Hearing of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee

SECTION: CAPITOL HILL HEARING

HEADLINE: HEARING OF THE SENATE SELECT INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE

SUBJECT: WORLDWIDE THREATS

CHAIRED BY: SENATOR PAT ROBERTS (R-KS)

LOCATION: 106 DIRKSEN SENATE OFFICE BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C.

WITNESSES: CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET; DIA DIRECTOR VICE ADMIRAL LOWELL JACOBY; FBI DIRECTOR ROBERT MUELLER

BODY:
SEN. SAXBY CHAMBLISS (R-GA): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Director Tenet, there's a media story out this morning that's generated a lot of emotion in folks, and it's the one --

MR. TENET: Yeah, on my part too, Senator.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: -- one relative to a name that was supposedly provided to the CIA by the Germans on one of the individuals who I believe flew into the south tower.

MR. TENET: Sir, what I'd like to do in open session is say to you, first, go back to page 186 of the Joint Intelligence Committee open study, and then go back and look at your classified report, what you did with the House Intelligence Committee and the JIC inquiry, go back and look at page 186, and then go look at the classified piece of paper in your classified report.

And then what I will tell you is, is in 1999, the Germans gave us a name, Marwan-that's it-and a phone number. And we didn't sit on our hands. And I'm not going to go through the rest of it in open session.

They didn't give us a first and a last name until after 9/11, with then additional data. And let me just leave it there. But I would urge you to go back and look at your unclassified and classified report because that's as far as I want to go here.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Well, you've confirmed what my sources have indicated to me, and that is that this was really piecemeal kind of information that was given to us prior to 9/11. We did not have, as this media report indicates, the name of an individual and the telephone number of an individual and asked by the Germans to follow that individual. Is that a fair statement?

MR. TENET: Sir, I'm going to be careful in open session. You've got a name, name "Joe," and here's a phone number, Joe's phone number. No last name. And then we did some things to go find out some things. Okay? We can give this all to you. Okay? We never conclusively got ???, because we didn't have enough, but we didn't sit around. But I would urge you to go look at your classified page on this. Take a look at it. That's all I want to say in open session.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Director Mueller, I was pleased to hear you talk about your Office of Intelligence that you've created. And with reference to that: You talked about the increase in translators that you have and the increase in analysts. Now, have you moved those people in there? Do you feel comfortable that you're-where you are from a resource standpoint with regard to operating this Office of Intelligence from an intelligence gathering, translating and analyzing standpoint from a real-time perspective?

MR. MUELLER: Let me say the '04 budget, once it was passed, gave us substantial additional resources that we are bringing on board this year. We made some request also in the '05 budget. It is an ongoing process. I wouldn't say we're where we want to be at this point, but we've made substantial strides. And the monies accorded to us by Congress and the administration will by the end of this year give us the cadre of analysts that will bring us a great deal closer to our goal.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: And as you and director Tenet and Admiral Jacoby know, I have been very focused on this issue of information sharing, and with relevance to this Office of Intelligence. What is your relationship with CIA and DIA and NSA relative to sharing of that information back and forth with that office?

MR. MUELLER: Let me just-there's one part of the previous question I didn't answer, and that was with regard to linguists. There are certain dialects we still have problems with, but we have doubled, if not tripled, our linguists in a number of the Middle Eastern languages. So we're on the way to success there.

In terms of information sharing, the Office of Intelligence, under Maureen Baginski, is an element of it, but the information sharing is at all levels of our organization. I get briefed at the 7:15 in the morning, I get a briefing at 5:00, and at those briefings I have individuals from the CIA, DHS sitting in in my briefings. I have a FBI senior supervisor sitting in at George's meetings.

We have had over the last couple of years what the 9/11 commission has called transnational intelligence operations. That is where we have operations that may have come to the attention of the agency overseas which have tendrils within the United States, and we have put together teams to address them and done it exceptionally successfully.

The exchange of information from the top down to the ranks, between our two organizations, is far better than it was before September 11th and is truly remarkable.

The advent of the TTIC, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, and some other mechanisms that allow our analysts to sit together and share information from our various databases has also contributed to that sharing of information.

I'm not certain-I can say we are not where we ultimately want to be. There are things that we are still doing in terms of communications with other agencies, communications with state and local, but we've made substantial strides. And I might let George add to that from his perspective if you'll give me that opportunity.

MR. TENET: I think that the power of the integration, Senator Chambliss, particularly in TTIC, where now you have 14 databases-there are FBI criminal files, there is CIA operational traffic in addition to data from all other places-coming together in one place for purposes of doing threat analysis is an unprecedented development. Now to be sure, we have a long way to go to achieve everything we want to achieve, but from where we were in setting up this organization to where we are today, particularly-and then when you look at what we're doing across the community, particularly with FBI and the intelligence community, I think-you know, Senator Rockefeller asked the question, are you safer today? Yes we are in this regard because of the advances that we've made. You know, you can't protect against everything, but we are in much better shape than we've ever been.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Are those computers talking to each other as well as people talking to each other?

MR. MUELLER: There are communications systems that are talking to each other, yes.

SEN. CHAMBLISS: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.