ASHINGTON, June 4 — The House and Senate intelligence committees announced today that they would investigate the government's overall response to international terrorism dating back to 1986, adopting an extremely broad charter for the review of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The joint committees said they would examine the performance of Republican and Democratic administrations beginning with the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the C.I.A. created its counterterrorism center. The committees said they would examine everything the government knew or should have known, from all sources of information, about the threat of international terror over the past 16 years.
In a preamble to their statement of purpose, the committees said they would look thoroughly into the mistakes and lapses before Sept. 11 and far beyond — in memory of the victims of the attacks. The committees said they would "search for facts to answer the many questions that their families and many Americans have raised and to lay a basis for assessing the accountability of institutions and officials of government."
As the hearings began on Capitol Hill, President Bush acknowledged that there had been a communications breakdown among counterterrorism agencies before Sept. 11.
"In terms of whether or not the F.B.I. and C.I.A. were communicating properly, I think it's clear that they weren't," Mr. Bush said during a morning tour of the National Security Agency, the government organization that electronically eavesdrops on conversations overseas.
But Mr. Bush said more emphatically than he has before that the attacks could not have been stopped, although he carefully couched that assertion. "I've seen no evidence today that said this country could have prevented the attack," Mr. Bush said.
The president also acknowledged for the first time the rivalry between the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. in the capital, where nearly every day brings a new disclosure of a clue missed by one agency or the other.
"In terms of the gossip and the finger-pointing, Level 3 staffers trying to protect, you know — trying to protect their hide, I don't think that's of concern," Mr. Bush said. "That's just typical Washington, D.C."
In the morning, at a separate closed staff meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, F.B.I. officials disclosed that they had opened an internal inquiry shortly after Sept. 11 into whether F.B.I. headquarters mishandled the July 10, 2001, memorandum from an agent in Phoenix, Congressional aides and other officials said.
After the first day of hearings of the joint committees, members of both panels said the session was a noncontentious one devoted to organizational matters and procedures. Senator Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, "It was a very productive business meeting."
Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he was surprised at the cordial tone of the first hearing. "I think people on the committee really are taken by the seriousness of it," he said. "We had very good member participation. The mood was very positive, and refreshing, especially in comparison to the finger-pointing that is going on in other circles."
At the Capitol today, the scene contrasted sharply from the opening day of past Congressional post mortems about incendiary national controversies like Watergate or the Iran-contra affair. In those instances, hearings were convened in majestic hearing rooms with powerful officials in the witness chairs under the glare of television cameras.
Today's action took place backstage behind a veil of secrecy in rooms accessible only to lawmakers and staff members with high security clearances. The intelligence committees assembled in Room 407 of the Capitol, a claustrophobic hearing room, sealed against electronic penetrations and protected by armed guards.
The Senate Judiciary Committee's proceedings were also closed to the public. Lawmakers on that panel focused on the memorandum by Kenneth Williams, the agent in Phoenix. In that memo, addressed to David Frasca, chief of the F.B.I.'s radical fundamentalist unit, Mr. Williams warned that Osama bin Laden's followers might be training for terror operations at American flight schools. Top F.B.I. officials were unaware of the memorandum until a few days after Sept. 11.
In addition, Mr. Frasca said today at the closed hearing that the first time he saw it was when he was shown a copy by an investigator for the inspector general's office of the Justice Department.
Mr. Frasca said the bureau's procedures in place before Sept. 11 routed some communications like the Phoenix memorandum to subordinates. But he could not explain why he never received the memorandum that was addressed to him. F.B.I. officials have not identified who at the bureau's headquarters actually handled the memorandum but have said that those agents seriously erred in failing to report it to their superiors.
Coleen Rowley, an F.B.I. agent in Minneapolis who is scheduled to testify before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday, complained bitterly in a letter last week to the head of the agency, Robert S. Mueller III, that no one at the bureau's headquarters ever told agents in Minnesota of the existence of the Phoenix memorandum. Mr. Frasca said at the meeting of judiciary committee's staff members that Ms. Rowley never called him to discuss the case in Minnesota.
Ms. Rowley has said that the Phoenix memorandum would have been significant in the effort by Minneapolis agents to obtain an intelligence search warrant to examine a laptop computer belonging to Zacarias Moussaoui, who has been indicted in the Sept. 11 hijackings. F.B.I. officials refused to seek the warrant until after Sept. 11. Ms. Rowley, in her letter, accused headquarters of interfering with the investigation.
The intense Congressional scrutiny has already forced the two old rivals, the C.I.A. and F.B.I., into an increasingly bitter exchange of charges and countercharges about how much information the agencies shared about Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, two Qaeda associates who later turned out to be among the 19 hijackers.
Even as the hearings began, Republicans and Congressional Democrats continued to fight today over how extensive and wide-ranging the investigation should be. In his remarks today, Mr. Bush renewed his effort to limit the inquiry to the Congressional panels that deal with intelligence matters and to head off calls for an independent outside commission.
"I want a committee to investigate, not multiple committees to investigate, because I don't want to tie up our team when we're trying to fight this war on terror," he said. "What I am concerned about is tying up valuable assets and time and possibly jeopardizing sources of intelligence."
But within hours, Senate Democrats debated the shape of an independent commission at their weekly party caucus. The majority leader, Senator Tom Daschle, said that Democrats by an "overwhelming majority" wanted a commission, and he argued that revelations about missed signals had strengthened the case for such an inquiry.
Even though today's hearing of the joint committees were held in closed session, the members decided today to hold most of their hearings in public, only taking testimony in a closed sessions when classified information is discussed. That decision was a response, Congressional aides said, to the continuing call by some lawmakers to establish an independent commission.
"They made a bipartisan commitment to hold as many of the hearings as possible in public session, recognizing the constraints they are under," said Paul Anderson, a spokesman for Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Besides going back to 1986, the joint committee also decided today to investigate what the intelligence community knew before Sept. 11 about "the scope and nature of any possible attacks against the United States," the resolution said.
A senior staff member said tonight, "That was a logical starting point when you start talking about commitment of resources, sharing of information and then as you develop a timeline."
One lawmaker who is a member of the committee said the panel decided to go as far back as 1986 as a compromise, saying that weeks ago there were arguments about how inclusive the inquiry should be.
"Democrats were trying to stop going back too far into what President Clinton did or did not do, or his functionaries," said this lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The Republicans tried to stop Bush and his functionaries from having to take any bullets for what they did in the run-up to 9/11."
As part of the inquiry, the committee will focus in particular on a series of terrorist attacks through the 1990's, beginning with the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, and continuing to the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
Mr. Anderson said, "The committee plans to look at how each of those investigations were handled, how the intelligence that came from those investigations were shared between agencies, and whether lessons from those events were learned and applied as we moved forward."
In another development today, the C.I.A. acknowledged that it had first received a report from a third country in March 2000 about a man who was later identified as one of the hijackers. The report said the man, Mr. Alhazmi, had visited Jordan and then flown to Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 2000.
At that point, officials said, the C.I.A. did not know that Mr. Alhazmi had come to the United States after leaving a meeting in Malaysia with other suspected Al Qaeda members in January 2000.
At first, the C.I.A. had only fragmentary identifications of some of those who would be attending the meeting. In January, it knew, for example, that a man named Nawaq had been at the meeting but by March had determined the man was Mr. Alhazmi.
By the time the meeting occurred, the agency had been able to identify another participant — Mr. Midhar, who later turned out to be another hijacker. The C.I.A. said this week that it had obtained his full name and Saudi passport number just before the meeting and had passed along that information to at least some officials at the F.B.I.
F.B.I. officials said they had received information identifying the two men, but they said they had not received any subsequent reports about their travels, even after the bombing of the Cole in October 2000.
A C.I.A. official said it was unclear what was done with the information in March 2000 that Mr. Alhazmi had been in the United States.
It was not until August 2001 that the C.I.A. finally asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to place both Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi on its watch list, after noticing that the two men had previously traveled together. The I.N.S. responded that the two were already in the country, and the C.I.A. then notified the F.B.I. that it should try to find them.