Embassies Should have Been on Alert Before Benghazi Attack, Former Official Says

By Jennifer Scholtes, CQ Staff Homeland Security
 
A former CIA analyst and congressional aide said this week that the absence of warning from intelligence officials before last month’s attack in Libya highlights a dangerous culture that has spread throughout the intelligence community over the last decade.

The Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi cannot altogether be blamed on a failure to share threat information, said Fred Fleitz, who served at the CIA starting in the 1980s, went on to work for the State Department in 2001 and then spent five years as a House Intelligence Committee adviser. But he added that he believes the CIA should have known to issue an urgent advance alert to U.S. embassies throughout the world, even if there was no definitive intelligence suggesting an attack on the consulate.

“It was common sense this was a dangerous day, and this is something the intelligence community should have jumped on,” Fleitz said during a panel Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

Since analysis about the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq proved faulty, analysts have been hesitant to predict threats that aren’t first suggested by evidence, Fleitz said. The George W. Bush administration used that analysis as a justification for invading the country, and the work was later pilloried in the media and in Washington. Fleitz said that when he joined the CIA in 1986, agents were “told to look beyond the evidence, dare to be wrong.”

“Today, intelligence is strictly evidence-based,” he said. “This makes it difficult to look over the horizon and to make a call that you know in your gut is right, even though the evidence isn’t there yet. And in my view, that’s the job of the intelligence analysts, to dare to be wrong, to make their best call, even when they don’t have all the pieces.”

Fleitz left the House Intelligence Committee last year to be managing editor of a website that provides intelligence analysis. During his time working for the panel, he said, it became clear managers are discouraging analysts from making those kinds of calls.

“There is an effort in the intelligence community that has made it gun-shy, that has made some analysts less willing to stick their necks out and dare to be wrong,” he said. “And there has been a political correctness imposed on intelligence analysts that has made it more difficult for them to think outside the box.”

The terminology used at homeland and intelligence agencies exacerbated those issues, Fleitz said.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s effort early on in her tenure to refer to “man-caused disasters,” rather than always saying “terrorist attacks,” affected the thinking of people working within the nation’s intelligence agencies, he said. Napolitano said she hoped the term would help promote an all-hazards approach at her department, but she soon began referring to terrorism.

Fleitz also cited the example of a threat report the intelligence community presented to the Senate and House intelligence committees this year, which used the term “homegrown radical extremist” rather than “homegrown terrorist.”

“This sort of reflected a politically correct effort, pressuring this government, pressuring intelligence analysts to think within a certain box, to not make certain calls,” he said.

Although he argues the lack of threat warning before the Benghazi attack constitutes an intelligence failure, Fleitz said the incident was ultimately the State Department’s fault for underestimating the threat and “misinterpreting consequences of the Arab Spring and the seriousness that radical jihadists still pose to this country and to our diplomats.”