The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [176]
The CIA asked Malaysian authorities to provide surveillance of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place on January 5 at a secluded condominium in a resort overlooking a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. The condo was owned by Yazid Sufaat, the Malaysian businessman who had worked with Zawahiri to cultivate anthrax spores. The meeting was not wiretapped, so the opportunity to discover the plots that culminated in the bombing of the USS Cole and the 9/11 attack was lost. Without Mike Scheuer’s sleepless vigilance, Alec Station had lost its edge. He was still sitting in the library, waiting to be used.
There was a cable that same day from Riyadh Station to Alec Station concerning Mihdhar’s American visa. One of the FBI agents assigned to Alec, Doug Miller, read the cable and drafted a memo requesting permission to advise the FBI of the Malaysia meeting and the likelihood that one or more of the terrorists would be traveling soon to the United States. Such permission was required before transmitting intelligence from one organization to another. Miller was told, “This is not a matter for the FBI.” Miller followed up a week later by querying Tom Wilshire, a CIA deputy chief who was assigned to FBI headquarters; Wilshire’s job was ostensibly to facilitate the passage of information from the agency to the bureau. Miller sent him the memo he had drafted and asked, “Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way?” Wilshire never responded. After that, Miller forgot about the matter.
Special Branch, the Malaysian secret service, photographed about a dozen al-Qaeda associates entering the condo and visiting Internet cafés. On January 8, Special Branch notified the CIA station chief in Thailand that three of the men from the meeting—Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Khallad—were flying to Bangkok. There, as it happened, Khallad would meet with the bombers of the USS Cole. But the CIA failed to alert anyone that the men should be followed. Nor did the agency notify the State Department to put Mihdhar’s name on a terror watch list so that he would be stopped or placed under surveillance if he entered the United States.
Three months later, the CIA learned that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000. Had it checked the flight manifest, it would have noticed that Mihdhar was traveling with him. The agency neglected to inform either the FBI or the State Department that at least one known al-Qaeda operative was in the country.
Why would the CIA—knowing that Mihdhar and Hazmi were al-Qaeda operatives, that they had visas to the United States, and that at least one of them had actually arrived on American soil—withhold this information from other government agencies? As always, the CIA feared that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services, but there were safeguards to protect confidential information, and the FBI worked routinely with the agency on similar operations. The CIA’s experience with John O’Neill, however, was that he would demand complete control of any case that touched on an FBI investigation, as this one certainly did. There were many in the agency—not just the sidelined Scheuer—who hated O’Neill and feared that the FBI was too blundering and indiscriminate to be trusted with sensitive intelligence. And so the CIA may have decided to hide the information in order to keep O’Neill off the case. Several of O’Neill’s subordinates strongly believe in this theory.
There may have been other reasons the CIA protected information that it was obliged to give to the bureau. Some other members of the I-49 squad would later come to believe that the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them. The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up. Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities;