Consider five special sections in the Federal Bureau of Investigations: The International Terrorism Operations Section, Domestic Terrorism Operations Section, the National Infrastructure Protection Center, the Strategic Information Operations Center, and the National Domestic Preparedness Office. These seem very impressive -- and central to the War on Terror-- until you learn that these entities all existed before 9/11 and were appallingly ineffective.
The gory details of the FBI's blunders before 9/11 are revealed in "A Review of the FBI's Handling of Intelligence Information Related to the September 11 Attacks," a startling document released earlier this month as the result of a defense motion in the Zacharias Moussaoui trial. It got some notice but interest soon died out. The broad outlines were well known thanks to the 9/11 Commission, which having had access to it in 2004 could incorporate some of its findings.
The report deserves much more attention. Amongst the weeds here are the reasons why citizens should be very skeptical of official descriptions of the health of our counterterrorism system. Let's look again at the effect of those five impressive titles. By 1998, and certainly by late 1999, the FBI had set up groups to monitor Sunni extremists, especially al Qaeda. Had anyone bothered to ask the FBI in early 2001, for example, whether it was targeting bin Laden the Bureau could have responded: "Indeed we have 90 people in our International Terrorism Operations Section, which included an Usama Bin Laden Unit." Not huge operations to be sure but at the very least the right boxes existed into which to place information about al Qaeda. Nevertheless, the FBI committed gaffs that still boggle the mind and for which it has largely escaped blame.
In late 1999 and early 2000 the US intelligence community was focused on the threat of terrorism during the Millenium celebrations. Arguably it was not until September 11, 2001 that the US government would again be as single-minded in its pursuit of information about bin Laden. Yet during this period of high alert, information that a known al Qaeda operative named Khalid al-Mihdhar had entered the US with a multiple entry US visa stamped in his passport managed to slip through the cracks. The CIA shares blame for this. It developed the most information on Mihdhar and shared it incompletely. But the FBI report reveals that five FBI officers specializing in counterterrorism knew that this terrorist had applied to enter this country and did not follow up on what was clearly a domestic intelligence case. Worse than that, when Mihdhar ultimately came here in mid-January 2000 he would move into a residence affiliated with a mosque in San Diego that was owned by an FBI informant. FBI headquarters never received any report from San Diego about Mihdhar. On September 11, Mihdhar participated in the hijacking of American Airlines Flight 77.
When you see that these mistakes were made by people in a time of apparent high alert whose job it was to follow al Qaeda, it is hard not to wonder whether we are doing the job any better now. In later blogs I will discuss what lessons the FBI took from these blunders and why these were not enough.