The Looming Tower (51 page)

Because they were Saudi citizens, both Hazmi and Mihdhar easily obtained U.S. visas. They didn’t even have to apply in person. For the other two prospective hijackers, both Yemenis, the situation was different. Immigration authorities believed that Yemenis were far more likely to disappear into the illegal underground once they arrived in the United States, so they were routinely turned down when they sought visas. Stymied by the inability to get all of his men into America, bin Laden sent them instead to Southeast Asia, to study the possibility of carrying out Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s scheme of simply blowing up American airliners in midair. At that point, the grand plan of attacking the American homeland seemed to have been shelved.

That is the moment when Mohammed Atta and his friends first showed up in Afghanistan. Their arrivals were staggered over a two-week period at the end of November, when the leaves were dropping and Ramadan was about to begin. Abu Hafs spotted them immediately: educated, technical men, with English skills ranging from rudimentary to fluent. They did not need to be told how to live in the West. Visas would be no problem. All they needed was to learn how to fly and to be willing to die.

By the time bin al-Shibh arrived, Atta, Jarrah, and Shehhi told him that they had been picked for a secret, undisclosed mission. The four of them were invited to a Ramadan feast with bin Laden himself. They discussed the Taliban, and bin Laden asked about the conditions of Muslims living in Europe. Then he informed them that they would be martyrs.

Their instructions were to return to Germany and apply to flight schools in the United States.

T
HERE WERE NOW
two separate teams on the rapidly changing planes operation, each of which would lead to a major attack. The Hamburg cell reported their passports lost or stolen in order to cover up their trip to Afghanistan. Meantime, the four men who had originally been selected for the planes operation went to Kuala Lumpur. Besides Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, there were the two Yemenis: Abu Bara and Tewfiq bin Attash, who adopted the name Khallad.

Khallad was another elusive but highly significant figure in al-Qaeda. He wore a metal prosthesis in place of the right leg he had lost while fighting against Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance. Although he was born in Yemen, he was raised in Saudi Arabia, and he had known bin Laden since he was a child. He had been part of the embassy bombing and the failed attempt to blow up USS
The Sullivans
in the Aden harbor, and he would be the mastermind behind the bombing of the USS
Cole
ten months later.

At the end of
1999,
Khallad telephoned Midhar and summoned him to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. It was the only time that members of the two teams would be together. The NSA picked up a conversation from the phone of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, Ahmad al-Hada, in Yemen—the one that al-Qaeda used as a message board—in which the forthcoming meeting in Malaysia was mentioned, along with the full name of Khaled al-Mihdhar and the first names of two other participants: Nawaf and Salem. The NSA had information from the same phone that Nawaf’s last name was Hazmi, although the agency did not check its own database. “Something nefarious might be afoot,” the NSA reported, but it did not pursue the matter further.

The CIA already had the names of Mihdhar and Hazmi, however. Saeed Badeeb, Prince Turki’s chief analyst in Saudi intelligence, had previously alerted his American colleagues that they were members of al-Qaeda in one of the monthly meetings in Riyadh. Armed with this knowledge, the CIA broke into Mihdhar’s hotel room in Dubai, where he had stopped on his way to Malaysia. The American agents photographed his passport, then faxed it to Alex Station. Inside the passport was the critical information that Mihdhar had a multi-entry American visa, due to expire in April. Alec Station notified various intelligence agencies around the world saying “We need to continue the effort to identify these travelers and their activities…to determine if there is any true threat posed.” The same cable said that the FBI had been alerted to the Malaysia meeting and that the bureau had been given copies of Mihdhar’s travel documents. That turned out not to be true.

The CIA asked Malaysian authorities to provide surveillance of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, which took place on January 5 at a secluded condominium in a resort overlooking a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. The condo was owned by Yazid Sufaat, the Malaysian businessman who had worked with Zawahiri to cultivate anthrax spores. The meeting was not wiretapped, so the opportunity to discover the plots that culminated in the bombing of the USS
Cole
and the 9/11 attack was lost. Without Mike Scheuer’s sleepless vigilance, Alec Station had lost its edge. He was still sitting in the library, waiting to be used.

There was a cable that same day from Riyadh Station to Alec Station concerning Mihdhar’s American visa. One of the FBI agents assigned to Alec, Doug Miller, read the cable and drafted a memo requesting permission to advise the FBI of the Malaysia meeting and the likelihood that one or more of the terrorists would be traveling soon to the United States. Such permission was required before transmitting intelligence from one organization to another. Miller was told, “This is not a matter for the FBI.” Miller followed up a week later by querying Tom Wilshire, a CIA deputy chief who was assigned to FBI headquarters; Wilshire’s job was ostensibly to facilitate the passage of information from the agency to the bureau. Miller sent him the memo he had drafted and asked, “Is this a no go or should I remake it in some way?” Wilshire never responded. After that, Miller forgot about the matter.

Special Branch, the Malaysian secret service, photographed about a dozen al-Qaeda associates entering the condo and visiting Internet cafés. On January
8,
Special Branch notified the CIA station chief in Thailand that three of the men from the meeting—Mihdhar, Hazmi, and Khallad—were flying to Bangkok. There, as it happened, Khallad would meet with the bombers of the USS
Cole.
But the CIA failed to alert anyone that the men should be followed. Nor did the agency notify the State Department to put Mihdhar’s name on a terror watch list so that he would be stopped or placed under surveillance if he entered the United States.

Three months later, the CIA learned that Hazmi had flown to Los Angeles on January
15, 2000.
Had it checked the flight manifest, it would have noticed that Mihdhar was traveling with him. The agency neglected to inform either the FBI or the State Department that at least one known al-Qaeda operative was in the country.

Why would the CIA—knowing that Mihdhar and Hazmi were al-Qaeda operatives, that they had visas to the United States, and that at least one of them had actually arrived on American soil—withhold this information from other government agencies? As always, the CIA feared that prosecutions resulting from specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services, but there were safeguards to protect confidential information, and the FBI worked routinely with the agency on similar operations. The CIA’s experience with John O’Neill, however, was that he would demand complete control of any case that touched on an FBI investigation, as this one certainly did. There were many in the agency—not just the sidelined Scheuer—who hated O’Neill and feared that the FBI was too blundering and indiscriminate to be trusted with sensitive intelligence. And so the CIA may have decided to hide the information in order to keep O’Neill off the case. Several of O’Neill’s subordinates strongly believe in this theory.

There may have been other reasons the CIA protected information that it was obliged to give to the bureau. Some other members of the I-49 squad would later come to believe that the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them. The CIA was desperate for a source inside al-Qaeda; it had completely failed to penetrate the inner circle or even to place a willing partner in the training camps, which were largely open to anyone who showed up. Mihdhar and Hazmi must have seemed like attractive opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the province of the FBI. The CIA has no legal authority to operate inside the country, although in fact, the bureau often caught the agency running backdoor operations in the United States. This was especially true in New York City, where there are so many foreign delegations. On many occasions, O’Neill complained to the CIA’s chief of station in New York about shenanigans that the I-49 squad had discovered. It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence in order to get around that restriction. Of course, it is also illegal for foreign intelligence services to operate in the United States, but they do so routinely.

These are only theories about the CIA’s failures to communicate vital information to the bureau, which can perhaps be better explained by the fact that the agency was drowning in a flood of threats and warnings. Alec Station had begun with twelve employees in
1996,
a number that had grown to about twenty-five when the Malaysia meeting occurred. There were another thirty or so analysts in the Counterterrorist Center who worked on all forms of terrorism worldwide, but al-Qaeda was not their primary responsibility. The analysts at Alec Station were a junior group, with about three years of experience on average. Most of them were women, which counted against them in the very masculine culture that surrounded the Near East Division of the agency. These young women analysts were the ones primarily charged with preventing a terrorist attack on the United States, a burden that weighed so heavily on them that they came to be seen in the agency as fanatics—“the Manson Family” some called them, after Charles Manson, the convicted psycho-killer. But they were sounding an alarm that the older generation of civil servants did not care to hear.

The atmosphere inside Alec Station was poisoned as a result of the attitude of the CIA analysts who held O’Neill responsible for the firing of Mike Scheuer, the driven leader of Alec from its inception. Only a few months before, the senior FBI agent assigned to Alec had demanded the authority to release CIA information to the bureau, and the quarrel over this matter had gone all the way to Freeh and Tenet, the respective heads of the two institutions. Scheuer was forced to step down, but the FBI agent who did gain that authority developed cancer and had to resign only a few days before the Malaysia meeting. None of the three FBI agents remaining in Alec had the seniority to release information, and consequently they had to rely on the agency to give them permission for any transfer of classified cable traffic. This was true until July
2000,
when a more senior agent, Charles E. Frahm, was assigned to Alec. He never saw a single memo or cable or heard any discussion about withholding information from the FBI. When he later learned about the Malaysia meeting, he concluded that the fact that it hadn’t been transmitted to the bureau was a mistake, accounted for by the abundance of threats that had occurred during the millennium period.

Many critical events occurred in the interim.

When Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles, on January
15, 2000,
they were supposed to enroll in flight school. They must have been overwhelmed by their assignment. Even finding a place to live would have presented a formidable challenge, since neither of them spoke English. Soon after their arrival, however, they became acquainted with Omar Bayoumi, a forty-two-year-old student who rarely attended classes and was supported by a stipend from a Saudi government contractor. He had drawn the attention of the local FBI office in 1998 because of the suspicions of the manager of the apartment complex where he lived. One of the bureau’s sources in San Diego asserted that Bayoumi was an agent for the Saudi government, but that meant little to the FBI investigators, since Saudi Arabia was seen as a loyal ally. In any case, the agents were called off the investigation by their supervisor, who worried that the Bayoumi inquiry would intrude on a major counterterrorism operation then under way.

As Bayoumi later told investigators, he drove up from San Diego on February
1, 2000,
to handle some visa matters at the Saudi consulate. From there he went directly to lunch at a halal restaurant nearby and overheard Gulf Arabic being spoken. He talked briefly with Mihdhar and Hazmi, who complained that they were having a hard time in Los Angeles, so he invited them to San Diego. Three days later they showed up. He let them stay in his apartment, then found them another place across the street and lent them money for the first two months’ rent. He held a party to introduce them to other members of the Muslim community.

If Bayoumi was sent to oversee the two men, who sent him? Perhaps he was their al-Qaeda contact. They certainly needed a caretaker. The fact that Bayoumi went directly from the Saudi consulate to the restaurant, however, suggests to some investigators that the two future hijackers were already under surveillance by Saudi government officials, who were aware of their membership in al-Qaeda. The CIA is the only government agency that knew who Hazmi and Mihdhar were and that they were in America. The CIA had tracked Mihdhar and Hazmi from Kuala Lumpur to Bangkok to Los Angeles. Perhaps the agency decided that Saudi intelligence would have a better chance of recruiting these men than the Americans. That would leave no CIA fingerprints on the operation as well.

This is the view of some very bitter FBI investigators, who wonder why they were never informed of the existence of al-Qaeda operatives inside America. Mihdhar and Hazmi arrived nineteen months before 9/11. The FBI had all the authority it needed to investigate these men and learn what they were up to, but because the CIA failed to divulge the presence of two active members of al-Qaeda, the hijackers were free to develop their plot until it was too late to stop them.

T
HE HEAD OF THE
N
EW
Y
ORK BUREAU,
Louis Schiliro, retired soon after the turn of the millennium, and O’Neill badly wanted his job. Because of the size and importance of the New York office, he would be an assistant director of the FBI, a position he held temporarily while the bureau considered two candidates for the post—O’Neill and Barry Mawn, the head of the Boston office. Mawn had more experience and O’Neill had more enemies. Moreover, O’Neill’s record, which had been unblemished, was now clouded by the incident of letting Valerie James use the bathroom in the offsite facility. Thomas Pickard, the deputy director of the bureau, reputedly told O’Neill that his career was going nowhere. The job went to Mawn.