The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [193]
But the CIA supervisor did want to know what the FBI knew. He gave Maggie Gillespie three surveillance photos from the Malaysia meeting to show to several I-49 agents. The pictures showed Mihdhar and Hazmi and a man who resembled Quso. The CIA supervisor did not tell Maggie Gillespie why the pictures had been taken. Gillespie researched the Intelink database about the Malaysia meeting, but the agency had not posted any reports about Mihdhar’s visa or Hazmi’s arrival in the country. There was NSA coverage of the events leading up to the Malaysia meeting, but Intelink advised her that such information was not to be shared with criminal investigators.
The CIA supervisor, along with Gillespie and another FBI analyst from headquarters, Dina Corsi, went to New York on June 11 to talk with the agents on the Cole investigation—except for Soufan, who was out of the country. The meeting started in midmorning with the New York FBI agents thoroughly briefing the others on the progress of their investigation. That went on for three or four hours. Finally, about two in the afternoon, the CIA supervisor asked Gillespie to display the photographs to her colleagues. There were three high-quality surveillance photos. One, shot from a low angle, showed Mihdhar and Hazmi standing beside a tree. The supervisor wanted to know if the agents recognized anyone, and if Quso was in any of the pictures.
The FBI agents on the I-49 squad asked who was in the pictures, and when and where they were taken. “And were there any other photographs?” one of the agents demanded. The CIA supervisor refused to say. He promised that “in the days and weeks to come” he would try to get permission to pass that information along, but he couldn’t be more forthcoming at present. The meeting became heated; people began yelling at each other. The FBI agents knew that clues to the crimes they were trying to solve were being dangled in front of their eyes, but they couldn’t squeeze any further information from the CIA supervisor or the FBI analysts—except for one detail: The supervisor finally dropped the name Khaled al-Mihdhar.
Steven Bongardt, a former Navy pilot and Annapolis graduate who was on the I-49 squad, asked the supervisor to provide a date of birth or a passport number to go with Mihdhar’s name. A name by itself was not sufficient to put a stop on his entry into the United States. Bongardt had just returned from Pakistan with a list of thirty names of suspected al-Qaeda associates and their dates of birth, which he had given to the State Department as a precaution to make sure they didn’t get into the country. That was standard procedure, the very first thing most investigators would do. But the CIA supervisor declined to provide the additional information.
One can imagine a different meeting, in which the CIA supervisor was authorized to disclose the vital details of Mihdhar’s travel to the United States, his connection to the telephone in Yemen that was a virtual al-Qaeda switchboard, his association with Hazmi, who was also in America, their affiliation with al-Qaeda and with Khallad. The pictures that were laid out on the table in the New York office contained within them not only the answers to the planning of the Cole attack but also the stark fact that al-Qaeda was inside the United States and planning to strike.
There was a fourth photo of the Malaysia meeting, however, that the CIA supervisor did not produce. That was a picture of Khallad. The Cole investigators certainly knew who he was. They had an active file on him and had already talked to a grand jury, preparing to indict him. That fourth photo would have prompted O’Neill to go to Mary Margaret Graham, who headed the New York office of the CIA, which was located in the World Trade Center, and demand that the agency turn over all information relating to