What failed before 9/11?

A meeting of FBI and CIA agents just months before Sept. 11, 2001, illustrates the flaws in the U.S. intelligence system.

WASHINGTON - They met in New York the summer before everything changed, a handful of intelligence agents intent, in theory, on achieving the same goal: preventing the next terrorist attack against the United States, just as reports warned that a spectacular one was coming.

In practice, however, they accomplished little. The meeting on June 11, 2001, would become one of several "missed opportunities" uncovered in the new report by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The commission found widespread problems in the way America disseminates intelligence data.

In the week since the commission's report was released, politicians and security analysts have decried the interagency turf battles and lapses the report uncovered.

But what, precisely, does that mean? The June 11 meeting, the least publicized of the missed opportunities, provides a case study of exactly what went wrong, on many levels. A dissection of that meeting illustrates a remarkable unwillingness by counterterrorism agents to communicate, even when working on the same cases in the same room.

It highlights a gross misunderstanding of the rules governing the sharing of intelligence data with criminal investigators, who might have found at least one hijacker before Sept. 11.

And it highlights the challenges ahead as Congress begins reworking the structure and culture of America's intelligence network.

Stephen J. Schulhofer, an expert in criminal law who testified before the Sept. 11 commission, said in an interview that CIA and FBI intelligence agents at the June 11 meeting built the very barriers they later complained about, barriers that were patently needless.

"It's carried to such an extreme here," he said, "it really defies common sense."

The June 11 meeting was supposed to be about everything it was not: communication, cooperation and a recognition of how the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency could complement each other's work.

It was scheduled by FBI and CIA analysts in Washington, D.C., who were revisiting surveillance data from a summit of al-Qaida operatives in January 2000 in Malaysia. The data included photos of suspected al-Qaida operatives, and they wanted New York-based FBI agents investigating the bombing of the USS Cole to look at them.

Through the spring and early summer of 2001, America's intelligence network had detected "chatter" about an upcoming al-Qaida attack. Agents around the world were working frantically to learn when or where it might occur. Investigators believed al-Qaida had used the Malaysian summit to plan the Cole bombing of October 2000, and they wanted to know more about the participants and where they might have gone.

Three agents flew up from Washington: a CIA analyst whom the 9/11 Commission Report identified only as Dave, an FBI analyst called Jane and an FBI analyst called Mary. They met the New York agents on a drizzly, foggy day at their offices in Federal Plaza in Manhattan.

Jane carried the photos. She had gotten them from a CIA counterterrorism analyst in Washington and had been told only that one of the men in the photos was named Khalid Almihdhar, a 26-year-old Saudi national.

She was not told that a CIA/FBI source had identified another man in the photos as a high-ranking al-Qaida security official, known as Khallad, suspected of planning the Cole bombing.

She was not told that the CIA had tracked Almihdhar from the Malaysia summit and that he had obtained a U.S. visa and had probably traveled to the United States.

At the meeting, the information gap only widened. The New York FBI agents had questions: Who is Almihdhar? Why is he significant? Why were these pictures taken? Where are the rest of the photographs?

But Jane didn't have much to tell them, and she didn't feel comfortable sharing what she did know. She had gotten her information from the National Security Agency, and NSA documents routinely carried the caveat that they not be shared with investigators without permission from the Justice Department office that oversees how intelligence is used in criminal cases.

The 9/11 Commission Report found that the caveats were clearly unnecessary and stemmed from "an overabundance of caution" by the Justice Department and the National Security Agency. But Jane never asked for permission to share the data, anyway. Nor did she realize that one of the New York agents also was a designated intelligence agent whom she could have briefed without getting permission.

"This decision was potentially significant," the 9/11 report said, "because the . . . intelligence she did not share linked Almihdhar to a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East. The agents would have established a link to the suspected facility from their work on the (Kenya) embassy bombing case.

"This link would have made them very interested in learning more about Almihdhar."

On top of that, someone who could have enlightened everyone was right there in the room.

Dave, the CIA analyst who accompanied Jane to New York, knew Almihdhar had attended the al-Qaida summit in Malaysia.

He knew Almihdhar had a U.S. visa. He knew he was probably in America. He knew his traveling companion, Nawaf Alhamzi, a Saudi with al-Qaida connections, had come to the United States. He knew a source had linked Almihdhar to a suspected leader of the Cole attack.

But Dave said nothing.

"No one at the meeting asked him what he knew; he did not volunteer anything," the 9/11 Commission Report says. "He told investigators that as a CIA analyst, he was not authorized to answer FBI questions regarding CIA information.

"Jane said she assumed that if Dave knew the answers to questions, he would have volunteered them. The New York agents left the meeting without obtaining information that might have started them looking for Almihdhar."

Almihdhar had indeed arrived in Los Angeles with Alhamzi in January 2000, then returned to the Middle East that summer, apparently homesick. The 9/11 report says al-Qaida planners worried that he might compromise the operation: He was known to have jihadist connections, and they feared he might be stopped when he tried to re-enter the United States. They even considered dropping him from the plot.

But their fears were not realized. Two days after the June 11 meeting, Almihdhar obtained another U.S. visa. He landed in New York on July 4.

The meeting on June 11, 2001, was not the most egregious of the missed opportunities cited by the Sept. 11 commission. Experts say that was the failure of the CIA, back in January 2000, to tell the FBI that it had spied Almihdhar at the al-Qaida summit in Malaysia and that he had a U.S. visa.

Nor did the CIA put him on the State Department's watch list, which would have triggered his detention when he and Alhamzi entered the country. The pair even lived for a while with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant in San Diego.

As the hijacking plot coalesced during the summer of 2001, Almihdhar and Alhamzi rented cars and hotel rooms under their real names in Virginia and New Jersey. Intelligence officials have speculated that Almihdhar coordinated the nonpilot hijackers, who were recruited to help take over the cockpits of the four hijacked planes.

On Sept. 11, the pair would help crash American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.

The June 11 meeting marked at least the third time the CIA failed to share enough information to put the FBI on Almihdhar's trail. The Sept. 11 commission and other experts lay the blame, in part, on the culture of the CIA, which jealously guards its sources and methods for gathering intelligence.

In the process, the agency often is not as forthcoming with information as it should be.

"It was a classic example of the CIA being focused on foreign issues, overseas issues, and the FBI being focused on the domestic side, and this huge gap between the two," said Eleanor Hill, director of last year's congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, which drew many of the same conclusions as the Sept. 11 commission.

"If things were working the way they should have worked, the FBI would have fed those names to their counterterrorism informants, and wham!"

The CIA is designed to collect intelligence overseas, not to watch or arrest people inside the United States or to make cases against terrorists. That's the FBI's job. Schulhofer, a law professor at New York University, said the CIA fears that if it tells the FBI too much, its sources could be made public in court.

"They want to make sure their intelligence operations don't get swept up in the criminal procedures and compromise an informant," he said.

That's a reasonable concern, but it's also surmountable, as it was on June 11. The CIA can and often does relay information to the FBI without revealing its sources, and the FBI can use that information for its own investigations.

At the June 11 meeting, Schulhofer said, nothing prohibited Dave, the CIA analyst, from telling the FBI that Almihdhar had a U.S. visa and connections to al-Qaida.

If the agents had pressed him, Dave simply could have told them, " "Well, I can't tell you our sources and methods, but trust me, this guy is in the country.' Or, "Trust me, this guy was at the meeting where they planned the Cole attack,' " Schulhofer said.

The House Intelligence Committee is scheduled to begin hearings this week on the findings of the Sept. 11 commission. The committee chairman, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, a former CIA agent, said he's not ready to endorse the commission's findings, but he acknowledged that the June 11 meeting exposes weaknesses in how America analyzes intelligence data.

"That meeting was illustrative of how far apart the cultures were, and that was by design. It was known - it was not a secret - that wall was there," Goss said.

"The mission of the CIA is to preserve those sources and keep those sources functioning, and the mission of the FBI is to take those bad guys off the street. If they're the same people, you've got a problem."

As for Jane's decision to withhold information from her FBI colleagues in New York, the report says her lapse was part of a widespread misunderstanding of policies governing how intelligence data can be shared with investigators.

In 1995, under former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Justice Department set up new rules for managing the flow of foreign and domestic intelligence data to criminal prosecutors. The gatekeeper was the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which was designed to ensure that intelligence information wasn't used improperly.

The law governs how evidence may be collected for use in court, and the fruits of many intelligence-gathering techniques, especially electronic surveillance, don't meet those standards. By tightening the rules, the Justice Department hoped to prevent evidence gathered by intelligence agents from tainting criminal cases in court.

From the beginning, however, the rules were misunderstood and misapplied, and the so-called "wall" grew to mythic proportions, the 9/11 report found. By the time the CIA and FBI agents gathered in New York on June 11, intelligence analysts such as Jane widely - and wrongly - believed they "could not share any intelligence information with criminal investigators."

"Thus, relevant information from the National Security Agency and the CIA often failed to make its way to criminal investigators," the report said.

Reno, who also testified before the commission, said in an interview that she was surprised at the scope of confusion the June 11 meeting reveals.

Jane's failure to tell her colleagues what she knew about Almihdhar "speaks to the need for a heavy emphasis on training, from the time (FBI agents) enter the academy on," Reno said. "The information that's in question should have been shared."

In an interview with the congressional panel that investigated the attacks last year, one of the New York FBI agents at the June 11 meeting expressed his frustration with the futility of it and the lack of information about Almihdhar and the Malaysia summit they received.

"We had information at the time that one of these suspects (in the Cole bombing) had actually traveled to the same region that this might have taken place, so we pressed . . . for more information," according to the New York agent, who spoke from behind a screen to keep his identity secret.

"At the end of that day, we knew the name Khalid Almihdhar, but nothing else. The context of the meeting was that we continued to press them two or three times on information regarding, "Why were you looking at this guy?' "

January 2000: Khalid Almihdhar, a Saudi, attends a summit of suspected al-Qaida operatives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The CIA trails him and Nawaf Alhamzi from Malaysia to Bangkok, Thailand, before losing them in a crowd. The CIA knows Almihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa but fails to tell the FBI or to put him on the State Department's watch list, which would have triggered his detention when he tried to enter the country.

Jan. 15, 2000: Almihdhar and Alhamzi arrive in Los Angeles on United Airlines. They stay with a longtime FBI counterterrorism informant in San Diego, but the FBI has no reason to suspect them.

June 2000: Apparently homesick, Almihdhar returns to the Middle East. His al-Qaida handlers, afraid that he'll be detected when he tries to re-enter the United States, consider dropping him from the plot. Alhamzi stays in California.

January 2001: Based on photos from the Malaysia summit, a CIA/FBI source ties Almihdhar to another al-Qaida operative, called Khallad, who is believed to have planned the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000.

Again, the CIA does not notify the FBI about Almihdhar's connection to al-Qaida, nor does it put him on the State Department's watch list.

June 11, 2001: FBI and CIA intelligence analysts meet in New York with FBI agents investigating the Cole bombing. The CIA analyst knows Almihdhar was linked to the suspected leader of the Cole attack and had a U.S. visa but does not tell the FBI. An FBI analyst also does not share information she has about Almihdhar, apparently confused about rules governing the flow of intelligence data to criminal investigators.

June 13, 2001: Still in the Middle East, Almihdhar obtains another U.S. visa.

July 4, 2001: Almihdhar arrives in New York.

Aug. 22, 2001: After examining the data from the Malaysia meeting for the first time, two FBI analysts in Washington realize Almihdhar's potential connection to the Cole case. Immigration records show he recently arrived in New York.

Aug. 24, 2001: Almihdhar and Alhamzi are put on the State Department's watch list. Meanwhile, the analysts contact FBI agents in New York and ask them to find Almihdhar. Confusion about the rules regarding the sharing of intelligence data delays the search.

Sept. 11, 2001: An agent in New York asks for help from the FBI in Los Angeles because that's where Almihdhar first entered the country in January 2000. That morning, Almihdhar and Alhamzi board American Airlines Flight 77 at Washington Dulles International Airport, then help crash it into the Pentagon, killing 184 people.

- SOURCE: SEPT. 11 COMMISSION REPORT

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