Blunders Numerous Before 9/11

The CIA failed repeatedly before Sept. 11 to share key information with the FBI about two Al Qaeda suspects who became hijackers in last year’s attacks, even after learning the men held U.S. visas, were in the United States, and had links to the bombing of the destroyer Cole, congressional investigators disclosed Friday.

When the FBI finally did learn that the two suspects were in the United States--just weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--top bureau officials in Washington rebuffed a frantic call from an agent in New York for an all-out search for the men.

In a prescient e-mail Aug. 29, the unnamed agent warned FBI headquarters that if the bureau didn’t add more agents to the hunt “someday someone will die and ... the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had” into tracking down the suspects.

One senator called the latest disclosures “unbelievable.” They capped a flurry of revelations this week that apparently persuaded President Bush on Friday to reverse course and support the creation of an independent commission to conduct a more thorough investigation of intelligence and other breakdowns surrounding the attacks.

Friday’s report went well beyond what was already known about missed signals on these two hijackers, And it pointed to additional intelligence on their travels to the United States that should have prompted the CIA to sound alarms.

It provided new evidence of what lawmakers called the bureaucratic barriers, short-sighted policies and repeated blunders at the CIA and the FBI.

“We have failure piled upon failure here,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “This is truly unbelievable.”

Friday’s hearing focused on what the CIA and other intelligence agencies knew about two of the 19 hijackers: Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Hazmi, Saudi Arabian citizens who with three others seized control of American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

The report and accompanying testimony indicate that the CIA had significantly greater cause to be pursuing Almihdhar and Hazmi than previously disclosed.

“In short,” the report concluded, “the CIA had obtained information identifying two of the 19 hijackers ... as suspected terrorists carrying visas for travel to the United States as long as 18 months” before placing them on watch lists.

The report noted that CIA Director George J. Tenet acknowledged in closed-door testimony June 18 that the agency “had made a mistake in not watch-listing these two individuals” earlier.

Placing the suspects on watch lists would have brought them to the attention of domestic authorities. The CIA gathers intelligence overseas, but the FBI is exclusively responsible for tracking terrorist suspects in the United States.

When the two suspects were finally placed on federal watch lists on Aug. 23, 2001--thus coming to the attention of the FBI--bureau officials fought about how aggressively to pursue the men.

In testimony Friday, the FBI agent who wrote the e-mail expressed deep frustration with the handling of his memo and bureau policies that he said prevented him and other agents from helping hunt for Almihdhar in the days leading up to the attacks.

The agent’s name was not revealed, nor was that of a CIA counterterrorism official who also testified. Both sat behind screens in the Senate hearing room, shielding them from public view. Lawmakers said their identities were protected because of the sensitive nature of their jobs.

The FBI agent said he had been investigating the Al Qaeda attack on the Cole in Yemen in October 2000. Almihdhar met with a key planner of that attack in Malaysia in January 2000, he said.

Upon learning that Almihdhar was in the United States, the agent said he urged superiors to allow criminal investigators in the New York office to help find him. But FBI officials in Washington refused, saying Almihdhar was not under criminal investigation, and they cited a “wall” between criminal and intelligence matters.

“Someday,” the agent replied, “someone will die and--wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ ”

The agent said he was very upset when he learned Sept. 11, 2001, that Almihdhar had been one of the hijackers. When a supervisor told him that the bureau “had done everything by the books,” the agent described “how ludicrous that sounded to me.”

An FBI spokeswoman declined to comment Friday about the matter, saying the bureau would not discuss an ongoing congressional investigation.

Many of the most damaging details to surface Friday centered on the CIA’s handling of information it obtained about Almihdhar and Hazmi but failed to disclose to the FBI or other authorities.

Even before the meeting in Malaysia, the report said, the CIA had Almihdhar’s full name and passport number, and knew that he held a multiple-entry U.S. visa that would not expire until April 2000.

In March of that year, the CIA learned that Hazmi already was in the United States, having flown into Los Angeles International Airport on Jan. 15.

But the CIA “did not act on this information,” the congressional report says, even when the agency subsequently learned that Almihdhar also had arrived in Los Angeles that day.

The agency’s failure to tell the FBI about the suspects’ arrival in the United States is “puzzling because it occurred shortly after the peak of intelligence community alertness to possible millennium-related terrorist attacks,” the report says. Indeed, Hazmi and Almihdhar arrived in Southern California just weeks after the arrest of another Al Qaeda operative on the Canadian border who later admitted he was plotting to bomb LAX.

The two suspects made no apparent attempt to hide their presence in the United States. They moved to San Diego, where they used their true names on a rental agreement. Almihdhar even used his real name to obtain a California Department of Motor Vehicles photo identification card.

On July 7, 2000, Hazmi applied to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for an extension of his visa using the San Diego address. He lived there until December, when he moved to Mesa, Ariz., where he joined Hani Hanjour, believed to have been the one who piloted the hijacked Flight 77.

Almihdhar left the United States, flying to Frankfurt, Germany, but returned to this country July 4, 2001, barely two months before the attacks.

The CIA’s interest in the Malaysia meeting soared in early 2001, when it learned that a key planner of the Cole attack the previous fall had attended the gathering. For the first time, Almihdhar and Hazmi were directly linked to a top Al Qaeda operative.

But even though the FBI had launched a massive investigation of the Cole attack, the CIA continued to withhold critical information, investigators said.

At meetings in May and June, FBI agents were shown CIA photos of the Malaysia meeting. FBI officials later told investigators that Almihdhar came up in discussions in those meetings but that the CIA said nothing about his travels to the United States or why the agency was tracking him, the report said.

The intelligence official also said CIA officials may have been reluctant to pass on certain information because they had been advised by FBI officials in Washington “not to get into operational details,” as it might taint ongoing investigations.

Eleanor Hill, staff director of the congressional probe, said CIA officials offered a number of explanations for failing to recognize and share important information about the two would-be hijackers.

At one point, the CIA officer analyzing the Malaysia meeting was assigned to another task and the matter was “dropped” for some time, Hill said.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2001, amid a torrent of intelligence traffic indicating an imminent threat from Al Qaeda, that the CIA finally sounded an alarm about Hamzi and Almihdhar.

On Aug. 23, the agency ordered the FBI, the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to put the two on watch lists. But by then, the men were in the United States, and the attacks were just 19 days away.

Relatives of victims of the attacks have attended the hearings, and they reacted emotionally at times to the testimony.

“This is a national disgrace,” said Sally Regenhard, who said her son was a firefighter who was killed at the World Trade Center. “I don’t want to hear the words ‘lessons learned.’ I want accountability and responsibility.”