The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [178]
According to the lieutenant colonel who first made the claim, Anthony Shaffer, the names came up in the course of a highly classified DIA operation code-named Able Danger. He and his staff had carried out “data mining,” under a round-the-clock counterterrorist program Shaffer described as the “use of high-powered software to bore into just about everything: any data that was available—and I mean anything. Open-source Internet data, e-mails believed to be terrorist-related, non-secret government data, commercial records, information on foreign companies, logs of visitors to mosques.”
According to Shaffer, such data also drew on U.S. visa records. If so, and given the reference to information obtained from mosques, it would seem that Able Danger perhaps could have picked up information on the named terrorists—even before they arrived in the United States.
Atta had applied for a U.S. green card in late 1999. Shehhi had gotten his U.S. entry visa by January 2000. Hazmi and Mihdhar had arrived that same month, having applied for and obtained their visas in the summer of 1999. All these documents were in the record.
All the documentary evidence involved, however, was destroyed well before 9/11 because of privacy concerns by Defense Department attorneys. Absent a future discovery of surviving documentary evidence, the Able Danger claims depend entirely on the memories—sometimes rusty memories—of those involved in the operation.
IN GERMANY, and as an outgrowth of surveilling the extremists in Hamburg, a border watch—or Grenzfahndung—was ordered on at least two of the men who frequented the Marienstrasse apartment. The routine was not to arrest listed individuals, but discreetly to note and report their passage across the frontier. It is hard to understand why, if the names of two of the Marienstrasse group were on the list, those of Atta and Shehhi would not have been. If they were under border watch, their departure for the United States ought to have been noted.
German federal officials were unhelpful when approached by the authors for interviews on the subject of either monitoring the terrorists or on the relationship with U.S. agencies before 9/11. “Sadly,” said an official from Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, “due to considerations of principle, your request cannot be granted. We ask for your understanding.”
The official who was in 2001 and still is deputy chief of Hamburg domestic intelligence, Dr. Manfred Murck, was in general far more cooperative. He had no comment, however, on the subject of collaboration with U.S. intelligence.
The Islamic affairs specialist with the domestic intelligence service in Stuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, for his part, offered a small insight into where the Germans’ monitoring of the men at Marienstrasse had led them. “Atta,” he said, “was going through the focus of our colleagues.… He came to their notice.”
Did the Germans share with the United States everything they learned about the future hijackers? “Some countries,” a 9/11 Commission staff statement was to state tartly, “did not support U.S. efforts to collect intelligence information on terrorist cells in their countries.… This was especially true of some of the European services.” Information gathered by Congress’s Joint Inquiry, and what we have of a CIA review, make it clear that there was intermittent friction between the U.S. and German services.
A former senior American diplomat, on the other hand, cast no aspersions on the Germans. “My impression the entire time,” former deputy head of mission in Berlin Michael Polt told the 9/11 Commission, “[was] that our level of interaction