The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [157]
Because the CIA had long since identified Hazmi as a suspected terrorist, because the Agency knew he was likely in the United States, there should long since have been an alert out for him. As there should have been for his comrade Mihdhar, when he slithered back into the country on July 4.
“Every cop on the beat needs to know what we know,” CIA director Tenet was to say. But that would be after the fact of 9/11—when all was lost. The Agency had shared what it knew with no one in law enforcement.
At their meeting in Spain, when Binalshibh told Atta that bin Laden wanted the operation to go forward rapidly, the hijackers’ leader had responded that he was not yet quite ready. He would come up with a date for the attacks, he said, in “five or six weeks.” As the first week of August ended, three of those weeks had passed.
Atta had recently tapped out a message to several associates in Germany. It read: “Salaam! Hasn’t the time come to fear God’s word? Allah. I love you all.”
IN WASHINGTON, warnings of impending attack had been coming in all summer. From France’s intelligence service, the DGSE; from Russian counterintelligence, the FSB; and—again—from Egypt. Citing an operative inside Afghanistan, the Egyptian report indicated that “20 al Qaeda members had slipped into the U.S. and four of them had received flight training.”
The most ominous warning, had it been heeded, reached the State Department from a source uniquely well placed to get wind of what bin Laden was hatching. The Taliban foreign minister, Wakil Muttawakil, had sent an emissary across the border into Pakistan to seek out a U.S. official to whom he could pass information.
Muttawakil, according to the emissary, had learned from the leader of one of the fundamentalist groups working with bin Laden of a coming “huge” attack on the United States. Already worried about the activities of Arab fighters in Afghanistan, the foreign minister now feared they were about to bring disaster down on his country in the shape of American retaliation. “The guests,” as he put it, “are going to destroy the guesthouse.”
So it was, in the third week of July, that the Taliban emissary met at a safe house with David Katz, principal officer of the U.S. consulate in the border town of Peshawar. Also present, reportedly, was a second, unnamed American. The emissary did not reveal exactly who in the Taliban regime had dispatched him on the mission. Muttawakil was taking a great risk in sending the message at all.
The bin Laden attack, the emissary said, “would take place on American soil and it was imminent.… Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans.… I told Mr. Katz they should launch a new Desert Storm, like the campaign to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive the foreigners out of Afghanistan.”
According to diplomatic sources quoted in 2002, principal officer Katz—an experienced diplomat—did not pass on the warning to the State Department. “We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff,” one of the sources said. “When people keep saying the sky’s going to fall in and it doesn’t, a kind of warning fatigue sets in.”
The CIA and counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, fielding incoming intelligence in July, reported up the line that bin Laden’s plans seemed to have been temporarily postponed. One CIA brief for senior officials read: “Bin Laden Plans Delayed but Not Abandoned,” another: “One Bin Laden Operation Delayed. Others Ongoing.” Intelligence on a “near-term” attack had eased, Clarke said in an email to Rice, but it “will still happen.”
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