NY Times
December 30, 2001
MISSED SIGNALS
Many Say U.S. Planned for Terror but Failed to Take Action
By THE NEW YORK TIMEs
Missed Signals
This is the last of three articles. The first report examined Saudi Arabia's
policies toward militants who left home to wage holy war. The second looked
at how Muslim militancy took root in Europe and how European governments
failed to understand its danger and depth.
Inside the White House situation room on the morning terrorism transformed
America, Franklin C. Miller, the director for defense policy, was suddenly
gripped by a staggering fear: "The White House could be hit. We could be
going down."
The reports and rumors came in a torrent: A car bomb had exploded at the
State Department. The Mall was in flames. The Pentagon had been destroyed.
Planes were bearing down on the capital.
The White House was evacuated, leaving the national security team alone,
trying to control a nation suddenly under siege and wondering if they were
next. Mr. Miller had an aide send out the names of those present by e-mail
"so that when and if we died, someone would know who was in there."
Somewhere in the havoc of the moment, Richard A. Clarke, then the White
House counterterrorism chief, recalled the long drumbeat of warnings about
terrorists striking on American soil, many of them delivered and debated in
that very room. After a third hijacked jet had sliced into the Pentagon,
others heard Mr. Clarke say it first: "This is Al Qaeda."
An extensive review of the nation's antiterrorism efforts shows that for
years before Sept. 11, terror experts throughout the government understood
the apocalyptic designs of Osama bin Laden. But the top leaders never
reacted as if they believed the country was as vulnerable as it proved to be
that morning.
Dozens of interviews with current and former officials demonstrate that even
as the threat of terrorism mounted through eight years of the Clinton
administration and eight months of President Bush, the government did not
marshal its full forces against it.
The defensive work of tightening the borders and airport security was
studied but never quite completed. And though the White House undertook a
covert campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden, the government never mustered the
critical mass of political will and on-the-ground intelligence for the kind
of offensive against Al Qaeda it unleashed this fall.
The rising threat of the Islamic jihad movement was first detected by United
States investigators after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The
inquiry into that attack revealed a weakness in the immigration system used
by one of the terrorists, but that hole was never plugged, and it was
exploited by one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
In 1996, a State Department dossier spelled out Mr. bin Laden's operation
and his anti-American intentions. And President Bill Clinton's own pollster
told him the public would rally behind a war on terrorism. But none was
declared.
By 1997, the threat of an Islamic attack on America was so well recognized
that an F.B.I. agent warned of it in a public speech. But that same year, a
strategy for tightening airline security, proposed by a vice- presidential
panel, was largely ignored.
In 2000, after an Algerian was caught coming into the country with
explosives, a secret White House review recommended a crackdown on
"potential sleeper cells in the United States." That review warned that "the
threat of attack remains high" and laid out a plan for fighting terrorism.
But most of that plan remained undone.
Last spring, when new threats surfaced, the Bush administration devised a
new strategy, which officials said included a striking departure from
previous policy an extensive C.I.A. program to arm the Northern Alliance
and other anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan. That new proposal had wound
its way to the desk of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and
was ready to be delivered to the president for final approval on Monday,
Sept. 10.
The government's fight against terrorism always seemed to fall short.
The Sept. 11 attack "was a systematic failure of the way this country
protects itself," said James Woolsey, a former director of central
intelligence. "It's aviation security delegated to the airlines, who did a
lousy job. It's a fighter aircraft deployment failure. It's a foreign
intelligence collection failure. It's a domestic detection failure. It's a
visa and immigration policy failure."
The Clinton administration intensified efforts against Al Qaeda after two
United States Embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998. But by then, the
terror network had gone global "Al Qaeda became Starbucks," said Charles
Duelfer, a former State Department official with cells across Europe,
Africa and beyond.
Even so, according to the interviews and documents, the government response
to terrorism remained measured, even halting, reflecting the competing
interests and judgments involved in fighting an ill-defined foe.
The main weapon in President Clinton's campaign to kill Mr. bin Laden and
his lieutenants was cruise missiles, which are fired from thousands of miles
away. While that made it difficult to hit Mr. bin Laden as he moved around
Afghanistan, the president was reluctant to put American lives at risk.
But a basic problem throughout the fight against terrorism has been the lack
of inside information. The C.I.A. was surprised repeatedly by Mr. bin Laden,
not so much because it failed to pay attention, but because it lacked
sources inside Al Qaeda. There were no precise warnings of impending
attacks, and the C.I.A. could not provide an exact location for Mr. bin
Laden, which was essential to the objective of killing him.
At the F.B.I., it was not until last year that all field offices were
ordered to get engaged in the war on terrorism and develop sources. Inside
the bureau, the seminars and other activities that accompanied these orders
were nicknamed "Terrorism for Dummies," a stark acknowledgment of how far
the agency had not come in the seven years since the first trade center attack.
"I get upset when I hear complaints from Congress that the F.B.I. is not
sharing its intelligence," said a former senior law enforcement official in
the Clinton and Bush administrations. "The problem is that there isn't any
to share. There is very little. And the stuff we can share is not worth
sharing."
Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central
Intelligence Agency said that they had some success in foiling Al Qaeda
plots, but that the structure of the group made it difficult to penetrate.
"It is understandable, but unrealistic, especially given our authorities and
resources, to expect us to be perfect," said Bill Harlow, a C.I.A. spokesman.
The reasons the government was not more single-minded in attacking Al Qaeda
will be examined exhaustively and from every angle by Congress and others in
the years ahead.
In an era of opulence and invincibility, the threat of terrorism never took
root as a dominant political issue. Mr. bin Laden's boldest attack on
American property before Sept. 11 the embassy bombings came in the same
summer that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was engulfing President Clinton. A
full fight against terrorism might have meant the sacrifice of money,
individual liberties and, perhaps, lives and even then without any
guarantee of success.
Mr. Clarke, until recently the White House director of counterterrorism,
warned of the threat for years and reached this conclusion: "Democracies
don't prepare well for things that have never happened before."
The First Warning
A Horrible Surprise At the Trade Center
On Feb. 26, 1993 a month after Bill Clinton took office, having vowed to
focus on strengthening the domestic economy "like a laser" the World Trade
Center was bombed by Islamic extremists operating from Brooklyn and New
Jersey. Six people were killed, and hundreds injured.
Today, American experts see that attack as the first of many missed
warnings. "In retrospect, the wake-up call should have been the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing," said Michael Sheehan, counterterrorism coordinator at
the State Department in the last years of the Clinton presidency.
The implications of the F.B.I.'s investigation were disturbingly clear: A
dangerous phenomenon had taken root. Young Muslims who had fought with the
Afghan rebels against the Soviet Union in the 1980's had taken their jihad
to American shores.
The F.B.I. was "caught almost totally unaware that these guys were in here,"
recalled Robert M. Blitzer, a former senior counterterrorism official in the
bureau's headquarters. "It was alarming to us that these guys had been
coming and going since 1985 and we didn't know."
One of the names that surfaced in the bombing case was that of a Saudi exile
named Osama bin Laden, F.B.I. officials say. Mr. bin Laden, they learned,
was financing the Office of Services, a Pakistan-based group involved in
organizing the new jihad. And it turned out that the mastermind of the trade
center attack, Ramzi Yousef, had stayed for several months in a Pakistani
guest house supported by Mr. bin Laden.
But if the first World Trade Center bombing raised the consciousness of some
at the F.B.I., it had little lasting resonance for the White House. Mr.
Clinton, who would prove gifted at leading the nation through sorrowful
occasions, never visited the site. Congress tightened immigration laws, but
the concern about porous borders quickly dissipated and the new rules were
never put in effect.
Leon E. Panetta, the former congressman who was budget director and later
chief of staff during Mr. Clinton's first term, said senior aides viewed
terrorism as just one of many pressing global problems.
"Clinton was aware of the threat and sometimes he would mention it," Mr.
Panetta said. But the "big issues" in the president's first term, he said,
were "Russia, Eastern bloc, Middle East peace, human rights, rogue nations
and then terrorism."
When it came to terrorism, Clinton administration officials continued the
policy of their predecessors, who had viewed it primarily as a crime to be
solved and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies. That approach, which
called for grand jury indictments, created its own problems.
The trade center investigation produced promising leads that pointed
overseas. But Mr. Woolsey said in an interview that this material was not
shared with the C.I.A. because of rules governing grand jury secrecy.
The C.I.A. faced its own obstacles, former agency officials say. In the wake
of the Soviet Union's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the agency
virtually abandoned the region, leaving it with few sources of information
about the rising radical threat.
Looking back, George Stephanopoulos, the president's adviser for policy and
strategy in his first term, said he believed the 1993 attack did not gain
more attention because, in the end, it "wasn't a successful bombing."
He added: "It wasn't the kind of thing where you walked into a staff meeting
and people asked, what are we doing today in the war against terrorism?"
Two years later, however, terrorism moved to the forefront of the national
agenda when a truck bomb tore into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in
Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people.
President Clinton visited Oklahoma City for a memorial service, signaling
the political import of the event. "We're going to have to be very, very
tough in dealing with this," he declared in an interview.
Mr. Panetta said that plans to reorganize the government's counterterrorism
efforts were quickly revived. Senior officials recognized that the United
States remained vulnerable to terrorism. The bombing proved to be the work
of two Americans, both former soldiers, but if Oklahoma City could be hit,
an attack by terrorists of any stripe could "happen at the White House," Mr.
Panetta said.
Two months after the bombing, Mr. Clinton ordered the government to
intensify the fight against terrorism. The order did not give agencies
involved in the fight more money, nor did it end the bureaucratic turf
battles among them.
But it did put Mr. bin Laden, who had set up operations in Sudan after
leaving Afghanistan in 1991, front and center.
Diplomacy and Politics
A Growing Effort Against bin Laden
As Mr. Clinton prepared his re-election bid in 1996, the administration made
several crucial decisions. Recognizing the growing significance of Mr. bin
Laden, the C.I.A. created a virtual station, code-named Alex, to track his
activities around the world.
In the Middle East, American diplomats pressed the hard-line Islamic regime
of Sudan to expel Mr. bin Laden, even if that pushed him back into
Afghanistan.
To build support for this effort among Middle Eastern governments, the State
Department circulated a dossier that accused Mr. bin Laden of financing
radical Islamic causes around the world.
The document implicated him in several attacks on Americans, including the
1992 bombing of a hotel in Aden, Yemen, where American troops had stayed on
their way to Somalia. It also said Mr. bin Laden's associates had trained
the Somalis who killed 18 American servicemen in Mogadishu in 1993.
Sudanese officials met with their C.I.A. and State Department counterparts
and signaled that they might turn Mr. bin Laden over to another country.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt were possibilities.
State Department and C.I.A. officials urged both Egypt and Saudi Arabia to
accept him, according to former Clinton officials. "But both were afraid of
the domestic reaction and refused," one recalled.
Critics of the administration's effort said this was an early missed
opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda. Mr. Clinton himself would have had to lean
hard on the Saudi and Egyptian governments. The White House believed no
amount of pressure would change the outcome, and Mr. Clinton risked spending
valuable capital on a losing cause. "We were not about to have the president
make a call and be told no," one official explained.
Sudan obliquely hinted that it might turn Mr. bin Laden over to the United
States, a former official said. But the Justice Department reviewed the case
and concluded in the spring of 1996 that it did not have enough evidence to
charge him with the attacks on American troops in Yemen and Somalia.
In May 1996, Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden, confiscating some of his
substantial fortune. He moved his organization to Afghanistan, just as an
obscure group known as the Taliban was taking control of the country.
Clinton administration officials counted it as a positive step. Mr. bin
Laden was on the run, deprived of the tacit state sponsorship he had enjoyed
in Sudan.
"He lost his base and momentum," said Samuel R. Berger, Mr. Clinton's
national security adviser in his second term.
In July 1996, shortly after Mr. bin Laden left Sudan, Mr. Clinton met at the
White House with Dick Morris, his political adviser, to hone themes for his
re-election campaign.
The previous month, a suicide bomber had detonated a truck bomb at a
military barracks in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 American servicemen. Days
later, T.W.A. Flight 800 had exploded off Long Island, leaving 230 people
dead in a crash that was immediately viewed as terrorism.
Mr. Morris said he had devised an attack advertisement of the sort that
Senator Bob Dole, the Republican candidate, might use against Mr. Clinton
and had shown it to a sampling of voters. Seven percent of those who saw it
said they would switch from Mr. Clinton to Mr. Dole.
"Out of control. Two airline disasters. One linked to terrorism," the
advertisement said. "F.A.A. asleep at the switch. Terror in Saudi Arabia."
Mr. Morris said he told Mr. Clinton that he could neutralize such a line of
attack by adopting tougher policies on terrorism and airport security. He
said his polls had found support for tightening security and confronting
terrorists. Voters favored military action against suspected terrorist
installations in other countries. They backed a federal takeover of airport
screening and even supported deployment of the military inside the United
States to fight terrorism.
Mr. Morris said he tried and failed to persuade the president to undertake a
broader war on terrorism.
Mr. Clinton declined repeated requests for an interview, but a spokeswoman,
Julia Payne, said: "Terrorism was always a top priority in the Clinton
administration. The president chose to get his foreign policy advice from
the likes of Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright and not Dick Morris."
On July 25, Mr. Clinton announced that he had put Vice President Al Gore at
the head of a commission on aviation safety and security. Within weeks, the
panel had drafted more than two dozen recommendations. Its final report, in
February 1997, added dozens more.
Among the most important, commission members said, was a proposal that the
F.B.I. and C.I.A. share information about suspected terrorists for the
databases maintained by each airline. If a suspected terrorist bought a
ticket, both the airline and the government would find out.
Progress was slow, particularly after federal investigators determined that
the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 resulted from a mechanical flaw, not
terrorism. The commission's recommendation languished until Sept. 11, when
two people already identified by the government as suspected terrorists
boarded separate American Airlines flights from Boston using their own names.
That morning, no alarms went off. The system proposed by the Gore commission
was still not in place. The government is now moving to share more
information with the airlines about suspected terrorists.
"Unfortunately, it takes a dramatic event to focus the government's and
public's attention, especially on an issue as amorphous as terrorism," said
Gerry Kauvar, staff director of the commission and now a senior policy
analyst at the RAND Corporation.
Focusing on Al Qaeda
A Clearer Picture, A Disjointed Fight
As Mr. Clinton began his second term, American intelligence agencies were
assembling a clearer picture of the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden and Al
Qaeda, which was making substantial headway in Afghanistan.
A few months earlier, the first significant defector from Al Qaeda had
walked into an American Embassy in Africa and provided a detailed account of
the organization's operations and ultimate objectives.
The defector, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, told American officials that Mr. bin
Laden had taken aim at the United States and other Western governments,
broadening his initial goal of overthrowing Saudi Arabia and other "infidel"
Middle Eastern governments.
He said that Al Qaeda was trying to buy a nuclear bomb and other
unconventional weapons. Mr. bin Laden was also trying to form an
anti-American terrorist front that would unite radical groups. But Mr.
Fadl's statements were not widely circulated within the government. A senior
official said their significance was not fully understood by Mr. Clinton's
top advisers until his public testimony in 2000.
The war against Al Qaeda remained disjointed. While the State Department
listed Mr. bin Laden as a financier of terror in its 1996 survey of
terrorism, Al Qaeda was not included on the list of terrorist organizations
subject to various sanctions released by the United States in 1997.
The F.B.I.'s counterterrorism experts, who were privy to Mr. Fadl's
debriefings, were growing increasingly concerned about Islamic terrorism.
"Almost all of the groups today, if they chose, have the ability to strike
us in the United States," John P. O'Neill, a senior F.B.I. official involved
in counterterrorism, warned in a June 1997 speech.
The task, Mr. O'Neill said, was to "nick away" at terrorists' ability to
operate in the United States. (Mr. O'Neill left the F.B.I. this year for a
job as chief of security at the World Trade Center, where he died on Sept.
11.)
As Mr. O'Neill spoke in Chicago, the F.B.I. and C.I.A. was homing in on a
Qaeda cell in Nairobi, Kenya.
The National Security Agency began eavesdropping on telephone lines used by
Al Qaeda members in the country. On several occasions, calls to Mr. bin
Laden's satellite phone in Afghanistan were overheard. The F.B.I. and C.I.A.
searched a house in Kenya, seizing a computer and questioning Wadih El-Hage,
an American citizen working as Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary.
American officials counted the operations as a success and believed they had
disrupted a potentially dangerous terrorist cell. They were proved wrong on
Aug. 7, 1998, when truck bombs were detonated outside the United States
embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people,
including 12 Americans, and injuring more than 5,000.
Stunned by the plot's ambition and precision, Mr. Clinton vowed to punish
the perpetrators, who were quickly identified as Al Qaeda adherents. "No
matter how long it takes or where it takes us," the president said, "we will
pursue terrorists until the cases are solved and justice is done."
The political calculus, however, had changed markedly since the president's
triumph in the fall of 1996, and Mr. Clinton was in no position to mount a
sustained war against terrorism.
His administration was weighed down by a scandal over his relationship with
a White House intern. Mr. Clinton was about to acknowledge to a grand jury
that his public and private denials of the affair had been misleading.
Republicans depicted every foreign policy decision as an attempt to distract
voters.
Thirteen days after the embassy bombings, President Clinton nonetheless
ordered cruise missile strikes on a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and a
pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that officials said was linked to Mr. bin
Laden and chemical weapons.
But the volley of cruise missiles proved a setback for American
counterterrorism efforts. The C.I.A. had been told that Mr. bin Laden and
his entourage were meeting at the camp, but the missiles struck just a few
hours after he left. And the owner of the pharmaceutical factory came
forward to claim that it had nothing to do with chemical weapons, raising
questions about whether the Sudan strike had been in error.
The Clinton administration stood by its actions, but several former
officials said the criticism had an effect on the pursuit of Al Qaeda: Mr.
Clinton became even more cautious about using force against terrorists.
Unfortunately, the quarry was becoming more dangerous. In the two years
since leaving Sudan, Mr. bin Laden had built a formidable base in
Afghanistan. He lavished millions of dollars on the impoverished Taliban
regime and in exchange was allowed to operate a network of training camps
that attracted Islamic militants from all over the world. In early 1998,
just as he declared war on Americans everywhere in the world, he cemented an
alliance with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a ruthless and effective group whose
leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was known for his operational skills.
The Battle Intensifies
Struggling to Track 'Enemy No. 1'
In the years after the embassy bombings, the Clinton administration
significantly stepped up its efforts to destroy Al Qaeda, tracking its
finances, plotting military strikes to wipe out its leadership and
prosecuting its members for the bombings and other crimes. "From August
1998, bin Laden was Enemy No. 1," Mr. Berger said.
The campaign had the support of President Clinton and his senior aides. But
former administration officials acknowledge that it never became the
government's top priority.
When it came to Pakistan, for example, American diplomats continued to weigh
the war on terrorism against other pressing issues, including the need to
enlist Islamabad's help in averting a nuclear exchange with India.
Similarly, a proposal to vastly enhance the Treasury Department's ability to
track global flows of terrorist money languished until after Sept. 11. And
American officials were reluctant to press the oil-rich Saudis to crack down
on charities linked to radical causes.
Still, the fight against Al Qaeda gained new, high-level attention after the
embassy attacks, present and former officials say. Between 1998 and 2000,
the "Small Group" of the Cabinet-rank principals involved in national
security met almost every week on terrorism, and the Counterterrorism
Security Group, led by Mr. Clarke, met two or three times a week, officials
said.
The United States disrupted some Qaeda cells, and persuaded friendly
intelligence services to arrange the arrest and transfer of Al Qaeda members
without formal extradition or legal proceedings. Dozens were quietly sent to
Egypt and other countries to stand trial.
President Clinton also ordered a more aggressive program of covert action,
signing an intelligence order that allowed him to use lethal force against
Mr. bin Laden. Later, this was expanded to include as many as a dozen of his
top lieutenants, officials said.
On at least four occasions, Mr. Clinton sent the C.I.A. a secret "memorandum
of notification," authorizing the government to kill or capture Mr. bin
Laden and, later, other senior operatives. The C.I.A. then briefed members
of Congress about those plans.
The C.I.A. redoubled its efforts to track Mr. bin Laden's movements,
stationing submarines in the Indian Ocean to await the president's launch
order. To hit Mr. bin Laden, the military said it needed to know where he
would be 6 to 10 hours later enough time to review the decision in
Washington and program the cruise missiles.
That search proved frustrating. Officials said the C.I.A. did have some
spies within Afghanistan. On at least three occasions between 1998 and 2000,
the C.I.A. told the White House it had learned where Mr. bin Laden was and
where he might soon be.
Each time, Mr. Clinton approved the strike. Each time, George Tenet, the
director of central intelligence, called the president to say that the
information was not reliable enough to be used in an attack, a former senior
Clinton administration official said.
In late 1998, according to former officials, intelligence agents reported
that Abu Hafs, a Mauritanian and an important figure in Al Qaeda, was
staying in Room 13 at the Dana Hotel in Khartoum.
With such specific information in hand, White House officials wanted Abu
Hafs either killed or, preferably, captured and transferred out of Sudan to
a friendly state where he could be interrogated, the former officials said.
The agency initially questioned whether it could accomplish such a mission
in a hostile, risky environment like Sudan, putting it in the "too hard to
do box," one former official said. An intelligence official disputed this
account, saying the C.I.A. made "a full-tilt effort in a very dangerous
environment."
Eventually, the C.I.A. enlisted another government to help seize Abu Hafs, a
former official said, but by then it was too late. The target had disappeared.
Officials said the White House pushed the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop
plans for a commando raid to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden. But the
chairman, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, and other senior Pentagon officers told Mr.
Clinton's top national security aides that they would need to know Mr. bin
Laden's whereabouts 12 to 24 hours in advance.
Pentagon planners also considered a White House request to send a hunter
team of commandos, small enough to avoid detection, the officer said.
General Shelton discounted this option as naïve, the officer said.
White House officials were frustrated that the Pentagon could not produce
plans that involved a modest number of troops. Military planners insisted
that an attack on Al Qaeda required thousands of troops invading
Afghanistan. "When you said this is what it would take, no one was
interested," a senior officer said.
A former administration official recently defended the decision not to
employ a commando strike. "It would have been an assault without the kind of
war we've seen over the last three months to support it," the official said.
"And it would have been very unlikely to succeed."
Clinton administration officials also began trying to choke off Al Qaeda's
financial network. Shortly after the embassy bombings, the United States
began threatening states and financial institutions with sanctions if they
failed to cut off assistance to those who did business with Al Qaeda and the
Taliban.
In 1999 and early 2000, some $255 million of Taliban-controlled assets was
blocked in United States accounts, according to William F. Wechsler, a
former White House official.
Mr. Wechsler said the search for Al Qaeda's assets was often stymied by poor
cooperation from Middle Eastern and South Asian states.
The United States, too, he added, had problems. "Few intelligence officials
who understand the nuances of the global banking system" were fluent in
Arabic. While the C.I.A. had done a "reasonably good job" analyzing Al
Qaeda, he wrote, it was "poor" at developing sources within Mr. bin Laden's
financial network. The F.B.I., he argued, had similar shortcomings.
Senior officials were frustrated by the C.I.A.'s inability to find hard
facts about Al Qaeda's financial operations.
Intelligence officials said the C.I.A. had amassed considerable detail about
the group's finances, and that information was used in the broad efforts to
freeze its accounts after Sept. 11.
At the State Department, officials reacted sharply to the assault on the
embassies. Michael Sheehan, the department's former counterterrorism
coordinator, said that after the bombings, Secretary of State Madeleine K.
Albright met with her embassy security director every morning and became
increasingly focused on efforts to protect her employees and installations.
But to Mr. Sheehan, the response was inadequate. He believed that terrorism
could be contained only if Washington devised a "comprehensive political
strategy to pressure Pakistan and other neighbors and allies into isolating
not only Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but the Taliban and others who provide
them sanctuary," he said, and that did not happen. There were competing
priorities. "Our reaction was responsive, almost never proactive," he said.
'We Were Flying Blind'
An Arrest, a Review And New Obstacles
The arrest of Ahmed Ressam was the clearest sign that Osama bin Laden was
trying to bring the jihad to the United States.
Mr. Ressam was arrested when he tried to enter the United States in Port
Angeles, Wash., on Dec. 14, 1999. Inside his rental car, agents found 130
pounds of bomb-making chemicals and detonator components.
His arrest helped reveal what intelligence officials later concluded was a
Qaeda plot to unleash attacks during the millennium celebrations, aimed at
an American ship in Yemen, tourist sites and a hotel in Jordan, and unknown
targets in the United States.
"That was a wake-up call," a senior law enforcement officer said, "not for
law enforcement and intelligence, but for policy makers." Just as the
embassy bombings had exposed the threat of Al Qaeda overseas, the millennium
plot revealed gaping vulnerabilities at home.
"If you understood Al Qaeda, you knew something was going to happen," said
Robert M. Bryant, who was the deputy director of the F.B.I. when he retired
in 1999. "You knew they were going to hit us, but you didn't know where. It
just made me sick on Sept. 11. I cried when those towers came down."
A White House review of American defenses in March 2000 found significant
shortcomings in nearly a decade of government efforts to improve defenses
against terrorists at home. The F.B.I. and the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, it said, should begin "high tempo, ongoing
operations to arrest, detain and deport potential sleeper cells in the
United States."
The review called for the government to greatly expand its antiterrorism
efforts inside the United States, creating an additional dozen joint
federal-local task forces like the one that had been set up in New York.
The review identified particular weaknesses in the nation's immigration
controls, officials said. The government remained unable to track foreigners
in the United States on student visas, despite a 1996 law passed after the
first World Trade Center bombing that required it to do so.
In June 2000, after the millennium plot was revealed, the National
Commission on Terrorism recommended that the immigration service set up a
system to keep tabs on foreign students. Academic institutions opposed the
recommendation, fearing that a strict reporting requirement might alienate
prospective foreign students, according to government officials. Nothing
changed.
As the commission was completing its work, the Sept. 11 hijackers began
entering the United States. One of the 19 hijackers, Hani Hanjour, who had
traveled on a student visa, failed to show up for school and remained in the
country illegally.
The F.B.I. had some problems of its own. It had no intelligence warning of
an attack on Los Angeles International Airport, which investigators
eventually learned was Mr. Ressam's intended target.
Beginning in 1997, senior officials at the bureau had begun to rethink their
approach to terrorism, viewing it now as a crime to be prevented rather than
solved. But it was the millennium plot that revealed how ill equipped the
bureau was to radically shift its culture, former officials say.
It lacked informers within terrorist groups. It did not have the computer
and analytical capacity for integrating disparate pieces of information.
"We did not have any actionable intelligence," one senior official said. "We
were flying blind."
In March 2000, Dale L. Watson, the F.B.I.'s assistant director for
counterterrorism, started a series of seminars with agents who headed the
bureau's 56 field offices. Each field office was required to establish a
joint terrorism task force with local police departments, modeled after the
arrangement begun in New York in the mid-1980's. Field office chiefs were
also told to hire more Arabic translators and develop better sources of
information.
Mr. Watson said that the meetings were a centerpiece of efforts to shore up
the bureau's counterterrorism work that had begun several years earlier. The
meetings, he said, were "designed to bring every office, no matter how
small, to the same top terrorism capacities resident in our larger offices
like New York."
The F.B.I. renewed its push on Capitol Hill for money to create a computer
system that would allow various field offices to share and analyze
information collected by agents. Until late last year, Congress had refused
to pay for the project.
Without the analytical aid of a computer system, Mr. Bryant said, the
bureau's counterterrorism program would be hobbled, particularly if the goal
was to avert a crime. "We didn't know what we had," he said. "We didn't know
what we knew."
Overseas, the Clinton administration searched for new ways to obtain the
intelligence needed to attack Mr. bin Laden. In September 2000, an unarmed,
unmanned spy plane called the Predator flew test flights over Afghanistan,
providing what several administration officials called incomparably detailed
real-time video and photographs of the movements of what appeared to be Mr.
bin Laden and his aides.
The White House pressed ahead with a program to arm the Predator with a
missile, but the effort was slowed by bureaucratic infighting between the
Pentagon and the C.I.A. over who would pay for the craft and who would have
ultimate authority over its use. The dispute, officials said, was not
resolved until after Sept. 11.
On Oct. 12, an explosive-laden dinghy piloted by two suicide bombers
exploded next to the American destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors.
Intelligence analysts linked the bombing to Al Qaeda, but at a series of
Cabinet-level meetings, Mr. Tenet of the C.I.A. and senior F.B.I. officials
said the case was not conclusive.
Mr. Clarke, the White House counterterrorism director, had no doubts about
whom to punish. In late October, officials said, he put on the table an idea
he had been pushing for some time: bombing Mr. bin Laden's largest training
camps in Afghanistan.
With the administration locked in a fevered effort to broker a peace
settlement in Israel, an election imminent and the two- term Clinton
administration coming to a close, the recommendation went nowhere. Terrorism
was not raised as an issue by either Vice President Al Gore or George W.
Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign.
In October 2000, the administration took another shot at killing Mr. bin
Laden. When Mr. Berger called the president to tell him the effort had
failed, he recalled, Mr. Clinton cursed. "Just keep trying," he said.
The New Team
Seeing the Threat But Moving Slowly
As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his
successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning.
According to both of them, he said that terrorism and particularly Mr. bin
Laden's brand of it would consume far more of her time than she had ever
imagined.
A month later, with the administration still getting organized, Mr. Tenet,
whom President Bush had asked to stay on at the C.I.A., warned the Senate
Intelligence Committee that Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda remained "the most
immediate and serious threat" to security. But until Sept. 11, the people at
the top levels of the Bush administration may, if anything, have been less
preoccupied by terrorism than the Clinton aides.
At the C.I.A., according to former Clinton administration officials, Mr.
Tenet's actions did not match his words. For example, one intelligence
official said, the C.I.A. station in Pakistan remained understaffed and
underfinanced, though the C.I.A. denied that.
In March, the White House's Counterterrorism Security Group began drafting
its own strategy for combating Al Qaeda. Mr. Clarke was still nominally in
charge, but Bush aides were on the way to approving Mr. Clarke's
recommendation that his group be divided into several new offices.
Mr. Bush's principals did not formally meet to discuss terrorism in late
spring when intercepts from Afghanistan warned that Al Qaeda was planning to
attack an American target in late June or perhaps over the July 4 holiday.
They did not meet even after intelligence analysts overheard conversations
from a Qaeda cell in Milan suggesting that Mr. bin Laden's agents might be
plotting to kill Mr. Bush at the European summit meeting in Genoa, Italy, in
late July.
Administration officials say the president was concerned about the growing
threat and frustrated by the halfhearted efforts to thwart Al Qaeda. In
July, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush likened the response to the Qaeda threat to
"swatting at flies." He said he wanted a plan to "bring this guy down."
The administration's draft plan for fighting Al Qaeda included a $200
million C.I.A. program that, among other things, would arm the Taliban's
enemies. Clinton administration officials had refused to provide significant
money and arms to the Northern Alliance, which was composed mostly of ethnic
minorities. Officials feared that large-scale support for the rebels would
involve the United States too deeply in a civil war and anger Pakistan.
President Bush's national security advisers approved the plan on Sept. 4, a
senior administration official said, and it was to be presented to the
president on Sept. 10. (However, the leader of the Northern Alliance was
assassinated by Qaeda agents on Sept. 9.) Mr. Bush was traveling on Sept. 10
and did not receive it.
The next day his senior national security aides gathered shortly before 9
a.m. for a staff meeting. At roughly the same moment, a hijacked Boeing 767
was plowing into the north tower of the World Trade Center.
This article was reported by Judith Miller, Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta Jr.
and written by Ms. Miller.
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Note from a stranger:
Some articles are information that count as disinformation - Beware!
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