MADELEINE BRAND, host:
This is MORNING EDITION from NPR News. Im Madeleine Brand.
STEVE INSKEEP, host:
And Im Steve Inskeep. Good morning. Lets take one more pass through the chain of events that ended with a passenger trying to blow up an airplane on Christmas Day. President Obama acknowledged intelligence failures yesterday, as did his counterterrorism advisor, John Brennan.
Mr. JOHN BRENNAN (Counterterrorism Advisor): This was not a failure to share information. In fact, our review found the intelligence agencies and analysts had the information they needed. It was a failure to connect and integrate and understand the intelligence we have.
INSKEEP: Turns out the U.S. had a good deal of information about the unfolding plot targeting the United States and even tried to act on it. NPRs Dina Temple-Raston has been reporting on this story. She has the latest.
Dina, Good morning.
DINA TEMPLE-RASTON: Good morning.
INSKEEP: What did the government know about the possible attack beforehand?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, senior intelligence officials tell NPR that in many respects U.S. intelligence agencies were everywhere they were supposed to be as they tried to zero in on this Christmas threat. Now, we know that the national security agency had intercepted communications among operatives from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and Yemen.
And in those intercepts the terrorist leaders had discussed that a Nigerian was apparently being trained for an attack. And while there wasnt specificity - I mean, clearly the NSA was listening to the right phone conversations if they picked up that intelligence.
INSKEEP: So was that actionable intelligence, as they say?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Not only actionable intelligence, but they actually acted upon it. I mean, a short time after they got the intercepts, officials tell NPR they worked with Yemen to launch a series of military raids against al-Qaida training camps, on a village that is several hundred yards away from Sana, the Yemeni capital. And that happened on December 17th.
And then at the time, when that was made public, it seemed like that was just another anti-al-Qaida operation. But in fact, sources tell us that the raid as aimed at derailing this holiday operation the NSA had heard about.
And then there was a second strike on December 24th. And you remember there was a missile strike aimed at senior al-Qaida operatives in Yemen? Again, officials tell NPR that that strike was called to try and derail this holiday attack that U.S. officials feared were underway.
INSKEEP: So we should be fair here. They still didn't have the specific identity of a suspect. But you're telling me that they knew that there was some kind of plot, that it involved some kind of Nigerian. And also, as weve heard on previous days, that there was this Nigerian who had - there were concerns being raised about a particular Nigerian who turned out to be the suspect.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Thats true. I mean, what happened is they didn't realize how far the plot had actually progressed. So they didn't connect the dots quickly enough to prevent Abdulmutallab, the suspect, from boarding the Northwest Flight 253 in Amsterdam.
What they also didn't realize was that, again, there was this Nigerian banker whod come to the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria and said that his son had been in Yemen, that he was worried hed been radicalized. I mean, clearly if those two pieces of information had come together this might - this story might have a different ending.
INSKEEP: Both those pieces of information were inside the government somewhere but not in the same place or in front of the same person at the same time.
TEMPLE-RASTON: Exactly.
INSKEEP: Well, thats being blamed on a failure to communicate, which is the same thing that people said was a problem after 9/11. Are intelligence and other agencies any better than they were?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Well, back during the 9/11 time, the problem was what they called stovepiping, right, that one agency would so jealously guard information against another agency because they felt it was theirs. There were turf problems. I don't think that was a problem this time. This time there was a lot of sharing going on. And what happened is people were sort of looking at the wrong screen.
Sort of like you get so much information, for example, in your email account, that you miss a very important message because youre inundated. And that seems to have been what happened here.
INSKEEP: So very briefly, this is too much information?
TEMPLE-RASTON: Yeah. Lets just give the example of the warning that came out of the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. The warning they used is something called a visa viper. And there are 180 U.S. embassies around the world. And just about every day they each provide at least one visa viper to the U.S. government saying theyre worried about someone who they got a piece of information and theyre worried about someone. Thats a lot of information when you think all these things are coming in.
INSKEEP: Dina, thanks very much.
TEMPLE-RASTON: You're welcome.
INSKEEP: Thats NPRs Dina Temple-Raston this morning.