FBI Cites Inadequacies Over Terrorist Warning

The FBI’s failure to follow up on an agent’s pre-Sept. 11 warning about Islamic militants attending U.S. flight schools highlights inadequacies in the bureau’s counter-terrorism efforts, senior bureau officials said Wednesday.

The agent was investigating what he described as several highly suspicious Middle Easterners who were training at an aviation school in Arizona and warned that the FBI should launch a full-scale investigation and contact flight schools nationwide.

And while the memo was sent to FBI headquarters in Washington and a special New York FBI unit hunting Osama bin Laden, that full-scale investigation was not launched until after the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings. Those attacks were carried out by several Middle Eastern pilots who trained at flight schools in the United States.

“Could it have been followed up more aggressively? Sure, it could have,” said a senior FBI official who requested anonymity.

Even though most counter-terrorism agents were involved in the investigation of the October 2000 bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen and other terrorist plots in Europe and elsewhere, that was not the reason for the failure to follow through, the official said.

“It highlighted the need for us to put in place a much more robust analytical capacity,” the official said. “We can’t afford to have our analytical capacity overwhelmed by current events.”

In an unusually blunt assessment, FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged Wednesday that the bureau could have responded more aggressively to the memo, adding that “in the future we have to be more proactive.”

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, several senators grilled Mueller about what he and other top bureau officials knew about the memo. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) gave Mueller a list of more than a dozen questions, seeking detailed answers about the bureau’s response.

“If I had seen that [memo], I would have sent it right to the president,” Feinstein told Mueller.

Feinstein said FBI officials should have taken the memo as a dire warning, particularly when accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested a month later after acting suspiciously at a Minnesota flight school. Feinstein, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, also noted the CIA had issued a warning last summer that there was a heightened risk of a terrorist attack on Americans, possibly on U.S. soil.

“So there were two things out there that should have alerted” the FBI, Feinstein said. “I think if it did drop between the cracks, I think there is a serious problem, because if one thing drops, others probably have as well.”

The FBI, Feinstein said, should have at least attempted to see how many Middle Eastern men had come into the country seeking flight training, “to see where the visas came from, see how many visas are out and where they are to people in similar circumstances.”

Congressional investigators said Wednesday that the memo--and the bureau’s apparent failure to act on it--could become significant in the ongoing effort to determine whether the FBI and the CIA failed in not preventing the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mueller, who took over the agency a week before the attacks, said it has used such “shortcomings” to revamp the bureau’s counter-terrorism operations.

“Even if we had followed those suggestions at that time, it would not, given what we know since Sept. 11, have enabled us to prevent the attacks of Sept. 11,” Mueller said. “But in the same breath, I should say that what we learned from instances such as that is much about the weaknesses of our approach to counter-terrorism prior to Sept. 11.”

“In the future we have to be more proactive,” Mueller said. “We cannot wait until we have evidence of a crime having been committed, but have to take what evidence we have and make predictive observations to avoid the next attack.”

Mueller said none of the Middle Eastern men under investigation in Arizona who prompted the memo have been linked to the Sept. 11 attacks or to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. But he said the bureau’s failure to respond to the memo underscored how the FBI needs to do a better job of analyzing intelligence from its 56 U.S. field offices and overseas and then acting on it.