CIA, FBI find plenty of blame to go around

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 1, 2002 | by Jamie Dettmer

The fabled Clinton "war room," with its alert media reflexes and craftiness in unleashing quick ripostes to potentially damaging stories, had nothing on these spooks and G-men! When it comes down to it, bureaucrats know how to handle the press as well as the politicians, judging by the ugly media brawl that has broken out between the CIA and the FBI.

Neither the agency nor the bureau has pulled any punches in respective bids to paint the other as the more egregious in missing clues that might have assisted in thwarting the attacks of Sept. 11. The G-men's preferred conduit for leaks is Newsweek; the spooks tilt toward Time.

From the get-go both the FBI and CIA knew the politicians would get around to scrutinizing what went wrong and why there wasn't much inkling in the U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement communities about the scale and nature of the likely terror attacks.

Nervousness was high at Langley and in the J. Edgar Hoover Building in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. Despite CIA Director George Tenet's public insistence that 9/11 was not a major intelligence failure, that isn't the way his underlings or their counterparts at the FBI feel about it. They knew and know that someone is going to get the major share of the blame, and they don't want it to be them.

It hardly is coincidence that the really serious leaking against each other came on the eve of the start of the 9/11 review by the House and Senate intelligence committees. In the fall and winter the politicians were focused on other things--the action in Afghanistan, tightening airport security, dealing with the economic aftermath of Sept. 11.

The ever-bumbling Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) walked its way into the crosshairs early by merrily sending off visa approvals to the hijackers long after they were dead. INS Commissioner James Ziglar's feckless Capitol Hill performances kept the heat on the service. But in the end--what with foreign-intelligence services from Egypt to Italy claiming they had issued warnings to the Americans about the likelihood of a large-scale terrorist assault, one possibly involving hijackings -it was only a matter of time before the CIA and FBI had to answer for themselves.

The list of missed opportunities and failed analyses is long. The spooks and G-men had two fallback positions--the first was to argue that the critics have the benefit of hindsight. The second was to blame the other guy.

No one argues that putting together the pieces of the deadly al-Qaeda puzzle was easy. But the "hindsight defense" quickly became threadbare. There were enough clues around last summer to suggest that airport security needed to be improved dramatically and warnings prompted by the Bush team were sent out by the Federal Aviation Administration.

And, as has been made clear by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, the so-called "chatter" within al-Qaeda was intense in the summer, suggesting that something big was in the works.

Even without recent revelations that information about specific individuals was not shared between the CIA and the FBI, it was pretty obvious that some kind of terrorist action using domestic commercial carriers was imminent.

French-intelligence officials certainly think so. Ten days before the World Trade Center was struck, they tipped off the FBI that Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th hijacker who had been arrested in the United States on Aug. 17 for immigration violations, had connections with radical Islamic extremists and possibly trained at an Osama bin Laden camp in Afghanistan.

Of course, Moussaoui was detained after a flight school in Minnesota told the FBI about his wish to train to fly a Boeing 747. The 34-year-old Moroccan-French man, who offered to pay $8,000 in cash for a course, only wanted to know how to steer, not to take off or land.

That should have set off alarm bells everywhere. It didn't, despite strenuous efforts by FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley, who protested the refusal by FBI headquarters to seek a search warrant to examine a laptop computer belonging to Moussaoui.

Even more bewildering is why no one apparently put the Moussaoui information next to what already was known from the intelligence services in the Philippines of a previous bin Laden plot to commandeer an airliner and crash it into CIA's headquarters in Langley, Va.

"Why didn't the Americans pay attention?" Filipino investigators are reported to have shouted in fury when they watched live TV coverage of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Remember that back in 1995, security officials in the Philippines arrested Abdul Hakim Murad and learned of several plots, including a well-financed one to crash a hijacked plane into Langley. Murad was handed over to the Americans and in 1996 was convicted for his role in a scheme to blow up a dozen U.S.-bound jetliners flying from Southeast Asia.

And where did Murad acquire his flying skills? At private flight schools in the United States, of course.

As a retired CIA agent told INSIGHT last September: "The trick is to spot the significant from the mundane and watch for patterns." That trick was fumbled by the spooks and the G-men. And all the leaking in the world blaming the other guy isn't going to disguise this fact. To put it another way, the boys at Langley and at the J. Edgar Hoover Building no longer have any feeling in their fingertips--all they can do is finger-point.