September 29, 2002
Panel's Findings Take Intelligence Officials by Surprise
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 28 — An aggressive Congressional investigation that has yielded new evidence about lapses in counterterrorism at the C.I.A. and F.B.I. before the Sept. 11 attacks has surprised and enraged senior officials at both agencies, say lawmakers and intelligence officials.
The findings of a joint committee, especially revelations that the C.I.A. and F.B.I. had for years collected information that showed Islamic militants hoped to strike in the United States, have been far more damaging than most officials at either agency expected when the panel's inquiry began early this year.
Even more than the findings of missed signals, however, the increasingly combative tone of the committee's staff and the tough language of its three interim reports on specific terrorism issues that have infuriated senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.
With George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the bureau, scheduled to testify before the panel in coming weeks, along with Louis J. Freeh, the former bureau director, the committee's investigation has added heat to hearings that at first seemed unlikely to produce either fireworks or revelations. The new disclosures from the first two weeks of hearings and the increasing acrimony surrounding them have left officials at the two agencies expecting an even more protracted and potentially damaging investigation by an independent commission.
The main conclusion of the hearings so far is that the bureau and the intelligence agency missed warning signals of the attacks and focused too much attention on threats overseas rather than on the possibility of an attack on United States soil. The reports by the ad hoc joint committee of the House and Senate intelligence panels have also included declassified intelligence that has created a far fuller account of the Sept. 11 plot and the 19 hijackers.
Antagonism between the Central Intelligence Agency and the joint inquiry erupted publicly on Friday, when Mr. Tenet sent an angry letter to the panel's leaders, protesting the treatment of a senior agency officer who testified on Thursday.
Mr. Tenet's letter was in response to a disclosure that the joint committee staff had predicted in a briefing book to committee members that Cofer Black, who was until recently the chief of the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, would "dissemble" in his testimony. Mr. Tenet said that the disclosure revealed that some members of the committee staff were motivated by "bias, preconceived notions and apparent animus."
The F.B.I., meanwhile, has gone to court to keep officials from testifying. Mr. Mueller failed in an attempt to avoid appearing in an open session by asking the judge in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person charged in the Sept. 11 attacks, to excuse Mr. Mueller and other bureau agents from appearing before the committee because of concerns that it might disclose information at issue in Mr. Moussaoui's prosecution. On Friday, the federal district judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, refused.
A sign of the joint committee's success in raising new questions about the government's performance before Sept. 11 was President Bush's decision a week ago to drop his opposition to an independent commission, created by Congress, to conduct a broader inquiry. A commission could mean that the bureau and the intelligence agency will be under scrutiny for years.
The joint committee has touched nerves at the two agencies by focusing much of its inquiry on a few key incidents in which the two agencies were slow to follow trails of evidence leading to the hijackers. The joint committee revealed a wealth of new details about the case of Khalid al-Midhar, a leading hijacker who was able to slip into the United States even after the C.I.A. had discovered that he had attended a meeting in Malaysia of people suspected of being Al Qaeda operatives.
The panel also issued a detailed report that was critical of the way in which the bureau handled the case of Mr. Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker" who was arrested in Minneapolis in August 2001. The committee found that F.B.I. headquarters had rejected a request by the bureau's Minneapolis office to search Mr. Moussaoui's laptop computer and other belongings, even though agents in the field suspected that Mr. Moussaoui might be part of a larger aircraft-related terrorist plot.
But officials at the two agencies have complained that the staff of the joint inquiry has taken material it has been given by the agencies out of context for shock value. At the bureau, officials were furious about the testimony in which an unidentified agent from the agency's New York office, speaking from behind a glass partition, said that he warned his superiors by e-mail that "someone would die" unless the government more aggressively investigated the mysterious trail of Mr. Midhar. The officials said the committee did not make it clear at the hearing that the agent's warnings had been passed on to the appropriate units within the bureau and were under investigation at the time of the attacks.
The officials believe that the inquiry has tried to paint many of the incidents they have documented, and the intelligence reports on potential threats received before Sept. 11, in the worst possible light. The officials also say they were never given enough resources before Sept. 11 to counter the threat.
"They said we were asleep," a counterterrorism official said. "The problem wasn't that we were asleep. We didn't get enough sleep."
At the start of the year, few officials at the two agencies believed that the review of their performances before Sept. 11 was likely to amount to much. They said that was because the committee's staff seemed ill equipped to wade through the more than half a million pages of classified documents.
At times, lawmakers on the committee fought in closed session over the scope and direction of the investigation, with some questioning the wisdom of heavily examining the missteps of intelligence agencies at a time when the country was engaged in a war against the Qaeda threat.
The committee staff, hired to conduct the inquiry, often seemed in disarray. L. Britt Snider, the first director of the panel, was forced to resign in April over the hiring of an employee who was being investigated for failing a C.I.A. polygraph exam.
But the Congressional committee seemed to have found a surer footing since the hiring of Eleanor Hill, a former inspector general at the Pentagon, who replaced Mr. Snider. She has been credited with helping to focus the hearings, sifting through a huge mass of fragmentary information to focus on the performance of the bureau and the intelligence agency in surprisingly powerful reports.
But F.B.I. officials disputed her assertion that the bureau had only one analyst working on strategic assessments of Al Qaeda, saying the agency had several dozen analysts assigned to two operational units focused on Osama bin Laden and radical fundamentalists groups.
Several lawmakers said that the bureau had been more badly damaged than the intelligence agency after a year in which the bureau's senior managers have been repeatedly criticized by lawmakers for lacking the analytical ability to grasp the danger posed by Al Qaeda.
Publicly, bureau officials said that they welcomed the review of their efforts, hoping that the committees would come up with recommendations that could improve the bureau's counterterrorism program.
Privately, several veteran agents bitterly complained that the F.B.I. had been singled out for criticism, that the committees had failed to look more broadly at failures of the Clinton or Bush administrations to exercise the "political will" to act against Al Qaeda until after the hijackings. "They took satellite graduation pictures of bin Laden's training camps and that's about it," as one agent put it.
Behind the scenes, the bureau has fought a running battle with the committee to keep agents from testifying publicly about the bureau's operations and to keep classified documents from being made public.
But in Congress, the joint inquiry's first two weeks of public hearings are widely seen as highly successful. Senator Richard C. Shelby, an Alabama Republican and a ranking member on the joint committee, said that the hearings have demonstrated the need for an intelligence overhaul.
"The hearings have exposed the failures of our intelligence agencies to the light of day," Senator Shelby said. "The much-needed reform of our intelligence agencies won't happen without the American people driving them every step of the way."
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