Sept. 10 messages decoded too late

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency intercepted two messages on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon warning that something was going to happen the next day, but the messages were not translated until Sept. 12, senior U.S. intelligence officials told the Washington Post on Wednesday.

The Arabic language messages said, "The match is about to begin," and "Tomorrow is zero hour." They were discussed Tuesday before the joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee during closed-door questioning of Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, the agency responsible for intercepting and analyzing electronic messages.

Intelligence officials said the two messages, even if translated on Sept. 10, would not have provided enough information to prevent the attacks in New York and Washington. But their disclosure put the NSA in the spotlight for the first time since reports of intelligence failures began to emerge this spring and seemed likely to sharpen the focus of the congressional investigation, which has been dominated by concerns about the performance of the FBI and CIA on problems at the nation's premier eavesdropping agency.

U.S. intelligence sources said NSA analysts are not certain who was speaking on the Sept. 10 intercepts. They came from sources -- a location or phone number -- that were of high enough priority to translate them within two days, but were not put in the top priority category, which included communications from Osama bin Laden or his senior al-Qaida assistants.

The agency provided classified information to the joint intelligence committee more than a month ago about the messages and the failure to get them translated until after Sept. 11.

The messages, and the delay in translating them, became the subject of discussions between the congressional staff and intelligence officials before Tuesday's hearing, which included testimony by CIA director George Tenet and FBI director Robert Mueller, according to congressional and administration officials. The three men appeared before the panel again Wednesday.

The NSA, which is based in Fort Meade, Md., is one of the government's most secretive intelligence agencies. It intercepts upwards of 2-million electronic communications -- telephone conversations, e-mails, Internet traffic -- an hour from satellites and listening posts around the world.

Although the NSA consumes an estimated $6-billion of the $30-billion the government budgets for intelligence each year, and spends most of it on high-tech interception equipment, the agency does not have adequate means to filter out the millions of bits of irrelevant information it scoops up each day. Intelligence budgets are classified.

Without such filters, human translators are left to sort through mountains of data and, as a result, only a fraction of the foreign-language material collected is translated promptly -- and much of it is never analyzed.

Indeed, analysts said the fate of the Sept. 10 intercepts points to a broader aspect of the post-Sept. 11 effort to improve intelligence gathering: technology versus human beings. Even more than the CIA, the NSA has been criticized for failing to put enough emphasis on employing enough skilled translators and analysts to decipher the information it collects.

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