By Rowan Scarborough, Washington Times

President Clinton left the National Security Agency, the nation’s electronic eavesdropper, in shambles at the very moment Al Qaida was in the final planning stages of carrying out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.

Retired Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the NSA director at the time, describes the decline in a memoir, writing an insider’s view of an agency that the government at one time refused to acknowledge even existed.

One day in January 2000, the NSA’s clunky, aging computer network became so overburdened that it crashed. The NSA, he says, was “brain dead.” The “coma” crisis lasted for several days as new computer hardware was flown into Fort Meade, Maryland, and techies shut down every node in order to reboot the nation’s largest spy machine.

But it was a symptom of something far more serious at the NSA, and for the country. … In a dawning age of encrypted, fiber optic and mass communications, coupled with rising global Islamic terrorism, the NSA was losing a game called SIGINT, or signals intelligence.

Mr. Hayden, who went on to become CIA director under President George W. Bush, is the second top intelligence official to write about the Clinton 1990s as a dark age for American spying.

SEE COMPLETE TEXT

  LIFE, NSA networks crashed, Under Clinton, went ‘brain dead’ as Al Qaida planned 9/11, WorldTribune.com