The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [200]
Alarmed by the information, Corsi sent an e-mail to the supervisor of the I-49 squad titled “IT: al-Qaeda.” “IT” means “international terrorism.” The message urgently ordered the squad to investigate whether Khaled al-Mihdhar was still in the United States. There was little explanation about who he might be, except that his association with al-Qaeda and his possible involvement with the bombers of the Cole made him “a risk to the national security.” The squad’s orders were to “locate al-Mihdhar and determine his contact and reasons for being in the United States.” But no criminal agents could be involved in the search, Corsi said. As it turned out, there was only one intelligence agent on the squad, and he was brand new.
Jack Cloonan was the temporary supervisor. He requested that criminal agents should carry out the investigation. Because of the existing bin Laden indictment, they would have far more freedom and resources to search for any al-Qaeda–related individuals. Corsi e-mailed the squad, “If al-Mihdhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel agent. A criminal agent CANNOT be present at the interview…. If at such time information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up investigation.”
Corsi’s original e-mail was accidentally copied to a criminal agent on the squad, however: Steve Bongardt, an aggressive investigator who had been Top Gun as a Navy fighter pilot. For more than a year he had been protesting the obstacles that were increasingly being put in the way of criminal investigators by the growing wall. “Show me where this is written that we can’t have the intelligence,” he demanded on a number of occasions from headquarters, but of course that was impossible, since the wall was largely a matter of interpretation. Since the June 11 meeting, Bongardt had been pressing Corsi to supply the information about the men in the photos, including Khaled al-Mihdhar. After Corsi’s e-mail wound up on his computer, Bongardt called her. “Dina, you got to be kidding me!” he said. “Mihdhar is in the country?”
“Steve, you’ve got to delete that,” she told him, referring to the e-mail. She said he had no right to the information. “We’ll have a conference call about it tomorrow.”
The next day Corsi called over the secure phone. A CIA supervisor at Alec Station was also on the line. They told Bongardt he would have to “stand down” in the effort to find Mihdhar. They explained how the wall prevented them from sharing any further information. Bongardt repeated his complaints that the wall was a bureaucratic fiction, and that it was preventing the agents from doing their work. “If this guy is in the country, it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!” he said. But he was told once again, not only by Corsi but also by her supervisor at the bureau, to stand down.
The next day Bongardt sent Corsi an angry e-mail, “Whatever has happened to this—someday somebody will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we are not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’”
Rookie intelligence agent Rob Fuller got the assignment to track down Mihdhar, as well as Hazmi, whose name was linked to Mihdhar’s on the watch list. Mihdhar had written on his landing card a month before that he would be staying at the “New York Marriott.” The lone agent set out to find the two al-Qaeda operatives in the nine different Marriotts in the city. They were long gone.
ON AUGUST 30, eight days after O’Neill