On August 22, 2001, twenty days before the attacks, the CIA’s acting inspector general sent the agency’s counterterrorism chiefs her office’s verdict on the DCI Counterterrorist Center. It opened with praise. The Center was “a wellmanaged component that successfully carries out the Agency’s counterterrorist responsibilities,” its workforce “highly dedicated and motivated.”
That sentence has been public since 2010. Much of what came after it was not. When the CIA first released the 81-page inspection report in July 2010, it blacked out nearly every number that would let a reader judge the Center’s size, budget and workload. In July 2026, after a mandatory declassification review that The Black Vault’s John Greenewald Jr. requested in January 2019, the agency released a new version with many of those numbers restored. We read the two versions side by side. The restored text doesn’t settle the long argument over whether the CIA was starved of resources before 9/11. It shows that both sides of that argument were describing something real.
Tenet’s war memo and Clarke’s “good money after bad”
The 9/11 Commission recorded both accounts. On December 4, 1998, after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet wrote to senior officials, “We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community.” The Commission found the memo “had little overall effect on mobilizing the CIA or the intelligence community.”
Money was the sore point. Intelligence budgets were cut from fiscal 1990 to 1996 and stayed essentially flat through 2000, apart from supplemental appropriations, the Commission wrote. Tenet went to Congress for counterterrorism supplementals after the embassy bombings and again after the millennium alert. White House counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke read those requests as a sign the agency wasn’t moving its own money. Of the CIA’s clandestine service chief, Clarke told the Commission, “he had had a lot of money to do it and a long time to do it, and I didn’t want to put more good money after bad.” Even after Tenet won a modest supplemental in 2000, “the CIA still believed that it remained underfunded for counterterrorism.”
Seventy-four percent more people, twice the money
The inspector general’s team spent September 2000 through February 2001 inside the Center. Its executive summary, as released in 2010, said the Center’s resources had “steadily increased,” and the redactions began mid-sentence. The 2026 version fills in the rest. Over the last five years, the inspectors wrote, the Center saw “personnel growing by 74 percent during that period and the budget more than doubling.”
That is Clarke’s half of the story, on the inspectors’ own figures. The other half sits a sentence later, and it was public all along. Most of the budget growth “has come in the form of supplemental funding, which is unpredictable.” The restored funding section puts a cost on that. In fiscal 2000, the Center estimated that the millennium surge consumed 15 percent of its budget. The money was spent in the first quarter, reserve funds arrived in May and the supplemental followed in August. Interviewees called it a “rollercoaster” year, a word that also survived the 2010 redactions.
On people, the restored numbers cut the other way. Forty percent of the Center’s survey respondents said their unit lacked the staff to do its job, the report now shows, and every interviewee in one redacted unit said more people were needed. A direct hiring drive for officers with native fluency in languages such as Farsi and Arabic had brought people in, a senior manager told the inspectors, but “many applicants with the desired ethnic background could not pass the security process.” The Usama Bin Laden station was the exception, over its authorized strength as of January 2001 by a number that is still redacted.
Seven percent of the Center were analysts
The most consequential restorations are in the analysis section. The Center’s Assessments and Information Group, its main analytic arm, accounted for “only 14 percent of staff officers or only 7 percent of the total CTC workforce.” Its analysts estimated they spent between 30 and 50 percent of their time supporting operations rather than writing analysis.
The 2010 release also withheld most of a paragraph about a review the Center commissioned after the 1998 embassy bombings. That study, whose author is still redacted, credited the Center’s bin Laden analysis with “significant strides.” It also warned that “the eruption of reporting, much of it unreliable, and the dramatic growth in customer taskings” were crowding out in-depth research on bin Laden and his organization. The inspectors checked back. Eighteen months after that study, they found, the conditions persisted, “and AIG remains largely reactive despite the infusion of more analytic resources.”
The 9/11 Commission reached the same place by a different route. Deputy Director John McLaughlin conceded to the Commission that most of the work of the Center’s 30- to 40-person analytic group dealt with collection issues. The Center set up a strategic assessments branch in July 2001. Its new chief reported for duty on September 10.
What the translators couldn’t reach
The 2010 version kept one warning in its summary. Because the Center couldn’t exploit everything it collected, “the risk exists that a potential warning will go unidentified.” The three pages behind that sentence, on the Language Exploitation Branch, were almost entirely blank.
Now they can be read. Much of the linguists’ material was audio, often of poor quality, in accented speech, slang or a specific dialect. They triaged by scanning for threat tip-offs and deciding what could wait. “Despite these efforts, the translators cannot process all of the information quickly,” the inspectors wrote, “and several interviewees expressed concern about what they might be missing. Data from some very large operations can take months or longer to process fully.” At the time of the inspection the new branch chief had no deputy, and some contractors told the team that work quality and productivity had declined. The second of the report’s three recommendations was a plan to fix the branch’s workflow and morale.
Still behind the black bars
The new release keeps withholding a great deal. Program names, overseas locations, the size of the workforce and the contractor count remain redacted, along with most of the section on the Center’s main liaison program, the subject of the report’s first recommendation. So do the charts of the Center’s reporting volume and its funding to other divisions. The CIA cited the CIA Act and the National Security Act for what it held back.
The inspectors were not investigating a failure. Theirs was a routine review of a component they judged successful, and their three recommendations covered a written strategy for the liaison program, the translation branch and career guidance for the Center’s officers.
We’ve covered other records from the same years, including the 71 presidential briefs on bin Laden and the sworn testimony on the 1998 capture plan.
Primary source: CIA Office of Inspector General, “Inspection Report of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, Directorate of Operations,” August 2001 (IG-2001-0513), 2026 release, case EOM-2019-00272. Full context: the 2010 release of the same report and The Black Vault’s account of the request.
Sources
- CIA, “Inspection Report of the DCI Counterterrorist Center,” August 2001, approved for release June 17, 2026, with the CIA’s July 6, 2026 response letter (EOM-2019-00272), via The Black Vault. Used for: every quotation and figure from the report, the inspection dates, the recommendations and the exemptions cited.
- CIA, the same report as released July 26, 2010, National Security Archive copy (also The Black Vault copy). Used for: which passages were redacted in 2010.
- The Black Vault, “New CIA Release Reveals More About Counterterrorism Problems Before 9/11” (Oct. 6, 2026). Used for: the request history.
- National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, “The 9/11 Commission Report” (2004), pp. 93, 184-185, 342 and 357. Used for: Tenet’s December 1998 memo, the intelligence budget trend, Clarke’s comments, the CIA’s view that it remained underfunded, the size of the analytic group and the strategic assessments branch.