___________________

REPORT

TOGETHER WITH ADDITIONAL VIEWS

DECEMBER 2002

___________________

REPORT

TOGETHER WITH ADDITIONAL VIEWS

DECEMBER 2002

Foreword

This is the declassified version of the Final Report of the Joint Inquiry that was

approved and filed with the House of Representatives and the Senate on December 20,

2002. With the exception of portions that were released to the public previously (e.g.,

the additional views of Members, the GAO Anthrax Report, etc.), this version has been

declassified by the Intelligence Community prior to its public release. That review was

for classification purposes only, and does not indicate Intelligence Community agreement

with the accuracy of this report, or concurrence with its factual findings or conclusions.

At appropriate points in the report, relevant information that developed after the

report was filed, or that has appeared in other public sources, has been inserted and is

denoted with an asterisk (*) and an accompanying footnote. Where necessary,

information that the Intelligence Community has identified as classified for national

security purposes has been deleted. Such deletions are indicated with brackets and a

strikethrough [ ]. In other portions of the report, alternative language that

the Intelligence Community has agreed is unclassified has been substituted for the

original report language which remains classified. Paragraphs that contain alternative

language, whether one word or several sentences, have been identified by brackets at the

beginning and end of the paragraph.

As a result of these changes to the text, the page numbers at the bottom of each

page do not match those of the original report. In order to preserve a record of the

mark where the corresponding pages begin and end in the original report.

II. The Context…………………………………………………………………………….. 3

III. Findings and Conclusions…………………………………………………………….. 6

A. Factual Findings……………………………………………………………….. 6

B. Conclusion - Factual Findings………………………………………………… 33

C. Systemic Findings…………………………………………………………….. 33

D. Related Findings………………………………………………………………. 117

I. The Plot Unfolds for the Attacks of September 11, 2001………………………………. 128

A. The al-Qa’ida Roots of the September 11 Attacks…………………………….. 128

B. The Springboards for the Attack–Germany and Malaysia…………………… 131

C. The Principals Arrive in the United States -- January 2000 through April 2001.135

D. The Supporting Hijackers Arrive--April to June 2001………………………… 137

E. Final Organization of the Attacks……………………………………………… 139

F. Financing of the Attacks……………………………………………………….. 140

G. Execution of the Attacks………………………………………………………. 141

II. Pentagon Flight Hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Salim al-Hazmi.. 143

A. The Malaysia Meeting and Identification of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Salim

and Nawaf al-Hazmi – First Watchlist Opportunity ….…………………….. 143

B. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi Travel to the United States – Second

Watchlist Opportunity …………………………………………………..…… 147

C. Khalid al-Mihdhar Leaves the United States and Nawaf al-Hazmi Applies for

a Visa Extension ……………………………………………………………… 148

D. The Attack on USS Cole and the Identification of Khallad–Third Watchlist

Opportunity……………………………………………………………………. 148

E. The June 11, 2001 FBI/CIA Meeting and Khalid al-Mihdhar’s Return to the

United States………………………………………………………………….. 150

F. The Watchlisting of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi…………………151

G. The Search for Khalid al-Mihdhar…………………………………………….. 152

ii

H. The Case Against Bin Ladin……………………………………………………154

III. NSA Communications Intercepts Related to Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf and

Salim al-Hazmi …………………………………………………………….…………….. 155

IV. Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar Had Numerous Contacts With an Active

FBI Informant……………..……………………………………………………………… 157

A. Background…………………………………………………………………. 158

B. Informant’s Relationship with Two Hijackers……………………………… 159

C. Questions About the Informant’s Credibility………………………………. 162

V. Associates of the September 11 Terrorists in the United States………………………. 168

A. U.S. Intelligence Community Knowledge of Support Networks Prior to

September 11.………………………………………………………………… 171

B. Persons Known to the FBI With Whom September 11 Hijackers May Have

Associated in the United States …..…………………………………………… 172

a. Omar al-Bayoumi .…………………………………………………….. 172

b. Osama Bassnan…………………………………………………………175

d. [Business Manager] …………………………………………………… 179

e. [Business Owner] ….………………………………………………….. 180

f. [An Individual] ………………………..….…………………………… 181

e. [An Individual]..……………………………………………………….. 182

VI. Germany–Investigation of the Hamburg Cell……………………………………….. 183

VII. The Hijackers’ Visas…………………………………………………………………. 187

VIII. The Rising Threat and the Context of the September 11 Attacks……………………190

A. A New Breed of Terrorists……………………………………………………. 191

B. Emergence of Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida……………………………….. 194

C. Attributes of Bin Ladin’s Terrorist Operations………………………………... 196

D. Intelligence about Bin Ladin’s Intentions to Strike Inside the United States…. 198

E. Indications of a Possible Terrorist Attack in Spring and Summer 2001………. 203

F. Intelligence Information on Possible Terrorist Use of Airplanes as Weapons…209

IX. The Development of U.S. Counterterrorism Policy Before September 11…………… 215

Inquiry. While the FBI has provided the Joint Inquiry with these names and those names are contained in the

classified version of this final report, the Joint Inquiry has decided to delete them from this unclassified version due

to the as yet unresolved nature of much of the information regarding their activities.

iii

A. Counterterrorism as an Intelligence Priority……………………………………216

B. Growing Importance in the Clinton Administration……………………………216

C. Uncertainty During the Transition……………………………………………... 217

D. The George W. Bush Administration………………………………………….. 218

E. Competing Priorities……………………………………………………………219

F. Policy Measures to Fight Terrorism…………………………………………… 220

G. The Law Enforcement Approach……………………………………………… 222

H. Disruptions and Renditions…………………………………………………… 225

I. Afghanistan as a Terrorist Sanctuary…………………………………………. 226

J. The Intelligence Community…………………………………………………. 229

K. The Declaration of War………………………………………………………. 230

L. The Intelligence Community’s Response…………………………………….. 231

M. Shortcomings in the Intelligence Community’s Response…………………… 232

N. The President and Senior Policy Advisor Responsibility…………………….. 234

O. Lack of an Integrated Response………………………………………………. 236

P. The Intelligence Community’s Failure to Establish a Coordinated Domestic

Focus before September 11……………………………………………………. 241

Q. Steps Taken to Fight International Terrorism at Home………………………. 243

R. Lack of Focus on the Domestic Threat……………………………………….. 243

S. Limited Counterterrorism Contributions by Other Intelligence Community

Members………………………………………………………………………. 247

I. Counterterrorism Resources…………………………………………………………….. 250

A. Joint Inquiry Resource Review Methodology and Limitations……………….. 251

B. Overall Intelligence Community Funding…………………………………….. 254

C. Resources Dedicated to Counterterrorism…………………………………….. 256

D. Personnel Shortages…………………………………………………………… 260

a. Personnel Concerns at CIA……………………………………………… 261

b. Personnel Concerns at NSA…………………………………………….. 262

c. Personnel Concerns at FBI……………………………………………… 263

E. Counterterrorism and the Competition for Scarce Resources………………… 264

F. Policymaker Criticism of Intelligence Community Budget Allocations……… 266

G. Reliance on Supplemental Funding for Counterterrorism…………………….. 267

H. How Easily Can Money Be Moved?………………………………………….. 269

II. Foreign Liaison………………………………………………………………………... 270

A. Efforts to Improve Foreign Liaison…………………………………………… 271

B. Benefits of Foreign Liaison…………………………………………………… 272

C. Disadvantages of Relying on Foreign Liaison Services………………………. 274

iv

D. Liaison Service Problems with the United States…………………………….. 275

E. Coordination of Foreign Liaison……………………………………………… 276

F. Additional Challenges for the FBI Overseas………………………………….. 278

G. Progress after September 11, 2001..…………………………………………… 278

III. Covert Action and Military Operations Against Bin Ladin…..…..…………………... 279

A. Background……………………………………………………………………. 279

B. Authorities to Conduct Covert Action Against Bin Ladin……………………. 281

C. Additional Operational Challenges and Constraints………………………….. 291

D. CIA Covert Action Against Bin Ladin [Prior to September 11, 2001].………. 294

E. Use of [ ] Against Bin Ladin.…………………………………. 300

F. Use of U.S. Military Force Against Bin Ladin………………………………… 303

IV. Strategy to Disrupt Terrorist Funding………………………………………………… 308

A. Financial Tracking before September 11……………………………………… 308

B. Financial Tracking after September 11………………………………………... 309

V. Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM): The Mastermind of September 11……………... 309

A. KSM’s Links to Terrorist Attacks before September 11……………………… 310

B. The Hunt for KSM…………………………………………………………….. 311

C. Finding KSM and Building the Case………………………………………….. 311

D. [ ]…………………………………………………. 312

E. Link to al-Qa’ida Discovered………………………………………………….. 313

F. The Emphasis on Renditions…………………………………………………... 313

G. KSM’s U.S. Connection……………………………………………………….. 314

H. The Hunt for KSM Continues…………………………………………………. 315

VI. The FBI’s Investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui Before September 11………………. 315

VII. The Phoenix Electronic Communication (EC)………………………………………. 325

A. The Phoenix EC……………………………………………………………….. 325

B. Headquarters’ Response to the Phoenix EC…………………………………… 327

C. New York FBI Office Action in Connection with the Phoenix EC…………… 329

D. Handling of Phoenix EC Indicates FBI Headquarters Weaknesses…………… 329

E. Links from the Phoenix EC to September 11…………………………………. 332

F. Previous FBI Focus on Suspected Terrorists at U.S. Flight Schools………….. 333

VIII. Strategic Analysis…………………………………………………………………… 336

A. The Intelligence Community’s Lack of Strategic Analysis…………………… 336

B. Analyst Qualifications and Training…………………………………………... 339

C. Analysts’ Access to Information………………………………………………. 341

v

D. Language Skills………………………………………………………………... 343

IX. Views of Outside Experts on the Intelligence Community…………………………… 345

A. Setting Priorities……………………………………………………………….. 346

B. Strategy and Organization……………………………………………………... 346

C. Should a Strong Director of National Intelligence Be Established?…………... 347

D. Should the Same Person be both DNI and Director of the CIA?……………… 348

E. Counterterrorism Within the United States and Creation of a Domestic

Intelligence Agency…………………………………………………………… 349

F. A Legislative Charter for the Intelligence Community……………………….. 353

G. Respect for the Rule of Law…………………………………………………... 353

X. Information Sharing…………………………………………………………………… 354

A. Information Sharing Between Intelligence Agencies and within the Federal

Government……………………………………………………………………. 355

a. National Security Agency………………………………………………. 355

b. The Central Intelligence Agency………………………………………... 357

c. The Federal Bureau of Investigation……………………………………. 357

d. The Department of State………………………………………………... 359

e. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the Transportation

Security Administration (TSA)………………………………………... 360

B. Information Sharing Between Intelligence Agencies and State and Local

Officials……………………………………………………………………….. 361

C. Additional Information Sharing Problems…………………………………….. 362

D. The Wall - Barriers Between Law Enforcement and Intelligence…………….. 363

XI. Technology Gaps……………………………………………………………………... 368

A. Technology Gaps at NSA………………………………………………………. 368

B. [ ]……...…………………………. 388

C. [ ]……..……………………………………… 388

D. [ ]………………………………………………….. 389

E. [ ] …..………………………………………………… 389

F. Selection and Filtering for [ ] Communications…………… 371

G. Analyst Tools………………………………………………………………….. 371

H. Collection Platforms……………………………………………………………372

XII. Technical Collection of Terrorist Communications…………………………………. 373

A. NSA’s Organizational Structure for Collecting Terrorist Communications…… 374

B. Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and the September 11 Attacks…………………. 374

C. A Chronological Review of NSA Collection Efforts Against al-Qa’ida……… 376

D. Technical Collection Problems and Limits at NSA…………………………… 379

a. Difficulties of Gaining Actionable Intelligence on al-Qa’ida…………... 380

vi

b. Difficulties in Adjusting to Terrorist Targets…………………………… 381

c. Problems Keeping Pace with [ ] Advances

before September 11………………………………………………. 381

E. Insufficient Resources for Counterterrorism at NSA………………………….. 382

F. Technical Collection at CIA…………………………………………………… 384

G. NSA/CIA Disputes over [ ] Collection…….…………………….. 384

H. Technical Collection at FBI……………………………………………………. 385

XIII. Human Intelligence (HUMINT) Collection………………………………………… 385

A. CIA Human Intelligence Collection……………………………………………. 386

B. DIA Human Intelligence Collection……………………………………………. 390

C. FBI Human Intelligence Collection…………………………………………….. 391

XIV. Summary of Joint Inquiry Review of Anthrax Attacks……………………………… 393

GLOSSARY……………………………………………………………………………….. 423

Additional Views of Members…………………………………………………………….. 436

Appendices

vii

Bob Graham, D - Florida, Chairman

Richard C. Shelby, R - Alabama, Vice Chairman

Carl Levin, Michigan Jon Kyl, Arizona

John D. Rockefeller, West Virginia James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma

Dianne Feinstein, California Orrin Hatch, Utah

Ron Wyden, Oregon Pat Roberts, Kansas

Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Mike DeWine, Ohio

Evan Bayh, Indiana Fred Thompson, Tennessee

John Edwards, North Carolina Richard Lugar, Indiana

Barbara Mikulski, Maryland

Al Cumming, Staff Director William Duhnke,

Minority Staff Director

viii

Porter J. Goss, R - Florida, Chairman

Nancy Pelosi, D - California, Ranking Democrat

Doug Bereuter, Nebraska Sanford D. Bishop, Georgia

Michael N. Castle, Delaware Jane Harman, California

Sherwood L. Boehlert, New York Gary A. Condit, California

Jim Gibbons, Nevada Tim Roemer, Indiana

Ray LaHood, Illinois Silvestre Reyes, Texas

Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Leonard L. Boswell, Iowa

Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Collin C. Peterson, Minnesota

Richard Burr, North Carolina Bud Cramer, Alabama

Saxby Chambliss, Georgia

Terry Everett, Alabama

Timothy R. Sample, Staff Director Michael W. Sheehy,

Democratic Counsel

ix

Eleanor Hill

Rick Cinquegrana

David Barton

Ann Bennett

Daniel Byman

Michael Davidson

George Ellard

Rahul Gupta

Kay Holt

John Ivicic

Michael Jacobson

Everette Jordan

Miles Kara

John Keefe

Thomas Kelley

Dana Lesemann

Patti Litman

Arthur Menna

Lewis Moon

Patricia Ravalgi

Alonzo Robertson

Robert Rosenwald

Michael Smith

Catherine Williams

Director

Deputy Director

Inquiry was made by the Staff’s first Staff Director, Britt Snider. Other original members of the staff included

Catherine Lotrionte, who left the staff in the summer of 2002.

x

• establish liaison with these schools;

• discuss the theories contained in the Phoenix EC with the Intelligence Community; and

• consider seeking authority to obtain visa information concerning individuals seeking to

individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant to the events of

September 11. As a result, the Community missed opportunities to disrupt the September 11th plot by

denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through

surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a

heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack.

No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn between

these disparate pieces of information. We will never definitively know to what extent the Community

would have been able and willing to exploit fully all the opportunities that may have emerged. The

important point is that the Intelligence Community, for a variety of reasons, did not bring together and

fully appreciate a range of information that could have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and

preventing Usama Bin Ladin’s plan to attack these United States on September 11, 2001.

Our review of the events surrounding September 11 has revealed a number of systemic

weaknesses that hindered the Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism efforts before September

11. If not addressed, these weaknesses will continue to undercut U.S. counterterrorist efforts. In

order to minimize the possibility of attacks like September 11 in the future, effective solutions to

those problems need to be developed and fully implemented as soon as possible.

[page xvi]

13. Finding: [

].

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence agreed to conduct a Joint Inquiry into the

activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community in connection with the terrorist attacks

perpetrated against our nation on September 11, 2001. Reflecting the magnitude of the

events of that day, the Committees’ decision was unprecedented in Congressional history:

for the first time, two permanent committees, one from the House and one from the

Senate, would join together to conduct a single, unified inquiry.

The three principal goals of this Joint Inquiry were to:

should have known prior to September 11, 2001, regarding the

international terrorist threat to the United States, to include the scope and

nature of any possible international terrorist attacks against the United

States and its interests;

Intelligence Community in learning of or preventing these attacks in

advance; and

to identify and prevent future international terrorist attacks.

It should be noted that this Joint Inquiry had the specific charter to review the

activities of the Intelligence Community and was limited to approximately one year’s

duration. It is recognized that there are many other issues relating to the events of

September 11, 2001 that are outside the limits of the Intelligence Community, and that

Community that was not reviewed by the Inquiry within the allotted time. With that in

mind, we look forward to cooperating with the new National Commission on Terrorist

Attacks Upon the United States and the continuing oversight efforts of the House and

Senate Intelligence Committees.

During the course of this Inquiry, these Committees have held nine public

hearings as well as thirteen closed sessions in which classified information has been

considered. In addition, the Joint Inquiry Staff has reviewed almost 500,000 pages of

relevant documents from the Intelligence Community agencies and other sources, of

which about 100,000 pages have been selected for incorporation into the Joint Inquiry’s

records. The Staff also has conducted approximately 300 interviews, and has participated

in numerous briefings and panel discussions, that have involved almost 600 individuals

from the Intelligence Community agencies, other U.S. Government organizations, state

and local entities, and representatives of the private sector and foreign governments.

Thus, the Inquiry has sought and considered information from agencies

throughout the Intelligence Community and other parts of the federal government; from

relevant state and local authorities; and from private sector and foreign government

individuals and organizations. This report is based on information gathered by the

Committees throughout this Inquiry as well as testimony and exhibits received during the

course of both the closed and open hearings. Consistent with the need to protect the

The statement of the Committees’ findings and recommendations in Part I of this

report includes only a brief summary of the nature of the terrorist threat that faced the

United States, and the Intelligence Community, in the years that preceded the vicious

attacks of September 11, 2001. Given the scope of the information and issues considered

during the course of this Inquiry, these findings and recommendations can only be

completely understood against the background of the full hearing and investigative

record. To provide that context, a detailed description of the hearings and investigative

America’s first confrontation with international terrorism. Although the nature of the

threat had evolved considerably over time, the United States and its interests have long

been prime terrorist targets. For example, the bombings of the Marine barracks and the

U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon in 1983 should have served as a clear warning that

terrorist groups were not reluctant to attack U.S. interests when they believed such

attacks would further their ends.

The Intelligence Community also had considerable evidence before September 11

that international terrorists were capable of, and had planned, major terrorist strikes

within the United States. The 1993 attack on the World Trade Center confirmed this

point, as did the 1993 plots to bomb New York City landmarks and the 1999 arrest at the

U.S.-Canadian border of Ahmad Ressam, who intended to bomb the Los Angeles

Usama Bin Ladin’s role in international terrorism had also been well known for

some time before September 11. He initially came to the attention of the Intelligence

Community in the early 1990s as a financier of terrorism. However, Bin Ladin’s own

words soon provided evidence of the steadily escalating threat to the United States he and

his organization posed. In August 1996, he issued a fatwa -- or religious decree --

authorizing attacks on Western military targets in the Arabian Peninsula. In February

1998, Bin Ladin issued a second fatwa authorizing attacks on U.S. civilians and military

personnel anywhere in the world. Bin Ladin’s fatwas cited the U.S. military presence in

Washington, D.C. as well as U.S. Postal Service facilities in Maryland, and significantly affected the U.S. economy.

The statement of Initial Scope of this Joint Inquiry made specific reference to the anthrax attacks. In pursuing that

matter, the Inquiry received briefings from the FBI and the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) regarding their

investigations of the anthrax attacks. It also requested that GAO’s Center for Technology and Engineering review the

attacks; current knowledge regarding the use of anthrax as a weapon; technologies available to detect anthrax; and the

law enforcement community’s ability to combat chemical and biological terrorist attacks, including the FBI’s resources

and analytical capabilities to investigate such attacks. The GAO report has been completed. It is summarized in Part

Three of this report and is included in its entirety as an appendix. To date, no connection has been established between

the anthrax attacks and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the Palestinian issue, and U.S. support for Israel as

justification for ordering these attacks.

The gradual emergence of Bin Ladin and others like him marked a change from

the type of terrorist threat that had traditionally confronted the Intelligence Community.

Throughout the Cold War, radical left and ethno-nationalist groups had carried out most

terrorist acts. Many of these groups were state-sponsored. The first bombing of the

World Trade Center in February 1993, however, led to a growing recognition in the

Intelligence Community of a new type of terrorism that did not conform to the Cold War

model: violent radical Islamic cells, not linked to any specific country, but united in anti-

American zeal. A July 1995 National Intelligence Estimate noted the danger of this "new

breed". By 1996, agencies within the Intelligence Community were aware that Bin Ladin

was organizing these kinds of cells, and they began to collect intelligence on him

actively.

In January 1996, the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) — which had been established

at CIA in 1986 -- created a special unit that was dedicated to focusing on Bin Ladin and

his associates. The unit quickly determined that he was more than a terrorist financier,

and it soon became a hub for expertise on Bin Ladin and for operations directed against

his terrorist network, al Qa’ida. Officials from the unit, which started with about 16 CIA

officers and grew to about 40 officers from throughout the Intelligence Community prior

to September 11, 2001, had unprecedented access to senior agency officials and White

House policymakers.

[Page 5]

[At the FBI, the Radical Fundamentalist Unit was created in March 1994 to

handle responsibilities related to international radical fundamentalist terrorists, including

Usama Bin Ladin. This Unit also handled other counterintelligence matters, and was

responsible for the coordination of extraterritorial intelligence operations and criminal

investigations targeted at radical fundamentalist terrorists. In 1999, the FBI recognized

the increased threat to the United States posed by Bin Ladin and created the Usama Bin

Ladin Unit to handle al-Qa’ida-related counterterrorism matters].

[As al-Qa’ida grew, both CIA and FBI officials recognized that the foreign

intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies of foreign governments, collectively

referred to as "foreign liaison," could be of great value in penetrating and countering the

organization. They understood that foreign liaison could act as a tremendous force

multiplier against terrorism and, with that in mind, tried to coordinate and streamline

what had been ad hoc relationships. As a result, as former National Security Advisor

Sandy Berger testified, al-Qa’ida cells were disrupted in a number of countries after

1997. CTC also stepped up its efforts to enhance the capabilities of some foreign liaison

services to work against joint terrorist targets. These efforts had mixed results].

The FBI also increased its focus on counterterrorism, establishing its own

Counterterrorism Center at FBI Headquarters in 1996. Recognizing the importance of

good relationships with foreign liaison services, the FBI expanded the permanent

stationing of agents, known as Legal Attaches, or "Legats," in principal cities across the

globe. In addition to improving relations with foreign services, the FBI engaged in an

aggressive program with the CIA to arrest terrorists outside the United States. Finally,

the FBI established Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) in thirty-five field offices before

September 11. These task forces were designed to bring together a range of federal, state

and local agencies that could provide valuable assistance in counterterrorism

investigations.

[Page 6]

The August 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa definitively

put the U.S. Intelligence Community on notice of the danger that Bin Ladin and his

network, al-Qa’ida, posed. The attacks showed that Bin Ladin’s network was capable of

carrying out very bloody, simultaneous attacks and inflicting mass casualties. In

December 1998, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, gave a chilling

direction to his deputies at the CIA:

We must now enter a new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin. . .

. We are at war. . . . I want no resources or people spared in this

effort, either inside the CIA or the Community.

Discovering and disrupting al-Qa’ida’s plans proved exceptionally difficult,

however. Details of major terrorist plots were not widely shared within the al-Qa’ida

organization, making it hard to develop the intelligence necessary to preempt or disrupt

attacks. Senior al-Qa’ida officials were sensitive to operational security, and many al-

Qa'ida members enjoyed sanctuary in Afghanistan, where they could safely plan and train

for their missions. Finally, senior members of al-Qa'ida were skilled and purposeful: they

learned from their mistakes and were flexible in organization and planning.

Nonetheless, particularly after the bombings in East Africa, the Intelligence

Community amassed a body of information detailing Bin Ladin’s ties to terrorist

activities against U.S. interests around the world. Armed with that information, prior to

September 11, 2001, U.S. Government counterterrorist efforts to identify and disrupt

terrorist operations focused to a substantial degree on Bin Ladin and his network. The

Intelligence Community achieved some successes — in some cases, major successes — in

these operations. In other cases, little came of the Intelligence Community’s efforts.

[Page 7]

By late 2000 and 2001, the Intelligence Community was engaged in an extensive,

shadowy struggle against al-Qa’ida. Despite such efforts, Bin Ladin carried out

successful and devastating attacks against Americans and citizens of other nations,

including the bombing of USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 and the attacks on the

World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

In reviewing the documents, interview reports, and witness testimony gathered

during this Inquiry, the Joint Inquiry has sought to determine what information was

available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001 that was relevant to

the attacks that occurred on that day. The record that has been established through this

Inquiry leads to the following factual findings and conclusions.

Discussion: This Inquiry has uncovered no intelligence information in the

possession of the Intelligence Community prior to the attacks of September 11 that, if

fully considered, would have provided specific, advance warning of the details of those

attacks. The task of the Inquiry was not, however, limited to a search for the legendary,

and often absent, "smoking gun." The facts surrounding the September 11 attacks

demonstrate the importance of strengthening the Intelligence Community’s ability to

detect and prevent terrorist attacks in what appears to be the more common, but also far

more difficult, scenario. Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that was

available prior to September 11, there were various threads and pieces of information

that, at least in retrospect, are both relevant and significant. The degree to which the

Community was or was not able to build on that information to discern the bigger picture

addressed in the findings that follow.

Discussion: The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, reported at least

33 communications indicating a possible, imminent terrorist attack in 2001. Senior U.S.

Government officials were advised by the Intelligence Community on June 28 and July

10, 2001, that the attacks were expected, among other things, to "have dramatic

consequences on governments or cause major casualties" and that "[a]ttack preparations

have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

Some Community personnel described the increase in threat reporting as

unprecedented, at least in their own experience. The Intelligence Community advised

senior policymakers of the likelihood of an attack but, given the non-specific nature of

the reporting, could not identify when, where, and how an attack would take place.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, in his testimony, described his recollection

of the threat and the U.S. Government’s response:

We issued between January and September nine warnings, five of them

global, because of the threat information we were receiving from the

intelligence agencies in the summer, when [DCI] George Tenet was

around town literally pounding on desks saying, something is happening,

this is an unprecedented level of threat information. He didn’t know where

it was going to happen, but he knew that it was coming.

[Page 9]

Discussion: Communications intercepts, the arrests of suspected terrorists in the Middle

East and Europe, and a credible report of a plan to attack a U.S. Embassy in the Middle East

shaped the Community’s thinking about where an attack was likely to occur. While former FBI

Director Louis Freeh testified that the FBI was "intensely focused" on terrorist targets within the

United States, the FBI’s Executive Assistant Director for Counterterrorism testified that in 2001

he thought there was a high probability — "98 percent" — that the attack would be overseas. The

latter was the clear majority view, despite the fact that the Intelligence Community had

information suggesting that Bin Ladin had planned, and was capable of, conducting attacks

within the domestic United States.

This stream of reporting began as early as 1998 and continued during the time of

heightened threat levels in 2001. For example, the Community received reporting in May 2001

that Bin Ladin supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States to conduct terrorist

operations and, in late summer 2001, that an al-Qa’ida associate was considering mounting

terrorist attacks within the United States.

[Of particular interest to the Joint Inquiry was whether and to what extent the President

received threat-specific warnings during this period. The Joint Inquiry was advised by a

representative of the Intelligence Community that, in August 2001, a closely held intelligence

report for senior government officials included information that Bin Ladin had wanted to

conduct attacks in the United States since 1997. The information included discussion of the

arrest of Ahmed Ressam in December 1999 at the U.S.-Canadian border and the 1998 bombings

of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. It mentioned that members of al-Qa’ida, including

some U.S. citizens, had resided in or traveled to the United States for years and that the group

apparently maintained a support structure here. The report cited uncorroborated information

obtained and disseminated in 1998 that Bin Ladin wanted to hijack airplanes to gain the release

of U.S.-held extremists; FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for

hijackings or other types of attacks; as well as information acquired in May 2001 that indicated a

[Page 10]

the information often sketchy, the Inquiry confirmed that the Intelligence Community did

receive intelligence reporting concerning the potential use of aircraft as weapons. For

example, the Community received information in 1998 about a Bin Ladin operation that

would involve flying an explosive- laden aircraft into a U.S. airport and, in summer 2001,

about a plot to bomb a U.S. embassy from an airplane or crash an airplane into it. The

FBI and CIA were also aware that convicted terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad and several

others had discussed the possibility of crashing an airplane into CIA Headquarters as part

of "the Bojinka Plot" in the Philippines, discussed later in this report. Some, but

President’s Daily Brief (PDB) included information about Bin Ladin’s methods of operation from a historical

perspective dating back to 1997. One of the methods was that Bin Ladin might choose to highjack an airliner in order

to hold passengers hostage to gain release of one of their operatives. She stated, however, that the report did not

contain specific warning information, but only a generalized warning, and did not contain information that al-Qa’ida

was discussing a particular planned attack against a specific target at any specific time, place, or by any specific

method.

apparently not all, of these reports were disseminated within the Intelligence Community

and to other agencies].

The Transportation Security Administration, for example, advised the Committees

that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had not received three of these reports,

that two others were received by the FAA but through State Department cables, and that

one report was received by the FAA, but only after September 11, 2001. Many

policymakers and U.S. Government officials apparently remained unaware of this kind of

potential threat and the Intelligence Community did not produce any specific assessments

of the likelihood that terrorists would in fact use airplanes as weapons. For example,

former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified before these Committees that:

I don’t recall being presented with any specific threat information about an

attack of this nature [the use of aircraft as weapons] or any alert

highlighting this threat or indicating it was any more likely than any other.

That testimony is consistent with the views publicly expressed by the current

National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, shortly after the September 11 attacks.

had not been made aware of this type of potential threat:

I don’t recall any warning of the possibility of a mass casualty attack using

civilian airliners or any information that would have led us to contemplate

the possibility of our shooting down a civilian airliner.

Even within the Intelligence Community, the possibility of using aircraft as

weapons was apparently not widely known. At the FBI, for instance, the FBI Phoenix

field office agent who wrote the so-called "Phoenix memo" testified that he was aware of

the plot to crash a plane into CIA Headquarters, but not the other reports of terrorist

groups considering the use of aircraft as weapons. The Chief of the Radical

Fundamentalist Unit in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division also confirmed, in an Joint

Inquiry interview, that he was not aware of such reports.

Discussion: [In early 1999, the National Security Agency (NSA) analyzed

communications involving a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East that had

previously been linked to al-Qa’ida activities directed against U.S. interests. Information

obtained [ ] included, among other things, the full name of future hijacker Nawaf al-

Hazmi. Beyond the fact that the communications involved a suspected terrorist facility in

the Middle East, the communications did not, in NSA’s view at the time, feature any

other terrorist-related information. The information was not published because the

individuals mentioned in the communications were unknown to NSA, and, according to

NSA, the information did not meet NSA’s reporting thresholds. NSA has explained that

these thresholds are flexible, sometimes changing daily, and consist of several factors,

including: the priority of the intelligence requirement; the apparent intelligence value of

the information; the level of customer interest in the topic; the current situation; and the

volume of intercept to be analyzed and reported].

[During the summer of 1999, NSA analyzed additional communications involving

a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East that included the name of Khaled. At

about the same time, the name Khallad also came to NSA’s attention. This information

did not meet NSA’s reporting thresholds and thus was not disseminated].

[In late 1999, NSA analyzed communications involving a suspected terrorist

facility in the Middle East that included the names of Khaled and Nawaf. At this time,

NSA did not associate the latter individual with the Nawaf al-Hazmi it had learned about

in early 1999. Later, the two individuals [ ] were determined to be Khalid al-Mihdhar

and Nawaf al-Hazmi, now known to be two of the September 11 hijackers. [

]. This information was passed to the CIA as well as the FBI in late 1999. In

early 2000, NSA also [ ] passed additional

information about Khalid to the CIA, FBI, FAA, the Departments of State, Treasury,

Transportation, and Justice, and others in the U.S. Government].

[Page 13]

was likely Nawaf’s last name was al-Hazmi, knew that they had attended what was

believed to be a gathering of al-Qa’ida associates in Malaysia, was aware that they had

been traveling together, and had documents indicating that al-Mihdhar held a U.S. B-1B-

2 multiple entry visa that would allow him to travel to and from the United States until

April 6, 2000. CIA arranged surveillance of the meeting and the DCI was kept informed

as the operation progressed].

Despite having all this information, and despite the republication of CTC

guidance regarding watchlisting procedures in December 1999 (see Appendix, "CTC

Watchlisting Guidance — December 1999"), CIA did not add the names of these two

individuals to the State Department, INS, and U.S. Customs Service watchlists that are

used to deny individuals entry into the United States. The weight of the record also

suggests that, despite providing the FBI with other, less critical, information about the

Malaysia meeting, the CIA did not advise the FBI about al-Mihdhar’s U.S. visa and the

very real possibility that he would travel to the United States. The CIA stated its belief

that the visa information was sent to the FBI and produced a cable indicating that this had

The FBI, for its part, had no record the visa information was received. Although

the facts of the Malaysia meeting were included in several briefings for senior FBI

officials, including FBI Director Louis Freeh, no record could be found that the visa

information was part of these briefings.

[Page 14]

[On March 5, 2000, CIA Headquarters received a cable from an overseas CIA

station indicating that Nawaf al-Hazmi had traveled to Los Angeles, California on

January 15, 2000. The following day, March 6, CIA Headquarters received a message

from another CIA station noting its "interest" in the first cable’s "information that a

member of this group had traveled to the U.S." The CIA did not act on either message,

again did not watchlist al-Hazmi or al-Mihdhar, and, again, did not advise the FBI of

their possible presence in the United States. In 2000, these same two individuals had

numerous contacts with an active FBI counterterrorism informant while they were living

in San Diego, California].

On January 4, 2001, CIA acquired information that Khallad, a principal planner in

the bombing of USS Cole, had, along with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, attended the

January 2000 meeting in Malaysia. Again, the CIA did not watchlist these two

individuals. At the time, al-Mihdhar was abroad, but al-Hazmi was still in the United

States. FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to the Joint Inquiry that: "al-Mihdhar’s role

in the September 11 plot . . . before his re-entry into the United States may well have

been that of the coordinator and organizer of . . . the non-pilot hijackers."

In May 2001, the CIA provided FBI Headquarters with photographs taken in

Malaysia, including one of al-Mihdhar, for purposes of identifying another Cole bombing

FBI.

suspect. Although the CIA told FBI Headquarters about the Malaysia meeting and about

al-Mihdhar’s travel in Southeast Asia at that time, the CIA did not advise the FBI about

al-Mihdhar’s or al-Hazmi’s possible travel to the United States. Again, the CIA did not

watchlist the two individuals. While CIA personnel were working closely with the FBI

in support of the USS Cole bombing investigation, the importance and urgency of

information tying suspected terrorists to the domestic United States apparently never

registered with them. CIA Director Tenet testified that CIA personnel:

. . . in their focus on the [USS Cole] investigation, did not recognize the

implications of the information about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar that

On June 11, 2001, FBI Headquarters and CIA personnel met with the New York

FBI field office agents who were handling the USS Cole investigation. The New York

agents were shown the Malaysia photographs, but were not given copies. Although al-

Mihdhar’s name was mentioned, the New York agents’ requests for more information

about al-Mihdhar and the circumstances surrounding the photographs were refused,

according to one of the field office agents. The FBI Headquarters analyst recalls that she

said at the meeting that she would try to get the information the agents had requested.

In Joint Inquiry hearing testimony, one of the New York FBI agents who was

present described his recollection of the meeting:

When these photos were shown to us, we had information at the time that

one of the suspects had actually traveled to the same region of the world

that this might have taken place, so we pressed the individuals there for

more information regarding the meeting. So we pressed them for

information. [A]t the end of the meeting — some of them say it was

because I was able to get the name out of the analyst, but at the end of that

day we knew the name Khalid al-Mihdhar but nothing else. The context

of the meeting was that we continued to press them two or three times on

information regarding, "Why were you looking at this guy? You couldn’t

have been following everybody around the Millennium. What was the

reason behind this?

And we were told that that information — as I recall, we were told that that

information could not be passed and that they would try to do it in the

days and weeks to come. That meeting — I wouldn’t say it was very

contentious, but we were not very happy, the New York agents at the time

were not very happy that certain information couldn’t be shared with us.

Again, in that meeting, the CIA had missed yet another opportunity to advise the

FBI about al-Mihdhar’s visa and possible travel to the United States and, again, the CIA

took no action to watchlist these individuals. Just two days later, al-Mihdhar obtained a

new U.S. visa and, on July 4, 2001, he re-entered the United States.

It was not until mid July 2001, that a concerned CIA officer assigned to the FBI

ironically, fell to an FBI analyst assigned to the CTC. Working with the Immigration and

Naturalization Service (INS), the FBI analyst determined that both al-Mihdhar and al-

Hazmi had entered the United States. As a result of that effort, on August 23, 2001, the

CIA finally notified the FBI and requested of the State Department that the two individuals

should be watchlisted.

Even then, there was less than an all-out effort to locate what amounted to two

Bin Ladin-associated terrorists in the United States during a period when the terrorist

threat level had escalated to a peak level. For example, neither CIA, FBI, nor State

Department informed the FAA. On August 21, 2001, coincidentally, FAA had issued a

Security Directive, entitled "Threat to U.S. Aircraft Operators." That Directive alerted

commercial airlines that nine named terrorism-associated individuals — none of whom

were connected to the 19 hijackers -- were planning commercial air travel and should

receive additional security scrutiny if they attempted to board an aircraft. The Directive

was updated on August 24 and August 28, 2001. Had FAA been advised of the presence

of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in the United States, a similar directive could have been

issued, subjecting the two, their luggage and any carry-on items to detailed, FAAdirected

searches.

Further, only the FBI’s New York field office received a request from FBI

Headquarters to conduct a search for the two prior to September 11, 2001. The

Headquarters written instruction to the New York field office only identified al-Mihdhar

in its subject line. Nawaf al-Hazmi was mentioned in the text, and it is not clear whether

it was intended that he be a subject of the search as well. It was not until September 11,

2001 that the Los Angeles FBI field office was asked to conduct a search. Other FBI

offices with potentially useful informants, such as San Diego, were not notified prior to

September 11.

A New York FBI field office agent testified that he urged FBI Headquarters on

August 28, 2001 to allow New York field office criminal agents to participate in the

search with FBI intelligence agents, given the limited resources that are often applied to

because of concerns about the perceived "wall" between criminal and intelligence

matters. Looking back, the New York FBI agent testified about his hope that the

Intelligence Community would overcome this kind of restriction in the future:

…after everything happened and we had ramped up where thousands of

FBI agents all over the world were trying to find somebody, I thought to

myself — and I don’t necessarily know how to do it, but we’ve got to be

able to get there — when we find out a Khalid al-Mihdhar is in the country,

intelligence, criminal, or whatever, we’ve got to be able to get to the level

we were at September 12, the afternoon of September 11. We’ve got to be

able to get there before September 11, not September 12.

Joint Inquiry witnesses testified that other federal agencies with potentially valuable

information databases were never asked to assist in FBI’s search.

Discussion: [While the Intelligence Community had information regarding these

communications, it did not determine the location from which they had been made [ ]

[ ]. After September 11, the

FBI determined from domestic toll records that it was in fact the hijacker Khalid al-

Mihdhar who had made these communications and that he had done so from within the

United States. The Intelligence Community did not identify what was critically

fact that the communications were between individuals within the United States and

suspected terrorist facilities overseas. That kind of information could have provided

crucial investigative leads to law enforcement agencies engaged in domestic

counterterrorist efforts].

Discussion: [Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar had numerous contacts with

a long-time FBI counterterrorism informant while they were living in San Diego,

California. There are several indications that hijacker Hani Hanjour may have had more

limited contact with the same informant in December 2000.]

[During the summer of 2000, the informant advised the FBI handling agent that

the informant had contacts with two individuals named "Nawaf" and "Khalid". The

informant described meeting these individuals. The informant described the two to the

FBI agent as Saudi Muslim youths who were legally in the United States to visit and

attend school. The FBI agent did not, at the time, consider these individuals to be of

individuals’ last names, the informant never provided that information and the FBI agent

did not press for the names because he had no reason to think they were significant until

after September 11, 2001.]

[ ]

[During one of their last contacts, al-Hazmi advised the informant that he was moving to

Arizona to attend flight training, but the informant did not advise the FBI of this

information until after the September 11 attacks].

[When the FBI’s San Diego field office determined after the attacks that a longtime

FBI counterterrorism informant had had numerous contacts in 2000 with two of the

September 11 hijackers, personnel there were immediately suspicious about whether the

informant was involved in the plot. Subsequently, however, all of the field office

personnel, including senior managers and various case agents, concluded that the

informant was unwitting of, and had no role in, the September 11 plot].

[Several questions remain, however, with regard to the informant’s credibility.

First, while there are several indications suggesting that future hijacker Hani Hanjour had

contact with the informant in December 2000, the informant has repeatedly advised the

FBI that the informant does not recognize photos of Hanjour. Second, the informant told

the FBI that the hijackers did nothing to arouse the informant’s suspicion, but the

informant also acknowledged that al-Hazmi had contacts with at least four individuals

the informant knew were of interest to the FBI and about whom the informant had

previously reported to the FBI. Third, the informant has made numerous inconsistent

statements to the FBI during the course of interviews after September 11, 2001. Fourth,

the informant’s responses during an FBI polygraph examination to very specific

questions about the informant’s advance knowledge of the September 11 plot were

judged by the FBI to be "inconclusive," although the FBI asserts that this type of result is

not unusual for such individuals in such circumstances].

[Page 20]

[Finally, there is also information which conflicts with the information provided

by the informant concerning the dates of contacts with the hijackers. The Joint Inquiry,

for example, brought to the FBI’s attention information that is inconsistent with the date

of initial contact as provided by the informant. In its November 18, 2002 written

response to the Joint Inquiry, the FBI has acknowledged that there are "significant

inconsistencies" in the informant’s statements about these contacts. The FBI investigation

regarding this issue is continuing].

[The Administration has to date objected to the Inquiry’s efforts to interview the

informant in order to attempt to resolve those inconsistencies. The Administration also

would not agree to allow the FBI to serve a Committee subpoena and deposition notice

on the informant. Instead, written interrogatories from the Joint Inquiry were, at the

suggestion of the FBI, provided to the informant. Through an attorney, the informant has

declined to respond to those interrogatories and has indicated that, if subpoenaed, the

informant would request a grant of immunity prior to testifying].

[The FBI agent who was responsible for the informant testified before the Joint

Inquiry that, had he had access to the intelligence information on al-Mihdhar’s and al-

Hazmi’s significance at the time they were in San Diego:

It would have made a huge difference. We would have immediately

opened [ ] investigations. We had the predicate for a

[ ] investigation if we had that information.…[W]e would

immediately go out and canvas the sources and try to find out where these

people were. If we locate them, which we probably would have since they

were very close — they were nearby — we would have initiated

investigations immediately.…We would have done everything. We would

have used all available investigative techniques. We would have given

physical surveillance, technical surveillance and other assets.

[Whether, as the agent testified he believes, that kind of investigative work would

have occurred and would have then uncovered the hijackers’ future plans will necessarily

remain speculation. What is clear, however, is that the informant’s contacts with the

hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office

perhaps the Intelligence Community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.

Given the CIA’s failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, intelligence information on

the significance and location of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance, unfortunately,

never materialized].

• accumulate a list of civil aviation universities/colleges around the country;

• establish liaison with these schools;

•discuss the theories contained in the Phoenix EC with the Intelligence

• consider seeking authority to obtain visa information concerning individuals

Discussion: Before the Joint Inquiry, the Phoenix agent who authored the

Phoenix communication testified that:

What I wanted was an analytical product. I wanted this discussed with the

Intelligence Community. I wanted to see if my hunches were correct.

He noted, however, that he also knew that this type of analytical product took a back seat

to operational matters at the FBI:

But, I am also a realist. I understand that the people at FBI Headquarters

are terribly overworked and understaffed, and they have been for years.

And at the time that I am a sending this in, having worked this stuff for 13

years, and watched the unit in action over the years, I knew that this was

going to be at the bottom of the pile, so to speak, because they were

dealing with real-time threats, real-timer issues trying to render fugitives

back to the United States from overseas for justice. And again, it is a

resource issue.

The Phoenix agent was correct, and his communication did fall to the bottom of the pile.

He sent the communication to four individuals in the Radical Fundamentalist

Unit, two individuals in the Usama Bin Ladin Unit, and two agents on International

terrorism squads in the New York field office. Only three of the eight addressees recall

reading the communication prior to September 11, 2001. Neither of the two Intelligence

Operations Specialists who reviewed it at FBI Headquarters undertook a comprehensive

national analysis of the theories it set forth. Nor did they send the communication to the

FBI’s analytic unit or the Intelligence Community, as requested by the Phoenix agent.

Instead, it was forwarded to the Portland FBI field office, not primarily because of

concerns about flight school theories, but rather because that field office had a possible

investigative interest in one of the individuals who were named in the communication.

Similarly, the New York field office personnel who reviewed the communication

said they found it to be speculative and not particularly significant. That office had been

one of the recipients of a 1999 FBI Headquarters request to track Islamic flight students

in its area of jurisdiction.

[Page 23]

The Chief of the Radical Fundamentalist Unit testified that he did not see the

communication prior to September 11, 2001. In his testimony before the Joint Inquiry,

FBI Director Mueller acknowledged that: "the Phoenix [communication] should have

been disseminated to all field offices and to our sister agencies, and it should have

triggered a broader analytical approach."

who was identified in the Phoenix communication, was an associate of hijacker Hani

Joint Inquiry. While the FBI has provided the Joint Inquiry with these names and those names are

contained in the classified version of this final report, the Joint Inquiry has decided to delete them from this

unclassified version due to the as yet unresolved nature of much of the information regarding their

activities.

Hanjour. [This individual] left the United States in April 2000 and returned in June 2001,

remaining in the United States for approximately one month. The FBI now speculates

that [the individual] may have returned to the United States either to evaluate Hanjour's

flying skills, or to provide Hanjour with his final training on the flight simulator before

the September 11 attacks. [The individual] was an experienced flight instructor who was

certified to fly Boeing 737s.

The FBI also has determined since September 11, 2001 that another individual

mentioned in the Phoenix communication — [ ] -- is also connected

to the al-Qa'ida network. [ ] was arrested at an al-Qa'ida safehouse in

Pakistan in 2002 along with [ ], one of the most prominent al-Qa'ida

facilitators.

Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, traveling on a French passport that allowed him to stay in the

country without a visa for 90 days, until May 22, 2001. On August 11, 2001, Moussaoui

and his roommate arrived in Eagan, Minnesota to begin classes at Pan Am, a flight school

that offered training on a Boeing 747 flight simulator used by professional pilots.

According to FBI documents, on August 15, an employee at Pan Am called the FBI’s

Minneapolis field office because he and other employees were suspicious of Moussaoui,

who met none of the usual qualifications for Pan Am students. The FBI’s Minneapolis

field office opened an international terrorism investigation and determined that, since

Moussaoui had been authorized to stay in the United States only until May 22, 2001, he

was no longer in proper legal status.

On the same day the Minneapolis field office learned about Moussaoui, it asked

both the CIA and the FBI’s legal attaché in Paris for any information about Moussaoui

and informed FBI Headquarters of the investigation. The FBI Headquarters agent who

was responsible for the contact suggested that the Minneapolis field office put Moussaoui

under surveillance. However, a Minneapolis field office supervisory agent testified to the

Joint Inquiry that:

. . . .[m]y background in the criminal arena suggests that when a violation

occurs and you can stop further or potential criminal activity, you act on

that. So that is exactly what I instructed the agents to do. . . . Because I

didn’t want him to get any additional time on a flight simulator that would

allow him to have the knowledge that we could no longer take back from

him to operate an aircraft.

INS agents took Moussaoui into custody on August 16 because his authority to

stay in the United States had expired. Moussaoui declined to consent to a search of his

belongings. On Saturday, August 18, the Minneapolis field office sent a detailed

memorandum to an agent in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI Headquarters

describing the investigation.

[Page 25]

The memorandum stated that Moussaoui had two knives, padded gloves and shin

guards in his possession when he was arrested; had told his roommate that "true Muslims

must prepare themselves to fight;" and had begun exercise and martial arts training. In

addition, the memorandum stated that the Minneapolis field office believed that

Moussaoui and his roommate were part of a larger international radical fundamentalist

group. Based on Moussaoui’s "possession of weapons and his preparation through

physical training for violent confrontation," the Minneapolis filed office stated it had

reason to believe that Moussaoui, his roommate, "and others yet unknown," were

conspiring to seize control of an airplane.

The Minneapolis field office agent testified to the Inquiry that Minneapolis agents

decided not to try to obtain a criminal search warrant to search Moussaoui’s belongings

as that might prejudice any subsequent efforts to get a court order for a physical search

under FISA. The FBI field office agent contacted the CTC, which then advised CIA

stations abroad about Moussaoui and asked them in an August 25 cable to provide any

relevant information they might have. Based on information provided by the FBI’s

Minneapolis field office, that cable described Moussaoui and his roommate as "suspect

747 airline attackers" and a "suspect airline suicide attacker," who might be "involved in

a larger plot to target airlines traveling from Europe to the U.S….."

On August 21, 2001, the Minneapolis field office agent sent an e-mail to the RFU

supervisory agent at FBI Headquarters stating: "[It is] imperative that the [U.S. Secret

Service] be apprised of this threat potential indicated by the evidence.…If [Moussaoui]

seizes an aircraft flying from Heathrow to NYC, it will have the fuel on board to reach

DC." In an interview, the FBI Headquarters agent to whom the message was addressed

said that he told the Minneapolis field office agent that he was working on a notification

to the entire Intelligence Community and the Secret Service about the threat presented by

Moussaoui. The RFU supervisory agent did send a teletype message to the Intelligence

Community and other U.S. Government agencies, including the FAA, on September 4,

2001. That message reported the FBI’s interviews of Moussaoui and his roommate, as

well as other information the FBI had obtained. The teletype, however, merely described

context of the

increased level of terrorist threats during the summer of 2001. Nor did it provide its

recipients with any analysis of Moussaoui’s actions or plans, or information about what

type of threat he may have presented.

[On August 22, the FBI legal attache’s office in Paris provided a report to the

RFU and the Minneapolis field office that contained information [

]. The FBI’s receipt of this information began a series of discussions

between the Minneapolis field office and FBI Headquarters focusing on whether the

Chechen rebels were a "recognized" foreign power for purposes of obtaining approval to

search Moussaoui’s belongings under FISA. The Minneapolis field office agent testified

to the Joint Inquiry that he had had no training in FISA, but that he believed, based on

advice from FBI Headquarters, that "we needed to identify a — and the term that was

thrown around was ‘recognized foreign power’ and so that was our operational theory."

As the FBI’s Deputy General Counsel has testified, however, this was incorrect. The FBI

may obtain a search warrant under FISA for an agent of any international terrorist group,

including the Chechen rebels. Because of this misunderstanding, the Minneapolis field

office expended valuable time and effort trying to establish a connection between the

Chechen rebels and al-Qa’ida, which it believed was a "recognized" foreign power].

The FBI Headquarters supervisory agent briefed the FBI’s Deputy General

Counsel, who testified that he agreed with the Headquarters agent that there was

insufficient information to show that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power. The

FBI’s focus shifted to arranging for Moussaoui’s deportation to France on September 17,

2001, at which point French officials would search his belongings and provide the results

to the FBI. Although the FBI was no longer considering a search warrant under FISA, no

one revisited the idea of attempting to obtain a criminal search warrant.

[Page 27]

Thus, during the summer of 2001 -- a time when the Intelligence Community was on the

highest state of alert, disparate parts of the FBI had information about Zacarias Moussaoui — a

suspected suicide hijacker, a Phoenix field office agent’s suspicions about radical

fundamentalists engaging in flight training, and the entry into the United States of Nawaf al-

Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who would become two of the September 11 hijackers. The FBI

field office agents in Minneapolis who were investigating Moussaoui knew nothing about the

Phoenix communication or al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The Phoenix field office agent had never

heard about Moussaoui or the two future hijackers. The FBI agents in New York who were

informed on August 23, 2001 that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had entered the United States knew

nothing about the other events of that summer. And, finally, the Chief of the RFU at FBI

Headquarters, which had handled both the Moussaoui investigation and the Phoenix

communication, acknowledged in testimony to the Joint Inquiry on September 24, 2001, that no

one at FBI Headquarters connected those events.

[The indictment against Moussaoui, which was filed on December 11, 2001, alleges that

Moussaoui possessed a number of items on August 16, 2001. On that day, which is when FBI

and INS agents first interviewed him, the INS took Moussaoui’s possessions for safekeeping.

Absent search authority, however, the possessions were not examined at that time. As it turned

out, according to the indictment, Moussaoui’s possessions included letters indicating that

Moussaoui was a marketing consultant in the United States for Infocus Tech. The letters had

been signed by Yazid Sufaat, whom the Intelligence Community was aware was the owner of the

Malaysian condominium in which the January 2000 al-Qa’ida meeting attended by hijackers al-

Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had been held. The indictment also alleges that Moussaoui possessed a

notebook listing two German telephone numbers and the name "Ahad Sabet," which, the

indictment states, was used by Ramzi Bin al-Shibh to send funds to Moussaoui. Bin al-Shibh,

who was apprehended in Pakistan in September 2002, is named in the indictment as a supporting

conspirator].

existence of an al-Qa’ida support network in the United States prior to the attacks, and

this was consistent with al-Qai’da’s modus operandi in previous attacks. The FBI had, to

some degree, focused sources and investigative work on radical Islamic extremists within

the United States prior to September 11. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger

testified that, during his time in office, the FBI view had been that "al-Qa’ida had limited

capacity to operate in the United States and any presence here was under surveillance."

[Ironically, this Inquiry has confirmed that at least some of the hijackers operated,

without detection, within the scope of the FBI’s coverage of radical Islamic extremists.

Hani Hanjour, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Nawaf al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-

Mihdhar may have had contact with a total of 14 people who had come to the FBI’s

attention during counterterrorism or counterintelligence investigations prior to September

11, 2001. Four of those 14 were the focus of active FBI investigations during the time

that the hijackers were in the United States. In fact, as noted earlier, two future hijackers

had numerous contacts with an active FBI counterterrorism informant while in the United

States. Despite their proximity to FBI targets and at least one FBI source, the future

hijackers successfully eluded FBI attention].

Several examples illustrate not only the reliance of the hijackers on the potential

support networks, but also the ease with which they operated despite the FBI’s pre-

September 11 domestic coverage. Shortly after their arrival in the United States, future

hijackers Khalid Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi moved to San Diego at the suggestion

of Omar al-Bayoumi, who had previously been the focus of an FBI counterterrorism

[ ] inquiry. In San Diego, they stayed at al-Bayoumi’s apartment for several

days until he was able to find them an apartment. He then co-signed their lease, paid

to the San Diego community, and tasked another individual to help them become

acclimated to the United States. [

]. The

second individual served as their translator, helped them obtain bank accounts and

drivers’ licenses, and assisted them in locating flight schools.

[Other individuals in San Diego also provided the two hijackers with similar types

of assistance. A manager of a local gas station, who was at the time being investigated

by the FBI, hired al-Hazmi to work for him briefly, after receiving a call from a mutual

friend at the mosque. In addition, a local imam, who was the subject of an FBI

counterterrorism inquiry for part of the time that the future hijackers were in San Diego,

served as their spiritual advisor when they were living in San Diego. Finally, al-Hazmi

and al-Mihdhar also maintained a number of other contacts in the local Islamic

community during their time in San Diego, some of whom were also known to the FBI

through counterterrorist inquiries and investigations].

Future hijacker Hani Hanjour also may have received flight-related assistance

from [an individual], who, was also known to the FBI and was, in fact, included among

the individuals discussed in the Phoenix communication. As noted earlier, [this

individual] left the United States in April 2000, and returned in June 2001, remaining in

the United States for approximately one month. [The individual] was an associate of

Hanjour’s and the FBI now speculates that [the individual] may have returned to the

United States either to evaluate Hanjour’s flying skills, or to provide Hanjour his final

training on the Cessna simulator before the attacks. This individual was an experienced

flight instructor and was certified to fly Boeing 737s.

When some of the future hijackers relocated to the East Coast, it appears that they

received assistance similar to that provided to them on the West Coast. Al-Hazmi and al-

Mihdhar’s spiritual advisor relocated to the East Coast, and, when Hanjour and al-Hazmi

arrived at his mosque, one of the mosque’s members helped them find an apartment in

the area. After approximately a month, this same individual drove Hanjour and al-

New Jersey. From the hotel in Connecticut where they stayed for two nights, a total of

75 calls were made in attempts to locate apartments, flight schools, and car rental

agencies for the future hijackers. The hijackers were also in contact with a number of

other people during their time on the East Coast.

[The fact that these future hijackers could rely on this type of support within the

United States is consistent with other information that was available to the Intelligence

Community prior to September 11, 2001. That information also points to the existence of

an al-Qa’ida support network within the United States. An August 2001 Intelligence

Community publication for senior U.S. government policy officials (called a "SEIB"), for

example, indicated that al-Qa’ida members, including some U.S. citizens, have resided in

or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure in

the United States. The FBI Phoenix field office agent who authored the Phoenix

communication also testified that, based on his experience, he had developed an

"investigative theory" that indicated that this kind of support network had been in place

in Arizona for some time].

[Finally, an early summer 2001 Intelligence Community report stated that Khalid

Shaykh Mohammed — the senior al-Qa’ida official who has been identified as the

mastermind of the September 11 attacks -- was recruiting individuals to travel to the

United States and engage in planning terrorist-related activity there. According to the

[ ] report, these individuals would be "expected to establish contact with

colleagues already living there." This information was disseminated [ ]

to all Intelligence Community agencies and the [ ], military commanders, and

components within the Departments of Treasury and Justice].

[A September 12, 2001 FBI interview [

] also suggests the existence of an al-Qa’ida support

network within the United States. In that interview, an individual with al-Qa’ida

multiple cells operating independently in the United States that could execute ten

operations simultaneously or in sequence that would produce a big impact on the United

States." When queried by the FBI, the individual indicated that the senior operative had

the necessary people positioned in the United States to carry out such a plan, noting that

the senior operative has many contacts in the United States].

Discussion: [CIA and FBI counterterrorism operations and investigations prior to

September 11, 2001 repeatedly produced intelligence relating to two individuals in

Hamburg, Germany — Mamoun Darkazanli, a suspected logistician in Bin Ladin’s

network, and Mohammed Zammar, a suspected recruiter for al- Qa’ida. The CIA had

been seeking more information about Darkazanli. [

].

After September 11, 2001, it was determined that these same two individuals had

been associates in Hamburg of hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad

Jarrah, as well as other individuals, such as Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who are now believed to

have been involved in the September 11 plot. In fact, the FBI now believes that Zammar

recruited Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah into Al Qaeda, and encouraged their participation in

the September 11 attacks.

[Page 32]

several sources after September 11, 2001, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM) -- also known

as "Mukhtar" (Arabic for "The Brain") -- masterminded the September 11 attacks. The

information indicates that KSM presented a plan to Usama Bin Ladin to mount an attack

using small rental aircraft filled with explosives. Usama Bin Ladin reportedly suggested

using even larger planes. Thus, the idea of hijacking commercial airliners took hold.

Thereafter, KSM reportedly instructed and trained the hijackers for their mission, including

directing them to undergo pilot training].

KSM came to the attention of the Intelligence Community as a terrorist in early 1995

when he was linked to Ramzi Yousef’s "Bojinka Plot" in the Philippines. One portion of that

plot involved the idea of crashing an airplane into CIA Headquarters. Through additional

intelligence and investigative efforts in 1995, KSM was also connected to the first World

Trade Center bombing. He was indicted by a U.S. grand jury in January 1996. The

indictment was kept under seal until 1998 while the FBI and CIA attempted to locate him and

arrange to take him into custody. Subsequently, indications were received that he might have

been involved in the East Africa U.S. Embassy bombings.

[In June 2001, [ ] disseminated a report to all Intelligence Community

agencies, [ ], military commanders, and components in the Treasury and Justice

to the United States. The report explained that KSM appears to be one of Bin Ladin’s most

trusted lieutenants and was active in recruiting people to travel outside Afghanistan,

including to the United States, on behalf of Bin Ladin. According to the report, he traveled

frequently to the United States, including as recently as May 2001, and routinely told others

that he could arrange their entry into the United States as well. Reportedly, these individuals

were expected to establish contact with colleagues already there. The clear implication of his

comments, according to the report, was that they would be engaged in planning terroristrelated

activities].

Although this particular report was sent from the CIA to the FBI, neither agency

apparently recognized the significance of a Bin Ladin lieutenant sending terrorists to the

United States and asking them to establish contacts with colleagues already there. CTC

questioned this report at the time and commented: "We doubt the real [KSM] would do

this…because if it is [KSM], we have both a significant threat and an opportunity to pick him

up." Neither the CIA nor the FBI has been able to confirm whether KSM had in fact been

traveling to the United States or sending recruits here prior to September 11.

communications involving [ ].

The communications discussed events that were to occur in the near term and appeared to be

related to terrorism. In the first communication, [ ]

[ ] asked whether [ ]. [ ] responded that [ ]

[ ].

[Page 34]

[Another communication, between [ ] and an unknown person [ ], was a

discussion of whether [ ].

[

]. NSA did not disseminate reports regarding the communications until

September 12 and 13, 2001].

Two additional communications that indicated imminent terrorist activity were

intercepted by NSA on September 10, 2001. The communications contained conversations

between unknown individuals located abroad. NSA Director Hayden described the content of

those communications in his testimony before the Joint Inquiry:

In the hours just prior to the attacks, NSA did obtain two pieces of information

suggesting that individuals with terrorist connections believed something significant

would happen on September 11.

These communications were, however, not translated into English and disseminated by NSA

until September 12, 2001.

It remains uncertain whether any of the September [ ] conversations

referred directly to the attacks of September 11. Like the intelligence reporting described

earlier, these intercepts did not provide any indication of where or what terrorist activities

might occur.

both the individual and collective significance of available information that appears relevant

to the events of September 11. As a result, the Community missed opportunities to disrupt

the September 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to

unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States;

against attack.

No one will ever know what might have happened had more connections been drawn

between these disparate pieces of information. We will never definitively know to what

extent the Community would have been able and willing to exploit fully all the opportunities

that may have emerged. The important point is that the Intelligence Community, for a variety

of reasons, did not bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could have

greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing Usama Bin Ladin’s plan to attack

the United States on September 11, 2001.

Our review of the events surrounding September 11 has revealed a number of

systemic weaknesses that hindered the Intelligence Community’s counterterrorism efforts

before September 11. If not addressed, these weaknesses will continue to undercut U.S.

counterterrorist efforts. In order to minimize the possibility of attacks like September 11

in the future, effective solutions to those problems need to be developed and fully

implemented as soon as possible.

Discussion: The United States has a long history of defining internal threats as

either foreign or domestic and assigning responsibility to the intelligence and law

enforcement agencies accordingly. This division reflects a fundamental policy choice

and is codified in law. For example, the National Security Act of 1947 precludes CIA

from exercising any internal security or law enforcement powers. The Congressional

investigations of the 1970’s into the activities of the intelligence agencies, including their

efforts to collect information regarding anti-Vietnam War activists and other "radicals,"

reinforced the importance of this division in the minds of the Congress, the American

public, and the agencies.

The emergence, in the 1990s, of a threat posed by international terrorists who

operate across national borders demanded huge changes in focus and approach from

intelligence agencies traditionally organized and trained to operate primarily in either the

United States or abroad. The legal authorities, operational policies and cultures that had

molded agencies like CIA, NSA and the FBI for years had not responded to the

"globalization" of terrorism that culminated in the September 11 attacks in the United

States. While some efforts, such as the creation of the CTC at CIA in 1986, were made

to increase collaboration between these agencies, the agencies focused primarily on what

remained essentially separate spheres of operations. In the absence of any collective

national strategy, they retained significant autonomy in deciding how to attack and array

their resources against Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida. Efforts to develop such a

strategy might have exposed the significant counterterrorism gaps that existed between

the agencies as well as the increasingly urgent need to compensate for those gaps in the

absence of more fundamental changes in organization and legal authority.

Prior to September 11, CIA and NSA continued to focus the bulk of their efforts

on the foreign operations of terrorists. While intelligence reporting indicated that al-

Qa’ida intended to strike in the United States, these agencies believed that defending

against this threat was primarily the responsibility of the FBI. This Joint Inquiry found

that both agencies routinely passed a large volume of intelligence to the FBI, but that

neither agency followed up to determine what the FBI learned from or did with that

developments within its areas of responsibility.

As noted earlier, the record confirms instances where, despite numerous

opportunities, information that was directly relevant to the domestic threat was simply

overlooked and not disseminated in a timely manner to the FBI. For example, the CIA

analyst who neglected to raise the information concerning al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi’s

U.S. travel in a June 2001 meeting with the FBI in New York said in a Joint Inquiry

interview that the information he had learned concerning the pair’s travel to Los Angeles

"did not mean anything to him." He also explained to the Joint Inquiry that the

information was operational in nature and he would have needed permission before

disclosing it.

The CIA’s inconsistent performance regarding the watchlisting of suspected

terrorists prior to September 11 also suggests a lack of attention to the domestic threat.

Watchlists are a vital link in denying entry to the United States by terrorists and others

who threaten the national security, and CTC had reminded personnel of the importance of

watchlisting in December 1999 (see Appendix, "CTC Watchlisting Guidance —

December 1999"). Yet, some CIA officers in CTC indicated they did not put much

emphasis on watchlists. The Joint Inquiry confirmed that there was no formal process in

place at the CTC prior to September 11 for watchlisting suspected terrorists, even where,

as was the case with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, there were indications of travel to the

United States.

Other CIA personnel reported that they received no training on watchlisting and

that names were added on an ad hoc basis. In the days and weeks following the

September 11 attacks, more focused CIA review of over 1,500 Classified Intelligence

Reports that had not previously been provided to the State Department for watchlist

purposes resulted in the identification of 150 suspected terrorists and the addition of 58

suspected terrorist names to the watchlist. DCI Tenet acknowledged in his testimony

before the Joint Inquiry that CIA’s watchlisting training had been deficient and that a

Hazmi promptly.

[There were also gaps between NSA’s coverage of foreign communications and

the FBI’s coverage of domestic communications that suggest a lack of sufficient attention

to the domestic threat. Prior to September 11, neither agency focused on the importance

of identifying and then ensuring coverage of communications between the United States

and suspected terrorist-associated facilities abroad [

]. Consistent with its focus on communications abroad, NSA adopted a policy that

avoided intercepting the communications between individuals in the United States and

foreign countries].

NSA adopted this policy even though the collection of such communications is

within its mission and it would have been possible for NSA to obtain FISA Court

authorization for such collection. NSA Director Hayden testified to the Joint Inquiry that

NSA did not want to be perceived as targeting individuals in the United States and

believed that the FBI was instead responsible for conducting such surveillance. NSA did

not, however, develop a plan with the FBI to collect and to ensure the dissemination of

any relevant foreign intelligence to appropriate domestic agencies. This further

evidences the slow response of the Intelligence Community to the developing

transnational threat.

[The Joint Inquiry has learned that one of the future hijackers communicated with

a known terrorist facility in the Middle East while he was living in the United States.

The Intelligence Community did not identify the domestic origin of those

communications prior to September 11, 2001 so that additional FBI investigative efforts

could be coordinated. Despite this country’s substantial advantages, there was

insufficient focus on what many would have thought was among the most critically

important kinds of terrorist-related communications, at least in terms of protecting the

Homeland].

[Page 39]

While most of the Intelligence Community focused on the collection of foreign

intelligence, the Joint Inquiry was told repeatedly that the nation lacked an effective

domestic intelligence capability prior to September 11. Former National Coordinator for

Counterterrorism Richard Clarke saw this as a longstanding problem that became

painfully obvious in the aftermath of September 11:

Well, I hear all of these comments about the Phoenix memo, the

Minnesota case, whatever. I think they miss the point that the failures

were years earlier. It was a failure on the part of the United States to not

have a domestic intelligence collection capability. I understand the

reasons for the lack of the ability. I know the abuses the FBI engaged in

[during] the 1950s and 1960s. I know the reason we have the Attorney

General-levied guidelines. But I think the pendulum swung too far, and

when we became aware of the fact that there were forces in the world such

as al-Qa’ida, and others, Iran, Hezbollah, that meant us ill, certainly by the

1980s or 1990s we should have recognized the need for a domestic

intelligence collection capability. Other democracies with civil rights and

civil liberties have that. It doesn’t mean you become a totalitarian state if

you do a good job of oversight and control. We needed to have a domestic

intelligence collection and analysis capability, and we did not have it, and

only now are we beginning to get it.

. . . .

But my point about the FBI was not just a few hints were missed or dots

weren’t connected; it is — my point was, they didn’t have the mission. It

was not their job to be a domestic collection service. Their job was to do

law enforcement. And they didn’t have the rules that permitted them to do

domestic intelligence collection.

While the FBI’s counterterrorist program had produced successful investigations

and major prosecutions of both domestic and international terrorists, numerous witnesses

told the Joint Inquiry that the program was, at least prior to September 11, incapable of

producing significant intelligence products. The FBI’s traditional reliance on an

aggressive, case-oriented, law enforcement approach did not encourage the broader

collection and analysis efforts that are critical to the intelligence mission. Lacking

appropriate personnel, training, and information systems, the FBI primarily gathered

intelligence to support specific investigations, not to conduct all-source analysis for

dissemination to other intelligence agencies. Former National Security Advisor Sandy

Berger testified about the FBI’s failure, prior to September 11, to assess the extent of the

Until the very end of our term in office, the view we received from the

Bureau was that al-Qa’ida had limited capacity to operate in the United

States and that any presence here was under surveillance. That was not

implausible at the time. With the exception of the World Trade Center

bombings in 1993, not attributed before 9/11 to Bin Ladin, plots by

foreign terrorists within the United States have been detected and stopped.

But revelations since September 11 have made it clear that the Bureau

underestimated the domestic threat. The stream of threat information we

received continuously from the FBI and CIA pointed overwhelmingly to

attacks on U.S. interests abroad. Certainly, the potential for attacks in the

United States was there.

Former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft told the Joint Inquiry hearing

on September 19, 2002, that:

. . . .I was thinking back [on] intelligence information from the FBI, and I

was trying to think of cases where we actually got it. Not very much,

because we are or I was focused on foreign intelligence primarily. There

was some counterintelligence issues where the FBI intelligence was

particularly involved, and the one case I mentioned. Pan Am 103, but that

was investigative intelligence and the FBI and the CIA did an absolutely

brilliant job on that. But I can't think of many--can't recall of any instances

of pure intelligence product from the FBI. And I don't say that pejoratively

at all.

Former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism Richard Clarke voiced similar

concerns about the extent of the FBI’s understanding of the domestic threat:

Let me give you the FBI case, because I think it is the most clear.

Following the Millennium alert . . . and . . . review, it became very clear to

. . . the [FBI] Assistant Director for Counterterrorism, there was the

potential for sleeper cells in the United States, people . . . the United States

that had been involved in the planned attacks.

. . . .

This was in 2000. The Assistant Director . . . then began a program to try

to get more control of the 56 FBI field offices, and I visited five or six of

the field offices and asked them what they were doing about al-Qa’ida. I

got sort of blank looks of "what is al-Qa’ida?"

He compared the effort to add priority to al-Qa’ida investigations in the FBI field offices

to "trying to . . . sort of turn this big Queen Mary luxury liner, trying to turn it."

[Page 41]

Numerous individuals told this Inquiry that the FBI’s 56 field offices enjoy a

great deal of latitude in managing their work, consistent with the dynamic and reactive

nature of its traditional law enforcement mission. In counterterrorism efforts, however,

that flexibility apparently served to dilute the FBI’s national focus on Bin Ladin and al-

Qa’ida. Although the FBI made counterterrorism a "Tier One" priority, not all of its field

offices responded consistently to this FBI Headquarters decision. The New York Field

Office did make terrorism a high priority and was given substantial responsibility for the

al-Qa’ida target following the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. However,

many other FBI offices were not focused on al-Qa’ida and had little understanding of the

extent of the threat it posed within this country prior to September 11.

The combination of these factors seriously handicapped efforts to identify and

defend against the foreign terrorist threat to the domestic United States. It is not

surprising, in the absence of more focused intelligence, that senior policymakers told this

Inquiry that, prior to September 11, they believed the terrorist threat was focused on U.S.

interests overseas. Deputy Secretary of State Armitage, for example, testified that ". . . I

don’t think we really had made the leap in our mind that we are no longer safe behind

these two great oceans. . . ." Former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre said in a

Joint Inquiry interview that he could not remember ever seeing an intelligence report on

the existence of terrorist sleeper cells in the United States. In retrospect, he recalled: ". . .

we thought we were dealing in important things, but we missed the domestic threat from

international terrorism."

Discussion: The Intelligence Community is a large distributed organism. It

encompasses 14 agencies and tens of thousands of employees. The number of people

relatively small. In addition, these people were operating in geographically dispersed

locations, often not connected by secure information technologies, and within established

bureaucracies that were not culturally or organizationally attuned to one another’s

requirements. Many of them had limited experience against the target, and did not know one

another. To achieve success in such an environment, leadership is a critical factor. The Joint

Inquiry found that the Intelligence Community’s structure made leadership difficult.

Usama Bin Ladin first came to the attention of the Intelligence Community in the

early 1990s, initially as a financier of terrorist activities. In 1996, as Bin Ladin’s direct

involvement in planning and directing terrorist acts became more evident, the DCI’s

Counterterrorist Center (CTC) created a special unit to focus specifically on him and the

threat he posed to the interests of the United States. Personnel within CTC recognized as

early as 1996 and 1997 that Usama Bin Ladin posed a grave danger to the United States.

Following the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, the

DCI made combating the threat posed by Usama Bin Ladin one of the Intelligence

Community’s highest priorities, establishing it as a "Tier 0 priority." The DCI raised the

status of the Bin Ladin threat still further when he announced in writing in December

1998 regarding Bin Ladin: "We are at war…I want no resources or people spared in this

effort, either inside the CIA or the [Intelligence] Community." This declaration

appeared in a memorandum from the DCI to CIA senior managers, the Deputy DCI for

Community Management and the Assistant DCI for Military Support.

The Intelligence Community as a whole, however, had only a limited awareness

of this declaration. For example, some senior managers in the National Security Agency

and the Defense Intelligence Agency say they were aware of the declaration. However, it

was apparently not well known within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In fact, the

Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division testified to the Joint Inquiry

that he "was not specifically aware of that declaration of war."

[Page 43]

Furthermore, and even more disturbing, Joint Inquiry interviews of FBI field

office personnel indicated that they were not aware of the DCI’s declaration, and some

had only a passing familiarity with the very existence of Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida

prior to September 11. Neither were the Deputy Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of

the Joint Chiefs of Staff aware of the DCI’s declaration. This suggests a fragmented

Intelligence Community that was operating without a comprehensive strategy for

combating the threat posed by Bin Ladin, and a DCI without the ability to enforce

consistent priorities at all levels throughout the Community.

The Director of NSA at the time of the DCI’s 1998 declaration was Lieutenant

General Kenneth Minihan. He acknowledged in a Joint Inquiry interview that he was

aware of that declaration, but believed that the DCI was speaking for CIA only. In his

experience, he said, the DCI generally left Intelligence Community matters to the head of

the Community Management Staff.

The record of this Joint Inquiry indicates that the DCI did not marshal resources

effectively even within CIA against the threat posed by al-Qa’ida. Despite the DCI’s

declaration to CIA officials that the Agency was at war with Bin Ladin, there is

substantial evidence that the DCI’s Counterterrorist Center needed additional personnel

prior to September 11, and that the lack of resources had a substantial impact on its

ability to detect and monitor al-Qa’ida’s activities. For example:

• In a September 12, 2002 Joint Inquiry hearing, the former Chief of CTC

testified that he did not have enough people to counter the threat posed by Bin

Ladin’s network: "The three concepts I would like to leave you with are

people, the finances, and operational approvals or political authorities. We

didn’t have enough of any of these before 9/11."

• In the same hearing, a senior CTC manager said, "Did we have enough

personnel resources? No. We always needed more."

[Page 44]

• In the same hearing, a former Chief of the CTC unit dedicated to focusing on

Bin Ladin explained: "We never had enough officers from the Directorate of

Operations. The officers we had were greatly overworked….We also received

marginal analytic support from the Directorate of Intelligence…."

• In a September 20, 2002 Joint Inquiry hearing, a CIA officer commented on

the reasons for the CIA’s failure to follow-up regarding the two September 11

hijackers who came to the attention of the Intelligence Community in January

2000:

How could these misses have occurred?… The CIA operators focused on

the Malaysia meeting while it occurred; when it was over, they focused on

other, more urgent operations against threats real or assessed. Of the

many people involved, no one detected that the data generated by this

operation crossed a reporting threshold, or, if they did, they assumed that

the reporting requirement had been met elsewhere…. They are the kinds

of misses that happen when people — even very competent, dedicated

people such as the CIA officers and FBI agents and analysts involved in

all aspects of this story — are simply overwhelmed.

• When asked why there was no marshaling of personnel to CTC to fight Bin

Ladin’s network, the former Chief of CTC recalled that the CIA’s Deputy

Director of Operations said there were not enough personnel to go around and

CTC was already well-endowed with people as compared to other divisions in

CIA.

Almost immediately after September 11, 2001, there was a substantial infusion of

personnel into the CTC. No comparable shift of resources occurred in December 1998

after the DCI’s declaration of war, in December 1999 during the Millennium crisis, or

after the attack on USS Cole in October 2000.

In his testimony before the Joint Inquiry on October 17, 2002, the DCI said, "In

hindsight, I wish I had said, ‘Let’s take the whole enterprise down,’ and put 500 more

people there sooner." It is noteworthy that the DCI’s comments were limited to the CIA

Intelligence Community.

Despite the DCI’s December 1998 declaration of war, other priorities continued to

detract from the Intelligence Community’s effort against Bin Ladin. The Joint Inquiry

heard repeatedly about intelligence priorities that competed contemporaneously with Bin

Ladin for personnel and funds. These included a range of regional and global issues.

The NSA Director described the pre-September 11 situation at NSA:

We, like everyone else at the table, were stretched thin in September. The

war against terrorism was our number one priority. We had about five

number one priorities. And we had to balance what we were doing against

all of them. . . . .

[Further, the NSA Director testified that he knew what NSA had to do to improve its

capabilities against the modern means of communications used by Bin Ladin and other

targets prior to September 11, but was unable to obtain Intelligence Community support

and resources for that effort:

Given all the other intelligence priorities, it would have been difficult at

that time within the [Intelligence Community] or the Department of

Defense to accept the kind of resource decisions that would have been

necessary to make our effort against the target more robust. NSA was

focused heavily on [a range of regional and global issues]. Our resources,

both human and financial, were in decline. Our efforts in 2000 to churn

money internally were not accepted by the Community; its reliance on

[signals intelligence] had made it reluctant to give it up].

The inability to realign Intelligence Community resources to combat the threat

posed by Usama Bin Ladin is a relatively direct consequence of the limited authority of

the DCI over major portions of the Intelligence Community. As former Senator Warren

Rudman noted on October 8, 2002 in his testimony before the Joint Inquiry: "You have a

Director of Central Intelligence who is also the Director of CIA; eighty-five percent of

[the Intelligence Community’s budget] is controlled by the Department of Defense."

[Page 46]

While the DCI has statutory responsibility that spans the Intelligence Community,

his actual authorities are limited to the budgets and personnel over which he exercises

direct control, i.e., the CIA, the Office of the DCI, and the Community Management

Staff. As former Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee

Hamilton stated in his testimony to the Joint Inquiry on October 3, 2002:

Currently, the Director of Central Intelligence, the leading intelligence

figure, as we all know, does not control but a small portion of his budget.

The DCI has, as I understand it, enhanced authority after 1997, and that

permits him to consolidate the national intelligence budget, to make some

trade-offs, but given the overwhelming weight of the Defense Department

in the process, that is of limited value.

. . . .

The very phrase "Intelligence Community" is intriguing. It demonstrates

how decentralized and fragmented our intelligence capabilities are. . . .

The Intelligence Community is a very loose confederation. . . .

. . . .

[T]he thing that puzzles me here is why we reject for the Intelligence

Community the model of organization that we follow in every other

enterprise in this country. We have someone at the head who has

responsibility and accountability. We accept that. But for some reason we

reject it when it comes to the Intelligence Community.

Further evidence of the absence of authoritative leadership and a comprehensive

counterterrorist strategy can be found in what the DCI referred to in his Joint Inquiry

testimony on October 17, 2002 as "The Plan." In his testimony, the DCI said:

In spring of 1999, we produced a new comprehensive operational plan of

attack against [Usama Bin Ladin] and al Qaeda inside and outside of

Afghanistan. The strategy was previewed to senior CIA management by

the end of July of 1999. By mid-September it had been briefed to the CIA

operational level personnel, to NSA, to the FBI and other partners. The

CIA began to put in place the elements of this operational strategy which

structured the agency’s counterterrorism activity until September 11 of

2001.

[According to documents reviewed by the Joint Inquiry, "The Plan" of 1999

consisted primarily of a variety of CIA covert action efforts directed against Usama Bin

Ladin. Later, "The Plan" also included [

].

Thus, "The Plan" was focused principally on CIA, Afghanistan, covert action, and

technical collection aimed at Usama Bin Ladin].

From a broader perspective, "The Plan" was significant for what it did not

include:

• An Intelligence Community-wide estimate of the threat posed by Usama Bin

Ladin’s network to the United States and to U.S. interests overseas;

• Significant participation by other elements of the Intelligence Community;

• A delineation of the resources required to execute "The Plan;"

• Any decisions to downgrade other Intelligence Community priorities to

accommodate the priority of "The Plan;"

• Any attention to the threat to and vulnerabilities of the U.S. homeland; and

• Any FBI involvement.

The absence of involvement by agencies other than CIA in "The Plan" is

particularly troubling, given gaps that existed in the efforts by other agencies to address

Bin Ladin. While the CIA was putting significant effort and attention into Usama Bin

Ladin, covert action, and Afghanistan, the FBI, for example, was focused on other issues.

Although FBI leadership recognized after the Embassy bombings in August 1998 that al-

Qa’ida posed an increasing threat to United States interests, investigations in the United

States of those who raised funds for other terrorist groups continued to consume

considerable field resources and attention prior to September 11.

While the FBI devoted considerable resources to the criminal investigations of the

terrorist attacks overseas, substantial efforts to prevent similar attacks at home were

lacking. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told the Joint Inquiry: ". . . if

there was a flood of intelligence information [on terrorism] from the CIA, there was

hardly a trickle from the FBI." In some FBI field offices, there was little focus on, or

awareness of, Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida. This included the San Diego field office

where FBI agents would discover, after September 11, that there had been numerous

local connections to at least two of the hijackers.

[Page 48]

The Executive Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division testified

to the Joint Inquiry that the FBI had no war plan against Bin Ladin: "Did we have a war

plan, a five-paragraph ops order issued on Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida? Absolutely,

we did not at that time." When asked how the FBI's counterterrorism program fit into

the overall Intelligence Community counterterrorism program, the same Assistant

Director replied: "I am not sure if I know the answer to that. I talked to [the DCI] briefly

about this. I have talked to [the CTC Chief] prior to -- the answer to your question is, I

don't know the answer." Without a comprehensive strategy in place for the whole

Intelligence Community, there was no assurance that agencies like the FBI were focused

on the DCI’s "war" effort.

Consistent with the absence of any comprehensive strategy, a recent Department of

Justice Inspector General (IG) report found that: "The FBI has never performed a

comprehensive written assessment of the risk of the terrorist threat facing the United States."

As the IG report explained: "Such an assessment would be useful not only to define the nature,

likelihood, and severity of the threat but also to identify intelligence gaps that need to be

addressed. Moreover, we believe that comprehensive threat and risk assessments would be

useful in determining where to allocate attention and resources...on programs and initiatives to

combat terrorism." This kind of assessment still had not been completed as recently as

Director Mueller’s testimony on October 17, 2002. Nor did the DCI’s National Intelligence

Council ever produce a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) regarding the threat to the United

States posed by al-Qa’ida or Usama Bin Ladin.

Without the support of a comprehensive strategy or credible domestic threat

assessment, DCI resource requests were often unsuccessful. In response to questions

about his own efforts to obtain additional counterterrorism resources, the DCI described

to the Joint Inquiry hearing on June 18, 2002 his inability, prior to September 11, to

generate necessary support within the Executive Branch:

. . . .

I'm not talking about the Committee. I'm talking about the front end at

OMB and the hurdle you have to get through to fully fund what we

thought we needed to do the job. Senator Kyl once asked me a question in

Senator Shelby's Committee and said, how much money are you short. I'm

short $900 million to $1 billion every year for the next five years, is what I

answered. And we told that to everybody downtown for as long as

anybody would listen and never got to first base. So you get what you pay

for in terms of our ability to be as big and robust as people - and when I

became Director, we had [ ] case officers around the world. Now

we're up to about [ ] and the President's given us the ability to

grow that by another [ ]. And everybody wonders why you can't

do all the things people say you need to do. Well, if you don't pay at the

front end, it ain't going to be there at the back end. Having said that, I

think we made an enormous amount of progress against this target. That

would be my view].

Discussion: [Throughout the Joint Inquiry, numerous officials at CIA, NSA and

the FBI testified that the greatest constraint in their effort against al-Qa’ida was the

availability of too few resources, compounded by too many requirements and priorities.

Regional and global issues were identified as some of the other important issues that

competed with counterterrorism and made heavy resource demands].

These other policy priorities demanded the support of the Intelligence Community

and made it difficult to transfer people or funds to counterterrorism. DCI Tenet testified

that:

As I ‘declared war’ against al-Qa’ida in 1998 — in the aftermath of the East

Africa embassy bombings — we were in our fifth year of round-the-clock

support to Operation Southern Watch in Iraq. Just three months earlier,

we were embroiled in answering questions on the India and Pakistan

nuclear tests and trying to determine how we could surge more people to

proliferation. In early 1999, we surged more than 800 analysts and

redirected collection assets from across the Intelligence Community to

support the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of

Yugoslavia.

[Similarly, NSA Director Hayden testified that NSA was focused heavily on

several other high priority intelligence targets. An FBI budget official told the Joint

Inquiry that counterterrorism was not a priority for Attorney General Ashcroft before

September 11, and the FBI faced pressure to make cuts in counterterrorism to satisfy his

other priorities].

The Joint Inquiry’s review of available budget and resource data confirmed that,

overall, the Intelligence Community budget peaked in fiscal year 1992 and thereafter fell

or remained even in constant dollars. The FBI is an exception to the overall resource

picture. Its overall funding increased for much of the 1990s, though most of this went to

the Bureau’s non-intelligence programs.

[In all, however, Intelligence Community capabilities declined over time. At the

CIA, for example, the Directorate of Operations cut the number of its personnel deployed

overseas by almost [ ] and closed down a portion of facilities in one part of the

world — where much information relating to terrorism could likely have been available.

In addition, the necessary support "tail" for counterterrorism, such as communications

and training, suffered from the decline in resources].

Specific funding for counterterrorism was, however, at least one exception to the

overall budget decline. Within existing budgets, counterterrorism spending generally

increased while funding for other issues generally fell or remained steady. The

counterterrorism component of the overall Intelligence Community budget, for example,

at least doubled at most agencies. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger

. . . the Clinton Administration more than doubled the federal

government’s counterterrorism spending from $5 billion in FY [Fiscal

Year] 1996 to over $11 billion in FY 2000) at a time of strong bipartisan

effort to achieve balanced budgets that resulted in highly constrained

spending for most programs. . . [T]he FBI’s counterterrorism staff budget

increased by 250% and their counterterrorism budget increased by nearly

350%. Similar increases were made in the CIA counterterrorism budget.

In general, personnel allocated to counterterrorism also increased. Although

specifics are imprecise, this Inquiry’s review and estimates provided by various agencies

indicate that the number of personnel working on terrorism steadily increased despite

overall decreases in Intelligence Community staffing. Nevertheless, the number of

counterterrorism personnel prior to September 11 generally remained small and paled by

comparison with post-September 11 levels.

During the course of the Joint Inquiry, Intelligence Community officials identified

a number of factors that limited their ability to allocate greater resources for

counterterrorism, despite the funding increases that occurred in that area. These

included, in addition to the overall general decline in funding for intelligence, outdated

and unrealistic intelligence priorities, and an overburdened requirements process.

The Intelligence Community’s current strategic-level guidance for national

security priorities was established by Presidential Decision Directive (PDD)-35 in 1995.

Former National Security Advisor Anthony Lake described PDD-35 as follows: "It

formally established our top intelligence priorities and placed terrorism among them, led

only by intelligence support for our troops in the field and a small number of states that

posed an immediate or potential serious threat to the United States." In an effort to rank

the myriad post-Cold War threats facing the United States, PDD-35 established a tier

system of priorities. The tiers were broad and concentrated at the upper levels of the

scale. For example, there were both Tier 1A and Tier 1B priorities, but the highest

priority was assigned to Tier Zero.

However, as several Intelligence Community officers told the Joint Inquiry, in

practice, the lack of adequate separation between the tiers made it very difficult to choose

between priorities, and the intelligence prioritization process was often confusing.

Former National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke noted that the White

House "…never really gave good systematic, timely guidance to the Intelligence

Community about what priorities were at the national level." Deputy National Security

Advisor Steven Hadley responded to Joint Inquiry questions by stating that Bush

Administration officials were told by Clinton Administration officials during the

transition that "this priority-setting process [PDD-35] … was not effective for

communicating changing priorities over time." Joint Inquiry interviews with

Intelligence Community officials indicate that many felt that the prioritization process

was so broad as to be meaningless.

Moreover, PDD-35 was never effectively adapted before September 11 to meet

the changing nature of the threat, despite specific language in the document that required

an annual review. As certain threats, including terrorism, increased in the late 1990s,

none of the "lower level" Tier 1 priorities were downgraded so that resources --money

and people-- could be reallocated. For much of the Intelligence Community, everything

became a priority since its customers in the U.S. Government wanted to know everything

about everything all the time.

The growing inadequacy of the PDD-35 structure fueled an overburdened and

increasingly ineffective requirements system within the Intelligence Community. At

NSA, for example, an official described the PDD-35 requirements system as

"cumbersome." NSA analysts acknowledged that they had far too many broad

requirements -- some 1500 formal requirements by September 11 -- that covered virtually

every situation and target. Working from these 1500 formal requirements, NSA had

developed almost 200,000 "Essential Elements of Information" that were desired by its

customers. While they understood the gross priorities and worked on the requirements

that were practicable on any given day, several NSA analysts acknowledged that the

certain areas as they would have liked.

As counterterrorism became an increasingly important concern for senior

Intelligence Community officials, collection and analytic efforts did not always keep pace

because other requirements competed with terrorism for attention, and real priorities

often were not clear. In Joint Inquiry interviews, CIA officials said that, because overall

resources were finite, any increased focus on counterterrorism meant that other issues

would have to receive less attention. At the FBI, where overall funding had increased,

officials said that substantial efforts focused on investigating terrorist cases overseas,

critical infrastructure protection programs, and other priorities not directly related to

strategic intelligence or al-Qa’ida activity within the United States.

[The Director of NSA testified that prior to September 11, other priorities

frustrated his attempts to acquire capabilities to process modern communications used by

terrorists and other intelligence targets:

It required a significant redirection of investment for us to acquire the

capabilities to exploit modern communications. I mentioned . . .trying to

churn . . .within what was then a fixed top line about $200 million . . . .

And we could only get about a third of it to stick because the people who

were using the products we created out of traditional means were unable to

give up those product lines to allow us to reinvest those dollars for the new

age signals environment . . . . I was unable to move some money because

we were going to erode our coverage of [another intelligence target] as

part of this effort.]

Even within the CTC, the staff and resources dedicated to counterterrorism could

not keep pace with the amount and scope of incoming intelligence reporting. The DCI

attributed CIA inaction on a cable pointing to al-Hazmi’s travel to the United States to

the fact that overworked CTC personnel did not have time to read "information only"

cables from the field:

The cable that came in from the field at the time, sir, was labeled

"information only," and I know that nobody read that cable. . . . Sir, we

have notified the [FBI]. Nobody read that cable in the March time frame. .

. . It was an information-only cable from the field and nobody read that

information-only cable. [In hindsight, of] course it should have been.

Another CIA official indicated, post-September 11: "The second thing that was

clear, as I showed [CTC personnel] the cable from March 5, [2000] -- just the look on

their face told me everything I needed to know. They just hadn't seen it. It passed them

We have asked everyone have you seen this and what action was taken. It

did not attract appropriate attention so that they could have been

watchlisted. I think the Director has already mentioned that that was not

done at the time. I think that it was reasonable by certainly March 5 that we

would have been in the position, we should have been in a position to firmly

watchlist this. I just have to underscore that we do this hundreds of times a

month. It should have been done. It was not. We have very good people

working this issue. It was not done, and it was not done because of the press

of lots of other work. We probably should have picked up on this in early

March, but we'd gone by for two months. The delay in that, sir, was the [

], took about six weeks to get that information to us, and in March we

should have picked up on it. All things being equal, they should have been

watchlisted; I think that month we watchlisted about 150 people. It should

have been done. It wasn't. It was a fact of life. And I think what contributed

to that was these same officers watching this operation were also doing a lot

of other things. So it's like balls in the air. There gets to a point where you

don't treat each one with the attention that it deserves.

There was also a March 6, 2001 cable from the field that called attention to the portion of

the March 5 cable regarding al-Hazmi’s travel to the United States, but CTC personnel

also did not read that cable at the time.

Senior NSA and CIA officials have acknowledged that, in hindsight, they would

have devoted many more personnel resources to the al-Qa’ida target and expedited the

development of certain collection capabilities. However, they testified that the operating

environment prior to September 11 — a combination of escalating requirements and

limited resources — limited their ability to respond to the growing terrorist threat.

[Page 55]

Those problems were aggravated by shortcomings that existed in the Intelligence

Community’s budgeting practices. The President annually submits to Congress an

Intelligence Community budget for the coming fiscal year. Included in that request are

both ongoing and new programs that are subject to long established, well understood

oversight and accountability procedures. Supplemental appropriations usually are

granted in reaction to unforeseen events that are not part of the President’s budget

request. Since it is temporary by nature, supplemental funding is not meant to pay for

additional personnel or for structural upgrades in future years.

The Intelligence Community received large supplemental appropriations from

1998 to 2001 to fight terrorism. These additional funds were provided by Congress

following several major al-Qa’ida attacks and to support the effort during the Millennium

celebrations. In particular, most of CIA’s and some of NSA’s efforts against al-Qa’ida in

the late 1990’s were funded from supplemental appropriations.

In Joint Inquiry interviews, Intelligence Community officials were critical of this

reliance on supplementals for counterterrorism programs. A former CTC Chief, for

example, told the Joint Inquiry that reliance on supplementals made it hard to create a

stable counterterrorism program. He noted that it is far more difficult to develop plans

for hiring and training personnel and to pursue long-term technical programs that require

years to develop without a stable year-to-year funding basis.

Despite such limitations, the Intelligence Community agencies sought additional

supplemental appropriations to sustain its counterterrorism effort rather than alter the

President’s budget request to provide annual counterterrorism funding. This is because

altering the annual budget request would have required the Intelligence Community

agencies to make substantial reductions in other programs, a course they were reluctant to

follow because of the many other intelligence priorities for which they were responsible.

Certain other Intelligence Community budgeting practices and procedures further

impeded efforts to ensure an effective allocation of resources to counterterrorism. A lack

the counterterrorism mission was properly funded because counterterrorism is not an

explicit Intelligence Community budget category. Instead, each Intelligence Community

agency budget consists of a compilation of funding levels desired for specific

capabilities, such as the cost of a particular number of intelligence officers or satellites.

Many of these capabilities are useful for more than one mission. For example, a CIA

operations officer may collect intelligence on the internal politics of a country, a weapons

shipment, and terrorism. The CIA considered having its personnel record the time they

expend on various missions, as do FBI field officers, but this was rejected due to the

perceived administrative burden it would impose.

This makes it very difficult to measure the amount of resources that the

Intelligence Community allocates to a particular mission such as counterterrorism. As a

result of this ambiguity, the Intelligence Community often does not know how much it

spends on different issues and, therefore, is unable to compare the funding levels it is

devoting to one mission versus another. For example, the CIA had great difficulty

determining for this Inquiry precisely how many of its personnel worked on al-Qa’ida in

recent years.

Moreover, different components of the Intelligence Community use different

measures when they do try to determine how much they spend on missions such as

counterterrorism. To further complicate matters, there is no agreed-upon way to measure

the level of indirect costs, such as communications, that is devoted to counterterrorism

versus other mission areas. Congressional overseers as well as senior Intelligence

Community managers thus find it difficult to judge whether agency resource allocations

reflect overall intelligence priorities.

In Fiscal Year 1999, the Office of Management and Budget began to require that

the Intelligence Community identify counterterrorism spending in each agency.

However, this information is gathered after money is spent, rather than as a planning and

accountability tool for Intelligence Community managers. In addition, the information is

much more than an educated estimate.

Finally, the Joint Inquiry confirmed through interviews that several other budgetrelated

problems hindered Intelligence Community efforts to satisfy counterterrorism

priorities and requirements:

• The DCI’s Community Management Staff has little authority to ensure

compliance with the DCI’s priorities. It cannot withhold funding from the

Intelligence Community agencies if they do not comply with those priorities;

• Managers within the CIA often found the budget planning and execution process

confusing, making it harder for them to articulate their needs; and

• Intelligence Community officials complained that reprogramming money is

difficult due to a slow Congressional approval process for even small changes.

Discussion: The Joint Inquiry confirmed that the Intelligence Community had not

yet fully incorporated the benefits of technology in the war against terrorism. Lack of

agency collaboration in the areas of technical collection and systems development was

one contributing factor. While CIA and NSA have had many successful joint

counterterrorism technical operations, the Inquiry was told that overlapping targets and

greater use of similar technologies caused friction between the two agencies in some

instances. Disputes emerged regarding which agency should be in charge of developing

and using such technologies against which targets. The Director of NSA explained to the

Joint Inquiry that "the old divisions of labor are impractical — the new electronic universe

surprised if someday the closeness of this relationship would require organizational

changes."

In Joint Inquiry interviews, agency personnel stated that, while individual

relationships and cooperation between CIA and NSA at the working level had often been

very good, relationships at the mid- and upper-management levels of those agencies were

often strained. CIA perceived NSA as wanting to control technology use and

development, while NSA was concerned that CIA was engaged in operations that were

NSA’s responsibility.

As a result, significant agency resources were devoted to documenting authorities

and responsibilities. For example, no less than seven executive-level memoranda

(including one from the President) have been necessary to reach agreement and define the

responsibilities and authorities of CIA and NSA in one counterterrorism effort. The

agencies also established a Senior Partnership Advisory Group to continue to deal with

these issues and CIA assigned several officers to NSA to enhance technology

development.

Prior to September 11, the Director of NSA publicly acknowledged the challenge

posed by Usama Bin Ladin’s access to the modern communications technology

developed by a three trillion dollar industry. Despite this recognition, NSA failed to

focus its efforts against al-Qa’ida’s use of certain forms of this technology, [

]. NSA also had not adapted technology fully to the challenge of transnational

threats such as terrorism. These present much different challenges than those posed by

state actors, such as the former Soviet Union, that were NSA’s primary targets in the

1980’s. As a result, prior to September 11, NSA provided little counterterrorism

intelligence from certain important technical sources. More critically, NSA has not been

able to describe to the Joint Inquiry its plans to address this technical problem on a larger

scale.

[Page 59]

Similarly, NSA could not demonstrate its current analytic tools to the Joint

Inquiry and could not identify upgrades that will assist NSA analysts in identifying

critical intelligence amidst the large volumes of information it collects. In the absence of

such tools, NSA language analysts must still conduct the bulk of their work with pencil

and paper. Many develop their own personal "databases" on index cards that cannot be

made readily available to counterterrorism analysts at other agencies. NSA’s highly

publicized TRAILBLAZER program was often cited by NSA officials as the solution to

many of these problems, but the implementation of those solutions is three to five years

away and confusion still exists at NSA as to what will actually be provided by that

program.

The FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Analysis testified to

the Joint Inquiry that "one of the FBI’s major deficiencies was that the FBI confronted a

variety of problems in sharing information, not only with other agencies but within the

Bureau itself. This was and is largely attributable to inadequate information technology."

Likewise, Director Mueller acknowledged to the Joint Inquiry that "[o]ver the years, [the

FBI] failed to develop a sufficient capacity to collect, store, search, retrieve, analyze, and

share information."

In their testimony, FBI field agents from Phoenix, Minneapolis and New York all

cited the FBI’s technology problems as among the top three things they would like to see

addressed in terms of the counterterrorism effort. As a New York agent explained:

The technology, number one. The FBI is a member of the Intelligence

Community. We have to be able to communicate with them. We have to

be able to have databases that can be integrated with them, and right now

we do not. It is a major problem. It is a major problem for our analysis.

The FBI deployed its Automated Case System (ACS) in 1995 to replace a system

of written reports and indices. The ACS was supposed to enable agents to send leads to

other FBI offices and units and to have access to a vast array of data electronically.

capacity, difficult to use, and unreliable.

The Chief of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) testified that ACS

remains unfriendly, unreliable and unworkable, and that, instead of using ACS to manage

cases, many agents rely on e-mail and paper copies to transmit important data. In

interviews, some FBI personnel conceded that "routine" leads, on which there were no

automated communications, might have "fallen through the cracks." Despite the priority

given to the war against terrorism since September 11, the Joint Inquiry heard testimony

that, at least as of the end of September 26, 2002, there were still 68,000 outstanding,

unassigned leads directed to the Counterterrorism Division, dating back to 1995.

Because many FBI personnel did not use ACS to track outstanding leads, the FBI has

been unable to determine how many of these leads have been completed. As the RFU

Chief explained:

I think we need to make it very clear, though, because there is [sic] 68,000

leads outstanding on that point, that does not mean that those leads were

not handled.... [E]ven though the lead is shown in the computer as not

covered by the Counterterrorism Division, it is covered by the operational

unit. So there is a lot of duplication. . . .[T]he system is very cumbersome,

and people unfortunately have just become very frustrated with it, to the

point where . . . [w]hat will frequently happen, for example, is even

though a field division sends a lead to headquarters and ACS, they are also

e-mailing that communication to the particular FBI headquarters

[supervisory special agent]. So they are getting it and working on it via

the e-mail but not necessarily within the ACS system. . . . Even though a

couple of years ago . . . there was a directive that went out to the field

telling them to stop sending hard copies to headquarters because they

should be retrieved electronically, it was well known, both in the field and

at headquarters, that you wouldn’t get the communication or there was a

good chance that you weren’t going to get it. As such, the field would

routinely still send hard copy.

ACS requires that FBI analysts search for information relevant to their analytical

responsibilities. This is in stark contrast to the CIA’s automated system, which

automatically routes communications to analysts that are relevant to their interests.

Before September 11, 2001, many FBI field agents did not include sensitive information

in ACS because they believed the system was not secure. In addition, many agents who

did include information in ACS blocked access to it in order to limit the number of FBI

does not provide assured retrieval of complete, authoritative information on any subject.

The fact that many FBI personnel do not understand how to make maximum use of the

limited capabilities of ACS and the FBI’s other databases compounds the problem.

Because of its limitations, many agents simply did not use ACS as a research or

case management tool. When the Phoenix FBI field office agent was drafting his July

2001 Electronic Communication, he had no easy or reliable way of querying a central

FBI system to determine whether there were other reports on radical fundamentalists

taking flight training or whether other FBI field offices were investigating similar cases.

As a result, the agent did not know that another FBI field office had voiced concern about

Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons in 1998 or that an operational unit in the

Counterterrorism Section at FBI Headquarters had directed twenty-four field offices

(including Phoenix) to pay close attention to certain Islamic students engaged in aviation

training in 1999.

In addition, because of the limitations of ACS, a number of addressees on the

Phoenix communication, including the Chief of the FBI Headquarters Radical

Fundamentalist Unit, were not aware of the communication before September 11.

Further, even though that Unit handled both the Phoenix communication and the

exchanges with the Minneapolis FBI field office in connection with the Moussaoui

investigation, no one connected the two matters. Likewise, the Minneapolis FBI field

office agents investigating Moussaoui had no reliable way of determining whether there

was information in FBI files about threats to aviation or terrorist plots to hijack planes

and, therefore, did not know about the Phoenix communication and other concerns about

Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons.

While ACS and most other FBI databases are classified at the Secret level, a large

percentage of the information disseminated throughout the Intelligence Community is

classified Top Secret and, therefore, cannot be maintained on ACS. The information is

instead maintained on a separate database to which FBI counterterrorism personnel do

information in a special compartment at the Secret level and that information also cannot

be shared within the FBI’s databases.

The Chief of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit described the FBI’s situation

in September 24, 2002 testimony to the Joint Inquiry:

. . . [C]ommunications coming into our building from NSA, from CIA

cannot be integrated into our existing databases. So if an analyst is

working, say, on a subject in Phoenix division and they run that person's

name through our databases, they will not retrieve information on that

person that other agencies may also have. It is required of them to get up,

walk over to a different set of--or a different computer that has access to a

different database and search that name in that database; and the two

databases will never come together and be integrated. So it is a setup for

failure in terms of keeping a strategic picture of what we are up against.

Although some FBI personnel have access to separate Top Secret Intelligence

Community networks, the FBI’s computer systems are not linked to Intelligence

Community systems or even to the Department of Justice.

States by al-Qa’ida, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analytic focus on al-Qa’ida was

woefully inadequate prior to the September 11 attacks. At the CTC, for example, there

were only three analysts assigned to work on al-Qa’ida full time between 1998 and 2000,

elsewhere in CIA who were in some part attentive to al-Qa’ida, the total was fewer than

forty.

[In terms of "work years," the equivalent of nine analyst work years was

expended on al-Qa’ida within CTC’s Assessments and Information Group in September

1998. According to CIA, nine CTC analysts and eight analysts in the Directorate of

Intelligence were assigned to UBL in 1999. This was only a fraction of the analytic

effort that was to be devoted to al-Qa’ida in July 2002].

DCI Tenet acknowledged at the June 19, 2002 Joint Inquiry hearing that:

I think that is correct. I think [the number of analysts in the CTC analytic

unit working on Usama Bin Ladin and al-Qa’ida] was too small. . . . I

think one of the things I would say is from a strategic analytical

perspective we should have had more analysts than we did. . . .

[At the FBI, there were fewer than ten tactical analysts and only one strategic

analyst assigned to al-Qa’ida prior to September 11, 2001. The NSA had only a limited

number of Arabic linguists, on whom analysis depends, and, prior to September 11, few

were dedicated full-time to targeting al-Qa’ida. At the time, NSA’s Arabic linguists were

also being used to support other high priority targets in the region and to translate

intelligence originating in the region and elsewhere].

Elsewhere in the Intelligence Community, other agencies dedicated varying

numbers of analysts to the al-Qa’ida issue prior to September 11, 2001. The other two

primary all-source analysis centers, DIA’s Joint Intelligence Task Force, Combating

Terrorism, and State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence Research (INR) focused on

anti-terrorism and force protection analysis to protect overseas equities. INR dedicated

one analyst solely to al Qa’ida, and, at Secretary of State direction, provided a daily

summary of intelligence relating to Usama bin Ladin and his activities. DIA devoted 30

analysts to Sunni Extremism and, on any given day, several of them — augmented by

Reservists — would be involved with Usama bin Ladin-related issues.

[Page 64]

Other agencies and organizations maintained at least an awareness of al-Qa’ida

and performed roles such as financial tracking and training camp observation consistent

with their charters. One non-Intelligence Community organization, the FAA, dedicated

as many as five analysts at any one time to al Qa’ida. In late 2000, according to FAA

officials, FAA offered CTC Chief Cofer Black the support of its nearly two-dozen

analysts regarding transportation security issues in exchange for broader information

sharing, but this offer was not accepted because of CTC concerns about protecting its

sources and methods. The Joint Inquiry was told that a similar offer of analytic support

was made to CTC Chief Black by DIA in 2000, but with similar results. FAA and DIA

are both represented at CTC.

The Intelligence Community’s focus was also far more oriented toward tactical

analysis of al-Qa’ida in support of operations than on the strategic analysis needed to

develop a broader understanding of the threat and the organization. For example, as

mentioned earlier, the DCI’s National Intelligence Council never produced a National

Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the threat to the United States posed by al-Qa’ida and

Usama Bin Ladin. Active analytic efforts to identify the scope and nature of the threat,

particularly in the domestic United States, were clearly inadequate.

As noted in an August 2001 CIA Inspector General report, analysts assigned to

CTC only had time to focus on crises or short-term demands, and "did not have the time

to spot trends or to knit together the threads from the flood of information." These

shortcomings, unfortunately, had an impact on areas that were directly relevant to the

September 11 attacks. The Joint Inquiry record confirms, for example, that the

Intelligence Community had devoted little or no analytic focus prior to September 11 to

the terrorist use of aircraft as weapons or to the significant role in al-Qa’ida that was

played by Khalid Shaykh Mohammed.

This review also confirms that the FBI was performing little, if any, strategic

analysis against al-Qa’ida prior to the September 11 attacks. The Chief of the FBI’s

National Security Intelligence Section testified that the FBI had "no analysts" dedicated

only one strategic analyst working on al-Qa’ida matters. FBI Assistant Director for

Counterterrorism Dale Watson testified that he could not recall any instance where the

FBI Headquarters terrorism analytical unit produced "an actual product that helped out."

When the FBI did complete analytic products, the quality was inadequate. During

the summer of 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community was in a state of heightened alert,

due to concern about an imminent al-Qa’ida attack. However, this concern was not

reflected in the FBI’s National Law Enforcement Threat System (NLETS) reports, which

are the means through which the FBI communicated terrorist threat information with state

and local law enforcement entities. In a May 2001 NLETS report, for example, the FBI

assessed the risk of terrorism as "low," and, in a July 2, 2001 NLETS report, stated that

the FBI had no information indicating a credible threat of terrorist attack in the United

States, although the possibility of such an attack could not be discounted. Additional FBI

notices that were issued later in July 2001 indicated that there was a potential for attacks

against U.S. interests abroad, but again that the possibility of an attack in the United

States could not be discounted.

More focus on strategic analysis by the FBI and the CIA would have helped

crystallize the threat, particularly within the United States, and perhaps spurred more

immediate defensive action by U.S. Government policymakers. The Intelligence

Community was not, however, poised or equipped to deliver the kind of analytic products

needed. The FBI, for example, was not even aware of the collective significance of

information pertaining to al-Qa’ida that was contained within its own files. This fact is

underscored by its failure to connect available information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi,

Zacarias Moussaoui, and the FBI Phoenix field office agent’s Electronic Communication

in the summer of 2001. The FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism

Analysis, recently detailed from CIA to improve the FBI’s analytic capability, testified

that the Bureau "didn’t have analysts dedicated to sort of looking at the big picture and

trying to connect the dots, say between the Phoenix memo and Moussaoui and some

were individuals there who might be preparing to hijack aircraft."

One of the primary reasons that there was so little focus on strategic analysis in

the Intelligence Community may have been the perception that operational personnel and

matters were more important to agency counterterrorism missions and operations than

analysis and analytic personnel. Consistent with its traditional law enforcement mission,

the FBI was, prior to September 11, a reactive, operationally driven organization that did

not value strategic analysis. While FBI personnel appreciated case specific analysis, for

example, most viewed strategic analytic products as academic and of little use in ongoing

operations. The FBI’s Assistant Director for Counterterrorism acknowledged in

Joint Inquiry testimony that the reactive nature of the FBI was not conducive to success

in counterterrorism:

No one was thinking about the counterterrorism program what the threat

was and what we were trying to do about it. And when that light came on,

I realized that, hey, we are a reactive bunch of people, and reactive will

never get us to a prevention and what we do. . . .Is there anybody thinking

and where’s al-Qa’ida’s next target? And no one was really looking at

that.

He also testified about the difficulty of going beyond the FBI’s traditional case-oriented

approach:

We will never move away from being reactive. We understand that. And

that’s what people want to talk about most of the time is how’s that case

going in East Africa, or how’s the USS Cole investigation going? But if

you step back and look at it strategically you need to have people thinking

beyond the horizon and that’s very difficult for all of us. It’s particularly

difficult for law enforcement people.

Other FBI executives acknowledged the FBI’s pre-September 11 analytic failings.

Director Mueller testified that:

I would be the first to concede that we have not done a good job in

analysis. We have not had either the technology nor the analytical cadre of

individuals that we have needed to perform strategic analysis.

In Joint Inquiry testimony, the FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism

Analysis referred to strategic analysis as the FBI’s "poor stepchild" prior to September

11, 2001. As a result, our review confirmed that strategic analysts were often

marginalized by the operational units and rarely, if ever, received requests from

operational sections for analytical assessments of pending al-Qa’ida’s cases.

In 2000, FBI management aggravated this situation by transferring five strategic

analysts who had been working on al-Qa’ida matters to FBI operational units to assist

with ongoing cases. According to a former Chief of the International Terrorism Analytic

Unit, this "gutted" the analytic unit’s al-Qa’ida-related expertise and left the unit with

little ability to perform strategic analysis.

Concerns about protecting criminal prosecutions also limited the FBI’s ability to

utilize strategic analytic products. In interviews, some analysts said they frequently were

told not to produce written analyses, lest the analyses be included in discovery during

criminal prosecutions. FBI analysts were further hindered because of the limitations of

the FBI’s information technology.

Due in large part to these cultural and practical issues, the Bureau has had little

success in building a strategic analytic capability, despite numerous attempts before

September 11 to do so. For example, in 1996, the FBI hired approximately fifty strategic

analysts for counterterrorism purposes, many with advanced degrees. According to both

current and former FBI analytic personnel and supervisors, most of those analysts left the

Bureau within two years because they were dissatisfied with the role of strategic analysis

at the FBI.

The lack of emphasis on strategic counterterrorism analysis was also an issue at

the CIA. The former Chief of CTC testified that, at the CTC:

We have under-invested in the strategic only because we’ve had such

near-term threats. The trend is always toward the tactical. . . . The tactical

accepted, but strategic analysis does not . . . get you to saving lives.

Analysts in the CTC also expressed concern to the Joint Inquiry that their

opinions were not given sufficient weight. A manager in the CTC confirmed to the Staff

that CIA operations officers in the field resented being tasked by analysts because they

did not like "to take direction from the ladies from the Directorate of Intelligence."

Despite the need for increased analytic capability, CTC reportedly refused to accept

analytic support offered by at least two other agencies prior to September 11, 2001. As

mentioned earlier, representatives of both FAA and DIA informed the Inquiry that CTC

management rebuffed their offers of analytic assistance in 2000 because those agencies

wanted greater access to CTC information in return, and this raised CTC concerns

regarding protection of its intelligence sources and methods.

Analysts at NSA commented to the Joint Inquiry that CTC viewed them as

subordinate — "like an ATM for signals intelligence." NSA analysts say they attempted

to accommodate CTC preferences by focusing on short-term operational requirements —

sometimes at the expense of more thorough analysis -- and even altered NSA reporting

formats because CTC did not like including NSA analyst comments in the text of signals

intelligence reports. Several NSA analysts also described a definite perception that the

DCI would always side with CIA and CTC operational personnel in any disagreements

between NSA and CTC.

Some of the shortcomings in analytical capability can be traced to the fact that

analysts were often inexperienced, under-trained, and, in some cases, unqualified for the

responsibilities they were given. At the CTC, the analysts were a relatively junior group

prior to September 11 since CTC had traditionally relied on rotational assignments. An

analytic career service was not created in CTC until about 1997. The average CTC

analyst had three years of analytic experience, versus the eight years for analysts in the

CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence.

[Page 69]

A former counterterrorism analyst at DIA explained to the Joint Inquiry the

consequences for analytic perspective of this shortfall in experience and knowledge:

Coupled with this issue of experience comes the ability to place current

intelligence reporting in the context of historical perspectives. In the

period leading up to the 1998 East Africa bombings and the 2000 attack

against the USS Cole in Yemen, terrorism analysts nearly across the board

incorrectly assessed that a group would not conduct an attack in an area

where it was able to operate with relative ease. Additionally, there

appears to be a continued reluctance to correctly assess and evaluate the

nature of cooperation between many [ ] and [ ]

Islamic extremist groups. Both of these examples, and there are certainly

others, occurred despite over a decade of credible reporting to the

contrary.

At the FBI, a January 2002 internal study found that 66% of the FBI’s 1200

"Intelligence Research Specialists" (strategic analysts) were unqualified. This problem

was compounded by the fact that newly-assigned strategic and operational analysts

received little counterterrorism training upon assuming their positions. As the Chief of

the FBI’s National Security Intelligence Section testified:

While there was no standardized training regimen, other than a two-week

basic analytical course, training was available on an ad hoc basis and

guidance was provided by both the unit chiefs of the analytical units and

the FBI's Administrative Services Division. The development of a

standardized curriculum, linked to job skills, and career advancement was

being planned . . . , but it was never implemented.

The quality of Intelligence Community counterterrorism analysis also suffered as

a result of the fact that agency analysts often did not have access to important information

residing at other agencies. DIA’s Associate Director for Intelligence at the Joint Chiefs

of Staff testified about the extent of these problems:

In my opinion, one of the most prolonged and troubling trends in the

Intelligence Community is the degree to which analysts, while being

expected to incorporate all sources of information into their assessments,

have been systematically separated from the raw material of their trade….

At least for a few highly complex high stakes issues, such as terrorism,

where information by its nature is fragmentary, ambiguous and episodic,

we need to find ways to emphatically put the "all" back in the discipline of

all-source analysis.

[Page 70]

Intelligence Community analysts had particularly limited access to "raw material"

contained in the FBI’s counterterrorism investigations, including Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act (FISA)-derived information, and to unpublished NSA information. The

former acting head of the FBI’s Usama Bin Ladin Unit informed the Joint Inquiry that,

prior to September 11, the FBI would generally only provide the CIA with FISA-derived

information when the FBI wanted it passed to a foreign government. Primarily due to the

FBI’s technological problems, the FBI’s analysts did not even have access to all relevant

FBI information. The FBI’s Deputy Assistant Director for Counterterrorism Analysis

testified that "the FBI lacked effective data mining capabilities and analytical tools, it has

often been unable to retrieve key information and analyze it in a timely manner–and a

lot has probably slipped through the cracks as a result."

There also was, and apparently continues to be, a reluctance at CIA to provide

raw data to analysts outside the Agency. DCI Tenet testified that even analysts at the

Department of Homeland Security will not be allowed access to CIA raw data:

There was a headline today that said raw data provided. Well, actually

that's not what's envisioned. They will get all of the finished product, the

finished analytical product, the finished intelligence that NSA, CIA and

FBI issues, and on a case-by-case basis, depending on what kind of an

environment we're in, we actually may give them a piece of raw data.

Discussions of access to "raw data" or "raw traffic" raise objections from CIA,

since it immediately equates the term to internal operational traffic, and from NSA. Both

agencies are concerned with protecting the sources and methods they use to collect

intelligence, a responsibility that has been specifically placed upon the DCI by the

National Security Act, and NSA is also concerned about its legal responsibilities to

"minimize" U.S. person data in the information it collects.

A significant portion of the communications collected by NSA involves U.S.

persons as parties or contains information about U.S. persons. NSA is responsible under

law and Attorney General procedures for ensuring that information of this type that does

persons outside the NSA production chain. NSA does allow analysts from other agencies

to have access to raw intercepts on a case-by-case basis, typically at NSA and after the

analysts have been trained in the minimization rules.

Analysts, for their part, maintain that there is intelligence information of potential

significance embedded in the raw CIA and NSA data. Much of this, they believe, is

filtered out during the CIA and NSA processes that determine what information analysts

receive in disseminated form. The CIA has implicitly recognized this by integrating its

counterterrorism analysts into CTC where they have full access to raw traffic, an access

that most CIA analysts do not routinely enjoy.

[As an example, the Joint Inquiry found numerous operational cables relating to

the meeting in Malaysia that was attended by al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in January 2000

containing information that could have enabled all-source analysts to assess that meeting

more completely. DIA identified four specific leads its terrorism analysts could have

pursued had this information been shared with it in early 2000, and three leads in the

critical August 2001 timeframe that DIA believes would have allowed additional action

to be taken concerning the arrest of Moussaoui and the watchlisting of Al-Mihdhar and

al-Hazmi. However, DIA did not learn of this operational traffic until informed of it in

the course of the Joint Inquiry in April 2002].

Intelligence analytical personnel told the Joint Inquiry that they are not seeking

access to operational details or the identification of sources and methods. The DIA

Director, for example, observed that he has tried to convince CTC that DIA does not

want operational details, but only important intelligence buried in the operational traffic.

The inadequate quality of the Intelligence Community counterterrorism analysis

impacted not only the Intelligence Community’s strategy and operations, but also the

ability of the U.S. Government’s policymakers to understand the threat and to make

informed decisions. Several current and former U.S. government policymakers provided

Clarke, the former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure and Counterterrorism

at the National Security Council ("National Counterterrorism Coordinator") explained to

the Joint Inquiry that:

FBI did not provide analysis. FBI, as far as I could tell, didn't have an

analytical shop. They never provided analysis to us, even when we asked

for it, and I don't think that throughout that 10-year period we really had

an analytical capability of what was going on in this country.

Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State complained that Intelligence

Community analysis tends to provide policymakers with only one view, and that

dissenting opinions are rarely expressed:

I am the consumer. It’s very rare that we get the one off voice or the

dissident voice . . . . For a policy maker, the dissident voice is very

helpful to either confirm what you think or really open up a new area, and

this is not generally done. If I had to say the one biggest weakness in the

analysis area, I would say that’s it. Second, it’s the way analysis in the

Intelligence Community is generally put forth, and it’s related, and that is

consensus…I really would just enforce this observation about the need to

get alternative views up, because almost everything that’s important here

is shrouded in ambiguity and uncertainty. There is a tendency to want to

get things scrubbed out to get the differences eliminated.

Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger implied in his testimony that the

U.S. Government has often relied too heavily on analytic expertise within the U.S.

Government, and that he believes that the best analytic expertise is often found

elsewhere:

I think we live in a world . . .in which expertise increasingly does not exist

in the government. It’s a very complicated world. And the five people

who know Afghanistan the best or Sierra Leone the best are probably

located either in academia, think tanks or in companies, not to devalue the

people of the government. So we have to find a way in my judgment to

integrate the expertise that exists on the outside with the information that

exists on the inside.

A former DIA counterterrorism analyst told the Joint Inquiry hearing on October

The single most important issue that will affect future performance is the

experience level of the analyst. While this certainly applies to all

intelligence analysts regardless of subject area, it is even more critical for

those trying to prevent the next terrorist attack. In the case of an analyst

responsible for tracking a Middle Eastern terrorist group, this person will

need to have an expertise or at least a good working knowledge of

terrorism itself, the group that they have for an account, regional and

country issues present in the group's operating area, which can be quite

extensive, and Islamic history, culture and the sects thereof. This . . .

required level of expertise is rarely going to be found outside the

Intelligence Community and is instead going to be recruited from

academia and then developed in-house through training programs and

mentors.

Former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Lee Hamilton noted in his

testimony to the Joint Inquiry on October 3, 2002 that the Hart-Rudman Commission had

concluded that the U.S. Government’s personnel system has become a national security

issue. As he stated:

There is too much rigidity in the system. There is not enough allowance

for incentive. And it is an exceedingly serious problem in our government.

And it has national security consequences. We've got to work through this

matter so that managers can manage more effectively. . . . . I would

absolutely assure you . . . that you would not tolerate in your office the

kind of management restrictions that operate today in the federal

government. . . . Now I know the importance of this to employees, so it's

a tough problem, but the only thing I want to say here, Senator, when you

talk about personnel we are now approaching this national security review

and we have to look at the civil service system and we have to find ways

and means of getting more flexibility into it. If we don't, we're going to

choke ourselves to death.

During the same hearing, former CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz discussed a

number of actions that might be taken to enhance the quality of the personnel employed

by the Intelligence Community agencies. These included the idea of establishing an

intelligence reserve corps that could be activated at a time of particular need, an

intelligence reserve officer training corps, and more internships to introduce young

people into the agencies. While he recognized that some of these ideas are not new, he

did not believe they had been vigorously pursued.

In sum, prior to September 11, the Intelligence Community’s analytic components

failed to understand the collective significance of the information in their possession.

This failure is attributable not only to the factors discussed above, but also to a basic lack

of creativity and imagination in evaluating the intelligence that was at hand. Ironically,

analysts, but, instead, of an FBI field agent in Phoenix. The Phoenix agent, in reviewing

his office’s case files, went beyond the facts of those individual cases to focus on a larger,

and far more serious, picture of the potential, long-term threat. By putting together

various pieces of information, he became convinced that Usama Bin Ladin was sending

individuals to aviation-related training in order to put al-Qa’ida in a position to target

civil aviation. His July 2001 Electronic Communication to FBI Headquarters was a

strategic analytic product that correctly identified at least one critical element that was to

be used in the plot that unfolded on September 11, an element that apparently eluded far

more seasoned analysts elsewhere in the Intelligence Community.

Discussion: The language problem has been one of the Intelligence Community’s

perennial shortfalls. Prior to September 11, the shortage of language specialists who

would be qualified to process large amounts of foreign language data in general, and

Arabic in particular, was one of the most serious issues limiting the Intelligence

Community’s ability to analyze, discern, and report on terrorist activities in a timely

fashion. According to a senior NSA official, [

]. These are promptly scanned for

intelligence value, and only the most important — [ ] -- are then

translated into English. Yet, prior to September 11, NSA had [ ] personnel assigned

to this task.

[Analyzing, processing, translating, and reporting al-Qa’ida-related [

] communications requires the highest levels of language and target

knowledge expertise that exist at the National Security Agency. The large number of

communicants whose native origins cover all of the major Arabic dialects makes this

understands life in a thoroughly Islamic milieu, a milieu that is often reflected in the

target’s communications].

Evaluating these communications requires considerable subject matter expertise

in Islam in general and Islamic extremism in particular in order to ensure the best

possible interpretations. Very few Arabic language analysts at NSA have done any

graduate work in Islamic Studies and the vast majority of these linguists [

].

The NSA Senior Language Authority explained to the Joint Inquiry that the

Language Readiness Index for NSA language personnel working in the counterterrorism

"campaign languages" is currently around 30%. This Index is based on the percentage of

the mission that is being performed by qualified language analysts. The current low level

of the Index is due in part to the fact that NSA has moved roughly [ ] language

personnel since September 11 from areas in which they were performing quite well to

counterterrorism, where they must gain experience and expertise before their

performance can improve.

[According to the Chief of the FBI’s Language Services Division, prior to

September 11, the Bureau employed [ ] Arabic speakers and was experiencing a

translation backlog. As a result, 35% of Arabic language materials derived from Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) collection were not reviewed or translated. If the

number of Arabic speakers were to remain at [ ], the projected backlog would rise to

41% in 2003.]

The Director of the CIA Language School testified that, given the CIA’s language

requirements, the CIA Directorate of Operations is not fully prepared to fight a world-

recruitment and intelligence collection mission. She also added that there is no strategic

plan in place with regard to linguistic skills at the Agency. When asked about the

language ability of CIA field officers, the Language School Director stated:

[Traditionally we have had an adequate number of Arabic speakers to

conduct their business in [

]. Level of language required to use with a volunteer

or for a thorough debriefing is very different than the level of language

you need to socially chit-chat with somebody or to even recruit someone.

And that is where the bar has been raised much higher, and that's why we

must now have a cadre of language speakers, [ ] who indeed can

debrief and write up reports with these volunteers].

The Director of the CIA Language School explained that CIA should have a pool

of interpreters to meet language support needs at home and abroad, but that this is not

easy to achieve. She stated that: "With the progress of technology, we keep on getting

more material — [ ]. These things need

translation, we don’t have that capability." In her view, CIA field officers are typically

generalists, and this has been important to their career progression culture since the mid-

1970s. Now, however, it is an absolute must that these officers possess expertise rather

than mastery of "one little dab here and one little dab there." Her recommendation was

that either a culture change within CIA is called for or that a cadre of specialists be

developed and not penalized.

Discussion: While one of the Intelligence Community’s greatest strengths is its

ability to rely on its advanced technical collection capabilities, the Joint Inquiry

confirmed that the Community did not, prior to September 11, fully exploit those

]. Post-September 11, this increased to [

].

It became very clear after September 11 [

]. In testimony before the Joint Inquiry, the NSA

Director acknowledged that "little was known prior to 11 September of how al-Qa’ida

used [ ] communications. . . .We continue to attack key gaps that

remain in our . . . [ ] exploitation capabilities."

Similarly, NSA has long had a program to use [

], but again little was known about al-

Qa’ida targets and few such operations were mounted before September 11. After

September 11, this changed and the NSA Director was able to testify that: "[

]."

The inability to bring technical collection capabilities to bear in the

counterterrorism area was particularly apparent in regard to signals intelligence that could

have shed greater light on the potential for terrorist activity within the domestic United

States. Both the NSA and the FBI have the authority, in certain circumstances, to

intercept international communications, to include communications that have one

communicant in the United States and one in a foreign country, for foreign intelligence

purposes. While those authorities were intended to insure a seamless transition between

U.S. foreign and domestic intelligence capabilities, significant gaps between those two

spheres of intelligence coverage persisted and impeded domestic counterterrorist efforts.

[Page 78]

Before September 11, it was NSA policy not to target terrorists in the United

States, even though it could have obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court

order authorizing such collection. NSA Director Hayden testified that it was more

appropriate for the FBI to conduct such surveillance because NSA does not want to be

perceived as targeting individuals in this country and because the intelligence produced

about communicants in the United States is likely to be about their domestic activities.

[As a result, NSA regularly provided information about these targets to the FBI —

both in its regular reporting and in response to specific requests from the FBI — [

] that NSA acquired in the

course of its collection operations. The FBI used this information in its investigations

and obtained FISA Court authorization for electronic surveillance [

] when FBI officials determined that such surveillance

was necessary to assist one of its intelligence or law enforcement investigations].

[One collection capability that was used by both NSA and FBI under approval of

the FISA Court (the "FISA Court technique") had a [ ] probability of collecting

[ ] communications between individuals in the United States and foreign

countries. NSA did not use the FISA Court technique against [ ],

however, precisely because of this [ ] probability].

As NSA Director Hayden has testified to the Joint Inquiry, NSA believed it was

the FBI’s responsibility to collect communications of individuals in the United States.

General Hayden stated two reasons for this position. One is that, since the individual is

in the United States, the information obtained is most likely to relate to domestic activity

that is of primary interest to the FBI. The second reason is that NSA does not want to be

viewed as targeting persons in the United States. Joint Inquiry interviews of a wide range

of NSA personnel, from the Director down to analysts, revealed the consistent theme that

NSA did not target individuals in the United States. This is so ingrained at NSA that one

counterterrorism supervisor at NSA admitted that she had never even thought about using

this technique against [ ].

[Page 79]

Despite the NSA view that this category of intelligence collection was the FBI’s

responsibility, NSA and the FBI did not develop any plan to ensure that the Bureau made

an informed decision about whether to use the FISA Court technique to collect

communications between the United States and foreign countries that NSA was not

covering. Thus, a gap developed between the level of coverage of communications

between the United States and foreign countries that was technically and legally available

to the Intelligence Community and the actual use of that surveillance capability].

[This gap was potentially very damaging in the case of Khalid al-Mihdhar during

the period in early 2000 when he was in the United States. [

]. His presence in the United States was not determined by

the Intelligence Community at the time. [

].

[NSA and CIA officers often worked closely together in [ ] collection

efforts against al-Qa’ida. The two agencies conducted [ ] operations,

And these operations often met with some success. However, one type of these

operations — [

] — caused much friction between NSA and CIA. This was especially true at

the mid- and upper-management levels where struggles developed regarding which

agency was in charge of developing and using such technology when human intelligence

and signals intelligence targets overlapped. CIA perceived NSA as wanting to control

was conducting NSA-type operations. The NSA Chief of Data Acquisition noted to the

Inquiry that this has been an issue during his entire tour of almost three years. These

frictions persisted even after the September 11 attacks. In the first six months of 2002,

for example, no less than seven executive-level memoranda (including one from the

President) were issued in attempts to delineate CIA and NSA responsibilities and

authorities in this collection area].

The Chief of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate acknowledged these frictions

in a Joint Inquiry interview, but cited the executive memoranda as evidence that the

situation is improving. NSA Director Hayden, told the Joint Inquiry that "the old

divisions of labor are impractical; the new electronic universe requires more and more

cooperation. " He also added that he "would not be surprised if someday the closeness of

this relationship would require organizational changes."

Discussion: One of the side effects of NSA’s downsizing, outsourcing, and

transformation has been the loss of critical program management expertise, systems

engineering, and requirements definition skills. These skills were devalued by NSA

during the 1990s when most technical development was done within the agency, and the

impact of their loss was evident in NSA’s response to the Joint Inquiry’s attempts to

gather information concerning NSA’s plans for developing solutions to its current

technology gaps in areas of particular importance to counterterrorism. [

]. NSA was able to provide little more than very

high-level and general vision statements.

The impact of this lack of program management was evident during interviews

with analysts who expressed frustration regarding their current working environment.

accommodate the demands of various customers and uses. The TRAILBLAZER

program, which the NSA Director has described as NSA’s "effort to revolutionize how

we produce SIGINT in a digital age," is now not expected to produce such results until

2004 at the earliest and confusion still exists as to what those results will actually be. In

the meantime, none of the analysts were aware of any near term efforts to alleviate their

current system’s technical limitations.

NSA personnel also stated that NSA’s efforts to collect [

], reveals a critical deficiency in its

capabilities. The solution to this deficiency is well understood and estimated to cost less

than $1 million to implement. However, the project manager is still struggling for funds

to pay for an upgrade that would not be completed until 2004.

The Joint Inquiry also found a high level of frustration among contractors who do

business with the NSA. Common themes repeated to the Joint Inquiry concern the

extremely poor quality of solicitation packages and acquisition expertise on the part of

NSA employees and the inability of program managers to speak with consistency and

authority on future contract opportunities. NSA also lacks a formal Contracting Officer

Technical Representative certification program. This is of special concern as NSA

continues to increase its reliance on contractors. In testimony to the Joint Inquiry in

October 2002, the NSA Director stated that NSA "spent about a third of our SIGINT

development money this year making things ourselves. Next year the number will be

[dropping to] 17%."

The Chief of Staff for NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) told the Joint

Inquiry he fears that "SID has lost its business acumen…and [he] worries greatly about

the lack of acquisition experience and program planning, especially in light of NSA’s

huge budget increase." He also told the Joint Inquiry that he has worked actively on this

issue, especially in providing program management training to frontline workers.

[Page 82]

trafficking, requires close coordination and information sharing among and within the

Intelligence Community agencies. Despite some improvement, significant problems

remained in the sharing of information within the Intelligence Community, prior to

September 11. As a result, the Community was unable to exploit the full range of

capabilities and expertise in the counterterrorist effort.

Each of the principal collectors and analyzers of counterterrorism intelligence --

the FBI, CIA, NSA, and DIA -- has its own distinct missions, sets of legal authorities and

restraints, and cultures. Unfortunately, these factors, while serving many other legitimate

purposes, often hinder collaboration and willingness to share information. In his

testimony, former Congressman and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Lee

Hamilton described the problem:

The very phrase "Intelligence Community" is intriguing. It demonstrates

how decentralized and fragmented our intelligence capabilities are. . . .

The Intelligence Community is a very loose confederation. There is a

redundancy of effort, an imbalance between collection and analysis, and

problems, as we have repeatedly heard in recent weeks, of coordination

and sharing.

While DCI George Tenet and former FBI Director Louis Freeh testified that

collaboration and information sharing in the Intelligence Community have markedly

improved in recent years, this Inquiry found that the agencies still act too often and at too

many levels as a loose collection of entities. The Joint Inquiry heard testimony that

confirmed problems in sharing information between different Intelligence Community

enforcement and intelligence agencies.

For example, the former FBI agent who had handled the San Diego informant

testified about his personal experience with information sharing between the FBI and the

CIA:

Ms. Hill: You also [said] that, in your opinion, information sharing

between the FBI and the CIA prior to 9/ll was almost nonexistent.

Former FBI Agent: It was bad. Well, it’s not nonexistent, but . . . if you

have a case that has a common mission and everybody can benefit from it,

you’re going to get their assistance. But if you don’t have that, asking

them for something, it’s very, very difficult.

. . . .

Former FBI Agent: If I had to rate it on a ten-point scale, I’d give them

about a 2 or a 1.5 in terms of sharing information.

Ms. Hill: Well, could you tell us what your experience was? Why do you

say that?

Former FBI Agent: [P]art of the problem here, I think, is being able to

communicate with them. . . .

Ms. Hill: By "them," you mean the CIA?

Former FBI Agent: With the CIA. Everything’s got to go through

headquarters, usually.

Ms. Hill: Through your headquarters, or through CIA?

Former FBI Agent: Through [FBI] headquarters. Normally, . . . you have

some information you want the Agency to check on. You end up writing it

up, sending it back through electronic communication or teletype, . . . or

memo. . . . And then the Bureau, FBI headquarters, runs it across the street

to the Agency. And then, maybe six months, eight months, a year later,

you might get some sort of response.

Even after the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the Millennium plot, and

attacks against U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 revealed that global Islamic

extremists were capable of reaching into the United States, there was little sustained

effort by the FBI, NSA, and CIA to work together to collect and share information about

contacts between foreign persons in the United States and those abroad. For example,

while a great amount of information that NSA collects is routinely transmitted

electronically into CTC databases at CIA, this is not true of terrorist information collected

domestically by the FBI.

The Acting Chief of the FBI’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit, told the Joint Inquiry

in an interview that, prior to September 11, the FBI would primarily think to provide the

also being passed to a foreign government. The FBI did not share such information with

CTC on a routine basis, partly due to the FBI’s inadequate information technology, but

also because they believed that sharing information with intelligence agencies raised

legal concerns relating to the traditional separation between law enforcement and

intelligence operations. As a consequence, gaps occurred in the collection and analysis

of information about individuals and groups operating in the United States and abroad.

The FBI has traditionally viewed intelligence primarily as a tool for developing

evidence to be used in FBI cases, rather than as the basis for valuable strategic analysis

for the FBI or other intelligence agencies. As Director Mueller noted to the Joint Inquiry:

. . . one of the things that we have to do, and I think is changing since

September 11, is for agents who are very good in the criminal sphere to

look at a piece of information and not run it through the sifting that you do

to determine whether it would be admissible in court. In other words, is it

hearsay? Well, I am going to thrust it aside. Do I have lack of foundation?

Therefore, I am going to disregard that.

Prior to September 11, FBI personnel were not trained or equipped to share

intelligence developed during FBI counterterrorism investigations with the Intelligence

Community or even with other units within the FBI on a regular basis. For example, after

receiving the Electronic Communication from the Phoenix field office in July 2001

indicating that al-Qa’ida might be sending operatives to the United States for flight

training, a Headquarters Intelligence Operations Specialist (IOS) did not send it to the

FBI’s analytic unit or to the CIA. Instead, the IOS forwarded it to the FBI field office in

Portland, Oregon, primarily because of possible connections to an individual case there.

The Joint Inquiry’s review of a July 2002 CIA cable that it found within a local

FBI field office’s investigative files provides another example of information sharing

problems within the FBI. A CIA officer assigned to a Joint Terrorism Task Force in

California sent a cable to CIA Headquarters after analyzing information gleaned

primarily from a review of the local FBI field office’s investigative files. He also

The cable sets forth the CIA officer’s concerns regarding indications that persons

associated with a foreign government may have provided financial support to some of the

September 11 hijackers while they were living in the United States. Those indications,

addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report, obviously raise issues with serious

national implications. Nevertheless, the FBI agent to whom he provided a copy viewed it

only in relation to ongoing investigations and did not consider its possible value for other

cases or the FBI’s national counterterrorism strategy. Thus, the FBI agent placed the

cable in only one case file and did not forward a copy to FBI Headquarters.

Similarly, the FBI typically used information obtained through the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) only in connection with the cases in which it was

obtained and would not routinely disseminate it within the FBI or to other members of

the Intelligence Community. FBI personnel advised the Joint Inquiry that FISA

information was not included in the FBI’s Automated Case System (ACS) because both

criminal and intelligence agents had access to that system.

Culture and policy issues also limited the extent to which CIA shared

counterterrorism information within the Intelligence Community. As noted earlier, a lack

of focus on the domestic terrorist threat, which was viewed as an FBI, rather than CIA,

mission, accounted for some information sharing problems. For example, the DCI

acknowledged in his testimony that CIA was not sufficiently focused on advising the

State Department to watchlist all terrorist operatives who might be traveling to the United

States, even though this would provide valuable information to domestic agencies in

targeting these persons at ports of entry. On at least three occasions between January

2000 and August 2001, there were opportunities to watchlist future hijackers Nawaf al-

Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, but the CIA failed to do so. In his testimony on October

17, 2002, the DCI admitted this failure, attributing it to:

. . .uneven practices, bad training and a lack of redundancy. The fact that

[CTC personnel] were swamped does not mitigate the fact that we didn’t

overcome that [with] a separate unit or better training for those people.

[Page 86]

Aside from the formal watchlist procedure, the record strongly suggests that,

despite numerous related contacts with the FBI during the period, no one at CIA advised

the FBI about al-Mihdhar’s U.S. visa and the fact that al-Hazmi had traveled to the

United States. Ironically, this occurred despite the fact that both CIA and FBI personnel

were at the time working in CTC where the information was received. The CIA

employee who briefed FBI personnel about al-Mihdhar on January 6, 2000, but did not

mention any information about al-Mihdhar’s visa and potential travel to the United

States, indicated in an e-mail to a colleague at CIA that same day: "In case FBI starts to

complain later . . . below is exactly what I briefed them on." This CIA employee told the

Joint Inquiry that he had, at the time, been assigned to work at the FBI Strategic

Information Operations Center specifically to fix problems "in communicating between

the CIA and the FBI." Obviously, such problems remained.

The Joint Inquiry also heard from many different agencies within the Intelligence

Community, most notably the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), that the perception

that collecting agencies have "ownership" of the intelligence they acquire impedes the

free flow of information. In a Joint Inquiry interview, one DIA official complained that

analysts were often denied access to critical intelligence held in other Intelligence

Community agencies:

We have to get raw data to the analysts. The analysts have been separated

from source-generated data that is important. There is excessive, filtering,

packaging and selective product reporting that is not helpful. Some

problems are so important that the U.S. Government cannot afford any

longer to filter.

In his testimony, the DCI confirmed that this filtering will continue when he noted

that even all-source analysts within the new Department of Homeland Security will not

have access to all raw intelligence on anything like a routine basis. This tendency to

ownership, in its simplest form, means that the originating agency is free to edit and

otherwise truncate the information it collects before it disseminates it to other agencies.

On the other hand, analysts frequently argued that, in the world of counterterrorism, there

is information in this filtered data that the collecting agency may not recognize as having

Community agencies, but did not always have access to the background information

necessary to understand the nature of the threat reporting fully. A senior DIA analytical

official testified that:

Senior [Defense Department] officials received information that his

analysts did not receive. However, to extract meaning from that data, to

perform the true analytic function, we need to get that information into the

hands and the brains of analysts who are paid to fill in the gaps of missing

information to compensate for absent evidence and to turn information

into knowledge. That’s what we pay them to do. They don’t have the

information, they can’t do that.

In a written statement to the Joint Inquiry, the new Director of the DIA noted: " In

my opinion, one of the most prolonged and troubling trends in the Intelligence

Community is the degree to which analysts — while being expected to incorporate the full

range of source information into their assessments — have been systematically separated

from the raw material of their trade. "

Information sharing is also limited by the longstanding Intelligence Community

practices of narrowly limiting disclosures of intelligence information outside normal

channels in order to protect sources and methods. Disclosures to criminal investigators

and prosecutors were intentionally limited to avoid having intelligence become entangled

in criminal prosecutions. In deference to those kinds of restrictions, CIA did not provide

the FBI New York field office criminal agents who were investigating the USS Cole

bombing information regarding the al-Qa’ida meeting in Malaysia that was attended by

hijackers-to-be al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar.

A 1995 Department of Justice policy that established procedures -- often referred

to as the "wall" -- governing FBI sharing of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

(FISA)-derived intelligence information with investigators handling parallel criminal

investigations also prevented sharing of important intelligence. Under this policy, the

FBI could share information from FISA surveillances with criminal investigators if the

information was relevant to a crime under investigation and an attorney in an FBI field

office or in the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) at the Department of

that the Court itself act as the "wall" and determine whether the information in question

was relevant to a criminal investigation and, thus, could be shared.

Unfortunately, the Inquiry confirmed that the Intelligence Community agencies,

perhaps overly "risk averse" in dealing with FISA-related matters, restricted the use of

information far beyond what was required. The majority of FBI personnel interviewed in

the course of the Inquiry incorrectly believed that the FBI could not share FISA-derived

information with criminal investigators at all or that an impossibly high standard had to

be met before the information could be shared. Most did not know that FISA-derived

information could be shared with criminal investigators if it was simply relevant to the

criminal investigation. Because of these misunderstandings, FBI intelligence

investigators rarely sought approval to pass FISA-derived information to FBI criminal

investigators.

Further, as a result of the FISA Court decision, NSA placed a caveat on all its [

] terrorism intelligence products requiring OIPR approval before information

could be shared with criminal investigators. This stemmed from NSA’s concern that it

could not determine which of its intelligence reports were the result of information

obtained through FBI-conducted FISA surveillances (and therefore subject to the "wall"

requirements) and which were not. The effect of this NSA effort to comply with the

FISA Court’s decision was an unnecessary restriction on the sharing of NSA-acquired

intelligence information with criminal investigators.

In August 2001, when the FBI was attempting to locate al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar

in the United States, an FBI Headquarters e-mail prohibited New York field office

criminal agents from participating in the search because the information had originated in

intelligence channels. However, because this information was not derived from a FISA

surveillance, there was no reason it could not be shared with FBI criminal agents.

Expressing his utter frustration with the system, a New York FBI agent responded by email:

[page 89]

Whatever has happened to this - someday someone will die — and wall or

not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and

throwing every resource we had at certain "problems." Let’s hope the

[FBI’s] National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then,

especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL, is getting the most

"protection."

Discussion: This Inquiry confirmed that, prior to September 11, problems in

information sharing reached beyond the boundaries of the Intelligence Community to

encumber the flow of information to and from various other entities. At each level,

communications with potentially valuable partners in the war against terrorism — other

federal agencies, state and local authorities -- were restricted. Witnesses testified that

these restrictions on information flow occurred at great cost to the counterterrorism

effort.

Officials in the Departments of Treasury, Transportation, and State told the Joint

Inquiry that, although they receive threat information from the Intelligence Community,

they do not always receive the information that adds context to the threat warnings. In

many instances, officials told the Joint Inquiry, this lack of context prevents them from

properly estimating the value of the threat information and taking preventive actions.

The Joint Inquiry was also told that not all threat information in the possession of the

Intelligence Community is shared with non-Intelligence Community entities that need it

the most in order to counter the threats.

For example, DCI Tenet testified that: "The documents we’ve provided show

some 12 reports spread over seven years which pertain to possible use of aircraft as

terrorist weapons. We disseminated those reports to the appropriate agencies, such as the

Subsequently, the Transportation Security Intelligence Service (TSIS) -- which formerly

was the Intelligence Office at FAA -- researched the 12 reports mentioned by DCI Tenet

to determine what actions had been taken as a result. TSIS reported to the Joint Inquiry

that it had no record of having received three of those reports, two others had been

derived from State Department cables, and one report was not received at all by FAA

until after September 11, 2001. A TSIS official also testified that, despite its clear

relevance to civil aviation, the FAA was not provided a copy of the FBI's July 1, 2001

Phoenix communication until its existence was made known to officials there by the Joint

Inquiry in early 2002.

In a similar vein, the FAA had certain intelligence information in its possession

prior to September 11 regarding the terrorist who was apprehended on his way from

Canada to the Los Angeles Airport at the time of the Millennium. It also had conducted a

detailed analysis of the bomb materials that were seized with him, and connected them to

the Bojinka Plot to blow up commercial airliners over the Pacific that had been

discovered in the Philippines in 1995. In testimony to the Joint Inquiry, a TSIS official

indicated uncertainty regarding whether or not these findings had been formally

communicated to the CIA.

The CIA and NSA had sufficient information available concerning future

hijackers al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi to connect them to Usama Bin Ladin, the East Africa

embassy bombings, and the USS Cole attack by late 2000, and there were at least three

different occasions when these individuals should have been placed on the State

Department’s TIPOFF watchlist and the INS and Customs watchlists. Nonetheless, this

was not done, nor was the FBI notified of their potential presence in the United States

until late August 2001.

The CIA also did not provide the Department of State with almost 1500 terrorismrelated

intelligence reports until shortly after September 11, 2001. These reports led to

the addition of almost 60 names of terrorist suspects to the State watchlist. Also, due to a

personnel before September 11, this information was not provided to the watchlists at

INS, and Customs. Intelligence officers at the Departments of Energy and Transportation

also did not have access to FBI data, CIA reports, and names on the watchlists.

The FBI did not advise the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service of

the reasons for its inquiries regarding al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi’s visa information in

August 2001 when it was engaged in efforts to find the two individuals in the United

States. Neither was INS asked by the FBI to use means available to it, including a search

of the Law Enforcement Support Center’s database, to locate al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi

when the FBI was looking for them in the United States in August 2001. INS and FAA

officials who testified at the Joint Inquiry’s October 1, 2002 hearing asserted that their

agencies might have been able to assist the FBI in locating the two if the FBI had told

them of the purpose and importance of the search.

Officials from the Departments of Transportation, State, Energy, Defense, and

Treasury stated to the Joint Inquiry that, unless information is shared by the Intelligence

Community on a timely basis, they are unable to include dangerous individuals on

various watchlists to either deny them entry into the United States or apprehend them in

the United States. The Transportation Security Administration Assistant Under Secretary

of Intelligence testified that, had he received the July 2001 FBI Phoenix field office

agent’s Electronic Communication, for example, he would have "…started to ask a lot

more probing questions of the FBI as to what this was all about…what connections these

people may have had to flight schools, by going back to the Airmen Registry in

Oklahoma City that is maintained by the FAA to try to identify additional people."

The INS also was not privy to the presence of two known terrorists inside the

United States. The INS Deputy Executive Associate Commissioner testified to the Joint

Inquiry hearing on October 1, 2002 that "there is a likelihood" that INS agents would

have been able to stop al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001. The INS Law

Enforcement Support Center (LESC) has been in operation for more than ten years. It is

seven-day per week basis. The LESC reportedly can provide information in about seven

minutes on the legal status of individuals in the United States.

In their testimony before the Joint Inquiry hearing, state and local government

witnesses were adamant about the necessity of the intelligence and law enforcement

agencies sharing terrorist information with state and local authorities. Former Virginia

Governor James Gilmore stated that, in his entire four-year term, he never received any

intelligence or law enforcement information regarding terrorists. Governor Gilmore also

testified that:

. . . to the extent that there has been intelligence sharing, it has been ad

hoc. It has been without a real systematic approach. And what would you

expect. With the Intelligence Comnunity, it is not within the culture if not

within the statute that you don't share information. If you do, you are even

subject to criminal penalties not to mention the danger of sharing

information and to the danger of people who provide it. And the capacities

of the United States in order to gather it.

In addition, he explained that he was not even given a security clearance while he was

Governor that would have allowed him to be briefed on possible terrorist plots.

The Police Commissioner of Baltimore stated at the same hearing that he does not

receive intelligence information about suspected terrorists living in his jurisdiction even

though some may have been associated with the September 11 hijackers. He also cited

the fact that there are 650,000 law enforcement officers nationwide and they should be

viewed by the federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies as force-multipliers.

However, this can only happen if information flows in both directions. The Police

Commissioner also testified that, domestically, the local police force is the "biggest

collector" of information, not the federal government. To illustrate his point that

information must flow in both directions, he added, "we can tell when people move from

one cave to another in Afghanistan, but we can’t tell when they move from one row

house to another in Baltimore."

By contrast, former FBI Director Louis Freeh testified that information sharing

with federal, state and local authorities was a priority for the FBI. In his Joint Inquiry

We doubled and tripled the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces

[JTTFs] around the United States so we could multiply our forces and

coordinate intelligence and counterterrorism operations with the FBI's

federal, state, and local law enforcement partners. Thirty-four of these

JTTFs were in operation by 2001. . . . We were also tasked to set up the

National Domestic Preparedness Office to counter terrorist threats and to

enhance homeland security.

Mr. Freeh added that counterterrorism was such a high priority that the FBI instituted a

national threat warning system in order to disseminate terrorism related information to

state and local authorities around the country and organized national, regional and local

practice exercises to help the country prepare for terrorist attacks.

Further, FBI Director Mueller explained in his October 17, 2002 testimony before

the Joint Inquiry the changes that had been made in this regard by the FBI since

September 11, and added that:

As a result of these initiatives and despite some of the testimony that this

[Inquiry] has heard, we have received numerous letters of support and

gratitude from state and local officials and most particularly from the

International Association of Chiefs of Police [IACP]. . . . Our agents must

work closely with our local and state law enforcement partners. . . . I don't

believe that [the testimony of the Baltimore Police Commissioner] is

representative of the feeling in the field. Does his testimony surprise me? I

would say probably not. But I will tell you every time that I have . . .

.seen, either publicly or in testimony before this committee or another

committee, that there is a police chief who is not getting what he or she

wants, I have called, picked up the phone and called them to try to address

those concerns.

. . . .

[A] letter from William Berger, the President of the IACP. . . . praises us

for the changes we have made to address this particular problem. I will

just read one paragraph:

It is my belief that the steps you have taken have been very

responsive to these concerns and clearly demonstrate the FBI's

commitment to enhancing its relationship with State and local law

enforcement in improving our ability to combat not only terrorism,

but all crime.

I was at the IACP two weeks ago. I talked to the hierarchy, and I believe

that they are supportive. There are isolated individuals throughout the

United States who do not believe we are doing enough, and there are areas

where we still have a ways to go, getting clearances for chiefs of police,

up. We have a number of [JTTFs] that are working exceptionally well

around the country. I think if you went to 9 or 10, or 99 out of 100, or 55

out of 56 you will find that State and local police are very supportive of

the relationship. There will always be one, there will always be two, and

we try to address them as we come along.

Following the events of September 11, 2001, the IACP President did indeed write

to FBI Director Mueller to express his appreciation for the steps the FBI has taken,

including the creation of the State and Local Law Enforcement Advisory Panel and the

Office of Law Enforcement Coordination. Subsequently, however, the IACP President

was quoted on September 19, 2002 that:

[Federal communications with state and local police] didn’t work

again…Most local police in New England were informed by the FBI

office in that area…about an hour before the public, but police in other

regions didn’t know about the change until Attorney General John

Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge announced it at a

press conference.

The Inquiry found that the FBI’s establishment of JTTFs in many FBI field

offices had begun to correct some information sharing problems by encouraging

coordination between federal, state, and local agencies prior to September 11. These

efforts did result in some successes. For example, in the Moussaoui investigation, the

INS representative on the Minneapolis JTTF was able to use the INS database to

determine Moussaoui’s immigration status quickly. The INS and FBI representatives

then approached Moussaoui together and he was taken into INS custody at an INS facility

and questioned by the FBI.

However, a variety of shortcomings in the JTTF program limited its effectiveness

prior to September 11. First, not all of the FBI field office had JTTFs. Further, some of

the JTTFs were hampered by a lack of analytic personnel, limited participation by local

law enforcement organizations, incomplete access to information by some of the

participants, and the absence of CIA detailees.

Prior to September 11, only 35 FBI field offices had JTTFs and only six JTTFs

a copy of the July 2001 Phoenix communication until well after September 11. The

Gilmore Advisory Panel reported anecdotal evidence suggesting that the JTTF and other

similar efforts, while well intentioned, continue to be confusing, duplicative, non-routine,

and bifurcated in both structure and implementation.

Discussion: The U.S. Intelligence Community was not able to penetrate al-

Qa’ida’s inner circle successfully before September 11, despite the fact that human

penetration of that organization was considered a priority. Richard Clarke, the former

National Counterterrorism Coordinator, described the problem as well as the impact that

it had on policymakers:

[It was not until 1999 that the Counterterrorism Center began to have

some success in developing penetrations of al-Qa’ida. A new Director. .

.took over the Counterterrorism Center and was instructed by George

Tenet to get human penetrations of al-Qa’ida, and they did have some

success in the succeeding years, although none of them very high level.

. . . .

. . . . [

] never had anyone in

position to tell us what was going to happen in advance, or even where

Bin Ladin was going to be in advance [

] we never knew where

he was going to be in advance, And usually we were only informed about

where they were able to tell us where they thought he was at the moment,

[ ] the CIA itself recommended against

action, because they said their sources were not very good, or not good

enough to recommend military action].

[Page 96]

Former Director Louis Freeh emphasized the critical difference that human

sources and adequate "infiltration" of terrorist organizations could have made in the

context of the September 11 attacks:

If one of those 19 hijackers had spoken — maybe they did, maybe we don’t

know about it yet — incautiously or imprudently to someone in some place

where that information could have been captured, we could have had a day

possibilities there. So, infiltration. We need to have our agents sitting

around wherever they were sitting around in Hamburg and the U.A.E. and

other places, as well as in the caves over in Afghanistan so we can know

what is going on.

[Lacking access to senior, high level al-Qa’ida leadership, the Community relied on

secondhand, fragmented and often questionable human intelligence information, a great

deal of which was obtained from volunteers or sources obtained through the efforts of

foreign liaison].

[According to senior CTC officials, CIA had no penetrations of al-Qa’ida’s

leadership and never obtained intelligence that was sufficient for action against Usama

Bin Ladin from anyone. A large number of current and former CTC officers indicated

that CTC had numerous unilateral sources outside the leadership who were reporting on

al-Qa’ida, and a larger number who were being developed for recruitment, prior to

September 11. The best source was handled jointly by CIA and the FBI. In addition,

CIA managed a network of [ ] in Afghanistan that often reported

information regarding Bin Ladin issues and relations with the Taliban. They occasionally

[Especially after the East Africa U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, CIA also tried

many avenues in an effort to obtain access to Bin Ladin and his inner circle. [

]

]. Despite

these creative attempts, according to former senior officials of CTC, CIA had no

penetrations of al-Qa’ida’s leadership, and the Agency never acquired intelligence from

anyone that could be acted upon, prior to September 11].

[Numerous sources were being handled by foreign intelligence services. Most

disruptions of al-Qa’ida activities abroad before September 11 were the result of joint

] meant that very little counterterrorism intelligence was obtained by

CIA in some parts of the world [ ].

[There was a surge in volunteer sources after the 1998 East African embassy

bombings, another surge on the anniversary of those bombings in 1999, and a third after

the December 1999 disruption of the Jordanian Millennium plot. [

]. One of these was very good and provided information that was used to

thwart attacks on U.S. interests in Europe. Several of these volunteers continue to act as

CIA sources. [

]. The

negative considerations were that most volunteer information was considered bogus by

CTC, some volunteers were suspected of being al-Qa’ida provocations, and some were

believed to have cooperated with terrorist groups].

The inability to develop reliable human sources effectively stemmed, in part, from

the difficult nature of the target. Members of Usama Bin Ladin’s inner circle have close

Information about major terrorist plots was not widely shared within al-Qa’ida, and many

of Bin Ladin’s closest associates lived in war-torn Afghanistan. The United States had no

official presence in that country and did not formally recognize the Taliban regime,

which viewed foreigners with suspicion. Pakistan is the principal access point to

southern Afghanistan, where al-Qa’ida was particularly active, but U.S.-Pakistani

relations were strained by Pakistani nuclear tests in 1998 and a military coup in 1999.

While attempts to penetrate al-Qa’ida cells outside Afghanistan may have

presented fewer obstacles, other factors limited CIA efforts to do so. [

]. This meant as a practical matter that CIA did not focus as

heavily as would otherwise have been the case on recruiting human sources of

counterterrorism intelligence in other locations such as [ ].

CTC personnel said they did not view guidelines issued by former DCI John

Deutch in 1996 concerning CIA recruitment of human sources with poor human rights

records as an impediment to the pursuit of terrorist recruitments in al-Qa’ida, and none of

the CTC officers interviewed by the Joint Inquiry attributed the lack of penetration of the

al-Qa’ida inner circle to the Deutch guidelines. In fact, the effort to recruit such

penetrations became increasingly aggressive with respect to Bin Ladin's network

beginning in 1999. These responses should be balanced against the examination of the

effect of the Deutch guidelines that was conducted by the House Permanent Select

Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security.

. . . Many CIA managers at headquarters posited that the guidelines did not

present a problem and that no extra labor [was] required on the part of

field officers as a result of the guidelines. Many others, including CIA

officers in the field who brought their concerns to the attention of HPSCI

members and staff, had a different view . . . . Their concerns were not that

waivers were denied, but that they were not career enhancing and that the

process by which requests were brought forward was cumbersome and

resulted in disincentive to work to recruit anyone who might have been

involved in proscribed acts. . . .

Prior to September 11, the FBI also attempted, but with only limited success, to

develop human sources regarding the activities of al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups

within the United States. Again, the difficult nature of the target, as well as FBI and

Department of Justice policies and practices, may have hampered the FBI’s coverage of

the radical fundamentalist community in this country.

Recruiting sources in fundamentalist communities within the United States may

have been more difficult than such recruitments abroad. The FBI advised the Joint

Inquiry that, for example, only 21 FBI agents possess the Arabic language skills that

would be expected to be important in pursuing such recruitments.

However, even those FBI agents who were skilled at developing such sources

faced a number of difficulties that may have hampered the FBI’s ability to gather

intelligence on terrorist activities in the United States. According to several FBI agents,

for example, FBI Headquarters and field managers were often unwilling to approve

potentially controversial activity involving human sources who were in a position to

provide counterterrorism intelligence. The 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death

Penalty Act specifically outlawed providing material support to terrorism. If an FBI

source was involved in illegal funding or in terrorist training, the agent responsible for

the source had to obtain approval from FBI Headquarters and the Department of Justice

to allow the source to engage in the illegal activity. According to FBI personnel, this was

a difficult process that sometimes took as long as six months. Because terrorist sources

frequently engaged in activity that violated the 1996 Act, the cumbersome approval

process often discouraged aggressive recruitment of these sources in the field.

[page 100]

FBI agents also cited to the Joint Inquiry the requirement for prior DCI approval

of FBI source travel abroad as a roadblock to sending sources overseas for operational

purposes. Several FBI agents expressed the opinion to the Joint Inquiry that the CIA took

advantage of this requirement to prevent FBI sources from operating overseas. Another

FBI agent complained that FBI Headquarters management did not readily approve

overseas travel for sources because of its belief that the FBI should focus on activity

within the United States. When FBI management did approve overseas travel for assets,

it often declined to allow the responsible agents to accompany the sources during such

travel. These decisions, according to FBI agents in Joint Inquiry interviews, significantly

diminished the quality of the operations

The FBI also apparently did not use those counterterrorism sources that had been

identified in the most effective and coordinated manner. The FBI generally focused

source reporting on cases and subjects within the jurisdiction of specific field offices and

did not adequately use sources to support a national counterterrorism intelligence

program. For example, the FBI received intelligence in 1999 that a terrorist organization

was planning to send students to the United States for aviation training. While an

operational unit at FBI Headquarters instructed twenty-four field offices to "task sources"

for information, it appears that no FBI sources were in fact asked about the matter.

In addition, when the Phoenix FBI agent reported to FBI Headquarters in July

2001 his concern that Middle Eastern students were coming to the United States for civil

aviation-related training, there was no effort by either FBI Headquarters or the field

office that was advised of his concern by FBI Headquarters to task counterterrorism

sources for any relevant information. Similarly, when Minneapolis FBI field office

agents detained Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001, they were concerned that he might

be part of a larger conspiracy. Nonetheless, neither the Minneapolis field office nor FBI

Headquarters asked any FBI sources whether they knew anything about Moussaoui or the

existence of any larger plot.

[Page 101]

[Finally, in August 2001, the FBI learned from the CIA that terrorist suspects

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were in the United States. Neither the FBI field

offices that were involved in the search nor FBI Headquarters thought to ask FBI field

offices to ask their sources whether they were aware of the whereabouts of the two

individuals, who later took part in the September 11 attacks. As one result, the San

Diego counterterrorism informant who had numerous contacts with those two individuals

during 2000 was never asked to help the FBI locate them in the last weeks before

September 11].

Discussion: In the summer of 2000, during preparation for the trial in New York

of those involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, prosecutors

discovered factual errors in applications for FISA orders sanctioning electronic

surveillance. The FISA Court found that these errors included an erroneous statement

that a FISA target was not under criminal investigation, erroneous statements concerning

overlapping intelligence and criminal investigations, and unauthorized sharing of FISA

information with criminal investigators and prosecutors.

The FISA Court also determined that these errors called into question the

certifications that had been made by senior officials that the FISA surveillances requested

by the applications had as their purpose the gathering of foreign intelligence, rather than

criminal-related information, as required by FISA. After being informed of additional

errors in subsequent months, the FISA Court barred an FBI agent who had prepared one

of the erroneous applications from appearing before the Court again.

The FBI and the Department of Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review

(OIPR) began a systematic review of the FISA application process in September 2000 to

al-Qa’ida agents were allowed to expire while OIPR and the FBI investigated how the

errors had occurred. These orders were not renewed until after the attack on USS Cole in

October 2000. In April 2001, the Bureau promulgated procedures for the review of draft

FISA declarations and the submission of FISA applications to the Court. OIPR also

revised the standard al-Qa’ida FISA application to reduce the amount of extraneous

information that was required and that increased the likelihood of factual errors.

During this process, many FISA surveillances of suspected al-Qa’ida agents

expired because the FBI and OIPR were not willing to apply for application renewals

when they were not completely confident of their accuracy. Most of the FISA orders

targeting al-Qa’ida that expired after March 2001 were not renewed before September 11.

The Joint Inquiry received inconsistent figures regarding the specific number of FISA

orders that were allowed to expire during the summer of 2001. One FBI manager stated

that no FISA orders targeted against al-Qa’ida existed in 2001, others interviewed said

there were up to [ ] al-Qa’ida orders at that time, and an OIPR official explained that

approximately two-thirds of the number of FISA orders targeted against al-Qa’ida had

expired in 2001.

Several organizations played a role in the breakdown of the FISA process in the

year before the September 11 attacks. According to FBI personnel, OIPR and the FISA

Court erred by requiring much extraneous information in FISA applications, thus

increasing the likelihood of mistakes. Bureau agents frequently could not or did not

verify the accuracy of information in the FISA applications. The FISA Court’s order

prohibiting an FBI agent from appearing before the Court also apparently had a chilling

effect on FBI agents, and they became increasingly unwilling to confirm the veracity of

FISA applications.

[page 103]

Discussion: [During his tenure, President Clinton signed documents authorizing

CIA covert action against Usama Bin Ladin and his principal lieutenants. [

].

[

]:

• [

].

• [

].

[

testified to the Joint Inquiry on September 19, 2002 that, from the time of the East Africa

U. S. Embassy bombings in 1998, the U. S. Government was:

. . . embarked [on] an very intense effort to get Bin Ladin, to get his

lieutenants, through both overt and covert means. . . . We were involved —

at that point, our intense focus was to get Bin Ladin, to get his key

lieutenants. The President conferred a number of authorities on the

Intelligence Community for that purpose.

Senator Shelby: By "get him," that meant kill him if you had to, capture

him or kill him?

Mr. Berger: I don’t know what I can say in this hearing, but capture and

kill. . . . There was no question that the cruise missiles were not trying to

capture him. They were not law enforcement techniques. . . ."]

[

].

[

]." As former National Security Advisor

Berger noted in his Joint Inquiry interview, "We do not have a rogue CIA."

[

]."

In his June 11, 2002 briefing to the Joint Inquiry, Mr. Clarke reiterated this point

I think if you look at the 1980s and 1970s, the individuals who held the

job of [DDO], one after another of them was either fired or indicted or

condemned by a Senate committee. I think under those circumstances, if

you become Director of Operations, you would want to be a little careful

not to launch off on covert operations that will get you personally in

trouble and will also hurt the institution. The history of covert operations

in the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s was not a happy one, and I think that

lesson got over-learned by people who at the time were probably in their

twenties and thirties, but by the time they became in their fifties, and they

were managers in the [Directorate of Operations], I think that they

institutionalized a sense of covert action is risky and is likely to blow up in

your face. And the wise guys at the White House who are pushing you to

do covert action will be nowhere to be found when the Senate Select

Committee on Intelligence calls you up to explain the mess that the covert

action became.

Mr. Clarke went on to say: "I think it is changed because of 9/11. I think it is changed

because George Tenet has been pushing them to change it."

In a July 26, 2002 Joint Inquiry interview, a former Chief of CTC made a similar

point when he implicitly acknowledged that he pushed whenever possible for clarity in

the covert action authorities [

]."

The policy makers’ reluctance [ ] limited the scope of

]."

[

]:

[

].

In any event, the differing perceptions about the scope of the authorizations

shaped the types of covert action the CIA was willing to direct against Bin Ladin prior to

September 11, 2001 and, therefore, its ultimate effectiveness. [

].

[

].

The CIA’s actual efforts to carry out covert action against Bin Ladin in

Afghanistan prior to September 11, 2001 were limited and do not appear to have

significantly hindered al-Qa’ida’s ability to operate. [ ]:

• [

];

• [

];"

• [

];

• [

];"

[Page 108]

• [

];

• [

]; and,

• [

].

Many of these efforts were key elements in "the Plan" — initially developed in

1999 and subsequently modified -- that the DCI described in his testimony before the

Joint Inquiry on October 17, 2002. "The Plan" did not, however, feature elements

commonly associated with war plans or contingency plans, such as a mission statement,

strategic goals or objectives, a statement of commander’s intent, a delineation of the

resources that would be required or are available for the operation, or the measures by

which operational success might be measured. Although a covert action plan might not

be expected to contain all of the elements of a war plan, the absence of all these elements

suggests an absence of rigor in the planning process.

[

]

].

The Joint Inquiry heard testimony on September 12 and September 19, 2002 that,

between March 2001 and September 2001, the Bush Administration was engaged in a

review of counterterrorism policy.

].

[

]. [Deputy Secretary of State Armitage testified that the Bush

Administration was considering, among other things, "increased authorities for the

Central Intelligence Agency" in the summer of 2001 and was close to final agreement on

a more aggressive strategy against Bin Ladin and his followers by September 11, 2001:

The National Security Council . . . called for new proposals [in March

2001] on a strategy that would be more aggressive against al-Qa’ida. The

first deputies meeting, which is the first decision making body in the

to include financing, getting at financing, to get at increased authorities for

the Central Intelligence Agency, sharp end things that the military was

asked to do. . . . So, from March through about August, we were preparing

a national security Presidential directive, and it was distributed on August

13 to the principals for their final comments. And then, of course, we had

the events of September 11. . . .]

Discussion: National Security Council officials, CIA officers in the CTC, and

senior U.S. military officers differ regarding the U.S. military’s willingness to conduct

operations against Usama Bin Ladin prior to September 11, 2001. In general, however,

military play a major role in offensive counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan prior to

September 11:

• In his June 11, 2002 remarks, former National Coordinator for Counterterrorism

Richard Clarke said, "the overwhelming message to the White House from the

uniformed military leadership was ‘we don’t want to do this,’ [

]. Later in that same briefing, he said: "The

military repeatedly came back with recommendations that their capability not be

utilized [ ] in Afghanistan."

• In a written response to the Joint Inquiry, former National Security Advisor Sandy

Berger said:

President Clinton’s top military advisers examined [military options].

They advised us that there would be a low probability of success for such

operations in Afghanistan (before 9/11 when we did not have the

cooperation of Pakistan and other bordering nations) in the absence of

substantial lead-time actionable intelligence (i.e., specific advanced

knowledge of where bin Ladin would be at a specific time and place).

There were many obstacles to deploying ground troops into Afghanistan

from staging areas at some distance, including a serious possibility of

detection, difficulty of basing back-up forces nearby and logistical

difficulties.

• Interviews of officials at the CTC and a review of CTC documents support the

finding that the military did not seek an active role in offensive counterterrorism

operations. For example,

]." In the CTC’s view,

although there was "lots of desire at the working level," there was "reluctance at

the political level," and it was "unlikely that JSOC will ever deploy under current

circumstances."

[Page 111]

• On September 12, 2002, a former Chief of CTC said: "You know, [the U.S.

military] — they have their own views on their willingness to take casualties and

take risky operations… For them to go, they are more exacting in their

requirements, in terms of intelligence certainly, before they engage."

• Another former Chief of CTC testified:

Actually it was discussed… turning the ball over to [the military], but

having them do it themselves. They declined, as I recall, as best I recall,

because they lacked the covert action authorities to work in that

environment. Since there wasn’t an official declaration of war, there

wasn’t fighting, they didn’t think they had the authorities to go in and do it

themselves. They were willing to help… but they couldn’t put boots on

the ground themselves.

• The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that the U.S. military

primarily thought about the threat posed by Usama Bin Ladin's network in terms

of protecting U.S. forces deployed overseas from terrorist attack. He also stated

his belief that the CIA and FBI should have the lead roles in countering terrorism,

and that military tools should be viewed as an extension and supplement to the

leading roles played by the CIA and FBI. In discussing offensive

counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan, the former Chairman cited the lack of

actionable intelligence, noting "Look at the risk associated with swooping in."

With regard to using U.S. military forces in clandestine operations, the former

Chairman said: "you don’t put U.S. armed forces in another country if the

President doesn’t declare war, unless you declare war on the Taliban." He said he

never received a tasker to put boots on the ground to obtain actionable

intelligence, noting "the military does what it is told to do."

• The Joint Chief of Staff’s Director of Operations indicated that options developed

by the military for the White House in 2000 were in part aimed at "educating" the

National Security Advisor on the complexities of operations in Afghanistan

involving "U.S. boots on the ground."

[Page 112]

In Joint Inquiry interviews, senior and retired U.S. military officers cited the lack

of precise, actionable intelligence as a primary obstacle to the military conducting its own

for example: ". . . you can develop military operations until hell freezes over, but they are

worthless without intelligence."

However, according to CIA officers in the CTC who testified before the Joint

Inquiry on September 12, 2002, the U.S. military often levied so many requirements for

highly detailed, actionable intelligence prior to conducting an operation — far beyond

what the Intelligence Community was ever likely to obtain — that U.S. military units were

effectively precluded from conducting operations against Bin Ladin’s organization on the

ground in Afghanistan or elsewhere prior to September 11. A former Chief of CTC's

special Bin Ladin unit said:

[the military's] requirements, before they operate, are absolutely

impossible for us to collect in most instances. [

]. And the requirements they sent us included items

like, which side of the door are the hinges on, do the windows

open out or go up and down. And it is just not the kind of

intelligence we can provide on anything resembling a regular basis.

The Department of Defense did ask the Defense HUMINT [Human Intelligence]

Service to determine whether it could obtain information regarding Bin Ladin’s

whereabouts. However, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff indicated that

the U.S. military did not undertake any independent efforts, utilizing U.S. military forces,

to determine Bin Ladin’s location.

Lower-level military officers appeared to be more enthusiastic than senior

military officials about active military participation in counterterrorism efforts. Senior

CIA officers, CIA documents, and at least one former special operations forces

were both capable and interested in conducting a special operations mission against Bin

Ladin in Afghanistan prior to September 11. A former JSOC commander told the Joint

Inquiry that his units did have the ability to put small teams into Afghanistan. A CIA

document commenting on the prospects of Joint Special Operations Command units

participating in an operation to capture Bin Ladin said: "lots of desire at the [military]

working level," but there was "reluctance at the political level."

Despite senior officers’ reluctance to play a major role, military personnel and

assets did contribute to several counterterrorism efforts in addition to force protection.

The Joint Inquiry has identified [ ] major types of military participation in, or

support for, operations to counter Usama Bin Ladin’s terrorist network prior to

September 11:

• On August 20, 1998, following the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East

Africa, the U.S. military, acting on President Clinton’s orders, launched cruise

missiles at Usama Bin Ladin-related targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. One of

the objectives of those strikes was to kill Usama Bin Ladin. As former National

Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified: "we [were] trying to kill Bin Ladin, we

dropped cruise missiles on him;"

• Between 1999 and 2001, the U.S. military positioned a number of Navy ships and

submarines armed with cruise missiles in the North Arabian Sea to launch

additional cruise missile strikes at Bin Ladin in the event the Intelligence

Community was able to obtain precise information on his whereabouts in

Afghanistan; and

• [In 2000 and 2001, the Joint Staff and U.S. Air Force provided technical

Afghanistan. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger told the Joint

Inquiry that:

The Clinton Administration was engaged in an active strategy against Bin

Ladin and was continuously examining new initiatives for defeating Bin

Ladin and al-Qa’ida, given what was known and the allies available at the

time. For example, in 2000, we developed the Predator program, which

was successfully tested in late 2000 and was available to be

operationalized as a critical intelligence platform to confirm intelligence

on his whereabouts when the weather cleared in the Spring of 2001].

In general, however, the CIA and U.S. military did not engage in joint operations,

pool their assets, or develop joint plans against Usama Bin Ladin in Afghanistan prior to

September 11, 2001 — despite interest in such joint operations at the CIA. Commenting

on the idea of the CIA and U.S. military engaging in joint operations, a former Chief of

CTC testified:

I think it is absolutely great [idea]. This is something we have been

advocating for a long time. If you want to go to war, you take the CIA, its

clandestinity, its authorities, and you match it up with special operations

forces of the U.S. military, you can really — you can really do some

damage.… This is something that we have tried to advocate at the

working level, and we haven’t made much progress. But, if this is

something that [the Congress] would like to look into, it would be great

for the United States.

Similarly, a former Chief of CTC's special Bin Ladin unit said: "As someone who

served [ ] and worked with special forces, they want to work with us and we want

to work with them. History was made between the CIA and special forces. We need to

do that." However, the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff told the Joint

Inquiry that he did not believe in joint operations with the CIA. He said, "I want to make

sure the military piece of the plan is under military control, and not predicated on the

CIA’s piece being successful."

[Page 115]

Discussion: [In the mid-1990s, CIA counterterrorism officials decided that

unilateral operations alone were of limited value in penetrating al-Qa’ida and that foreign

liaison services could serve as a force multiplier. Foreign intelligence and security

services often had excellent local knowledge and capabilities; [

]. Therefore, CIA, FBI, NSA, and other Intelligence Community

agencies strengthened their liaison relationships with existing foreign partners and forged

new relationships to fight al-Qa’ida and other radical groups. For example, the CIA [

]. The FBI expanded its Legal

Attache (Legat) program].

[Despite those efforts, many weaknesses in foreign liaison relationships were

apparent before the September 11 attacks. These weaknesses limited the amount and

quality of the counterterrorism intelligence received as a result of those relationships. For

example, individuals in some liaison services organization are believed to have

cooperated with terrorist groups].

[Regarding Saudi Arabia, former FBI Director Louis Freeh testified that,

following the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, the FBI "was able to forge an effective

working relationship with the Saudi police and Interior Ministry." A considerable

amount of personal effort by Director Freeh helped to secure what he described as

"unprecedented and invaluable" assistance in the Khobar Towers bombing investigation

from the Saudi Ambassador to the United States and the Saudi Interior Minister. By

contrast, the Committees heard testimony from U.S. Government personnel that Saudi

officials had been uncooperative and often did not act on information implicating Saudi

nationals].

[Page 116]

[According to a U. S. Government official, it was clear from about 1996 that the

Saudi Government would not cooperate with the United States on matters relating to

Usama Bin Ladin. [

], reemphasized the lack of Saudi cooperation and stated that there was

little prospect of future cooperation regarding Bin Ladin. [

] told the Joint Inquiry that he believed the U.S. Government’s hope of eventually

obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance to the U.S.

Government on this matter is contrary to Saudi national interests].

[A U. S. Government official testified to the Joint Inquiry on this issue [

] as follows:

[

]….[F]or the most part it was a very troubled relationship where

the Saudis were not providing us quickly or very vigorously with response

to it. Sometimes they did, many times they didn’t. It was just very slow

in coming.

The Treasury Department General Counsel testified at the July 23, 2002 hearing

about the lack of Saudi cooperation:

There is an almost intuitive sense, however, that things are not being

volunteered. So I want to fully inform you about it, that we have to ask

and we have to seek and we have to strive. I will give you one-and-a-half

examples. The first is, after some period, the Saudis have agreed to the

designation of a man named Julaydin, who is notoriously involved in all of

this; and his designation will be public within the next 10 days. They

came forward to us two weeks ago and said, okay, we think we should go

forward with the designation and a freeze order against Mr. Julaydin. We

asked, what do you have on him? Because they certainly know what we

have on him, because we shared it as we tried to convince them that they

ought to join us. The answer back was, nothing new.

. . . .

. . . I think that taxes credulity, or there is another motive we are not being

told.

[Page 117]

[A number of U. S. Government officials complained to the Joint Inquiry about a

lack of Saudi cooperation in terrorism investigations both before and after the September

11 attacks.

]. A high-level U. S. Government officer cited greater Saudi

cooperation when asked how the September 11 attacks might have been prevented. In

May 2001, the U.S. Government became aware that an individual in Saudi Arabia was in

contact with a senior al-Qa’ida operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming al-

Qa’ida operation. [

].

[

].

Several other Arab governments hesitated to share information gleaned from

arrests of suspects in the USS Cole bombing and other attacks. Even several European

governments were described to the Joint Inquiry as indifferent to the threat al-Qa’ida

posed prior to September 11, while others faced legal restrictions that impeded their

ability to share intelligence with the United States or to disrupt terrorist cells. Prior to

September 11, for example, [ ], despite repeated requests from CIA,

representative described the situation in his testimony before the Joint Inquiry:

We had passed [ ] a great number of leads about al-Qa’ida

members. We passed [them] a great deal of leads on al-Qa’ida members,

including some of the people you see in the press now, like [

], and we had really given them a lot of names to track after

September 11. The arrests they made [after September 11, 2001] showed

that they had in fact been following them and monitoring them to some

extent. But the CIA did not get information back [

] on it to any measurable extent that would help us with our efforts.

[CIA’s liaison partners vary in competence and commitment. [

]. However, the Agency still had to rely heavily on liaison partners in

several countries in order to acquire counterterrorism intelligence for the conduct of other

counterterrorism activities].

There were also missteps in the efforts of various Intelligence Community

agencies to develop foreign liaison relationships. [

]. However, significant problems arose because liaison on

counterterrorism was not always well integrated into overall U.S. regional goals and

liaison relations. As a result, other issues, albeit important, sometimes diverted attention

from counterterrorism.

The many channels for contact between U.S. and foreign intelligence services

also led to a lack of coordination at times. Former National Security Advisor Sandy

Berger noted that many U.S. agencies, ranging from the CIA and FBI to the Agriculture

Department, develop liaison service relations and that, in some countries, there are now a

dozen or more of these kinds of relationships. Often, U.S. ambassadors were not able to

control these interactions, and, as a result, the U.S. Government did not always place

Mr. Berger recommended giving "the DCI authority to coordinate all intelligence

cooperation with other countries."

Finally, the capabilities of FBI Legats were not always incorporated within the

overall intelligence relationship with a foreign country. Thus, other members of the U.S.

Intelligence Community did not always utilize relationships developed by the Legats to

their full advantage.

Discussion: [Tracking terrorist funds can be an especially effective means of

identifying terrorists and terrorist organizations, unraveling and disrupting terrorist plots,

and targeting terrorist financial assets for sanctions, seizures, and account closures. As

with organized criminal activity, financial support is critically important to terrorist

networks like al-Qa’ida. Prior to September 11, 2001, however, no single U.S.

Government agency was responsible for tracking terrorist funds, prioritizing and

coordinating government-wide efforts, and seeking international collaboration in that

effort. Some tracking of terrorist funds was undertaken before September 11. For the

most part, however, these efforts were unorganized and ad-hoc, and there was a

reluctance to take actions such as seizures of assets and bank accounts and arrests of

those involved in the funding. A U.S. Government official testified before the Joint

Inquiry, for example, that this reluctance hindered counterterrorist efforts against Bin

Ladin: "Treasury was concerned about any activity that could adversely affect the

international financial system . . . ]."

Treasury Department General Counsel David Aufhauser testified to the Joint

inquiry on July 23, 2002 that, prior to September 11, the financial war on terrorism was

"ad-hoc-ism", episodic, and informal without any orthodox mechanism for the exchange

the DCI never asked Treasury to perform an analysis of Bin Ladin, al-Qa’ida, or

associated terrorist financing.

At the same hearing, the Chief of the FBI’s Financial Review Group also testified

to the lack of an overall financial strategy against terrorist funding. He stated that the

FBI’s financial investigations prior to September 11 were inconsistent, done on a caseby-

case basis, and not supervised by a specialized unit at FBI Headquarters.

Given this lack of focus on terrorist financing, the Intelligence Community was

unable, prior to September 11, to identify and attack the full range of Bin Ladin’s

financial support network. Former National Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard

Clarke described for the Joint Inquiry his pre-September 11 frustration with the

Intelligence Community’s lack of focus in this regard:

[

].

. . . .

Whenever we pressed the various agencies to do more on finding Bin

Ladin’s money, we would hear that they didn’t consider it as important as

the White House did for the reason you specified, that you were able to

stage an operation for a small amount of money. My view was that it may

have been true that you could stage an operation for a small amount of

money, but you couldn’t run al-Qa’ida for a small amount of money. Al-

Qa’ida was a vast worldwide organization that was creating terrorist

groups in various countries that would not be called a-Qa’ida, but would

be called names associated with that particular country. But they were

creating terrorist groups, they were funding them from the start. They

were taking preexisting terrorist groups and buying their allegiance and

buying them additional capability. It seemed to me it must have cost a

great deal of money to be al-Qa’ida, but I was never able to get the

Intelligence Community to tell me within any range of magnitude how

much money the annual operating budget of al-Qa’ida may have been.

[Page 121]

Prior to September 11, there was also some reluctance to use available financial

databases to track suspected terrorists. The Chief of the FBI’s Financial Review Group —

which had been only a section in the FBI’s White Collar Crime Unit before September 11

-- and the Director of the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network

(FinCEN) both testified before the Joint Inquiry that, prior to September 11, they had

capabilities to develop leads on terrorist suspects and link them to other terrorists and to

terrorist funding sources. They both agreed that they would have been able to locate

Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar in the United States in August 2001, if asked,

through credit card and bank information. The use of these capabilities in the first weeks

after September 11 enabled the FBI, with assistance from the Secret Service, to connect

almost all of the 19 hijackers to each other very quickly by linking bank accounts, credit

cards, debit cards, address checks, and telephones. Despite the existence of those

capabilities, the FBI did not seek their assistance in the search for al-Hazmi and al-

Mihdhar in late August 2001.

FinCEN was involved in tracking terrorist funds prior to September 11 and

experienced some success. FinCEN began doing linkage analysis of terrorist financing in

October 1999 and first identified a specific account with a direct link to al-Qa’ida in

February 2001. It has the advantage of being able to work with both law enforcement

and intelligence information, and to combine that information with Bank Secrecy Act and

commercial data to assist the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control

(OFAC) and others in the seizure, blocking, and freezing of terrorist assets. FinCEN’s

capabilities have been made available to federal, state, and local law enforcement

agencies for lead purposes since before September 11.

The FBI did some tracking of terrorist funds prior to September 11, but this was

mostly done on an episodic basis, primarily directed at money laundering activity, in the

context of field office investigations with no national or international coordination, and

with very limited cooperation with the Treasury Department. The Joint Inquiry was

informed that the FBI’s newly-formed Financial Review Group is developing what did

not exist pre-September 11, a national strategy for a coordinated U.S. Government-wide

investigate, disrupt, arrest, and prosecute.

International cooperation in tracking terrorist funds was also not easy to achieve

prior to September 11. For example, the Director of OFAC at the Treasury Department

testified that he made two trips to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and

Kuwait in 1999 and 2000 to request their cooperation in tracking and restricting Bin

Ladin and al-Qa’ida funds, but only achieved limited results. Pre-September 11, OFAC

did take some actions, such as trade sanctions and an asset freeze against the Taliban for

harboring Bin Ladin, that achieved a modicum of success.

On September 24, 2001, President Bush gave a new priority to the tracking of

terrorist funds when he stated: "We will direct every resource at our command to win the

war against terrorists, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every

instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence. We will starve the terrorists of

funding." (Emphasis added.) The President made this statement four days after signing

an executive order to block the funds of terrorists and their associates. Substantial

actions have been taken by the U.S. Government in this area since September 11,

including blocking terrorist-related assets; seizing assets and smuggled bulk cash;

arresting terrorist financiers and indicting them; and, shutting down front companies,

charities, banks, and hawala conglomerates that served as financial support networks for

al-Qa’ida and Bin Ladin.

New authorities that have been granted since September 11 have also been

instrumental in making these seizure and arrest actions successful. For example, OFAC

at Treasury requested and received in the October 2001 USA PATRIOT Act explicit

authorities to block assets while an investigation is in progress and to use classified

information as evidence in order to place additional names on the list for freezing and

blocking assets. The challenge facing the Intelligence Community is to maintain, expand

and adapt the use of these capabilities to combat future terrorist threats effectively.

Coordinator Richard Clarke told the Joint Inquiry that, as of June 2002, there were still

many unanswered questions about Bin Ladin’s finances:

We asked [CIA] in particular [ ], because initially

— because he was said to be a financier. They were unable to do that, [

].CIA was [ ] unable to tell

us what it cost to be Bin Ladin, what it cost to be al-Qa’ida, how much

was their annual operating budget within some parameters, where did the

money come from, where did it stay when it wasn’t being used, how it was

transmitted. They were unable to find answers to those questions.

Part of the challenge for the Intelligence Community, and particularly the FBI, is

the difference between terrorist financing and other forms of organized criminal money

laundering. Strategies and tactics that were effective in countering money laundering

must be reexamined in order to assure their effectiveness in regard to terrorist financing.

The Treasury Department’s General Counsel was in England at a money laundering

conference on September 11, 2001 and explained to the Joint Inquiry how his perception

of the problem shifted as he watched the two World Trade Center towers disintegrate:

It was as if we had been looking at the world through the wrong end of a

telescope. . . . Money had been spirited around the globe by means and

measures and in denominations that mocked all of our detection. . . . The

most serious threat to our well being was now clean money intended to

kill, not dirty money seeking to be rinsed in a place of hiding.

During the course of this Joint Inquiry, testimony and information were received

that pertained to several issues involving broader, policy questions that reach beyond the

boundaries of the Intelligence Community. In the three areas described below, the Inquiry

finds that policy issues were relevant to our examination of the events of September 11.

[Page 124]

Intelligence Community acquired and disseminated from 1998 through the summer of

2001 intelligence reports indicating in broad terms that Usama Bin Ladin’s network

intended to carry out terrorist attacks inside the United States. This information

encompassed, for example, indications of plots for attacks within the United States that

would include:

• attacks on civil aviation;

• assassinations of U.S. public officials;

• use of high explosives;

• attacks on Washington, D.C., New York City, and cities on the West Coast;

• crashing aircraft into buildings as weapons; and

• using weapons of mass destruction.

The intelligence that was acquired and shared by the Intelligence Community was

not specific as to time and place, but should have been sufficient to prompt action to

insure a heightened sense of alert and implementation of additional defensive measures.

Such actions could have included: strengthened civil aviation security measures;

increased attention to watchlisting suspected terrorists so as to keep them out of the

United States; greater collaboration with state and local law enforcement authorities

concerning the scope and nature of the potential threat; a sustained national effort to

inform and alert the American public to the growing danger; and improved capabilities to

deal with the consequences of attacks involving mass destruction and casualties. The

U.S. Government did take some steps in regard to detecting and preventing the use of

weapons of mass destruction, but did not pursue a broad program of additional domestic

defensive measures or public awareness.

[Page 125]

Both the DCI and the FBI Director discussed the important role that defensive

measures could have played. According to the DCI’s ’s testimony, looking back at the

September 11 attacks:

. . . since now we understand and possibly have understood the basis of the

history of specific reporting with regard to specific targets, and the context

was we raced from threat period to threat period, from target to target, and

once we resolved them we never thought about the fact that the security

that was protecting, whether it's a plane or an infrastructure or a bridge, is

poor to begin and somebody will come back to the same target that they've

planned against. Unless they see a security profile and a deterrent posture

that's different, there's nothing to stop them from doing that, because

essentially we all believed that it would never happen here. That's the

point.

. . . .

. . . I posit a theory that we were so busy overseas in terms of what we

were doing at the time that, you know, they were looking here the whole

time and steadily planning in terms of what they were doing. So they

were operating on two fronts.

FBI Director Mueller added:

I think you can look at what happened September 11 and I think both of us

would say there are things we did right and things we missed and did

wrong. But you look at it from the perspective of could we have prevented

these individuals, identified these individuals and prevented them from

undertaking this multi-plane undertaking, and I guess I would say I think

it's speculation, but in looking at each of the areas that we could have done

better, I'm not certain you get to the point where we stop these individuals.

On the other hand, looking at the concept of hijacking planes and taking

them over, as a country one could look back and say with reports of

hijackings over a period of time, perhaps we as a country should have

looked at changing the way we protect our planes, which means doing

what we are doing now in terms of hardening the cockpit, understanding

that the threat of a hijacking is not for a person to hijack a plane and get it

to the ground, utilizing the passengers as hostages, but the concept of

using a plane as a weapon. Had we, as a country, reached the position

where the attacks were such and the possibilities such that we would

change what we did in our airline industry to harden cockpits and train

pilots to resist being taken over, that's another avenue that I think might

have made a difference. But that's speculation.

dozens of cooperating foreign governments to disrupt al-Qa’ida activities, arrest and

interrogate operatives, and otherwise prevent terrorist attacks. Throughout that period of

time, however, Afghanistan was largely a terrorist "safe haven." In its Afghan sanctuary,

al-Qa’ida built a network for planning attacks, training and vetting recruits, indoctrinating

potential radicals, and creating a terrorist army with little interference from the United

States.

Some CIA analysts and operators have told the Joint Inquiry that they recognized

as early as 1997 or 1998 that, as long as the Taliban continued to grant Bin Ladin’s

terrorist organization sanctuary in Afghanistan, it would continue to train a large cadre of

Islamic extremists and generate numerous terrorist operations. In 1999, senior officials at

the CIA and the State Department began to focus on the Taliban as an integral part of the

terrorist problem. In 1999 and 2000, the State Department worked with the United

Nations Security Council to obtain resolutions rebuking the Taliban for harboring Bin

Ladin and allowing terrorist training. The Defense Department began to focus on this

issue in late 2000, after the USS Cole bombing. A State Department demarche to Taliban

representatives in Pakistan, on June 26, 2001, specifically noted the threats to Americans

emanating from Afghanistan and stated that the United States would hold the Taliban

regime directly responsible for any actions taken by terrorists harbored by the Taliban.

Former National Security Advisor Berger noted in a statement to the Joint Inquiry

that "In fact, there was a concerted military, economic, and diplomatic pressure on the

Afghanistan and the Taliban…." Mr. Berger also explained that Saudi Arabia and

Pakistan were pressed to cut support for the Taliban and that covert and military

measures were taken to disrupt al-Qa’ida activities in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the

terrorist training or al-Qa’ida’s ability to operate from Afghanistan.

[Despite the Intelligence Community’s growing recognition that Afghanistan was

churning out thousands of radicals, the U.S. government did not integrate all the

instruments of national power and policy — diplomatic, intelligence, economic, and

military — to address this problem. [

]. Prior to September 11, military force was

used only in the August 20, 1998 cruise missile strikes on targets in Afghanistan and the

Sudan. Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified to the Joint Inquiry that

massive military strikes on Afghanistan would have had little public or Congressional

support before September 11, 2001. Moreover, as Mr. Berger noted to the Joint Inquiry,

a lack of intelligence on which to base action hindered efforts to use military force in

Afghanistan].

Permitting the sanctuary in Afghanistan to exist for as long as it did allowed Bin

Ladin’s key operatives to meet, plan operations, train recruits, identify particularly

capable recruits or those with specialized skills, and ensure that al-Qa’ida’s masterminds

remained beyond the reach of international justice. In his testimony before the Joint

Committee on October 17, 2002, the DCI responded to a question about what he would

do differently prior to September 11, 2001, saying:

[H]indsight is perfect, we should have taken down that sanctuary a lot

sooner. The circumstances at the time may have not warranted, the

regional situation may have been different, and after [September] 11 all I

can tell you is we let a sanctuary fester, we let him build capability. And

there may have been lots of good reasons why in hindsight it couldn't have

been done earlier or sooner. I am not challenging it, because hindsight is

always perfect, but we let him operate with impunity for a long time

without putting the full force and muscle of the United States against it.

As an adjunct to covert and military efforts to eliminate Bin Ladin’s sanctuary in

Afghanistan, the United States Government relied heavily on law enforcement to counter

the 1980s, when Congress and President Reagan gave the FBI an important role in

countering international terrorism, including events overseas. More recently, the

successful prosecutions of individuals involved in the 1993 World Trade Center

bombing, the plot to attack New York City landmarks, and the 1998 bombings of two

U.S. Embassies in East Africa added to the emphasis on law enforcement as a

counterterrorism measure.

Senior Department of Justice officials, including former U.S. Attorney for the

Southern District of New York Mary Jo White, who prosecuted many of the most

important cases against al-Qa’ida, point out that they saw their efforts as an adjunct to

other means of fighting terrorism. Prosecutions do have several advantages in the fight

against terrorism. As Ms. White noted to the Joint Inquiry, prosecutions take terrorists

off the street. She acknowledged that this does not shut down an entire group, but some

bombs do not go off as a result of the arrests. In addition, critical intelligence often

comes from the investigative process, as individual terrorists confess or reveal associates

through their personal effects and communications. Former FBI Director Louis Freeh

pointed out to the Joint Inquiry, "you can’t divorce arrest from prevention." Ms. White

also contends that the prosecutions may deter some, though admittedly not all,

individuals from using violence. Finally, the threat of a jail sentence often induces

terrorists to cooperate with investigators and provide information.

Heavy reliance on law enforcement had limits, however. As Paul Pillar, National

Intelligence Officer for the Near East and Asia, explained to the Joint Inquiry, it is easier

to arrest underlings than masterminds. Those who organize and plan attacks, particularly

the ultimate decision makers who authorize them, are often thousands of miles away

when an attack is carried out. In addition, the deterrent effect of imprisonment is often

minimal, particularly for highly motivated terrorists such as those in al-Qa’ida.

Moreover, law enforcement is time-consuming. The CIA and the FBI expended

considerable resources supporting investigations in Africa and in Yemen regarding the

Embassies and USS Cole attacks, a drain on scarce manpower and resources that could

were no established mechanisms for law enforcement officials to share foreign

intelligence developed in these investigations with the Intelligence Community, and they

did not always recognize it, prior to September 11. Finally, law enforcement standards of

evidence are high, and meeting these standards often requires unattainable intelligence or

the compromise of sensitive intelligence sources or methods.

At times, law enforcement and intelligence have competing interests. The former

head of the FBI’s International Terrorism Division noted to the Joint Inquiry that

Attorney General Janet Reno leaned toward closing down Foreign Intelligence

Surveillance Act-based collection activities if they seemed to hinder criminal cases. Ms.

White, however, said that the need for intelligence was balanced with the effort to arrest

and prosecute terrorists.

The reliance on law enforcement when individuals can operate from a hostile

country such as the Taliban’s Afghanistan appears particularly ineffective, as the

masterminds are often beyond the reach of justice. One FBI agent, in a Joint inquiry

interview, scorned the idea of using the Bureau to take the lead in countering al-Qa’ida.

He noted that the FBI can only arrest and support prosecution and cannot shut down

training camps in hostile countries. He added that, "[it] is like telling the FBI after Pearl

Harbor, ‘go to Tokyo and arrest the Emperor.’" In his opinion, a military solution was

necessary because, "[t]he Southern District [of New York] doesn’t have any cruise

missiles." As the DCI testified to the Joint Inquiry on June 19, 2002:

The fact that you went into the sanctuary and took it down is the single

most important thing that occurred [after September 11], because they no

longer operated with impunity in terms of their training and financing and

all the things they were doing. And that opportunistically has changed the

game. So the policy question I would answer first is, the longer you wait

when you see this kind of thing, the longer you wait to intervene, the

longer you wait to allow evidence to manifest behavior, I guarantee you

will be surprised and hurt.

2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community was involved in fighting a "war" against Bin

Ladin largely without the benefit of what some would call its most potent weapon in that

effort: an alert and committed American public. Senior levels of the Intelligence

Community, as well as senior U.S. Government policymakers, were aware of the danger

posed by Bin Ladin. Information that was shared with senior U.S. Government officials,

but was not made available to the American public because of its national security

classification, was explicit about the gravity and immediacy of the threat posed by Bin

Ladin. For example:

• In December 1998, as noted earlier, the DCI wrote: "We must now enter a

new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin…We are at war…I want no

resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the [Intelligence]

Community."

• A classified document signed by the President in December 1998 read in part:

"The Intelligence Community has strong indications that Bin Ladin intends to

conduct or sponsor attacks inside the United States"; and

• A classified document signed by the President in July 1999 characterized a

February 1998 statement by Bin Ladin statement as a "de facto declaration of

war" on the United States.

In addition, numerous classified intelligence reports were produced and

disseminated by the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, based upon

information obtained from a variety of sources, about possible terrorist attacks being

planned by Usama Bin Ladin’s terrorist network. Some of this information was

summarized and released, in declassified form, in the Joint Inquiry’s September 18, 2002

• In June 1998, the Intelligence Community obtained information from several

sources that Usama Bin Ladin was considering attacks in the United States,

including against Washington, D. C. and New York;

• In August 1998, the Intelligence Community obtained information that a

group of unidentified Arabs planned to crash an explosive-laden plane from a

foreign country into the World Trade Center;

• In September 1998, the Intelligence Community obtained information that

Usama Bin Ladin’s next operation could possibly involve flying an aircraft

loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport;

• In October 1998, the Intelligence Community obtained information that al-

Qa’ida was trying to establish an operative cell within the United States, and

that there might be an effort underway to recruit U.S. citizen- Islamists and

U.S.-based expatriates from the Middle East and North Africa;

• In September 1999, the Intelligence Community obtained information that

Usama Bin Ladin and others were planning a terrorist act in the United States,

possibly against specific landmarks in California and New York City; and

• In late 1999, the Intelligence Community obtained information regarding the

Bin Ladin network’s possible plans to attack targets in Washington, D. C. and

New York City during the New Year’s Millennium celebrations.

There is little indication of any sustained and successful national effort to

mobilize public awareness about the gravity and immediacy of the threat prior to

September 11, however. Specifically citing speeches by President Clinton at the United

Nations in 1995 and at George Washington University in1996 regarding the fight against

terrorism, former national Security Advisor Sandy Berger told the Inquiry that the

President: "continuously attempted to raise public awareness of the terrorist threat, as a

central challenge to our country and our future, [and] including in every State of the

Union address for eight years."

Clearly, there were Presidential remarks regarding terrorism in the years before

September 11, 2001, including references to the threat that Bin Ladin’s network posed to

the interests of the United States. There were also periodic statements and references to

elsewhere by both the DCI and the FBI Director.

In an interview, Richard Clarke, the former National Counterterrorism

Coordinator under President Clinton, pointed to background briefings to the press by his

office immediately after the Millennium crisis in January-February 2000 and the

Administration’s cooperation with the New York Times in December 2000 and with

CBS’s 60 Minutes on stories about terrorism as efforts to inform the American people of

the growing terrorist threat.

These efforts were, however, largely sporadic and, given the classified nature of

intelligence, limited in terms of the specifics that could be shared with the public about

the immediacy and gravity of the threat. They were not sufficient to mobilize and sustain

heightened public awareness about the danger of a domestic attack.

By comparison to what has occurred since September 11, the American public

was not focused on and was not on heightened alert regarding Bin Ladin, his fatwa

against the United States, and the immediate likelihood of a terrorist attack on American

soil. In the aftermath of September 11, two incidents illustrate the difference that an

alerted American public can, and does, make:

• On September 11, 2001, passengers aboard Flight 93, aware that two aircraft

had been flown into the World Trade Center towers in New York City,

attempted to retake control of their hijacked aircraft and, it is widely believed,

saved further loss of life and destruction; and

• On December 22, 2001, an alert flight attendant on board an American

Airlines flight from Paris to Miami noticed passenger Richard Reid attempting

to light a fuse in his shoe. Reid was subsequently subdued by a number of

passengers and has pleaded guilty to charges of attempting to blow up the

aircraft.

[Page 133]

Kristen Breitweiser, speaking on behalf of the families of the victims of the

September 11 attacks, reminded the Joint Inquiry of the importance of an alert and

involved American public in the war against terrorism. In her testimony, she emphasized

the potential importance of information that was not shared with the public before

September 11, 2001:

One thing remains clear from history. Our intelligence agencies were

acutely aware of an impending domestic risk posed by Al Qaeda. A

question that remains unclear is how many lives could have been saved

had this information been made more public.

. . . .

How many victims may have taken notice of these Middle Eastern men

while they were boarding their plane? Could these men have been

stopped? Going further, how many vigilant employees would have chosen

to immediately flee Tower 2 after they witnessed the blazing inferno in

Tower 1, if only they had known that an Al Qaeda terrorist attack was

imminent?

Could the devastation of September 11 been diminished in any degree had

the government’s information been made public in the summer of 2001?

Directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency, and also

examined the records of these agencies, to determine what the Intelligence Community knows

now about the September 11 attacks. FBI Director Mueller described efforts by the U.S.

intelligence and law enforcement communities "to find out everything we could about the

hijackers and how they succeeded."

Usama Bin Ladin came to the FBI’s attention after the first attack on the World Trade

Center in February 1993. While the FBI has not linked that attack directly to Bin Ladin, the

investigation developed information that Muslim men, including participants in the attack, had

been recruited at the al-Kifah refugee office in Brooklyn, New York and sent to training camps

in Afghanistan — first to fight the Soviet army and later to engage in a jihad against the United

States. In 1993, the FBI also learned of a plot to blow up bridges, tunnels, and landmarks in

New York. That investigation led to the conviction of Omar Abdul al-Rahman, the "Blind

Sheikh," for soliciting others to commit all of those acts of terrorism in 1993. Bin Ladin’s

fatwas and press statements later called for avenging the Blind Sheikh’s imprisonment.

The FBI has identified at least two Bin Ladin connections in Ramzi Yousef’s 1995

conspiracy, centered in the Philippines, to blow up twelve U.S. airplanes flying East Asian routes

to the United States. Mohamed Jamal Khalifah, the alleged financier of the plot, is Bin Ladin’s

brother-in-law. Ramzi Yousef was arrested at a Bin Ladin guesthouse in Pakistan to which

Yousef had fled after the plot had been uncovered. Yousef was a principal in the first World

Trade Center attacks, for which he was tried and convicted upon being returned to the United

128

George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), testified that "a common thread

runs between the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the 11 September

attacks." The thread is Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, also known as Mukhtar or "the Brain."

According to the DCI, Muhammad, "a high-ranking al-Qa’ida member," was "the mastermind or

one of the key planners of the 11 September operation." The DCI noted that Mukhtar is Ramzi

Yousef’s uncle, and, after the World Trade Center attack, Muhammad joined Yousef in the 1995

airplane plot, for which Muhammad has been indicted by a federal grand jury.

In August 1996, Bin Ladin issued the first fatwa declaring jihad against the United States.

A second fatwa in February 1998 proclaimed: "to kill the Americans and their allies — civilian

and military is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is

possible to do it." Bin Ladin repeated these threats in a May 1998 press interview. The

bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania followed in August.

In June 1998, the Department of Justice obtained a sealed indictment in the Southern

District of New York against Bin Ladin as the sole named defendant in a "conspiracy to attack

defense utilities of the United States." Among other overt acts, the indictment charged that in

October 1993 "members of al-Qa’ida participated with Somali tribesmen in an attack on United

States military personnel serving in Somalia [which] killed a total of 18 United States soldiers

and wounded 73 others." The indictment was unsealed after the East African embassy bombings

and was followed by a series of superseding indictments that charged Bin Ladin and others with

a conspiracy to "murder United States nationals anywhere in the world, including in the United

States."

The U.S. Government produced proof in the embassy bombing trials of Bin Ladin’s

direct connections to the attacks. Mohamed al-Owhali, who was to have been a suicide

passenger in the Kenya bombing, ran from the bomb truck moments before it exploded. After

his arrest in Kenya, al-Owhali confessed and admitted that he had been given a telephone

number in Sana’a, Yemen, which he called before and after the bombing. Telephone records for

calls to that number led to the bomb factory for the Nairobi attack in a house occupied by a

satellite phone to the Yemen number were made the day of the attack and the day after when al-

Owhali called that number for help. Al-Owhali also confessed that he had asked Bin Ladin for a

129

mission, a request that led to his being in the bomb truck. According to al-Owhali, the suicide

driver had been present with him at Bin Ladin’s May 1998 press conference.

U.S. investigators have also described Bin Ladin’s connection to the October 2000 attack

on the United States Navy’s ship, USS Cole. The [ ], which

figured in the East Africa embassy bombings, was also used in planning the attack on USS Cole.

In addition, Tawfiq bin Attash, known as Khallad, who had been a trainer at an al-Qa’ida camp

in Afghanistan, prepared an introduction in the summer of 1999 for Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri

addressed to Jamal al-Badawi, who had trained under Khallad. Al-Nashiri is believed to be a

long-time Bin Ladin operative and a first cousin of the suicide driver who attacked the U.S.

Embassy in Kenya. Khallad appears to have directed the Cole operation from Afghanistan or

Pakistan, while al-Nashiri was its local manager.

Investigators believe that Khallad’s letter set in motion plans to attack another U.S. Navy

ship. Following al-Nashiri’s introduction, Badawi obtained the boat that would be used in the

failed attack on USS The Sullivans in January 2000. The same boat was used later that year in

the attack against USS Cole.

[In testimony to the Joint Inquiry, the DCI explained that, after September 11, 2001, CIA

learned [ ] that "in 1996, Bin Ladin’s second-in-command, Muhammad Atif, drew up a

study on the feasibility of hijacking U.S. planes and destroying them in flight." Khalid Shaykh

Muhammad proposed to Bin Ladin that the World Trade Center "be targeted by small aircraft

packed with explosives." Bin Ladin reportedly suggested using even larger planes].

According to the DCI, Muhammad Atif "chose the hijackers from young Arab men who

had no previous terrorist activities." After Bin Ladin had approved the selection, Khalid Shaykh

"supervised the ‘final touches’ of the 11 September operation."

130

most notably Germany, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates."

Two principal hijackers in the September 11 attacks, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-

Hazmi, entered the United States on a flight from Bangkok on January 15, 2000, a week after

leaving a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Three other principals, Mohammed Atta,

Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah, entered the United States in May and June 2000 from or

through Europe. Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah had lived in Hamburg, Germany where they

associated with each other in various ways. A sixth principal, Hani Hanjour, had been in the

United States off and on since October 1991.

In June 18 testimony at a Joint Inquiry hearing, the DCI described al-Hazmi and al-

Mihdhar as "al-Qa’ida veterans." They had been involved with al-Qa’ida for six years before

September 11, 2001, "having trained and fought under al-Qa’ida auspices in three different

countries."

Al-Hazmi first traveled to Afghanistan in 1993 as a teenager and came into contact with a

key al-Qa’ida facilitator in Saudi Arabia in 1994. In 1995, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar traveled to

Bosnia to fight with other Muslims against the Serbs. Al-Hazmi probably came into contact with

al-Qa’ida leader Abu Zubaydah when Zubaydah visited Saudi Arabia in 1996 to convince young

Saudis to attend al-Qa’ida camps in Afghanistan. Sometime before 1998, al-Hazmi returned to

Afghanistan and swore loyalty to Bin Ladin. He fought against the Northern Alliance, possibly

with his brother Salem, another of the hijackers, and returned to Saudi Arabia in early 1999,

Africa embassy bombings.

Al-Mihdhar’s first trip to the Afghanistan training camps was in early 1996. [

131

]. In 1998, al-Mihdhar traveled to Afghanistan and swore

allegiance to Bin Ladin.

In April 1999, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Salem al-Hazmi, and Khalid al-Mihdhar obtained visas

through the U.S. Consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi then

traveled to Afghanistan and "participated in special training," which, according to the DCI, may

have been "facilitated by Khallad" (Tawfiq bin Attash who also directed the USS Cole

operation). A USS Cole suicide bomber also participated in that training.

From Yemen, al-Mihdhar traveled to Kuala Lumpur, arriving on January 5, 2000. There

he met al-Hazmi, who had traveled to Malaysia from Pakistan. In Malaysia, the two met Khallad

at a condominium owned by Yazid Sufaat, who later signed letters of introduction on behalf of

Zacarias Moussaoui that were found in Moussaoui’s possessions after the September 11 attacks.

Malaysian police arrested Sufaat in December 2001 after they developed information that he had

procured four tons of bomb material, ammonium nitrate, for an Indonesian jihad cell.

In testimony before the Joint Inquiry, DCI Tenet described the significant characteristics

that were shared by Muhammad Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah — the September 11

hijackers who most likely piloted the airplanes that the groups they were part of commandeered.

The three were intelligent, spoke English and were proficient in several other languages, and

were familiar with Western society. They were also educated in technical subjects and had

group of young Muslim men in Hamburg, Germany, who came from different countries and

backgrounds, but attended the same mosques, shared acquaintances, and were drawn together by

Islamist views and disenchantment with the West.

Atta was born in Egypt in 1968. He graduated from Cairo University with a degree in

Architectural Engineering in 1990 and began attending the Technical University in Hamburg in

1992. Between 1996 and 1998, Atta traveled in the Middle East and then returned to Germany.

132

Al-Shehhi was born in the United Arab Emirates in 1978. A sergeant in the UAE Army,

he was sent to Germany for technical studies in 1996. In 1997 and 1998, he studied English at

the University at Bonn and electrical engineering at the Technical University in Hamburg.

Jarrah was born in Lebanon in 1975. He attended the Fachhochschule, a technical

University in Hamburg from 1996 to 2000, studying aircraft construction and maintenance.

While in Germany, Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah, according to FBI documents, Akept

company with a loosely organized group of associates comprised of roommates, co-workers and

mosque colleagues.@ Three associates, Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, Said Bahaji, and Zakariya Essabar,

became subjects of post-September 11 German arrest warrants for alleged membership in a

terrorist organization and for murder and aircraft piracy. A fourth, Mounir el Motassadeq, is on

trial in Hamburg on those charges.*

Bin al-Shibh, who was born in Yemen in 1972 and entered Germany in 1995, is

described as a Asupporting conspirator" in the Moussaoui indictment. In August 2000, Jarrah

attempted to enroll Bin al-Shibh in the Florida Flight Training Center, where Jarrah was taking

lessons. On August 15, Bin al-Shibh sent a $2200 wire transfer to the school for tuition, and in

July and September, he transferred funds to al-Shehhi in Florida. Between May and October

2000, Bin al-Shibh unsuccessfully attempted four times -- three in Germany and once in Yemen

Bin al-Shibh was in London. Moussaoui flew from London to Pakistan on December 9.

FBI Director Mueller testified that Bin al-Shibh was a "significant money person." The

Moussaoui indictment charges that Bin al-Shibh received $15,000 in wire transfers from the

UAE on or about July 30 and 31, 2001 and that he wired $14,000 to Moussaoui in Oklahoma on

or about August 1 and 3 from train stations in Dusseldorf and Hamburg.

[DCI Tenet testified that, after September 11, 2001, CIA received reports identifying Bin

al-Shibh "as an important al-Qa’ida operative." The agency suspects that, "unlike the three

* Motassadeq was convicted in Germany on February 19, 2003 of being a member of a terrorist organization and

accessory to over 3,000 murders in New York and Washington.

133

Hamburg pilots, he may have been associated with al-Qa’ida even before moving to Germany in

1995." Bin al-Shibh flew to Spain in early September 2001. He disappeared until an interview

with al-Jazeera was aired in September 2002, and he was captured in Pakistan on September 11,

2002. Bin al-Shibh is now being held [ ] at an undisclosed location].

Atta lived at Marienstrasse 54 in Hamburg with Bin al-Shibh, Essabar, and Bahaji.

Director Tenet testified that, after Bin al-Shibh failed to obtain a U.S. visa, "another cell

member," Essabar, "tried [on two occasions in December 2000] and failed to obtain a visa in

January 2001" to travel to Florida while Atta and al-Shehhi were there. Uncorroborated sources

report that Essabar was in Afghanistan in late September 2001. Bahaji left Germany on

September 3, 2001 for Pakistan. Uncorroborated sources also placed him in Afghanistan in late

September 2001.

DCI Tenet testified that Muhammad Heydar Zammar was an acquaintance of members of

Atta’s circle in Hamburg, where Zammar lived. Zammar, a German citizen born in Syria in

1961, was described by DCI Tenet as "a known al-Qa’ida associate," active in Islamic extremist

circles since the 1980s, who trained and fought in Afghanistan in 1991 and in Bosnia in 1995 and

returned to Afghanistan a number of times between 1995 and 2000.

It has been reported that U.S. and German officials believe that Zammar is a pivotal

figure in understanding the genesis of the September 11 attacks. DCI Tenet told the Joint

when he traveled to Morocco to divorce his wife and that he was "moved from Morocco into

Syrian custody, where he has remained." It has also been reported that Zammar has provided

details about the September 11 attacks to U.S. investigators. According to the DCI, Zammar has

said that he met Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah in the late 1990s in Hamburg’s al-Qods mosque and

he "persuaded them to travel to Afghanistan to join the jihad."

DCI Tenet testified that Atta may have traveled to Afghanistan for the first time in early

1998. In June 1998, he applied for a new passport in Egypt, although his old one had not

expired. This suggested, according to the DCI, "that he might have been trying to hide evidence

of his travel to Afghanistan." On November 29, 1999, Atta flew from Hamburg to Istanbul and

then to Karachi. He left Pakistan to return to Hamburg on February 25, 2000.

134

In the fall of 1999, al-Shehhi stayed at Bin Ladin’s Qandahar guesthouse while awaiting

transportation to Pakistan for medical treatment. He returned to Germany in January 2000.

According to FBI information, Atta and al-Shehhi "were both present at Bin Ladin facilities in

Kandahar in December 1999." The DCI noted that "Jarrah’s travel at this time mirrored Atta’s,"

as Jarrah flew from Hamburg to Karachi on November 25, 1999 and stayed in Pakistan for two

months.

There are indications that Bin al-Shibh was in Afghanistan in 1998 and had been seen at

the Khalden Camp or guesthouse in late 1998. The Moussaoui indictment alleges that

Moussaoui had been present at the Khalden Camp in or about April 1998.

On January 15, 2000, one week after leaving Malaysia, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-

Hazmi flew to Los Angeles from Bangkok and settled in the San Diego area. In April 2000, al-

Hazmi took an introductory flying lesson at the National Air College in San Diego. A week

United Arab Emirates. In May, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi took flight training in San Diego, and

in June, al-Mihdhar left the U.S. on a Lufthansa flight from Los Angeles to Frankfurt, connecting

to Oman. Al-Mihdhar did not return to the United States until thirteen months later in July 2001.

Al-Hazmi remained in the United States, staying in the San Diego area until December

2000 when he moved to Arizona with Hani Hanjour who had just returned to the United States.

The DCI testified that Hanjour went to Afghanistan for six weeks in 1989 when he was 17 to

participate in a jihad. He first entered the United States in October 1991 from Saudi Arabia to

attend an English language program at the University of Arizona in Tucson. When he left the

U.S. in early 1992 for Saudi Arabia, he was a "different person," according to a brother who

spoke to the media. According to the DCI, Hanjour then "wore a full beard, cut his past social

ties, and spent most of his time reading books on religion and airplanes." Hanjour returned to

the United States in April 1996. After residing in Florida for a month, he moved to Oakland,

California, where he took an English language course. In the summer, he began flight training,

and in September, he moved to Arizona where he took flight lessons for a month in Scottsdale.

135

Hanjour left the U.S. for Saudi Arabia in November 1996, returning to the United States in

November 1997.

Hanjour left the United States again in April 1999, after receiving an FAA

commercial pilot certificate. In September, after an initial denial, he obtained a student visa in

Jeddah and returned to the United States. Then in November 2000, having stayed in Florida for

a month, he met al-Hazmi in California and traveled with him to Arizona in early December.

On December 12, he took up residence in Mesa, Arizona with al-Hazmi and resumed aviation

training. He took Boeing groundwork and simulator training in February and March 2001, when

he and al-Hazmi left Arizona for northern Virginia.

Atta returned to Germany from Afghanistan through Pakistan in February 2000. On

March 1, he sent the first of a series of e-mails to pilot training schools in Lakeland, Florida and

Norman, Oklahoma. Claiming that his passport had been lost, Atta obtained a new Egyptian

passport in Hamburg in May 2000 and a visa for travel to the United States. He crossed over to

several days earlier on a flight from the United Arab Emirates through Brussels to Newark. He

obtained a new passport, apparently in Pakistan before leaving for Germany at the beginning of

January 2000. Later that month, he obtained a ten-year multiple entry visa at the U.S. consulate

in Dubai. Atta and al-Shehhi stayed in the New York area, renting apartments together until the

beginning of July when they flew to Oklahoma City for a short visit to the Airman Flight School

in Norman. They proceeded to Florida, opened a joint account at Sun Trust Bank (depositing

$7000), and began training at Huffman Aviation in Venice.

In the meantime, Jarrah arrived in the U.S. on June 27 at Atlanta, Georgia. Earlier in the

year, he reported losing his Lebanese passport, and in May he obtained a five-year B1/B2

multiple entry visa. On arriving in the United States, Jarrah proceeded to Venice, Florida, where

he began training at the Florida Flight Training Center.

In Fall 2000, Atta and al-Shehhi obtained instrument certifications and commercial pilot

licenses while at Huffman Aviation. They also spent a brief period at Jones Aviation in Sarasota,

Florida. From December 29 through 31, Atta and al-Shehhi received Boeing flight simulator

training at Sim Center and Pan Am International in Opalocka, Florida. The FBI reports that that

136

both men "requested training on >executing turns and approaches" but not other training

normally associated with the course.@ In the meantime, Jarrah continued flight training until

December 2000 where he had begun it, the Florida Flight Training Center. In mid-December

and in early January 2001, he took Boeing flight simulator lessons at the Aeroservice Aviation

Center in Virginia Gardens, Florida.

In December 2000, al-Shehhi flew to Hamburg and then on to the United Arab Emirates,

returning for the December flight simulator training with Atta. On January 4, 2001, Atta flew

from Tampa through Miami to Madrid, returning to Miami on January 10. The DCI testified

that the purpose of Atta’s trip to Spain "may have been to meet with another al-Qa’ida operative

to pass along an update on the pilots’ training progress and receive information on the supporting

hijackers who would begin arriving in the U.S. in the spring." DCI Tenet testified that "Atta

may also have traveled outside of the U.S. in early April 2001 to meet an Iraqi intelligence

under an unknown alias: the CIA has been unable to establish that he left the United States or

entered Europe in April under his true name or any known alias.

On April 18, al-Shehhi, who traveled outside the United States three times, flew to Egypt

by way of Amsterdam and returned to Miami from Egypt through Amsterdam on May 2. In

Egypt, al-Shehhi visited Atta’s father and returned to the U.S. with Atta’s international driver’s

license. Apart from that, the DCI testified, "nothing else is known of al-Shehhi’s activities while

traveling outside the U.S." Jarrah traveled even more frequently, taking at least five trips outside

the United States to visit his family in Lebanon, and to visit his girl friend in Germany.

After al-Shehhi returned from Morocco in January 2001, he and Atta moved to Georgia

for flight training. In February, they traveled to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where they opened a

mailbox account. A crop duster pilot in Belle Glade, Florida identified Atta as inquiring about

the purchase and operation of crop dusters while Atta was living in the Atlanta area.

137

The thirteen remaining hijackers, the "muscle," whose role was to overcome pilots and

control passengers, began arriving in the United States in April 2001. Except for one threesome,

they arrived in pairs, the last in June. Twelve of the thirteen were from Saudi Arabia, and one

was from the United Arab Emirates. Salem al-Hazmi, Nawaf’s brother, obtained his visa as

early as April 1999; seven obtained visas from September to November 2000; three, as late as

June 2001. As FBI Director Mueller noted, these hijackers arrived in the United States "within a

fairly short window," each transiting through the United Arab Emirates.

Many in the group knew each other. There were two pairs of brothers, the al-Hazmis and

al-Shehris, in addition to networks of friends. Many came from southwest Saudi Arabia, and

they represented a range of socioeconomic levels. A few had higher education. Others had little

education. Some had struggled with depression or alcohol abuse. Some, according to DCI

Tenet, "never exhibited much religious fervor, before apparent exposure to extremist ideas —

separation from their families;" some spoke of "their desire to participate in jihad conflicts such

as the war in Chechnya, and some appear to have used this as a cover for traveling to

Afghanistan." The DCI also testified that "[a]s part of their commitment to militant Islam, these

young Saudis traveled to Afghanistan to train in the camps of their exiled countryman Usama

Bin Ladin." Most supporting hijackers went to Afghanistan for the first time in 1999 or 2000.

Notwithstanding the experience in Afghanistan, the CIA does not believe that the supporting

hijackers became involved in the plot until late 2000. Their early travel may have "added these

young men to the ranks of operatives that al-Qa’ida could call upon to carry out future missions,"

but DCI Tenet said he does not believe that al-Qa’ida leadership wanted the supporting hijackers

to know about the plot any sooner than necessary: "they probably were told little more than that

they were headed for a suicide mission inside the United States."

Al-Mihdhar, who left the United States a year before, obtained a visa in Jeddah in June

2001, using a new Saudi passport. According to DCI Tenet, he "spent the past year traveling

between Yemen and Afghanistan, with occasional trips to Saudi Arabia." Al-Mihdhar traveled

to New York in July 2001 from Saudi Arabia, six days after the last of the supporting hijackers

had flown to the United States. FBI Director Mueller testified that "al-Mihdhar’s role in the

September 11 plot between June 2000 and July 2001 — before his re-entry into the United States

— may well have been that of the coordinator and organizer of the movements of the non-pilot

138

hijackers. This is supported by his apparent lengthy stay in Saudi Arabia and his arriving back in

the United States only after the arrival of all the hijackers."

Beginning in May 2001, each of the four pilot hijackers flew across the United States.

FBI Director Mueller described these trips: "With their training complete, it appears that the

pilots began conducting possible surveillance flights as passengers aboard cross-country flights

transiting between the Northeast United States and California." On May 24, al-Shehhi flew

from New York to San Francisco on a Boeing 767 (seated in first class), leaving immediately on

a Boeing 757 (seated in first class) to Las Vegas. On May 27, al-Shehhi left Las Vegas to San

Francisco, continuing to New York on a Boeing 767 (seated in first class). On June 7, Jarrah

10. On June 28, Atta flew from Boston to San Francisco, continuing to Las Vegas, departing

there on July 1 through Denver to Boston. On August 13, Atta flew a second time across country

from Washington to Las Vegas on a Boeing 757 (seated in first class), returning on August 14 to

Ft. Lauderdale. On August 13, Hanjour and al-Hazmi (seated in first class) flew from Dulles to

Las Vegas via Los Angeles. They left Las Vegas on August 14 on a flight to Minneapolis (close

to Eagan, Minnesots, where Moussaoui had started flight lessons the day before), connecting an

hour and a half later to a flight to Baltimore.

Director Mueller noted the Las Vegas layovers:

Each of the return flights for these hijackers had layovers in Las Vegas. To date,

the purpose of these one-to-two day layovers is not known. However, with

respect to travel to Las Vegas, we know that at least one hijacker on each of the

four hijacked airplanes traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada sometime between May

and August of 2001. This travel consisted of an initial transcontinental trip from

an east-coast city to a west-coast city, and a connection in that west-coast city to a

Las Vegas-bound flight.

Atta flew to Zurich from Miami in July 2001, continuing on to Madrid. He checked out

of a Madrid hotel on July 9 and rented a car that he returned on July 19, after having driven

1,908 kilometers. For the days immediately following July 9, Atta’s whereabouts are unknown

until he checked into a hotel in Tarragona on Spain’s east coast on July 16. On July 9, Bin al-

Shibh flew from Hamburg to Tarragona, where he checked out of a hotel on July 10. His

139

whereabouts from July 10 to 16 are unaccounted for, "roughly the same period during which

Atta’s movements are unknown," suggesting, according to DCI Tenet, that "the two engaged in

clandestine meetings on the progress of the plot." Atta returned to the United States on July 19,

arriving in Atlanta. Jarrah traveled to Germany from Newark on July 25, returning on August 5,

a trip that may have permitted further contact with Bin al-Shibh. Director Mueller also testified

that "[d]uring the summer of 2001, some of the hijackers, specifically Mohamed Atta and Nawaf

al-Hazmi appear to have met face-to-face on a monthly basis to discuss the status of the

operation, and ultimately the final preparation for the attack." In an interview with al-Jazeera

shortly before his capture, Bin al-Shibh described al-Hazmi as Atta’s "right hand."

[Page 147]

As the supporting hijackers arrived, they divided between Florida and New York before

moving to three staging areas. The two who arrived in Virginia and the two who arrived in New

York joined Nawaf al-Hazmi and Hanjour in Paterson, New Jersey. The four who arrived in

Orlando and the five who arrived in Miami joined Atta, al-Shehhi, and Jarrah in the Fort

Lauderdale, Florida area.

The nineteen hijackers began to book September 11 flights on August 26. Al-Mihdhar

and Majed Moqed, hijackers on the Pentagon flight, were unable to buy tickets on August 24

because their address could not be verified. They finally purchased them with cash on

September 5 at the American Airlines counter in the Baltimore/Washington International

Airport. The hijackers in the Fort Lauderdale area also booked flights to locations in the Boston,

Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. areas where the teams for each September 11 flight

assembled.

The FBI estimates that the September 11 attacks cost $175,000 to $250,000. According

to Director Mueller and Bureau documents, "the funding mechanism behind the conspiracy

appears to center around Marwan al-Shehhi and individuals providing financial support

primarily" through the "banking and wire service infrastructure" of the United Arab Emirates.

In Hamburg, al-Shehhi received substantial transfers from the UAE by wire from

Mohamed Yousef Mohamed Alqusaidi, whom the FBI believes to be al-Shehhi’s brother. In

July 1999, al-Shehhi opened a checking account in the UAE and soon after granted a power of

140

attorney over the account to Alqusaidi. From July 1999 to November 2000, about $100,000

moved through the account. While they were in Germany, al-Shehhi transferred funds to Atta.

In July 2000, al-Shehhi and Atta opened a joint account at Suntrust Bank in Venice,

Florida, which received, according to the FBI, Awhat appears to be the primary funding for the

conspiracy,@ four transfers from the UAE totaling approximately $110,000 from Ali Abdul Aziz

Ali using a variety of aliases. In June 2000, al-Shehhi also received $5,000 by Western Union

Several hijackers, including Hanjour and al-Mihdhar, supplemented their financing with credit

cards drawn on Saudi and UAE banks.

Transfers to Bin al-Shibh on July 30 and 31, 2001, which preceded his transfers to

Moussaoui, were from Hashem Abdulraham, whom FBI Director Mueller identified as Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed, "the Brain."

There was also an important flow of money back to the UAE immediately before

September 11. FBI documents state that funds "were returned to the source because the

hijackers would not have wanted to die as thieves, therefore they returned the money that was

provided to them.@ Three hijackers, including Atta and al-Shehhi, sent funds to Mustafa Ahmed

Alhawsawi in the UAE. Al-Hazmi sent an Express Mail package to a UAE post office box

rented in Alhawsawi’s name that contained al-Mihdhar’s debit card for an account in which

$10,000 remained. Alhawsawi also had power of attorney over accounts of several hijackers in

the UAE.

At approximately 7:59 a.m., on September 11, American Airlines Flight 11, bound for

Los Angeles, was cleared for takeoff from Logan International Airport in Boston. On board

were 81 passengers and 11 crew members. Two hijackers were in the first two seats in First

Class, from which the cockpit doors were easily accessible. According to Director Mueller, the

hijackers "apparently using commonly available box cutters" seized the aircraft and diverted its

141

course at about 8:13 a.m. At 8:45 a.m. Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North

Tower, which collapsed at 10:25 a.m.

Atta is believed to have been the pilot because he was the only Flight 11 hijacker known

to have had flight training. He spent the night before the attacks in Portland, Maine, flying to

Boston on the morning of September 11. Atta’s luggage did not make the connection to Flight

11. The FBI Director testified that a search "revealed a three page letter handwritten in Arabic

which, upon translation, was found to contain instructions on how to prepare for a mission

applicable, but not specific, to the September 11 operation."

[Page 149]

At approximately 7:58 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175, also bound for Los Angeles, left

Logan with 65 passengers and crew members. At 9:05 a.m., Flight 175 crashed into the World

Trade Center’s South Tower, which collapsed at 9:55 a.m. Marwan al-Shehhi is believed to have

been the pilot.

As of December 2002, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New

York reported that 2792 persons are reported as missing as a result of the attacks on the World

Trade Center, including persons on the ground and passengers and crew of the two planes. Of

this number, 2743 death certificates have been issued. The Chief Medical Examiner has

periodically revised the death toll based on continuing forensic and other determinations.

At approximately, 8:20 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 left Dulles International

Airport for Los Angeles with 58 passengers and six crew members. The last routine radio

contact with the plane was at 8:50 a.m. A few minutes later the plane made an unauthorized

turn. At 9:39 a.m., Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon’s southwest side. In addition to the

passengers and crew, 125 military and civilian Pentagon employees died. The pilot is believed

to have been Hani Hanjour. A copy of the letter in Atta’s luggage was found in a car registered

to al-Hazmi that had been parked at Dulles.

At approximately 8:42 a.m., United Airlines Flight 93 left Newark International Airport

for San Francisco with 37 passengers and seven crew members. Ziad Jarrah was the only one of

four hijackers aboard known to have a pilot’s license; therefore, he is believed to have been the

142

pilot. At approximately 10:03 a.m., Flight 93 crashed into the ground at Stoney Creek Township

in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Telephone calls from passengers and crew to family and friends described attempts by

passengers and crew to retake the plane prior to the crash. One call described three hijackers

wearing bandanas and armed with knives, with one hijacker claiming to have a bomb strapped to

his waist. Two hijackers entered the cockpit and closed the door behind them. The passengers

were herded to the back of the plane. The captain and co-pilot were seen lying on the floor of

forward. As described by the FBI Director, the cockpit tape-recorder indicates that a hijacker,

minutes before Flight 93 hit the ground, "advised Jarrah to crash the plane and end the

passengers attempt to retake the airplane."

A copy of the letter found in Atta’s baggage and al-Hazmi’s car was also found at the

Flight 93 crash site. The FBI notes that some of the Arabic on the cockpit tape, "such as

supplications to Allah, conforms to the suicide preparation instructions" in that letter.

In the UAE, Alhawsawi, the plot financier, consolidated in his bank account funds the

hijackers had returned, to which he added funds he withdrew from one of their accounts just

hours before the September 11 attacks. He then flew to Karachi, Pakistan. His whereabouts are

unknown.

[In late 1999, the Intelligence Community launched a worldwide effort to disrupt terrorist

operations that were planned to occur during the Millennium celebrations. A CIA officer told

the Joint Inquiry that, as the Intelligence Community reviewed information from the 1998 East

Africa embassy bombings, "a kind of tuning fork . . . buzzed when two individuals reportedly

planning a trip to Kuala Lumpur were linked indirectly to what appeared to be a support element

. . . involved with the Africa bombers." One traveler, Khalid al-Mihdhar, started his journey to

Malaysia from the Middle East, where, according to Joint Inquiry testimony from DCI Tenet, he

143

had been at a "suspected al-Qa’ida logistics facility." The other, Nawaf al-Hazmi, began his trip

to Malaysia from Pakistan. Initially, only the travelers’ first names were known. From the

outset, information circulated throughout the Intelligence Community that identified them as

"terrorist operatives." For example, a CIA cable stated, "Nawaf’s travel may be in support of a

terrorist mission]."

[Page 151]

The intelligence preceding the Malaysian meeting also showed that a person whose first

name was Salem would attend. An intelligence analyst observed at the time that "Salem may be

Nawaf’s younger brother," and that observation was reported to other Intelligence Community

agencies.

The Kuala Lumpur meeting took place between January 5 and 8, 2000. There has been

no intelligence about what was discussed at the meeting, but, according to DCI Tenet,

surveillance [ ] that began with al-Mihdhar’s arrival on

January 5 "indicated that the behavior of the individuals was consistent with clandestine

activity."

It was later determined that Khallad bin-Atash, a leading operative in Bin Ladin’s

network, also attended the meeting. According to DCI Tenet, Khallad was "the most important

figure at the Kuala Lumpur meeting" and he would later become "a key planner in the October

2000 USS Cole bombing."

The principal location of the meeting was a condominium owned by Yazid Sufaat, who

DCI Tenet identified to the Joint Inquiry as "a Malaysian chemist . . . directed by a terrorist

leader to make his apartment available." Later in 2000, Sufaat signed letters of introduction for

Zacarias Moussaoui as a representative of his company, letters Moussaoui took with him to the

United States.

DCI Tenet testified that, "[i]n early January 2000, we managed to obtain a photocopy of

al-Mihdhar’s passport as he traveled to Kuala Lumpur." This gave the CIA al-Mihdhar’s full

name, his passport number, and birth information. It also showed that al-Mihdhar held a U.S.

visa, issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in April 1999, that would not expire until April 2000. These

144

facts were verified at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah before the meeting started. The DCI told the

Joint Inquiry:

We had at that point the level of detail needed to watchlist [al-Mihdhar] — that is,

to nominate him to State Department for refusal of entry into the US or to deny

him another visa. Our officers remained focused on the surveillance operation

and did not do so.

Surveillance photographs of the meeting were taken by the [ ] and

transmitted to CIA Headquarters. When the meeting ended, al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi, and Khallad

(under a different name) flew to Thailand seated side by side.

[Page 152]

Soon after the travelers left Malaysia on January 8, the CIA received evidence that

Nawaf’s last name might be al-Hazmi when it learned that someone with that last name had been

seated next to al-Mihdhar on the flight from Malaysia. That information could have led to

Nawaf al-Hazmi’s watchlisting.

Unknown to the CIA, since early 1999 the National Security Agency had information

associating al-Hazmi by his full name with the Bin Ladin network, information it did not

disseminate. NSA Director Hayden, told the Joint Inquiry:

We did not disseminate information we received in early 1999 that was

unexceptional in its content except that it associated the name of Nawaf al-Hazmi

with al-Qa’ida. . . . At the time of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, we had the al-

Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salem, as well as Khalid al-Mihdhar, in our sights.

We knew of their association with al-Qa’ida, and we shared this information with

the Community. I’ve looked at this closely. If we had handled all of the above

perfectly, the only new fact that we could have contributed at the time of Kuala

Lumpur was that Nawaf’s surname (and perhaps that of Salem, who appeared to

be Nawaf’s brother) was al-Hazmi.

Although NSA did not disseminate this information to the Intelligence Community

before September 11, it was available in NSA databases. However, no one at CIA or elsewhere

asked NSA before September 11 to review its database for information about Nawaf al-Hazmi.

Knowledge of Nawaf’s last name also pointed to his brother Salem’s last name, which

meant that the Intelligence Community had in its grasp the full names of three of the future

hijackers. In addition, the State Department had in the records of its Jeddah consulate the fact

145

that Nawaf and Salem al-Hazmi had obtained U.S. visas in April 1999, several days before al-

Mihdhar obtained his U.S. visa at that consulate.

Thus, at the time of the Malaysia meeting, the CIA had passport information regarding al-

Mihdhar, including his U.S. visa. A CIA officer, who was working as a CTC Supervisor,

testified before the Joint Inquiry that a CTC cable in early 2000 noted that al-Mihdhar’s passport

information had been "passed to the FBI," but the CIA was unable to "confirm either passage or

were passed." The Joint Inquiry found no record of the visa information at FBI Headquarters.

While the Malaysia meeting was in progress, a CIA employee sent an e-mail to a CIA

colleague describing "exactly" the briefings he had given two FBI agents on al-Mihdhar’s

activities. The CIA employee had been assigned to the FBI’s Strategic Information Operations

Center to deal with problems "in communicating between the CIA and the FBI." The e-mail did

not mention that al-Mihdhar held a U.S. visa, but did report that the CIA employee told the

second FBI agent the following:

This continues to be an [intelligence] operation. Thus far, a lot of suspicious

activity has been observed but nothing that would indicate evidence of an

impending attack or criminal enterprise. Told [the first FBI agent] that as soon as

something concrete is developed leading us to the criminal arena or to known FBI

cases, we will immediately bring FBI into the loop. Like [the first FBI agent]

yesterday, [the second FBI agent] stated that this was a fine approach and thanked

me for keeping him in the loop.

An e-mail from the second FBI agent to FBI Headquarters discussed the conversation with the

CIA employee. This e-mail also did not mention al-Mihdhar’s visa information. None of the

participants in these communications now recalls discussing the visa information.

146

however, because, according to a CIA officer’s testimony, "[w]hen they arrived [in Thailand] we

were unable to mobilize what we needed to mobilize." Nonetheless, in February 2000, CIA

rejected a request from foreign authorities to become involved because CIA was in the middle of

an investigation "to determine what the subject is up to]."

[In early March 2000, CIA Headquarters, including CTC and its Bin Ladin unit, received

a cable from a CIA station in [ ] noting that Nawaf al-Hazmi had traveled to Los Angeles on

January 15, 2000. The cable was marked "Action Required: None, FYI [For Your

Information]." The following day, another station, which had been copied on the cable by the