NYT report on 26/11: Yes, everyone knew, and yes, it could happen again

The latest revelations in the New York Times story about the collective failure of India, the US and Britain to share advance information they had on the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s 26/11 attack on Mumbai would come as no surprise to members of intelligence community anywhere.

The al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks carried out in the US remain the mother of all such SNAFUs (situation normal, all fouled up) by a government which had not acted in spite of getting advance information.

The Bush administration chose to ignore a number of warnings of Osama bin Laden’s impending attack, received from different sources including the CIA. According to a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) report, which had warned of an al Qaeda plan to hijack a commercial airliner leaving from Frankfurt International Airport between March and August 2000, was disregarded because nobody believed that either Osama or the Taliban was capable of carrying out such an operation.

The 9/11 commission had found “four kinds of failures: in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management" of various agencies involved in fighting terrorism. All these relate to the leadership failure at various levels to take quick follow-up actions, though the administration and the media quickly attributed such terror attacks to intelligence failure.

The 26/11 attack itself is a classic example of multiple failures. The NYT report gives details of the failure of the US, Britain and India, which gleaned different bits of information. But none of them eviscerated a coherent picture of the terrorists’ intentions.

In the 26/11 attack, there was executive failure at various levels make use of available information. Both the RAW and the Intelligence Bureau had given advance information on the LeT training its cadres for carrying out a sea-based raid on key targets in Mumbai.

In fact, they had provided details of trainees, training schedule and trainers to Mumbai police as early as December 2006. And Mumbai police had alerted the hotels that were subsequently targeted. But the police lifted the alert as it was “too general” and the Navy and the Coast Guard probably ignored it after the Naval chief was said to have called it “not actionable”. And when the attack took place everyone was totally unprepared because they had not taped up their drills. These included the Union home ministry.

Since then a lot of effort and money has been spent upon improving our technology resources for intelligence gathering, coordination and dissemination. Qualitative improvement is taking place in coastal security set up. Despite many states resisting quantitative and qualitative improvements in policing, quite a few terrorist modules have been busted. The National Intelligence Agency is increasingly bringing in its expertise to help investigations before terrorists carry out 26/11-styled attacks.

But still, the moot question is, are we confident that such an attack would not be repeated? Before answering it, it is good to remember that no intelligence is going to be complete or always timely.

The New York Times report is a testimony to the reluctance of intelligence agencies to share information available to them instantly with other nations. There are a number of professional reasons for this. This happens even among nations like the US and Australia, which have very close security relations.

Apart from political complications, they want to protect their sources who might be involved in collecting other information. So they generally give it a high security classification; this automatically limits its circulation.

With technology leaping forward in snooping and eavesdropping on communication intelligence, agencies are sitting on a tome of inputs. So they have a major problem in identifying and sifting through information to evolve usable assessment in time even to meet their own requirement, let alone for other countries’ benefit.

So despite all the pious pronouncements, nations will continue to share information as they choose and nothing more. That is why all nations including India are augmenting their own intelligence resources. But in the war against terrorism, it is going to be even more difficult as the terrorist is getting increasingly tech-savvy and makes use of the same technological advances the intelligence gatherers enjoy. So we should get ready for an even more complex counterterrorism threat in the time to come. But are we ready? It is for the people to demand the answer from rulers, particularly at the state level.