Inquiry likely to cast light on ‘Bat Cave’

The anonymous intelligence analysts who staff the headquarters of the US National Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia call it “the Bat Cave”.

The nickname, borrowed from the Batman cartoon fantasy, is intended to add a little ironic superhero glamour to an agency previously little known to the US public.

Now it is in the limelight as a Washington inquiry tries to determine what went wrong in the weeks leading to the foiled Christmas day attack on a Northwest Airlines flight.

When Barack Obama, US president, visited the NCTC in October, he told staff: “Our intelligence community is comprised of 16 organisations. We have countless federal, state, local and international partners. And this is where it has to all come together.”

The NCTC was established in 2004 on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that looked into the intelligence failure that contributed to the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the US.

The aim, in the words of the commission’s report, was to “connect the dots” between the various strands of information turned up by existing bodies such as the Central Intelligence Agency, which focuses overseas, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which operates domestically. “It should also provide a warning,” the report said.

Michael Leiter, the NCTC director who regularly chairs the president’s daily intelligence briefings, has described its creation as a break with a traditional structure in which individual agencies had operated alone.

The NCTC, which sits near the top of an organisational pyramid that leads from agents on the ground up to the White House, is “first and foremost the principal organisation responsible for terrorism analysis, for ensuring information sharing among federal agencies”, according to Mr Leiter.

In a 2008 presentation, the former federal prosecutor said the NCTC was the single focal point where all terrorism-related information available to the government came together.

“We are, in short, a one-stop shop for mapping out the terrorist threat and designing a plan for the US government to counter it,” Mr Leiter said.

John Brennan, the official who put the NCTC together with staff drawn from existing agencies, is now Mr Obama’s top counter-terrorism adviser and is in charge of the inquiry into what went wrong.

The journey to greater inter-agency co-operation has not been an entirely smooth ride. Intelligence agencies are notoriously reluctant about sharing their information and sources.

The desire of the public and local police authorities to have advanced warning of potential threats sometimes conflicts with the demands of individual agencies to keep investigations secret.

The FBI, renowned for keeping its cards close to its chest, is particularly concerned that details of continuing investigations should not be so widely shared that they end up in the newspapers before a case has fully matured.

In the first year of the administration, the Obama White House had to intervene to calm tensions between the demands of various agencies and seek a balance between the requirements of the terrorist-hunters and the public’s need to know.

That is perhaps why Mr Obama felt he needed to remind intelligence chiefs during his October visit to the NCTC that all the US’s agents, diplomats and domestic police depended on their ability to “work together, across divisions and disciplines”.