The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [194]
At the time, Mihdhar had returned to Yemen and then gone to Saudi Arabia, where presumably he had been herding the remaining hijackers into the United States. Two days after the frustrating meeting between the CIA supervisor and the I-49 squad, Mihdhar received a new American visa from the consulate in Jeddah. Since the CIA had not given his name to the State Department to post on its watch list, Mihdhar disembarked in New York on the Fourth of July.
THE JUNE 11 MEETING was the culmination of a bizarre trend in the U.S. government to hide information from the people who most needed it. There had always been certain legal barriers to the sharing of information. By law—Rule 6E of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—information arising from grand jury testimony is secret. The bureau took that as a nearly absolute bar to revealing any investigative material at all. Every morning on Dick Clarke’s classified computer there were at least a hundred reports, from the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence branches, but the FBI never disseminated such information. Rule 6E also meant that agents could not talk about criminal cases with colleagues who were working intelligence—even if they were in the same squad.
But until the second Clinton administration, information derived from intelligence operations, especially if it might involve a crime, was freely given to criminal investigators. In fact, it was essential. Agents in the 26 Federal Plaza building would often go upstairs to a highly secure room where they could read NSA transcripts and get briefings by a CIA representative posted there. Such cooperation helped convict Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, for instance; the wiretaps that had been placed in his apartment during an intelligence-gathering operation proved that he authorized terrorist bombings in New York. But there was always the concern that intelligence operations would be compromised by the disclosure of sensitive information during a trial.
The Justice Department promulgated a new policy in 1995 designed to regulate the exchange of information between agents and criminal prosecutors, but not among the agents themselves. FBI headquarters misinterpreted the policy, turning it into a straitjacket for its own investigators. They were sternly warned that sharing intelligence information with criminal investigators could mean the end of an agent’s career. A secret court in Washington, created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, became the arbiter of what information could be shared—“thrown over the Wall,” in the parlance of the court. Bureaucratic confusion and inertia allowed the policy to gradually choke off the flow of essential information to the I-49 counterterrorism squad.
The CIA eagerly institutionalized the barrier that separated it from the bureau. The formula used by the CIA supervisor in the June 11 meeting to justify not telling the agents the identities of the men in the photographs was that it would compromise “sensitive sources and methods.” The source of their intelligence about the Malaysia meeting was the telephone in Yemen belonging to the al-Qaeda loyalist, Ahmed al-Hada, that was so central in mapping al-Qaeda’s network. The Hada phone was an al-Qaeda clearinghouse and an intelligence bonanza. Ironically, it was the FBI’s investigation in the embassy bombings case—headed by the New York office—that had uncovered the Hada phone in the first place. Any information that had to do with the Hada household was crucial. The CIA knew that one of the men in the photographs of the Malaysia meeting—Khaled al-Mihdhar—was Hada’s son-in-law, but the agency also kept this vital detail from the bureau.
The NSA, not wanting to bother with applying to the FISA court for permission to distribute essential intelligence, simply restricted its distribution. For example, in San Diego, Mihdhar