CIA–FBI incompatible computer systems is the technical half of John Kiriakou’s explanation for the intelligence failure preceding the September 11 attacks — the other half being institutional hatred between the two agencies.
What each side knew
Kiriakou distinguishes an easy answer about the pre-attack warnings from a harder one. The easy answer concerns the intercepted chatter, including the coded references he describes in the honey salesman warning.[1]
The harder answer, he says, has only emerged over the last couple of years: the CIA knew that the hijackers were in the United States and never told the FBI, because the CIA thought it had a shot at recruiting these men and turning them against al-Qaeda — an idea Kiriakou calls fantasy.[1][2] At the same time the FBI knew the names and identities of the hijackers and never told the CIA, on the reasoning that it was not the CIA’s business until an arrest could be made.[2]
The systems
Kiriakou then gives the mechanical constraint underneath the rivalry. From the founding of the CIA in 1947 until 2009, he says, the FBI and CIA computer systems were not even compatible with one another: a message could not be sent from one agency to the other, intelligence could not be shared from one to the other, and the systems simply were not set up that way.[2][3]
It was only in the sixteen years before his telling, he says, that the two agencies finally got past the institutional hatred they had held for one another.[3]
The gap the torture program was run through
The incompatibility is not, in Kiriakou’s telling, only a 9/11 story. It is also the mechanism that allowed the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program to appear to work. Ali Soufan and the FBI were twice thrown out of the secret site where Abu Zubaydah was held, and each time James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen took over, “all of the information dried up.” What let the claim survive anyway was the plumbing: “remember at the time the CIA and the FBI still hated each other with a special passion and the computer systems weren’t compatible.” Soufan was putting his debriefings into FBI cables and sending them to FBI headquarters, “and the CIA is none the wiser.”[4]
So once Soufan and the FBI officers had gone, Mitchell and Jessen “pulled all of Ali’s reporting, they retyped it in the CIA computer system and they said, oh, we waterboarded at one time, he cracked, and look at all the amazing information that he gave us. That’s how they pulled the wool over our eyes for so long.”[5] Kiriakou puts himself among the deceived: he was at CIA headquarters reading the cables, and told a colleague he might have been wrong — he had argued that torture was immoral, unethical and in his view illegal and that it did not work, and here were cables reporting that it had worked fantastically. His objection on ethical and moral grounds stood; the factual half of it wavered.[6]
He gives the same account elsewhere in shorter form — the two contractors “repeated” Soufan’s information “because they knew that the FBI computer system and the CIA computer system were not compatible and so they were not sharing information,” with the result that “the FBI was thinking, boy, Ali did a really great job, and at the CIA they’re thinking, wow, this torture program really works. It was all a lie.”[7]
And he dates the discovery. The claim that Abu Zubaydah “was giving us information that was saving American lives and disrupting attacks” turned out to be false: the contractors had copied information Abu Zubaydah had freely given the FBI, and “because the FBI computer system and the CIA computer system had no connectivity, we and the CIA didn’t know that that had already been reported to the FBI.” Per Kiriakou, that was not known until 2009 — the same year he gives for the systems finally being made to talk to each other.[8]
Relation to his wider account
The claim sits alongside Kiriakou’s longer treatment of the CIA–FBI rivalry, which he traces to J. Edgar Hoover’s opposition to the National Security Act, and forms part of his standing description of September 11 as the greatest intelligence failure in American history.[9]