Who Will Be the Red Flag Scapegoats?

W A S H I N G T O N, May 18 -- The missed signals that the intelligence community, including the FBI, supposedly overlooked that theoretically could have warned of or even prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks became red flags this past week. And some members of Congress seemed out for blood.

I wrote last week about the eight-page message from the FBI's Phoenix field office to headquarters that included one paragraph about concerns regarding certain Middle Eastern students at Arizona flight schools.

Much has also been made of the request from the Minneapolis field office to headquarters seeking a national security warrant on accused "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui after he aroused suspicions while attending Minnesota flight schools. Finally, Wednesday night came the revelation that President Bush had received a vague intelligence warning that Osama bin Laden might hijack an airliner.

So now we have a genuine furor. For the foreseeable future, we'll all be either chasing or reading about variations on the theme of who-knew-what-when. I'll leave the questions about the CIA's briefings of the president, and the political ramifications of the ensuing uproar, to others. I'm interested in where that message went; whether anyone dealing with Moussaoui also saw it; and what this says about FBI procedures.

All this is not-entirely-coincidentally coming at a time that FBI Director Robert Mueller is very publicly planning a reorganization of the bureau, the major centerpiece of which is to devote more resources to counterterrorism and the analysis of intelligence.

So as we tear into what happened last July and August with these various communications between FBI officials, the ones in charge now will be ruefully shaking their heads and repeating their new mantra: this is why we need to make these changes. This is why we need new technology, more analysts, more translators, more agents, more money.

I'm not saying any of that is wrong — but the focus on the lack of adequate electronic systems, the dearth of analysts and translators, the need for more agents all plays into Mueller's current plans for retooling the FBI. I might also add that even while the bureau suffers from these revelations now, potentially this means that when the joint intelligence committees actually begin their hearings in June, it'll all be old news by then. This is one of the FBI's favorite public relations ploys.

Currently it appears that both the Phoenix message and the information about Moussaoui did not climb any higher at headquarters than the unit chief level in the Counterterrorism Division. If this is accurate, it means the following levels were never informed about these arguably vital clues: section chief, deputy assistant director, assistant director, deputy director, director. That would mean officials six rungs down received and alone dealt with these messages.

One source says the Phoenix message stayed in the Bin Laden Unit of Counterterrorism, except for being forwarded to two field offices, including New York City. Another official maintained the Phoenix message was in addition shared with the chief of the Radical Fundamentalists Unit, or RFU.

That could be significant, because that guy was also handling the Moussaoui matter. But as one Hill staffer cogently noted, "It's one or the other; it's so hard to tell what happens at the FBI!" A message might list several recipients, but it's hard to prove each one actually got it.