Missed Opportunities Shadow 9/11 Attacks

Last week’s hearings on the Sept. 11 attacks were like rewinding a movie with a hauntingly tragic ending. Again and again, commissioners backed up the tape and hit pause at critical passages, always with a single question in mind: If this sequence or that had taken an alternate turn, could the ending have been different?

And although almost every high-powered witness called before the Sept. 11 commission said they did not think so, the hearings brought years of U.S. counterterrorism efforts into a sharper focus that suggested a more complicated answer.

Testimony detailed unfulfilled efforts and opportunities to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; to launch Predator aircraft into the skies of Afghanistan; and, in the final months before the attacks, to mobilize intelligence across the federal government in an urgent search for clues.

Each episode was a turning point in the war on terrorism before many Americans even knew there was such a war. Each was an opportunity to deliver a blow to Al Qaeda or roll up cells whose intentions were unclear. In hindsight, they also represented chances to bump the Sept. 11 plot off its course.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, said in an interview he thought the attacks were preventable.

“There are probably 16 or 17 different events that, had they happened differently, would have had an effect,” said Kean, a Republican.

“Had we been able to get [Bin Laden] back in the late 1990s, and perhaps his No. 2, then I think there’s a real chance that they wouldn’t have been able to put [the plot] together.”

Actions ranging from assassination to surveillance could have made a difference, Kean said.

“If people had been put on watch lists, perhaps some of them would have been stopped before they got on the planes,” he said. “There’s just a whole string of things that happened, that had enough of that gone the other way, probably it would have been preventable.”

In fact, Kean said, U.S. intelligence has compiled psychological profiles of the hijackers, portraying them as so skittish that even minor disruptions very late in the game might have prompted them to cancel or postpone their plans.

“There is evidence from looking at psychological profiles of these hijackers, they were somewhat risk-averse -- very jumpy,” Kean said.

For that reason, he said, the hijackers might have changed course if they had known, for example, that Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected Al Qaeda operative who took flight training in Minnesota, had been arrested by the FBI in the summer of 2001.

“Some officials think that would have spooked them,” Kean said.

A former FBI counterterrorism chief thinks that if the CIA was able to eliminate Bin Laden early enough, it would have crippled the Al Qaeda brain trust and forced the plot to be aborted, or at least delayed.

“Certainly if they also had taken out some of his top guys -- it would have been all over,” said Robert M. Blitzer, chief of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism and Counterterrorism Planning Section until the end of 1998.

From their headquarters in Afghanistan, Blitzer said, Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and a few other lieutenants kept a tight rein on Al Qaeda plots in the late 1990s. They worked with the globe-trotting Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to control finances, oversight of their international network and the execution of large-scale plots, including Sept. 11. At the very least, Blitzer said, Bin Laden’s death could have caused Mohammed -- the mastermind of the attacks -- and the 19 hijackers to abruptly stop their planning and reassess. “That might have given us time to discover the plot, and roll up these guys,” Blitzer said.

No evidence has surfaced to suggest that any U.S. official ever had specific information about the Sept. 11 plot before the attacks. And the missed opportunities cataloged by the commission last week carried costs beyond Sept. 11, as Al Qaeda has since struck numerous other targets.

But to a large extent, the hearings were an exploration of competing chronologies. They showed that while U.S. counterterrorism officials were meeting and drawing up never-used plans to strike Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and his deputies were holding planning meetings of their own, and setting in motion an operation to use airplanes as missiles against highly symbolic American targets. The gnawing question was what would have happened if the United States had executed its plans first.

Most experts and intelligence officials think the Sept. 11 plot was conceived in the mid-1990s by Mohammed, a Kuwaiti who was the operational overseer, maintaining contact with various cells and ensuring that they got resources, instruction and funding. Mohamed is thought to have based the plan on his unsuccessful attempt in 1995 to blow up 12 American passenger jet airliners over the Pacific from his base in the Philippines.

Though accounts remain unclear, the details and components of the Sept. 11 plot came together years later, when Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were increasingly in U.S. sights.

Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the Sept. 11 scheme, is thought to have made his first trip to Afghanistan, to train in Al Qaeda camps, in early 1998. More than a year later, in the fall of 1999, he and two of his cohorts, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, were again in Afghanistan, staying in a Kandahar guest house of Bin Laden.

Authorities think this may have been the occasion when Bin Laden met with the three men, and selected or approved them for their mission. From there, authorities say, he sent them to meet with Mohammed in Karachi, Pakistan, where they apparently received at least a preliminary set of marching orders.

These developments came as the United States was taking its first steps to target Bin Laden. After U.S. embassies in East Africa were bombed in 1998, the United States retaliated by striking Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan with cruise missiles. No senior leaders were killed, and the United States spent years waiting for another opportunity.

In preliminary findings presented last week, the commission pointed to four instances, from December 1998 through July 1999, in which the United States got intelligence -- predominantly from Afghan sources on the ground -- about Bin Laden’s location. In certain cases, the United States moved submarines into position off the Pakistani coast, ready to fire cruise missiles. But in each case, policymakers decided the intelligence was too thin or the prospect of civilian casualties too great.

The most tantalizing case occurred in February 1999, when Bin Laden spent a week at a remote hunting camp in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. But senior officials from the United Arab Emirates, supposedly an American ally, were also at the camp. The strike was called off because, as CIA Director George J. Tenet testified last week, “You might have wiped out half the royal family in the UAE in the process.” CIA officers in the field would later describe it as a major missed opportunity to kill Bin Laden.

Each of those four chances came months before Atta and the others returned to Afghanistan. If there had been a successful strike on Bin Laden during that period, would the hijackers have returned to Afghanistan and gotten their deadly assignment? Experts have conflicting opinions.

Some think the decapitation of Al Qaeda’s leadership would have created turmoil in its ranks, putting plots on hold and discouraging young recruits from returning to Afghanistan. Others say destruction of the training camps in Afghanistan would have been even more important, depriving the network of its safe haven in which to plot attacks and recruit and train those to carry them out.

“It’s impossible to spot the point on the Sept. 11 timeline when destroying the Al Qaeda leadership would have been decisive,” said Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a former counterterrorism official in the Clinton White House. But “there is an argument,” Benjamin said, that a blow to Bin Laden or other leaders at certain junctures “might have disrupted the plot. Things could have been different.”

Even so, few think it would have been a mortal blow to Al Qaeda, particularly if Bin Laden’s top deputy, Zawahiri, had survived. Matthew Levitt, a terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that “by the time [Atta] went to Afghanistan, Al Qaeda had been organized to a point where [Bin Laden’s deputies] were far more important tactically, in terms of being operational commanders.”

Levitt was referring to such operatives as Zawahiri, Abu Zubaydah and Mohammed Atef.

After July 1999, there was no other occasion when the U.S. cruise missiles were readied for a possible strike. But by 2000, officials were becoming enthusiastic about another option: using Predator drones, pilotless planes that can hover over targets for hours and capture surveillance images, to track Bin Laden from the sky.

After initial hesitation, the CIA sent 16 drones over Afghanistan in the fall of 2000. At least twice, the drones saw a security detail around a tall man in a white robe. Richard Clarke, then the White House terrorism chief, would later conclude that the imagery provided by the planes was “truly astonishing,” and so rich in detail that he could say with “very high probability” that it was Bin Laden.

By that point, the government had considered sets of plans to insert U.S. forces, covert operatives or Afghan proxies to capture or kill Bin Laden. But the proposals were always deemed too risky, and the fallback option remained cruise missiles.

Clarke urged that Clinton’s most senior advisors be ready for emergency meetings to decide whether to strike if Bin Laden was again spotted by a Predator.

National security advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger argued that Clinton would not have ordered such a strike unless he could have been sure Bin Laden would stay where he had been sighted. The Predator could spot Bin Laden, but knowing his travel plans required on-the-ground intelligence. No strikes were ordered.

The Predator was mothballed during the Afghan winter. By then, the Bush administration was seeking to arm the drones with Hellfire missiles, and the CIA was reluctant to redeploy the drones until they were armed. Sending up unarmed versions, the agency argued, would only allow Al Qaeda and the Taliban to learn to recognize the planes and evade their detection.

In fact, Taliban forces had spotted one of the strange-looking planes the previous fall, and there had been an article in the Afghan press speculating that it was an American attempt to locate Bin Laden.

Clarke argued that the unarmed Predators should be redeployed anyway, again with the idea of seeking an opportunity to strike Bin Laden with cruise missiles, but was overruled. In July, Bush officials ordered the armed Predator to be ready by Sept. 1, but were still trying to resolve “technical issues” at the time of the attacks.

After the attacks, “We just took what we had and deployed it,” one official told the commission. Early in the war in Afghanistan, the planes targeted and killed Bin Laden’s top military chief, Mohammed Atef.

Officials testified last week that killing Bin Laden in 2001 probably would have been too late to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. Atta and other hijackers had entered the United States the previous year and enrolled in flight schools.

They continued to get money transfers from foreign sources, and made numerous trips overseas, but seemed to be operating autonomously.

By 2001, “I believe that this plot line was off and running,” Tenet said. “Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was in the middle of it, operators were moving into this country. Decapitating one person -- even Bin Laden in this context -- I do not believe we would have stopped this plot.”

The delays in deploying the Predator came at a time when the new Bush administration was struggling to set its own counterterrorism course. Some of the most damaging testimony last week came from Clarke, who accused Bush of ignoring the terrorist threat and giving more attention to other matters.

The final opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks crumbled amid a series of breakdowns in communications between the CIA, FBI and other agencies over the entry of two of the hijackers into the United States, according to investigators.

Two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, had attended an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia in January 2000. Days later, they boarded flights to Los Angeles, and moved to San Diego, where they lived for much of the next year.

The CIA learned of their entry into the country, and had tied them to Al Qaeda, but failed to put them on State Department watch lists until just weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Meanwhile, the summer of 2001 was marked by such a spike in intelligence traffic that counterterrorism officials were in a state of panic. Clarke said he pushed for an all-out effort by an array of government agencies to scrub their databases for clues to threats to U.S. targets.

Such an effort had played a big part in disrupting a wave of attacks Al Qaeda was planning for the millennium, leading to roll-ups of suspected cells in Brooklyn, Boston and Montreal, as well as disruptions of plots in Jordan and other nations, authorities said.

Had such a push been ordered in the summer of 2001, authorities might have discovered a collection of unconnected dots, including the so-called Phoenix memo -- an e-mail warning from an FBI agent that terrorists might be enrolled in U.S. flight schools -- as well as the information on Alhazmi and Almihdhar, according to investigators.

Clarke has said that he would have broadcast the names and faces of suspected terrorists on television’s “America’s Most Wanted” program and pushed for an all-out manhunt to locate the men, who at one point were listed in the San Diego phone book.

With one or both in custody, authorities might have had chance to unravel at least a portion of the plot. Providing their names to immigration and aviation authorities might have led to them being picked up in instances when they left and reentered the United States, or even when they boarded the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon.

For many who have investigated Sept. 11, this last chance to detect the plot remains the most heart-wrenching.

“To me that [was] still the best chance,” said Eleanor Hill, who was staff director of a separate, congressional investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks concluded last year. “I think had Bin Laden been taken out early on that could have disrupted Al Qaeda and led to other opportunities. But in terms of preventing this particular plot, the best shot was San Diego.”

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Parallel tracks to 9/11

As Al Qaeda plotted its attacks, U.S. officials were trying to track Osama bin Laden and kill him.

The Sept. 11 plot

Mid-1990s -- Plot to use airplanes to attack high-profile U.S. targets conceived by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

Early 1998 -- Plot ringleader Mohammed Atta makes first trip to Afghanistan.

Fall 1999 -- Atta and other hijackers return to Afghanistan, possibly to get blessing from Osama bin Laden, and travel to Karachi to receive preliminary marching orders.

June 2000 -- Atta arrives in United States; he and others begin flight training.

April-June 2001 -- The “muscle” hijackers, those charged with subduing passengers, arrive in the country and are brought into the plot.

Sept. 11 -- 19 hijackers seize control of four airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. About 3,000 are killed.

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Counterterrorism efforts by U.S.

1996 -- CIA creates special “issue station” devoted exclusively to tracking Bin Laden.

Aug. 20, 1998 -- U.S. fires cruise missiles on Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in retaliation for bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

December 1998 through July 1999 -- U.S. gets intelligence on the whereabouts of Bin Laden on four occasions, but does not fire missiles because of questions about the quality of intelligence or concern about civilian casualties.

Fall 2000 -- CIA flies Predator surveillance drones over Afghanistan. In two instances, a surveillance drone provides video of a tall man in white robes who is probably Bin Laden; no cruise missiles are fired.

Winter 2000 -- Predators mothballed for the winter; U.S. seeks to arm its fleet of drones with Hellfire missiles.

Spring 2001 -- Richard Clarke urges redeployment of unarmed drones and the use of cruise missiles if Bin Laden is spotted, but he is overruled by officials who prefer to wait for armed version of drone, which isn’t ready.

July 2001 -- Officials say armed Predator will be available by September.

Summer 2001 -- Spike in intelligence warning of attacks; Clarke urges government-wide push for clues; CIA, which had intelligence that two Al Qaeda operatives had entered the United States in early 2000, fails to place them on watch lists until weeks before the attacks. The two are among the Sept. 11 hijackers.

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Sources: Staff Statements of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States; Report of the Joint Inquiry into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.