ASHINGTON, Dec. 11 — The joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes issued a final report today sharply criticizing intelligence agencies for their failure to prevent the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

But the panel did not go far enough for a leading member who issued a separate report identifying current and former senior officials who he said should be held accountable for the intelligence failures.

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In a report that included findings about the government performance before Sept. 11 and recommendations for changes, the joint inquiry said stronger leadership was needed to improve coordination of the work of more than 12 military and civilian agencies that failed to share information before the attacks.

The report said that the agencies "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

Although he said he supported the broad recommendations of the joint inquiry, the member who issued his own report, Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said he was disappointed that the panel did not assign personal responsibility for the failures to any individual senior officials.

He singled out the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet; the director of the National Security Agency, Michael V. Hayden; the F.B.I. director who vacated his post in 2001, Louis J. Freeh; and other senior officials for failing to do more before Sept. 11.

"The U.S. intelligence community," Mr. Shelby wrote, "would have been far better prepared for Sept. 11 but for the failure of successive agency leaders to work wholeheartedly to overcome the institutional and cultural obstacles to interagency cooperation and coordination that bedeviled counterterrorism efforts before the attacks."

He added that the leaders whom he named were "not responsible for the disaster of Sept. 11, of course, for that infamy belongs to Al Qaeda's 19 suicide hijackers and the terrorist infrastructure that supported them."

"As the leaders of the United States intelligence community, however," he added, "these officials failed in significant ways to ensure that this country was as prepared as it could have been."

Mr. Tenet came in for some of the most pointed criticism. Mr. Shelby suggested that after Mr. Tenet issued a memo in 1998 saying the United States was "at war" with Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. director did not follow up by aggressively seeking additional money and resources for the fight against the terrorist organization.

"One of the great unanswered questions of our Sept. 11 inquiry, therefore, is how the D.C.I. could have considered himself to be `at war' against this country's most important foreign threat without bothering to use the full range of authorities at his disposal in this fight," Mr. Shelby wrote.

A spokesman for the agency said it would review the findings and recommendations. Officials at the F.B.I. said they welcomed the input and had taken steps to put into effect some of the recommendations.

Broadly, the panel found that the government had failed to grapple with the growing terrorist threat to the United States in a coherent and coordinated way before Sept. 11.

"Neither the U.S. government as a whole nor the intelligence community had a comprehensive counterterrorist strategy for combating the threat posed by Osama bin Laden," the report said. "The intelligence community was neither well organized nor equipped, and did not adequately adapt, to meet the challenge posed by global terrorists focused on targets within the domestic United States."

The panel urged the creation of a cabinet-level director of national intelligence to oversee the entire intelligence community, in part to end decades-old budget and turf battles that have prevented smooth information sharing and greater coordination in counterterrorism operations.

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was co-chairman of the inquiry, said although many similar proposals for changing intelligence operations had failed, the Sept. 11 attacks made it clear that Congress could not afford to keep the status quo.

"I come back to one number — 3,025 — the number of persons who were killed on September the 11th," Mr. Graham said. "And I do not believe that the members of Congress are going to want to take the position, let us just stand by, let us allow the gaps and holes and weaknesses in our current system to continue, to cross our fingers and hope that we are not in the next few months again picking up the pieces and, sadly, the bodies of yet another successful attack inside the United States."

Mr. Graham said at a news conference today that the joint inquiry had approached the issue of personal accountability cautiously because it believed that assigning blame might make officials at the intelligence agencies afraid to take the risks needed to achieve success in counterterrorism operations. He noted that the panel had decided to turn over its findings to the inspectors general of each agency so that the inspectors could recommend action against individuals.

In the report were new findings concerning potential clues that intelligence agencies did not adequately pursue before Sept. 11.

In June 2001, American intelligence obtained information that indicated that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti extremist, had an active role in sending terrorists to the United States and suggested that he was helping them here, the report said.

American intelligence officials have identified Mr. Mohammed as a central planner of 9/11 and is considered one of the most important leaders of Al Qaeda. The report says that before Sept. 11 American intelligence had information that linked Mr. Mohammed to Al Qaeda and to anti-American terrorist plans to use aircraft as weapons.

He was indicted in 1996 in connection with an unsuccessful plot to bomb American airliners over the Pacific. The United States had been searching for him for years before Sept. 11.

But the report found that American intelligence "did not recognize the significance of reporting" last June about what was apparently Mr. Mohammed's role in sending terrorists here and that his role in the attacks "was a surprise to the intelligence community."

The joint inquiry's main recommendation, creating a cabinet-level post of director of national intelligence, would effectively reduce the power of the director of central intelligence while setting the stage for a major turf battle between the Pentagon and the new intelligence czar.

Under the proposed structure, the director of central intelligence, who now has nominal authority over the entire intelligence community, would have control only over the Central Intelligence Agency. The panel found that the C.I.A. needed a director focused solely on the agency, and one not distracted by responsibilities for other agencies.