What I want to know is whether it’s okay with the bureau that I point out to the investigators exactly where to look. Otherwise they’re just searching through hundreds of files.”
“Absolutely, give them everything they want and need,” Pat replied.
This was a marked change from how the bureau approached the Joint Inquiry, where agents were told that the FBI leadership was just going to accept the “blame” for 9/11 in order not to upset anyone in the CIA and rock the boat. This decision outraged the agents who were on the front lines against al-Qaeda and who knew that the truth was very different. As I walked back into the room the commission investigators were using, I felt liberated.
At one point during my discussions with the 9/11 Commission investigators, I was called into the office of my assistant special agent in charge, Amy Jo Lyons. “Ali, we’ve been getting complaints from the CIA about things you’re saying to the commission,” she said. It seemed that the investigators were going back and asking the CIA new questions based on the information I had given them. And the CIA had complained to FBI headquarters.
“That’s okay with me,” I replied to Amy, “but if people in headquarters are unhappy with me telling the commission what really happened, they can tell me in writing not to cooperate, and I won’t cooperate.”
“No, no,” Amy said, “I just want to know what’s happening here.”
“It’s simple,” I told her. “The commission started asking questions about the
“If that’s the case,” Amy replied, “you didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what needed to be done.”
When the 9/11 Commission published their findings, everything I said was confirmed by their investigation. On page 355 of the report, they list “Operational Opportunities.” Included in that summary list are:
1. January 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Khalid al-Mihdhar or notify the FBI when it learned Mihdhar possessed a valid U.S. visa.
2. January 2000: the CIA does not develop a transnational plan for tracking Mihdhar and his associates so that they could be followed to Bangkok and onward, including the United States.
3. March 2000: the CIA does not watchlist Nawaf al-Hazmi or notify the FBI when it learned that he possessed a U.S. visa and had flown to Los Angeles on January 15, 2000.
4. January 2001: the CIA does not inform the FBI that a source had identified Khallad, or Tawfiq bin Attash, a major figure in the October 2000 bombing of the USS
5. May 2001: a CIA official does not notify the FBI about Mihdhar’s U.S. visa, Hazmi’s U.S. travel, or Khallad’s having attended the Kuala Lumpur meeting (identified when he reviewed all the relevant traffic because of the high level of threats).
6. June 2001: FBI and CIA officials do not ensure that all relevant information regarding the Kuala Lumpur meeting was shared with the
The CIA’s own inspector general’s report into 9/11 came to the same conclusions regarding CIA shortcomings and its failure to share intelligence. The report states: “Earlier watchlisting of Mihdhar could have prevented his reentry into the United States in July 2001. Informing the FBI and good operational follow-through by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. Surveillance, in turn, would have the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.” The report goes on to say: “That so many individuals failed to act in this case reflects a systematic breakdown.” The inspector general recommended that an “accountability board review the performance of the CTC chiefs.” (This never happened.)
My discussions with the 9/11 Commission investigators resumed, and we started discussing the “source” in Afghanistan.
“He’s an FBI source developed in Afghanistan before 9/11. We agreed to share him with the CIA. Our agreement with them on the source was that anything gained from the source—he was a criminal investigation source—had to be shared with us.”
“And what happened?”
“After 9/11 we learned that the CIA went behind our backs and showed the pictures of the Malaysia summit meeting—the pictures they wouldn’t share with us—to the source. They didn’t tell us that they had shown him the pictures, nor did they share with us what he told them about the pictures. He didn’t know that the CIA wasn’t sharing information with the FBI; nor was he told why these pictures were important. When the source was shown the pictures from Malaysia in January 2001, he told them he didn’t recognize who Mihdhar was, but he was 90 percent certain that the other person was Khallad.
“We were not told this. This shows that the CIA knew the significance of Malaysia, Khallad, and Mihdhar but actively went out of their way to withhold the information from us. It’s not a case of just not passing on information. This is information the FBI representative working with the source should have been told about. It was a legal requirement. Instead we were deliberately kept out of the loop.”
“We were told by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that they shared all their information with the FBI from the source and that nothing was hidden,” a commission member responded.
I paused and, thinking out loud, asked, “Did you check all the regular cables?”
“Yes.”
“Did you check operational traffic?”
“That must be it,” Doug said, smiling broadly. At first only he understood the point I was making, and he received puzzled looks from other staffers. But then he explained it to them.
Operational traffic refers to cables sent during an operation. The officer will list procedures, leaving a record in case something goes wrong or something needs to be referred to. Because these cables are strictly procedural and not related to intelligence, they would not be sent to the FBI. If someone wanted to hide something from the FBI, that’s where he would put it. Because Doug had worked for the CIA, he knew what operational cables were, while other members of the team might not have.
After investigating the episode, the 9/11 Commission found that this intelligence was indeed hidden in operational traffic.
When an FBI colleague from New York, Frank Pellegrino, briefed the commission after me, a staffer commented about investigators being “unable to connect the dots.”
“What dots?” Frank angrily replied. “There are no dots to connect! It was all there, written in front of them.”
Later I was asked by the 9/11 Commission to travel to Washington with Dan Coleman, Debbie Doran, and a few senior FBI officials to deliver a briefing about al-Qaeda to the full commission. The CIA was represented by some analysts, and the meeting was chaired by the executive director of the commission, Philip Zelikow.
Doug MacEachin, the former CIA official who had become a supporter of mine after our meeting in New York, told me beforehand to give the same briefing I had given them, which I did. The CIA analysts then gave a presentation about the structure of al-Qaeda.
“Is that accurate?” a commission team member asked me.
“No, unfortunately, there is a series of errors in what they think is the structure of al-Qaeda.”
“For example?”
“Well, they said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed runs al-Qaeda’s media committee. This is under the control of Ayman Zawahiri. KSM runs the media office, a cover for their operational planning unit.”
“Can you support your claim?”
“Yes. We found some documents in Afghanistan explaining the structure.”
“What else?”
“Then there’s what they said about Khallad,” I replied. “They said Khallad has never been to the United States. Debbie can tell you that’s false.”
“Yes,” Debbie interjected, “we found that Salah bin Saeed bin Yousef—this is the alias Khallad traveled under—was listed as having traveled to LAX during the millennium.”
“We have Khallad in our custody,” a CIA analyst said, [11 words redacted]
“You may be right, but if he wasn’t there, why is his alias on the flight manifest?”
These are a few of the points we raised, among many others. Some are classified; others I simply cannot
