The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [161]
Sensing that this student was no mere oddball, that he might have evil intent, the school’s instructors agreed that the FBI should be contacted. The reaction at the Minneapolis field office was prompt and effective. Moussaoui was detained on the ground that his visa had expired, and agents began questioning him and a companion—a Yemeni traveling on a Saudi passport. They learned rapidly that Moussaoui was a Muslim, a fact he had denied to his flight instructor.
The companion, moreover, revealed that the suspect had fundamentalist beliefs, had expressed approval of “martyrs,” and was “preparing himself to fight.” Within the week, French intelligence responded to a request for assistance with “unambiguous” information that Moussaoui had undergone training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
One of the Minneapolis agents, a former intelligence officer, felt from early on “convinced … a hundred percent that Moussaoui was a bad actor, was probably a professional mujahideen” involved in a plot. Though he and his colleagues had no way of knowing it at the time, their suspicions were well founded. KSM would one day tell his interrogators that Moussaoui had been slated to lead a second wave of 9/11-type attacks on the United States. In a post-9/11 climate, KSM had assumed, the authorities would be especially leery of those with Middle Eastern identity papers. In those circumstances, and though Moussaoui was a “problematic personality,” his French passport might prove a real advantage. Osama bin Laden, moreover, favored finding a role for him.
Before flying into the States, the evidence would eventually indicate, Moussaoui had met in London with Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh had subsequently wired him a total of $14,000. Binalshibh’s telephone number was listed in one of Moussaoui’s notebooks and on other pieces of paper, and he had called it repeatedly from pay phones in the United States.
In August 2001, however, the agents worrying about Moussaoui knew nothing of the Binalshibh connection, were not free to search the suspect’s possessions. In spite of a series of appeals that grew ever more frantic as the days ticked by—the lead agent wound up sending Washington no fewer than seventy messages—headquarters blocked the Minneapolis request to approve a search warrant.
In late August, in response to a tart comment from headquarters that he was just trying to get people “spun up,” the Minneapolis supervisor agreed that was exactly his intention. He was persisting, he said with unconscious prescience, because he hoped to ensure that Moussaoui did not “take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.”
“That’s not going to happen,” a headquarters official retorted. “You don’t have enough to show that he is a terrorist.”
THE SECOND DEVELOPMENT, of enormous potential importance, had meanwhile been evolving—and aborting—on the East Coast. The episode centered on the prickly relationship between the FBI and the CIA, a blot on good government since anyone could remember. While in theory the two agencies liaised on counterterrorism, in practice they coexisted at best awkwardly. From early in 2001, according to the sequence of events published in the 9/11 Commission Report, some in the CIA’s bin Laden unit had been looking again at the case of Khalid al-Mihdhar.
New information indicated that Mihdhar, whom the Agency had identified as a terrorist the previous year, who it had known had a visa to enter the United States—yet had failed to share the information with the FBI or Immigration—was linked to bin Laden through his trusted operative Walid bin Attash. Yet still the FBI was kept in the dark