesion between other agencies, including the FBI, he said.

Illustrating the earlier problems, he said there had been four different types of terrorist database
and "legal impediments to cooperation" between services.

Speaking on Capitol Hill to the commission, watched by some of the families of the victims of September 11, Mr Tenet said: "This is not a clinical excuse - 3,000 people died."

Those people, he added, had deserved better from the security services.

Mr Tenet was making his opening remarks before being questioned by the panel of commissioners.

Earlier, the panel said the CIA had missed the big-picture significance of "tell-tale indicators" of impending terrorist attacks.

This was partly because it had a culture of taking a piecemeal approach to intelligence analysis, it said.

The commission was holding a second day of hearings on US intelligence leading up the 2001 hijackings.

Preliminary findings from the panel's latest report concluded that a more detailed look at clues prior to the attacks could have unveiled the plot behind them.

A more strategic analysis could have identified that the plot might require suicide hijackers, who would take flight courses, the commission said.

Establishing such "tell-tale indicators" could have raised alerts after a July 2001 FBI report of terrorist interest in aircraft training in Arizona and the August 2001 arrest of French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui because of suspicious behaviour in a Minnesota flight school, it said.

"While many dedicated officers worked day and night for years to piece together the growing body of evidence on al-Qaida and to understand the threats, in the end it was not enough to gain the advantage before the 9-11 attacks," the commission said.

The panel did acknowledge the CIA had been hobbled by staffing limitations and the daily demands of issuing fresh intelligence summaries to government policy-makers.

It noted, for instance, that Mr Tenet recognised the need for strategic analysis against al-Qaida in late 2000 and appointed a manager to create a new CIA branch.

But the report said the CIA had had an inadequate counter-terror management strategy before the attacks.

Mr Tenet had sought greater funding for the CIA as a whole, not specifically for counter-terrorism, hampering long-term capabilities, it added.

The commission is expected to make its final report in the summer.