IN WASHINGTON, meanwhile, Richard Clarke still pressed in vain for expeditious action. Fearing that he was becoming “like Captain Ahab with bin Laden as the White Whale,” he had long since thought he should consider finding other work. Yet he was still there at the end of May, still worrying.
A recently released Commission staff note, written following a review of National Security Council files, observes that it was clear that “Clarke was driving process in the new Bush Administration, not Condi Rice or Steve Hadley. Not much was going on at their level against AQ. Highest levels of government were not engaged, were not driving the process.”
“When these attacks occur, as they likely will,” Clarke wrote Rice on May 29, “we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.”
The following day, Rice asked George Tenet and CIA colleagues to assess the gravity of the danger. On a scale of one to ten, she was told, it rated a seven.
Two weeks later, a report reached the CIA that KSM was “recruiting people to travel to the United States to meet with colleagues already there.” On June 21, with the wave of threat information continuing, the intelligence agencies—and the military in the Middle East—went on high alert. As the month ended, with the July 4 holiday approaching, the National Security Agency intercepted terrorist traffic indicating that something “very, very, very, very big” was imminent. Clarke duly advised Rice.
The holiday passed without incident, but the anxiety remained. On July 10, according to Tenet, his counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, delivered a threat assessment that made his hair stand on end. With Black and the head of the bin Laden unit at his side, the director rushed immediately to see Rice at the White House. There followed a deeply unsatisfactory encounter—one the 9/11 Commission Report failed to mention.
The CIA chiefs told Rice flatly: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months.” The bin Laden unit head went through the bald facts of the intelligence. His colleagues described CIA ploys that might disrupt and delay the attack. Then they urged immediate decisions on measures that would tackle the overall problem. The slow, plodding deliberations of the deputy secretaries were taking too long.
Rice asked Richard Clarke, who was also present, whether he agreed. Clarke, according to Tenet, “put his elbows on his knees and his head fell into his hands and he gave an exasperated yes.” “The President,” Tenet told Rice, “needed to align his policy with the new reality.” Rice assured them that Bush would do that.
She did not convince the deputation from the CIA. According to the
In Cofer Black’s view, Woodward wrote, “The decision to just keep planning was a sustained policy failure. Rice and the Bush team had been in hibernation too long.” “Adults,” Black said, “should not have a system like this.”
Black had been sure for months that catastrophe was coming. Sure, too, that as counterterrorist head he would take the flak for it, he had long had his resignation signed and ready in his desk. The bin Laden unit head—his name is still officially withheld—and Michael Scheuer, his predecessor, were also now talking of resigning.
The same day the CIA chiefs tried to get action from the White House, an FBI agent in Arizona sent a memo to a number of headquarters officials, including four members of the Bureau’s own bin Laden unit. Agent Kenneth Williams reported: “The purpose of this communication is to advise the Bureau and New York of the possibility of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to attend civil aviation universities and colleges. Phoenix has observed an inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest who are attending or who have attended.… These individuals will be in a position in the future to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”
Over eight pages, Williams laid out the reasons for his concern. One man he named was a known contact of bin Laden’s senior accomplice Abu Zubaydah. Another connected to the two Saudis who two years earlier had come under suspicion for their behavior during an America West flight. Investigators were later to conclude that the same man’s associates had included Hani Hanjour—the 9/11 hijacking pilot who had trained in Arizona.
Agent Williams recommended checking on flight schools around the nation. Yet he got no response, and his prescient message received minimal circulation. FBI officials worried that the checks he proposed would risk accusations of “racial profiling.”
Only a week earlier, all FBI regions had been alerted to the terrorist threat and urged to “exercise extreme vigilance.” “I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree,” counterterrorism coordinator Clarke would write long after 9/11. “Somewhere in FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools.… Red lights and bells should have been going off.”
Had the FBI recipients of Williams’s memo been aware of the attitude of the man who headed the Bush Justice Department, their torpor might have been more understandable. Acting Director Thomas Pickard has said that, following Director Freeh’s resignation that June, he tried repeatedly to get Attorney General Ashcroft to give the terrorist threat his attention. When he approached the subject for the second time, on July 12, Ashcroft abruptly cut him off—as he reportedly had Freeh back in the spring.
“I don’t want to hear about that anymore,” snapped the attorney general, according to Pickard. “There’s nothing I can do about that.” Pickard remonstrated, saying he thought Ashcroft should speak directly with his CIA counterpart, but the attorney general made himself even clearer. “I don’t want you to ever talk to me about al Qaeda, about these threats. I don’t want to hear about al Qaeda anymore.”
“Fishing rod in hand,” CBS News noted two weeks later, “Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri aboard a chartered government jet.” Asked why he was not using a commercial airline, the Justice Department cited a “threat assessment,” saying he would fly only by private jet for the remainder of his term. Asked whether he knew the nature of the threat, Ashcroft himself responded, “Frankly, I don’t.”
Late on July 20, when President Bush arrived in Italy to attend a G8 summit, antiaircraft guns lined the airport perimeter. He and other leaders slept not on land but on ships at sea. Next day, Bush had an audience with the Pope not at the Vatican but at the papal residence outside Rome. Wherever he went, the airspace was closed and fighters flew cover overhead. Egypt’s President Mubarak, acting on an intelligence briefing, had warned of a possible bin Laden attack using “an airplane stuffed with explosives.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
IN THE UNITED STATES, MEANWHILE, THE TERRORISTS HAD CONTINUED to move toward their goal. On July 4, as Americans celebrated the holiday and security officials fretted, Khalid al-Mihdhar had flown back into JFK Airport—unchallenged. It should not have been that way.
The CIA had identified Mihdhar as a prime suspect eighteen months earlier—it was to emerge after 9/11— when the Saudi flew to join fellow terrorists in Kuala Lumpur. While he was on his way there, during a stopover in Dubai, the local intelligence service broke into his hotel room at the request of the CIA. His passport, which was copied, had given the Agency two superb leads. It now knew not only Mihdhar’s full identity but also the fact that he had a valid entry visa for the United States.
Even so, and although the CIA firmly believed he and his companions in Kuala Lumpur were terrorists, it had not placed Mihdhar on the TIPOFF list of known and suspected terrorists. And it had withheld what it knew from the FBI. The CIA’s handling of its intelligence on Mihdhar—and the almost identical information on the companion with whom he arrived in the States, Nawaf al-Hazmi—had allowed the first of the 9/11 operatives to enter the States under their own names and live openly in California in the months that followed.
The CIA’s action—or failure to take appropriate action—had also allowed Mihdhar to depart freely in mid- 2000, when he returned to the Middle East for an extended period. Then in summer 2001, and because the CIA continued to withhold what it knew about him from U.S. Immigration, he had easily obtained yet another entry visa to get back into the country.
So it was, on July 4, that Mihdhar was able to breeze back into America and join his accomplices as they made final preparations for the 9/11 operation. His return brought the hijackers’ numbers up to nineteen, the full complement of those who were to attack on 9/11. Had the CIA’s performance been merely an appalling blunder, as
