Warnings Raise Troubling Questions

August is a quiet time in this town. Congress is out of session, and many bureaucrats head to the shore to escape the Beltway’s stifling humidity.

But around the country last August, strange things were happening--things that are now stirring increasingly troubling questions about whether authorities back in Washington should have suspected that a terrorist attack was imminent.

In Minnesota, French Moroccan student Zacarias Moussaoui was taken into custody after his strange behavior and flashy cash payments at a flight school raised suspicions.

In Arizona, an FBI agent warned in a lengthy memo that authorities should be on the lookout for Al Qaeda-trained operatives using U.S. flight schools.

In San Diego, two Osama bin Laden associates who showed up on a terrorist watch list--and who weeks later would help hijack the plane that slammed into the Pentagon--were living quietly in the area despite a coast-to-coast hunt by the FBI.

And in Texas, a vacationing President Bush was told by the CIA that Bin Laden operatives were seeking to hijack aircraft.

All four episodes took place within a few weeks of each other last summer. But poor communication, disjointed coordination among intelligence agencies and questionable attention to counter-terrorism operations may have hindered the ability of any one individual or agency to determine their collective significance, experts said.

The new evidence about last summer becomes even more pronounced against a backdrop of previous warnings about Al Qaeda-linked terrorist threats against Americans in such far-flung spots as Canada, France, Spain, Turkey and the Philippines.

In several of these episodes, U.S. authorities had eyewitness testimony from Al Qaeda-trained terrorists. A Montreal-based operative caught with massive amounts of explosives at the Canadian border in December 1999 later admitted that he was planning to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, and a terrorist caught in Manila told police in 1996 that Al Qaeda was planning to hijack 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and crash into CIA headquarters.

The later information prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to warn that “there is every reason to believe that civil aviation will continue to be an attractive target for terrorist groups.”

And the FAA in late July 2001--just days before the CIA warning to Bush--issued a report saying for the first time that Bin Laden and his followers were “a significant threat to civil aviation.”

“That statement made it pretty plain that people ought to be paying attention,” said Gerald Kauvar, who was staff director of a White House aviation safety commission during the Clinton administration. “It strengthens the case that if security people got this [warning], they should have acted on it.”

Many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress said Thursday that they were deeply troubled by the new revelations about what the White House and the intelligence community knew in advance of Sept. 11, and they promised to investigate the administration’s performance fully in upcoming congressional hearings to determine whether the White House dropped the ball.

Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was particularly troubled by the disclosure that an FBI agent in Phoenix had recommended last summer that investigators probe possible terrorist plans and Bin Laden links among Middle Eastern students at flight schools. The recommendation never reached senior levels, officials said.

“How in the world could somebody have read this [FBI] document and not had lights, firecrackers, rockets go off in their head that this is something that is really important?” Graham asked.

A former Justice Department official who asked not to be identified said the controversy hinges on the question of whether the administration kept information from the public.

“They may not have known that the planes were going to be hijacked and used as missiles, but given what they did know, how could they not have warned the public?” the former official asked.

For the last eight months, however, the Bush administration has insisted that even in hindsight, there was no way intelligence officials could have predicted and disrupted the tragic events of Sept. 11.

Indeed, just hours after the attacks, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush had “no warnings” of an attack, and on Thursday, the White House launched an aggressive defense of its actions following the disclosure that the CIA had briefed Bush weeks before the attacks about the prospect of Al Qaeda hijackings.

The CIA’s analysis for Bush was “the most generalized type of information--there was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told reporters Thursday.

Rice acknowledged that there was “a lot of chatter” from intelligence sources last spring and summer about the possibility of more terrorist attacks.

“There was a clear concern that something was up, that something was coming. But it was principally focused overseas,” she said, with particular concern about the threat of violence against Bush at the Group of 8 economic summit in Italy last July.

Over the summer of 2001, federal authorities put out multiple alerts, internally and to law enforcement agencies, that warned about the threat of terrorist attacks, Rice said. Authorities were so concerned about the threat of attacks in Paris, Turkey and Italy that they moved to suspend nonessential travel by U.S. counter-terrorism staff, she said.

Numerous embassies around the world were shuttered and the Pentagon last June abruptly ended military exercises in Jordan and called the highest state of alert for U.S. military forces in the Persian Gulf after intercepted communications indicated an imminent attack by Bin Laden terrorists.

But, Rice said, despite the high level of concern, putting out a public warning about the threat of a hijacking “would have risked shutting down” the aviation industry.

Law enforcement and intelligence officials reacted angrily to the second-guessing that erupted Thursday.

“Everyone wants to blame someone, but there was nothing the intelligence community knew that could have prevented what happened Sept. 11--period, end of story. This is all rhetoric,” said one U.S. official who asked not to be identified.

An FBI official who also asked not to be identified said that “people are asking legitimate questions, but Sept. 10 was a very different time than Sept. 11. There was not the hypersensitivity to these reports that there is now.”

The missed warning signals also point up the failure of different U.S. intelligence agencies working in counter-terrorism to operate on the same page, some analysts believe.

In the case of Sept. 11 hijackers Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmzi, for instance, the CIA alerted the FBI last August that the two men were linked to Bin Laden and other terrorists and were thought to have entered the United States, but FBI officials say they were never told the urgency of that alert.

The FBI searched for the two men in the days before Sept. 11, but it was too late to find the pair, who had previously lived in San Diego before they helped crash an American Airlines flight into the Pentagon.

In addition, more than a year before the terrorist attacks, FBI agents in Phoenix had been monitoring a group of Middle Eastern flight school students, including one who adhered to radical beliefs about Islamic world domination.

The revelations of the last few days have prompted many intelligence and law enforcement specialists to ask what might have happened last August if someone had been able to connect the dots. If the FBI in Arizona knew that agents in Minneapolis had stumbled upon Moussaoui at a flight school there--or that the CIA was warning the president about the prospect of hijackings--could things have turned out differently on Sept. 11? they ask.

“What this means is that the same old confrontations, the same cat-and-mouse game that has been going on for 50 years between the CIA and the FBI, contributed to the inability of the U.S. government to put together all of the intelligence needed to increase the chances of predicting Sept. 11,” said a former senior official in counter-terrorism. “It took 9/11, tragically, to force them to share intelligence that they should have been sharing all along.”

Times staff writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar and Doyle McManus contributed to this report.