Tenet: 'It is not possible to protect everything'

MATTHEWS:  How about the Hamburg crowd, the ones who were up there, Mohammed Atta—had you—did you have a tail on him?  Did you have a sense of where he was going?

TENET:  We did not, at the time.

MATTHEWS:  But remember the day of—the reason I’m asking you, because I get the feeling that it wasn’t impossible that we could have caught this gang before it struck on 9/11 -- the day of, you were having breakfast at the St. Regent’s, right down near the White House.  I think I was right on that corner, going to a funeral that morning—because I remember the craziness of the crowd that morning, when all this hit.

You had Moussaoui on your brain.  You were speaking with David Boren, your former boss, the Senate Intelligence chief, and you said, God, it must have been that guy that was trying to get the airplane training, to fly the big planes.  What was your mind thinking then, because something was—you were close to something.

TENET:  The immediate—the immediate thing I thought about is, I remembered the 1995 Manila air conspiracy, where they were going to hijack ten planes and explode them over the Pacific.  And I remembered that one of those plotlines included flying an airplane into CIA headquarters.  And I thought about Moussaoui and I knew it was al Qaeda immediately.

MATTHEWS:  Yes, you did.  You didn’t think the first plane hit was an accident.

TENET:  No, there was no accident, in my mind.  So—

MATTHEWS:  So your brain was wired for these kind—had you gotten a dream the night before, or if something had—what would have had to stick in your brain for you to put together:  My god, why would a guy want to fly a 747, and he didn’t want to learn how to take off or land? 

Why don’t we get that guy and get it out of him?

Maybe if we put that together with the news we got from Arizona, or somewhere else, could you have put it all together?

TENET:  You can go back, and you go, Arizona, you go to the Phoenix memo, you watch-list 19 -- you watch-list these guys 19 days before the event.  Not a great effort is made to go find them.  You put all of these things together, and we sat around and thought about it, was there a silver bullet, was there something that could’ve been done domestically to get on top of these guys?  I thought about Moussaoui—he was in our custody, he was under arrest.  That was a good thing.

We didn’t get FISA on him, we didn’t get into his luggage.  You think about all these things, and at the end of the day, Chris, I don’t know that there was a silver bullet.  I do know that, what we were doing and what we were warning—we had a keen sense of something big and spectacular’s going to happen, we just didn’t know when and how.

MATTHEWS:  Okay, let’s talk about now, because the average person right now, going into the next election—this is a political show, HARDBALL—wants to know how they should vote, in terms of getting hit again.  I was talking to someone this morning who said, States like Ohio

I know you’re not in politics, but—if states like Ohio went one way because of fear of the so-called soccer mom that we’re going to get hit again, and so they might vote a little more right wing than they would normally.

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