9/11 Trial Reveals Troubles Then, and Ahead

Harry Samit was green. He’d been an FBI agent just two years. He was assigned to a terrorism task force, but in the bureau’s field office in Minneapolis -- about the least likely city in America for stumbling across an extremist.

Michael Rolince was a coat-and-tie supervisor at the FBI headquarters in Washington. For nearly 30 years, he’d worked for the bureau, handling organized crime, drugs, intelligence. Now he was running the international terrorism operations section. That made him a regular at classified meetings in the White House Situation Room.

Out in Minneapolis, Samit was tipped that an inexperienced student at a local flight school had plunked down cash to learn to fly jumbo jets. The young agent pounced. The student, a French Muslim, was arrested, and Samit worked desperately to get him to talk.

The matter was duly reported to the terrorism operations center in Washington, but Rolince heard about it in just two brief hallway chats with other bureau officials. The ops center was already tracking 70 threats; only a tiny fraction had anything to do with airplanes. There were at least 100 buildings in New York and Washington alone that Rolince viewed as “logical targets.”

Later, when Samit sent Rolince’s office a 25-page memo pleading for search warrants, the veteran FBI supervisor didn’t even see it.

The time was August 2001, and history was about to drop the hammer. The man Samit collared and tried to warn Rolince and others about was Zacarias Moussaoui, now on trial for his life as the only Sept. 11 conspirator to be prosecuted in the United States. And the story of the new FBI agent and his veteran superior in the weeks before Sept. 11 -- as it is emerging in Moussaoui’s sentencing trial -- is more than a tragedy of fumbled opportunities.

And it is a lesson for the future. Much has been done to improve the nation’s defenses against terrorism, but the evidence presented over the last several weeks underscores just how daunting the challenge remains. Extracting meaningful clues from the mass of tips and gossip and incomplete information is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. It’s like looking for a particular wisp of hay in that haystack.

Samit and Rolince were hard-working public servants, as were their colleagues. Neither underestimated the threat. Yet both fell short.

In demanding the death penalty for Moussaoui, Justice Department lawyers argue that if he had fully disclosed what he knew about the Sept. 11 plot, it could have been thwarted. Moussaoui’s lawyers contend that the government’s anti-terrorism system was so fouled up that nothing could have kept the hijackers out of the planes.

A jury will sort out the question as it applies to Moussaoui. But the larger issue -- how to make sure the system spots important scraps of information among mountains of such scraps -- is far from resolved.

Samit and Rolince are not alone in the glare of hindsight. The trial has shown that Federal Aviation Administration officials barely raised an eyebrow when told that Mohamed Atta, who turned out to be the lead hijacker, had abandoned a small plane on a runway at Miami International Airport. Further, testimony has detailed how CIA agents missed clues that two other hijackers were living in San Diego.

But it is the Olympian battle between Samit and Rolince that has defined much of this trial and offered new insights into the challenge of preventing terrorism -- insights into how something as elusive as the mind set of the FBI can play a role, for example, or the different perspectives of two men who stood at a historic crossroads but did not quite realize their moment.

Samit said FBI headquarters was guilty of “criminal negligence” for not letting him seek search warrants on Moussaoui and learn more about the plot. Rolince countered that Samit was an overeager agent who was being “spun up,” that he was obsessing about Moussaoui’s arrest on a minor immigration infraction.

Samit continues to fight crime in Minneapolis. Rolince retired last October. Both men love the FBI.

“I didn’t agree with them, but they are in charge,” Samit said of headquarters. Said Rolince: “Agent Samit’s suppositions and hunches were one thing. What we actually knew at the time of the arrest was clearly something else.”

Samit is a short, stocky man with a buzz haircut, a leftover from his enlistment as a naval intelligence officer and pilot. At the FBI field office in Minneapolis, he was attached to “Squad 5” and its joint task force on terrorism.

Samit was alarmed that Moussaoui, with little flying experience, was training on a jumbo jet simulator, had paid cash for lessons and was outspoken in his criticism of America.

Washington initially advised Samit to limit himself to putting Moussaoui under surveillance. But Samit had already told the manager of the Residence Inn where Moussaoui was staying that the FBI wanted him. The agent decided he had to act.

Agents arrested Moussaoui in mid-August as he was coming out of the motel. He had a small knife in his pocket, another in his car. Taken to an immigration detention center, he talked to Samit for a while, saying he was in the U.S. to learn to fly for personal reasons. Moussaoui then asked for a lawyer, and that ended all interviews.

Samit still wanted to search Moussaoui’s belongings -- his laptop computer, a black duffel bag and other items in his car and his apartment back in Norman, Okla.

The agent asked Washington for approval to seek a criminal search warrant; Washington said no because more seasoned heads felt it would be denied for insufficient evidence. Samit asked Washington for permission to obtain a special intelligence court search warrant. Washington said no again, fearing that if the intelligence court said no, the bureau would never be able to go back and get a warrant from a criminal court judge.

The next request was for approval to place an informant inside Moussaoui’s jail cell. Denied again.

Worse, as Samit saw it, was that FBI headquarters never told him of other leads percolating around the country, most important, a fellow agent’s memo out of Phoenix that reported suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants taking flying lessons.

“You didn’t know at that point in time that Mr. Moussaoui was the most dangerous man in the history of the United States?” Samit was asked by a defense lawyer.

“Absolutely not, sir.”

But Samit had not stopped. He spent several days drafting the 25-page memo to Rolince’s office

He described the knives and the flying lessons. He discussed the large amounts of cash Moussaoui was carrying. He reported how Moussaoui’s companion spoke of his friend’s determination to wage jihad, his hatred of Americans, his loyalty to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

“You wanted the people in Washington to know all this information about Moussaoui, didn’t you?” he was asked on the stand.

“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” he said. “I did.”

But when Washington came through, it was too late.

Rolince was besieged with his own problems. He said his office was taking in leads from 56 FBI field offices and 400 smaller agencies around the country.

The summer chatter was high, but Rolince said none of the tips rose to the level of “actionable” information for agents to make arrests.

“The threats covered about every area that one could possibly conceive,” he told the jury. “From the traditional truck bomb to the use of chemical, radiological, biological, nuclear, to kidnappings, to assassinations ....”

Sometimes the threats dealt with civil aviation, but “I think that was on three occasions out of the thousand or something” raw leads, Rolince said.

On June 12, the CIA warned that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, “was recruiting people to travel to the United States to meet with colleagues already there so that they might conduct terrorist attacks on Osama bin Laden’s behalf.”

On June 10, the CIA notified all its station chiefs of a possible “Al Qaeda suicide attack on a United States target over the next few days.”

Late in the month, a CIA terrorist threat advisory indicated a “high probability of near-term spectacular terrorist attacks resulting in numerous casualties.” More such warnings poured in. Meetings in the White House Situation Room were now increased to three times a week.

And then Rolince heard a whisper about Samit’s case.

“My unit chief approached me on two different occasions in hallway conversations that an individual had been reported by a flight school,” Rolince recalled. But Rolince said that “the FBI did not possess sufficient information to levy a charge.”

In his eyes, whatever threat Moussaoui had posed was neutralized by his arrest. For that reason, Rolince said, the search warrants were not approved.

Instead, Rolince OKd Samit’s last-ditch idea to fly with Moussaoui when he was deported back to Europe. Moussaoui’s bags and other belongings would be automatically subject to inspection there.

Rolince gave his approval late in the day, on Sept. 10.

But the next morning, no one was going anywhere.