Bush Told of Likely Hijacks

A month before the Sept. 11 attacks, senior CIA officials warned President Bush that members of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network might try to hijack airplanes, prompting the White House to issue an alert to U.S. law enforcement agencies, officials said Wednesday.

White House and CIA officials said the intelligence behind the warning was not specific, however, and that nothing then available hinted at Bin Laden’s plot to seize four passenger jets and use them as weapons.

But the latest indication of another possible missed signal raised fresh concerns as to whether U.S. intelligence, law enforcement and aviation agencies were sufficiently on guard to prevent an attack on U.S. soil.

House and Senate committees have launched a joint investigation into how America’s vast intelligence agencies failed to detect the plot. Other congressional committees are looking into why the FBI ignored an internal memo in July that specifically warned that Bin Laden’s followers could be training at U.S. flight schools.

The CIA warning of a possible hijacking, first reported Wednesday night by CBS News, indicates for the first time that the White House also may have failed to recognize the imminent threat posed by Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Officials said Bush was told of the possibility of a hijacking in early August during a regular morning intelligence report, a highly classified written and oral presentation known as the President’s Daily Brief. Bush was on vacation at his ranch near Crawford, Texas, at the time.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Wednesday that the information was not clear enough to prevent the September attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, however.

“There was of course an awareness by the government, including the president, of Osama bin Laden and the threat he posed in the United States and around the world,” Fleischer said.

But he said that Bush was warned about “hijackings in the traditional sense, not suicide bombers using airplanes as missiles.”

Fleischer said the administration notified domestic law enforcement agencies of a possible hijacking threat, but did not announce the alert to the public.

A senior intelligence official said Bush was told that hijackings were “among the range of possibilities” that Al Qaeda might use, as other Islamic militants had hijacked planes in the recent past.

“This was among the many things that we talked about all the time as a potential terrorist threat,” said the official, who downplayed the significance of the warning.

“There was nothing about hijacked aircraft that would be flown into buildings or anywhere else,” the official said. “We had no specific information about the time, the place, or the means of attack.”

In recent days, FBI Director Robert Mueller has moved swiftly, and vocally, to address shortcomings within the bureau that he admits allowed it to miss potential warning signs before Sept. 11.

Mueller, who took over the bureau just a week before the attacks, has said he plans to beef up intelligence gathering and information sharing with the CIA.

He also is already centralizing counter-terrorism measures at Washington headquarters. Most of the FBI’s Al Qaeda hunters in the past were based in the New York City field office, where Bin Laden and others were indicted for their alleged roles in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

And in unusually frank congressional testimony last week, Mueller said that the bureau missed at least one important warning sign two months before the attacks, even though he said it would not have averted the Sept. 11 assaults.

In July, an FBI counter-terrorism agent in Phoenix wrote an internal document warning that Islamic militants were trying to gain access to U.S. flight training schools and other aviation facilities, perhaps to commit terrorist acts.

In a classified memo sent to FBI headquarters and to a special New York FBI unit hunting Al Qaeda, the agent urged a full-scale investigation into all flight training schools and aviation facilities.

No such investigation was launched until several Middle Eastern men, who had trained at flight schools in the United States, had carried out the attacks, killing more than 3,000 people.

Law enforcement sources now admit that the Phoenix FBI agent also mentioned Bin Laden by name and suggested that his Al Qaeda followers could be behind such terrorist plots.

Mueller told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that Louis J. Freeh, then director of the FBI, and CIA director George J. Tenet were never told about the Phoenix memo.

“Should we have done more in terms of the Phoenix [memo]? Yes,” Mueller said. “Prior to Sept. 11, we did not focus as we should on our analytical capability, understanding that we have to take every piece that may be provided to us and put it in a larger framework in a larger puzzle. We have changed dramatically to address some of these shortcomings.”

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) said he was particularly troubled by the bureau’s failure to pursue the Phoenix agent’s warnings.

“I’m very troubled by this, and I think that it is likely to become a major concern for Americans, because in my committees on Capitol Hill, we have been assured and reassured that the tragedy of Sept. 11 was unanticipated; it came as a startling surprise to those who followed terrorist activities,” he said.

Durbin said the memo is likely to become “one of the most important documents in our national debate about whether we did enough to protect America from the attack of Sept. 11.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said she was extremely concerned about such missed warning signs.

“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,” she said.

She similarly questioned whether the FBI responded appropriately after agents arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August in Minnesota.

After local flight school instructors called the FBI, agents concluded that Moussaoui might be considering trying to use a commercial aircraft in a terrorist act.

After his arrest, FBI agents sought a special warrant to search his laptop computer for evidence of a terrorist plot, but officials at headquarters turned down the request rather than take it to the Justice Department to see if a federal judge thought there was enough cause to approve the warrant.

Moussaoui was indicted in December in a federal court in Virginia and charged with conspiring with the 19 hijackers and Bin Laden in the attacks and of perhaps trying to be the 20th hijacker.

And in another case, a third flight school expressed concerns last year to an Federal Aviation Administration official about the activities of one of its students. No action was taken against that student, Hani Hanjour, who the FBI says later piloted one of the hijacked planes.

“What you had were individual investigations and they were all compartmented from each other,” said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism official and an expert on Al Qaeda. “If the intelligence was gathered in one place, someone should have been able to see that there was a threat, that there was a common thread among all of these.”

He called the missed signals “extremely embarrassing” for the Bush administration.

“The threats were there to paint a picture of a coming attack but no one did anything about it,” he said.