The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [162]
In the spring of 2001, a CIA deputy chief working liaison with the Bureau’s terrorism unit in New York—now known to have been Tom Wilshire—reportedly reconsidered the overall picture on Mihdhar. The suspect with a U.S. visa was an associate of Nawaf al-Hazmi, who—the CIA knew—definitely had entered the United States many months earlier. With growing indications that an attack was coming, it is said to have occurred to Wilshire that “Something bad was definitely up.” When he asked a CIA superior for permission to share what he knew with the FBI, however, he got no reply.
In late July, apparently on his own initiative, Wilshire suggested to Margarette Gillespie, an FBI analyst working with the CIA’s bin Laden unit, that she review files on the terrorist meeting in Malaysia back in January 2000—the meeting that had first brought Mihdhar to CIA attention. Gillespie did so, and—piece by piece, week by week—began putting together the alarming facts about Mihdhar, his visa, and his plan to visit the United States.
On August 21, she found out about his accomplice Hazmi’s arrival in the United States. Within twenty-four hours, when she consulted the INS, she made a startling discovery. Not only that Hazmi was probably still in the country, but that Mihdhar had very recently been readmitted. “It all clicked for me,” Gillespie was to recall.
The final days of August were a combination of rational action and bureaucratic confusion. On the 22nd, at Gillespie’s request, the CIA drafted a message asking the FBI, INS, the State Department, and Customs to “watchlist” Mihdhar and Hazmi. The watchlisting, though, applied only to international travel, not to journeys within the United States—and the FAA was not informed at all.
Gillespie’s colleague Dina Corsi, meanwhile, sent an email to the FBI’s I-49 unit—which handled counterterrorism—requesting an investigation to find out whether Mihdhar was in the United States.
At that point the process became tied up in much the same red tape as the push in Minnesota to find out what Moussaoui was up to. Mihdhar could not be pursued as a criminal case, Corsi stipulated, only as an intelligence lead. This was a misinterpretation of the rules, but—even though only one intelligence agent was available—Corsi and a CIA official insisted on the condition. One I-49 agent was angered by their insistence. “If this guy is in the country,” Steve Bongardt said acidly during a call to colleagues on August 28, “it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!”
Within twenty-four hours, Bongardt’s frustration surfaced again. “Someday,” he wrote in an email, “someone will die … the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ ”
The job of finding Mihdhar, nevertheless, went to an intelligence agent, Robert Fuller, working on his own. Corsi marked the assignment “Routine” because—she would later tell investigators—she “assigned no particular urgency to the matter.” The designation “Routine” gave Fuller thirty days to get under way. It was August 29.
LIKE PRESIDENT BUSH, CIA director Tenet had spent part of August on vacation—again like the President, fishing. By his own account, however, he kept very much abreast of developments. That month, he wrote in 2007, he had directed his counterterrorism unit to review old files—and thus took part of the credit for the “discovery” that Mihdhar and Hazmi might be in the United States.
Tenet, too, had been briefed on the detention of the suspect flight student in Minneapolis. The FBI early on sent fulsome information on Moussaoui to the Agency, and the details went to Tenet on August 23 in the form of a document headed “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” The director’s staff took the matter very seriously, urging that the Bureau give it real attention. “If this guy is let go,” one CIA officer wrote on the 30th to a colleague liaising with the Bureau, “two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.”
Did Tenet share the developments