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Former CIA Director Mike Morell stands in front of the Aston Martin that was featured in the movie "Goldfinger," after appearing with USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page for a Capital Download segment.(Photo: Steve Elfers, USA TODAY)
WASHINGTON – The Islamic State simply inspired the deadly assault by two men on an exhibit of cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed near Dallas last week, CIA veteran Michael Morell says. But it's only a matter of time before the jihadist group is likely to be in a position to direct more elaborate attacks on American soil that could result in mass casualties.
"If we don't get ISIS under control, we're going to see that kind of attack," the kind of attack al-Qaeda launched on 9/11, Morell told USA TODAY. So far, U.S. efforts haven't been effective in countering the Islamic State's success in recruiting hundreds of American converts, he says, "and we're not effective at it because it's very hard to do."
Morell was by President George W. Bush's side at a Florida elementary school in 2001 when the president was told hijacked airliners had crashed into the World Trade Center, and he was in the White House Situation Room with President Obama nearly a decade later when the first word was relayed that Navy Seal Team Six had killed Osama bin Laden.
After 33 years in the CIA, including two stints as acting director, Morell has written an account of his experiences, published Tuesday by Twelve, titled The Great War of Our Time: The CIA's Fight Against Terrorism From Al Qa'ida to ISIS.
His central point: This "great war," which already has tested the nation's national security and its politics, is likely to stretch for decades more. "For as far as I can see," he says.
Just last Friday, the threat level at U.S. military bases was raised to the highest level since the 10[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary of 9/11, in part because of concern about the Texas attack that left the two assailants dead. "We're very definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat," Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson warned Sunday on ABC's This Week. On Fox News Sunday, House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul, R-Texas, said the groups' sophisticated use of the Internet means that "really, terrorism has gone viral."
"It was a mistake to think that al-Qaeda died along with bin Laden in Abbottabad," Morell says, an assumption made by some relieved Americans that he says wasn't shared by intelligence agencies. While al-Qaeda's leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been decimated, other branches of the group have thrived, including al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, based in Yemen.
"They today have the ability to bring down an airliner in the United States," Morell says. "If that happened tomorrow, I would not be surprised."
BOND. JAMES BOND.
Morell, 56, sat down with USA TODAY's Capital Download newsmaker series at the International Spy Museum in downtown Washington before the doors had been opened to the public. Every 10 minutes or so, at one nearby exhibit, the headlights on the sleek, silver-birch Aston Martin DB5 featured in Goldfinger would flip up and the sound of the car's (mock) embedded machine guns would fire.
He never really operated in the mode of James Bond, though. When he joined the CIA at age 22 – a native of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, with an economics degree from the University of Akron – he worked as an analyst, not a covert operative. If other parents at his children's back-to-school nights would ask where he worked, he would tell them. "And then they'd run away," he says, smiling.
USA TODAY
Capital Download - Conversations with Washington's biggest newsmakers
Still, for decades, he found himself at the center of the nation's biggest crises and most perilous challenges in a career that was defined in large part by the 9/11 attacks.
The Great War of Our Time by former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell. [Via MerlinFTP Drop]<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Twelve Books)
Morell defends the use of so-called enhanced interrogation – critics call it torture – and blasts as inaccurate the report on the program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that found no evidence the brutal techniques produced significant intelligence. But he also discusses the reasons for intelligence findings that wrongly concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the leading justification for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He offers an apology to then-secretary of State Colin Powell, who cited the flawed intelligence before the United Nations.
And he describes how the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies misjudged the impact of the Arab Spring. As pro-democracy demonstrations swept across the Middle East and North Africa, they concluded it would devastate al-Qaeda because it would "undercut their narrative that only violence can lead to political change."
That turned out to be "dead wrong," he says. The governments that followed were either unable or unwilling to combat extremism.
On the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that left four Americans dead, Morell questions why the State Department didn't respond to an increasing threat there by bolstering security for its workers, as the CIA did. But he also questions efforts by congressional Republicans to suggest some sort of conspiracy was at play in its aftermath. Benghazi is "the poster child of the intrusion of politics into national security."
Morell argues that the NSA's mass collection of metadata on telephone calls in the United States, including by millions of Americans not suspected of any wrongdoing, has been "a very important tool" against terrorism, although he acknowledges it's hard to point to a particular plot it has disrupted. A federal appeals court last week concluded the program was illegal, and Congress is now debating whether to revise the way it works before it expires on June 1.
"If it had been there prior to 9/11, there is a good chance we would have seen those 19 hijackers communicating with each other," he says. A dozen years later, when the scope of the program was revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the political landscape had changed.
"The public's reaction to it in 2013 was, 'Geez, can we trust the government?' That would have been a completely different reaction in 2001, (when) the 9/11 attacks had just happened." Then, he speculates, "The reaction would have been, 'This sounds just great, sounds like exactly what we need.' "
'HE'S IN MOSCOW'
Morell is withering toward Snowden. "If he really believes what he says, that the American people need to debate these issues and the American people need to decide whether these programs are right, then he should be willing to come home and have those same American people judge his actions," he says. "Where is he? He's in Moscow."
USA TODAY
Morell's quick takes: From Snowden (treasonous) to Palin (clueless)
He also is scathing about efforts by Vice President Dick Cheney and a top aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, to press the argument after the 9/11 attacks that there had been links between al-Qaeda and Iraq. When CIA formally concluded that that there had not been, he says, Libby demanded the agency withdraw the paper.
Fighters from the al-Qaida linked Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) marching in Raqqa, Syria.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>(Photo: Uncredited, AP)
"I have never in my 33-year experience had a policymaker demand that something be withdrawn," Morell says. "Highly unusual. Unprecedented. Never happened before; never happened again in my experience."
Even after the agency refused to back off, Cheney continued to imply in public statements that there had been a link as he made the case for U.S. action against Iraq. "The impact was huge," Morell recalls, contributing to the belief by a majority of Americans that Iraq had a role in the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I was having dinner with my own father a year after the war started in Iraq, and I said something that even raised a question about whether this was the right thing to do or not," Morell recalls. "My father slammed his hand down on the table until the silverware jumped off and he said, 'But Iraq did 9/11!' I said, 'No, they didn't, Dad. I know. Trust me. I know.' "
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