| The FBI Missed Massaoui By Antonio C. Abaya April 21, 2004 President Bush�s National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleeza Rice, whose testimony before and questioning by the bipartisan 9/ll Congressional Commission in early April had me glued to CNN for three whole hours, insisted that there was no �silver bullet� that could have stopped the suicide attacks of 9/11. Dr. Rice also testified that in the many conferences that she attended with other security principals of the Bush administration and in those conducted by their deputies, they had all been encouraged to �shake the tree,� but apparently no fruit fell to the ground to convince the sluggish bureaucracy that al-Qaeda was about to strike. She lamented that in the 233 days that she occupied her office, the security agencies (who were not sharing information with each other) evaluated thousands of security threats, but there was never any specific information as to who, what, where and how. Was she, perhaps, waiting for a gold-embossed invitation to the suicide bombing? In the Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) of August 6, 2001, titled �Bin Laden determined to attack the US,� delivered to President Bush more than a month before the actual attacks, mention was made that Osama bin Laden had wanted to strike inside the US �as early as 1997.� Dr. Rice also testified that she did not receive any warnings before Sept. 11 that a plane might be used as a terrorist weapon. As early as 1997? And no specific warnings that a plane might be used as a terrorist weapon? In 1995, Philippine police had broken up an al-Qaeda cell in Manila and foiled a plot to hijack and blow up 12 US airliners which fly routes across the Pacific. During the investigation, one of the captured terrorists, Hakim Murad, revealed that there was also a plan to hijack airliners INSIDE the US and to crash them against tall buildings. This information was passed on to the Americans, presumably the CIA, which apparently did not pass it on to the FBI, which has sole jurisdiction over the continental USA. An example of what Dr. Rice termed a structural flaw in the security apparatus � the CIA and the FBI did not share information with each other - which took her more than 233 days, or well past 9/11, to correct. No wonder President Bush did not find Murad�s revelation in his PDB of August 6, 2001. This was not the only failure of intelligence. In late 2000 or early 2001 - I cannot recall which � the CIA, with the help of the Malaysian police, were able to track two al-Qaeda suspects, whose names I also cannot recall, attending a meeting in Kuala Lumpur and monitored their movements until they boarded an airliner for the US. But the CIA, again, apparently did not share that information with the FBI, and the two suspected terrorists were not tracked from their initial stay in San Diego (CA) to their eventual move to the East Coast where they made history with the 17 other hijackers on Sept. 11. It was only after 9/11 that their whereabouts were tracked backwards from their credit cards and motel bookings. The movement of these two, from Kuala Lumpur to San Diego, were also not mentioned in President Bush�s August 6 PDB, and, for reasons that I do not know or understand, did not merit any notice at all when the 9/11 Commission questioned Dr. Rice. But the most glaring failure of US intelligence, most especially of the FBI, has got to be Zacarias Massaoui. The hijackers who struck on 9/ll numbered 19, an odd number for such a meticulously planned operation. Almost certainly, there should have been 20, five for each hijacked airplane. And Massaoui was almost certainly the 20th. But Massaoui was arrested in Minnesota on August 16, for a visa violation. I wrote about Massaoui in my column of May 30, 2002, titled �World Trade Center Revisited� (archived in the website www.tapatt.org). Allow me to quote myself: �I was going to write in January (2002) that the FBI had failed to act on information gathered on a Frenchman of Moroccan descent, Zacarias Massaoui, who had been arrested for a visa violation in August (2001), and was found a) to have a manual on crop-dusting in his back-pack; and b) to have tried to enroll in two flying schools, one in Oklahoma, the other in Minnesota, arousing suspicion with his expressed interest only in steering an airborne plane, not in taking off or in landing. �In addition, I was going to write in January (2002) that French police had told the Americans in August (2001) that Massaoui was connected with al-Qaeda. His own mother had admitted to reporters that he was involved with Islamic fundamentalists. �Incredibly, the FBI failed to search Massaoui�s apartment or computer��.. �It has now been revealed that an FBI agent in Phoenix (AZ) did inform FBI headquarters last July (2001) that several Middle Eastern men were training at an Arizona flight school and recommended that this be discussed by the higher-ups. It wasn�t���. �The mass of information that the FBI/CIA had collected from the Philippine police, the French police and their own agents prior to Sept. 11 should have rung bells at headquarters that Massaoui was a prize catch and should have been pumped for information. He wasn�t. His apartment was not even searched and his computer was not impounded. Incredibly, they saw him only as a visa violator, nothing more���� If the FBI top brass had shaken the Massaoui tree in mid-August 2001 and had connected the dots supplied by the Philippine police, the French police and their own field agents, chances are that at least one silver bullet would have fallen to the ground, if I may be allowed to mix Condi�s metaphors, and 9/11 could arguably have been prevented. But they didn�t. Was it bureaucratic inertia, cultural hubris or just plain stupidity? Probably a combination of all three. In September 2001, Director Robert Muller had just taken over from Acting Director Thomas Pickard, who himself had just taken over from resigned Director Louis Freeh. History, however, has a way of repeating itself, and the philosopher Santayana is said to have warned that those who do not learn from the mistakes of the past are condemned to repeat them. Just before 7:00 am of December 7, 1941, two non-com operators of a field radar station in a remote corner of Oahu (Hawaii) rang up their lieutenant to report that their instrument had picked up a swarm of airplanes coming down from the north. Roused from bed, the lieutenant famously replied, �I wouldn�t worry about it,� and promptly went back to sleep. At 7:55 am, the first Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. ***** The bulk of this article appears in the May 01, 2004 issue of the Philippines Free Press magazine. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Just in TIME (issue of April 26, 2004, Asia Edition, page 30-31) 4 Dots American Intelligence Failed to Connect Could 9/11 have been prevented? In four crucial cases, mishandled intelligence, bureaucratic tangles and legal hurdles blinded the CIA and the FBI to clues right in front of them. Individually, none of these was a smoking gun. But combined they were a four-alarm fire. �By Mitch Frank 1 Operation Bojinka, Jan. 7, 1995 The Clue in Manila. Philippine police bust a cadre of al-Qaeda members plotting to blow up 12 airplanes, a scheme they called Operation Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for explosion). On a test run, the conspirators had planted a small bomb on a Philippine Air Lines flight that killed one passenger. Officials finger Ramzi Yousef - the wanted leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing � and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the plot�s masterminds. An accomplice of Yousef�s, Abdul Karim Murad, who learned to fly at a US flight school, tells interrogators that he and Yousef discussed a plan to fly a small plane packed with explosives or a hijacked jumbo jet into the CIA�s Langley, Va., headquarters or into other American targets. What Happened? Bojinka was only one of several hints of potential attacks involving aircraft, yet U.S. intelligence did not give the idea serious consideration. Others included an attempt by Algerian terrorists to crash a hijacked plane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994. A foreign intelligence service told U.S. agents in 1998 of al-Qaeda plans to hijack a plane and bargain for the release of blind cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, who was in a U.S. prison for his role in the first World Trade Center attack. What Could Have Happened? The intelligence community could have analyzed attacks al-Qaeda might attempt with planes and determined that recruiting qualified pilots was a major obstacle. FBI agents could have monitored aviation schools for possible Islamic extremists. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) could have hardened cockpits and banned all blades from airplanes, as it did after 9/11. 2 The Malaysia Meeting, Jan. 5, 2001 The Clue. 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi arrive in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with Khallad bin Attash; they stay with Yazid Sufaat. Suspecting that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi are al-Qaeda members, the CIA monitors them there. From a third country, the CIA learns that al-Midhar�s passport contains a U.S. visa. After a few days, the three men leave for Bangkok, where Thai intelligence agents lose them. What Happened? Thai authorities tell the CIA in March that al-Hazmi flew to Los Angeles on Jan. 15. The CIA takes no action. Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar move to San Diego. Al-Midhar leaves in June for Yemen. In January 2001, the CIA realizes that bin Attash, by this time identified as a key figure in the October 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole, was at the Kuala Lumpur meetings. But no effort is made to pick up the trail of al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. Two FBI analysts detailed to the CIA ask the INS for information on al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. On Aug. 22, the INS tells them al-Midhar returned to the U.S. in July. The CIA puts al-Midhar and al-Hazmi on the TIPOFF watch list and asks the FBI to look for them. The FBI assigns one agent, with no counter-terrorism experience, to track down al-Midhar. Only on 9/11, in the hours before the attacks, does he ask the Los Angeles field office for help. Earlier, a New York FBI agent involved in the Cole criminal investigation asks colleagues for more information about al-Midhar but is told �the wall� separating the agency�s functions prevents him from working on an intelligence case. What Could Have Happened. At several points the CIA could have asked the FBI to trace the two hijackers� activities in the US., which would have led to 9/11 pilot Hani Hanjour, who was training with al-Hazmi. The State Department could have put them on the TIPOFF list much earlier. The FAA could have put them on its no-fly list, keeping them off domestic flights. 3 The Phoenix Memo, July 10, 2001 The Clue. Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sends a memo to two units at FBI headquarters in Washington and to the New York field office describing 10 foreign students at aviation schools who are under investigation for ties to Sunni extremists. Williams theorizes that Bin Laden could be systematically sending students to study aviation in the U.S. and recommends that agents compile a list of such schools, establish contacts with them, discuss his theory with the rest of the intelligence community and obtain background information on foreign students applying to flying schools. What Happened. Two FBI specialists in Washington � one in the radical fundamentalists unit, one in a unit dedicated to bin Laden � analyze the memo and consult two other specialists about the legal implications. On Aug. 7 they decide to close the case and come back to it when they have time. Three agents in the New York office read the memo but are not asked to take follow-up action. The terrorism unit in New York knows that bin Laden sent employees to U.S. flight schools in the past but believes he just wanted them to fly his private planes. What Could Have Happened. Two of the suspects Williams mentioned did have al-Qaeda links; one trained with Hanjour at an Arizona flight school. A thorough investigation of flight schools might have led to one in Florida where an instructor recalled the odd behavior of 9/11 pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi or to a California outfit that expelled al-Hazmi and al-Midhar for lack of flight skills and poor English. Had Williams� memo been sent to all FBI field offices, it could have set off alarms at the Minneapolis field office when would-be pilot Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in August. 4 The 747 Trainee, August 13, 2001 The Clue. Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui begins training at a Minneapolis flight school after writing instructors that he wants to learn how to fly jumbo jets. His teachers discover he has almost no flight knowledge but wants to train on the flight simulator. The manager reports Moussaoui�s suspicious behavior to the local FBI office. Agents question Moussaoui and then have the INS arrest him for staying too long without a visa. What Happened. Convinced that Moussaoui is plotting to seize control of an airplane, Minnesota FBI agents seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to search his belongings. French sources tell agents Moussaaoui has ties to Islamist militants, but FBI headquarters does not believe that justifies a FISA warrant. After the FBI contacts the CIA about the case, CIA chief George Tenet gets a briefing titled �Extremist Learns to Fly.� An agent at FBI headquarters complains to a Minnesota agent on Aug. 27 that he is getting people �spun up� about Moussaoui. The agent replies that he is worried will �take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.� What Could Have Happened. Had the FISA warrant been approved, as it would be today under a proposed change in rules, agents would have found in Moussaoui�s belongings a letter signed by Sufaat, who the CIA knew was the host of the 2000 Kuala Lumpur meetings that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi attended. They would have also discovered a notebook containing the name Ahad Sabet, the alias of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who wired money to Moussaoui and was a roommate of 9/11 pilots Atta, al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. That might have enabled agents to speculate about a plot involving aircraft and to bar the three pilots from all flights. (My article of May 30, 2002, titled �World Trade Center Revisited�[archived in this website] dwelt on three of Time Magazine�s Four Dots above: Operation Bojinka, The Phoenix Memo, and The 747 Trainee. This April 21, 2004 article, to which �Just in Time� is appended, mentions the fourth Dot: The Malaysia Meeting. ACA) OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �The FBI Missed Massaoui� You and I and others who can follow and use deductive reasoning see the "total" picture! But it seems, the vast majority or else a majority of Americans (mostly of the red-neck variety) ONLY see and hear what they want to see and hear and think GWB with his "messianic militarism" is the victim of the intellectual do-nothing elites who never ever have or act on "gut" feelings! It would seem all the commissions' hearing reports and conclusions - just are over their heads (literally) - just so much flak bouncing off their beloved bullet-proof vested President! And now the commission is seen as definitely too "partisan" and they're crying for the head of one Democratic panel member! And Kerry and his campaign managers can't seem to aim right and drive the point home!!!! Maria Vicoria Go, [email protected] April 23, 2004 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article on intelligence failures that you might want to look at. I'm attaching it for your perusal. Basically he makes the point that what seems obvious after the fact was not so obvious at the time. Raul Rodrigo, [email protected] April 23, 2004 wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww hi Antonio, very very good writing...thanks for posting it. I wanted to post this to another ygroup that im a member of. but before i did, i wanted to get your permission to re-post it. Terry John B. Tiongson, [email protected] April 23, 2004 MY REPLY. Ok to re-post it, as long as due acknowledgement of source is made. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww we already knew and read what you sent, no need in sending this on people leaving in north america. [email protected] April 24, 2004 MY REPLY. You mean, �no need in sending this to people living in North America.� If you don�t even know basic English grammar and vocabulary, how can you consider yourself well-informed in an English-speaking milieu? wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww At 10:52 PM 4/23/2004, you wrote: >The lieutenant famously replied, "I wouldn't worry about it," and promptly >went back to sleep. At 7:55 am, the first Japanese bombs fell on Pearl >Harbor. ***** You seem to defend the very orthodox side of the story here. General Short and Admiral Kimmel, in charge of Hawaii at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack were both fired and demoted for failure to ward off the attack. The war criminal Roosevelt and his General Marshall knew the attack was coming, having monitored it from the beginning, after they provoked it in the first place. They sacrificed 2400 lives on Hawaii in order to have a reason to get into the war - but not before sending their carriers to safety first. Why don't you mention that? It was an inside job, like 9/11. On October 30, 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a defense appropriations bill containing congressional findings that both Kimmel and Short were denied crucial military intelligence. They were posthumously reinstated. [email protected] April 24, 2004 MY REPLY. If you are so cocky about your view of history, why don�t you sign your real name and say what you really want to say, namely, that the Jews bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Jews bombed the World Trade Center. At least, you get it off your chest and you can breathe easier. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww The U.S. can certainly improve on its intelligence capability but its arrogance and greed will continue to make it a terrorist target. Only when the U.S. can learn to be a citizen of the world can it be truly safe. Gico Dayanghirang, [email protected] April 25, 2004 Davao City wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww (Through the pilipinasforum egroup) It's good that the US government impartially investigates policies, procedures, and historical records in order to fix whatever structural mistakes in its bureaucracy which may have contributed to the terrorist attack on September 11, 1991. If such an investigation and report were to be conducted in the Philippines, I doubt if there would be such thoroughness and impartiality as has been exhibited so far. There could even have been a lot of political grandstanding, roadblocking, or steamrollering, as what usually happens in many high-profile court cases or Congressional "investigations in aid of legislation" done here in the Philippines -- but America has avoided getting it overpoliticized and biased. Thus such individual testimonies such as the one given by Dr. Condoleeza Rice contribute to everyone's overall understanding of the terrorist attack and the US governments disjointed lack of response to its initial threat. Hindsight is always more revealing than foresight, after all. Still is there a need to pillory individual members of the US security services for what nobody in their wildest dreams assumed was likely to happen? It is easy to play the blame game against the heads of such agencies while smugly snickering "Why didn't you notice such and such a thing under your noses?" Three years after 9/11/2001, however, is the US homeland security infrastructure still the same clumsy stovepiped setup that it once was? Not anymore. There is a term for the isolation and separation between different US security, police, and intelligence-gathering organizations. It is called "stovepiping" after the manner in which individual organizations have no links with other organizations that are supposedly in the same line of work or have the same mission as them. Thus the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the US Border Patrol, the US Secret Service, the US Coast Guard, the US Federal Marshal Service, and every other state or county police department in the US has a tradition of limiting their individual contacts with each other and preventing others from overstepping into their individual turfs. Thus also, the FBI can interfere or take over a local police investigation only if a federal or interstate offense is being committed, and they have to ask permission before they can even examine evidence collected by local authorities. This process was one of the built-in methods by which the US Federal Government prevents its own police forces from merging into one combined, integrated, synergistic, and all-powerful "secret police" organization that could threaten everyone's individual freedom. The question of "Who will guard the citizens against the guardians?" is answered within the US government by setting up separate guardian agencies who will watch each other and prevent one from overstepping its bounds. Thus the CIA and the US military are prevented by law from setting up stand-alone operations within US territory or targeted against US citizens. The NSA's analysis are matched against the reports of the CIA analysts. The FBI's jurisdiction ends and an investigation is turned over to other government agencies if the perpetrators of an illegal activity are found to be sanctioned by a foreign government. State police and local county sheriffs sometimes butt heads in preventing each other from overstepping local boundaries instead of cooperating to capture slippery criminals. Stovepiping is less efficient than centralization but it helps protect democracy by limiting the scope of a powerful police organization. In the US system, however, turf protection became a time-honored tradition that was carried away too far, such that critical information that should have been handed over efficiently across one interagency boundary to the next became sluggish or easily blocked at critical points (depending on the attitudes of the individual case officers or investigators). Once the structural flaw of stovepiping was identified, however, the President George W. Bush was very quick in immediately creating a new policy and agency for Homeland Defense and Security. Thus the new agency became tasked with consolidating all national, federal, state, and county police and intelligence organizations into a seamless and collaborative network that would share information instead of hoarding it. This hasn't been easy to do given the decades-long internal cultures of each organization but 9/11 and the need to prevent another homeland terrorist incident forced them to do it. The saying "That which does not kill us immediately just serves to make us stronger" is applicable to the US homeland security setup. The US government has had three years to restructure its interagency procedures and information sharing policies since the terrorists launched their attack on an unsuspecting America. I doubt if Osama Bin Laden will have as easy a time sending in sleeper agents to conduct their training on American soil as he had in the past. With every US security agency on the look out for Islamist extremists and even organized criminals, such terrorists will be forced to conduct their training outside of the US. Then they have to run the gauntlet of trying to penetrate the US borders and ports of entry as well as to slip past the layered defenses of possible targeted installations. Half-trained agents and terrorists may get lucky and be able to penetrate but they most likely won't be able to do as much damage as they want or be able to escape (assuming they want to escape and will not immolate themselves). How long does it take to train a terrorist? Probably at least a year, involving practical skills combined with indoctrination and "live practice" against real targets. Such training is expensive to sustain and can just serve to make individual terrorists visible or identifiable via their signature actions. With international cooperation and collaboration between the USA, UK, NATO, Israel, Japan, Interpol, and other US allies, Islamist extremists will have a more difficult time "disappearing" for training and "reappearing" for operations. With individual nations contributing various local efforts (such as the Philippine's successes against the Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiyah, and Al-Qaeda), the days when terrorist-trainees could easily fly overseas as transnational mujahideen is now over. Confirmed terrorists are getting quietly caught in the net more often and are ending up held incommunicado or shipped to other countries without much fanfare. Their cohorts are being left to wonder how some of them get caught and how much information they've spilled to the authorities. It is important to let the citizens of the free world know that terrorism is getting to be a very unprofitable and hazardous line of work because of the steady successes of the US and its allies. The terrorists may succeed in exploding some bombs against the civilians and US soldiers in Iraq for the moment, but that's because Iraq is still a lawless and uncontrolled area where gunmen can still freely roam. Once the pacification drives and Iraqi security build-up gains momentum, it will be less easy for gunmen and terrorists to move around and kill Iraqis or foreign visitors there. Selwyn Clyde M. Alopijan, [email protected] April 26, 2004 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |
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