On July 5 of last year, a month and a day before President Bush first
heard that al Qaeda might plan a hijacking, the White House summoned officials
of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room.
"Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going
to happen soon," the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke,
told the assembled group, according to two of those present. The group included
the Federal Aviation Administration, along with the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret
Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations,
defer nonvital travel, put off scheduled exercises and place domestic
rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks last summer, at home
and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness
-- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack.
That intensity -- defensive in nature -- did not last. By the time Bush
received his briefing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, the government
had begun to stand down from the alert. Offensive planning against al Qaeda
remained in a mid-level interagency panel, which had spent half a year already
in a policy review. The Deputies Committee, the second tier of national security
officials, had not finished considering the emerging plan, and Bush's
Cabinet-rank advisers were still a month away from their first meeting on
terrorism. That took place Sept. 4, a week before hijacked planes were flown
into the Pentagon and World Trade Center in synchronized attacks.
What Bush and his government did with the information they had in
August became the subject of a political brawl on Capitol Hill yesterday,
largely shorn of the context of those weeks before Sept. 11. A close look at the
sequence of events, based on lengthy interviews early this year with
participants and fresh accounts yesterday, appears to support the White House
view that Bush lacked sufficient warning to stop the attack. But it also
portrays a new administration that gave scant attention to an adversary whose
lethal ambitions and savvy had been well understood for years.
Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet had been "nearly
frantic" with concern since June 22, according to one frequent interlocutor, and
a written intelligence summary for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice
said on June 28: "It is highly likely that a significant al Qaeda attack is in
the near future, within several weeks." By late summer, one senior political
appointee said, Tenet had "repeated this so often that people got tired of
hearing it."
The president's daily briefing, a CIA distillation of noteworthy
current intelligence, seldom includes a threat "so important and so precise that
everyone stops in their tracks" to head it off, one senior foreign policy
official said yesterday. The reference to hijacking on Aug. 6, said another
source with first-hand knowledge, was speculative and backed by no specific
threat report more recent than 1998.
But it is also true that Bush and his Cabinet advisers were not yet
disposed to respond to al Qaeda as a first-tier national security threat. The
alerts of the early and mid-summer -- described by two career counterterrorist
officials as the most urgent in decades -- had faded to secondary concern by the
time of Bush's extended Crawford vacation. As late as Sept. 9, Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto when the Senate proposed to
divert $600 million to counterterrorism from ballistic missile defense.
"I knew he was a menace and I knew he was a problem," Bush said of
Osama bin Laden in a Dec. 20 interview with The Washington Post. "I was prepared
to look at a plan that would be a thoughtful plan that would bring him to
justice, and would have given the order to do that. I have no hesitancy about
going after him. But I didn't feel that sense of urgency."
One major U.S. government error before Sept. 11, according to some
counterterrorist officials, was the FBI's failure to share its field reports
from aviation schools.
A senior FBI official attended Clarke's urgent White House meeting on
July 5. He committed the bureau to redoubling contacts with its foreign
counterparts and to speed up transcription and analysis of wiretaps obtained
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, among other steps. But when a
field agent in Phoenix reported suspicions of a hijacking plot just five days
later, the FBI did not share the report with any other agency.
"I'm fit to be tied," said one top official from another agency.
"People are saying we didn't connect the dots. It's awfully hard to connect the
dots if people don't give you the dots."
The July 10 report from Phoenix was a five-page electronic
communication to headquarters outlining links between a group of suspected
Middle Eastern terrorists and the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in
Prescott, Ariz. The agent, whose name has not been divulged, suggested that the
FBI should canvass U.S. flight schools for information on other Middle Eastern
students. He speculated that bin Laden might be attempting to train operatives
to infiltrate the aviation industry.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has acknowledged that the bureau
should have responded more aggressively to that report. But the FBI did not
share it within the interagency Counterterrorism Security Group, which had a
"threat subgroup" meeting three times a week. According to sources, the Phoenix
report reached no further than FBI headquarters and the New York field
office.
"Even today I get dozens of reports a day from the CIA and none from
the FBI," said a government counterterrorism official. "When an FBI SAC [special
agent in charge] sends in a message, it never leaves the bureau. In fact, they
can still get in trouble if they show it to you."
Mueller testified last week that the bureau is cooperating
comprehensively with other agencies. He said none of the men under investigation
in Arizona have been linked with the Sept. 11 attacks, and that the memo would
not have led investigators to unravel the plot.
The last concrete hijacking threat report, sources said, came in 1998.
A son of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in 1995 of conspiring to blow up
tunnels and other New York City landmarks, was reported to say then that the
best way to free his father from a U.S. prison might be to hijack an American
plane and exchange the hostages.
In the 10 weeks before Sept. 11, most of the thousands of intelligence
leads pointed to an attack on Americans or their properties overseas.
"Most of the al Qaeda network is anticipating an attack," said a highly
classified analysis at the end of June. "Al Qaeda's overt publicity has also
raised expectations among its rank and file, and its donors. We have increased
security at U.S. facilities, warned Americans, threatened the Taliban, stretched
intelligence collection efforts, caused the arrest of some of those al Qaeda
members we have located, and placed consequence management teams on
alert."
On June 22, the military's Central and European Commands imposed "Force
Protection Condition Delta," the highest anti-terrorist alert. The next day the
State Department ordered all diplomatic posts to convene emergency action
committees. The CIA, including the Rome station chief, said the most probable
targets included the U.S. Embassy in Italy, the Genoa summit of the Group of
Eight leaders in July, and the Vatican -- a threat that caused Bush to change
the venue of his meeting with Pope John Paul II to the papal summer residence at
Castel Gandolfo outside Rome.
On July 3, Tenet made an urgent special request to 20 friendly
intelligence services, asking for the arrest of a list of known al Qaeda
operatives.
As late as July 31, the FAA urged U.S. airlines to maintain a "high
degree of alertness." All those alert levels dropped by the time hijackers armed
with box cutters took control of four jetliners on the morning of Sept.
11.
