The CIA–FBI interagency rivalry is, per John Kiriakou, a structural feature of the U.S. intelligence community dating to the creation of the CIA itself — and a rivalry he says contributed directly to the intelligence failures preceding the September 11 attacks.
Origins in 1947
Kiriakou traces the rivalry to the National Security Act of 1947, signed by President Truman, which created a central intelligence agency where none had existed before. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover — then arguably the most powerful man in government next to the president, and, per Kiriakou, the Bureau’s founder and director for 48 years — lobbied Capitol Hill, and Republican members of Congress in particular, to oppose the act’s passage.[1][2] Truman got wind of the lobbying campaign and summoned Hoover to the White House, telling him the country needed a central intelligence agency, but lying to him that the CIA would be made a division of the FBI under Hoover’s own control; Hoover, satisfied, withdrew his opposition and the bill passed.[3][4] Only after the CIA was stood up as fully independent did Hoover realize he had been tricked. He never forgave Truman for the deception, and that same year ordered the FBI to refuse any and all cooperation with the new agency — an order Kiriakou says held for the rest of his career: in all his years at the CIA, he says, he never once set foot in the FBI.[5][6][7]
The Kuala Lumpur surveillance and the withheld visas
The CIA watched future hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and his companion Khalid al-Mihdhar attend an al-Qaeda conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in January 2000, with assistance from the Malaysian security service. Around the same time, between November and December 1999, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah had visited Afghanistan and were selected for what would become the “planes operation.”[8]
Cofer Black, then head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, was later criticized in an internal CIA report for keeping the FBI in the dark during this period — specifically, the agency never told the Bureau that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had been granted visas to enter the United States.[9] Kiriakou, then chief of counterintelligence at Alec Station, recalls colleagues being “giddy” at the prospect of recruiting the two men rather than notifying the Bureau.[10] By the time the plot matured, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were living openly in San Diego and the CIA knew their location — it wanted to recruit them as agents inside al-Qaeda — while the FBI was separately hunting for them with no idea they were already inside the country, because it wanted to arrest them and, under the CIA/FBI division of labor, an arrest on U.S. soil would have been the Bureau’s case, not the agency’s.[11][12] The FBI, for its part, was independently working the same plot and withheld its own information from the CIA for the same reason: each agency wanted the recruitment for itself, and the FBI was searching overseas for hijackers who were, in fact, already in the United States.[13] At a July 10, 2001 meeting with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a CIA official known as “Rich B” — George Tenet’s assistant — predicted not a single spectacular attack but multiple simultaneous attacks against U.S. interests in the coming weeks or months.[14] On September 4, 2001, a week before the attacks, Black urged Tenet to promote arming Predator drones with missiles against Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders; Tenet won cabinet-level authorization that same day.[15]
Kiriakou says the CIA and FBI had concrete warning that al-Qaeda intended to use hijacked airliners as weapons as early as 1996, from the foiled Bojinka plot in the Philippines — which is why he calls the failure to anticipate a domestic attack not merely a bureaucratic failure but, in his view, a criminal one.[16] Even inside Alec Station on September 12, 2001, he says, no one had believed al-Qaeda capable of striking inside the United States itself; the working assumption beforehand had been another multi-embassy attack, most likely in Africa.[17]
Compartmentalization and structural mistrust
Kiriakou attributes part of the failure to differing institutional missions — the FBI exists to build prosecutable criminal cases, while the CIA exists to infiltrate and disrupt terrorist groups — a mismatch he says produced “bureaucratic incompetence” on both sides rather than any single villain.[18] He says he was told directly, at multiple points in his career, not to inform the FBI of specific intelligence.[19] Structurally, the two agencies’ computer systems remained incompatible until 2009 — meaning that even if a CIA officer wanted to route intelligence to the Bureau electronically, there was no mechanism to do so.[20][21] Kiriakou says this was by design, not oversight: neither agency wanted the other to see its business.[22]
He also points to a narrower, related failure inside the CIA itself: officers fluent enough in Arabic to be truly useful tended to be naturalized citizens born in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, or the Palestinian territories, and the agency was reluctant to grant such people the highest security clearances. His own Arabic instructors — full-time CIA employees born in Lebanon and Egypt — held only secret-level clearance badges, while Kiriakou himself, a native-born American with far weaker Arabic, held a clearance six levels higher.[23][24] Kiriakou says George Tenet and counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke were “shouting from the rooftops” in the summer of 2001 that a major attack was imminent, briefing the White House repeatedly, but that Vice President Dick Cheney was more preoccupied with the strategic threat from China.[25]
Aftermath and accountability
Kiriakou describes being ordered to evacuate CIA headquarters on September 11 itself, abandoning his car on the GW Parkway; he returned within hours and slept under his desk for four days while colleagues broke into the cafeteria and took roughly $10,000 worth of food from the Marriott catering contractor, for which the agency later reimbursed the company.[26] He says he never once heard anyone inside CIA headquarters suggest Cheney had deliberately allowed the attacks to happen.[27] Despite widespread expectation at the time that Tenet and his deputy Jim Pavitt would be forced out, Kiriakou says no one at the top of the agency — not Tenet, not Pavitt, not John McLaughlin, not Michael Hayden — was ever held accountable; instead, both agencies’ budgets were tripled.[28][29] The two agencies did make some structural repairs: each placed a liaison officer inside the other, with a CIA officer becoming deputy director of the FBI for counterterrorism and an FBI officer becoming deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.[30] Kiriakou notes that the 9/11 Commission itself was not permitted to speak with any active-duty CIA officers, nor to interview a single Guantánamo detainee — meaning no al-Qaeda fighter or leader was ever questioned by the Commission that investigated the attacks.[31] He assigns blame beyond the CIA and FBI alone, calling the State Department (for issuing visas to every one of the hijackers) and Congress (for inadequate oversight) equally culpable.[32]