Intelligence Report Rips FBI -
68,000 Counterrorism Leads Lost?

September 25, 2002
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — The status of as many as 68,000 possible clues and other leads related to FBI counterterrorism efforts remain unknown because of a communications breakdown, authorities said Tuesday.

Bureau officials believe most of the information was dealt with properly, but they are attempting to make sure it wasn't mishandled.

The communications breakdown, blamed on an outdated case management system, was one of several failures highlighted during a House-Senate review of intelligence operations related to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

A detailed report delivered by Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint intelligence committee, singled out the FBI for having ignored or dismissed a raft of potential clues about threats to the United States before the attacks.

The 23-page report provided a particularly troubling account of information available well before Sept. 11, and the FBI's initial response to a 2001 memo raising concerns about Middle Eastern men who were enrolled in flight training school near Phoenix, Ariz.

In its review of the so-called Phoenix memo, the committee found that the FBI actually began receiving information as early as 1998 that indicated terrorists planned to send students to the USA for aviation training similar to the training received by the Sept. 11 hijackers.

On at least three different occasions between 1998 and 1999, the report said, the FBI was informed of terrorist-related interest in U.S. aviation. Included in those briefings was information that said terrorist leaders viewed aviation as particularly important and that they "approved an open-ended amount of funding to ensure its success."

The report said the FBI was aware in 1998 that "individuals connected to the (terrorist) organization had performed surveillance and security tests at airports in the United States and made comments suggesting an intention to target civil aviation."

Although the FBI asked the Immigration and Naturalization Service to track suspicious students enrolled in aviation schools, the INS "never provided any information in response to the request," the report said.

It concluded that the author of the Phoenix memo was never aware of the earlier reports about terrorist groups sending people to the USA for aviation training. He also did not know that the FBI had attempted to identify Middle Eastern flight students in the USA two years earlier.

The FBI has since discovered that one of the suspects named in the Phoenix memo crossed paths in 1997 with Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour when the two attended flight training school in Arizona.

Investigators, however, don't believe the Sept. 11 plot existed at that time.

"No one will ever know whether a greater focus on the connection between these events would have led to the unraveling of the Sept. 11 plot," Hill told committee members Tuesday.

Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., a vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, later described the bureau as having "grossly failed" to recognize important clues at a time when U.S. intelligence agencies were receiving information that terrorists might be targeting U.S. interests.

In the case of terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, the committee report outlined a series of frustrations encountered by federal agents in Minnesota who sought a more aggressive investigation of the flight school student when he was arrested on immigration violations about a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Just two weeks before the attacks, in an attempt to get FBI headquarters to take more notice of Moussaoui's potential threat, an FBI supervisor in Minneapolis told colleagues in Washington that he was only trying to ensure that Moussaoui "did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center."

"The Minneapolis supervisor ... had no reason to believe that Moussaoui was planning an attack on the World Trade Center," the report said. "He was merely trying to get headquarters' attention."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-09-24-intelligence_x.htm