Book Excerpt: 'The Bureau'

ByABC News via logo
May 9, 2002, 6:13 PM

May 10 -- In The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, journalist Ronald Kessler reveals startling new inside information about the FBI from J. Edgar Hoover's blackmailing of Congress to the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. The excerpt below gives an inside view of the bureau's reaction to terrorism.

Chapter 36, "The Marine"

At 2:20 a.m. on October 2, 2001, Robert Stevens, a sixty-three-year-old photo editor at tabloid publisher American Media, was admitted to JFK Medical Center in Atlantis, Florida. Vomiting and confused, he had a 102 fever. The next day, doctors determined that Stevens had contracted anthrax by inhaling spores. On October 4, doctors called a press conference to announce the confirmation of anthrax. They believed Stevens to be an isolated case. Perhaps he had contracted it in the woods.

A day before Stevens was admitted, Erin M. O'Connor, a thirty-eight-year-old assistant to Tom Brokaw, went to the doctor with a low-grade fever and a bad rash. The doctor suspected anthrax and prescribed Cipro. That same day, Ernesto Blanco, seventy-three, an American Media mail room employee, was hospitalized with pneumonia. By October 5, Stevens had died, the first known anthrax fatality in the United States since 1976.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found anthrax spores on Stevens's computer keyboard and in Blanco's nasal passages. The agency decided that the American Media building should be sealed.

Soon, there were more anthrax cases, from Washington to New York. At first, it seemed to be another attack by bin Laden. Unlike the September 11 cases, Mueller allowed the Washington Field Office to direct the anthrax investigation. The case did not appear to have the global dimensions of the terrorist attacks. Agents headed by Bradley Garrett, who had been working on the disappearance of Chandra Levy and a possible obstruction of justice charge against Representative Gary Condit, were pulled off the celebrated case.

The FBI traced the new anthrax cases to letters addressed to Brokaw, to Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, to Senator Patrick Leahy,and to other news outlets. The letters went through mail-processing facilities in Hamilton Township, New Jersey, and the Washington sorting center on Brentwood Road. Through cross contamination, traces of anthrax turned up at mail rooms used by the White House, the State Department, the CIA, Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Hart and Dirksen Senate office buildings. More traces were found at the Morgan Station postal facility in Manhattan and at other sorting centers in New York. Spores turned up at ABC and CBS as well.

At one point, the House suspended work, and three Senate office buildings were closed. In all, eighteen people contracted anthrax, either though skin contact or inhalation. Five died.

On September 25, more than a week before any anthrax cases had been detected, NBC security called the New York Field Office about a letter addressed to Brokaw containing white powder. The letter was mailed on September 20 in St. Petersburg, Florida. O'Connor, Brokaw's assistant, opened it. It turned out that this letter, unlike the second one she opened, was a hoax. It contained talcum powder.

Still, Mayor Giuliani criticized the FBI for being slow to react. The two agents who showed up at NBC normally were assigned to investigate drugs. They had no idea anthrax might be involved and treated the case like an illicit drug case. Without explanation, they were told that O'Connor was not available to be interviewed. The agents put the letter in an evidence vault instead of having the powder tested. They waited until they could interview O'Connor.

Subsequently, O'Connor developed anthrax from the second letter. On October 6, one of her doctors notified the city health department, which notified the FBI. Only then did Barry Mawn became aware of the delay in investigating the first, bogus letter. He made sure the powder was tested immediately. Since that letter turned out to be a hoax, the delay did not make any difference.

The call from NBC about the first letter was "one of maybe about eight thousand leads we had received," said Mawn, who was working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. "The letter should have been sent to headquarters for immediate testing. The agents who normally pursue drug cases handled it like a drug case," he said.

At the Washington Field Office, Van Harp pursued three theories: that the anthrax letters came from al-Qaeda, from a domestic right-wing terrorist group, or from a lone suspect like the Unabomer. After a month, the bureau had developed enough investigative information to suggest that this last possibility was the right one. As the investigation into the airplane attacks began to wind down, Harp had practically the entire office of 659 agents working the anthrax case.

In the middle of it, Al Kamen of the Washington Post noted that an FBI advisory warned citizens to look for indications that a letter or package might be suspicious and might contain anthrax or a bomb. The indications might include excessive tape or string, protruding wires, no return address, or a strange odor. Recipients should also be on the lookout for misspelled words, the poster said. In addition, the FBI advised recipients to check to see if it's "Possiblly sic mailed from a foreign country."

"Yikes!" Kamen commented. "They've taken over the FBI!"

In the months leading up to the September 11 attacks, the CIA, whose job it is to spy overseas, and NSA, which intercepts communications, had been picking up fragmentary intelligence that al-Qaeda might be planning another attack on U.S. interests. An intercept picked up Osama bin Laden telling one of his four wives to return to Afghanistan immediately. "There is a big thing coming," an al-Qaeda operative said.

"There was general intelligence that al-Qaeda was up to something," Mawn said. "We heard the drums beating. There were specific threats about Yemen. We thought there might be an attack overseas."

That the attacks came as a surprise was widely called an "intelligence failure." The term implies that the CIA and FBI have a foolproof way of detecting attacks and crimes before they happen. To be sure, some developments should be detected and, when they are not, can legitimately be characterized as failures. For example, the CIA failed to detect movements indicating that India and Pakistan were about to detonate nuclear test weapons in 1998. With satellite coverage, there was no excuse for not warning of such a development. But no one would suggest that when a bank has been robbed or the federal building in Oklahoma City blown up, the FBI "failed" to detect the plot.

Penetrating an organization like bin Laden's was extremely difficult. While twenty-year-old American John Philip Walker Lindh joined the Taliban and met bin Laden several times, he learned few secrets. For his inner circle, bin Laden was careful to recruit fanatics whom he or his people had known for years. The fact that even after the U.S. government offered rewards that began at $5 million and eventually zoomed to $25 million, no one turned him in demonstrates how loyal his organization was.

In the year before the attacks, George Tenet, director of Central Intelligence, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that bin Laden posed the "most serious and immediate threat" to the United States. But an assessment from the CIA director was hardly needed. Anyone who read the newspapers or watched television knew of al-Qaeda's previous attacks and threats.

Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the radical Islamic leader who was convicted of plotting to bomb the United Nations, the FBI's New York Field Office, and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels, urged followers to "break and destroy the morale of the enemies of Allah" by attacking their "high world buildingsand the buildings in which they gather their leaders." Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 plot on the World Trade Center, told FBI agents as they flew in a helicopter over Manhattan that the World Trade Center would not "still be standing if I had enough money." In 1995, a terrorist based in the Philippines threatened to fly a plane loaded with chemical weapons into the CIA at Langley and to blow up twelve U.S. airliners. All these plots were linked to bin Laden, and all were made public.

In retrospect, no one took the threats seriously enough. The Clinton administration's response to the bombings that bin Laden masterminded of the two American embassies in East Africa only demonstrated America's weakness and lack of resolve. In response to the attacks, the United States launched two strikes, one on training camps where bin Laden was supposedly hiding and one on a pharmaceutical plant where the CIA believed chemical weapons could be made for bin Laden.

Certainly American arrogance played a role. How could people with unpronounceable names living in caves threaten American might and technology? But al-Qaeda had a sophisticated appreciation of America's vulnerabilities. The FAA allowed knives up to four inches long to be taken on airplanes. Without any difficulty, the hijackers could pack knives and box cutters that they would use to threaten passengers and crew. Thanks to lax regulation and the airlines' shortsighted fixation on cost cutting, airline security had long been a joke.

Hijacking airplanes and plunging to one's death is not exactly high tech. But the FBI soon learned that the dead hijackers had been as sophisticated as KGB officers at concealing their activities. They used phony names and public libraries for communicating on the Internet. They used couriers and codes embedded in graphics to convey their messages, a system called steganography. They listed Mail Boxes outlets as home addresses and transferred money through an ancient secret system called hawala, which relies on trust to move sums around the world.

"To me, they acted like normal human beings, nothing abnormal," said Henry George, a flight instructor who taught Atta and another hijacker to fly. "They were polite, maybe even shy."

To finance the plot, the hijackers used at least $500,000 funneled by Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi, a fugitive believed to be al-Qaeda's finance chief. At least $325,000 of the money was disbursed through ATMs, money orders, and credit cards, the rest in cash. Al-Qaeda operatives hatched the plot in Germany with connections in France, Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, Italy, Bosnia, and the Czech Republic.

Most important, to avoid detection, each group or cell targeting a plane kept itself totally separate from the others. As specified in an al-Qaeda training manual, the hijackers themselves did not go to mosques or see other Muslims. Some of them even drank alcohol, which was forbidden by Islam.

"There was no information about them before the attacks," Mawn said. "I'm still shocked and amazed it happened here. These people didn't necessarily bring attention to themselves. All but one was here legitimately. They were not involved in criminal activities. They were separate and unaware of each other until the end."

L ooking back, the one hope of foiling the plot might have been determining what Zacarias Moussaoui was up to when he was taking lessons at the Pan Am Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. On August 15, 2001, an official of the school called the FBI and reported that Moussaoui, a thirty-three-year-old French national of Moroccan descent, wanted to concentrate on navigation and midair turns, not landings or takeoffs. He lacked flight skills and was belligerent and evasive about his background. He paid $6,800 of the $8,300 fee in cash. The biggest plane he had ever flown was a single-engine Cessna, and then only with an instructor. Yet he wanted to learn to fly "one of these Big Bird," as he put it in an E-mail to the flight school a Boeing 747-400 or Airbus A-300.

Minneapolis was not exactly a hotbed of terrorists. To Dave Rapp, the Minneapolis counterterrorism agent who got the case, this was like Watergate to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The agent pursued it as if it were the threat it turned out to be.