The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [184]
That notion is not fantasy. The CIA’s own in-house review noted that—had the FBI been told that the two future hijackers were or might be in the country—“good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both Mihdhar and Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
The CIA kept to itself the fact that it knew long before 9/11 that two of the future hijackers—known to be terrorists—had U.S. visas, and that one had definitely entered the United States.
If the FBI had known, then–New York Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kenneth Maxwell has said, “We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted to them.” After 9/11, and when the CIA’s omissions became known, some of Maxwell’s colleagues at the FBI reacted with rage and dark suspicion.
“They purposely hid from the FBI,” one official fulminated, “purposely refused to tell the FBI that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America.… And that’s why September 11 happened.… They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.”
Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the Agency want to arrange to monitor the pair’s activity? The CIA’s mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States, but the prohibition had been broken in the past.
The CIA had on at least one occasion previously aspired to leave an Islamic suspect at large in order to surveil him. When 1993 Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef was located in Pakistan two years later, investigative reporter Robert Friedman wrote, the Agency “wanted to continue tracking him.” It “fought with the FBI,” tried to postpone his arrest. On that occasion, the FBI had its way, seized Yousef, and brought him back for trial.
With that rebuff fresh in the institutional memory, did the CIA decide to keep the sensational discovery of Mihdhar’s entry visa to itself? Or did it, as some Bureau agents came to think possible, even hope to recruit the two terrorists as informants?
The speculation is not idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that, only weeks before Mihdhar’s visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the Agency had as yet not penetrated al Qaeda: “Without penetrations of OBL organization … [redacted lines] … we need to also recruit sources inside OBL’s organization. Realize that recruiting terrorist sources is difficult … but we must make an attempt.”
The following day, CIA officers went to the White House for a meeting with a select group of top-level National Security Council members. Attendees discussed both the lack of inside information and how essential it was to achieve “penetrations.” Many “unilateral avenues” and “creative attempts” were subsequently to be tried. Material on those attempts in the document has been entirely redacted.
President Clinton himself aside, the senior White House official to whom the CIA reported at that time was National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. After 9/11, while preparing to testify before official inquiries into the attacks, Berger was to commit a crime that destroyed his shining reputation, a folly so bizarre—for a man of his stature—as to be unbelievable were it not true.
On four occasions in 2002 and 2003, Berger would make his way to the National Archives in Washington, the repository of the nation’s most venerated documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This trusted