Plenty of
Intelligence To Prevent 9/11
By Ray McGovern
September 13, 2021 -- "Information
Clearing House
- "Anti
War" -
Shortly before 9/11 the
National Security Agency (NSA) asked Thomas Drake to join its
senior staff. As things turned out, Sept. 11 was his first day
on the job. Already au courant with key NSA programs via his
earlier contract work, Tom was immediately tasked to find out
how much information NSA had on terrorist attacks before
9/11.
Drake found an
embarrassing abundance of such information. But when he told top
NSA management, his investigation was abruptly shut down. On
Jan. 7, 2014 in a VIPS Memorandum prepared for President Obama,
"NSA
Insiders Reveal What Went Wrong."
Drake wrote: "Make
no mistake. That data [collected and analyzed by NSA] could
have, should have prevented 9/11."
As the post-9/11 months
dragged on, Drake had to listen to NSA Director Michael Hayden’s
gloating over the ease with which he was able to hide NSA’s
egregious performance. It is a good guess that a huge part of
that "ease" can be attributed to protection by Hayden’s very
powerful patron, Vice President Dick Cheney. It is clear that
the Vice President played a key role in "authorizing"
unconstitutional surveillance. It is also possible that, BEFORE
the 9/11 attacks, Hayden shared with Cheney some of the alarming
evidence NSA had collected but otherwise kept to itself. Tom
continued:
"In short, when
confronted with the prospect of fessing up, NSA chose instead to
obstruct the 9/11 congressional investigation, play dumb, and
keep the truth buried, including the fact that it knew about all
inbound and outbound calls to the [al-Qaeda] safe house
switchboard in Yemen. …
"When the 9/11
Commission hearings began, Director Hayden chortled at executive
staff meetings over the fact that the FBI and CIA were feeling
the heat for not having prevented 9/11. This was particularly
difficult for me to sit through, for I was aware that NSA had
been able to cover up its own culpability by keeping
investigators, committees, and commissions away from the truth."
***
FBI and CIA Feeling
the Heat
The role played by NSA
Director Hayden was replicated by his counterparts at the FBI
and CIA – in addition to other ossified bureaucracies like the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Each had intelligence
information, that could have, and should have, thwarted the
attacks of 9/11. We know some of that from the public record –
although not much from the literarily polished but grossly
deficient "The 9/11 Commission Report".
Deficient? Let’s
take just a moment to remind ourselves that those who would rely
on that poor excuse for an investigative report are not working
with a full deck, and that this was openly acknowledged by the
commission’s co-chairmen, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton. A
couple of years after the formal report they published a book
Without Precedent, which
began with the words, "We were set up to fail." They elaborated,
"both of us were aware of grumbling around Washington that the
9/11 Commission was doomed – if not designed – to fail". Besides
complaining about inadequate funding and too little time, the
two predicted, accurately, that they "would be denied the
necessary access to do the job". (NOW they tell us.)
Several of us
VIPs (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) were
involved in intelligence work related to 9/11. Coleen Rowley, a
FBI special agent for more than 20 years, was legal counsel to
the FBI field office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. Bogdan
Dzakovic was a special agent for the FAA’s security division. On
Oct. 15, 2010, the Los Angeles Times
published an op-ed in which
both wrote about their frustration – and that of their
close-to-the-ground colleagues – at the ossified bureaucracies
that ignored the warnings they gave before 9/11.
The FBI
A gutsy investigative
journalist like the late Michael Hastings could write a volume
about FBI mismanagement under Director Louis Freeh and his
deputy Thomas Pickard, as well as the cover-up (and worse) under
Director Robert Mueller (yes, that Robert Mueller) of Bureau
errors pre-9/11. Let’s focus here on what Coleen Rowley observed
from her catbird seat in the Minneapolis Division. After
arresting would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui on August 16,
2001, Rowley’s FBI colleagues in Minneapolis ran into scarcely
believable foot-dragging by FBI headquarters functionaries, who
would not permit a search of Moussaoui’s laptop computer or his
personal effects.
In late August, the
same Washington functionaries stonewalled an FBI Minneapolis
Division supervisor, who emphasized that he was just "trying to
keep someone from taking a plane and crashing it into the World
Trade Center." (Yes, those were his exact words.) Special Agent
Harry Samit, who helped arrest Moussaoui, later testified that
the actions of his FBI superiors in Washington constituted
"criminal negligence."
The main fly in the
ointment was a FBI Headquarters functionary, Marion "Spike"
Bowman, the lawyer who turned down the agents in Minneapolis
when they asked for a search warrant against Moussaoui. At
Mueller’s recommendation, Bowman was later awarded a
Presidential Rank Award and large cash bonus – incentives
characterized by some congressional overseers as rewards for
incompetence – or for risking/doing nothing.
The FAA
Former Air Marshal
Bogdan Dzakovic led an elite "Red Team" for the Federal Aviation
Administration to probe vulnerabilities of airports and aircraft
during the years before 9/11. Given the many holes in security
before 9/11, Dzakovic describes the task of hijacking planes
"child’s play". In trying to warn those would could plug this
holes, Bogdan and his team ran into perpetual foot-dragging at
senior levels of the FAA. His story is as painful to hear as FBI
Special Agent Harry Samit’s, in terms of being ignored and
stymied in the period leading up to 9/11.
Dzakovic’s "Red Team"
included two Vietnam veterans: Steve Elson, a retired Navy Seal
lieutenant commander, and Brian Sullivan, a retired Army
lieutenant colonel with experience in intelligence and law
enforcement. Their Red Team had found weaknesses in airport and
airline security nine out of ten times, vulnerabilities that
made it possible to smuggle weapons aboard and seize control of
airplanes.
Starting in 1997-98,
the Team worked feverishly through its chain of command, and got
nowhere with its urgent warnings. It then went to the FAA
inspector general and, later, the Government Accountability
Office – and again got nowhere.
Team members then
contacted and briefed members of Congress in person, to no
avail. As a last resort, about a year before the 9/11 attacks,
Team members desperately tried to get the media interested in
the calamity they could see brewing. This resulted in only two
small stories, easily ignored in other mainstream media.
Testifying before the
9/11 Commission, Dzakovic summed up the Team’s experience:
"In the simulated
attacks, the Red Team was extraordinarily successful in killing
large numbers of innocent people … [and yet] we were ordered not
to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we
found particularly egregious vulnerabilities… Finally, the FAA
started providing advance notification of when we would be
conducting our ‘undercover’ tests and what we would be
checking."
Dzakovic has
expressed "contempt… for the
bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but
didn’t." Adding further bureaucratic insult to injury, the 9/11
Commission did not see fit to include any of his testimony in
its report.
The CIA
Deliberately
withholding critical intelligence from those who need it, and
can act on it, is, at the least, gross dereliction of duty. The
more so if keeping the White House promptly and fully informed
is at the top of your job jar, as it was for Director of Central
Intelligence George Tenet – especially amid accumulating
evidence that a terrorist attack on U.S. territory was in the
works.
And yet dereliction of
duty is precisely the charge former anti-terrorism chief,
Richard Clarke leveled at the former DCI. In a little-noticed
interview aired on Aug. 11, 2011 on a local PBS affiliate in
Colorado, Clarke charges that Tenet and two other senior CIA
officials, Cofer Black and Richard Blee, deliberately withheld
information about two of the hijackers of American Airlines
Flight 77, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The two had entered the
United States more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.
Clarke added that the
CIA then covered it all up by keeping relevant information away
from Congress and the 9/11 Commission.
Lying by senior
officials is bad enough, and there is now plenty of evidence
that former CIA Director George Tenet and his closest agency
associates are serial offenders. (Think for a minute about the
falsehoods spread regarding Iraq’s nonexistent WMD stockpiles.)
But withholding
intelligence on two of the 9/11 hijackers would have been
particularly unconscionable, the epitome of malfeasance, not
just misfeasance.
That’s why Richard
Clarke’s conclusion that he should have received information
from CIA about al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, "unless somebody
intervened to stop the normal automatic distribution" amounts to
a criminal charge, given the eventual role of the two in
hijacking on 9/11 of AA-77, the plane that struck the Pentagon.
Tenet has denied that
the information on the two hijackers was "intentionally
withheld" from Clarke, and he has enlisted the other two former
CIA operatives, Cofer Black (more recently a senior official of
Blackwater) and Richard Blee (an even more shadowy figure), to
concur in saying, Not us; we didn’t withhold. Whom to believe?
It is an open question,
if a key one, whether Tenet told Bush about the two hijackers,
al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, while keeping that key information from
the person who most needed it, White House counter-terrorist
czar Richard Clarke. Clarke finds the only plausible explanation
in his surmise that Tenet was personally responsible.
Clarke says: "For me to
this day, it is inexplicable, when I had every other detail
about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t
tell me, that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t
tell me, that the other 48 people inside CIA that knew about it
never mentioned it to me or anyone in my staff in a period of
over 12 months."
The CIA is said to have
had zero spies within al-Qaeda at the time. It would be
reasonable to expect that there were desperate attempts to
"turn" al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and get them working for the
agency. Once Richard Clarke and – inevitably – the FBI found out
about these two al-Qaeda operatives already inside the US, the
Bureau would acquire jurisdiction. This may account for Tenet’s
unconscionable silence, but it cannot – by a long shot – excuse
it.
The Other Big Rap on
Tenet
As DCI (Director of
Central Intelligence) George Tenet had the
authority/responsibility to gather the various elements of the
intelligence community and cobble together a National
Intelligence Estimate for the President and his chief advisers.
The NIE process is designed to provide each intelligence element
the opportunity to share information and to make it difficult
for a particular agency too hide/hoard relevant data.
After 9/11 the
conventional wisdom was that "No one was in charge of the
intelligence community". That was self-serving – and dead wrong.
Tenet was in charge, but had not ordered an NIE. Indeed, the NIE,
once the coin of the realm for intelligence analysis and impact
with policy makers, seems to have become a vanishing species.
(See: "Generals
End-Run Around Civilian Intel Analysts."
*** Drake added, "I
subsequently blew the whistle on … NSA’s hoarding of critical
pre- and post-9/11 intelligence, and its cover-up. I shared this
information via proper channels with the Joint Congressional
Inquiry on 9/11 and the Defense Department Inspector General to
no avail."
Drake also blew the
whistle, through authorized channels, on NSA’s gross violation
of 4th Amendment rights, as well as widespread waste, fraud, and
abuse.. The Department of Justice retaliated by indicting and
prosecuting Drake under the Espionage Act. In July 2011, the DOJ
lawyers abruptly dropped felony charges, which could have put
Tom in prison for 35 years; at which point Maryland’s Federal
District Court judge, Richard D. Bennett, termed DOJ behavior
"unconscionable".
Ray McGovern works
with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of
the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a
CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign
Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily
Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
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