According to Shaffer, such data also drew on U.S. visa records. If so, and given the reference to information obtained from mosques, it would seem that Able Danger perhaps could have picked up information on the named terrorists—even before they arrived in the United States.
Atta had applied for a U.S. green card in late 1999. Shehhi had gotten his U.S. entry visa by January 2000. Hazmi and Mihdhar had arrived that same month, having applied for and obtained their visas in the summer of 1999. All these documents were in the record.
All the documentary evidence involved, however, was destroyed well before 9/11 because of privacy concerns by Defense Department attorneys. Absent a future discovery of surviving documentary evidence, the Able Danger claims depend entirely on the memories—sometimes rusty memories—of those involved in the operation.
IN GERMANY, and as an outgrowth of surveilling the extremists in Hamburg, a border watch—or Grenzfahndung—was ordered on at least two of the men who frequented the Marienstrasse apartment. The routine was not to arrest listed individuals, but discreetly to note and report their passage across the frontier. It is hard to understand why, if the names of two of the Marienstrasse group were on the list, those of Atta and Shehhi would not have been. If they were under border watch, their departure for the United States ought to have been noted.
German federal officials were unhelpful when approached by the authors for interviews on the subject of either monitoring the terrorists or on the relationship with U.S. agencies before 9/11. “Sadly,” said an official from Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst, “due to considerations of principle, your request cannot be granted. We ask for your understanding.”
The official who was in 2001 and still is deputy chief of Hamburg domestic intelligence, Dr. Manfred Murck, was in general far more cooperative. He had no comment, however, on the subject of collaboration with U.S. intelligence.
The Islamic affairs specialist with the domestic intelligence service in Stuttgart, Dr. Herbert Müller, for his part, offered a small insight into where the Germans’ monitoring of the men at Marienstrasse had led them. “Atta,” he said, “was going through the focus of our colleagues.… He came to their notice.”
Did the Germans share with the United States everything they learned about the future hijackers? “Some countries,” a 9/11 Commission staff statement was to state tartly, “did not support U.S. efforts to collect intelligence information on terrorist cells in their countries.… This was especially true of some of the European services.” Information gathered by Congress’s Joint Inquiry, and what we have of a CIA review, make it clear that there was intermittent friction between the U.S. and German services.
A former senior American diplomat, on the other hand, cast no aspersions on the Germans. “My impression the entire time,” former deputy head of mission in Berlin Michael Polt told the 9/11 Commission, “[was] that our level of interaction with counterterrorism and cooperation with the Germans was extremely high and well coordinated.… And the reason the Germans would want to share those concerns with us [was] because they were expecting from us some information that they could use to go ahead and go after these people.”
For all that, German officials the authors contacted remained either evasive or diplomatic to a fault. Were they concealing the failures of their own intelligence apparatus, or courteously avoiding placing the blame on the ally across the Atlantic?
“They lied to my face for four years, the German secret service,” said Dirk Laabs, a Hamburg author who has reported on the 9/11 story for the Los Angeles Times and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Then I found information that they passed on everything to the CIA.… We only know a little bit of the true story, what really went on.”
The release to the authors in 2011 of a single previously redacted sentence on a 9/11 Commission staff document makes crystal clear what was left fuzzy in the Commission Report. The document summarized the coded conversation between KSM and Binalshibh not long before the attacks—described in an earlier chapter—as to whether lovelorn Ziad Jarrah would stay the course.
The sentence that heads the document’s summary of the exchange, now made public for the first time, reads:
On July 20, 2001, there was a call between
KSM and Binalshibh. They used the codewords
Teresa and Sally.
The only way the authorities could have known of such a phone call, on a known date and in great detail, was thanks to a telephone intercept. The call was intercepted and recorded while it was in progress.
That certainty leads to a string of further questions.
Which intelligence service tapped the call? The only probable candidates are those of the United States or of Germany. If the intercept was American, which service was responsible? The CIA or the NSA—the National Security Agency? It is the NSA’s mission to spy on international communications, yet its pre-9/11 performance is only minimally reported in the Commission Report.
If the intercept cited above was made in Germany by the Germans, was the take passed to the Americans at the time—or only after 9/11?
The questions do not end there. What other conversations between key 9/11 players were tapped into during the run-up to the attacks? If other conversations were captured, were they all in code that was incomprehensible at the time? Did such intercepts result in any action being taken?
A breakthrough answer on the German intelligence issue came to the authors from a very senior member of the U.S. Congress, a public figure with long experience of intelligence matters, who has held high security clearances, speaking not for attribution.
“We were told by the German intelligence,” the member of Congress said of a visit to Berlin following 9/11, “that they had provided U.S. intelligence agencies with information about persons of interest to them who had been living in Hamburg and who they knew were in, or attempting to get into, the United States. The impression German intelligence gave me was that they felt the action of the U.S. intelligence agencies to their information was dismissive.”
Sour grapes, or an accurate account of the American response to pertinent intelligence?
THIRTY-ONE
THE CIA CERTAINLY HAD KNOWN EARLY ON ABOUT TWO OF THE 9/11 terrorists.
The way it gained that intelligence speaks to the Agency’s operational efficiency, in a brilliant operation a full twenty months before the attacks. Its subsequent performance, however, reflects disastrous inefficiency, perhaps the greatest fiasco in CIA history. Depending on how the evidence is interpreted, it points to something even more culpable.
This is a scenario that began to unravel for the CIA on 9/11 itself, just four hours after the strikes. Soon after 1:00 P.M. that day, at Agency headquarters, an aide hurried to Director Tenet with a handful of papers—the passenger manifests for the four downed airliners. “Two names,” he said, placing a page on the table where the director could see it. “These two we know.”
Tenet looked, then breathed, “There it is. Confirmation. Oh, Jesus …”
A long silence followed. There on the Flight 77 manifest, allocated to Seats 5E and 5F in First Class, were the names of Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem. Also on the list, near the front of the Coach section at 12B, was Khalid al-Mihdhar’s name.
The names Hazmi and Mihdhar were instantly familiar, Tenet has claimed, because his people had learned only weeks earlier that both men might be in the United States. According to his version of events, the CIA had known of Mihdhar since as early as 1999, had identified him firmly as a terrorist suspect by December that year, had had him followed, discovered he had a valid multiple-entry visa to allow him into the States, and had placed him and comrades—including Hazmi—under surveillance for a few days. Later, in the spring of 2000, the Agency had learned that Hazmi had arrived in California.
Yet, the director had claimed in the wake of 9/11, the CIA had done absolutely nothing about Mihdhar or Hazmi. It had not asked the State Department to wat
chlist the two terrorists at border points, had not asked the FBI to track them down if they were in the country, until nineteen days before 9/11.
Tenet blamed these omissions solely on calamitous error.
“CIA,” he wrote in 2007, “had multiple opportunities to notice the significant information in our holdings and watchlist al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. Unfortunately, until August, we missed them all.…
“Yes, people made mistakes; every human interaction was far from where it needed to be. We, the entire government, owed the families of 9/11 better than they got.”
But was it just that CIA “people made mistakes”? Historical mysteries are as often explained by screwups as by darker truths. Nevertheless, senior Commission staff became less than convinced—and not just on the matter of Mihdhar and Hazmi—that Tenet was leveling with them.
When the director was interviewed, in January 2004, on oath, he kept saying “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall.” Those with courtroom experience among the commissioners reflected that he was “like a grand jury witness who had been too well prepared by a defense lawyer. The witness’s memory was good when it was convenient, bad when it was convenient.”
Executive Director Philip Zelikow was to say later of Tenet, “We just didn’t believe him anymore.” Tenet, for his part, declared himself outraged by the remark, and insisted that he had told the truth about everything.
What is known of the evidence on Hazmi and Mihdhar, however, makes it very hard for anyone to swallow the screwup excuse. Not least because, the CIA version of events suggests, its officials blew the chance to grab the two future hijackers not once, not twice, but time and time again.
This is a puzzle that has confounded official investigators, and reporters and authors, for a full decade now. It will not be solved in these pages, but readers may perhaps see its stark outline, its striking anomalies, its alarming possible implications, more clearly than in the past. To trace the chapter of supposed accidents we must start with a pivotal development that occurred as long as five years before 9/11.
SOMETIME IN 1996, the National Security Agency—which intercepts electronic communications worldwide—had identified a number in Yemen that Osama bin Laden called often from his satellite telephone in Afghanistan. The number, 967-1-200-578, rang at a house in the capital, Sana’a, used by a man he had first known in the days of the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. The man’s name was Ahmed al-Hada, and—a great benefit for bin Laden, who in Afghanistan had no access to ordinary communications systems—his house had long served as an al Qaeda “hub,” a link to the wider world.
The NSA did not immediately share this information either with the CIA or with other agencies—a symptom of the interagency disconnect that long plagued U.S. intelligence. The CIA did learn of the intercepts, however, and eventually obtained summaries of intercepted conversations. It was the start of a period of frustratingly sporadic, incomplete access granted by the NSA to material harvested from the hub.
Hada’s telephone also came to loom large for the FBI. One of the Kenya bombers called the number before and after the 1998 attack on Nairobi, and—once agents learned that the number also took calls from bin Laden’s sat-phone on the day of the bombing and the following day—they had a vital evidentiary link between the East Africa attacks and al Qaeda.
The intercepts of Hada’s phone conversations were a priceless resource, and in 1999 yielded the first factual pointer to the preparations for 9/11. Hada’s daughter, U.S. intelligence learned at some stage, was married to a young man named “Khalid”—full name, as we now know, Khalid al-Mihdhar. In December 1999, crucially, the NSA reported to both the CIA and the FBI that it had intercepted an especially interesting call on the Hada telephone, one that mentioned an upcoming trip by “Khalid” and “Nawaf” to Malaysia.
From the start, CIA officers guessed that this was no innocent excursion. Its purpose, one staffer suspected, was “something more nefarious.” The travel, one cable stated, “may be in support of a terrorist mission.” The men were referred to early on as members of an “operational cadre” or as “terrorist operatives.”
The episode that was eventually to bring the Agency lasting shame began as textbook undercover work. As foreshadowed in an earlier chapter, Mihdhar’s Saudi passport was photographed during the stopover in Dubai—leading to the startling revelation that the terrorist had a visa valid for travel to the United States.
As veteran FBI counterterrorism specialist Jack Cloonan was to say, “This is as good as it gets.… How often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple-entry visas? How often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of al Qaeda anyplace in the world? … This is what you would dream about.”
Intelligence bounty continued to rain down on the CIA following the look inside Mihdhar’s passport. The suspect was tracked as he traveled on to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur. He was watched, starting on January 5, as he met and talked with fellow suspects—including his associate Nawaf al-Hazmi. Courtesy of Malaysia’s Special Branch, the men were covertly photographed, observed going out to pay phones, surveilled when they went to an Internet café to use the computers. The computers’ hard drives were reportedly examined afterward.
The whirl of suspicious activity was of interest not merely to CIA agents in the field, nor only to CIA headquarters at Langley. For it all occurred in the very first days of January 2000, the post-Millennium moment when Washington was more than usually on the alert—at the highest level—for any clue that might herald a terrorist attack. Regular situation reports went day by day not only to the directors of the CIA and the FBI but also to National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his staff, who included Richard Clarke, at the White House.
Three days later, on January 8, Mihdhar and two of his comrades—one of them later to be identified as having been Hazmi and the other as senior bin Laden henchman Tawfiq bin Attash—took the brief two-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur to the Thai capital Bangkok. There, according to the CIA, and though communication with a Bangkok hotel was logged on one of the pay phones used by the suspects in Kuala Lumpur, the trail was lost.
Nothing would be known of the operatives’ whereabouts, the available record indicates, until two months later. Only then, according to the known record, did Thai authorities respond to a January CIA request to watch for the suspects’ departure. At last, however, in early March, two Agency stations abroad reported a fresh development. Their message said that Hazmi and an unnamed comrade—only later to be named as Mihdhar—had flown out of Bangkok as long ago as January 15, bound for Los Angeles. The men, the cables noted, were “UBL [bin Laden] associates.”
This was stunning information, information that should have triggered an immediate response. Yet, we are asked by the CIA to believe, no one reacted. No one did anything at all. The first cable to arrive with the news was marked “Action Required: None.”
This in spite of the fact that, just before the Millennium, Director Tenet had told all CIA personnel overseas, “The threat could not be more real.… The American people are counting on you and me to take every appropriate step to protect them.”
Tenet’s Counterterrorist Center had circulated an unambiguous instruction just a month before the al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. “It is important,” the document had warned, “to flag terrorist personality information in DO [Directorate of Operations] reporting for the [State Department watchlist program] so that potential terrorists may be watchlisted.”
Yet in March 2000, although it had learned that Hazmi, a bin Laden operative, had entered the country, the CIA did not alert the State Department. Nor, back in January, had it alerted State to the fact that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The Agency was not to request that either man be watchlisted until late August 2001.
While the Kuala Lumpur meeting was still under way, a 9/11 Commission document notes, top FBI officials had been told that the CIA “promised to let FBI know if an FBI angle to the case develop
ed.” The CIA is prohibited from undertaking operations in the United States, and the FBI has responsibility for domestic intelligence and law enforcement.
Even so, with the revelation that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa—very much an FBI angle—the CIA left the Bureau in the dark just as it did the State Department. It certainly should have alerted the FBI the moment it learned that Hazmi had entered the United States. Information that, if shared, may have led to an earlier hunt for Hazmi and Mihdhar.
After 9/11, when its horrendous failure to do any of these things came out, the CIA would attempt to claim that it had not been quite like that. Later investigations by Congress’s Joint Inquiry and the Department of Justice’s inspector general were to produce vestigial portions of emails and cables written right after the discovery that Mihdhar had a U.S. entry visa. The picture that emerged is not immediately clear.
The very day the CIA learned that Mihdhar had a U.S. visa, a CIA bin Laden unit desk officer—identified for security reasons only as “Michelle”—informed colleagues flatly that his travel documents, including the visa, had been copied and passed “to the FBI for further investigation.”
In an email to CIA colleagues the following day, an Agency officer assigned to FBI headquarters—identified as “James”—wrote of having told two senior FBI agents what had been learned of Mihdhar’s activity in Malaysia. He had advised one of them: “as soon as something concrete is developed leading us to the criminal area or to known FBI cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop.”
Were one to know only that about the CIA record, it might seem that the FBI was given the crucial visa information. Serious doubt sets in, though, on looking at the wider picture. In an email to CIA colleagues, the Justice Department inspector general discovered, “James” had “stated that he was detailing ‘exactly what [he] briefed [the FBI] on’ in the event the FBI later complained that they were not provided with all of the information about al-Mihdhar. This information did not discuss al-Mihdhar’s passport or U.S. visa [authors’ italics].”