Reflect, Remember, Renew

It became the most consequential day of my life—one that shaped my actions, my career, and my thinking ever since.Twenty-five years later, I recall particular moments: the smell of smoke as we evacuated, the morgue erected to identify the victims, the fire burning through the Pentagon roof and the heroic firefighters who battled to extinguish it, and the enormous American flag unfurled across the Pentagon on September 12—a symbol of mourning, resolve, and national unity.What forever remains with me is the memory of leaving the Pentagon that morning and the questions that haunted me:How could we have missed this? How could our intelligence community and national security leaders have failed to protect the nation? How had we failed to connect the dots? How could we have suffered what the 9/11 Commission would later describe as a “failure of imagination?”As with most intelligence failures, the warning signs appear painfully obvious in hindsight. The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center demonstrated the potential consequences of a major terrorist attack on American soil. Osama bin Laden and the World Islamic Front openly declared war against Americans in 1998. That same year, al Qaed...