‘The scent was there, but no one smelled it
Revelations by The New York Times on how the intelligence agencies of three countries failed to stop the 26/11 attack, even though they were all on the terrorists' trail, has important lessons for the security community worldwide. As the report makes clear, the attack could not be foiled because the agencies did not share the information they had. And in the instances where intelligence was shared — for example, the Americans had warned their Indian counterparts at least twice — it did not make an impact.
Eventually the problem was this: Nobody could connect the dots. While in hindsight, this seems like a devastating mistake, the fact is that it is a problem that intelligence officials across the world grapple with all too often. In India we hear, after a terror attack has taken place, that the authorities had intelligence about an impending attack but were still caught off guard. In the US, one of the most important lessons that came from 9/11 was that the country's myriad law enforcement bodies, intelligence and security agencies, had failed to connect the dots; else they could have prevented the attack.
It was this lesson that prompted one of the biggest re-organisations of the American intelligence apparatus: The US Congress passed new laws and established the Department of Homeland Security, the Director for National Intelligence, and the National Counter-Terrorism Center (based on which the UPA regime proposed its own NCTC after 26/11). Yet the Americans were unable to connect the dots during the 2012 Boston bombing, with local police and State agencies complaining that federal authorities didn’t inform them of the multiple warnings, including from Russian sources, against the Tsarnaev brothers.
There are two basic reasons why connecting such dots is a challenge. The first is administrative. Everybody talks of better coordination, but what they really mean is that they'd like others to share intelligence with them, without their returning the favour. Such turf wars are common even between different departments of the same agency, so one can only imagine how difficult it is to coordinate transnationally.
Yet, given the global nature of terrorism today, this is a challenge that every country needs to address. India has made some progress in this regard through bilateral agreements with countries such as the US and Israel on homeland security and counter-terrorism, but a lot more needs to be done. The second problem is technological. Today, security agencies can easily gather swathes of metadata (video footage, phone calls, emails, threats onjihadi websites), but it is still enormously difficult to process them and find that needle of a terror plot within the haystack of innocuous chatter.