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MISSED MESSAGES by SEYMOUR M. HERSH Why the
government didn't know what it knew. Issue
of 2002-06-03 On September
23rd, twelve days after the terror attacks on America, Secretary of State
Colin Powell told a Sunday-morning television-news show that the Bush
Administration planned to publish a white paper that would prove to the world
that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization were responsible for the
hijackings. "We are putting all of the information that we have
together, the intelligence information, the information being generated by
the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies," Powell said. The
information that the White House had available, we now know, included a
top-secret briefing, given to President Bush on August 6th, documenting what
was known about Al Qaeda's determination to attack American targets. The
briefing, prepared by the C.I.A. at the President's request, was reportedly
entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It warned that Al
Qaeda hoped to "bring the fight to America." Despite Powell's
declaration, the Administration never released the white paper. And in
October, when the evidence of bin Laden's involvement was made public, by
proxy—by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair—there was no mention of the
pre-attack warnings. In fact, the white paper stated, incorrectly, that no
such information had been available before the attacks: "After 11
September we learned that, not long before, Bin Laden had indicated he was
about to launch a major attack on America." It is now clear that the White
House, for its own reasons, chose to keep secret the extent of the
intelligence that was available before and immediately after September 11th.
In addition to the August briefing, there was a prescient memorandum sent in
July to F.B.I. headquarters from the Phoenix office warning of the danger
posed by Middle Eastern students at American flight schools (Robert Mueller,
the F.B.I. director, did not see the memo until a few days after September
11th), and there was what Condoleezza Rice, the President's national-security
adviser, called "a lot of chatter in the system." Congressional
hearings will almost certainly take place in the next few months, given the
conviction of Democratic Party leaders that they finally have a viable
political issue. What the President knew and
when he knew it may not be the relevant question, however. No one in
Washington seriously contends that the President or any of his senior
advisers had any reason to suspect that terrorists were about to fly hijacked
airplanes into buildings. A more useful question concerns the degree to which
Al Qaeda owed its success to the weakness of the F.B.I. and the agency's
chronic inability to synthesize intelligence reports, draw conclusions, and
work with other agencies. These failings, it turns out, were evident long
before George Bush took office. Neither the F.B.I. nor
America's other intelligence agencies have effectively addressed what may be
the most important challenge of September 11th: How does an open society deal
with warnings of future terrorism? The Al Qaeda terrorists were there to be
seen, but there was no system for seeing them.
Several weeks
before the attacks, the actor James Woods was in the first-class section of a
cross-country flight to Los Angeles. Four of his fellow-passengers were
well-dressed men who appeared to be Middle Eastern and were obviously
travelling together. "I watch people like a moviemaker," Woods told
me. "As in that scene in 'Annie Hall' "—where Woody Allen and Diane
Keaton are sitting on a bench in Central Park speculating on the personal
lives of passers-by. "I thought these guys were either terrorists or
F.B.I. guys," Woods went on. "The guys were in synch—dressed alike.
They didn't have a drink and were not talking to the stewardess. None of them
had a carry-on or a newspaper. Nothing. "Imagine you're at a
live-music event at a small night club and you're standing behind the singer.
Everybody is clapping, going along, enjoying the show— and there's four guys
paying no attention. What are they doing here?" Woods concluded that the
men were "casing" the plane. He said that his concern led him to
hang on to his cutlery after lunch. He shared his worries with a flight
attendant. "I said, 'I think this plane is going to be hijacked.' I told
her, 'I know how serious it is to say this,' and asked to speak to the
captain." The flight attendant, too, was concerned. The plane's first
officer came over immediately and assured Woods that he and the captain would
keep the door to the cockpit locked. The remainder of the trip was bumpy but
uneventful, and Woods recalled laughingly telling his agent, who asked about
the flight, "Aside from the terrorists and the turbulence, it was
fine." Woods said that the flight
attendant told him that she would file a report about the suspicious
passengers. If she did, her report probably ended up in a regional Federal
Aviation Authority office in Tulsa, or perhaps Dallas, according to Clark
Onstad, the former chief counsel of the F.A.A., and disappeared in the
bureaucracy. "If you ever walked into one of these offices, you'd see
that they have no secretaries," Onstad told me. "These guys are
buried under a mountain of paper, and the odds of this"—a report about
suspicious passengers—"coming up to a higher level are very low."
Even today, eight months after the hijacking, Onstad said, the question
"Where would you effectively report something like this so that it would
get attention?" has no practical answer. Throughout the spring and
early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded the government with
warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets, including
commercial aircraft, by Al Qaeda and other groups. The warnings were vague
but sufficiently alarming to prompt the F.A.A. to issue four information circulars,
or I.C.s, to the commercial airline industry between June 22nd and July 31st,
warning of possible terrorism. One circular, from late July, noted, according
to Condoleezza Rice, that there was "no specific target, no credible
info of attack to U.S. civil-aviation interests, but terror groups are known
to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use
caution." For years, however, the
airlines had essentially disregarded the F.A.A.'s information circulars.
"I.C.s don't require special measures," a former high-level F.A.A.
official told me. "To get the airlines to react, you have to send a
Security Directive"—a high-priority message that, under F.A.A.
regulations, mandates an immediate response. Without a directive, the American
airline industry was operating in a business-as-usual manner when Woods
noticed the suspicious passengers on his flight. On the evening of September
11th, Woods telephoned the Los Angeles office of the F.B.I. and told a
special agent about the encounter. In an interview on Fox Television in
February, Woods described being awakened at six-forty-five the next morning
by a telephone call from the agent. "I said, 'I'll get ready and I'll
come down to the federal building,' " Woods recounted. "He said,
'That's O.K. We're outside your house.' " By then, Woods told me, he was
no longer certain of the date of his trip. "The first thing I said is
'I'm not sure which flight it was on.' " But he had a vivid memory of
the men's faces. When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized
two of the hijackers—Hamza Alghamdi, who flew on United Airlines Flight 175,
which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Almihdhar,
who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. One of the
men stood out because of his "pointy hair," Woods told me, and the
other looked like one of the characters in the movie version of John le
Carré's "The Little Drummer Girl." A senior F.B.I. official told
me that the bureau had subsequently investigated Woods's story but had not
been able to find evidence of the hijackers on the flight Woods thought he
had taken. "We don't know for sure," the official said. Woods's flight was not the
only one the F.B.I. looked into after September 11th. The bureau found other
evidence that the terrorists from the four different planes had flown
together earlier, in various combinations, to "check out flights,"
as one agent put it. The F.B.I. now thinks that the hijackers flew on perhaps
a dozen flights, together and separately, in the summer of 2001. The hijackers' decision to
risk flying together calls into question much of the conventional wisdom
about September 11th. The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have repeatedly characterized
the Al Qaeda terrorists as brilliant professionals—what I. C. Smith, who
retired in 1998, after a twenty-five-year career at the F.B.I., much of it in
counterintelligence, calls "the superman scenario." In a rare
public appearance, at Duke University in April, James Pavitt, the C.I.A.'s deputy
director for operations—the agency's top spymaster—said of Al Qaeda: The terror cells that we're going up
against are typically small and all terrorist personnel . . . were carefully
screened. The number of personnel who know vital information, targets,
timing, the exact methods to be used had to be smaller still. . . . Against
that degree of control, that kind of compartmentation, that depth of
discipline and fanaticism, I personally doubt—and I draw again upon my thirty
years of experience in this business—that anything short of one of the
knowledgeable inner-circle personnel or hijackers turning himself in to us
would have given us sufficient foreknowledge to have prevented the horrendous
slaughter that took place on the eleventh. The point of operating in cells
is to insure that if one person is caught he can expose only those in his own
cell, because he knows nothing of the others. The entire operation is not put
at risk. The Al Qaeda terrorists seem to have violated a fundamental rule of
clandestine operations. Far from working independently and maintaining rigid
communications security, the terrorists, as late as last summer, apparently
mingled openly and had not yet decided which flights to target. The planning
for September 11th appears to have been far more ad hoc than was at first
assumed. A senior F.B.I. official
insisted to me that the September 11th attacks were "carefully
orchestrated and well planned," but he agreed that serious and
potentially fatal errors were made by the terrorists. Another official said,
"We early on thought that people on flight one did not know anything
about flights two, three, and four, but we did find that there was
cross-pollination in travel and coördination. If they're so good, why did
they intermingle?" A third F.B.I. official said, "Are they ten feet
tall? They're not." The fact that the terrorists
managed to bring down the World Trade Center may simply mean that seizing an
airplane was easier than the American public has been led to believe. The
real message of missed opportunities like the Woods flight may be that, even
at a time when America's intelligence agencies had raised an alarm, chatter
remained chatter—diffuse noise. There were no mechanisms to either dispose of
leads, warnings, and suspicious incidents or effectively translate them into
a plan for preventing Al Qaeda from attacking.
By 1990, in
the wake of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, congressional
committees had concluded that the F.A.A. needed more immediate access to
current intelligence, and urged that an F.A.A. security official be assigned
to the relevant offices in the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the State Department.
Leo Boivin, who was the agency's primary security analyst at the time, told
me, "I started the program. Getting into the C.I.A. and State was no
problem, but the F.B.I. effectively said no—that it wasn't going to happen.
The bureau didn't want anybody in there, and we couldn't fight the bureau."
In 1996, after the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, a commission directed by
Vice-President Al Gore also called for closer liaison. This time, according
to Boivin, who retired last August, the F.B.I. refused to give the F.A.A.
security officer a building pass that would permit unfettered access to
F.B.I. headquarters. "The problem with the intelligence community is
that you didn't know what you didn't know," Boivin said. " 'If
there is a problem,' the bureau would say, 'we'll tell you about it.' "
The difficulties continued after September 11th. Boivin said that the F.B.I.
sought to get rid of the F.A.A.'s liaison man at headquarters, because, in
Boivin's words, "he was seen as too pushy about trying to get
information." (An F.B.I. spokesman, when asked for comment, said,
"Both before September 11th and after September 11th, the bureau shared
information with our law-enforcement partners to the fullest extent
possible.") The airlines, always eager to
trim operating expenses, successfully lobbied against many of the safety
provisions recommended by the Gore commission, such as more stringent
security checks on airline employees and tighter screening of passenger
baggage. William Webster, the former F.B.I. director, served as the airlines'
lobbyist. "The airlines never wanted to spend a lot of money on
security," said David Plavin, who was on the Gore commission and is the
president of Airports Council International, the lobbying arm of the nation's
more than five hundred commercial airports. "They were always concerned that
the government would stick them with the bill." Much of that worry,
Plavin told me, was alleviated after September 11th with the passage of
legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, which puts
the responsibility for security on the federal government, but the new
legislation won't solve the most serious problem: bureaucratic infighting.
"More than half a dozen federal agencies are involved in airline travel,
and their inability to work with each other is notorious," Plavin said. "Protecting
their own turf is what matters." In the late nineteen-nineties,
the C.I.A. obtained reliable information indicating that an Al Qaeda network
based in northern Germany had penetrated airport security in Amsterdam and
was planning to attack American passenger planes by planting bombs in the
cargo, a former security official told me. The intelligence was good enough
to warrant the dissemination of an F.A.A. Security Directive, and the C.I.A.,
working with German police, planned a series of successful preëmptive raids.
"The Germans rousted a lot of people," the former official said.
The F.A.A. and the C.I.A. worked closely together and the incident was kept
secret. "While the threat was on, the F.A.A. was getting two or three
C.I.A. briefings a day," the former official said. In contrast, in
operations in which the F.B.I. took the lead, "the F.A.A. got nothing.
The F.B.I. people said, 'If there is a threat, we'll tell you, but we're not
going to tell you what's going on in the investigations.' The F.A.A. told
them that it had much more information about threats in Hamburg and Beirut
than in Detroit, and they said, 'That's the way it is.' They'd come and give
a dog-and-pony show."
Long before
September 11th, the American intelligence community had a significant amount
of information about specific terrorist threats to commercial airline travel
in America, including the possibility that a plane could be used as a
weapon.In 1994, an Algerian terrorist group hijacked an Air France airliner
and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In 1995, police in Manila
broke up a terrorist operation that was planning to plant bombs with timing
devices on as many as twelve American airliners. They also found information
that led to the arrest of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who directed the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center. Abdul Hakim Murad, one of Yousef's collaborators,
told the Philippine police and, later, U.S. intelligence officers that he had
earned his pilot's license in an American flight school and had been planning
to seize a small plane, fill it with explosives, and fly it into C.I.A.
headquarters. Murad confessed, according to an account published last
December in the Washington Post, that he had gone
to the American flight school "in preparation for a suicide
mission." In 1996, the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh, asked officials in
Qatar—a nation suspected of harboring Al Qaeda terrorists—for help in
apprehending another alleged accomplice of Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed,
who was then believed to be in Qatar. One of Freeh's diplomatic notes stated
that Mohammed was involved in a conspiracy to "bomb U.S. airliners"
and was also believed to be "in the process of manufacturing an
explosive device." In late December of 1999, a
group of Al Qaeda terrorists armed with knives hijacked an Indian airliner
and diverted it to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The hijackers maintained control of
the passengers and crew by cutting the throat of a young passenger and
letting the victim bleed to death, a tactic that the September 11th
terrorists are believed to have used on flight attendants. (Shortly after the
Indian hijacking, the F.B.I. opened a liaison office in New Delhi, and has
since worked closely with Indian security officials.) The F.A.A., in its
annual report for the year 2000, warned that bin Laden and Al Qaeda posed
"a significant threat to civil aviation." The F.A.A. had earlier
noted, according to the Times, that there was a
specific report from an exiled Islamic leader in Britain alleging that bin
Laden was planning to "bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to
humiliate the United States." The attendance of potential
terrorists at flight-training schools in America is not a new phenomenon,
either. As early as 1975, according to an unpublished Senate Foreign
Relations Committee document, Raymond Winall, then the F.B.I.'s assistant
director for intelligence, revealed that a suspected member of Black
September, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the deaths of
eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, had explained his
presence in the United States by telling the F.B.I. that he had been admitted
for pilot training—the same explanation for the presence here of a number of
the September 11th terrorists. The suspect was indicted but fled the country
before he could be arraigned. Since then, according to Bill Carroll, a former
district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, thousands
of young Middle Easterners have obtained visas to enroll in
flight-instruction programs.
Inrecent
interviews, three senior F.B.I. officials in charge of responding to
terrorism threats did not defend the bureau's past performance, and
acknowledged that many of the long-standing complaints had merit. But they
insisted that, since September 11th, many things had been done right. The
F.B.I. had invested enormous resources in tracking the terrorists' travel
activities, and much progress had been made in disrupting the international
flow of money to Al Qaeda. The officials admitted that there are still
questions about the reliability of some of the information that was collected
in the days immediately after September 11th. One unresolved mystery is how
many of the nineteen hijackers understood that the mission called for the
immolation of all aboard. The officials maintained that
they have correctly established the true identity of all nineteen, by
consulting records and going back to their countries of origin. There are,
however, lingering questions about at least eight of them. For example, the
F.B.I. has identified one of the hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 77,
which crashed into the Pentagon, as Nawaf Alhazmi. A Maryland motel he had
checked into under this name had a record of a New York driver's license
number and a Manhattan address he had given. But the address turned out to be
a hotel, which reported that it had no record of him. And the New York
Department of Motor Vehicles said that the number was invalid, and that it
had never issued a license to anyone named Nawaf Alhazmi. Similarly, Waleed
Alshehri, who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, was identified by the
F.B.I. as a college graduate from Florida whose father was a Saudi diplomat.
And yet, last fall, the diplomat told a Saudi Arabian newspaper that his son
was still alive and working as a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines. The prevalence of identity
theft has also complicated matters. There are an estimated seven hundred and
fifty thousand cases of stolen identity in the United States every year,
according to Rob Douglas, a leading privacy expert. Saudi newspapers
eventually reported that at least four men with the same names as those
listed by the F.B.I. as hijackers had been victims of passport theft. A
hijacker identified as Abdulaziz Alomari, who also was aboard Flight 11, was
reported by the Rocky Mountain News to have the
same name as a graduate of the University of Colorado, a man who did not
resemble a photograph of the hijacker. That Alomari had been stopped by the
Denver police several times for minor offenses while attending college and
had given three different birth dates. One of the dates matches the birth
date used by the hijacker. Investigators subsequently learned that in 1995
the Colorado student had reported a theft in his apartment; among the items
stolen was his passport. Another hijacker, who used the
name Saeed Alghamdi and was aboard Flight 93, was reported last fall by Newsday to have taken the Social Security number of a
Vermont woman who had been dead since 1965. The name is a common one in Saudi
Arabia. At least four other men with that name have shown up on records at
the flight school in Florida where Alghamdi was said by the F.B.I. to have
trained. The school reported that it had trained more than sixteen hundred
students with the first name Saeed and more than two hundred with the surname
Alghamdi. Social Security officials also said that six of the nineteen
hijackers were using identity cards belonging to other people. In April, police in Milan
raided the apartment of Essid Sami Ben Khemais, the alleged head of an
extremist group based in Italy that has been linked to Al Qaeda. A
prosecutor's affidavit, the Baltimore Sun reported,
described what was found: a cache of forged Tunisian and Yemeni passports,
Italian identity cards, and photocopies of German driver's licenses. The
prosecutor wrote, "One of the most essential illegal activities of the
group is the procurement and use of false documents . . . to guarantee a new
identity to the 'brothers' who must hide or escape investigation." The
prosecutor further said that the police had recorded telephone conversations
in which Khemais discussed with Al Qaeda members the mechanics of falsifying
documents.
The complaints
about the F.B.I. are well known to the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman,
Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, has been urging extensive reform of the bureau for
years. "These are not problems of money," Leahy said last July,
during confirmation hearings on the appointment of Robert Mueller as the new
F.B.I. director. "We have poured a lot of money into the F.B.I. It is a
management problem." The F.B.I.'s computer systems
have been in disarray for more than a decade, making it difficult, if not
impossible, for analysts and agents to correlate and interpret intelligence.
The F.B.I.'s technological weakness also hinders its ability to solve crimes.
In March, for example, Leahy's committee was told that photographs of the
nineteen suspected hijackers could not be sent electronically in the days
immediately after September 11th to the F.B.I. office in Tampa, Florida,
because the F.B.I.'s computer systems weren't compatible. Robert Chiradio,
the special agent in charge, explained at a hearing that "we don't have
the ability to put any scanning or multimedia" into F.B.I. computer
systems. The photographs had "to be put on a CD-ROM and mailed to me." Part of the problem, former
F.B.I. agents have told me, is the long-standing practice by the F.B.I.
leadership of "reprogramming" funds intended for computer
upgrading. I. C. Smith, who was in charge of the F.B.I.'s budget for
national-security programs, told me that his department was "constantly
raiding the technical programs" to make up for shortfalls in other
areas—such as, in one case, the travel budget. Mueller, who had been on the
job for only a week before September 11th, acknowledged in a speech in April
that many of the desktop computers at the F.B.I. were discards from other
federal agencies that "we take as upgrades." He went on, "We
have systems that cannot talk with other bureau systems, much less with other
federal agencies. We're working to create a database . . . that we can use to
share information and intelligence with the outside world. We hope to test it
later next year"—that is, sometime in 2003. Clearly, the agents in the field
and their superiors at F.B.I. headquarters did not have the optimal tools to
cope with the complex world of Middle Eastern terrorism—and the outpouring of
intelligence data and warnings about activities inside the United States.
(They were not alone. The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies also
contributed to the failure that led to September 11th.) The F.B.I. also found
it extremely difficult to field undercover operatives inside the Islamic
fundamentalist movement. The situation remains the same today, intelligence
officials told me. "They're incapable of it," one former
intelligence official said, referring to the F.B.I.'s lack of experience in
covert operations. "This is much scarier than the C.I.A.'s inability to
penetrate overseas. We don't have eyes and ears in the Muslim communities.
We're naked here."
In a recent
conversation, a senior F.B.I. official acknowledged that there had been
"no breakthrough" inside the government, in terms of establishing
how the September 11th suicide teams were organized and how they operated.
America's war in Afghanistan, despite success in driving Al Qaeda from its
bases there, has yet to produce significant information about the planning
and execution of the attacks. U.S. forces are known to have captured
thousands of pages of documents and computer hard drives from Al Qaeda
redoubts, but so far none of this material—which remains highly
classified—has enabled the Justice Department to broaden its understanding of
how the attack occurred, or even to bring an indictment of a conspirator. The
government's only criminal proceeding filed thus far is against Zacarias
Moussaoui, a French citizen who was already in jail on September 11th, on
immigration charges. "It's kind of obvious that we haven't wrapped
anything up," a C.I.A. consultant told me. One senior F.B.I. official
argued, however, that the intensive American bombing campaign in Afghanistan
and the dramatically improved coördination with international police forces
and intelligence agencies have led to a serious degradation of Al Qaeda's
command and control, and, he said, "the over-all structure of Al Qaeda
has been disrupted." Referring to the heavy satellite monitoring of the many
training camps operated by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in
Afghanistan, he said, "For years, we watched the graduating classes
every year at the University of Terrorism." What's left, he went on, are
"those fleas—the graduates of the training classes who are spread out in
the world. We are going to have problems with them for years to come. Could
there be a flea who strikes this week in Kansas City? Absolutely." In Senate testimony in May,
Robert Mueller emphasized how difficult it would have been to thwart the
September 11th attacks, noting that fifty million people entered and left the
United States in August, 2001. "The terrorists took advantage of
America's strengths and used them against us," he said. "And as
long as we continue to treasure our freedoms we always will run some risk of
future attacks." "These guys were not
superhuman," I. C. Smith noted, "but they were playing in a system
that was more inept than they were. If you go back to the aircraft hijackings
of the early nineteen-seventies, I can't recall a single instance where we
caught a guy"—in advance—"who really intended to hijack a
plane." But men like Mueller, Smith added, "can't afford to say
that the terrorists stumbled through this."
Mueller has
one of the most difficult jobs in government today. He is trying to
reorganize a bureaucracy that has resisted changes—and outsiders—for decades.
He does not praise the old days, and the old ways of doing business, in his
public statements. "We must refocus our mission and our
priorities," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. "We
must improve how we hire, manage, and train our workforce, collaborate with
others, and manage, analyze, share, and protect our information." He
added, "I am more impatient than most, but we must do these things
right, not simply fast." Mueller's insistence on
centralizing decision-making and control of counterterrorism operations at
F.B.I. headquarters has provoked discord in some of the F.B.I.'s fifty-six
bureaus across the nation. Senior officers with specialized expertise were
reassigned to counterterrorism duty after September 11th, and many still find
their new jobs bewildering. Increasingly, the divisions
are becoming public. Last week, a letter of complaint sent to the House and
Senate intelligence committees by the F.B.I.'s general counsel in Minneapolis
was leaked to the press. It accused F.B.I. headquarters of obstructing the
local inquiry into Zacarias Moussaoui and accused Mueller personally of
misrepresenting the bureau's handling of the case. Mueller quickly announced
that he had referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation.
A Senate aide told me that Mueller's willingness to air the problems—even at
the risk of adverse publicity—had won him few friends inside the Bush
Administration. "He's had his hand slapped by the Justice
Department," the official said, "and he's having problems with the
White House." Mueller does have the support,
thus far, of the often skeptical Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee,
under Senator Leahy, began extensive oversight hearings into the F.B.I. last
year—the first comprehensive hearings in two decades. "He inherited a
mess," Leahy said. "The F.B.I. has improved since the days of J.
Edgar Hoover. It doesn't go around blackmailing members of Congress anymore.
But it still has a 'We don't make mistakes or admit mistakes' culture."
Mueller seems to be committed to changing that attitude, Leahy told me. "I
have confidence in him, and it will continue as long as we see a bureau that
really wants to correct its mistakes. Mueller's best defense—and his best
offense—is to be as forthcoming with Congress as possible." The Senator
added, "White Houses come and go, but he has a ten-year tenure." Since the hijackings, the
F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have gone to great lengths to improve coöperation, and
C.I.A. personnel are assigned to F.B.I. offices. In some basic ways, however,
the F.B.I. still doesn't work. The bureau, one of Mueller's aides said, is
undergoing an enormous and painful change in its day-to-day approach to
investigations. "The mission now is not just to put handcuffs on people
and throw them into jail but to stop acts of terrorism in the future. A lot of
people here are not prepared to radically change their way of doing business,
and it's frustrating for many agents, with their black-and-white way of
looking at the world. The F.B.I.'s priority now is to get information to
prevent the next event—even if it means we lose the case." The
transition will lead to many forced early retirements. "There hasn't
been time to build up a cadre of people with the right skills," the aide
said. One inevitable problem is that the most significant of Mueller's changes—such
as the recruitment and hiring of experts in foreign languages, area studies,
and computer technology—will not pay dividends for years. A longtime clandestine C.I.A.
operative was skeptical about the rival agency's ability to transform itself.
"They're cops," he said of the F.B.I. agents. "They spent
their careers trying to catch bank robbers while we spent ours trying to rob
banks."
The
Administration did not respond passively to the recent wave of media reports
of warnings gone unheeded. It went on the offensive. Vice-President Dick
Cheney warned against "incendiary rhetoric," and said that the
criticism from Democrats about the missed messages was "thoroughly irresponsible
of national leaders in a time of war." Other Cabinet members issued dire
public warnings of increased terrorism threats—based not on specific
information but on more "chatter," in various corners of the
Islamic world. In earlier interviews with me, senior F.B.I. counterterrorism
officials had made a point of criticizing such vague warnings. "Is there
some C.Y.A."—cover your ass—"involved when officials talk about
threats to power supplies, or banks, or malls?" one senior F.B.I.
official asked. "Of course there is." "Puffing up the threat
because of a political interest is a disservice," the official added.
When such threats are unfulfilled, the result is that "the country
lowers its guard. And that kind of flippancy is what we don't need now. The
American people are going back to sleep." Another F.B.I. official
depicted the question of when to warn the public as a "lose-lose"
situation. "Say we get a report that three Al Qaeda guys are driving up
from Mexico to blow up an unspecified mall in Dallas," the official
said. "What do you want to be told?" He added, "We know the
power of the people. Do we want you calling us if your neighbor is turning in
to his driveway at two in the morning?" The bureau responded to three
hundred calls about suspicious packages between January 1st and September
10th of 2001. After September 11th, the official said, "we received
fifty-four thousand calls and physically responded to fourteen thousand of
them." Even now, according to another official, scores of tips arrive
every day from overseas, many of them relayed by C.I.A. sources that are
known to pay for such information. "And the C.I.A. is happy to forward
them to us," he noted. "Then it's not the C.I.A.'s problem." Stories of supposed terrorist
sightings have also become common inside the airline industry—a part of its
post-September 11th folklore. One widely repeated tale involves a stewardess
who flew with a man dressed as a captain—he had hitched a ride, as crew
members often do—whom she later recognized as Mohammed Atta. Many in the
industry, it seems, know someone who knows someone who saw one or another of
the September 11th terrorists in captains' uniforms in cockpit jumpseats. There also has been a series
of jarring alerts from federal health agencies and the Office of Homeland
Security depicting the far-reaching threat posed by biological warfare or the
possible use of fissile materials by Al Qaeda. One public-health official who
has participated in Homeland Security discussions described the group as being
overwhelmed by the potential threat to America's water supply, electrical
grids, oil depots, and even the wholesale processing of milk. "Where do
we start?" he said. "So many threats. We're like deer in the
headlights." "Traditionally, when
Americans have had a war, they go and find the enemy, defeat it on the
battlefield, and come home to replant," a senior F.B.I. official said.
The war against terrorism is a long-term struggle and has no borders.
"We need maturity when it comes to protecting our society," the
official went on. "We shouldn't profoundly change our system, but we
need a balance. Democracy is a messy business." Meanwhile, the
terrorists won't go away. Another senior F.B.I. official said, "They'd
like nothing better than to regroup and come back." |
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