The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [80]
In July 2001, exactly two months before the attack, an FBI agent in Phoenix had reported his suspicion that it was “more than a coincidence that subjects who are supporters of [bin Laden] are attending civil aviation universities/colleges in the state of Arizona.… Phoenix believes that it is highly probable that [bin Laden] has an established support network in place in Arizona.” The memo recommended checks on flight schools and on the visa details of foreign students attending them, not only in Arizona but around the country.
After 9/11, the agent’s apprehension was proven to have been entirely justified. One of the four hijacker pilots had indeed trained in Arizona, the other three at Florida flight schools. Two others, already known to the CIA as terrorist suspects, had for a while taken flight training in California. FBI headquarters, however, had virtually ignored the agent’s prescient memo. No effective action was taken or planned.
Another, even more glaring FBI failure occurred just before the attacks, when agents in the Minneapolis field office reported their grave concern about a then-obscure French Moroccan flight student named Zacarias Moussaoui. The flight school at which he was studying had reported that he was behaving suspiciously, and a check with French intelligence revealed that he had links to extremism.
The Minneapolis agents, who wanted clearance to search the suspect’s baggage, were rebuffed time and time again with legalistic objections sent from headquarters. Only on September 11, after the strikes on the Trade Center, was the search warrant approved. Moussaoui is now serving a life sentence for conspiracy to commit acts of terror and air piracy. Evidence found in his belongings and detainee statements would link Moussaoui to two of the most significant of the 9/11 conspirators.
Information that emerged in 2005 suggested that the Defense Intelligence Agency had failed to inform the FBI of intelligence on four of the future hijackers, including their leader, Mohamed Atta, when it was obtained in early 2000. The lead, provided by a U.S. Army officer, and initially supported by several other members of the DIA operation concerned, went nowhere. The Defense Department refused to allow those involved to testify to a Senate committee, and relevant documents have been destroyed. The Bush White House had allegedly been briefed on the matter within weeks of 9/11, as—much later—9/11 Commission staff had been. The episode went unmentioned, however, in the 9/11 Commission Report.
And then there is the CIA. The month before 9/11, the Agency’s inspector general produced a report lauding the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center as a “well-managed component that successfully carries out the Agency’s responsibilities to collect and analyze intelligence on international terrorism.” In 2007, however, and then only when Congress demanded it, the Agency belatedly produced an accountability review admitting that—before 9/11—the Counterterrorist Center had been “not used effectively.”
It got worse. Most of those in the unit responsible for bin Laden, the inspector general reported, had not had “the operational experience, expertise and training necessary to accomplish their mission.” There had been “no examination of the potential for terrorists to use aircraft as weapons,” “no comprehensive analysis that put into context the threats received in the spring and summer of 2001.”
Senator Bob Graham, who in 2001 was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee—and later chaired the House-Senate Joint Inquiry into the intelligence community’s pre-9/11 failures—has cited a dozen “points at which the plot could have been discovered and potentially thwarted.” “Both the CIA and the FBI,” he wrote, “had information that they withheld from one another and from state and local law enforcement and that, if shared, would have cracked the terrorists’ plot.”
One item the CIA withheld