CIA director admits failure to stop terrorism

CIA director George Tenet predicted yesterday it will take “another five years of work to have the kind of clandestine service our country needs” to combat terrorist threats.

“The same can be said for the National Security Agency, our imagery agency and our analytic community,” Tenet testified before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.

He said tight budgets at the end of the Cold War meant that by the mid-90s, intelligence agencies had “lost close to 25% of our people and billions of dollars in capital investment”.