The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [182]
This in spite of the fact that, just before the Millennium, Director Tenet had told all CIA personnel overseas, “The threat could not be more real.… The American people are counting on you and me to take every appropriate step to protect them.”
Tenet’s Counterterrorist Center had circulated an unambiguous instruction just a month before the al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. “It is important,” the document had warned, “to flag terrorist personality information in DO [Directorate of Operations] reporting for the [State Department watchlist program] so that potential terrorists may be watchlisted.”
Yet in March 2000, although it had learned that Hazmi, a bin Laden operative, had entered the country, the CIA did not alert the State Department. Nor, back in January, had it alerted State to the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The Agency was not to request that either man be watchlisted until late August 2001.
While the Kuala Lumpur meeting was still under way, a 9/11 Commission document notes, top FBI officials had been told that the CIA “promised to let FBI know if an FBI angle to the case developed.” The CIA is prohibited from undertaking operations in the United States, and the FBI has responsibility for domestic intelligence and law enforcement.
Even so, with the revelation that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa—very much an FBI angle—the CIA left the Bureau in the dark just as it did the State Department. It certainly should have alerted the FBI the moment it learned that Hazmi had entered the United States. Information that, if shared, may have led to an earlier hunt for Hazmi and Mihdhar.
After 9/11, when its horrendous failure to do any of these things came out, the CIA would attempt to claim that it had not been quite like that. Later investigations by Congress’s Joint Inquiry and the Department of Justice’s inspector general were to produce vestigial portions of emails and cables written right after the discovery that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The picture that emerged is not immediately clear.
The very day the CIA learned that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa, a CIA bin Laden unit desk officer—identified for security reasons only as “Michelle”—informed colleagues flatly that his travel documents, including the visa, had been copied and passed “to the FBI for further investigation.”
In an email to CIA colleagues the following day, an Agency officer assigned to FBI headquarters—identified as “James”—wrote of having told two senior FBI agents what had been learned of Mihdhar’s activity in Malaysia. He had advised one of them: “as soon as something concrete is developed leading us to the criminal area or to known FBI cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop.”
Were one to know only that about the CIA record, it might seem that the FBI was given the crucial visa information. Serious doubt sets in, though, on looking at the wider picture. In an email to CIA colleagues, the Justice Department inspector general discovered, “James” had “stated that he was detailing ‘exactly what [he] briefed [the FBI] on’ in the event the FBI later complained that they were not provided with all of the information about al-Mihdhar. This information did not discuss al-Mihdhar’s passport or U.S. visa [authors’ italics].”
“James,” the inspector general noted, refused to be interviewed.
The inspector general was given access to “Michelle,” the desk officer who had written flatly that Mihdhar’s passport and visa had been passed to the FBI. She prevaricated, however, saying she could not remember how she knew that fact. Her boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said that for his part he had no knowledge of the “Michelle” cable. He “did not know whether the information had been passed to the FBI.”
Other documents indicate that the opposite was the case, that Wilshire had deliberately ensured that the information