September 11 Intelligence Failure

The 2001 attacks that exposed failures to share and fuse threat intelligence

Overview

The September 11 attacks revealed warning signs scattered across agencies that never fused into alarm. The FBI Phoenix memo and interest in the flight student Zacarias Moussaoui, CIA tracking of two future hijackers who later entered the United States, and fragmentary threat reporting stayed in separate channels. The 2004 commission report described a failure of imagination more than of information. Its recommendations created the Director of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center under the reform act of 2004. Fusion centers and shared watch lists followed, trading openness for security across the agencies.