Stunned guns: how we've made the FBI too timid to bug mosques—or Ken Lay's office

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Richard Gid Powers

A month after Williams's tip, headquarters got another lead just as good, maybe even better. Tipped off by alert flight instructors at the Pan American International Flight School in Minnesota, FBI agents from the Minneapolis field office arrested a French-born Moroccan student pilot named Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui had asked for time on Pan American's Boeing 747 flight simulator--a strange request, bemuse that machine was usually used only by newly hired airline pilots or by veteran airline pilots refreshing their skills. Moussaoui was arrested for a passport violation, but when agents from the Minneapolis office asked headquarters to broaden the investigation, they were accused of trying to get leadership "spun up" about a merely conjectural threat. The Minneapolis agents had to spend the next four weeks trying push their application for a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer and personal effects through bureaucratic mazes set up by headquarters supervisors and lawyers. They got nowhere. Their application was even sabotaged by headquarters officials who seemed far more worried that a judge or a reporter might someday criticize the Bureau for proceeding with a less than airtight case than that they might be letting a plot against America proceed with impunity.

The Phoenix and Minneapolis field offices had given the FBI leads that were at least as good as those the Bureau had gotten in any of the great eases of its history. Had the Minneapolis agents been able to pursue their Moussaoui leads before 9/11 (as they finally did after the attacks), they would have quickly discovered an alining connection between Moussaoui and bin Laden's personal pilot--who had trained at the Norman, Okla., flight school where Moussaoui had begun his flying lessons, and who had begun cooperating with the Bureau after the East African embassy bombings. The FBI would have also learned that Moussaoui was receiving large sums of money, perhaps for a hijack team he would lead. And if headquarters had also been investigating the names Williams had furnished in his electronic communication, the Bureau would have been led to the imam who was the hijackers' spiritual leader in San Diego, and the imam of the mosque where two of the hijackers worshipped. They would have then seen the significance of an Aug. 27, 2001, tip from the CIA that those two hijackers, both of whom had recently been added to the terrorist watch list, had at rived in the country. The Bureau had an informant in San Diego who could have been sent to make inquiries that might well have tightened the noose around those two. A simple credit-card trace would have found them--both used VISA cards in their own names to buy tickets on the hijacked planes.

But one reason these great leads went nowhere was because the FBI had not developed the web of informants it would have needed in order to pursue them quickly and effectively, it is true that most of the Bureau's great espionage and criminal cases were cracked by what seem to have been lucky breaks--walk-ins from the Woman in Red or from a deflecting Soviet agent--but in all of these cases, the FBI had already collected information from domestic surveillance mad set up networks of informants to exploit those fortunate leads. But by 2001, the Bureau, in the opinion of Clinton and Bush terrorism expert Richard Clarke, didn't "know whether or not there was anything going on in the United States."