9/11 Commission
911 Commission
A01=Amy B. Zegart
Al-Qaeda
American Airlines Flight 77
Americans
Author_Amy B. Zegart
Brent Scowcroft
Bureaucrat
Category=JPSH
Category=JPWL
Central Intelligence Agency
Chairman
Clandestine cell system
Cofer Black
Committee
Council on Foreign Relations
Counter-terrorism
Counterintelligence
Criminal investigation
Defense Intelligence Agency
Director of Central Intelligence
Director of National Intelligence
Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Directorate of Operations (CIA)
Dissolution of the Soviet Union
Employment
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Field agent
Foreign policy
George Tenet
George W. Bush
Government agency
Human intelligence (intelligence gathering)
Information sharing
Intelligence agency
Janet Reno
Khalid al-Mihdhar
Law enforcement
Legislation
Legislator
Louis Freeh
National security
Nawaf al-Hazmi
Osama bin Laden
Phoenix Memo
Policy
Political science
Politics
President's Daily Brief
Private sector
Public policy
Robert Baer
Robert Gates
Robert Mueller
Roberta Wohlstetter
Scott Sagan
September 11 attacks
Special agent
Strategic intelligence
Task force
Technology
Terrorism
The New York Times
Uncertainty
United States Department of Homeland Security
United States Department of State
United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Intelligence Community
United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
USS Cole bombing
War President
Weapon of mass destruction
What Happened
World War II
Zacarias Moussaoui
Product details
- ISBN 9780691141039
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 09 Mar 2009
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In this pathbreaking book, Amy Zegart provides the first scholarly examination of the intelligence failures that preceded September 11. Until now, those failures have been attributed largely to individual mistakes. But Zegart shows how and why the intelligence system itself left us vulnerable. Zegart argues that after the Cold War ended, the CIA and FBI failed to adapt to the rise of terrorism. She makes the case by conducting painstaking analysis of more than three hundred intelligence reform recommendations and tracing the history of CIA and FBI counterterrorism efforts from 1991 to 2001, drawing extensively from declassified government documents and interviews with more than seventy high-ranking government officials. She finds that political leaders were well aware of the emerging terrorist danger and the urgent need for intelligence reform, but failed to achieve the changes they sought. The same forces that have stymied intelligence reform for decades are to blame: resistance inside U.S. intelligence agencies, the rational interests of politicians and career bureaucrats, and core aspects of our democracy such as the fragmented structure of the federal government.
Ultimately failures of adaptation led to failures of performance. Zegart reveals how longstanding organizational weaknesses left unaddressed during the 1990s prevented the CIA and FBI from capitalizing on twenty-three opportunities to disrupt the September 11 plot. Spying Blind is a sobering account of why two of America's most important intelligence agencies failed to adjust to new threats after the Cold War, and why they are unlikely to adapt in the future.
Amy B. Zegart is associate professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of "Flawed by Design: The Evolution of the CIA, JCS, and NSC".
