Posted on 01/15/2002 4:38:07 PM PST by t-shirt
Bin Laden fled in December, says CIA
Jan 15 2002
Osama bin Laden not only escaped the US bombing of eastern Afghanistan, but has reportedly fled the region by sea, according to a CIA report.
In a major setback to the war on terrorism, CIA analysts have said bin Laden escaped from the Tora Bora cave complex around the first week of December.
CIA officials told America's ABCNews that one captured al-Qaida fighter claims to have witnessed, in one of the Tora Bora hiding places, bin Laden handing control to one of his deputies
"I think that most intelligence analysts are absolutely convinced at this point that bin Laden has slipped the noose and has left Afghanistan and Pakistan," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA counter-terrorism chief.
To fool US forces in the area, the CIA believes, bin Laden left behind a video message that was transmitted only after had escaped.
Asked about bin Laden's whereabouts, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he did not know where bin Laden was but that US forces were in "hot pursuit" of him. "I can't say he is out of that immediate region. I have seen nothing that suggests we know where he is, whether it's in Afghanistan, Pakistan or somewhere else," Powell said.
US, British, German and French forces have been searching dozens of ships in the Arabian Sea for the last two months and the CIA have concluded that bin Laden most likely fled by sea to Pakistan.
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U.S. book claims bin Laden met Iran intelligence
officerTuesday January 15, 9:28 AM
By Tabassum Zakaria
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Osama bin Laden met an Iranian intelligence officer in the mid-1990s to try to forge an alliance to conduct a terror campaign against the United States, according to a new book by a former CIA officer.
Bin Laden met an Iranian intelligence officer in Afghanistan in July 1996 to "hammer out a strategic relationship," Robert Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East and Tajikistan, writes in "See No Evil," due out later this week.
Tajik Islamic chieftain Abdallah Nuri, who operated out of Afghanistan, brokered the alliance and at least one meeting between bin Laden and an Iranian intelligence officer occurred, the book said. The Iranian was not identified.
"Although we never found out what happened at the meeting, we knew bin Laden intended to propose to Iran a coordinated terrorism campaign against the U.S.," the book said.
U.S. officials recently expressed concerned that Tehran might give safe haven to some al Qaeda fighters fleeing across the border from Afghanistan due to the U.S.-led war.
U.S. President George W. Bush warned Iran last week against harboring members of al Qaeda or trying to undermine the interim government in Kabul. Iran said its border with Afghanistan was sealed and it would not allow any al Qaeda members to cross.
BOOK CRITICAL OF CIA
The United States has bombed Afghanistan since October 7 and vowed to destroy bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, who Washington blames for the September 11 attacks on America that killed more than 3,100 people.
Baer, who left the CIA in 1997 after 21 years with the spy agency, criticizes the CIA and the White House National Security Council for not taking a more active role in fighting terrorism in the 1990s.
In December 1995 one of bin Laden's Egyptian associates visited Tehran and met several officers from the Ministry of Intelligence and Security, Baer writes in the book, an advance copy of which was released to the media.
"The U.S. wasn't sure bin Laden had reached an agreement with the Iranians on a strategic relationship, but we in the intelligence community suspected he had," Baer said.
Early in 1996 a CIA field office proposed a plan to bug a clandestine facility of the Pasdaran or Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the book said.
Baer said National Security Council staff expressed concern that the proposed eavesdropping operation might result in the Iranians taking revenge on employees if U.S. oil company Amoco in Azerbaijan, but later allowed it.
The CIA also suspected bin Laden had a hand in the November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Baer said.
While posted in Dushanbe during the Afghan civil wars that erupted in the 1990s after Soviet forces withdrew from Afghanistan, Baer said he repeatedly asked for Dari or Pashtun speakers to debrief Afghans crossing into Tajikistan.
"I was told there were no Dari or Pashtun speakers anywhere. I was also told the CIA no longer collected on Afghanistan, so those languages weren't needed," Baer said.
He criticizes the CIA at that time for not actively pursuing contacts in the Middle East and elsewhere who could have provided information on bin Laden's network, but acknowledges there was "no silver bullet" that by itself could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.
Baer also said when he was in northern Iraq he was approached by an Iraqi military opponent of President Saddam Hussein willing to organize a coup on Baghdad in 1995, but the NSC shied away from supporting it.
The CIA had no comment on Baer's book, which as required went through the CIA's publication review board to ensure it did not reveal classified information. Some words and a few passages were blacked out in the book.
You'll see many, many more of these over the years. He's worth more to the warmongers at large than he is captured. In fact I predict they'll never capture him.
Er, so what ocean lies between Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Exactly from which country? Afghanistan is land-locked, you know.
By Gwen Robinson in Washington
Financial Times
Published: January 12 2002 00:57 | Last Updated: January 12 2002 01:39
A former US intelligence agent has alleged that the CIA ignored detailed warnings he passed on in 1998 that a Gulf state was harbouring an al-Qaeda cell led by two known terrorists.
When FBI agents attempted to arrest them, the Gulf state's government provided the men with alias passports, the former agent claims.
The allegation is contained in a controversial new book on US intelligence operations in the Middle East by Robert Baer, a former case officer in the CIA's directorate of operations.
The book, See No Evil, is to be published later this month featuring blacked-out sections which obscure passages that the CIA's publications review board claimed were classified.
An excerpt is being published this weekend by the US magazine Vanity Fair.
After months of acrimonious negotiation last year with the CIA over passages of the book, Mr Baer added further detail after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US.
Among fresh details are an account of how, after he left the CIA in 1997 and became a consultant in Beirut, Mr Baer was advising a prince in a Gulf royal family.
A military associate of the prince, he said, had last year warned Mr Baer that a "spectacular terrorist operation" was being planned and would take place shortly.
Mr Baer said he also provided him a computer record of "hundreds" of secret al-Qaeda operatives in the Gulf region, many in Saudi Arabia. Mr Baer said that in August 2001, at the military officer's request, he offered the list to the Saudi Arabian government. But an aide to the Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan, refused to look at the list or to pass them (the names) on.
On the al-Qaeda cell in the Gulf state, which is not named in the book, Mr Baer claims the two men who led the cell, Shawqi Islambuli and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, escaped arrest and settled in Prague.
The information Mr Baer gave to the CIA was not followed up, he said.
In the book, Mr Baer also claims: That in 1996, Osama bin Laden established a strategic alliance with Iran to co-ordinate terrorist attacks against the US. In 1995, the National Security Council intentionally aborted a military coup against Saddam Hussein, partly orchestrated by Mr Baer, who at the time was working to help organise the opposition. In 1991, the CIA intentionally shut down its operations in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
Some of Mr Baer's charges, such as the White House's decision to withdraw support from the Iraqi opposition, are in the public realm.
But a former CIA analyst who specialised in the Middle East said on Friday night: "What's new, and potentially explosive, is the detail - this book will definitely put focus on the issue of the CIA and State Department's handling of the Iraqi opposition."
Greg Gordon
Star Tribune
Published Jan 13 2002
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- FBI officials promptly told the Federal Aviation Administration last August of the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, who raised suspicions at a Minnesota flight school, but FAA security officials took no action.
They saw no reason to check scores of other flight schools for Middle Eastern men seeking flight training, said a senior FAA official, speaking for the agency.
There is no way to know whether such a nationwide canvass would have led investigators to any of several Sept. 11 suicide hijackers who had enrolled in flight schools in Florida and Western states.
Rather, the FAA's decision may be remembered as one in a series of pre-Sept. 11 instances in which federal authorities did not fully recognize and respond to faint warning signals that a terrorist network was at work. FBI officials maintain that based on what was known at the time, the bureau did well to nab Moussaoui, who faces conspiracy charges and is suspected of being the 20th hijacker.
Besides being informed by the FBI, FAA personnel also learned about Moussaoui from another channel. A program manager at the Eagan flight school who first phoned the FBI about the young Frenchman of Moroccan descent also informally shared his concerns with as many as four FAA inspectors, according to several people familiar with the matter. But there is no indication that any of them relayed the information to FAA security officials.
FBI officials also made fateful decisions. After Moussaoui's arrest, bureau lawyers in Washington repeatedly declined requests from Minneapolis agents to seek a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) authorizing a search of Moussaoui's laptop computer. That decision is being questioned by some FISA experts, who say it's possible a warrant would have been granted.
The special court that reviews FISA requests -- a federal panel that since 1999 has included U.S. District Judge Michael Davis of Minnesota -- has approved more than 12,000 Justice Department applications for covert search warrants and wiretaps and rejected only one since the act was passed in 1978, according to government reports.
Mary Schiavo, a former Transportation Department inspector general who handled FISA cases as a Justice Department attorney in the 1980s, said FBI officials in Washington may have had a regional bias in the Moussaoui case: "They probably assumed there's nothing going on in Minnesota."
After the Sept. 11 attacks, when authorities did search Moussaoui's computer, they found evidence that would have heightened suspicions that he was a terrorist.
Tips to FBI
The FBI was alerted to Moussaoui on Aug. 15 by two program managers at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, who called the bureau's Minneapolis office and spoke to Special Agent Dave Rapp. They were concerned about Moussaoui's odd behavior -- he lacked a pilot's license, and they said he paid nearly $10,000 for a few lessons in a Boeing 747 flight simulator as an "ego thing."
FBI officials shared with other law enforcement agencies in a Twin Cities counter-terrorism task force what they knew about Moussaoui, a law enforcement official said. They debated whether to arrest him or to try to watch his movements. Given the scarce law enforcement resources and the easy paths out of the country, it was decided to detain him for overstaying his permitted 90-day visit. Agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested Moussaoui at his suburban motel on the eve of his first scheduled session in a 747 flight simulator.
Last month Moussaoui was indicted on six counts of conspiracy related to the Sept. 11 attacks. His trial is scheduled to begin Oct. 14.
But in mid-August, 3 1/2 weeks before 19 hijackers commandeered and crashed four passenger jets, FAA security officials showed only mild interest in the uncooperative foreigner sitting in a Sherburne County jail cell.
FBI officials had "multiple consultations" with the FAA about Moussaoui between his Aug. 16 arrest and Sept. 11, a senior law enforcement official said. But the FBI had received no leads suggesting that terrorists had recently received training at U.S. flight schools, the official said.
"The FBI did notify us about this," said the senior FAA official, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used. "But it was a notification which said, 'Here's what this guy did,' not that he was a terrorist.
"So here we have a guy acting strange who's in custody. As a result of that, we did not notify other flight schools. ... If this guy was a threat, taken to the most extreme, he was in custody, so it was not a worry."
Before Sept. 11, FBI tidbits on possible terrorism threats "couldn't always fit into a puzzle," the FAA official said. So word of the arrest of a flight student for suspicious behavior, while unusual, did not seem of extraordinary consequence.
At Pan Am, the program manager who first alerted the FBI to Moussaoui also shared his concerns in late August with the FAA's on-site inspector and three commercial airline inspectors taking a refresher course at the school, according to people familiar with his account.
Jan Orr Pelletti, the FAA on-site inspector at the time, declined to comment.
But one of the three inspectors, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he remembered the program manager telling him and his colleagues of his concerns about Moussaoui. He said he and his colleagues agreed that alerting the FBI was "the right thing to do."
While the Pan Am manager didn't explicitly say so, the inspector said, the "logical extension" of his comments was that "this guy might be a terrorist" seeking to hijack or blow up a plane.
The inspector said he chose not to phone the FAA's security office because "security just ignores" flight standards inspectors.
Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., who watches over the aviation industry as the senior Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said past events have underscored the importance "of sharing information on credible terrorist threats."
The inspectors' reactions to learning about Moussaoui, he said, suggest that agency personnel "were not on a high state of alert."
Since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988 and amid rising threats from Osama bin Laden's global Al-Qaida terrorist network, the FAA and FBI have improved communication in recent years. That includes posting an FAA liaison at FBI headquarters.
But Schiavo, the outspoken former Transportation Department inspector general, said that FAA officials had refused to believe that the United States faced a threat of domestic terrorism. She said that flight schools "fairly well salivated at the thought of getting lots of foreign students, and the FAA encouraged it."
"People didn't want to do anything to turn off the pipeline of foreign cash," she said.
"So the mere fact that the [Pan Am] flight school itself raised a red flag, which was totally against its own interests, should have been taken very, very seriously," said Schiavo, now an aviation disaster attorney.
Soon after Sept. 11, authorities would learn that Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, the two men who who allegedly flew planes into the World Trade Center, and Ziad Jarrah, believed to be at the controls of the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, all enrolled in Florida flight schools over the last two years. Hani Hanjour, believed to have guided the plane that hit the Pentagon, attended several flight schools in Arizona and California.
As part of aviation security legislation adopted after the attacks, flight schools now are required to clear any foreigner seeking admission with the Justice Department.
The FAA also issued an advisory urging flight schools to watch for unusual behavior from students, including those who pay in cash or abruptly leave.
Moussaoui's laptop
Soon after Moussaoui's arrest, FBI agents in Minneapolis asked bureau headquarters to float his name in international intelligence circles. Within days, the French intelligence agency responded with sketchy information stating that Moussaoui had been under surveillance and might be associated with terrorists, a federal law enforcement official said. When the French were prodded for more details, they said that a friend of Moussaoui's had fought with Bin Laden in Chechnya, but did not tie Moussaoui to a specific terrorist group.
It could not be learned whether the FBI shared that information with the FAA.
When the Minneapolis agents asked headquarters to seek a FISA warrant, bureau lawyers told them that the evidence did not meet the law's test. Unlike a standard search warrant, which requires a belief that a crime already has been committed, FISA requires only that agents show it is more likely than not that a suspect is planning terrorist activities, is a member of a terrorist group or is an agent of a foreign power.
Washington lawyer Kenneth Bass, who helped write the FISA law as a Justice Department official during the Carter administration, said that a decision on a warrant in Moussaoui's case would rise or fall mainly on the credibility and strength of the foreign intelligence information.
But Schiavo, who handled FISA requests as a special assistant to Attorney General Richard Thornburgh in 1987 and 1988, contended that the FBI probably could have made a strong case even without the foreign intelligence.
She said that if the lawyers had laid out the circumstances of Moussaoui's flight training, including that he was a foreigner who paid with a large amount of cash, they could have shown "reasonable suspicion" and obtained a FISA warrant.
FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he believes bureau lawyers made the right decision on the Moussaoui warrant request, given what was known at the time.
Even after the Sept. 11 attacks, Minneapolis agents investigating Moussaoui were still seeking a FISA warrant.
Then, on about Sept. 14, an agent phoned a Pan Am official and asked about a computer disk that had been found next to Moussaoui's laptop and which contained a 747 flight manual, several people familiar with the case said. The Pan Am official said it must be "proprietary information" that belonged to the school.
It was too late to prevent the attacks. But the flight manual would help agents get a standard search warrant so they could begin to investigate whether Moussaoui was connected to the hijackers.
On the laptop's hard drive, they found voluminous information on crop-dusting planes -- aircraft that investigators fear could be used in a biological or chemical weapons attack. Alleged hijacker Atta made inquiries at a Florida crop-dusting firm early last year and again in the weeks before Sept. 11.
-- Greg Gordon is at ggordon@mcclatchydc.com .
Er, so what ocean lies between Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Hahahahahaha! I almost posted the same question. I'm glad I scrolled down.
What DOES concern me is that IF the CIA said this then they need to take some remedial geography classes. Maybe a subscription to NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. Those maps are really great.
CIA Reportedly Warned FBI About One Suspect (6 Stories of Prior Knowledge By FBI ; Government)
Man in Germany Warned of Attack (WasAllowed to Ring WhiteHouse &CIA,Wasn't TakenSerious)
A safer prediction would be that "they" will not capture him alive.
Note the word "alive". Shoot first, ask questions later.
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