Washington – FBI investigators missed several chances to track down two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers and also mishandled a memo from an agent in Arizona suggesting that Osama bin Laden might be sending operatives to the United States to take flying lessons, a government watchdog reported in a study kept secret until this week.
The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine concluded that “we cannot say whether the FBI would have prevented the attacks had they handled these matters differently. … But … the way the FBI handled these matters was a significant failure that hindered the FBI’s chances of being able to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.”
Some of the report’s findings were also made in less detailed fashion in last fall’s Sept. 11 commission report, which relied on interviews and other information gathered by Fine’s investigators.
The new report describes a series of lost opportunities to unravel the activities of Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, two of the so-called muscle hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.
The report blames the failures primarily on CIA-FBI turf battles, confusion about when intelligence information could be shared with criminal investigators, and the FBI’s antiquated computer system, which made it difficult for investigators to know what information about investigations the bureau possessed.
In January 2000, the CIA noted Almihdhar’s presence at an al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and learned that he had a visa to enter the United States.
But the intelligence agency never passed the information on to the FBI, and bureau employees with access to the same data did not tell their bosses about it, according to the report.
Later, Almihdhar and Alhamzi were boarders with an FBI informant in San Diego, but the bureau didn’t learn of their identities because the agent handling the informant didn’t press him for the identities of his lodgers.
By late August 2001, the FBI finally realized that Almihdhar had entered the United States and began looking for him. But, according to the report, “the FBI assigned few resources … and little urgency was given to the investigation.”
The CIA shares “significant responsibility for the breakdowns … and several of its employees did not provide the intelligence information to the FBI as they should have,” according to the report.
One CIA employee interviewed by Fine’s staff referred to an FBI agent working at the CIA as “a mole” for the bureau.
The report found that FBI employees sometimes misunderstood or were inhibited by the so-called wall that is supposed to divide criminal investigations from intelligence gathering.
Fine also faulted the FBI for not doing more with a now-famous July 2001 memo written by Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams warning that the number of bin Laden followers receiving aviation training in the United States would put them “in a position … to conduct terror activity against civil aviation targets.”
