The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [153]
“That’s okay with me,” I replied to Amy, “but if people in headquarters are unhappy with me telling the commission what really happened, they can tell me in writing not to cooperate, and I won’t cooperate.”
“No, no,” Amy said, “I just want to know what’s happening here.”
“It’s simple,” I told her. “The commission started asking questions about the Cole and 9/11, and I quickly realized they had been told a series of lies. With Pat’s approval I went through actual documents with them and showed them what really happened.”
“If that’s the case,” Amy replied, “you didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what needed to be done.”
When the 9/11 Commission published their findings, everything I said was confirmed by their investigation. On page 355 of the report, they list “Operational Opportunities.” Included in that summary list are:
1. January 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Khalid al-Mihdhar or notify the FBI when it learned Mihdhar possessed a valid U.S. visa.
2. January 2000: the CIA does not develop a transnational plan for tracking Mihdhar and his associates so that they could be followed to Bangkok and onward, including the United States.
3. March 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Nawaf al-Hazmi or notify the FBI when it learned that he possessed a U.S. visa and had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.
4. January 2001: the CIA does not inform the FBI that a source had identified Khallad, or Tawfiq bin Attash, a major figure in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, as having attended the meeting in Kuala Lumpur with Khalid al-Mihdhar.
5. May 2001: a CIA official does not notify the FBI about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa, Hazmi’s U.S. travel, or Khallad’s having attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting (identified when he reviewed all the relevant traffic because of the high level of threats).
6. June 2001: FBI and CIA officials do not ensure that all relevant information regarding the Kuala Lumpur meeting was shared with the Cole investigators at the June 11 meeting.
The CIA’s own inspector general’s report into 9/11 came to the same conclusions regarding CIA shortcomings and its failure to share intelligence. The report states: “Earlier watchlisting of Mihdhar could have prevented his reentry into the United States in July 2001. Informing the FBI and good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.” The report goes on to say: “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systematic breakdown.” The inspector general recommended that an “accountability board review the performance of the CTC chiefs.” (This never happened.)
My discussions with the 9/11 Commission investigators resumed, and we started discussing the “source” in Afghanistan.
“He’s an FBI source developed in Afghanistan before 9/11. We agreed to share him with the CIA. Our agreement with them on the source was that anything gained from the source—he was a criminal investigation source—had to be shared with us.”
“And what happened?”
“After 9/11 we learned that the CIA went behind our backs and showed the pictures of the Malaysia summit meeting—the pictures they wouldn’t share with us—to the source. They didn’t tell us that they had shown him the pictures, nor did they share with us what he told them about the pictures. He didn’t know that the CIA wasn’t sharing information with the FBI; nor was he told why these pictures were important. When the source was shown the pictures from Malaysia in January 2001, he told them he didn’t recognize who Mihdhar was, but he was 90 percent certain that the other person was Khallad.
“We were not told this. This shows that the CIA knew the significance