[iwar] [fc:CIA,.FBI.Disagree.On.Urgency.Of.Warning]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-18 08:33:06
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From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
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Date: Thu, 18 Oct 2001 08:33:06 -0700 (PDT)
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Subject: [iwar] [fc:CIA,.FBI.Disagree.On.Urgency.Of.Warning]
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Los Angeles Times
October 18, 2001
CIA, FBI Disagree On Urgency Of Warning
Inquiry: Dispute over cable on suspected terrorists points up an ongoing
rift.
By Bob Drogin, Eric Lichtblau and Greg Krikorian, Times Staff Writers
WASHINGTON -- The one thing everybody agrees on is that a CIA cable
transmitted Aug. 27 over a classified government computer network warned
that two "Bin Laden related individuals" had entered the United States and
that two other suspected terrorists should be barred from entering.
The CIA had already notified the White House and other senior policymakers
in early August that the exiled Saudi militant Osama bin Laden was
determined to launch a terrorist attack within the United States.
But CIA and FBI officials now disagree over the significance of the later
notice and, specifically, whether an apparent miscommunication affected the
FBI's response.
The FBI failed to find two men who later emerged as suspected skyjackers
Sept. 11. Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, the two men identified on the
CIA cable as already being on U.S. soil, helped seize an American Airlines
jet after takeoff and crash it into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.
The argument underlines the sometimes bitter communication problems between
the two agencies at the front line of America's war on terrorism. The CIA
insists the cable was coded "immediate" in capital letters at the top. The
agency uses four alert levels--routine, priority, immediate and flash--but
flash is reserved only for the most serious events, such as outbreak of war.
Immediate, said an intelligence official, means "It's an emergency. It's
rare you would get a cable anything higher. This is the upper end of the
scale."
The official, who read parts of the classified cable to The Times, said it
warned that the four suspected terrorists, including Almihdhar and Alhazmi,
had "confirmed links to Egyptian Islamic Jihad operatives." U.S.
intelligence believes the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, one of the world's most
ruthless terrorist groups, merged with Al Qaeda last June in Afghanistan.
The cable also disclosed that Almihdhar met with "Bin Laden associates" in
Malaysia in January 2000. That meeting, which the CIA later viewed on a
videotape, has become a key link in the current investigation. The agency
concluded that Almihdhar had met a man that it believed was a prime suspect
in the bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Yemen in October 2000.
The cable added that Almihdhar flew into New York's John F. Kennedy
International Airport on July 4 and that Alhazmi flew into Los Angeles on
Jan. 15, 2000. It does not mention the Cole and provides no other
information about the two other suspected terrorists. Those two other
suspects, U.S. officials said Wednesday, did not play a role in the Sept. 11
attacks and are not believed to be in the United States.
Several FBI officials gave a markedly different version of the cable's
contents Wednesday, however.
An FBI official who was involved in the episode but asked not to be
identified said that the CIA cable was not coded "immediate" and gave no
other indication of its urgent status. He said the agency requested only
that the Immigration and Naturalization Service put the four men
"immediately" on a special watch list.
"That was the purpose," the official said. "The purpose of the cable was not
to tell the FBI to do anything."
"I saw no reference in the cable to any kind of priority. Whether there was
some sort of CIA code or something, I don't know . . . [but] there's nothing
up front that lights this thing on fire that we can tell."
Still, he and other FBI officials insisted that the bureau acted
aggressively after receiving the CIA cable at its counter-terrorism unit in
Washington. Agents saw it as a promising lead on the Cole investigation, one
of the bureau's highest priorities.
"As it was treated, it was urgent in the sense that we had no idea where
this person [Almihdhar] was and we wanted to figure out where he might be,"
one official said.
The FBI analyst on the case spoke frequently with her counterpart at the CIA
regarding the cable and made immediate contact with the INS to track down
information on Almihdhar.
Field agents were sent first to check Marriott hotels in New York, the
address Almihdhar had given when he arrived in July, and then at Sheraton
hotels around Los Angeles, the address he gave on a previous trip. They
found no record that he ever had stayed in a hotel.
The FBI went back to the INS on Sept. 10, hoping to find another lead.
"It moved along very quickly," even though "there's nothing [in the cable]
that suggests an imminent terrorist threat. This is not about a warning of
an imminent threat," said the FBI official, but rather about looking for a
potential witness in a past attack.
The official praised the FBI analyst's performance, and said an internal
review after Sept. 11 had found that "everything was done that could have
been done."
Other FBI officials also defended the bureau's response. "The point is, we
acted upon it immediately," one official said. "We did not take that
information from headquarters and travel by horseback to New York."
Several suggested the CIA was over-dramatizing the cable's importance and
questioned the agency's motive in disclosing the cable's contents now.
"If the cable says, 'Don't let them in the country, and they were already in
the country,' what's the point of bringing this up now?" one FBI official
asked.
The U.S. intelligence official conceded that the FBI had very little to go
on. "They had the guy's names, passport numbers and last addresses. It would
be very difficult to find someone based on that. . . . And they didn't."
The official said he couldn't explain why the CIA version was marked
"immediate," and the one the FBI received was not. He speculated that the
coding had been stripped out in the FBI computers.
"I don't know what happened on [the FBI] end," he said. "Anywhere else in
government, when it says 'immediate,' it gets a higher degree of attention.
And this definitely says 'immediate' in capital letters."
The cable may have been changed as it moved through official channels. One
law enforcement source said his version began with an instruction that read,
"The following information is provided for lead purposes only and is
intended solely for the background information of recipients in developing
their own leads." That language doesn't appear on the original CIA cable.
The cable also was addressed to the State Department's Intelligence and
Research office, the Customs Department and the INS.
Bill Strassburger, spokesman for the INS, questioned why it took so long for
the CIA to share its intelligence. Had the notice arrived earlier, for
example, the INS might have prevented Almihdhar and Alhazmi from entering
the country.
"My understanding is it's not a situation where we had the information and
didn't act on it, but [a situation where] the information didn't get to us
in time," Strassburger said.
The head of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, Mary Ryan,
complained bitterly at a Senate hearing last week that consular offices
could have stopped more of the suspected terrorists from entering the
country if the CIA and FBI had shared more of their intelligence with the
State Department.
"It is a colossal intelligence failure, or there was information that wasn't
shared with us," Ryan told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee. "What went wrong
is we had no information on [the hijackers] from intelligence and law
enforcement."
Ryan said that Mohamed Atta, a suspected cell leader in the Sept. 11 plot,
received a U.S. visa, for example. But intelligence agencies know now, and
apparently knew before, that Atta had met with Bin Laden operatives earlier
in the year. "I'm surprised how much we learned in the immediate aftermath"
of Sept. 11, she said.
Ryan said the FBI has refused for a decade to provide the State Department
with access to its National Crime Information Center databases, including
one on gang and terrorist group members, because the State Department is not
a law enforcement agency.
INS Commissioner James Ziglar told the same hearing that the FBI only
recently granted the INS, a fellow Justice Department agency, access to the
databases, and then only at two entry points into the United States. He did
not say where, however.
The Times reported Sunday that a simple check of public records and
addresses from the California Department of Motor Vehicles would have shown
the FBI that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had been living at a series of addresses
in the San Diego area.
Similarly, a check with credit card companies would have shown that Alhazmi
used a Visa card in his own name on the Internet to purchase a ticket on
Flight 77 on Sept. 11. He bought the ticket Aug. 27 and gave an address in
Fort Lee, N.J., according to law enforcement records.
Moreover, if the FBI had provided the airlines with the two men's names, the
airlines could have alerted authorities to their travel plans and prevented
them from boarding. Since the attacks, airlines have been receiving watch
list names and checking them against ticketed passengers.
The CIA and FBI long have bickered over the sharing of intelligence
information, partly a result of their widely different cultures. CIA agents
steal secrets and harvest intelligence in furtherance of U.S. policy. FBI
agents seek to solve crimes. CIA sources and methods are secret. FBI
evidence must be acceptable in open court.
Efforts to bring the two camps together have included the posting of an FBI
special agent as deputy director of the CIA counter-terrorist center, and
the posting of a senior CIA official in the FBI's counterpart operation.
On Sept. 16, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued a classified memo to agency
leaders calling for better cooperation in the war against terrorism. The
memo later was circulated to other top figures in the nation's intelligence
community. It was first reported by the New York Times. Portions were
provided Wednesday to the Los Angeles Times.
Tenet said the "unrelenting focus" of the CIA's "operational, analytical and
technical capabilities" should be protecting the United States from further
terrorist attacks and destroying Al Qaeda and its allies.
"There can be no bureaucratic impediments to success," Tenet wrote. "All the
rules have changed. There must be an absolute and full sharing of
information, ideas and capabilities. We do not have time to hold meetings to
fix problems. Fix them--quickly and smartly."
Tenet said the CIA should employ the same "principles" in dealings with law
enforcement, military, civilian and other intelligence agencies.
"Whatever systemic problems existed in any of these relationships must be
identified and solved now," he said. "There must be an absolute seamlessness
in our approach to waging this war--and we must lead."
Since then, according to the CIA, the agency has made a greater effort to
provide briefings to people on Capitol Hill, at the Treasury, State and
Defense departments, as well as the FBI.
"We're reaching out to more people without being asked, and telling them
what we know," said one official. "We're grabbing people by the lapels to
make sure they're hearing what we're hearing."
Times staff writer Jon Peterson in Washington contributed to this report. 

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