Celebratory phone calls led to arrests

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 28, 2001

WASHINGTON -- Within hours of the terror attacks on Sept. 11, FBI agents hurriedly intercepted telephone calls in which suspected associates of al-Qaida in the United States were overheard celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In the following days, agents swept in and arrested them and have been holding them since, some as material witnesses, based on the information picked up in the phone calls. They are among hundreds of people detained after the attacks.

Agents made the requests for the intercepts barely minutes after the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, knowing from past terrorist acts that Osama bin Laden's followers often phone to congratulate each other after a successful operation.

The agents' requests quickly paid off. While the precise contents of the intercepted phone calls have not been disclosed, officials have said some were congratulatory, even gloating.

Yet it remains unclear whether the people involved in the conversations were participants in the plot, or merely exulting in the audacity and destructiveness of the attacks on the American "enemy." None of the people arrested on the basis of the intercepts are cooperating with the authorities and none have been charged with crimes related to Sept. 11.

According to a New York Times report, law enforcement officials have said that, before Sept. 11, they did not believe they had sufficient evidence to ask a court to authorize wiretaps of people suspected of being al-Qaida sympathizers. But after the attacks, they abandoned their reluctance and the requests were quickly approved.

Among the people arrested as a result of these intercepts and other information are several material witnesses in the case, the New York Times reported. The newspaper said its sources would not identify the witnesses or discuss the contents of the intercepted communications. They did say that the tone of the conversations was happy -- good cheer at the success of the attacks, a pattern of behavior that paralleled what occurred after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998.

This "spike" in intercepts on Sept. 11, as one official called it, helped lead the authorities to break up cells of Islamic militants whose objectives remain murky but who were suspected of being in the early stages of developing the capability to make other attacks, the New York Times reported.

The government's eavesdropping on bin Laden's followers in the United States remains a highly classified operation, one of the least known areas of the FBI's counterterrorism program. The heavy reliance on wiretaps is supposed to compensate in part for the shortage of people who could be recruited to help penetrate the group's operations in the United States.

According to the New York Times, intelligence officials said they had aimed their efforts at bin Laden associates because they now believe it is impossible to catch bin Laden through the use of electronic intercepts. Officials said they have learned that he has made it a firm practice since August not to use or even go near electronic communications devices, the newspaper reported.

According to the report, one official said bin Laden now uses associates as messengers, who make cell phone or satellite calls after they have left him. This official said previous reports that bin Laden had telephoned his wife in Syria shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks to advise her to return to Afghanistan were incomplete. In fact, the official said, bin Laden had someone else telephone his wife with that message. The call was made away from bin Laden's hideaway.

Other governments have collected similar information from bin Laden followers. A German security agency obtained an intercept immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks in which two al-Qaida members in an unknown European location, believed to be outside of Germany, were exulting over the operation. One referred to the "party of 30," a comment that led the FBI into an extensive investigation to see if the hijackers intended to seize other flights on the day of the hijackings. Nineteen hijackers were believed to have been involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

As of Saturday, U.S. law enforcement authorities say they have arrested 977 people in connection with the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. The bulk of those arrested have been charged with immigration violations or criminal violations. A far smaller group -- the number has not been disclosed -- is being held on material witness warrants.

Mindy Tucker, the Justice Department spokeswoman, said last week that the authorities have not released most of the names of those being held because the identities of some material witnesses are being kept under seal. She said the department would not disclose the names of those arrested on immigration violations because privacy issues must be resolved.

The New York Times cited one senior law enforcement official as saying the new wiretaps principally produced information about al-Qaida associates in the United States and their activities. But investigators have not learned more about the Sept. 11 attacks from those in detention.

The wiretaps being used against al-Qaida are authorized by a special court in Washington that hears requests from the government to conduct surveillance against anyone who might be connected to a foreign intelligence operation. The new antiterrorism law signed by President Bush on Friday is supposed to make it easier for federal investigators to obtain eavesdropping authorization. Under the law, officials have to assert only that foreign intelligence is a part of their need; before that, it had to be the only purpose.

Under the law that created the special court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the attorney general must personally request authorization for eavesdropping on people suspected of involvement in foreign intelligence. The subjects may be American citizens or foreigners. Most of the wiretaps are directed against foreign embassy personnel in Washington and New York.

Information gathered through these wiretaps is supposed to be collected only for intelligence purposes, not with the intention of building a criminal case against a suspect. Prosecutors must meet a higher standard to obtain wiretaps in criminal cases, showing that they have evidence that the subject broke the law.

But under the antiterrorism law signed Friday, intelligence officials and prosecutors are now allowed to share information more freely.

The surveillance act, first passed in 1978 after Watergate and other revelations of abuses by the FBI and the CIA, created a legal framework allowing the government to spy on suspects considered dangerous to American national security -- even if prosecutors had not developed a criminal case against them.

This year, the Justice Department and the FBI began an investigation of formal requests to the court that administers these requests after complaints that agents had sought to eavesdrop on people who were already the subject of criminal investigations -- apparently a violation of the rules.

Despite the recent problems, the number of applications to the special court has surged in the last decade, for espionage and terrorism investigations. Last year, the government made 1,005 applications under the act for electronic surveillance and physical search warrants, according to an April report from Attorney General John Ashcroft to Congress. The court approved 1,003 of the applications in 2000, and the final two in January 2001.

In 1999, the Justice Department made 886 applications, and all were eventually approved.

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