The National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC)

In the aftermath of 9/11 the world heard the scathing indictment of the U.S. intelligence agencies charged with preventing terrorist attacks. The dots weren’t connected! Why? Because intelligence agencies that had bits and pieces of the attack information hadn’t provided it to their counterparts. There was a myriad of reasons for this, including protecting one’s turf, fear of critical information leaks to the press and the like, but the “stove pipe” analogy was the most troubling. “Stovepiping” was the practice of only sending information up the chain of command within an agency. The 9/11 Commission also called this reluctance to share the “Gorelick Wall.”

Jamie Gorelick was the U. S.Deputy Attorney General under the Clinton administration, who wrote the 1995 intelligence guideline memorandum for disseminating terrorist information between agencies. And even though there was back-and-forth finger pointing about the extent intelligence agencies were prohibited from sharing crucial information, her memorandum was widely cited as the legally restrictive lynch pin. The intelligence community thought a violation of the memorandum guidelines would lead to civil suits and felony criminal prosecutions by the Justice Department. The bottom line: Agents believed they could lose their homes, pensions, be fired and sent to prison. A very chilling cloud to work under, and it wasn’t a comforting sight to see Jamie Gorelick sitting on the 9/11 Commission panel overseeing the hearings.

But some good did come in the form of recommendations by the Commission. The National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was formed. Heard of it? Unless you’re part of the intelligence community most likely you haven’t, or if you did you’ve forgotten about it as you went about day-to-day tasks. After 9/11 a number of agencies known by their initials were mixed together to form alphabet soup organizations, such as the Office of Homeland Security. Of all the groups the NCTC was one that made sense to me.

The NCTC was established by President Bush in August 2004, to serve as the primary U.S. organization to integrate and analyze all intelligence pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism, and to construct strategic operational plans. The NCTC also houses the central knowledge bank on terrorism information, and it developed the architecture that allows agencies such as the FBI and CIA ready access to the millions of terrorist related documents contained in the database.

The NCTC is staffed by analysts from 16 agencies that are co-located with the CIA and FBI Watch Centers at the Liberty Crossing Center in Northern Virginia. There analysts from these agencies work side-by-side scouring foreign and domestic terrorism information from 30 networks or more in an effort to uncover and disrupt terrorist plots.

Is everything perfect? No, but we’re getting our act together. It isn’t by accident that we haven’t suffered a major terrorist attack on our home territory since 9/11, but for logistical reasons and to protect ongoing investigations, many positive results aren’t trumpeted in the New York Times or on the evening news. You can take it to the bank that because our intelligence agencies are working together around the clock there have been attacks prevented, plots uncovered, and terrorists captured or killed that we don’t know about, and quite frankly, don’t need to. Fighting terrorism is an ongoing battle. Now the terrorists don’t have an open field; they can’t act with impunity and they’re getting more than they’re giving.

I’ll have more to say about the NCTC in later postings.