The Washington Times reports that the NSA issued a top-secret intelligence report on the day the destroyer USS Cole was attacked in Yemen—the alert warning that terrorists were planning an attack against the United States in the Middle East. It isn’t the first (or last) time that NSA was implicated in possessing intelligence that provided tactical warning but never got disseminated in time or sent to the right people.
Bill Gertz reports that the NSA report was not dispatched until several hours after the bombing. The report, according to officials who were familiar with the top-secret intelligence, stated that unidentified terrorists were involved in “operational planning” for an attack on U.S. or Israeli personnel or property in the Middle East. One official said the warning was specific as to an attack in Yemen. Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, agreed that the NSA report was specific. He investigated the NSA warning and later told Gertz that the warning “related specifically to Yemen.” (Breakdown, p. 51)
Is it true? What’s more important is that through 9/11 (and about 9/11) we just don’t know what intelligence NSA possessed or reported because the signals intelligence (SIGINT) agency evades deep scrutiny, even after disasters. And history is distorted, at least U.S. history, by the absence of much information on the substance of intelligence reporting: what the IC knows, what subject matters it collects on, what happens to the intelligence. Intelligence leaders are always ready to boast that intelligence on this and that saved lives, but the substance is really a black hole.