CIA, FBI, and NSA on 9/11

W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 19, 2002 -- The public hearings of the Joint Intelligence Committee of both Houses of Congress to examine lessons learned from the 9/11 attacks ended Thursday with testimony from the Big Three of the intelligence community: CIA Director George Tenet; FBI Director Robert Mueller and National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden.

Tenet was loaded for bear. Irrespective of the committee's wishes, he was determined to read as much of his statement as he deemed necessary — 50 minutes' worth. When the committee chairman, Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., tried to cut him off, Tenet protested that he had "been waiting a year" for the opportunity. He was unwilling to concede much of anything; page 2 of his prepared statement contained the sentence "We made mistakes." He did not read that sentence aloud.

Hayden was less feisty in tone but no less unapologetic. He asserted that the only additional information his agency could have provided regarding the now-infamous Malaysian meeting of terrorist plotters in January 2000 if they had handled everything "perfectly" would have been the last name of the al-Hazmi brothers.

The NSA chief — whose testimony was also notable because anything public from the "No Such Agency" is still such a rare treat — also pointed out that "throughout the summer of 2001 we had more than 30 warnings that something was imminent. We dutifully reported these, yet none of these subsequently correlated with terrorist attacks. The concept of 'imminent' to our adversaries is relative; it can mean soon or simply sometime in the future."

As to whether his agency needs to make any changes, having praised his own pre-9/11 plans for transforming the agency, he recounted: "Shortly after Sept. 11, I had a meeting of my senior leaders. I asked them the following question: Is there any part of our transformation road map that we should now change as a result of the attacks? Unanimously, they responded, 'No, but we need to accelerate these changes.'"

Mueller, by contrast, continued his public attitude of eating humble pie. Unlike the other two directors, he skipped large chunks of his prepared statement so as to accommodate the committee's request for brevity. He recounted once again how 9/11 had forced the FBI to change its priorities dramatically; and how already the number of agents assigned to counterterrorism is twice what it was pre-9/11.

And he, once again, acknowledged "the valid criticisms, many of which have been reiterated by this committee. For example, the Phoenix memo should have been disseminated to all field offices and to our sister agencies and should have triggered a broader analytical approach; and the 26-page request from Minneapolis for a FISA warrant should have been reviewed by attorneys handling the request. These incidents have informed us on needed changes, particularly the need to improve accountability, analytic capacity and resources, information sharing, and technology …"

(What's interesting about his apologia re: the Minneapolis FISA request are all the points that he does not concede — he does not say the request should have been granted. More on this subject below.)

Mueller did take mild exception to two frequently leveled criticisms (which his predecessor Louis Freeh had countered in much stronger language last week) — that the FBI was uncooperative with both the CIA and with state and local law enforcement. Noting that "much has been made of the reportedly hostile relationship and turf battles between the FBI and the CIA," he maintained that except for "isolated failings," the relationship is now strong and successful.

He also protested the committee's "select testimony," asserting "the FBI's historical unwillingness and technological inability to share information" with the locals.

But he once again admitted the bureau's failure "to develop a sufficient capacity to collect, store, search, retrieve, analyze and share information" due to its "outdated technology."

He concluded that the bureau has faced many challenges over the past year and has made "significant progress in addressing these challenges." And in a bit of an emotional coda, he once more praised the men and women of the FBI and quoted testimony from a New York field agent before the committee who had pointed out that the same FBI they were criticizing for its mistakes was the same bureau that had achieved many successes.

Perhaps as a result of this low-key and repentant attitude, there was virtually no pointed questioning of Mueller by the committee, except for a few testy exchanges with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.

As the hearings dragged to their somewhat anticlimactic close, it seemed that except for some fascinating detail, the final picture was pretty much what we had thought. The committee's conclusions seemed to be summed up in this paragraph from Staff Counsel Eleanor Hill's statement:

"No one will ever know whether more extensive analytic efforts, fuller and more timely information sharing, or a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the Sept. 11 plot. But, it is at least a possibility that increased analysis, sharing and focus would have drawn greater attention to the growing potential for a major terrorist attack in the United States involving the aviation industry. This could have generated a heightened state of alert regarding such attacks and prompted more aggressive investigation, intelligence gathering and general awareness based on the information our government did possess prior to Sept. 11, 2001."

More on Moussaoui

A staff statement released by the committee last month had to be severely redacted so as not to interfere with the upcoming trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of being a co-conspirator in the 9/11 plot.

The statement summarizes the committee's conclusions regarding the FBI's handling of the Phoenix EC, in which an FBI agent requested headquarters consider investigating suspected terrorists attending flight schools in the United States; and the request from its Minneapolis field office for a FISA warrant to examine Moussaoui's computer and possessions. An order from the judge in the Moussaoui case has allowed the committee to declassify additional information, some of which is quite interesting.

Here's one newly released section, which we can only hope will help forever to remove some bad information from the public record:

"On Wednesday, August 15, 2001, an employee at Pan Am [International Flight School] called the FBI's Minneapolis Field Office because the employee and other Pan Am employees were suspicious of Moussaoui.

"The FBI determined that Moussaoui had paid $8,000 to $9,000 in cash for training on the Boeing 747 Model 400 aircraft simulator but met none of the usual criteria for students at the flight school. What set Moussaoui apart from all other students was that Moussaoui had no aviation background and, apparently, no pilot's license. It was also considered odd that Moussaoui indicated that he wished to learn to take off and land the 747 Model 400, which he referred to as an 'ego boosting thing.' It should be noted that this conflicts with published reports that he only wanted to pilot the plane in the air and did not want to land or take off." (My emphasis)

By the following day, the "FBI determined that Moussaoui was unlike any other student with whom his flight instructor had worked." For one thing, he "was extremely interested in the operation of the plane's doors and control panel, which Pan Am found suspicious. Further, Moussaoui reportedly said that he would 'love' to fly a simulated flight from Heathrow Airport in England to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York."

Once the Immigration and Naturalization Service had taken him into custody for being out of status, "Moussaoui declined to allow the agents to search his belongings. When the agents told Moussaoui that he would be deported, Moussaoui agreed to let the agents take his belongings to the INS office for safekeeping." Nice save!

By the third week of August, a CIA officer working at FBI headquarters learned of the Moussaoui matter and was alarmed: "First, Moussaoui had denied being a Muslim to the flight instructor, while al-Attas [Moussaoui's companion at the flight school] informed the FBI that Moussaoui was a fundamentalist. Further, the fact Moussaoui was interested in using the Minneapolis flight school simulator to learn to fly from Heathrow to JFK Airport, made him concerned that Moussaoui was a hijacker."

The report goes into laborious detail explaining how Minneapolis frantically tried to justify seeking a FISA warrant, but headquarters did not agree that they "had it." At one point, after the legal attaché in Paris had told Minneapolis that Moussaoui appeared to have ties to a Chechen rebel group, the agents started focusing on whether the Chechen group was a "recognized" foreign group that would meet the requirements of FISA, that the target of a surveillance warrant be demonstrated to have ties to a foreign power.

Unfortunately, an agent with the Radical Fundamentalists Unit at headquarters mistakenly told Minneapolis that "the Chechen rebels were not a 'recognized' foreign power and that, even if Moussaoui were to be linked to them, the FBI could not obtain a search order under FISA. Thus, the RFU agent told the Minneapolis agents that they needed to somehow connect Moussaoui" to al Qaeda. Minneapolis labored mightily to establish that link; in fact, they "spent the better part of three weeks" trying to do so.

But, as the committee found, and as FBI Deputy General Counsel Spike Bowman told me last week, the deficiency in Minneapolis' case was not the failure to tie Chechens to al Qaeda; it was the failure to demonstrate strong ties between Moussaoui and any foreign group. The only thing the French had provided was that a grieving mother blamed Moussaoui for the death of her son, whom Moussaoui had supposedly talked into going to fight with the Chechen rebels. That was not enough to justify a warrant.

Barry Sabin, Experienced Terrorism Fighter

CORRECTION: The Criminal Division front office is in high dudgeon because I wrote a couple weeks ago that the new head of the Terrorism & Violent Crime Section (TVCS), Barry Sabin, has no terrorism experience. Apparently I was misinformed.

The fact that I said he was "highly praised" and has "vast experience" fighting crime did not appease the division. So, in a probably vain attempt to escape the wrath of the division poobahs, let the record show that Sabin: was the first prosecutor to wield 2339A (providing material support to terrorists) in an IRA gun-running case; prosecuted the Brothers to the Rescue case; ran the anthrax/AMI investigation while still in Miami; and handled other cases, such as arms and alien smuggling and money laundering, that are now considered to fall under the terrorism rubric.

He also oversaw the South Florida response to the 9/11 attacks, and set up the national security unit in the Miami U.S. Attorney's Office post-9/11.

Beverley Lumpkin has covered the Justice Department for 16 years for ABCNEWS. Halls of Justice appears every Saturday.