Robert Baer is a former CIA intelligence field officer who has written extensively (“Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude“; “See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism“) about how political wrangling in Washington over the past 30 years has badly damaged the ability of the CIA and other intelligence gathering agencies to generate an effective product for our nation’s leaders for use in evaluating and implementing foreign policy.
In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Mr. Baer uses his extensive experience in intelligence matters to evaluate the recently declassified and now famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (“PDB”) that President Bush and his advisors reviewed a little more than a month before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Mr. Baer begins by explaining the nature of a PDB:

. . . PDBs are the crown jewels. They meld the best information from the CIA’s clandestine sources, our embassies all over the world, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and every other federal agency with a possible input. Like crown jewels, too, they are protected to within an inch of their lives. In all my years in the CIA, I never once was given access to a PDB, and I was by far the rule, not the exception. Compartmentation rules forbid it. Sources and methods are too valuable.
The Aug. 6, 2001, PDB, in short, represents the very best intelligence we then had on Osama bin Laden and his plans.

So, Mr. Baer asks, how good was the August 6, 2001 PDB?:

In fact, pretty awful. The first item in the PDB refers the president to two interviews that Osama bin Laden gave to American TV in 1997 and 1998. In the interviews, bin Laden promises to “bring the fighting to America,” following “the example of World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.” As it turns out, bin Laden was telling the truth, but that’s not the point. In intelligence documents as in corporate reports and the evening news, the best stuff goes up top, and in this case the best was cribbed straight from the boob tube.
How about items two and three? The information in both relates to bin Laden’s intention to attack the U.S., but it is from “liaison services” — i.e. foreign governments. We now know from leaks what those liaison services were, but we don’t know the provenance of the information. Was our friendly liaison reading it in the local paper? Was it fabricating, as happened with the Italians and the Niger yellow cake that was supposedly going to Saddam Hussein? The CIA rule used to be that you never ever trust liaison reporting unless you can confirm it with your own sources. Imagine The Wall Street Journal relying on Mad magazine for its investigative sourcing, and you’ll see just where such sloppy vetting can lead.

And what of the PDB’s disclosure of a bin Laden cell in New York recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks? Mr. Baer is not impressed:

Not until three-quarters of the way through the PDB do we finally get to our own intelligence: a clandestine source who reported directly to a U.S. official that “a bin Laden cell in New York was recruiting Muslim-American youth for attacks.” Why bury this seemingly valuable nugget? Perhaps because our own source was dead wrong. Sept. 11 was planned and organized in Afghanistan and Germany. The 19 hijackers found their own way here and relied on their own funds. Support inside the U.S. came from unwitting contacts. No American Muslim was recruited to help the hijackers.
What’s in the PDB is damning enough, but to me, maybe the most alarming part is what’s not there. In the entire document — this crown jewel of intelligence — there isn’t a single mention of Saudi Arabia, the real Ground Zero of 9/11. Apparently, we had no idea suicide bombers were being recruited there or that cash was being raised for an attack on America.

Mr. Baer closes with a cautious observation regarding the future of American intelligence gathering:

In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, CIA director George Tenet — the most candid of any of the witnesses, by the way — said we need five more years to catch up. I think he’s optimistic. It takes a generation to build an effective clandestine service. In the meantime, we have no choice but to rely on the Saudis to tell us whether we need to worry about all the killing going on in the Kingdom, whether it really has the petroleum reserves it claims to have, and a lot of other issues vital to our national security.
Personally, I would like to have my own source to tell me what’s happening inside the Kingdom’s fire-breathing mosques. That’s the only way we’re going to find out if more young Saudis are being recruited and money raised for another 9/11. Until then, we’re flying blind not just on Osama bin Laden but on Islamic extremism throughout the Arab world and our own. That’s the opposite of intelligence.

Over the past generation, each Democratic and Republican administration has contributed in varying degrees to the progressive evisceration of the American government’s intelligence gathering capability. The government’s failure to anticipate the 9/11 attacks was in large part the result of that gradual weakening of intelligence over the past 30 years. Consequently, during this political season, make sure that any politician who criticizes the present administration’s production or use of intelligence is not one of the politicians who was contributed to the demise of such intelligence in the first place.