The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [153]
In Cofer Black’s view, Woodward wrote, “The decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long.” “Adults,” Black said, “should not have a system like this.”
Black had been sure for months that catastrophe was coming. Sure, too, that as counterterrorist head he would take the flak for it, he had long had his resignation signed and ready in his desk. The bin Laden unit head—his name is still officially withheld—and Michael Scheuer, his predecessor, were also now talking of resigning.
The same day the CIA chiefs tried to get action from the White House, an FBI agent in Arizona sent a memo to a number of headquarters officials, including four members of the Bureau’s own bin Laden unit. Agent Kenneth Williams reported: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended.… These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”
Over eight pages, Williams laid out the reasons for his concern. One man he named was a known contact of bin Laden’s senior accomplice Abu Zubaydah. Another connected to the two Saudis who two years earlier had come under suspicion for their behavior during an America West flight. Investigators were later to conclude that the same man’s associates had included Hani Hanjour—the 9/11 hijacking pilot who had trained in Arizona.
Agent Williams recommended checking on flight schools around the nation. Yet he got no response, and his prescient message received minimal circulation. FBI officials worried that the checks he proposed would risk accusations of “racial profiling.”
Only a week earlier, all FBI regions had been alerted to the terrorist threat and urged to “exercise extreme vigilance.” “I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke would write long after 9/11. “Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools.… Red lights and bells should have been going off.”
Had the FBI recipients of Williams’s memo been aware of the attitude of the man who headed the Bush Justice Department, their torpor might have been more understandable. Acting Director Thomas Pickard has said that, following Director Freeh’s resignation that June, he tried repeatedly to get Attorney General Ashcroft to give the terrorist threat his attention. When he approached the subject for the second time, on July 12, Ashcroft abruptly cut him off—as he reportedly had Freeh back in the spring.
“I don’t want to hear about that anymore,” snapped the attorney general, according to Pickard. “There’s nothing I can do about that.” Pickard remonstrated, saying he thought Ashcroft should speak directly with his CIA counterpart, but the attorney general made himself even clearer. “I don’t want you to ever talk to me about al Qaeda, about these threats. I don’t want to hear about al Qaeda anymore.”
“Fishing rod in hand,” CBS News noted two weeks later, “Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri aboard a chartered government jet.” Asked why he was not using a commercial airline, the Justice Department cited a “threat assessment,” saying he would fly only by private jet for the remainder of his term. Asked whether he knew the nature of the threat, Ashcroft himself responded, “Frankly, I don’t.”
Late on July 20, when President Bush arrived in Italy to attend a G8 summit, antiaircraft guns lined the airport perimeter. He and other leaders slept not on land but on ships at sea. Next day, Bush had an audience with the Pope not at the Vatican but at the papal residence outside Rome. Wherever he went, the airspace was closed and fighters flew cover overhead. Egypt’s President Mubarak, acting on an intelligence briefing,