The NSA did not immediately share this information either with the CIA or with other agencies—a symptom of the interagency disconnect that long plagued U.S. intelligence. The CIA did learn of the intercepts, however, and eventually obtained summaries of intercepted conversations. It was the start of a period of frustratingly sporadic, incomplete access granted by the NSA to material harvested from the hub.
Hada’s telephone also came to loom large for the FBI. One of the Kenya bombers called the number before and after the 1998 attack on Nairobi, and—once agents learned that the number also took calls from bin Laden’s sat-phone on the day of the bombing and the following day—they had a vital evidentiary link between the East Africa attacks and al Qaeda.
The intercepts of Hada’s phone conversations were a priceless resource, and in 1999 yielded the first factual pointer to the preparations for 9/11. Hada’s daughter, U.S. intelligence learned at some stage, was married to a young man named “Khalid”—full name, as we now know, Khalid al-Mihdhar. In December 1999, crucially, the NSA reported to both the CIA and the FBI that it had intercepted an especially interesting call on the Hada telephone, one that mentioned an upcoming trip by “Khalid” and “Nawaf” to Malaysia.
From the start, CIA officers guessed that this was no innocent excursion. Its purpose, one staffer suspected, was “something more nefarious.” The travel, one cable stated, “may be in support of a terrorist mission.” The men were referred to early on as members of an “operational cadre” or as “terrorist operatives.”
The episode that was eventually to bring the Agency lasting shame began as textbook undercover work. As foreshadowed in an earlier chapter, Mihdhar’s Saudi passport was photographed during the stopover in Dubai—leading to the startling revelation that the terrorist had a visa valid for travel to the United States.
As veteran FBI counterterrorism specialist Jack Cloonan was to say, “This is as good as it gets.… How often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple-entry visas? How often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of al Qaeda anyplace in the world? … This is what you would dream about.”
Intelligence bounty continued to rain down on the CIA following the look inside Mihdhar’s passport. The suspect was tracked as he traveled on to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. He was watched, starting on January 5, as he met and talked with fellow suspects—including his associate Nawaf al-Hazmi. Courtesy of Malaysia’s Special Branch, the men were covertly photographed, observed going out to pay phones, surveilled when they went to an Internet café to use the computers. The computers’ hard drives were reportedly examined afterward.
The whirl of suspicious activity was of interest not merely to CIA agents in the field, nor only to CIA headquarters at Langley. For it all occurred in the very first days of January 2000, the post-Millennium moment when Washington was more than usually on the alert—at the highest level—for any clue that might herald a terrorist attack. Regular situation reports went day by day not only to the directors of the CIA and the FBI but also to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his staff, who included Richard Clarke, at the White House.
Three days later, on January 8, Mihdhar and two of his comrades—one of them later to be identified as having been Hazmi and the other as senior bin Laden henchman Tawfiq bin Attash—took the brief two-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Thai capital Bangkok. There, according to the CIA, and though communication with a Bangkok hotel was logged on one of the pay phones used by the suspects in Kuala Lumpur, the trail was lost.
Nothing would be known of the operatives’ whereabouts, the available record indicates, until two months later. Only then, according to the known record, did Thai authorities respond to a January CIA request to watch for the suspects’ departure. At last, however, in early March, two Agency stations abroad reported a fresh development. Their message said that Hazmi and an unnamed comrade—only later to be named as Mihdhar—had flown out of Bangkok as long ago as January 15, bound for Los Angeles. The men, the cables noted, were “UBL [bin Laden] associates.”
This was stunning information, information that should have triggered an immediate response. Yet, we are asked by the CIA to believe, no one reacted. No one did anything at all. The first cable to arrive with the news was marked “Action Required: None.”
This in spite of the fact that, just before the Millennium, Director Tenet had told all CIA personnel overseas, “The threat could not be more real.… The American people are counting on you and me to take every appropriate step to protect them.”
Tenet’s Counterterrorist Center had circulated an unambiguous instruction just a month before the al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. “It is important,” the document had warned, “to flag terrorist personality information in DO [Directorate of Operations] reporting for the [State Department watchlist program] so that potential terrorists may be watchlisted.”
Yet in March 2000, although it had learned that Hazmi, a bin Laden operative, had entered the country, the CIA did not alert the State Department. Nor, back in January, had it alerted State to the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The Agency was not to request that either man be watchlisted until late August 2001.
While the Kuala Lumpur meeting was still under way, a 9/11 Commission document notes, top FBI officials had been told that the CIA “promised to let FBI know if an FBI angle to the case developed.” The CIA is prohibited from undertaking operations in the United States, and the FBI has responsibility for domestic intelligence and law enforcement.
Even so, with the revelation that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa—very much an FBI angle—the CIA left the Bureau in the dark just as it did the State Department. It certainly should have alerted the FBI the moment it learned that Hazmi had entered the United States. Information that, if shared, may have led to an earlier hunt for Hazmi and Mihdhar.
After 9/11, when its horrendous failure to do any of these things came out, the CIA would attempt to claim that it had not been quite like that. Later investigations by Congress’s Joint Inquiry and the Department of Justice’s inspector general were to produce vestigial portions of emails and cables written right after the discovery that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The picture that emerged is not immediately clear.
The very day the CIA learned that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa, a CIA bin Laden unit desk officer—identified for security reasons only as “Michelle”—informed colleagues flatly that his travel documents, including the visa, had been copied and passed “to the FBI for further investigation.”
In an email to CIA colleagues the following day, an Agency officer assigned to FBI headquarters—identified as “James”—wrote of having told two senior FBI agents what had been learned of Mihdhar’s activity in Malaysia. He had advised one of them: “as soon as something concrete is developed leading us to the criminal area or to known FBI cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop.”
Were one to know only that about the CIA record, it might seem that the FBI was given the crucial visa information. Serious doubt sets in, though, on looking at the wider picture. In an email to CIA colleagues, the Justice Department inspector general discovered, “James” had “stated that he was detailing ‘exactly what [he] briefed [the FBI] on’ in the event the FBI later complained that they were not provided with all of the information about al-Mihdhar. This information did not discuss al-Mihdhar’s passport or U.S. visa [authors’ italics].”
“James,” the inspector general noted, refused to be interviewed.
The inspector general was given access to “Michelle,” the desk officer who had written flatly that Mihdhar’s passport and visa had been passed to the FBI. She prevaricated, however, saying she could not remember how she knew that fact. Her boss, Tom Wilshire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s bin Laden unit, said that for his part he had no knowledge of the “Michelle” cable. He “did not know whether the information had been passed to the FBI.”
Other documents indicate that the opposite was t
he case, that Wilshire had deliberately ensured that the information would not reach the FBI. This emerged with the inspector general’s discovery of a draft cable—one prepared but never sent—by an FBI agent on attachment to the CIA’s bin Laden unit.
Having had sight of a CIA cable noting that Mihdhar possessed a U.S. visa, Agent Doug Miller had responded swiftly by drafting a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR, addressed to the Bureau’s bin Laden unit and its New York field office. Had the CIR then been sent, the FBI would have learned promptly of Mihdhar’s entry visa.
As regulations required, Agent Miller first submitted the draft to CIA colleagues for clearance. Hours later, though, he received a note from “Michelle” stating: “pls hold off on CIR for now per [Wilshire].”
Perplexed and angry, Miller consulted with Mark Rossini, a fellow FBI agent who was also on attachment to the CIA unit. “Doug came to me and said, ‘What the fuck?,’ ” Rossini recalled. “So the next day I went to [Wilshire’s deputy, identity uncertain] and said, ‘What’s with Doug’s cable? You’ve got to tell the Bureau about this.’ She put her hand on her hip and said, ‘Look, the next attack is going to happen in South East Asia—it’s not the FBI’s jurisdiction. When we want the FBI to know about it, we’ll let them know.’ ”
After eight days, when clearance to send the message still had not come, Agent Miller submitted the draft again directly to CIA deputy unit chief Wilshire along with a note asking: “Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way?” According to the CIA, it was “unable to locate any response to this e-mail.”
Neither Miller nor Rossini was interviewed by 9/11 Commission staff. Wilshire was questioned, the authors established, but the report of his interview is redacted in its entirety.
In July 2001, by which time he had been seconded to the FBI’s bin Laden unit, Wilshire proposed to CIA colleagues that the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa should be shared with the FBI. It never happened.
Following a subsequent series of nods and winks from Wilshire, the FBI at last discovered for itself first the fact that Mihdhar had had a U.S. entry visa in 2000, then the fact that he had just very recently returned to the country. Only after that, in late August, did the FBI begin to search for Mihdhar and Hazmi—a search that was to prove inept, lethargic, and ultimately ineffectual.
An eight-member 9/11 Commission team was to reach a damning conclusion about the cable from CIA officer “Michelle” stating that Mihdhar’s travel documents had been passed to the FBI. “The weight of the evidence,” they wrote, “does not support that latter assertion.” The Justice Department inspector general also found, after exhaustive investigation, that the CIA had failed to share with the FBI two vital facts—“that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa and that Hazmi had travelled to Los Angeles.”
In 2007, Congress forced the release of a nineteen-page summary of the CIA’s own long-secret probe of its performance. This, too, acknowledged that Agency staff neither shared what they knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi nor saw to it that they were promptly watchlisted. An accountability board, the summary recommended, should review the work of named officers. George Tenet’s successor as CIA director, Porter Goss, however, declined to hold such a review. There was no question of misconduct, he said. The officers named were “amongst the finest” the Agency had.
THE EXCUSE for such monstrous failures? According to the CIA’s internal report, the bin Laden unit had had an “excessive workload.” Director Tenet claimed in sworn testimony, not once but three times, that he knew “nobody read” the cable that reported Hazmi’s actual arrival in Los Angeles. Wilshire, the officer repeatedly involved, summed up for Congress’s Joint Inquiry: “All the processes that had been put in place,” he said, “all the safeguards, everything else, they failed at every possible opportunity. Nothing went right.”
There are those who think such excuses may be the best the CIA can offer to explain a more compromising truth. “It is clear,” wrote the author Kevin Fenton, an independent researcher who completed a five-year study of the subject in 2011, “that this information was not withheld through a series of bizarre accidents, but intentionally.… Withholding the information about Mihdhar and Hazmi from the FBI makes sense only if the CIA was monitoring the two men in the U.S. itself.”
That notion is not fantasy. The CIA’s own in-house review noted that—had the FBI been told that the two future hijackers were or might be in the country—“good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both Mihdhar and Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”
The CIA kept to itself the fact that it knew long before 9/11 that two of the future hijackers—known to be terrorists—had U.S. visas, and that one had definitely entered the United States.
If the FBI had known, then–New York Assistant Special Agent in Charge Kenneth Maxwell has said, “We would have been on them like white on snow: physical surveillance, electronic surveillance, a special unit devoted to them.” After 9/11, and when the CIA’s omissions became known, some of Maxwell’s colleagues at the FBI reacted with rage and dark suspicion.
“They purposely hid from the FBI,” one official fulminated, “purposely refused to tell the FBI that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America.… And that’s why September 11 happened.… They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.”
Could it be that the CIA concealed what it knew about Mihdhar and Hazmi because officials feared that precipitate action by the FBI would blow a unique lead? Did the Agency want to arrange to monitor the pair’s activity? The CIA’s mandate does not allow it to run operations in the United States, but the prohibition had been broken in the past.
The CIA had on at least one occasion previously aspired to leave an Islamic suspect at large in order to surveil him. When 1993 Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef was located in Pakistan two years later, investigative reporter Robert Friedman wrote, the Agency “wanted to continue tracking him.” It “fought with the FBI,” tried to postpone his arrest. On that occasion, the FBI had its way, seized Yousef, and brought him back for trial.
With that rebuff fresh in the institutional memory, did the CIA decide to keep the sensational discovery of Mihdhar’s entry visa to itself? Or did it, as some Bureau agents came to think possible, even hope to recruit the two terrorists as informants?
The speculation is not idle. A heavily redacted congressional document shows that, only weeks before Mihdhar’s visa came to light, top CIA officials had debated the lamentable fact that the Agency had as yet not penetrated al Qaeda: “Without penetrations of OBL organization … [redacted lines] … we need to also recruit sources inside OBL’s organization. Realize that recruiting terrorist sources is difficult … but we must make an attempt.”
The following day, CIA officers went to the White House for a meeting with a select group of top-level National Security Council members. Attendees discussed both the lack of inside information and how essential it was to achieve “penetrations.” Many “unilateral avenues” and “creative attempts” were subsequently to be tried. Material on those attempts in the document has been entirely redacted.
President Clinton himself aside, the senior White House official to whom the CIA reported at that time was National Security Adviser Sandy Berger. After 9/11, while preparing to testify before official inquiries into the attacks, Berger was to commit a crime that destroyed his shining reputation, a folly so bizarre—for a man of his stature—as to be unbelievable were it not true.
On four occasions in 2002 and 2003, Berger would make his way to the National Archives in Washington, the repository of the nation’s most venerated documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. This trusted official, alumnus of Cornell and Harvard, former lawyer and aide to public officials, a former deputy director of poli
cy planning at State, had crowned his career by becoming national security adviser during President Clinton’s second term.
It was at Clinton’s request, and in his capacity as one of the very few people allowed access to the former administration’s most secret documents, that Berger went to the Archives to review selected files. Given his seniority, he was received with special courtesy and under rather less than the usual stringent security conditions. All the more astounding then that on his third visit a staff member “saw Mr. Berger bent down, fiddling with something that could have been paper, around his ankle.”
Under cover of asking for privacy to make phone calls, or in the course of uncommonly frequent visits to the lavatory, the former national security adviser was purloining top secret documents, smuggling them out of the building hidden in his clothing, and taking them home. He was caught doing so, publicly exposed, forced to resign from his senior post with the 2004 Democratic campaign for the presidency, charged with taking classified documents, and—a year later—fined $50,000 and sentenced to one hundred hours of community service.
What had possessed Berger? What seemed so compromising to himself or to the Clinton administration—or so essential to be hidden from 9/11 investigators—as to drive him to risk national disgrace?
What is known is that Berger took no fewer than five copies of the Millennium After Action Review, or MAAR, a thirteen-page set of recommendations that had been written in early 2000, focused mostly on countering al Qaeda activity inside the United States. While the MAAR is still classified, it seems somewhat unlikely that it is the item that Berger deemed potential dynamite. It may have been handwritten notes on the copies that he thought potentially explosive, former 9/11 Commission senior counsel John Farmer has surmised. That would account for the former official’s apparently frantic search for additional copies.
The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11 and Osama bin Laden Page 41