When I gave lectures in the early years after September 11, I was often asked, “Why didn't the FBI and the CIA cooperate better before September 11?” My answer was then and would still be now, “Because we, the American people, didn't want them to.” We feared that the concentration of police and intelligence power would infringe on the privacy and liberties of our citizens. Especially after the congressional investigations of the 1970s, we had decided as a people that – out of concern for privacy and civil liberties – the two agencies should not be too close. By the latter stages of the Cold War, when early concern about communists linked to Moscow in our midst turned out to be exaggerated (to put it gently), raggedy cooperation between the two agencies was good enough. However, it set us up to fail on September 11, 2001.

That is the first sense in which the Cold War legacy of intelligence was and is mismatched to the transnational threat that the United States and its allies now face. The FBI and the CIA sit astride the fundamental boundaries, or “distinctions,” of the Cold War – boundaries between intelligence and law enforcement, between foreign and domestic, and between public and private. The nation said that just as law enforcement was one thing and intelligence another, so too it distinguished sharply between home and abroad and between the public and the private sectors. The distinctions run very deep.