May 27 issue Forget James Bond. Intelligence gathering is
more like taking a metal detector to the city dump.
SO MUCH COMES IN, rumor, hearsay, disinformation, so
little of it more than trash: once in a blue moon an agent-
prospector may get lucky. But even then an agent s warning is
likely to be dismissed as what Condoleezza Rice last week
called chatter. There s always TMI too much information,
says former CIA agent Milt Bearden. Often agents poke fun at
the sometimes obsessive quirks of their colleagues. If a
confidential memorandum comes from a guy out in, say, Phoenix,
the first thing that goes up the line is, That s Harry again.
He s like a broken clock twice a day , one ex-agent says.
Even today, long after 9-11, streams of new threats pass
unnoticed through Washington. In recent weeks, for instance,
the FBI has gotten specific threats about a car- or truck-bomb
attack on an all-glass building near the U.S. Capitol, and
another threat against a Celebrity cruise ship off Florida.
Neither was corroborated, or publicized.
Yet every now and then, amid the piles of dross, a
nugget of pure gold turns up in intel files. The key for
American national security now and into the future is to know
it when we see it. Back in July 2001, Bill Kurtz and his team
hit pay dirt, and no one seemed to care. A hard-driven
supervisor in the FBI s Phoenix office, Kurtz was overseeing an
investigation of suspected Islamic terrorists last July when a
member of his team, a sharp, 41-year-old counterterrorism agent
named Kenneth Williams, noticed something odd: a large number
of suspects were signing up to take courses in how to fly
airplanes. The agent s suspicions were further fueled when he
heard that some of the men at the local Embry-Riddle
Aeronautical University were asking a lot of questions about
airport security.
SOMETHING BIGGER?
Kurtz, who had previously worked on the Osama bin Laden
unit of the FBI s international terrorism section, was
convinced he and his colleagues might have stumbled on to
something bigger. Kurtz s team fired off a lengthy memo raising
the possibility that bin Laden might be using U.S. flight
schools to infiltrate the country s civil-aviation system. He
thinks of everything in terms of bin Laden, one colleague
recalled. The memo outlined a proposal for the FBI to
monitor civil aviation colleges/universities around the
country.
Williams, the agent who sniffed out the link, was
described by one former colleague as a superstar, a former
SWAT sniper and family man who coaches Little League and, in
1995, helped track down Michael Fortier, Timothy McVeigh s
former Army buddy. Anything he says you can take to the bank,
says former agent Ron Myers.
But little of that seemed to make a difference back in
Washington, where the Kurtz team suffered a fate even worse
than Cassandra s: not only were they not believed, they were
ignored altogether. The FBI was concerned about racial
profiling. Moreover, it wasn t used to gathering intelligence,
especially domestically, given American sensitivities about
intrusive government and civil liberties. Its intelligence-
assessment system was almost laughably antiquated. And under
Attorney General John Ashcroft, the department was being
prodded back into its old law-and-order mind-set: violent
crime, drugs, child porn. Counterterrorism, which had become a
priority of the Clintonites (not that they did a better job of
nailing bin Laden), seemed to be getting less attention. When
FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence
agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to
take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons.
The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-
emphasize terror in the young Bush administration. Over at the
Pentagon, new Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld elected not to
relaunch a Predator drone that had been tracking bin Laden,
among other actions. In self- absorbed Washington, the Phoenix
memo, which never resulted in arrests, landed in two units at
FBI headquarters but didn t make it to senior levels. Nor did
the memo get transmitted to the CIA, which has long had a
difficult relationship with the FBI and whose director, George
Tenet, one of the few Clinton holdovers, was issuing so many
warnings that bin Laden was the most immediate threat to
Americans he was hardly heeded any longer.
A STREAM OF WARNINGS
Last week the tale of the missed signal from Phoenix
became, for thousands of families of 9-11 victims, yet another
tendril of pain stemming from that day. Indeed, it was part of
a whole summer of missed clues that, taken together, seemed to
presage the terrible September of 2001. The same week in early
July that Kurtz and his team were dispatching their memo, the
White House acknowledged for the first time, Bush was privately
beginning to worry about the stream of terror warnings he was
hearing that summer, most of them aimed at U.S. targets abroad.
On July 5, five days before the Phoenix memo, Bush directed
Rice to figure out what was going on domestically. A month
later, America learned for the first time last week nine months
after the attacks Bush received a presidential daily brief in
Crawford, Texas, that mentioned the possibility of an airline
hijacking as a domestic threat. The Aug. 6 briefing was
only an analytic report that talked about [bin Laden s]
methods of operation, talked about what he had done
historically, Rice said in a hastily called conference to
contain the damage from the news.
Because Bush has long insisted he had no inkling of
the attacks, the disclosures touched off a media stampede in a
capital long deprived of scandal. The fact that the nation s
popular war president might have been warned a little over a
month before September 11 and that the supposedly straight-
talking Bushies hadn t told anyone about it opened up a serious
credibility gap for the first time in the war on terror.
There were, in fact, failures at every level that
summer: from the shortcomings in the law-enforcement trenches
the FBI s poor record at domestic surveillance, the CIA s poor
record at infiltrating Islamic groups and the lack of
cooperation between the two agencies to the fixed strategic
mind-set of the Bush administration. Between the claims by the
FBI and CIA that they didn t get enough information and the
White House s insistence that it didn t receive any reports He
doesn t recall seeing anything, Rice said when asked if Bush
had read the Phoenix memo the buck seems to be stopping
nowhere. If I were an average citizen, I d be pissed at the
whole American government, says a senior official who has
worked on counterterrorism.
The question is not so much what the president knew and
when he knew it. The question is whether the administration was
really paying much attention. Terrorism is by nature stealthy
and hard to crack, even in the face of the most zealous efforts
to thwart it. What Americans should be asking is why the Bush
administration in its first eight months, like the Clinton
administration for much of its eight years, did not demand the
intelligence cooperation that was needed. At issue is not whom
to blame for the past, but how to learn from it to safeguard
our future.
NEW CLUES IN ODD PLACES
The fact is, in a nation that prides itself on its
mastery of the Information Age, almost no one in the U.S.
government seemed to know what anyone else was doing. Even as
what Rice called major threat spikes began to appear on
Washington s radar screen the summer of the Phoenix memo, other
new clues began arising in odd places around the country,
unknown to senior members of the administration. In mid-August
Minneapolis agents arrested a French-Moroccan flight student,
Zacarias Moussaoui, and worked themselves into a frenzy over
the possibility that he was planning a terrorist act involving
a large aircraft, one official said. One agent even speculated
in his notes that Moussaoui, whom some authorities now believe
was supposed to have been the 20th hijacker, might be planning
to crash a plane into the World Trade Center. But the
Minneapolis agents knew nothing about the Kurtz team s memo.
Nor did they or senior administration officials appear
to know that a few weeks after the Phoenix warning, the FBI got
wind that two men who were on a watch list of terror suspects
Khalid Almihdhar, who had been linked to the USS Cole bombing,
and an associate, Nawaf Alhazmi were in the United States. The
FBI traced them to southern California, but failed even to
check the San Diego phone book to see if they were listed
(Alhazmi was), or local banks to see if they had accounts (one
of them did). Both men, then in San Diego, were hijackers on
American Airlines Flight 77. Rice also disclosed that during
the course of last summer, the Federal Aviation Administration
issued several information circulars warning the aviation
industry of possible terror attacks. NEWSWEEK has learned that
as many as 10 to 12 such warnings were issued to all U.S.
airlines and major airports in the period between June 2001 and
September 11. According to sources who have read them, more
than two of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility
of hijackings.
9-11 Families: Reopening the Wounds
Also in early July, about the same time that Bush
expressed an interest in learning more about Al Qaeda, Ahmed
Ressam was spilling his guts in prison on the West Coast.
Ressam had planned to bomb the L.A. Airport after the turn of
the millennium but was caught when he bolted from his car.
After he was convicted in the spring of 2001, Ressam started
giving investigators detailed information on Al Qaeda s designs
in the United States. He left no doubt that U.S. airports were
a prime target because an airport is sensitive politically and
economically, as Ressam said in court on July 3. At least two
of the FAA s summer warnings came from Ressam s information,
which should have given pause to Bush administration officials
who remained convinced that the threat was abroad.
NEWSWEEK has learned there was one other major complication as
America headed into that threat-spiked summer. In Washington,
Royce Lamberth, chief judge of the special federal court that
reviews national-security wiretaps, erupted in anger when he
found that an FBI official was misrepresenting petitions for
taps on terror suspects. Lamberth prodded Ashcroft to launch an
investigation, which reverberated throughout the bureau. From
the summer of 2000 on into the following year, sources said,
the FBI was forced to shut down wiretaps of Qaeda-related
suspects connected to the 1998 African embassy bombing
investigation. It was a major problem, said one source
familiar with the case, who estimated that 10 to 20 Qaeda
wiretaps had to be shut down, as well as wiretaps into a
separate New York investigation of Hamas. The effect was to
stymie terror surveillance at exactly the moment it was needed
most: requests from both Phoenix and Minneapolis for wiretaps
were turned down.
Together all these clues, scattered like tantalizing
jigsaw pieces across America, suggest that U.S. airports at
least should have been on high alert on September 11. They
weren t. Indeed, the two airlines involved in the hijackings
say they were barely aware of the FAA warnings.
FUZZY AND THIN
Even most of Bush s critics said the president himself
was mostly blameless in the blame game, at least when it came
to the kind of briefing he received on Aug. 6. Rice said the
memo he got that day was fuzzy and thin, only a page-and-a-half
long. But once again the administration sought to fend off
hearings as Vice President Dick Cheney had in early February,
when he defiantly told Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle that
administration officials might not show up to testify.
Meanwhile, the president, still basking in his 70 percent-plus
approval rating, put on a defiant, even haughty, front.
Once upon a time, a stern word from George W. Bush on
the war on terror would have been enough. But this time the
Democrats, and even Republicans like Richard Shelby and John
McCain, weren t buying the Teflon patriotism. The president s
political opponents were backed by some 9-11 victims
families. Look at all of the investigations that have been
held to examine the Enron collapse, a financial thing, said
Kathy Ashton, whose 21-year-old son Tommy was killed at the
World Trade Center on his second day on a contracting
job. Why, eight months later, are we not investigating the
mass murder of 3,000 human beings on American soil by an enemy
of the United States that was enabled to carry out this mass
murder because many agencies in this country dropped the
ball?
Vice President Dick Cheney (right) speaks with President Bush
by phone inside the operations center at the White House on
September 11; at far left is Karen Hughes ; at center is
Condoleezza Rice, two top aides
The administration s defensiveness suggested America
may have entered the post-post-9-11 period. Washington politics
is back to its partisan snarling, and the media, self-muzzled
until now, is yapping at the White House s heels. One sign is
that heads in Washington are already rolling. FBI Director
Robert Mueller is said by associates to be furious over the
bureau s internal handling of the memo. (Six days after the
attack, Mueller had said at a news conference: There were no
warning signs that I m aware of that would indicate this type
of operation in the country. ) On Friday it was learned that
the FBI s and CIA s top counterterrorism officers were leaving,
though officials denied they were being pushed out.
BEYOND TRADITIONAL TERROR
While Bush may have a point in saying he heard no
specific threat, other aspects of the administration s story
weren t holding up. Last week Rice declared, I don t think
anybody could have predicted that these people would take an
airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center ... All of
this reporting about hijacking was about traditional
hijacking ; in other words, using passenger jets as hostages.
In fact, the government had ample reason to believe that Al
Qaeda was no longer interested in traditional terror. The CIA
had learned as early as 1995 that Abdul Hakim Murad, an
associate of 93 WTC plotter Ramzi Yousef, had talked about
plunging an airliner into the CIA building. Italian authorities
had warned of a similar bid at last June s Genoa summit of the
G8 leaders and they ringed the area with surface-to-air
missiles, with CIA cooperation.
In any case, few Americans seem to be in the mood any
longer for more-of-the-same from Washington. September 11 has
often been compared to Pearl Harbor as a fault line between a
complacent and war-ready America. And, like Pearl Harbor,
questions about whether it could have been prevented will
forever haunt us. To give the Bush administration some credit,
no government in modern history has ever predicted a major
surprise attack. Britain and France missed the Blitzkrieg in
1940. The Germans missed D-Day in June 1944. And everyone
missed Iraq s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
Even so, it s too simple to say that postmortems now
are somehow unfair or unpatriotic in wartime America. The
latest revelations could open up a Pandora s box of questions
about the administration s pre- 9-11 performance on terror
questions with complicated and interesting roots.
By the end of the Clinton administration, the then
national-security adviser Sandy Berger had become totally
preoccupied with fears of a domestic terror attack, a
colleague recalls. True, the Clintonites had failed to act
decisively against Al Qaeda, but by the end they were certain
of the danger it posed. When, in January 2001, Berger gave Rice
her handover briefing, he covered the bin Laden threat in
detail, and, sources say, warned her: You will be spending
more time on this issue than on any other. Rice was alarmed by
what she heard, and asked for a strategy review. But the effort
was marginalized and scarcely mentioned in ensuing months as
the administration committed itself to other priorities, like
national missile defense (NMD) and Iraq.
John Ashcroft seemed particularly eager to set a new
agenda. In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an
extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis
Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge in
Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft
laid out his priorities for Freeh, another Clinton holdover
(though no friend of the ex-president s), basically violent
crime and drugs, recalls one participant. Freeh replied
bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk
about terror and counterterrorism. Ashcroft didn t want to
hear about it, says a former senior law-enforcement official.
(A Justice Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying
that in May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was
his highest priority. )
That was unfortunate, because Freeh, despite his late-
tenure interest in global terrorism, had left behind an FBI
that badly needed fixing, especially its antiquated evidence-
gathering methods. So fouled up is the FBI s communications
system that it is almost impossible for agents to send
classified e-mails to another agency like the CIA; the effect
is that little is shared.
It wasn t that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned
about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had
an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department,
Secretary Paul O Neill s team wanted to roll back almost all
forms of government intervention, including laws against money
laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At
the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and
push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert
$800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The
Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for
observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration:
the CIA s Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the
Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator
back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in
February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when
valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush
administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill
sources say DOD didn t want the CIA treading on its turf.
And while most of the current controversy is about what
America didn t do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn t take
the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested
publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a
weak image abroad. The day after the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on
the USS Cole, the then candidate Bush said there must be
aconsequence. An FBI document dated January 26, 2001 six days
after Bush took office shows that authorities believed they had
clear evidence tying the bombers to Al Qaeda. Yet the new
administration mounted no retaliation of its own.
GETTING SERIOUS ABOUT AL QAEDA?
By the time the Bushies did get serious and gear up
against Al Qaeda, it was too late. The administration says a
long process of revamping the strategy against Al Qaeda
culminated in a supreme irony on Sept. 10, when the directive
reached Rice s desk for Bush s signature. And yet even then
there were questions about how serious the administration
really was. The new strategy called for little more aggressive
action than Clinton had adopted: arming and financing anti-
Taliban forces inside Afghanistan. And on the same day,
Ashcroft submitted his budget request, barely mentioning
counterterrorism.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who with Republican Sen. Jon Kyl
had sent a copy of draft legislation on counterterrorism and
homeland defense to Cheney s office on July 20, also heard some
news that day. Feinstein was told by the veep s top
aide, Scooter Libby, as Feinstein described it to
NEWSWEEK, that it might be another six months before he would
be able to review the material.
Today the Bush team is clearly focused, and the CIA and
FBI are cooperating more smoothly. They had better: ominous if
unconfirmed threats keep pouring over the transom among them,
NEWSWEEK has learned, a recent CIA warning of a series of
explosions using low charge nuclear weapons. Mueller has
recentralized FBI analysis in Washington to coordinate intel.
The key will be how the Bush administration can learn both from
past mistakes and from the investigation that, whether they
like it or not, is surely coming.
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With Daniel Klaidman, Mark Hosenball, Eleanor Clift, John
Barry, Colin Soloway and Tamara Lipper in Washington, Andy Murr
in Phoenix, Jamie Reno in San Diego and Christopher Dickey in
Paris
2002 Newsweek, Inc.
