The Zero Hour

He entered the conference room and could immediately sense the tension. Muttering an apology for his tardiness, he set down his mug on the large, gleaming mahogany table and looked around with a worried expression.

Morrison was small and thin, with heavy black-framed glasses and a sallow complexion. Forgoing any opening statement-they knew why they were here-he launched right in: “Um, I’ve got the complete transcript here.”

He handed the pile of printouts to the director of the Counterterrorism Center, a whippet-thin, athletic-looking, squash-playing man in his mid-fifties, Hoyt Phillips (Yale ’61), who took one and passed it on. Morrison waited as the transcripts made their way around the table.

The reaction was swift yet subdued: murmurings of amazement, the occasional whisper, and then a grave silence. He waited, his stomach queasy with acid, until everyone had finished reading.

The Counterterrorism Center-the existence of which was until recently one of the CIA’s closely held secrets-was founded in 1986 to deal with the government’s embarrassing inability to handle the steadily worsening plague of international terrorism.

The idea behind the center was simple: to give the dozen or so agencies in the U.S. government concerned with terrorism-from the FBI to the State Department, from the Pentagon to the Secret Service-one centralized location into which intelligence from around the world could be funneled, and where all terrorism-fighting efforts could be coordinated.

For years the CIA had resisted the notion. It ran against the very culture of the Agency, whose gentlemen spies much preferred fighting the Soviet menace to soiling their hands with terrorists.

Also, the CIA’s leadership never much liked the idea of sharing “product” with its siblings in the intelligence community. And in order for such a center to work, it would have to allow collectors-the people in the field who gather the information-to mingle with the analysts. That simply had never been done. The CIA almost always keeps a Chinese Wall between its analysts and its operators, so as not to taint the product. The folks in the trench coats, it was always believed, should do their spying without any sense of the larger picture, or at least without any agenda or bias. Leave the political bias to the desk jockeys.

But Director of Central Intelligence William Casey did not share this concern. He ordered the establishment of an interagency “fusion center” where specially chosen representatives of the intelligence community-eighteen or nineteen intelligence officers from the NSA, the FBI, INR (the State Department’s intelligence arm), the DIA, and other agencies-are detailed full-time. Although they work at CIA headquarters, their salaries are paid on a nonreimbursable basis by their home departments.

Until the spring of 1994, the twenty-five or so staff members of the center worked in an overcrowded warren of desks and partitions on the sixth floor of the CIA headquarters’ original building. Thereafter, they were located in a more spacious, much more modern area in the new building next door. But it was hardly sleek or impressive; no one who has ever been inside CIA headquarters would call the place sleek.

Anything that happens in the world that is in any way related to terrorism will flash across the computer terminals in the center. Armed with secure communications and other secure links to the NSA and other intelligence agencies, the Counterterrorism Center’s staff are charged with ensuring cooperation among the various agencies, putting out intelligence products (while protecting sources and methods), and quelling the disputes over credit that are so rife in government bureaucracies.

Since the center is a part of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, the director of the center is always an Ops officer; the deputy director is always an analyst from the Intelligence Directorate. For all his athletic prowess, Hoyt Phillips, the director, was a classic Agency burnout case, bored with a career stymied by his own mediocrity, whiling away his time here until retirement.

Deputy Director Paul Morrison effectively ran the center, deftly managing its six sections. Rare though it is for a CIA office, the center’s organizational chart is fairly fluid. There is the Intel staff, who do what is called “target analysis” (evaluating the information collected by CIA and other agencies’ sources), a Reports staff, a Technical Attack group, an Assessment and Information group, an Ops group, and so on.

And there are all sorts of meetings, ranging from the monthly Warning and Forecast meeting, to the bimonthly Interagency Intelligence Committee, to the three-times-a-week 8:45 A.M. staff meeting. This meeting, however, had been called for seven-thirty in the morning, which was the earliest all the staff could be gathered.

It was not yet an emergency, but something close to it.