Tag: FBI

15 January 2000

Posted on by Featherproof Books

 

The first two hijackers associated with 9/11, Saudi nationals Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, arrive in the United States, 18 months before the attacks. The two arrive in Los Angeles on United Airline Flight 2 from Bangkok, Thailand.

Despite CIA admission (see January 13) that al-Mihdhar, a “known” al Qaeda operative, is on the loose, neither is ever put on any watchlist—that is, until days before the attacks in August 2001. But the real problem here is how the two could live in the United States for so long, even while the CIA and FBI exchange hundreds of emails and reports about them. (And then al-Mihdhar will actually leave the United States and return on another flight on July 4, 2001, a far more troublesome lapse for the counterterrorism watchers.

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar told immigration authorities at LAX that they would be staying at the Sheraton Hotel in Los Angeles. The FBI later found that their names never appeared in the hotel’s records. Then the FBI searched the records of other hotels near the airport, as well as smaller establishments in Culver City, failing to find any trail of the two as they reconstructed the road to 9/11.

They are, in fact, picked up by an intelligence officer of Saudi Arabia and taken to San Diego, residing in the officer’s apartment from January 15 to February 2, 2000. But then that’s another story.

8 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar leave Malaysia on a flight to Bangkok. It is the last time that the CIA “sees” the two. There is much written about the two: about the Malaysia meeting, about their visas, about intelligence not read, not passed on, and about mistakes in not recognizing their true purpose. It is worth a book in itself, but suffice it to say that the post-9/11 recriminations about the CIA not telling the FBI, and about the two not sharing information, is only a small piece of the multiple failures, ones that ultimately allowed everyone to say that domestic rules were to blame for the gigantic failure, rather than that the officers involved—and their bosses—just didn’t do their jobs, didn’t recognize the terrorists, didn’t understand the plotting, didn’t follow them into the United States, and didn’t, even a year later, see Mihdhar leaving the United States prior to 9/11 and then returning as a tourist in July 2001.

7 January 1995

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The “Bojinka” set of plots in the Philippines are foiled, both an attack on the Pope and an assassination attempt against President Clinton, as well as preparations that involved airliners.

In the discovery of the plot, Philippine police discover Ramzi Yousef’s bomb-making lab and they arrest an accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad, who is subsequently tortured by the Philippine authorities before being hand over to the FBI.

Captured materials revealed a plot to kill the Pope, to blow up U.S. and Israeli embassies in Manila, to destroy United Airlines aircraft flying Asian routes, and even to crash a plane into CIA HQ (surely the most obvious connection to 9/11). Murad also tells Philippine authorities details about Ramzi Yousef’s involvement in February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and that he planted a bomb on a Philippines airliner in December 1994 that killed one and almost brought the airliner down.

30 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, is identified by an al Qaeda captive from a photograph and labeled an “associate” of Osama bin Laden.

He is subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury the next month. The FBI and U.S. Attorney do not really know who KSM is, other than as a financier of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and an accomplice in Ramzi Yousef’s activities in the Philippines. The indictment is sealed—secret—only to be opened once KSM is in custody.

24 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin
NSA

 

NSA reportedly begins placing caveats on certain raw Osama bin Ladin intercepts that precludes automatic sharing of the contents with the FBI or U.S. Attorneys.

These controls over dissemination were initially created at the direction of Attorney General Janet Reno, and applied solely to intelligence gathered as a result of three specific domestic-related intercepts that she had authorized. Because NSA decided it was administratively too difficult to determine whether particular intelligence derived from these specific surveillances was contained in finished reports, the NSA also decided to control dissemination of all its bin Laden related reports.

In November 2000, in response to direction from the FISA Court, NSA modified these caveats to require that NSA’s Customer Needs and Delivery Services group could make exceptions to share the resulting intelligence with prosecutors and FBI agents. This episode is often confused with the larger question of FBI and CIA sharing—the so-called “wall”—but really it’s related to intelligence from three al Qaeda suspect intercepts.

9 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Fahd al Quso

 

Another missed opportunity occurs to expose the 9/11 plotters. Fahd al-Quso, an al Qaeda operative, is arrested in Yemen. In addition to being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, al-Quso was at a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia also attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the San Diego duo who would go on to become hijacker “musclemen” on 9/11.

The FBI tries to get direct access to al-Quso after his arrest but is thwarted by the government of Yemen. (He is finally interrogated days after 9/11 and reveals his presence in Malaysia in January 2000.)

The CIA write in a December 2000 cable it had learned that al-Quso had received $7,000 from someone named Ibrahim, which he delivered to “Khallad” in Southeast Asia. They incorrectly identify this “Khalled” as Khalid al-Mihdhar. Khallad turns out to be Walid Muhammad Salih bin Mubarak bin Attash, currently in Guantanamo detention camp, and a close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

2 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Ramzi Binalshibh, the fourth of the Hamburg Four, and the only one unable to obtain a U.S. visa (because of his being Yemeni, not because of terrorism suspicions) arrives in London from Germany (the FBI believes to meet with Zacarias Moussaoui). The Frenchman flew into London from Pakistan.

Moussaoui was arrested on August 16, 2001 and charged with an immigration violation. He had aroused suspicion of the FBI while in flight training in Eagan, Minnesota. During his trial, federal prosecutors said that he was to have been a replacement for Binalshibh, the so-called 20th hijacker. Though there is no doubt that Moussaoui was in the U.S. to prepare for some al Qaeda planes operations, there is no evidence (other than the London meeting) connecting him to 9/11.

21 November 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
Satam Muhammed Abdel Rahman al-Suqami

 

Satam Muhammed Abdel Rahman al-Suqami, a 24-year-old Saudi who would end up being one on the musclemen on American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, gets a visa with an altered passport.

Suqami applied for and received a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on November 21. After 9/11, the FBI concluded that he had fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda. In his application, Suqami also left blank the line on which he was asked to supply the name and street address of his present employer. But Suqami raised no suspicions—that was the case with Saudis—and his application was approved the next day.

After 9/11, the FBI also pieced together that in the two years prior to the attacks, Suqami had traveled to Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Oman, and had taken additional international trips using Bahrain and the UAE as jumping off points.

19 November 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

FBI Director Louis Freeh announces that he is creating a new “Investigative Services Division” to “coordinate the FBI’s international activities, integrate and substantially strengthen its analytic capabilities, and oversee the Bureau’s crisis management functions.”

The reorganization is the beginning of a long road on the part of the Bureau to build up its intelligence capacities, a shift that did not really occur until after 9/11. The FBI’s importance as an intelligence producer was made all the more central given its role in investigating overseas terrorism strikes and in pursuing terrorist suspects in the United States, particularly in the terrorism expertise of the New York field office. But it saw its collection of information solely as part of building cases for prosecution and the “intelligence” derived was generally not shared with the rest of the government.

The post-9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry (p. 113) labeled the FBI’s “chronic inability to perform serious intelligence analysis,” even internally, as a problem. There have been many post-9/11 reorganizations of the FBI’s intelligence infrastructure, and field intelligence groups have been created in every field office. But ultimately the greatest impact—two decades later—is the FBI’s domestic intelligence apparatus that is focused on immediate and not “strategic” analysis. Much of that effort has little to do with terrorism, or at least with foreign terrorism.

26 October 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The Military Intelligence Board (MIB) meets and discusses the issue of “need to know.”

The board (made up of senior directors of the Defense Department intelligence components) coordinates activities of the defense intelligence community, sets policies, and coordinates allocation of intelligence assets.

According to the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001, a top secret-level Senate Intelligence Committee inquiry, the DIA representative said that most of military intelligence had moved away from “need to know,” the doctrine of restricting the circulation of intelligence, even inside classified systems, to protect “sources and methods” regarding the origins of the intelligence. In most cases, this also facilitated the creation of then emerging networks and information architectures that allowed analysts to openly share information, or at least to query other-agency databanks, to find intelligence hidden within the vast American collection machine.

The board took note of that fundamental difference with the CIA, which adhered to the principle of need to know “as a foundation” and rarely shared raw intelligence with the defense agencies. According to the partially declassified Joint Inquiry, “the DIA attendee concluded that the defense intelligence community would not be able to bridge the gap with CIA on this information sharing issue.”

It was an important pre-9/11 discussion because, after the attacks, the CIA and FBI blamed “The Wall” between intelligence and law enforcement—a Clinton administration rule—that sought not to contaminate investigative material so that it was unusable in a court of law, and also segregated intelligence that could not be divulged in court from influencing an investigation if the intelligence could not be part of grand jury and legal proceedings.

Both agencies used The Wall to justify not sharing, but that was never its intent, particularly when it came to time sensitive information that was immediate use, such as in stopping a terrorist attack. Lost in the post-9/11 blame game was the cultural reason for not sharing.