Moussaoui Memo Says FBI Stalled Probe After Attacks

FBI officials in Washington not only stymied an investigation into flight school student Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, but also actively tried to stop field agents from connecting the suspected 20th hijacker to the terrorist attacks after they occurred, a Minnesota field agent contends in a 13-page “whistle-blower” letter made public Sunday.

FBI agent Coleen Rowley, general counsel in the Minneapolis field office, also asserts that facts “have been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mischaracterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment.... “

By doing so, Rowley says, the FBI put Americans at further risk by failing to act quickly and aggressively enough to determine the extent of the Sept. 11 conspiracy or whether further attacks were planned.

Rowley contends in her letter to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III that intelligence on Moussaoui provided by the French government, which included information on his “activities connected with Osama bin Laden,” was more than enough to obtain a special surveillance warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer in the weeks before the terrorist attacks.

But requests for such a warrant were thwarted by FBI supervisors in Washington who seemed so intent on ignoring the threat posed by Moussaoui, Rowley wrote, that some field agents were frustrated enough to joke that key officials at FBI headquarters “had to be spies or moles ... who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.”

In August, FBI agents in Minnesota had become increasingly “desperate” to search the laptop and personal effects of the mysterious Frenchman of Moroccan descent, Rowley wrote. He had been detained on immigration violations after arousing suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, where he was trying to learn to fly a commercial airliner. Moussaoui, 33, has since been indicted as an Al Qaeda operative and is the sole person charged with conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks. He faces the death penalty if convicted in a trial scheduled later this year.

Rowley’s scorching letter, sent Tuesday to Mueller and several congressional intelligence committee members, was posted by Time magazine on its Web site Sunday, two days after the FBI refused to turn it over to congressional investigators or U.S. senators. Excerpts of the letter were leaked to the media late last week.

FBI officials said Sunday that the letter remains classified and that they would not comment on its contents. But it prompted an immediate and angry reaction on Capitol Hill, from Democrats and Republicans alike. Some said on the Sunday TV talk shows that it was further proof the FBI needs an overhaul and called for additional inquiries and public hearings into the burgeoning controversy.

“It is ... shocking,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said of Rowley’s letter during an appearance on CNN’s “Late Edition.” “And the only way, I believe, that we’re going to get to the bottom of this thing is if we have a broad investigation with a blue-ribbon panel, but also if we release the documents now and hold people accountable.”

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) seized on the Rowley memo as proof that an independent commission was needed to investigate the FBI, despite vigorous opposition to such an inquiry from the White House. Daschle said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney personally lobbied him in January “not to investigate the events of Sept. 11.”

“They were concerned about the diversion of resources ... [involved in] an investigation of any kind,” Daschle said. Bush and Cheney have said that the House and Senate intelligence committees are the proper forums for such a sensitive investigation.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) sidestepped taking a position on an independent inquiry. But, citing the Rowley letter, he too called for aggressive FBI reforms and inquiries into what officials did in the Moussaoui case.

“It’s a serious criticism,” Lott said, “and it cannot be ignored.”

Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) said he would use the forthcoming hearings of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, of which he is chairman, to examine whether officials at FBI headquarters had removed information from the Minnesota agents’ request for a warrant--as Rowley contends--out of concern that they were using “racial profiling.”

The full disclosure of Rowley’s letter came as a U.S. official confirmed Sunday that the Federal Aviation Administration had told airlines more than three years ago to be on a “high degree of alertness” against possible hijackings by followers of Bin Laden.

The FAA issued the warning in a Dec. 8, 1998, “information circular” that expired about seven weeks later, the official said. Like other FAA circulars issued in 2001 before the Sept. 11 attacks, it did not contain any specific credible threats and did not order the airlines to increase security, the official said.

“It was designed to be a specific warning around that period of time, based on intelligence information we get from other agencies,” the official said. “It was not designed to be a permanent warning.”

Rowley’s detailed, often bitter comments raised a raft of fresh questions Sunday--particularly her assertion that high-ranking bureau officials had sought to impede an investigation into Moussaoui after the attacks by “a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts” concerning mistakes they had made before Sept. 11.

Within days of Moussaoui’s arrest Aug. 15, FBI field agents in Minneapolis were convinced he was a dangerous Islamic militant who had sought aviation training for terrorist acts. That belief stemmed from their investigation and information provided by the French intelligence service, Rowley said. Her reference to “activities connected to ... Bin Laden” is the first indication that authorities had suspected Moussaoui of being linked to the alleged terrorist mastermind before Sept. 11.

Despite those concerns, officials at FBI headquarters in Washington repeatedly quashed efforts to help the field agents secure a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would have allowed them to run wiretaps and search Moussaoui’s computer and personal effects, Rowley said.

The request for a FISA warrant was denied Aug. 28. Minutes after two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, one of the FBI supervisors in Washington who was intimately involved in the Moussaoui case called Rowley on her cell phone. She believed, she wrote to Mueller, that the supervisor reluctantly was going to admit that the warrant to search Moussaoui’s effects was now necessary.

Instead, the “supervisory special agent” told her that “we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got [headquarters’] permission because we might ‘screw up’ something else going on elsewhere in the country,” Rowley wrote. She did not name the supervisor.

“Even after the attacks had begun, [the supervisor] was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Minneapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui,” Rowley wrote.

What’s more, Rowley contends, as field agents desperately tried to learn who was behind the Sept. 11 attacks and whether more were imminent, “we were prevented from even attempting to question Moussaoui on the day of the attacks when, in theory, he could have possessed further information about other co-conspirators.”

Ultimately, FBI officials did get a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer on Sept. 11, using the same information initially rejected by FBI lawyers and supervisors as being insufficient in showing probable cause, Rowley said. They found a flight simulation program and information about crop-dusters and other suspicious material.

In her letter to Mueller, Rowley asserted her claim to the federal government’s “whistle-blower protection” provisions, which prohibit any disciplinary or other retaliatory action while complaints are being investigated.

Mueller has referred Rowley’s letter to the bureau’s inspector general for investigation, and he has acknowledged that mistakes were made in the Moussaoui case. He has said that he plans to overhaul the bureau to better analyze and disseminate intelligence and get a better handle on terrorist threats before attacks can occur.

Mueller, who took over the FBI a week before Sept. 11, also is moving to greatly increase the intelligence capacity of the bureau by bringing aboard many CIA analysts and by forging better ties to the CIA and other intelligence-gathering agencies.

The director is expected to announce those reforms as early as this week, when he unveils his reorganization plan for the bureau.

Rowley also criticized FBI officials for promoting the supervisor whom she blames for blowing the Moussaoui investigation. And she took exception to some of Mueller’s own reform measures, saying they “simply fly in the face of an honest appraisal of the FBI’s pre-September 11th failures.”

In particular, Rowley criticized Mueller’s plans to centralize counter-terrorism efforts in Washington, including his proposal for a “super squad” of agents at FBI headquarters.

“If we are indeed in a ‘war,’ shouldn’t the generals be on the battlefield,” she asked, “instead of sitting in a spot removed from the action while still attempting to call the shots?”