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Nearly two years before 9/11, America's largest intelligence agency had recordings of three of the al Qaeda hijackers plotting an attack. But the information, obtained by the National Security Agency, wasn't analyzed in a way that could uncover the plot.
Inside the super-secret NSA, several analysts and managers believed the agency had a powerful tool that might have had a chance to head off 9/11. But it wasn't used.
One of those agency insiders was Thomas Drake, who thought taxpayer money was being wasted on useless intelligence gathering projects while promising technology was ignored.
Recognizing that vulnerability in the late 1990s, Binney, a legendary NSA mathematician, led development of a revolutionary computer system to collect, isolate and connect important information like phone calls and financial transactions.
Its code name was "Thin Thread."
"Thin Thread was fundamentally dedicated to collecting and processing and ultimately analyzing the vast reams of digital data. It was a breakthrough solution," Drake explained.
Binney was pushing to use it before the attack on America. "We proposed it for January of 2001," he recalled.
"Now, there is no answer to this next question, 'cause we'll never know. But
if Thin Thread had been deployed worldwide at the point that it was ready, is there a chance that information could've been picked up that might have headed off 9/11?" Pelley asked.
"Indeed," Wiebe said.
"Absolutely," Binney added. "We had planned on going after all the appropriate targets at the time."
After 9/11, Drake felt America was threatened as long as Thin Thread was confined to the lab. But others at NSA doubted Thin Thread was up to the job.
One of them was Lieutenant General Michael Hayden, the head of the agency: he wanted to transform the agency and launched a massive modernization program, code named: "Trailblazer." It was supposed to do what Thin Thread did, and more.
Trailblazer would be the NSA's biggest project. Hayden's philosophy was to let private industry do the job. Enormous deals were signed with defense contractors. Binney's Thin Thread program cost $3 million; Trailblazer would run more than $1 billion and take years to develop.
"Do you have any idea why General Hayden decided to go with Trailblazer as opposed to Thin Thread, which already existed?" Pelley asked.
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I believe he was convinced by others that going with a large-scale, industrial strength solution was the approach that NSA needed to take. You can't really understand why they would make that kind of a decision without understanding the culture of NSA," Drake said.
Asked to elaborate, Drake said, "Careers are built on projects and programs. The bigger, the better their career."
