CIA Finds Holes in Pre-9/11 Work

Tenet also said that he inherited an intelligence agency "in shambles," with declining budgets and plummeting morale. There was "no coherent, integrated and measurable long-range plan," he wrote. "That's where I focused my energies from day one."

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, in a statement addressed to the agency's employees, said he had opposed releasing the inspector general's report, fearing it would "distract officers serving their country on the frontlines of a global conflict."

"It will, at a minimum, consume time and attention revisiting ground that is already well plowed," Hayden said. Both he and predecessor Porter J. Goss have rejected calls for an "accountability board" to assess the responsibility of individual CIA officials.

The limited focus was one reason that Tenet and his successors fought releasing the report. They argued that CIA leaders were being unfairly singled out in an investigation that deliberately ignored the role played by other intelligence agencies and administrations.

Despite the narrow scope, the document sheds new light on several controversies and conflicts in the months before the attacks.

It describes, for example, a little-known clash between the CIA and National Security Agency over surveillance activities and authorities. According to the report, the NSA had long refused to share raw transcripts of intercepted al-Qaeda communications with the CIA but finally relented and allowed one CIA officer to review the intercepts at the NSA for a brief period in 2000.

The report summary also reveals that CIA analysts, before Sept. 11, had trained their sights on Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who was later determined to be the chief planner of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, the man known as "KSM" became a high priority for capture because of his connections to the organizer of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. But CIA analysts did not recognize that he was also a senior al-Qaeda planner, despite "reporting from credible sources," the investigators concluded.

The report also sheds light on the agency's failures to identify Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, two al-Qaeda operatives who became part of the Sept. 11 hijacking plot. In the early months of 2000, as many as 60 intelligence officials saw agency cables concerning the two men's travels.

Yet they were never placed on a watch list that might have resulted in their capture before the attacks, the report states.

Staff writer Glenn Kessler and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.