The United States must do more to track visa-carrying visitors if it wants to prevent terrorist attacks within its borders, according to Salisbury native Britt Snider.
Snider retired at the beginning of this year as inspector general with the Central Intelligence Agency.
But he has been on Capitol Hill during the past two weeks, sharing information and insights with members of Congress who are investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Snider, speaking to the Salisbury Rotary Club Tuesday, said he knew the country was concerned about the failure to detect and prevent the attacks.
“I can tell you that no one is more upset than the intelligence groups in the country and the law enforcement groups,”he said.
Snider reiterated that he was retired. “I’m not representing anyone other than myself with these comments.”
Then he went on to describe some of the challenges he saw for the government as it responded to the attacks:tracking visitors, focusing on the right dangers, penetrating terrorist groups, finding a balance between beefing up intelligence and protecting civil liberties.
The hijackers all entered the country legally, with student visas or tourist visas, he said.
“Once someone is legally admitted into this country, the reality is that we have no way to track them,” Snider said.
Visitors can blend in, get jobs, hide, he said. “They become essentially lost as far as the government’s concerned.”
The FBI was in the process of looking for two of the men who hijacked the planes because the agency had discovered their connections to Osama bin Laden, newspapers have reported.
“I do think that this is one area that as a country we’re going to have to come to grips with,” Snider said, referring to the untracked visitors. “It is a monstrous problem. ...I don’t know what the answer is. But it does seem to me that the system that we have now —which is really no system — we can’t live with either.”
The nation was caught off-guard by the attacks because it hadn’t foreseen the scenario that played out, he said. U.S. counter-terrorism efforts were focused on car and truck bombs and keeping conventional weapons from getting into the country. “We weren’t thinking that this could happen,” he said.
Though investigators found a picture of a plane crashing into a building after thwarting one terrorist attack in the Philippines in the 1990s, he said, apparently that bit of evidence was forgotten. “We weren’t looking at aviation flight schools,”Snider said. Nor had the United States started securing cockpits, like Israel had. “In hindsight, we probably should have.”
What now?Snider said the intelligence community is looking into two issues.
One is whether to increase the CIA’s capability to penetrate terrorist groups with human agents. Snider said the CIA could and should do more of this. “But I also will tell you this is not an area that has been neglected in the last 10 years, particularly in the past five years.”
Money and manpower have increased considerably, he said, and some plots have been thwarted. But tragedy prevented doesn’t get much attention in the press, Snider said.
Penetrating a terrorist group would not be easy, Snider said.
“These are very difficult people to get access to,” he said. “...We don’t look like them, and we don’t know how to relate to them. ...
“Getting someone in a position to be able to approach a terrorist and say, ‘Would you work for the U.S. for money?’ —and having the idea that he’ll say ‘yes’ —it’s not easy.”
The intelligence community also is reviewing the idea of loosening restrictions and controls on intelligence gathering to make the job easier.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has proposed several changes to laws concerning wiretapping, eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, 90 to 95 percent of which Snider supports. Most are administrative issues that pose no threat to civil liberties. But he questioned the notion of being able to detain immigrants indefinitely.
The country has 40 to 50 federal agencies with some responsibility for counter-terrorism, Snider said, and sharing information among them all has always been a problem.
Progress has been made. For about 10 years, the CIA has had a Counter-Terrorist Center, which forms the focal point for information coming in about terrorists.
Still, major problems lie ahead, Snider said. “We don’t have enough linguists and translators ... A lot of information is gathered. It’s never translated and can’t be exploited at all.”
A lot of important information is not noticed or passed on to the right agency or person.
“By and large, it’s also not shared with the private sector. I think this is something that’s going to have to be looked at.” Airlines, for example, ought to know who’s on the government watch list for possible terrorist activity, he said.
“I have no doubt in the end we will prevail,” Snider said. “The question is, at what cost?”
Contact Elizabeth G. Cook at 704-797-4244 or editor@salisburypost.com
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