The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [179]
For all that, German officials the authors contacted remained either evasive or diplomatic to a fault. Were they concealing the failures of their own intelligence apparatus, or courteously avoiding placing the blame on the ally across the Atlantic?
“They lied to my face for four years, the German secret service,” said Dirk Laabs, a Hamburg author who has reported on the 9/11 story for the Los Angeles Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Then I found information that they passed on everything to the CIA.… We only know a little bit of the true story, what really went on.”
The release to the authors in 2011 of a single previously redacted sentence on a 9/11 Commission staff document makes crystal clear what was left fuzzy in the Commission Report. The document summarized the coded conversation between KSM and Binalshibh not long before the attacks—described in an earlier chapter—as to whether lovelorn Ziad Jarrah would stay the course.
The sentence that heads the document’s summary of the exchange, now made public for the first time, reads:
On July 20, 2001, there was a call between
KSM and Binalshibh. They used the codewords
Teresa and Sally.
The only way the authorities could have known of such a phone call, on a known date and in great detail, was thanks to a telephone intercept. The call was intercepted and recorded while it was in progress.
That certainty leads to a string of further questions.
Which intelligence service tapped the call? The only probable candidates are those of the United States or of Germany. If the intercept was American, which service was responsible? The CIA or the NSA—the National Security Agency? It is the NSA’s mission to spy on international communications, yet its pre-9/11 performance is only minimally reported in the Commission Report.
If the intercept cited above was made in Germany by the Germans, was the take passed to the Americans at the time—or only after 9/11?
The questions do not end there. What other conversations between key 9/11 players were tapped into during the run-up to the attacks? If other conversations were captured, were they all in code that was incomprehensible at the time? Did such intercepts result in any action being taken?
A breakthrough answer on the German intelligence issue came to the authors from a very senior member of the U.S. Congress, a public figure with long experience of intelligence matters, who has held high security clearances, speaking not for attribution.
“We were told by the German intelligence,” the member of Congress said of a visit to Berlin following 9/11, “that they had provided U.S. intelligence agencies with information about persons of interest to them who had been living in Hamburg and who they knew were in, or attempting to get into, the United States. The impression German intelligence gave me was that they felt the action of the U.S. intelligence agencies to their information was dismissive.”
Sour grapes, or an accurate account of the American response to pertinent intelligence?
THIRTY-ONE
THE CIA CERTAINLY HAD KNOWN EARLY ON ABOUT TWO OF THE 9/11 terrorists.
The way it gained that intelligence speaks to the Agency’s operational efficiency, in a brilliant operation a full twenty months before the attacks. Its subsequent performance, however, reflects disastrous inefficiency, perhaps the greatest fiasco in CIA history. Depending on how the evidence is interpreted, it points to something even more culpable.
This is a scenario that began to unravel for the CIA on 9/11 itself, just four hours after the strikes. Soon after 1:00 P.M. that day, at Agency headquarters, an aide hurried to Director Tenet with a handful of papers—the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where