FBI Brass Accused of Apathy

FBI agents attempting to investigate terrorism were hamstrung for years by top officials here despite abundant evidence of Middle Eastern extremists, according to a letter sent to FBI headquarters late last year by a longtime special agent.

The letter, written five months before the now-famous flight school warning memo by Phoenix agent Kenneth Williams became public, portrayed counter-terrorism as “the lowest investigative priority in the Phoenix Division.”

“The [international anti-terrorism] program ground to a halt a couple years ago because of the micromanaging, constant indecision, and stonewalling,” retired Special Agent James H. Hauswirth wrote in his two-page December letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

As far back as 1994, the 27-year FBI veteran said in the letter reviewed by The Times, the Phoenix office had evidence of Islamic potential terrorists operating in the region. That year, agents were monitoring a Phoenix FBI informant who had been recruited as a suicide bomber, the letter says. One of those recruiting the informant, according to a source, was linked to a terrorist involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

And in 1998, the office’s international terrorism squad investigated a possible Middle Eastern extremist taking flight lessons at a Phoenix airport, wrote Hauswirth, who retired from the FBI in 1999.

Despite such activities, the commitment to anti-terrorism by some in top management at the Phoenix office was lukewarm at best, according to Hauswirth. One top Phoenix FBI official described anti-terrorism investigations as “hokey-pokey work” before Sept. 11, he wrote.

“Maybe, just maybe,” the Dec. 6 letter concluded, “we could have been one step ahead of the eight ball on Sept. 11, 2001 if the [international terrorism] program had the full support of top management in the Phoenix division.”

The allegations, echoed by other former agents here, in some sense mirror complaints by a Minneapolis FBI lawyer this week about inaction at bureau headquarters in the Zacarias Moussaoui case. That letter claims officials in Washington set up a “roadblock” for Minneapolis agents, who were pursuing a search warrant on the radical flight school student just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Phoenix Special Agent Manuel Johnson, spokesman for the division, said Friday he was not aware of Hauswirth’s letter and neither he nor Special Agent in Charge Guadalupe Gonzalez could discuss the allegations because of ongoing oversight investigations.

An FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C., also declined to comment, other than to say it is not uncommon for the bureau headquarters to receives letters from former agents critical of operations. “They write the letters after they leave because they don’t have the [nerve] to write them while they’re still agents,” the spokesman said.

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Letter Reflected Broader Concerns

In a one-paragraph January response, Director Mueller thanked Hauswirth, saying the matter had been referred to the appropriate personnel for review. Hauswirth’s letter prompted a brief interview by an FBI official as part of a routine office audit.

Hauswirth declined to comment on his letter. But records and interviews show it reflected broader concerns among some current and former FBI agents in Phoenix.

“The guys who work [international terrorism] have been frustrated,” said another former Phoenix agent. “Management didn’t take them as seriously as it should have.”

At one point, Phoenix memo author Williams, who appeared before congressional committees this week, left the international terrorism, or IT, squad in frustration, according to two sources. He was later persuaded to rejoin when a new squad leader was appointed, the sources said.

That such complaints were festering in an FBI office that produced what now appears to be a model of anti-terrorism foresight is more instructive than surprising, agency veterans said.

And it’s not unique to Phoenix, several added.

Until the Sept. 11 skyjacking attacks on New York and Washington, many FBI field office managers viewed crimes such as bank robberies and high-profile busts of drug dealers as their bread and butter.

“They looked down on people who worked for counterintelligence because they couldn’t show results. They’re not arresting people,” said one former federal law enforcement official.

“It has been the lowest priority throughout my ... years with the FBI,” said another retired agent. “That is probably because [before Sept. 11], we hadn’t been hit between the eyes since Pearl Harbor.”

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Informant’s Bomb Training Videotaped

Congress and the Bush administration are debating how best to refocus the mission of the FBI and permanently shift resources from areas such as bank heists and identity theft to the fight against international terrorism.

Hauswirth’s letter, while not as long or detailed as Williams’ memo, highlights the potential significance of the investigations by the Phoenix international terrorism squad.

“In 1994, the Phoenix IT squad developed an informant who was being trained to be a suicide bomber,” the letter says. “In fact, the Phoenix [Special Operations Group] videotaped the man being taken out into the desert and being trained to set off bombs.”

One of the men tracked by FBI surveillance was an associate of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric imprisoned for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, according to a law enforcement source familiar with that investigation.

For almost three months, the source added, agents had the two men under surveillance before moving on to another investigation. The suspects were never charged, though it was not known if they remain under surveillance by the FBI.

In the spring of 1998, Phoenix FBI agents investigated a Middle Eastern flight student who had received literature from a suspected terrorist fund-raising group, according to the Hauswirth letter.

That man was never linked to terrorism or the Sept. 11 attacks. But some familiar with the 1998 investigation believe it may have led Williams to his subsequent observations that Middle Eastern students sympathetic to Osama bin Laden were attending Phoenix-area aviation schools.

By early 2000, Phoenix anti-terrorism agents were monitoring a group of Middle Eastern students at small flight schools, as well as Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott.

At least one of those students, Zakaria Soubra, acknowledged in The Times last fall that he was a member of the Arizona chapter of Al Muhajiroun, a virulently anti-American group based in London. Some intelligence officials suspect the group of links to Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Soubra, who is Lebanese, said he endorsed Al Muhajiroun’s vision for Muslim world rule but said he opposed violence against American civilians. He has not been charged with any crime and is expected to complete his senior year in aeronautical studies next year.

It was partly the concern about Al Muhajiroun and connections to flight schools that prompted Williams’ July memo.

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Conflicts Developed Over Paying Operatives

While FBI officials have pointed out that none of those referenced in Williams’ memo have been linked to the Sept. 11 terrorism, authorities knew just hours after the East Coast attacks that skyjacker Hani Hanjour had trained at Arizona flight schools. Hanjour was the suspected pilot of the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon.

Months before the 2001 attacks, Williams appeared to be trying to muster resources for a large-scale prevention push by sending his e-mail memo to Washington urging a nationwide investigation of possible Al Qaeda infiltration of U.S. flight schools. Congressional investigators are examining why the memo did not make it to the highest levels of the FBI and why it was not connected with other warning signs of a terrorist strike.

Williams, a 12-year FBI veteran who also trained as a SWAT team leader and sniper, was working on the international terrorism squad then made up of just eight to 10 agents--a fraction of the roughly 200 agents assigned to Phoenix.

Williams had developed an expertise in Middle Eastern extremist groups. Records and interviews show he worked closely with another squad member, agent George Piro, one of the few FBI agents nationwide who is fluent in multiple Arabic languages.

In the mid-1990s, the IT squad began developing paid operatives with ties to Arizona’s Muslim community, records and interviews show.

But conflicts developed between the IT squad and the Phoenix office management, partly over money that agents thought was needed to keep paid informants working, according to sources familiar with the dispute.

Court records show at least one former informant in the Muslim community near Tempe sued the FBI in 1999, claiming his payments were dramatically reduced. IT squad members blamed a “new boss,” records show.

“These [management] guys did not want to pay sources,” said one former agent who discussed the rift with the anti-terrorism squad.

“They just didn’t understand what [the squad] did.” Without money, the source added, “you’re not going to get the informants you want.”

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Top Agent in Phoenix Target of Criticism

Much of the criticism in the letter is directed at Phoenix Special Agent in Charge Gonzalez. A former Marine, Gonzalez has a background in drug investigations and by some accounts favored those investigations over counterterrorism probes.

After Sept. 11, sources said, Gonzalez rejected an IT squad proposal to build a database for the hundreds of Arizona leads and reports tied to the Sept. 11 investigation, using the FBI’s Rapid Start tip management program.

One source said Gonzalez told agents to just box up their reports and ship them to the FBI in New York because it was that office’s case.

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Times researcher Nona Yates contributed to this report.