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NCTC: Up to 70 Terrorist Plots Each Day Ronald Kessler This is Part II of a two-part series by Ronald Kessler on the National Counterterrorism Center. Read Part I of the series, "NCTC Says 9/11 Anniversary Attacks Unlikely."
WASHINGTON -- Every weekday morning at 7, Vice Admiral John Scott Redd, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia, picks up the "Read Book" that lists as many as 60 or 70 potential terrorist threats against the United States.
The white binder is four inches thick, and each copy is specially numbered for the person receiving it.
Admiral Redd gets number one. Beyond Top Secret A string of code words across the cover of the "Read Book" classify it beyond top secret. Inside, a 16-page document called the threat matrix lists the latest threats. It changes daily. A kind of terrorism spread sheet, the threat matrix notes the type and reliability of the source for each threat, such as: "a new source, unevaluated, first time reporting" or "an established source, generally reliable, has provided reliable information in the past."
The "Read Book" — the title is printed in red — also contains a situation report produced by the center.
Before 9/11, no one brought together all the intelligence on possible terrorist plots and made sure the appropriate agencies were pursuing leads. As director of the NCTC, created by President Bush in 2004, Admiral Redd has this job.
Retired from the Navy, Redd was executive director of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding weapons of mass destruction.
At the NCTC, he meets with a small group of analysts at 7:15 a.m. and whittles down the list of plots of greatest concern to perhaps 25 or 30. Tossed out are plots from walk-ins who may be looking for money and seem flaky or offer details that don't check out.
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Fifteen minutes later, Redd meets with a larger group and cuts the number of threats to be scrutinized to 10 or 20.
Redd regularly goes off for meetings with President Bush, the National Security Council, the Department of Homeland Security, or National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte. Meanwhile, at 8 a.m., Kevin R. Brock, an FBI agent who is the principal deputy director of the NCTC, starts a secure video teleconference with the FBI, CIA, NSA, White House, and other agencies to review the threats and make sure that the appropriate agencies cover all the leads. Reminiscent of the Old West When Brock speaks, it's with controlled energy. He doesn't open his mouth any wider than he has to, similar to an old Western cowboy from the movies. The word terrorism is pronounced "terrism" by Brock. And except that his days growing up in California and Connecticut deprived him of a Texas drawl, he is an FBI version of the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
The NCTC acts as a sort of traffic controller, Brock said in an interview in his NCTC office.
"We want to know, 'Have we thought through the problem?'" Brock said. "Are we thinking of everything we could do here? Maybe NSA could help out on this. Maybe the CIA could pursue this angle or this agent. "It's more of a collaborative brainstorming on ways that we can enhance the intelligence on this particular problem and get out of it everything that we can. This kind of stuff really wasn't being done before."
In the end, "The vast majority of the threats wash out," Brock said. "They are not credible or just didn't pan out. But it gives you a sense of what is out there, what does the bad guy community look like, and what is the kind of information that's emerging from all that. For the one or two threats that are real, we want to move against that threat, to head it off at the pass, interdict it, neutralize it." All Threats Taken Seriously "Some days you get stuff that's just off the wall," Admiral Redd said. "But you gotta take it all seriously."
A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Redd's last assignment on active duty was as director of Strategic Plans and Policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Redd has a neat, white mustache. His thick white hair is parted low. He is fast-talking and professorial. He sweeps his arms out while he's speaking, in wide, shipboard gestures.
Interviewed on the day before the London airliner plot was taken down, Redd said he had been at the White House that morning and had "talked to the key players in the Cabinet about what's going on." He did not specify to a reporter what was going on.
But the NCTC, along with the FBI, CIA, and NSA, had been working closely with the British during the investigation. According to the portrayal by the media and congressional critics, the FBI and CIA don't talk to each other. At the NCTC, they not only talk to each other, they sit side by side 24 hours a day in a 10,000-square-foot operations center, sharing information and leads.
"We are better prepared today as a country, in the war on terror, than any time in our history," Redd said. "First reason is our intelligence is a lot better. Terrorists are a tough target. For all the obvious reasons, this is a very small group and they are in places from the mountains, the outback border, to other places. Secondly, we're sharing that intelligence much more effectively. We give it to the people who need to have it. Third, we are taking the war offensively to the terrorists."
"The public just knows the tip of the iceberg," Redd said. "There are lots of terrorists out there. You hear about the more famous ones when they get taken down, or something happens to them, but we have really decimated not only al-Qaida but a lot of other ones that most people will never hear about. And we have disrupted a lot of terrorist operations, we with our allies."
Collaboration Is Key Besides integrating intelligence with counterterrorism, the collaboration fostered by the NCTC means different agencies within the intelligence community can hash out their differences in a productive way.
"Let's say that three agencies disagreed on a threat," Redd said. "By bringing people together, we can ask not only what do you know and what do you not know. The CIA may think they've got a HUMINT [human intelligence] source that they think is really hot, and they're really banking on that.
"NSA maybe isn't quite so sure because they've got something that's contradictory. Ideally, everybody comes together, but even if they don't, if it goes to a policy-maker here, he or she can say, ‘OK. I understand why the intelligence community differs. Here's how and why they differ,' putting it in context."
In the same vein, material presented to Bush every morning in the "President's Daily Brief" now specifies the agency behind a report. Included in the PDB are reports from the NCTC.
During the design phase of the NCTC operations center, a question arose about how to configure the watch centers of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division and the CIA's Counterterrorism Center.
An NCTC official suggested that they be located at either end of the operations center, with no wall separating them. That was a shocking idea. Even though the NCTC's nearly 200 analysts are detailed from the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other agencies and work side by side, having discreet FBI and CIA space open to analysts from other agencies was unheard of. Sharing Information The two agencies agreed to try the open space idea. After all, too many walls — real and imagined — was one of the 9/11 commission's major criticisms. Now, ever since the NCTC opened its six-story secure building in January 2005, the walls have stayed down, with FBI agents and CIA analysts walking back and forth between the two watch centers.
In another wall-busting innovation, the NCTC operates a classified Web site that provides information to 5,000 analysts throughout the world. Analysts can search for Hezbollah and "John Jones" and pull up anything relating to that person.
The NCTC's analysts have access to the raw intelligence reports of all the agencies. If they think a sensitive report should be disseminated to the intelligence community at large, the analysts ask the originating agency, which usually provides an edited version. That way, the information becomes available without compromising a sensitive source.
The NCTC also operates what Redd calls "the mother of all databases," the Terrorist Information Datamart Environment (TIDE).
"Whether it comes from an operations cable from the CIA or a very sensitive SIGINT [signals intelligence intercept] from NSA, if there's a piece of derogatory information on a known or suspected terrorist, it goes in that database," Redd said.
From that database, the NCTC extracts the name, date of birth, and some additional basic information to identify each possible terrorist. The NCTC passes those names, each tagged with a TIDE number, to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center. Those names then form the basis for the no-fly list and other lists checked by U.S. Customs officers and State Department officers issuing visas.
The list has 350,000 names, of which 250,000 are separate individuals. The other entries consist of aliases or different spellings of the same name, like Muhammed and Mohammad.
Civil liberties advocates have complained that there is something insidious about the number of names on the list. Yet the problem before 9/11 was that there were too few names on it. Back then, the government maintained four different terrorist identity databases and 13 independent watch lists. It was in part because the databases were incompatible that two of the 9/11 hijackers managed to slip into this country.
Besides running the NCTC, Redd is tasked with developing a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy that pinpoints which component of what agency is responsible for every aspect of protecting the country from terrorism. That includes the fighter jets that scramble to possibly shoot down an airplane considered a danger. In that role, Redd reports directly to the president.
"Most agencies do pretty well at what they understand their role in life to be," Redd said. "It's when you come up against a boundary situation—foreign and domestic being a perfect example from 9/11 — when people aren't quite sure how to act. We want to make sure they know who is accountable for what."
The admiral's office is stark, with lots of filing cabinets, a stand of nine CPUs (the guts of a computer), two waste baskets, and a secure trash bag. The nine CPUs are a reminder that integration of the intelligence community is not yet complete. While two of the CPUs give Redd access to the computer networks of intelligence services of allied countries, the rest are for the separate networks of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Defense Department. All told, the NCTC taps into 28 separate computer networks.
The good news is that NCTC analysts, working in a building protected against electronic intrusions and rarely seen by journalists, have access to all the country's intelligence networks. The bad news is there are still so many systems, each requiring separate access codes and each presenting information differently. Contracts are being let to integrate some of them.
"There's this balancing act, which is always going on, in which somebody says you share everything with everybody. That there's no concept of need to know any more. Rather, it's need to share," Redd said. "That's fine until you have a very sensitive source, a human source or technical source, and the cost of having to replace that source if it becomes blown is maybe a human life or, in the case of a technical source, maybe millions of dollars. So there's always this balance between need to know, protecting sensitive sources and methods, and need to share. And that's one of the beautiful things about NCTC, that we've got people here from all these agencies, who understand what their agencies are trying to do, and they get to see it all coming in here."
While further work on integration still remains, the fact that the United States has not been attacked since 9/11 is no accident, Redd said.
"This is a long battle," Redd said. "My grandchildren, I hope, will be around when the war on terror is finally over with. There'll be a lot of battles out there; it's a long war; and we may well lose a battle or two. It's just strict laws of probability that something's going to happen at some point. But by and large, we are better prepared than we've ever been."
Ronald Kessler is Chief Washington Correspondent for NewsMax.com. Get his dispatches FREE sent you via e-mail – Click Here Now.
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