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May 27, 2002
WASHINGTON -- FBI officials in Washington not only stymied an investigation into flight school student Zacarias Moussaoui before Sept. 11, but also actively tried to stop field agents from connecting the suspected 20th hijacker to the terrorist attacks even after they occurred, a Minnesota field agent contends in a 13-page "whistle-blower" letter made public Sunday.
FBI agent Coleen Rowley, general counsel in the Minneapolis field office, also charges in her letter to FBI director Robert S. Mueller III that intelligence on Moussaoui provided by the French government, which included information on his "activities connected with Osama bin Laden," was more than enough to obtain a special surveillance warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop computer in the weeks before the terrorist attacks.
But requests for such a warrant were thwarted by FBI supervisors in Washington who seemed so intent on ignoring the threat posed by Moussaoui, Rowley wrote, that some field agents speculated that key officials at FBI headquarters "had to be spies or moles . . . who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis' effort."
Last August, FBI agents in Minnesota had become increasingly "desperate" to search the laptop and personal effects of the mysterious Frenchman of Moroccan descent, Rowley wrote. He had been detained on immigration violations after arousing suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, where he was trying to learn how to fly a commercial airliner. Moussaoui, 33, has since been indicted as an al-Qaida operative and is the sole person charged with conspiracy in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Rowley's scorching May 21 letter, which caused an uproar on Capitol Hill last week, was posted in full by Time magazine on its Web site Sunday, two days after the FBI refused to turn it over to congressional investigators or even to U.S. senators. Excerpts leaked to the media late last week.
FBI officials said Sunday that the letter remains classified and that they would not comment.
Rowley's detailed, often bitter comments raised a raft of fresh questions Sunday -- particularly her assertion that high-ranking bureau officials had sought to impede an investigation into Moussaoui after the attacks by "a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts" concerning mistakes they had made before Sept. 11.
By doing so, Rowley contends, the FBI put Americans at further risk by failing to act quickly and aggressively enough to determine whether Moussaoui was part of the Sept. 11 conspiracy or of unrelated terrorist attacks.
Within days of Moussaoui's arrest on Aug. 15, FBI field agents in Minneapolis were convinced that he was a dangerous Islamic militant who had sought aviation training for terrorist acts. That belief stemmed from their investigation, as well as a wealth of information provided by the French intelligence service, Rowley said. Her reference to "activities connected to . . . bin Laden" is the first indication that authorities had suspected Moussaoui of being linked to the alleged terrorist mastermind prior to Sept. 11.
Despite those concerns, officials at FBI headquarters in Washington repeatedly quashed efforts to help the field agents secure a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which would have allowed them to run wiretaps and search Moussaoui's computer and personal effects, Rowley said.
The request for such a warrant was denied Aug. 28. Minutes after two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center, one of the FBI supervisors in Washington who was intimately involved in the Moussaoui case called Rowley on her cell phone. She believed, she wrote to Mueller, that the supervisor reluctantly was going to admit that the warrant to search Moussaoui's effects was now necessary.
Instead, Rowley writes, the "supervisory special agent" told her that "we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got (headquarters') permission because we might 'screw up' something else going on elsewhere in the country," Rowley wrote. She did not name the supervisor.