Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI director, Robert Mueller III, were told a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks that the FBI had received a memorandum from its Phoenix office the previous July that Osama bin Laden's followers could be training at American flight schools, government officials said on Monday.
But senior Bush administration officials said on Monday that neither Ashcroft nor Mueller briefed President George W. Bush and his national security staff until recently about the Phoenix memorandum. Nor did they tell congressional leaders.
The disclosure is certain to magnify criticisms of the FBI's performance, including its failure to act on the memo before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Neither Mueller nor Ashcroft have said publicly when they learned of the July 10 memorandum, but officials said that within days of the attacks senior law enforcement officials grasped the document's significance a potentially important missed signal.
On Monday, several FBI and Justice Department officials said that in the chaotic days after the attacks, discussions between Ashcroft and Mueller were hurried and that their recollection of events were somewhat blurred by the frenetic pace of activity. Some officials said they recalled high-level discussions about how the hijackers had attended American flight schools, but one Justice Department official did not recall a briefing about the memorandum.
Spokesmen for Mueller and Ashcroft would not discuss the issue on Monday. A Justice Department official said: "The attorney general was not briefed in any detail or with any specificity about the document known as the Phoenix memo until about a month ago."
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary who was traveling on Monday with the president in Miami, said, "We have nothing that indicates the president had seen or even heard about this memo prior to a few weeks ago."
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last Thursday that the president had not heard about the memorandum before the hijackings and had only recently learned of it. "I personally became aware of it just recently," Rice said, adding that she asked Mueller and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to review the matter.
The Phoenix memo, written by Kenneth Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, was sent to FBI headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by mid-level supervisors, who headed the agency's bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units.
But the officials said the memo was never sent to top FBI managers, such as Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of last year, before Mueller took over early last September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum prior to Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson, his superior, the officials said.
The issue of when top officials knew of the Phoenix memorandum is emerging as a main focus in congressional inquiries getting under way. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has asked the FBI to identify anyone at the agency who knew about the memo before the attacks.
But lawmakers also want to know when Bush administration officials first learned about the memo after the attacks. Some lawmakers have asked whether administration officials were told about the memorandum soon after the attacks, but were slow to disclose it.
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