CIA Lost Its Enemy Then Found A War
The Silence Before A Different War
Forty minutes. That is how long Margaret Henoch waited on the morning of 11 September 2001 before she concluded that no order was coming from the top of the Central Intelligence Agency. [1] She was a counter-intelligence officer, which is the branch of spycraft that guards an agency against penetration rather than running agents abroad, and terrorism was not her subject. She had previously been stationed in Vienna, where she focused on the International Atomic Energy Agency and nuclear threats. “One of my officers came in and said to me: ‘A plane just ran into the World Trade Center,’” she recalls. [1] About 40 minutes after that first attack, still with no clear direction from the top of the CIA, she decided to go up to the seventh floor. That floor accommodated the agency’s senior figures, including its then director, George Tenet. To her surprise, the area was deserted, apart from three assistants. In a building of thousands, on the one morning when the chain of command mattered most, three people were left holding the corridor. Forty minutes, in other words, is a short meeting in an ordinary bureaucracy and a very long silence in an emergency.
Henoch’s account of what unfolded inside the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, suggests an organisation unprepared for the drastically changed world the attacks ushered in. That was true even though some in the intelligence community were aware that al-Qaida and its leader, Osama bin Laden, represented a clear and present danger. Henoch still recalls confusion, chaos and an initial lack of direction from senior leadership, and she is haunted to this day by the apparent vacuum that followed the first attack. She did not object to the leadership leaving the building. “It was reasonable that they would have moved those guys someplace else,” she said. What she found unreasonable was something else: that no one thought about all those people sitting in that building. If the Pentagon was hit, she reasoned, there was a chance that the agency itself was a target. It would be nice, she added, to believe that the people who left the building rapidly had a thought for all those who worked for them. “It was not clear that they did.” Her complaint is not about cowardice. It is about the absence of a plan for everyone who was not on the seventh floor.
The CIA’s own account of that morning is on the record. Bill Harlow, the CIA’s public affairs director at the time of the attacks, replied by email to questions put to Tenet, who now works in the private sector. Harlow cited details in the 2007 memoir “At the Center of the Storm”, which he co-wrote with Tenet. According to that account, orders were issued for the majority of the staff to leave the building at “about 10am”. [1] That was nearly an hour after the second plane struck at 9.03am. Harlow said the agency was aware at the time of intelligence gathered around 1995-96 of terrorist desires to attack CIA headquarters with an airplane. Tenet and the senior leadership moved to another building on the compound that presented a lower profile and would have had a greater chance of survival if the site were hit by a plane. A decision was made that the personnel of the counter-terrorism centre remained in the original headquarters building throughout that day. They stayed, in Harlow’s phrase, accepting the risk. The senior leadership team returned to the headquarters in the middle of the afternoon on 9/11. Reading the two accounts side by side, the disagreement narrows to minutes and messages: the leadership says it moved and came back, the officer on the seventh floor says nobody told the people below.
The larger transformation was never in doubt. A decade after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, al-Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington announced to the CIA that the long era of battling communism, the purpose for which the agency was founded, was officially at an end. It was to be replaced by a no-holds-barred “war on terror”. That war left the agency with a soiled reputation. The first stain was falsified intelligence that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The second was an extraordinary rendition programme, the practice of seizing suspects outside any courtroom and delivering them into custody elsewhere. Within that programme, suspects were subjected to interrogation techniques at secret sites that the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence subsequently classified as torture. The physical facts of the day itself were these: two planes flew into the World Trade Center, a third smashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside after passengers overcame the hijackers. The US intelligence community was dramatically transformed in the years that followed. The question the morning left behind — who decides, who is told, and who is left in the building — remained after the attacks.
Trapped In The CIA Parking Lot
The car park of the CIA’s headquarters at Langley, Virginia, was crowded in the middle of the day on 11 September 2001. The building behind it held thousands of personnel. Some time after the attacks, an order was given for those thousands to evacuate. Some, including Henoch, were told to relocate to alternative sites to address the emergency. By then, however, the roads around the compound were choked with traffic. Commuters had been released from work early in Washington DC and were trying to get home. The jam prevented agency staff from departing. Large segments of the CIA’s operating staff were trapped. They were trapped in the one place that some of them now believed could be struck next. The fourth plane was already known to be in the air. That triggered fears that the people stuck in their cars and in the open could be sitting ducks. A car park is the least dramatic place in any intelligence service, and on that afternoon it was the most exposed one on the compound.
One man, senior to Henoch, was standing next to her in that car park. “I have served in multiple war zones,” he said. “I was a combat soldier in Vietnam and I’m going to die in the parking lot of the CIA.” The sentence is worth pausing over, because of what it measures. An officer who had survived combat in Vietnam calculated his odds not in a foreign capital and not in a jungle, but in his employer’s own car park. He was not describing an enemy. He was describing an exit that did not work. The danger had arrived at the address, and the plan for the people at that address had not.
That dysfunctional scene was replaced, quickly, by one of much greater conviction. The conviction led to permanent changes in US intelligence. “I just remember loads of cable traffic coming in that said: it’s got to be al-Qaida,” Henoch said. It was not her world. She had to have a quick briefing on who the hell al-Qaida was, because she just did not know anything about it. The change was immediate. The next morning, everybody at the Central Intelligence Agency had to know who they were. They also had to know how that knowledge intersected with everything the agency was doing. A counter-intelligence officer focused on nuclear threats in Vienna became, within a day, an officer who had to understand a terrorist network. That is how fast a mandate gets rewritten once the old one has run out. .
Faster still, and more uncomfortably, the failures of the preceding decade were re-examined. Steven Cash, a former CIA counter-terrorism officer who had left the agency six months beforehand to join the staff of the US Senate intelligence committee, faults the CIA’s pre-9/11 terrorism strategy as too narrowly focused. The agency was, in his description, “looking to find bad guys”, while neglecting the “political dimension”. Cash had specialized on the Lebanese Shia group Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran. He traces part of the problem to an organisational decision taken in the first Bush administration: terrorism was taken away from the officers who looked at geographic areas and separated out. He called that “illustrative of a mistaken way of looking at the world”, because terrorists do not exist in a vacuum. That is a structural complaint, not a personal one. It says that a service organised around hunting individuals will miss the states, parties and alliances that give those individuals a base. Cash moved on to focus on the Balkans before leaving the agency, but he still harboured guilt after the attacks. “Was this our fault? Did we fail?” That kind of guilt felt, at least for him, really personal. Whether or not the judgement is fair, the date on the reorganisation matters: the separation he describes predates the attacks by a decade.
What Was Built, And What It Cost
Cash watched the second half of that morning from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. He was on Capitol Hill, attending a committee meeting, when news of the attacks filtered through. “Somebody said, put on the TV,” he recalled. They saw the second plane hit. Then they started evacuating the building. “It was a mess. People were in the hall screaming, running around.” The third plane had hit the Pentagon by that point. They knew because they could see smoke across the National Mall. For the staff of the Senate intelligence committee — the body that oversees the agency Cash had just left — the distance between the two buildings collapsed in a single morning.
The following day, Cash and his then boss, the late Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein, visited CIA headquarters. They found a mood of determined resolve. “It was all hands on deck,” he said. “The people I knew were getting deployed very quickly to Afghanistan.” He described the culture plainly: “These people are pros. They didn’t care whether they were blamed or not. They wanted to do something.” He added that he carries a little survivor guilt of his own. “Maybe I should have been shipped out to Afghanistan.” On that visit, senators asked agency operatives what legislation and resources they would need to respond to the attacks of the previous day. Two early and controversial results followed. The first was the USA Patriot Act of 2001, which expanded law enforcement and surveillance powers. [2] The second was the Homeland Security Act of the following year, which created the US Department of Homeland Security, the department that houses agencies including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The mandate and the money were rewritten in public within eighteen months.
Later changes went further than legislation. They established the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with a specific job attached. The office was created to coordinate 18 different intelligence bodies. The goal was to eliminate the lack of coordination widely held to blame for warning signs of the 9/11 plot going unheeded. The pieces existed and never met. Susan Miller, a retired CIA counter-intelligence officer, puts the change in plain terms. “DNI was formed to make sure that we actually share everything with everybody. We don’t just keep it inside CIA,” she said. She credits the reform with a wider effect. “What’s really cool is we’ve changed how we do things across the board, not just for terrorism. It’s really improved things,” she said. “There was no coordination before.” Eighteen agencies now sit under a coordination requirement that did not exist when two planes hit the World Trade Center. The structure was built after the fact, to answer a question the plot had already asked.
What remains genuinely open is the record of the morning itself. The two accounts of what happened inside Langley diverge on one specific point: when, and whether, the staff below were told to leave. Harlow’s version, anchored in a memoir published in 2007, puts the evacuation order at about 10am. Henoch’s version puts her on the seventh floor roughly 40 minutes after the first attack, looking at three assistants and no direction. Both are on the record. Neither is a court finding. Both were given by people who were in the building, and both concern decisions taken before anyone knew whether a fourth plane would reach Washington. The 25th anniversary of the attacks falls on 11 September 2026, the date on which these two accounts will next be read side by side.
Sources
1. Central Intelligence Agency