Posted on 05/26/2002 11:30:03 PM PDT by Mr. Burns
Saturday, May 25, 2002 – Print Edition, Page A4
Four years ago, Stephen Gale, a University of Pennsylvania terrorism specialist, made a presentation to security officials of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
He outlined to them scenarios where hijackers crashed planes either into nuclear power plants or into major buildings, such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
An FAA official responded by telling Mr. Gale his predictions were outlandish.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Gale had a sinking feeling as he watched news of the attacks in New York and Washington.
"I did feel pretty weird," he recalled yesterday.
"That's no accident. I know this scenario," he remembers thinking.
Right after the suicide hijackings, the common wisdom was that no one could possibly have foreseen a plot so demented.
But the idea of crashing a plane into a building isn't new. As early as the mid-1990s, Islamic terrorists had been toying with the concept in various plots. Those schemes formed the basis of Mr. Gale's analysis.
And throughout the dog days of the summer that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks, high-ranking Washington officials were in a funk over ominous warnings of an imminent, major terrorist strike.
In addition, two separate probes by Federal Bureau of Investigation agents last summer had come tantalizingly close to spotting terrorists infiltrating flight schools in the United States.
But agents in the two cases were not aware of each other's efforts, and their superiors did not appear to have grasped the broader picture, creating a disturbing portrait of a bureaucracy-heavy agency that was either too lazy or too unimaginative to put the clues together.
U.S. officials now stand accused of failing to spot the key signposts in the worst terrorist strike in history.
"It was a monumental counterintelligence failure," former FBI agent William Turner said.
Reacting to internal complaints, FBI director Robert Mueller on Thursday requested an internal inquiry over the way his bureau handled its investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the man accused of being the 20th hijacker.
"I am convinced that a different approach is required," Mr. Mueller said in a statement.
Mr. Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was arrested in Minnesota on Aug. 16, after he paid $6,800 (U.S.) in cash for flight-simulator training, but acted suspiciously.
An acquaintance told FBI agents that Mr. Moussaoui held deep-seated, violent anti-American views and that he carried fighting gloves and shin guards to practise martial arts.
The agents tried twice to get their Washington superiors to approve warrants to search Mr. Moussaoui's computer and records.
They were rebuffed, even as French intelligence warned that Mr. Moussaoui harboured extremist beliefs.
The Minneapolis agents did not know that, a month before, on July 10, Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, wrote a memo warning that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network might have enrolled followers at U.S. flight schools.
Arab aviation students he had interviewed displayed extreme hostility toward the United States, Mr. Williams said, suggesting a check be made of U.S. flight schools for al-Qaeda terrorists. The idea was rejected for lack of staff.
"This guy followed standard procedures, otherwise he would have been fired," Mr. Gale said. "What else could he possibly have said and done? Are you going to ground the entire U.S. air fleet based on pretty flimsy evidence?"
While he does not think the attacks could have been prevented, former Washington Post investigative reporter Ronald Kessler, author of The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI, said the agency wasn't ready to deal with terrorism.
"Their computers are primitive, their analysis was about non-existent," he said. "Lots of things slipped between the cracks. They were not following all the leads they should have followed."
As a police agency, the FBI has trouble dealing with its counterintelligence mandate, Mr. Turner said. The FBI should have put Mr. Moussaoui under physical and electronic surveillance, to identify others in the terrorist cell, he said. Instead they arrested him on an immigration violation and tried to question him. He wouldn't talk.
"They ruined it right there," Mr. Turner said. "The mission in counterintelligence is to disrupt an enemy operation, not to prosecute. Who cares if you convict someone if the attack takes place anyway?"
The Phoenix memo and the Minneapolis case were not the first time that terrorists showed interest in either learning to fly or crashing planes into a landmark building.
In September of 1994 a man with a history of mental illness crashed a Cessna into the grounds of the White House. Three months later, Algerian terrorists tried to smash a hijacked Air France airliner into the Eiffel Tower but police commandos stormed the plane during a refuelling stop in Marseilles.
In 1995, Filipino police arrested Hakim Murad, an accomplice of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first attack on the World Trade Center that killed six people in 1993. Mr. Murad told his interrogators of schemes to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners on the same day. He also admitted to plotting to dive a plane into the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Mr. Murad's plot was mentioned in a 1999 federal report suggesting that al-Qaeda might hijack an airliner and fly it into the Pentagon or another government building.
Then, after the 1998 al-Qaeda suicide attacks against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, two defectors who were pilots for the organization, Essam al Ridi and L'Houssaine Kherchtou, said that Mr. bin Laden personally got involved in efforts to train pilots and obtain planes.
More warnings came last summer. On June 13, Egypt alerted its Western allies that heads of state gathering in Italy in July for a Group of Eight meeting were targeted for assassination, possibly by a plane slamming into summit headquarters.
By July, the U.S. government's top counterterrorism officials had received numerous intelligence reports suggesting that terrorists could be plotting a major attack against the United States. For six weeks, government agencies were placed in the highest possible state of readiness.
But the state of alert eventually waned by August.
Then U.S. President George W. Bush received an intelligence briefing warning of possible al-Qaeda hijackings.
Also in August, the CIA asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to place Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi on its lookout list because the two had been identified as being linked to the attack in October of 2000 on the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen.
But the two men were already in the country and their whereabouts wouldn't be known until after Sept. 11 -- when they turned up among the 19 hijackers.
Ultimately, the FBI's sins reflect an entire nation's complacency, Mr. Kessler said. "We all knew bin Laden was after us. So to some extent we were all asleep."
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