More 9/11 Clues Were Overlooked

U.S. intelligence had information months before the Sept. 11 attacks that an Al Qaeda operative now seen as the mastermind of the plot was planning to send terrorists to the United States, according to a highly anticipated congressional report.

A year before the attacks, the United States had also intercepted phone calls from one of the hijackers to a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East, but failed to realize until after Sept. 11 that the calls had come from one of the San Diego-based hijackers, congressional sources said.

The revelations were among more findings released Wednesday by a joint congressional panel that has spent much of the last year investigating Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

The report paints a disturbing portrait of a U.S. spy community too hobbled by Cold War habits and myopic policies to fully comprehend the emerging terrorist threat to the United States. It urged a host of reforms, including the creation of a Cabinet-level intelligence position.

“The intelligence community was not properly postured to meet the threat of global terrorism against the people of the United States,” said Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The report represents the culmination of a high-profile probe in which investigators examined half a million intelligence documents and conducted more than 600 interviews.

But the materials released Wednesday -- including nine pages of findings and 15 pages of recommendations -- represent only a portion of the final product.

The bulk of the 450-page report remains classified, and it is unclear whether lawmakers will succeed in persuading the White House and intelligence agencies to release substantial portions of it to the public.

As a result, much of the information presented Wednesday was in summary form, offering tantalizing glimpses of material uncovered during the investigation, but making it difficult to fully assess the meaning of that material.

Graham and others stressed that there is no evidence that any agency had collected information indicating the time, place and nature of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But through a series of public hearings and sharply worded reports, the congressional inquiry has significantly eroded early claims by intelligence officials that the hijackers’ planning was so sophisticated, and the plot so unimaginable, that preventing it would have been almost impossible.

Many of the findings issued Wednesday had been previously reported. Among them are the FBI’s failure to heed warnings from agents in Arizona that terrorists might be training at U.S. flight schools. The report also repeated criticism of the CIA for failing to notify the FBI or other domestic agencies that two Al Qaeda operatives had entered the country in early 2000.

But several findings had not been previously disclosed. One of the most tantalizing is the assertion that U.S. intelligence agencies failed to recognize the significance of information collected in June 2001 on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda operative now believed to be the architect of the Sept. 11 plot.

The reporting suggested that Mohammed was interested in “sending terrorists to the United States” and planning to direct their activities once they had arrived.

Mohammed has since been linked to a series of suspected plots, including a 1995 scheme to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. He has also been linked to a key planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Mohammed is now one of the most wanted Al Qaeda fugitives. But the panel’s report chastises the CIA for failing to see Mohammed’s rising stature in Al Qaeda. His role in the Sept. 11 attacks, the report says, “was a surprise to the intelligence community.”

A senior U.S. intelligence official said the CIA had not examined the report and could not comment on its contents. Several federal law enforcement and intelligence officials said they were not familiar with any specific piece of intelligence reporting that showed Mohammed played a role in sending terrorists to the United States.

But one former official said that if the CIA and the National Security Agency had received such specific intelligence about Mohammed, they didn’t share it with others in the counter-terrorism community.

“They never told us about it,” said the former official. “But what type of information was it? How good was the reporting? ... If it was vague, they probably wouldn’t have, even if in hindsight it seems significant.”

Another disclosure centers on communications between one of the San Diego hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, and an unidentified “terrorist facility” in the Middle East.

The nature of the communications was not specified in the report. But congressional sources said the finding refers to intercepted phone calls to a Middle East facility under U.S. surveillance.

Only after the attacks, the report said, did the intelligence community realize that the “Khaled” identified in the communications was Khalid Almihdhar, who had previously been observed by the CIA attending an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and who died in the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.

Officials at the NSA, the agency that eavesdrops on electronic communications, did not respond to a request for comment.

In another passage, the report says that some hijackers had contacts inside the United States and abroad with individuals who “were known to the FBI through either past or, at the time, ongoing inquiries and investigations.” Challenging assertions from FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and others, the report says the hijackers “were not as isolated during their time in the United States as has been previously suggested.”

Sources said some of this language refers to the San Diego hijackers, who rented rooms from a man who was also an informant for the FBI.

Graham noted Wednesday that the congressional inquiry marks the first time that House and Senate committees have combined to conduct a joint investigation. Many in Washington have given the inquiry high marks for the material it has uncovered.

But the reports released Wednesday also reveal much about what members could not accomplish.

A list of 19 recommendations consists largely of recycled proposals and tepid calls for further study of thorny issues members themselves could not resolve, including whether a new domestic intelligence agency should be created.

For its part, the Department of Justice issued a lengthy statement defending its performance and arguing that it should not be stripped of its role, through the FBI, as the nation’s domestic intelligence service.

Indeed, the department said it views the committee’s recommendations “as an endorsement” of reforms already underway at the FBI.

“While improvements are necessary and ongoing,” wrote Barbara Comstock, director of public affairs at the department, “the department believes that the FBI is well suited to serve as the domestic intelligence and terrorism prevention agency in the United States.”

Members of the committee also disagreed sharply over whether officials in the intelligence community should be held accountable for failures documented in the report. Deep disagreement over that issue and others prompted one of the top Republicans on the panel, Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, to issue a 75-page dissenting report.

During a news conference Wednesday, Shelby heaped criticism on CIA Director George J. Tenet and his predecessor at the agency, John M. Deutch. He also singled out former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, and NSA Director Michael Hayden.

“I believe that they’ve got to be called to account,” Shelby said.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer dismissed Shelby’s remarks as “a one-man, minority dissent,” and he said President Bush continues to have confidence in Tenet.

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow declined to respond directly to Shelby’s remarks but referred to Tenet’s prior testimony.

“The director said that there were things which we should have handled better,” Harlow said.

The community now faces additional scrutiny from an independent commission headed by former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger.

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Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.