NSA Accused of Fumbling Intelligence on Underpants Suspect

The Senate Intelligence Committee is publicly criticizing the ultrasecret National Security Agency for fumbling intelligence that might have kept would-be airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding the Christmas Day transatlantic flight he allegedly tried to blow up with a bomb hidden in his underpants. An NSA spokesperson said the agency declined to comment.

In  a declassified report released on Tuesday recounting a number of supposed intelligence-handling "failures" related to Abdulmutallab, the Senate panel faulted several government units, including the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the CIA, and the FBI. Some of the issues raised by the Senate report have been publicly discussed before, for example in Declassified posts here and here.

But issues raised by the report about the NSA's handling of intelligence related to Abdulmutallab, while presented only in cryptic form because many of the details remain classified, have received less attention. Perhaps the most important point made by the Senate committee regarding the NSA's handling of pre-Christmas intel on Abdulmutallab is that the electronic spying agency failed to insist that information it had collected before Christmas "partly identifying" Abdulmutallab should be entered into key government terrorism databases. Those databases include the unclassified master terrorism watch list maintained by an interagency unit called the Terrorist Screening Center and a classified database called Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which is operated by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a branch of the Office of the National Intelligence Director that was created by post-9/11 reforms to ensure that terrorism-related intelligence is shared more effectively among government agencies.

Due to the heavy blanket of secrecy that covers virtually all NSA activities, the report does not elaborate on what information "partly identifying" Abdulmutallab should have been put in the databases before Christmas. However, The New York Times reported in January that early last November, U.S. intelligence learned from a "communications intercept of Qaeda followers in Yemen" that someone named "Umar Farouk...had volunteered" for an upcoming terrorist operation. Two U.S. national-security officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, indicate that it was this intercept, collected by the NSA's worldwide electronic eavesdropping network, that Senate Intelligence Committee investigators believe should have become the basis for a watch-listing entry—in TIDE, at the very least—indicating that a suspect using the names "Umar Farouk" might be part of a plot being hatched by Yemen-based Al Qaeda operatives.

Had this intelligence fragment been entered into TIDE, the officials say, it is possible that analysts at NCTC or other agencies with access to the database, including the CIA, might subsequently have been able to link the sketchy information to a report entered into TIDE later in November. In that report, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, recounted how a wealthy Nigerian financier had visited the embassy in mid-November to request U.S. assistance in locating and retrieving his wayward son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who the father said had gone to Yemen to study Arabic but who he feared might have fallen in with Islamic extremists there. Information from an embassy cable recording the father's story, including Abulmutallab's full name, was entered in TIDE shortly after the cable was received by the NCTC. But little, if any, further information on Abdulmutallab was entered into TIDE before Christmas. Based on the rules governing air-travel security watch-listing that existed at the time, the officials say, there was insufficient information about Abdulmutallab in TIDE to have justified moving his name into the airline-screening database maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, never mind onto two more selective watch lists the center maintains: the official U.S. government "no-fly" list and a larger list of individuals who are supposed to receive extra preflight screening before boarding flights to, from, or within the United States.

One of the officials explains that one of the reasons—perhaps the principal reason—why the NSA did not request or insist that the partial report on "Umar Farouk" be entered into TIDE was that the "practice" governing TIDE entries at the time was that intelligence reports containing only partial names of suspects should not be entered into the system, though the official says this was not a formally written rule. The rationale behind this practice was that putting partial names in TIDE would create confusion and risk disrupting the activities of too many innocent people. The official says that TIDE entry practices have now been modified to allow for, if not to encourage, the recording of intelligence reports where information on the identities of possible terror suspects remains partial. Asked for a comment on the Senate committee report, an NSA spokesperson e-mailed simply, "We don't have anything for you."

The CIA and NCTC handling of pre-Christmas intelligence that later turned out to be related to Abdulmutallab also comes in for criticism in the Senate report. NCTC, which is supposed to be the focal point within the government for ensuring that dispersed pieces of intelligence relating to terror plots are properly assembled, is criticized by the committee for failing "to connect the reporting on Abdulmutallab" and for not doing enough research on him. CIA is also chastised for not doing enough follow-up research on Abdulmutallab and for not disseminating all the information it had on him widely enough until after the Christmas Day incident. In an official response to the Senate report, the office of national-intelligence czar Dennis Blair says that it already had "clarified roles and responsibilities among the [intelligence community's] counterterrorism functions, ensuring that any stream of threat reporting receives follow-through to its conclusion" in the future. The statement also notes that NCTC had established a "dedicated analytic element"—known in spy jargon as a "pursuit team"—to "thoroughly and exhaustively pursue terrorist threat threads, including identifying appropriate follow-up actions by other intelligence and law enforcement organizations, and increasing the number of personnel resources dedicated to enhancing the records of information on individuals contained in ... TIDE."