The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [111]
The 9/11 Commission Report, which quoted none of these statements verbatim, consigned them to an obscure footnote and referred to them as mere “claims.” Its investigation, it stated, found no indication that such information “was written down or disseminated within the U.S. government.”
Congress’s Joint Inquiry Report, however, said the FBI and the CIA did learn what Murad had said about a plan to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The FBI, the report stated, later “effectively forgot all about it … ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of American power.”
The Philippines National Police intelligence chief, Robert Delfin, said, “We shared that with the FBI. They may have mislooked [sic], and didn’t appreciate the info coming from the Philippines police.… I believe there was a lapse.”
Colonel Mendoza, who said he personally questioned Murad, insisted that he briefed the U.S. embassy on everything Murad told him. Another lead investigator on the Manila episode, police Colonel—later General—Avelino Razon, immediately called a press conference when news broke of 9/11. “We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995,” he said. “Why didn’t they pay attention?”
Last word to Inspector Fariscal, the officer who discovered Ramzi Yousef’s bomb factory. “I still don’t understand,” she said after 9/11, “how it could have been allowed to happen.… The FBI knew all about Yousef’s plans.… They’d seen the files.… The CIA had access to everything, too.… This should never have been allowed to happen.”
Prisoner Murad said his principal accomplice planned a second attack on the World Trade Center—as early as 1995.
AFTER THE WORLD TRADE CENTER bombing of 1993, well before the Philippines police discovered the Manila bomb factory, the U.S. Defense Department convened a panel to report on how vulnerable the nation might be to terrorism. Presciently, the group discussed the possibility of an airliner being deliberately flown into a public building.
“Coming down the Potomac in Washington,” panelist Marvin Cetron recalled saying, “you could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House, or you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.” “Targets such as the World Trade Center,” he wrote the following year, “not only provide the requisite casualties but, because of their symbolic nature, provide more bang for the buck. In order to maximize their odds for success, terrorist groups will likely consider mounting multiple, simultaneous operations with the aim of overtaxing a government’s ability to respond.”
That view did not appear in the published Defense Department report. “It was considered radical thinking,” said Douglas Menarchik, the retired Air Force colonel who ran the study, “a little too scary for the times.”
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who had plotted using planes as missiles to hit targets in the United States, was still at large, still plotting.
TWENTY-ONE
“YOU NEED THE CHARISMATIC DREAMERS LIKE BIN LADEN TO MAKE a movement successful,” a former intelligence analyst was to say. “But you also needed operators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who can actually get the job done.” KSM’s confederates dubbed him “Mukhtar”—an Arabic word to denote a leader, a man respected for his brain. The CIA came to consider him the “manager” of the September 11 plot.
He had been born in the mid-1960s in Kuwait, the son of immigrants from Baluchistan, a fiercely independent frontier region of Pakistan. His father was an imam, his mother