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CIA's Inquiry on Qaeda Aide Seen as Flawed


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C.I.A.'s Inquiry on Qaeda Aide Seen as Flawed

By JAMES RISEN

ASHINGTON, Sept. 22 — The Central Intelligence Agency failed to adequately scrutinize information it received before Sept. 11 about the growing terrorist threat posed by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a leader of Al Qaeda now believed to have been a central planner of the attacks on New York and Washington, Congressional investigators have concluded.

The joint Congressional committee investigating intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks issued a report last week that included a cryptic reference to a "key Al Qaeda leader" whom the United States intelligence community had identified as early as 1995. The report was critical of the failure to "recognize his growing importance to Al Qaeda" and said the intelligence community "did not anticipate his involvement in a terrorist attack of Sept. 11's magnitude," even though information about him had been collected for at least six years.

United States officials say that reference was to Mr. Mohammed, but the joint committee was prevented from publicly identifying him because information about him remains highly classified.

Next to Osama bin Laden, Mr. Mohammed is probably the most wanted terrorist in the world, because of what officials believe is his central role in the Sept. 11 plot and in Qaeda operations today. American intelligence officials say he has emerged as Al Qaeda's new chief of operations, succeeding Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March and is in United States custody.

The criticism of the intelligence community's handling of information about Mr. Mohammed was just one element in a weeklong series of Congressional reports and hearings by the joint committee. Operating under tough strictures imposed by the intelligence community on what it can declassify and make public, the panel has nonetheless provided a far more detailed and textured portrait of the way in which the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency and other agencies handled information that might have tipped them off in time to prevent the attacks.

Even as the panel continues its work, with public hearings scheduled to start again on Tuesday, the White House on Friday agreed to a separate, independent commission to investigate Sept. 11 intelligence lapses.

Support for an independent inquiry began to build as a result of last week's hearings, the first in public, which revealed a series of previously undisclosed intelligence reports concerning terrorist threats to the United States and included testimony from relatives of Sept. 11 victims.

In addition, a New York F.B.I. agent recalled his anger and frustration that bureaucratic obstacles prevented him from tracking one of the hijackers in the weeks before Sept. 11.

Congressional criticism of the way the C.I.A. dealt with information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed cuts to the heart of the intelligence community's handling of the growing terrorist threat before Sept. 11. Mr. Mohammed was first identified as a terrorist as a result of his role in an abortive 1995 plot to blow up American airliners flying over the Pacific. The plot was the brainchild of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was also the leader of the group that bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.

Mr. Yousef was captured in Pakistan in 1996, but Mr. Mohammed remained at large, and the C.I.A. concluded that he had joined Al Qaeda.

The Congressional committee criticized the C.I.A.'s failure to pay much attention to Mr. Mohammed's growing role within Al Qaeda.

Before Sept. 11, the report stated, "there was little analytic focus given to him, and coordination amongst intelligence agencies was irregular at best."

In interviews, United States intelligence officials disputed the report's conclusions, and in the process disclosed for the first time some of the operations conducted before Sept. 11 to capture him. "We have been after him for years, and to say that we weren't is just wrong," one official said. "We had identified him as a major Al Qaeda operative before Sept. 11."

In the spring of 1996, these officials said, the F.B.I. sent a counterterrorism team to Qatar after receiving information that Mr. Mohammed was hiding there, but he escaped. In the fall of that year, the C.I.A. received information, including visa records, that showed Mr. Mohammed was traveling to a South American country, which the officials declined to identify. The C.I.A. arranged through its liaison with that country's security service to arrest him, but officials said the effort failed and he slipped away.

By 1999, Mr. Mohammed was believed to be living in Germany, but he has moved repeatedly, and American officials say he is extremely careful and security conscious. The classification of information about Mr. Mohammed — extending even to mention of his name in the Congressional report — made it impossible for the joint committee to publicly debate how the C.I.A. handled information about him.

Still, in two separate interim reports and three days of public hearings, the committee was able to document the escalating threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda's growing interest by the late 1990's in launching an attack inside the United States, along with its desire to turn aircraft into terrorist weapons.

The committee concluded in its report that the C.I.A. and F.B.I. were slow to grasp Al Qaeda's capacity to strike inside the United States, even after a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport was prevented in December 1999. Samuel R. Berger, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, told the committee last week that the F.B.I. had repeatedly assured the Clinton White House that Al Qaeda lacked the ability to launch a domestic strike.

But the committee also found that a long series of intelligence reports about Al Qaeda's intentions, coupled with its successful strikes against two American embassies in East Africa in 1998 and an American destroyer in 2000, never raised sufficient alarm within the government.

George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, issued a memorandum to his deputies in December 1998 declaring war on Al Qaeda, yet neither President Clinton nor President Bush went on a war footing against the terror network.

Without forceful direction from the White House, American intelligence and law enforcement officials handling counterterrorism cases were frequently short of resources and often distracted by competing tasks. Michael E. Rolince, a senior F.B.I. official, told the Congressional committee last week that there were fewer F.B.I. agents assigned to counterterrorism last Sept. 10 than there had been in August 1998, at the time of the embassy bombings in East Africa.

Inevitably, cases like those of Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, fell through the cracks.

In January 2000, the C.I.A. arranged for Malaysian security to conduct surveillance of suspected Qaeda operatives meeting in Kuala Lampur. The C.I.A. soon identified one of the people at the meeting as a Saudi named Khalid al-Midhar and another as "Khallad," a name used by Tawfiq al-Atash, a Yemeni extremist. The C.I.A. was able to determine that Khalid al-Midhar had a multiple-entry visa to get into the United States, yet failed to ask that he be placed on a State Department watch list to stop him from coming into the country.

The C.I.A. also soon discovered that he was traveling with another Saudi, Nawaq Alhazmi. By March, the C.I.A. had found that Mr. Alhazmi had traveled to Los Angeles in January, yet neither man was placed on a watch list until August 2001, just weeks before the attacks. By that time, both were already in the country.

Lapses in the case of Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi continued throughout the spring and summer of 2001, even as the intelligence community began to pick up a surge in reports of threatened attacks by Al Qaeda. In a briefing paper for senior government officials in July 2001, quoted in the Congressional report, intelligence analysts wrote, referring to Osama bin Laden: "Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning."

Finally, on Aug. 23, 2001, the C.I.A. asked that Mr. al-Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi be placed on a watch list. But by then it was too late to find them.

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