Posted on 09/27/2001 3:52:39 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
`Red flags all over the place'
Warning signs look obvious now
BY LENNY SAVINO
Herald Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- In hindsight, the warning signals were obvious. Law enforcement officials knew that, in 1995, two associates of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden had talked about crashing a plane into CIA headquarters outside Washington. Egypt and Italy had warned the CIA that bin Laden was plotting to fly an airplane into last June's economic summit in Genoa, Italy.
The FBI knew that bin Laden associates were taking flying lessons at U.S. schools. One school in Minnesota warned that one of its Arab students was interested only in learning to steer a commercial airliner, not in how to take off or land. French authorities identified the man, Zacarias Moussaoui, as a terrorist weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Finally, bin Laden's al Qaeda organization had tried and failed to blow up the World Trade Center, and his associates have a pattern of learning from their mistakes and trying again, as they did after a failed attempt to blow up the U.S. Navy destroyer The Sullivans. Armed with better explosives and training, they hit another destroyer, the USS Cole.
Two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed more than 6,000 people, intelligence and law enforcement officials are asking themselves why no one connected the dots.
``Somehow, it fell between the cracks,'' said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the Pentagon and World Trade Center investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``We had red flags all over the place.''
Officials say they never had enough intelligence information to predict or pre-empt the Sept. 11 attacks, but concede they had enough pieces of the puzzle to be more alarmed about whether bin Laden was planning to use some kind of airplane as a bomb.
``We've had indications this was coming for some years,'' said Rusty Capps, who retired after 21 years with the FBI, where he was the first manager of its national counterintelligence awareness program.
Analyzing and assessing terrorist threats is the responsibility of the government's Counter Terrorism Center, located at CIA headquarters but staffed by officials from the intelligence community, the FBI and other agencies.
The center was created in the mid-1980s, but since 1996 its top targets have been bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. In fact, after bin Laden issued an edict that year urging all Muslims to take arms against U.S. soldiers, the center has had a bin Laden task force.
The CIA and FBI declined to comment on events preceding the Sept. 11 attacks and what mistakes may have been made, but privately a number of intelligence officials conceded there was an intelligence and analytical failure of what one called ``Pearl Harbor proportions.''
Paul Moore, an FBI counterintelligence analyst for 21 years who's now retired, said there are several reasons that FBI and CIA analysts couldn't piece together what now seems obvious: ``Analysts look at probabilities, not possibilities. They don't look at the ways of attacking the Capitol. They look at ways of how it would most likely be attacked based on prior attacks.''
Thus, because no U.S. landmarks such as the Pentagon or the World Trade Center had been attacked by a commercial airliner hijacked by suicide bombers, analysts would not consider such scenarios.
Herald staff writer Nancy San Martin contributed to this report.
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