The Black Banners_ 9_11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda - Ali H. Soufan [155]
The leadership of the FBI didn’t know that we had been requesting information and that the CIA hadn’t shared it; and they just wanted to move on and start fresh. President George W. Bush had told the FBI and the CIA that he wanted everyone to get along. Again, the implication was that the FBI should just take the criticism and blame for 9/11.
But those of us who knew the truth stated exactly what had happened when we were asked about events under oath before the 9/11 Commission. And when senior FBI officials heard about our performance before the commission, they were surprised. At one point I was asked to brief John Pistole, one of Director Mueller’s chief deputies, prior to his testifying publicly before the 9/11 Commission, but at the last minute the briefing was canceled, as the leadership didn’t want to cause problems for the CIA.
Later, when John Miller, the former ABC journalist who had interviewed bin Laden in 1998, was appointed assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs, he understood the need to correct the narrative. When Lawrence Wright asked for access to people, John told the director: “We need to do this for history. It isn’t about CIA or FBI. We need to tell the American people the truth about an important era.” The director agreed, and the bureau gave Larry access. He then wrote the best-seller The Looming Tower, and he later profiled me in the New Yorker. Between his book and the 9/11 Commission, the truth began to come out.
Those in the CIA who were responsible for not passing on information did their best to ensure that the truth didn’t come out. With approval from the bureau, around the same time we spoke to Wright, Joe Valiquette arranged for Dan Coleman and me to brief a senior journalist from one of the major newspapers. After he spoke to us in New York, he went to the CIA with a bunch of questions.
“What you were told by the FBI is completely false,” a CIA official told him. The journalist asked to see evidence, whereupon the CIA official pointed to a stack of documents, describing the files as consisting of “information disproving everything the FBI said, but it’s all classified, so I can’t show it to you.” The journalist decided to tone down the story. Wright was told the same thing, and veiled threats were made (with reference to his daughter). But he’s a courageous reporter who could read through bluffs, and he had done enough research to be confident in what the truth was, and he wouldn’t be pressured by threats. He wrote his book, and won the Pulitzer Prize for it.
After The 9/11 Commission Report was published and everything I had told the journalist was verified, the journalist contacted Joe Valiquette, told him what the CIA had said, and apologized for not running with the truth. “I was duped. I trusted them,” the journalist told Joe.
What really upset a few people on the seventh floor of Langley—the executive floor—was that the 9/11 Commission flatly contradicted the CIA’s claims about sharing intelligence. The commission showed the American people that if information had been shared, 9/11 might have been prevented.
The most damning passage in The 9/11 Commission Report is found on page 267: “DCI Tenet and Cofer Black testified before Congress’s Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI had access to this identification [of Khallad in Kuala Lumpur] from the beginning. But drawing on an extensive record, including documents that were not available to the CIA personnel who drafted that testimony, we conclude this was not the case.”
In a footnote to that line, one of the sources is “Al. S.” Those in the CIA who had not shared the intelligence knew that this referred to “Ali Soufan,” and they hated me for it.
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