Nerve Center In The War On Terror

Five years ago, a counterterrorism center with top intelligence officers in constant contact with one another existed only on the hit TV series "24" — which debuted shortly after 9/11.

But today there is a real-life National Counterterrorism Center. CBS News has agreed not to give away its exact location in return for unprecedented access, reports CBS News national security correspondent David Martin.

The top-secret facility was set up specifically to overcome rivalries between intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI, which failed to share vital clues about the al Qaeda plot to attack the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

The nerve center of the war against terror is a 24/7 operations center where all the intelligence collected by 18 different agencies is supposed to come together. Barely a year old, it's run not by Jack Bauer but by retired Navy Adm. Scott Redd.

"All counterterrorism intelligence comes into the center," Redd says. "We see the most sensitive stuff."

A binder holds one of the most sensitive documents in the entire government. It's the Threat Matrix, a daily status report on every potential terrorist plot against the United States. On any given day there are 30 to 40.

"A large percentage of them, probably well over 90 percent, turn out to be nothing," Redd says.

"This is a dangerous and persistent enemy," Redd adds. "They're persistent and they're not stupid."

The heavy lifting of figuring out where terrorists might strike is the job of Andy Leibman, who oversees 200 analysts.

Leibman is from the CIA, but his analysts come from almost every agency.

"It's probably the only place in the intelligence community where, where you'll find a CIA analyst, an FBI analyst, a DHS analyst and a DIA analyst all sitting together," Leibman says,

That may sound unremarkable to you, but it took a bureaucratic battle royal to make it happen.

"I think a lot of people hoped it was gonna fail," says John Brennan, the former CIA officer who set up the center. "Sometimes if I told CIA that I wanted to have someone from the Department of Homeland Security have access to their sensitive operational cable traffic, I would be met with looks of disbelief."

Have bureaucratic battles detracted from the center's ability to track terrorists?

"There were times that we were spending energy on fighting those bureaucratic battles when it should have been, in fact, directed toward the terrorism front," Brennan replies.

Despite all the hard work in the five years since 9/11, the counterterrorism center is still not fully manned.

"The answer is no. I don't have enough," Leibman says when asked if he has enough staff to cover all of al Qaeda's offshoots around the world. "I should be gradually increasing the size until probably a year and a half or so from now when we'll be at full strength."

He's going to need every one of them, because each day the National Counterterrorism Center adds literally thousands of names to a list of suspected terrorists that already numbers 400,000.