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Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
In this revelatory new account, national security historian Timothy Naftali relates the full back story of America’s attempts to fight terrorism. On September 11, 2001, a long history of failures, missteps, and blind spots in our intelligence services came to a head, with tragic results.At the end of World War II, the OSS’s “X-2” department had established a seamless system for countering the threats of die-hard Nazi terrorists. But those capabilities were soon forgotten, and it wasn’t until 1968, when Palestinian groups began a series of highly publicized airplane hijackings, that the U.S. began to take counterterrorism seriously. Naftali narrates the game of “catch-up” that various administrations and the CIA played —with varying degrees of success—from the Munich Games hostage-taking to the raft of terrorist incidents in the mid-1980s through the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, and up to 9/11.In riveting detail, Naftali shows why holes in U.S. homeland security discovered by Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1986 were still a problem when his son became President, and why George W. Bush did little to fix them until it was too late. Naftali concludes that open, liberal democracies like the U.S. are incapable of effectively stopping terrorism. For anyone concerned about the future of America’s security, this masterful history will be necessary—and eye-opening—reading.
416 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2005
12 people are currently reading
200 people want to read
About the author
Timothy Naftali
18 books47 followersTimothy Naftali is a Canadian-American historian and director of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives at New York University. From 2007 to 2011 he directed the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. He was appointed when control of the Library was transferred from the Richard Nixon Foundation to the National Archives and Records Administration. His biggest task at the library was to present a more objective and unbiased picture of the Watergate scandal—a task completed in March, 2011, when the Library's new Watergate gallery opened and received extensive news coverage. Naftali left the Nixon Library later that year.
Previously Naftali's area of focus was the history of counterterrorism and the Cold War. Before taking the Nixon Library position, Naftali had been an associate professor at the University of Virginia, where he directed the Miller Center of Public Affairs' Presidential Recordings Program. In the 1990s he taught at the University of Hawaii and Yale. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev.
He served as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, which commissioned him to write an unclassified history of American counterterrorism policy. This was later expanded into his well-received 2005 book Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
Previously Naftali's area of focus was the history of counterterrorism and the Cold War. Before taking the Nixon Library position, Naftali had been an associate professor at the University of Virginia, where he directed the Miller Center of Public Affairs' Presidential Recordings Program. In the 1990s he taught at the University of Hawaii and Yale. He has written four books, two of them co-authored with Alexander Fursenko on the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nikita Khrushchev.
He served as a consultant to the 9/11 Commission, which commissioned him to write an unclassified history of American counterterrorism policy. This was later expanded into his well-received 2005 book Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 20, 2017
I'm not sure what I expected when this book was assigned to me for homework, but it definitely wasn't this. This book reads like a textbook. It's 100% info dumping without any kind of plot line or narrative. It's nothing but sentences like, "He asked for a meeting with Reagan. They met. Reagan agreed with him." Very bland, dull, and, quite frankly, boring. It's highly historical, but that doesn't mean it has to put me to sleep. The first chunk was very interesting, but then it quickly became a struggle as the book sounded more and more like an encyclopedia...
February 14, 2013
This book takes an interesting approach to the issue of counterterrorism, going back to WWII times and giving good historical background. Although now almost eight years old, "Blind Spot" is still a valuable and comprehensive work. Perhaps the topic is a little too broad, but the book lacks detail that has been published in other sources and little that is new. Still, Naftali shows a solid grasp of the subject and obviously knows what he's talking about.
It is not a "secret history" in any sense nor is it a diatribe against either the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) or the Executive Branch of government. The book is a sober and sobering history of how the U.S. has dealt with issues of State and non-State terrorism from World War II through the catastrophe of September 11 2001. Naftali also does a great service by noting the obvious similarities between the operating techniques of counter-Espionage and counter Terrorism (especially domestic).
In this book Naftali chronicles the failure of our political and national security systems to effectively protect American lives and property from terrorist threats. Naftali does record those rare successes against individual terrorists such as Abu Nidal, but the thrust of his book is that on the whole we have had difficulty countering terrorism in any form. Naftali also documents the numerous failures of the Reagan administration, puncturing the conservative myth of a "badass, tough president who wasn't afraid to take action when the liberals had done nothing" yada yada yada.
naftali gives a fairly detailed case study of the series of terrorist attacks against U.S. personal in Lebanon during 1983-1984. The perpetrators of these attacks were members of Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist organization sponsored by Iran and enabled by Syria. In the case of the bombing of the U.S. Beirut Embassy in 1984 as it turned out, if the CIA had reviewed its available evidence, especially imagery they would have seen that a mock up of the U.S. Embassy had been constructed and was being used to train for car bomb attacks against the real thing. This is not a matter of "connecting the dots"; it is a matter of knowing the target (in this case Hezbollah) and building rational indications lists. In the fallout from this series of disasters, the redoubtable Charlie Allen, a long time CIA employee, called attention to the existence of this imagery (hind site is always 20/20). As a result Allen was named the new National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counter-Terrorism.
To his credit, Allen almost immediately tried to make information sharing a part of IC culture by connecting all concerned agencies directly with the CIA center for photo interpretation. Needless to say the IC culture than as now was largely opposed to sharing anything and Allen's efforts came to naught. In the couple of chapters of this book Naftali does chronicle the efforts by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to deal with the terrorist threat posed by the Osama bin Laden movement. Neither comes off very well in this, but the Bush administration comes off as the most indifferent, at least prior to 9/11.
There are also a few errors: for example, Naftali writes that Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by US fighter jets when it was actually by the USS Vincennes. he also writes that Abu Zubaydah "would later lead a resistance movement in Iraq." However, Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. Naftali obviously means Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was moving between Iraq and Jordan at the time and was killed by US forces in Iraq in 2006.
Other than that, this is still a valuable work.
It is not a "secret history" in any sense nor is it a diatribe against either the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) or the Executive Branch of government. The book is a sober and sobering history of how the U.S. has dealt with issues of State and non-State terrorism from World War II through the catastrophe of September 11 2001. Naftali also does a great service by noting the obvious similarities between the operating techniques of counter-Espionage and counter Terrorism (especially domestic).
In this book Naftali chronicles the failure of our political and national security systems to effectively protect American lives and property from terrorist threats. Naftali does record those rare successes against individual terrorists such as Abu Nidal, but the thrust of his book is that on the whole we have had difficulty countering terrorism in any form. Naftali also documents the numerous failures of the Reagan administration, puncturing the conservative myth of a "badass, tough president who wasn't afraid to take action when the liberals had done nothing" yada yada yada.
naftali gives a fairly detailed case study of the series of terrorist attacks against U.S. personal in Lebanon during 1983-1984. The perpetrators of these attacks were members of Hezbollah, a Shia terrorist organization sponsored by Iran and enabled by Syria. In the case of the bombing of the U.S. Beirut Embassy in 1984 as it turned out, if the CIA had reviewed its available evidence, especially imagery they would have seen that a mock up of the U.S. Embassy had been constructed and was being used to train for car bomb attacks against the real thing. This is not a matter of "connecting the dots"; it is a matter of knowing the target (in this case Hezbollah) and building rational indications lists. In the fallout from this series of disasters, the redoubtable Charlie Allen, a long time CIA employee, called attention to the existence of this imagery (hind site is always 20/20). As a result Allen was named the new National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for counter-Terrorism.
To his credit, Allen almost immediately tried to make information sharing a part of IC culture by connecting all concerned agencies directly with the CIA center for photo interpretation. Needless to say the IC culture than as now was largely opposed to sharing anything and Allen's efforts came to naught. In the couple of chapters of this book Naftali does chronicle the efforts by the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to deal with the terrorist threat posed by the Osama bin Laden movement. Neither comes off very well in this, but the Bush administration comes off as the most indifferent, at least prior to 9/11.
There are also a few errors: for example, Naftali writes that Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down by US fighter jets when it was actually by the USS Vincennes. he also writes that Abu Zubaydah "would later lead a resistance movement in Iraq." However, Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. Naftali obviously means Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was moving between Iraq and Jordan at the time and was killed by US forces in Iraq in 2006.
Other than that, this is still a valuable work.
July 1, 2021
A lot of books written in the first few years following 911 are pretty rushed and skippable, but this isn't one of those books. Naftali mined a wide range of archival sources, memoirs, interviews, and other documents to present a thorough but not overly long history of counterterrorism since the 1960s. It should still be read by all scholars of American CT and the War on Terror, although it's not quite engaging enough for the general reader in my opinion.
The book picks up with the wave of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s. Airplanes were the ultimate soft target at the time: there was basically no security checks, and most passengers figured that they would be inconvenienced rather than endangered. The airlines didn't want to beef up security at all for cost reasons; it was really the pilots themselves who first put pressure on the government to act by boycotting flying to certain countries (Cuba, Algeria) that were known to welcome hijackers. The problem got more serious with the rise of Palestinian terrorism in the 1970s, especially the Munich attack and more violent hijackings. From the 70s on, every US president had working groups and more concerted policies on terrorism, but it was seen as something that happens abroad and that terrorists don't want mass casualty events, only shocking events that garner attention and leverage.
The paradigm in the 70s and 80s was also state sponsorship, and US analysts generally saw Libya, Syria, and Iran as the main sponsors, replacing Palestinian groups for a time. It wasn't until the 1990s that a new form of terrorism arose (McVeigh, AQ, Aum Shinrikyo, Hamas) that wasn't primarily state sponsored. This new wave was less restrained, more driven by millenarian ideologies, and more decentralized. In a sense, you could see Bush's state sponsor paradigm of the GWOT as a way to force the terrorist threat back into the state sponsor box even though the game had clearly changed in the preceding decade.
I respected that Naftali doesn't judge US leaders too harshly on terrorism preparedness. Something like 911 was hard to imagine, and indeed most foreign-group attacks on the US hit targets overseas rather than the homeland. There were major political barriers to serious CT action, and the threat didn't necessarily seem to rate being included with, for instance, great power rivals or regional civil wars. It is inherently hard for a democracy with a strong Constitution and civil liberties tradition to establish effective and somewhat constraining CT policies when we aren't in an emergency. What makes this book especially valuable for the present moment is that we are now trying to find a sustainable but effective CT posture without having it swallow up all our resources and attention; this was the balance that presidents from Nixon to Clinton also had to navigate, and Naftali charts their policies, thoughts, and struggles incredibly well.
Still, this book leaves plenty of room for other scholars of the US experience with terrorism to make their mark. It mostly leaves the politics of counterterrorism out, as well as the larger question of how Americans beyond these administration understood the causes and nature of the modern phenomena of terrorism in its different ideologies and iterations. What makes terrorism so interesting to me is, in part, its moral challenge, its trampling of virtually every law and norm in the pursuit of a political objective or a fantastic dream. Is it rational or irrational? Is it fundamentally different from state terror, like in the USSR? Is is a disease of modernity somehow? I'm really interested in how Americans have answered these questions about terrorism, especially on the right, which has been the most enthusiastic backers of the GWOT since its inception.
The book picks up with the wave of hijackings in the late 60s and early 70s. Airplanes were the ultimate soft target at the time: there was basically no security checks, and most passengers figured that they would be inconvenienced rather than endangered. The airlines didn't want to beef up security at all for cost reasons; it was really the pilots themselves who first put pressure on the government to act by boycotting flying to certain countries (Cuba, Algeria) that were known to welcome hijackers. The problem got more serious with the rise of Palestinian terrorism in the 1970s, especially the Munich attack and more violent hijackings. From the 70s on, every US president had working groups and more concerted policies on terrorism, but it was seen as something that happens abroad and that terrorists don't want mass casualty events, only shocking events that garner attention and leverage.
The paradigm in the 70s and 80s was also state sponsorship, and US analysts generally saw Libya, Syria, and Iran as the main sponsors, replacing Palestinian groups for a time. It wasn't until the 1990s that a new form of terrorism arose (McVeigh, AQ, Aum Shinrikyo, Hamas) that wasn't primarily state sponsored. This new wave was less restrained, more driven by millenarian ideologies, and more decentralized. In a sense, you could see Bush's state sponsor paradigm of the GWOT as a way to force the terrorist threat back into the state sponsor box even though the game had clearly changed in the preceding decade.
I respected that Naftali doesn't judge US leaders too harshly on terrorism preparedness. Something like 911 was hard to imagine, and indeed most foreign-group attacks on the US hit targets overseas rather than the homeland. There were major political barriers to serious CT action, and the threat didn't necessarily seem to rate being included with, for instance, great power rivals or regional civil wars. It is inherently hard for a democracy with a strong Constitution and civil liberties tradition to establish effective and somewhat constraining CT policies when we aren't in an emergency. What makes this book especially valuable for the present moment is that we are now trying to find a sustainable but effective CT posture without having it swallow up all our resources and attention; this was the balance that presidents from Nixon to Clinton also had to navigate, and Naftali charts their policies, thoughts, and struggles incredibly well.
Still, this book leaves plenty of room for other scholars of the US experience with terrorism to make their mark. It mostly leaves the politics of counterterrorism out, as well as the larger question of how Americans beyond these administration understood the causes and nature of the modern phenomena of terrorism in its different ideologies and iterations. What makes terrorism so interesting to me is, in part, its moral challenge, its trampling of virtually every law and norm in the pursuit of a political objective or a fantastic dream. Is it rational or irrational? Is it fundamentally different from state terror, like in the USSR? Is is a disease of modernity somehow? I'm really interested in how Americans have answered these questions about terrorism, especially on the right, which has been the most enthusiastic backers of the GWOT since its inception.
March 30, 2023
I picked up this book based off some of the author's comments in The Seventies series on CNN a few years ago. Great analysis of where we were.
March 8, 2017
The book is pretty good, and love how it taught me about something I didnt know.
February 15, 2016
Excellent look at the US Govt's Counter-terrorism apparatus prior to 9/11 as well as an all encompassing conclusion that links exactly how Sunni extremists were able to move in undetected. The author draws hard lines about the political atmosphere at specific times as well as internal policies failures.
This book remains important today as we move into another change in in presidential administrations; which may, historically, change political parties. We see that countless times Presidents want to view Terrorism as something winnable like against the Soviets or the Nazi's and each time we see that come back to bite us.
The single greatest line from I took from this book is in the conclusion when the author talks about Policy Failure vs. Intelligence Failure. The author quotes Henry Kissenger when he claimed an attack occurred due to an intelligence failure. He's quickly reminded that he had been warned to which he responds that "yes, however I wasn't convinced." This point strikes home as we see time and time again it's easy for the president to say something is an intelligence failure, IE ISIS, when in reality it just didn't fit the political bill. On the same token though, it does mean that when facing that sort of challenge it's up to the intelligence community to prove to the American people more than the President that something is expected.
This book remains important today as we move into another change in in presidential administrations; which may, historically, change political parties. We see that countless times Presidents want to view Terrorism as something winnable like against the Soviets or the Nazi's and each time we see that come back to bite us.
The single greatest line from I took from this book is in the conclusion when the author talks about Policy Failure vs. Intelligence Failure. The author quotes Henry Kissenger when he claimed an attack occurred due to an intelligence failure. He's quickly reminded that he had been warned to which he responds that "yes, however I wasn't convinced." This point strikes home as we see time and time again it's easy for the president to say something is an intelligence failure, IE ISIS, when in reality it just didn't fit the political bill. On the same token though, it does mean that when facing that sort of challenge it's up to the intelligence community to prove to the American people more than the President that something is expected.
January 25, 2014
Blind Spot is an informative account on counterterrorism efforts in the US. At some points it feels dull and droning (particularly in the Ford and Carter eras) but it picks up pace towards the end. The conclusion brings up interesting points on the tradeoffs between safety and security and the knowing the history of counterterrorism in this country sheds an interesting light on that debate.
January 19, 2015
Impressive, thorough, authoritative account of US counterterrorism efforts from WWII on. Well-written, and of course somewhat distressing in hindsight. I got this book years ago and for whatever reason failed to read it promptly - but although it's a few years old, the context and lessons it provides remain as relevant as ever.
Want to read
November 3, 2011had to go back to the library / good,but takes some work to understand all the implications / yes, either buy it or check it out again someday
May 8, 2012
Megh... I think Naftali misses the point most of the time in this book.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews