The spy who cried “wolf”?
By Thoreau
ABC News is reporting that US intelligence agencies warned India of the Mumbai attacks. Maybe they did. However, it’s interesting that the report says:
U.S. intelligence agencies warned their Indian counterparts in mid-October of a potential attack “from the sea against hotels and business centers in Mumbai,” a U.S. intelligence official tells ABCNews.com. A second government source says specific locations, including the Taj hotel, were listed in the U.S. warning.
They say that multiple locations were mentioned by US intelligence, and one of those locations was among the places actually attacked. Now, here in the US we’re accustomed to getting the occasional warning that the National Mood Ring is changing color from Yellow Alert to Orange Alert, and that terrorists may try to attack some major city at some point with some unknown means, and within that city they may attack a variety of targets including hotels, stadiums, office buildings, malls, public transportation, private transportation, for-profit enterprises, non-profits, apartment complexes, single-family homes, schools, workplaces, churches, synagogues, grocery stores, farmers markets, animal research labs, PETA offices, blacks, whites, gyms, fast food outlets, women, men, children, adults, etc.
So, if you’re in Indian intelligence, and you get a memo from the CIA that at some point a Pakistani terrorist group might hit one or more big buildings a major city, and you’ve gotten used to memos saying that they heard some terrorist mention some city so something might happen, well, you know, maybe you just shrug it off.
Did US intelligence agencies really have good info this time? Maybe. Or maybe not. What I do know is that after 7 years of vague warnings that never pan out, I’m no longer ready to be impressed that some part of some warning happened to be true. If you issue enough of these warnings, then eventually one of them will be true, but that doesn’t mean that we should start paying attention to them.
EDIT: Some reports say that the CIA also told them the attack would be launched by boat, other sources say that Indian intelligence deduced that the attackers would arrive by boat. Even so, predicting that people and/or equipment might be smuggled into a major port city by boat is not sufficient reason to conclude that the authorities must know what they are talking about. Also, is it even all that useful? I presume that the people in charge of major port cities are already on the look-out for smugglers. Telling them that a terrorist might be smuggled in doesn’t provide much extra help for their task. Now, you’ll probably say to me “But look how ineffective the anti-smuggler measures were! Don’t you think they need to beef them up?” My answer is that you should try to get some illicit drugs, and then we can talk about whether effective anti-smuggling measures are really possible.
Am I being too harsh? Maybe. But after 7 years of “OMG! A wolf!” I sort of have to be harsh on them, and question whether this wasn’t just a matter of the NSA’s VCR clock flashing 12:00 at noon.
Comment by josephdietrich —
December 2, 2008 @ 5:32 am
I wonder if they predicted that the terrorists might use guns, and perhaps bombs, as well.
Comment by Michael L —
December 2, 2008 @ 10:26 am
Of course much of Mumbai is surrounded by water, so the boat thing would be really hard to predict.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 2, 2008 @ 10:49 am
So, if it’s so easy to predict that a coastal city would face a terrorist attack by boat, because that’s such an obvious way to attack, then can someone please name another terrorist attack on a coastal city that was launched by boat?
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 2, 2008 @ 10:51 am
The point of the the Boy Who Cried Wolf story is that the kid was right at the end, and no one believed him, not that he was wrong when he yelled after actually seeing the wolf.
Sort of like all of the bogus warnings in the past don’t make this one wrong.
This post demonstrates the dynamic precisely. After all the color coding, even when the agencies actually get one right, it just gets shrugged off.
Comment by Two if by Sea? —
December 2, 2008 @ 11:46 am
then can someone please name another terrorist attack on a coastal city that was launched by boat?
‘LISTEN, my children, and you shall hear…’
[of course, it sort of depends on your point of view]
Comment by SM —
December 2, 2008 @ 12:01 pm
I don’t think it would have been the case that Indian intelligence agencies ignored CIA warnings – well, maybe they did, who knows. But there were news reports that security at the Taj and Oberoi had been greatly increased for a couple of months and then relaxed. The fact seems to be that Indian responders were underequipped and/or undertrained at all levels. There are stories of how armed policemen hid from the terrorists.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Mumbai_cops_hadnt_fired_in_10_yrs/articleshow/3783461.cms
The commando’s were 10 hours late in arriving because they couldn’t find a frickin’ plane to fly them in. People expect everyone to have Israeli lvl’s of command-and-control. That just ain’t happening.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 2, 2008 @ 12:17 pm
joe-
They were certainly right to the extent that their prediction came true. The question is whether they were acting on good information or just a broken clock at the right time of day.
If they were tapping the phone of somebody who wasn’t involved in the attacks, and heard the Taj Hotel mentioned in a conversation that was completely misinterpreted, that doesn’t mean they had good information.
As to raising the alert level at the hotel: This just shows how useless information can be unless it is highly, highly specific. If you have, say, additional surveillance cameras and metal detectors and you limit access to the upper floors to registered guests and stuff like that, it’s completely useless when some guys with AK-47s show up. Conversely, a bunch of armed guards would be useless against some guys who show up, check into a room, and smuggle the components of a bomb in with several pieces of luggage.
Comment by Steven Taylor —
December 2, 2008 @ 1:15 pm
Thoreau,
What, you mean things like this: A 50% Chance of WMD Terrorism?
Comment by sglover —
December 2, 2008 @ 9:01 pm
Hell, how does anyone know that the intelligence crowd predicted anything? How do we know that this isn’t simply their PR arms, trying to milk a catastrophe? That’s **one** “core competency” that they have, anyway…..
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 2, 2008 @ 10:35 pm
I don’t know, thoreau. There seems to be a pattern to how the wrong predictions turn out. First, they’re wrong. Spectacularly wrong. Nothing, and I mean nothing, happens.
Second, details like the right city, landings by boat in the harbor, and the hotel? That doesn’t sound like the “possible attacks on modes of transport in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, or Boston, using bombs, automatic rifles, grenades, or WMD!” warnings we usually get.
I know what you’re saying, but this isn’t the same thing at all.
Comment by Thoreau —
December 2, 2008 @ 11:08 pm
joe-
I know what you’re saying, but I’d still love to see the memo sent to Indian Intelligence.
If it listed multiple cities, multiple targets in each city, and something like “Attackers may be smuggled in by boat, car, plane, donkey, scuba, tunnels, or hot air balloons” then I’m a bit more skeptical.
Remember that they’re only citing the aspects of the report that match the attack. If the memo was very specific, then, yeah, I guess we have to give them this one. OTOH, if the memo included several possibilities, and one of them happened to match this, then I can’t give them any credit.
So let’s see the memo.
Finally, I’d just point out that as specific as it allegedly was, it wasn’t specific enough to help stop the attack. Security was apparently heightened at the hotel and other possible targets, but eventually they decreased the security, and the measures they put in place reportedly wouldn’t have stopped it: Having security cameras and controlling access to elevators to prevent people from smuggling in a bomb won’t stop the guy who shows up at the front door with an AK-47 blasting.
So I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think they’ve earned any benefit of the doubt. Let’s see the memo, and let’s hear more about the measures put in place in response to that memo, and then we can decide whether to give them some credit.
Comment by y81 —
December 3, 2008 @ 9:29 am
Another issue, besides the ones thoreau raises, is “how many such memos are there?” The government is huge, bureaucrats write memos all day, and if you go through the files you can hundreds of cya memos warning of things that never happen. It’s easy to ignore those and pull out the one that focuses on the Pearl Harbor airfields, or al Qaeda wanting to hijack airplanes, or overleverage at Fannie Mae, or whatever.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
December 3, 2008 @ 10:34 am
Agreed, Thoreau. I’d love to see it, too.