Before flying into the States, the evidence would eventually indicate, Moussaoui had met in London with Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh had subsequently wired him a total of $14,000. Binalshibh’s telephone number was listed in one of Moussaoui’s notebooks and on other pieces of paper, and he had called it repeatedly from pay phones in the United States.
In August 2001, however, the agents worrying about Moussaoui knew nothing of the Binalshibh connection, were not free to search the suspect’s possessions. In spite of a series of appeals that grew ever more frantic as the days ticked by—the lead agent wound up sending Washington no fewer than seventy messages—headquarters blocked the Minneapolis request to approve a search warrant.
In late August, in response to a tart comment from headquarters that he was just trying to get people “spun up,” the Minneapolis supervisor agreed that was exactly his intention. He was persisting, he said with unconscious prescience, because he hoped to ensure that Moussaoui did not “take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.”
“That’s not going to happen,” a headquarters official retorted. “You don’t have enough to show that he is a terrorist.”
THE SECOND DEVELOPMENT, of enormous potential importance, had meanwhile been evolving—and aborting—on the East Coast. The episode centered on the prickly relationship between the FBI and the CIA, a blot on good government since anyone could remember. While in theory the two agencies liaised on counterterrorism, in practice they coexisted at best awkwardly. From early in 2001, according to the sequence of events published in the 9/11 Commission Report, some in the CIA’s bin Laden unit had been looking again at the case of Khalid al- Mihdhar.
New information indicated that Mihdhar, whom the Agency had identified as a terrorist the previous year, who it had known had a visa to enter the United States—yet had failed to share the information with the FBI or Immigration—was linked to bin Laden through his trusted operative Walid bin Attash. Yet still the FBI was kept in the dark about Mihdhar.
In the spring of 2001, a CIA deputy chief working liaison with the Bureau’s terrorism unit in New York—now known to have been Tom Wilshire—reportedly reconsidered the overall picture on Mihdhar. The suspect with a U.S. visa was an associate of Nawaf al-Hazmi, who—the CIA knew—definitely had entered the United States many months earlier. With growing indications that an attack was coming, it is said to have occurred to Wilshire that “Something bad was definitely up.” When he asked a CIA superior for permission to share what he knew with the FBI, however, he got no reply.
In late July, apparently on his own initiative, Wilshire suggested to Margarette Gillespie, an FBI analyst working with the CIA’s bin Laden unit, that she review files on the terrorist meeting in Malaysia back in January 2000—the meeting that had first brought Mihdhar to CIA attention. Gillespie did so, and—piece by piece, week by week—began putting together the alarming facts about Mihdhar, his visa, and his plan to visit the United States.
On August 21, she found out about his accomplice Hazmi’s arrival in the United States. Within twenty-four hours, when she consulted the INS, she made a startling discovery. Not only that Hazmi was probably
The final days of August were a combination of rational action and bureaucratic confusion. On the 22nd, at Gillespie’s request, the CIA drafted a message asking the FBI, INS, the State Department, and Customs to “watchlist” Mihdhar and Hazmi. The watchlisting, though, applied only to international travel, not to journeys within the United States—and the FAA was not informed at all.
Gillespie’s colleague Dina Corsi, meanwhile, sent an email to the FBI’s I-49 unit—which handled counterterrorism—requesting an investigation to find out whether Mihdhar was in the United States.
At that point the process became tied up in much the same red tape as the push in Minnesota to find out what Moussaoui was up to. Mihdhar could not be pursued as a criminal case, Corsi stipulated, only as an intelligence lead. This was a misinterpretation of the rules, but—even though only one intelligence agent was available—Corsi and a CIA official insisted on the condition. One I-49 agent was angered by their insistence. “If this guy is in the country,” Steve Bongardt said acidly during a call to colleagues on August 28, “it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!”
Within twenty-four hours, Bongardt’s frustration surfaced again. “Someday,” he wrote in an email, “someone will die … the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ ”
The job of finding Mihdhar, nevertheless, went to an intelligence agent, Robert Fuller, working on his own. Corsi marked the assignment “Routine” because—she would later tell investigators—she “assigned no particular urgency to the matter.” The designation “Routine” gave Fuller thirty days to get under way. It was August 29.
LIKE PRESIDENT BUSH, CIA director Tenet had spent part of August on vacation—again like the President, fishing. By his own account, however, he kept very much abreast of developments. That month, he wrote in 2007, he had directed his counterterrorism unit to review old files—and thus took part of the credit for the “discovery” that Mihdhar and Hazmi might be in the United States.
Tenet, too, had been briefed on the detention of the suspect flight student in Minneapolis. The FBI early on sent fulsome information on Moussaoui to the Agency, and the details went to Tenet on August 23 in the form of a document headed “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.” The director’s staff took the matter very seriously, urging that the Bureau give it real attention. “If this guy is let go,” one CIA officer wrote on the 30th to a colleague liaising with the Bureau, “two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.”
Did Tenet share the developments on Mihdhar and Hazmi, and the alert over Moussaoui, with the President? It would seem surprising had he not done so—especially in the month Bush had received a Daily Brief entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” When the President was asked the question, Commissioner Ben-Veniste recalled, his “brow furrowed.” Bush said he recalled no mention of Moussaoui, that “no one ever told him there was a domestic problem.”
Tenet, for his part, stumbled badly in an appearance before the Commission. He claimed in sworn testimony that he had not seen Bush in August. “I didn’t see the President,” he said. “I was not in briefings with him during this time.… He’s in Texas and I’m either here [in Washington] or on leave [in New Jersey].” “You never get on the phone or in any kind of conference with him to talk,” asked commissioner Tim Roemer, “through the whole month of August?” “In this time period,” replied Tenet, “I’m not talking to him, no.”
It seemed astonishing, and for good reason: it was not true. Hours after Tenet had testified, CIA spokesman Bill Harlow told reporters that the director had in fact briefed the President in person twice in August, at the Texas ranch on August 17 and in Washington on August 31.
Could Tenet possibly have forgotten his one trip to see Bush in August, the very first time he had visited the ranch, in the sweltering heat of Texas? Roemer thought it possible that Tenet had lied.
Writing in 2007, Tenet made no mention of the lapse. Instead, he said he had indeed traveled to Texas, “to make sure the President stayed current on events.” According to the known record, the director would not have known of the Moussaoui and Mihdhar-Hazmi developments on the 17th. Both were well under way, however, by the time he saw the President on the 31st. Would they not have fit within the frame of keeping the President “current on events”? In a private interview, Tenet told the Commission that he did “not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period.”
“THE QUESTION,” Michael Hirsh and Michael Isikoff wrote in
In her testimony to the Commission, Rice rejected any notion that the administration let things slide. “I do not believe there was a lack of high-level attention,” she said. “The President was paying attention to this. How much higher level can you get?”
Lawrence Wilkerson, a trusted aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, worked with a colleague on the preparation of Rice’s testimony. The job, he said, had been “an appalling enterprise. We would cherry-pick things to make it look like the President had been actually concerned about al Qaeda.… They didn’t give a shit about al
