Inquiry Into Attack on the Cole in 2000 Missed 9/11 Clues

WASHINGTON, April 10 — The American investigators probing the October 2000 terrorist attack against the Navy destroyer Cole came tantalizingly close to detecting the Sept. 11 plot, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials now say. But the government missed the significance of a series of clues because some investigators believed that the evidence fit narrowly into their case against the ship bombers and, others say, they did not have access to all the information.

The lost opportunity, described by the officials for the first time in interviews this week, involved two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who fell under suspicion by the C.I.A. early in 2000 but were not put on a watch list of foreigners barred from entering the United States until August 2001, after they were already here.

A reconstruction of events shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency failed to recognize the significance of the two men and to act in concert to intercept them because of internal miscommunications and legal restrictions on the sharing of C.I.A. intelligence information with criminal investigators at the F.B.I. Problems developed even though F.B.I. agents and C.I.A. officers were assigned to each other's operational and analytical units.

The reconstruction also shows that the importance of the two men, who have figured centrally in examinations of the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, was misunderstood before the attacks because investigators thought the two were associated with only the Cole bombing. They were not linked with a plot to strike targets within the United States until after Sept. 11, 2001.

"You have to go back to that time and get rid of all your guilty knowledge about what happens later," one C.I.A. official said. "At the time, it was looking more like Alhazmi and al-Midhar were involved in ship bombings."

The government's failure to effectively pursue leads about Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi after they first came to the attention of the C.I.A. in Malaysia in January 2000 will be a focus of hearings next week by the independent commission studying the government's response to terrorist threats before Sept. 11, commission members said.

The performance of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in dealing with Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi has led to years of recriminations and finger-pointing between the organizations. Officials from both agencies, while still in disagreement over critical details, now say the evolution of the Cole investigation is critical to understanding the miscues before Sept. 11. The story opens in Malaysia in January 2000, when Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi attended a meeting of terrorists in Al Qaeda.

When the C.I.A. first heard that suspected Qaeda operatives were planning to gather in Malaysia, the agency was not sure exactly who was going to be there or what the meeting was about. The agency asked the Malaysian security service to watch the meeting and report back. From Jan. 5 to Jan. 8, 2000, at least four suspected terrorists gathered in Kuala Lumpur, including Mr. Midhar, Mr. Alhazmi and a man whose identity was in question but who was known to other Qaeda followers as Khallad.

Khallad was later identified by the C.I.A. as one of Osama bin Laden's operational lieutenants; he is now in United States custody.

The agency, worried about the possibility of terrorist attacks tied to the millennium celebrations, subjected Mr. Midhar to intensive scrutiny, directing a clandestine search of his hotel room in Dubai as he traveled to Malaysia. The search yielded a photocopy of his passport showing that he had obtained a valid visa to enter the United States.

When the Malaysia meeting ended, Khallad, Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi flew to Bangkok. Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi then flew first class to Los Angeles on Jan. 15.

No one at the C.I.A. or F.B.I. knew then that Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi were part of a hijacking plot, but their movements were troubling enough that they could have been placed on a State Department watch list to bar their entry into the United States. George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the Sept. 11 commission in an interview that the C.I.A. did not do so.

Still, the C.I.A. was not sure what to make of the Malaysia meeting until the Cole bombing later that year.

The F.B.I., which took the lead in the investigation of the Cole bombing in Yemen, quickly began to focus on Khallad as a key figure in the plot.

His real name was Walid Ba'Attash. The nickname Khallad was a reference to his artificial left leg, which he had lost in fighting in Afghanistan. A 9/11 commission staff report says Khallad means silver in Arabic, a translation not borne out by dictionaries. It was not long before the F.B.I. determined that Khallad had hand-delivered the go-ahead letter to the suicide bombers who rammed an explosive-laden boat into the Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, in the port of Aden, Yemen, killing 17 sailors.

At the time of the Cole investigation, "Khallad was not a new name to either the agency or the bureau," said one C.I.A. official. "And within a couple of weeks of the attack, both agencies knew that Khallad was involved in the Cole."

"What we were not able to do was focus on Alhazmi and al-Midhar," said another C.I.A. official, discussing the leads that almost intersected with the 9/11 plot. "We were focusing on Khallad, and the Cole, and not on them. We just didn't get there."

Less than a month after the Cole bombing, the F.B.I. got a break when a suspect named Fahd al-Quso told investigators about his dealings with Khallad. Along with one of the Cole bombers, Mr. Quso said that he had flown from Yemen to Bangkok in January 2000 for a secretive meeting in which he turned over $36,000 in cash to Khallad. F.B.I. agents, suspicious of Mr. Quso's account but eager to learn whatever they could about Khallad and whether the meeting was a Cole planning session, turned to the C.I.A. for help and sent a formal query in November 2000.

The F.B.I. investigators gave the C.I.A. Khallad's Yemeni passport picture and a phone number at a Bangkok hotel that seemed connected with the meeting with Mr. Quso, who is one of two men who were indicted in New York in the Cole bombing. In an interview, C.I.A. officials acknowledged that they had received the request from the F.B.I. But from that point on, through the summer of 2001, the accounts of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. differ on crucial details relating to the cooperation between them.

Former and current F.B.I. officials said that the C.I.A. failed to share critical information about the Malaysia meeting, and in particular about Khallad, Mr. Alhazmi and Mr. Midhar. C.I.A. officials said in interviews that their records showed that the F.B.I. was told everything that the intelligence agency was learning about Khallad and the Malaysia meeting. The Sept. 11 commission staff has learned that the F.B.I. director at the time, Louis J. Freeh, was personally briefed about the Malaysia meeting at the time it occurred and that lower-level F.B.I. officials were also informed.

C.I.A. officials now say that the strange story Mr. Quso had told about his trip to Thailand, accompanied by one of the bombers in the Cole attack, prompted the joint F.B.I.-C.I.A. team working on the Cole investigation to review the available evidence about the Malaysia meeting.

That led them to ask a trusted source known as Omar to look at surveillance photographs of the Malaysia meeting. In January 2001, Omar recognized a photo of Khallad, establishing a direct link between the Cole bombing and the meeting. C.I.A. officials say the F.B.I. was aware that Khallad had been identified in Malaysia.

F.B.I. agents, however, dispute this C.I.A. account, contending that they were not informed about Khallad's role or other details about the Malaysia meeting until after the Sept. 11 attacks. That disagreement is at the heart of a continuing dispute between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. Had they known that Khallad was at the Malaysia meeting, F.B.I. officials contend, they would have given much greater scrutiny to Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi.

In April 2001, the F.B.I. sent another query to the C.I.A. asking about a phone number in Kuala Lumpur and passing along information about the Washington Hotel in Bangkok, which investigators had determined was the site of Mr. Quso's meeting with Khallad.

On June 11, 2001, F.B.I. agents and C.I.A. officers met in New York to brainstorm about the Cole investigation. An F.B.I agent from the bureau's Washington headquarters took along surveillance photographs taken during the Malaysia meeting. But agents in New York were not shown the photograph of Khallad. It is unclear why, although some F.B.I. officials suggest that the photograph was not shown at the meeting because of tight restrictions then in effect regarding the use of intelligence information in criminal cases.

In August 2001, heightened threat warnings prompted the C.I.A. to reopen its files on many terrorism cases, including the Malaysia meeting, to look for patterns that might help explain what Al Qaeda might be planning. "Because of the spike in reporting, people were told to review everything," said a C.I.A. official. An examination of the Kuala Lumpur meeting files meant a new look at Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi, and a realization that they were at large and needed to be kept out of the United States.

On Aug. 23, 2001, the C.I.A. directed the State Department to place them on a watch list that banned them from entry into the United States. Within a few days, investigators concluded that both men were probably in the United States. On Sept. 11, an F.B.I. agent in New York sent an e-mail message to the F.B.I.'s Los Angeles office asking it to begin a search for Mr. Midhar. By then Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi and two other terrorists had hijacked American Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.

More information on FBI from New York Newday, 4/10/04:

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uscomm103749699apr10,0,1170602.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines

Disputing Rice testimony
She told the 9/11 panel of 70 investigations on al-Qaida and of orders to boost surveillance before attacks, but FBI officials dispute both

BY KNUT ROYCE AND TOM BRUNE
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The FBI on Friday disputed National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony that it was conducting 70 separate investigations of al-Qaida cells in the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Rice, testifying before the Sept. 11 commission Thursday, said that those 70 investigations were mentioned in a CIA briefing to the president and satisfied the White House that the FBI was doing its job in response to dire warnings that attacks were imminent and that the administration felt it had no need to act further.

But the FBI Friday said that those investigations were not limited to al-Qaida and did not focus on al-Qaida cells. FBI spokesman Ed Coggswell said the bureau was trying to determine how the number 70 got into the report.

The Aug. 6, 2001, memo was prescient in its title, which she divulged for the first time as "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

She said the briefing memo disclosed that the FBI had 70 "full-field investigations under way of [al-Qaida] cells" in the United States. And that, Rice said, explained why "there was no recommendation [coming from the White House] that we do something about" the flurry of threat warnings in the months preceding the attacks.

But Coggswell Friday said that those 70 investigations involved a number of international terrorist organizations, not just al-Qaida. He said that many were criminal investigations, which terrorism experts say are not likely to focus on preventing terrorist acts. And he said he would "not characterize" the targets of the investigations as cells, or groups acting in concert, as was the case with the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition to these investigations, Rice told the panel that FBI headquarters, reacting to alarming but vague intelligence in the spring and summer of 2001 that attacks were imminent, "tasked all 56 of its U.S. field offices to increase surveillance of known suspected terrorists" and to contact informants who might provide leads.

That, too, is news to the field offices. Commissioner Timothy J. Roemer told Rice that the commission had "to date ... found nobody, nobody at the FBI, who knows anything about a tasking of field offices." Even Thomas Pickard, at the time acting FBI director, told the panel that he "did not tell the field offices to do this," Roemer said.

Two and a half years after the terrorist attacks, it remains unclear why the FBI, given the general but dire warnings that preceded the attacks, did not go on full alert.

The agency clearly believed something was afoot. On July 12 of that year, Assistant FBI Director Dale Watson, chief of the counterterrorism division, told the National Governors Association that a significant terrorist attack was likely on U.S. soil. "I'm not a gloom-and-doom-type person," he said. "But I will tell you this. [We are] headed for an incident inside the United States."

The Aug. 6 CIA memo, called the president's daily brief, includes this passage: "The FBI indicates patterns of suspicious activity in the United States consistent with preparations for hijacking." This line was read into the record by Commissioner Bob Kerrey, but the memo itself remains classified. The White House said it may declassify it as early as next week.

Asked to elaborate on the nature of the suspicious activities, Coggswell, the FBI spokesman, said, "I can't speak to that classified document."

Some answers may come Tuesday, when Louis J. Freeh, the FBI's director until June 2001, and Pickard, who then served as acting director until a few days before Sept. 11, testify publicly before the commission.

What bothers me the most is the 9/11 Commissioners duping the American people into thinking that the intel community and our government are infused with infallibility.

Exactly. And, even beyond that, the 9-11 Commission is going down the wrong road. The point is not to figure out how to avoid another 9-11. The 9-11 terrorism strategem was effective for about 45 minutes - from the time that the first plane crashed into the WTC to the time that the passengers on Flight 93 took matters into their own hands.

We don't have to prevent another 9-11 - that specific event will never happen again, because passengers won't let it. But the terrorists are working on another paradigm. And we're not properly examining why our intelligence cannot detect the paradigm as it develops. Until we reach that point, we are highly vulnerable.

It appears that the FBI has consistently been unable to look past their nose. I was always taught to leave no stone unturned. No matter where it led, at least you could say you followed it up. Back in '93, in the aftermath of the WTC bombing, I believe the FBI & NYPD investigation failed to look at the big picture that was right in front of them. For example, in a NY Times article in March '93: "One leading law enforcement official said, the bombing is seen as an act by ill-trained New York-area plotters operating independently and without direct orders from a foreign government or international terrorist network."

This statement leads one to believe that the FBI & law enforcement personnel viewed the terrorists as rinky-dink, two-bit crooks. In reality though, this so-called inept group managed to blow a 100 foot crater in the parking garage of the WTC, killing 6 people and injuring 100.

Four days after the attack, the NY Times received a letter from individuals claiming to have committed the bombing. They threatened to continue their missions against military and civilian targets if their demands were not met, and claimed to have an army of 150 suicidal warriors ready to attack those targets. The NY Times article dated 3/28/93 reports: "Some Federal Investigators and police officials discounted the group’s claim (in letter), that they have more than 150 suicidal soldiers” ready to attack other United States civilian and military targets. “There’s no reason to believe that threat is real,” said one top investigator. “We can try to prepare for everything, but we can’t lock up the city.”

The FBI & NYPD may have changed their minds as this investigation progressed, however, it shows the mindset that appears to be pretty common among investigators. Is it arrogance or just plain ignorance?

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