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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES
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.
Several lawmakers, including Richard Shelby, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have already singled out the FBI for blunt criticism after Williams' memorandum came to light several weeks ago.
The Phoenix memorandum is one of two documents that are under heavy scrutiny by congressional investigators. The other is a daily intelligence report, shown to Bush on Aug. 6. The report mentions the threat of al-Qaeda mem-bers' carrying out hijackings in the US. The White House has refused to produce the document, and administration officials have said that the information was too vague to act on.
Mueller has acknowledged that the bureau's failure to evaluate the Phoenix memorandum fully was an analytical failure that the FBI has tried to correct.
The Phoenix memorandum remains classified, and much of its contents are unknown. But officials have confirmed that it expressed concern that bin Laden and other groups could be using the flight schools to prepare for terror attacks. It urged FBI officials to check the visas of foreigners at American aviation academies. But no action was taken before Sept. 11.
The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities -- one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the FBI's New York office. O'Neill retired from the FBI in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks.
Usually, internal investigative proposals that involve agencywide resources are reviewed by high-level FBI officials. But in this case FBI officials have said that officials who read the memo were distracted by other cases, a plot against American interests in France and the investigation of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole.
Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Pickard, who had returned to his job as deputy director after a stint as acting director, officials said. Pickard and several other agents then briefed Mueller and Aschroft on its existence, the officials said.
The Phoenix agent's memorandum was not based on intelligence that was developed, but instead its concerns and recommendations were based on "conjecture and assumptions," said a senior official who has read it.
Officials at the CIA have said that they did not receive a copy of the memorandum until several weeks ago.
BACK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: The planned transit by the ‘Baden-Wuerttemberg’ and the ‘Frankfurt am Main’ would be the German Navy’s first passage since 2002 Two German warships are set to pass through the Taiwan Strait in the middle of this month, becoming the first German naval vessels to do so in 22 years, Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Reuters last month reported that the warships, the frigate Baden-Wuerttemberg and the replenishment ship Frankfurt am Main, were awaiting orders from Berlin to sail the Strait, prompting a rebuke to Germany from Beijing. Der Spiegel cited unspecified sources as saying Beijing would not be formally notified of the German ships’ passage to emphasize that Berlin views the trip as normal. The German Federal Ministry of Defense declined to comment. While
‘UPHOLDING PEACE’: Taiwan’s foreign minister thanked the US Congress for using a ‘creative and effective way’ to deter Chinese military aggression toward the nation The US House of Representatives on Monday passed the Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act, aimed at deterring Chinese aggression toward Taiwan by threatening to publish information about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials’ “illicit” financial assets if Beijing were to attack. The act would also “restrict financial services for certain immediate family of such officials,” the text of the legislation says. The bill was introduced in January last year by US representatives French Hill and Brad Sherman. After remarks from several members, it passed unanimously. “If China chooses to attack the free people of Taiwan, [the bill] requires the Treasury secretary to publish the illicit
A senior US military official yesterday warned his Chinese counterpart against Beijing’s “dangerous” moves in the South China Sea during the first talks of their kind between the commanders. Washington and Beijing remain at odds on issues from trade to the status of Taiwan and China’s increasingly assertive approach in disputed maritime regions, but they have sought to re-establish regular military-to-military talks in a bid to prevent flashpoint disputes from spinning out of control. Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, and Wu Yanan (吳亞男), head of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command, talked via videoconference. Paparo “underscored the importance
The US House of Representatives yesterday unanimously passed the Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act, which aims to disincentivize Chinese aggression toward Taiwan by cutting Chinese leaders and their family members off from the US financial system if Beijing acts against Taiwan. The bipartisan bill, which would also publish the assets of top Chinese leaders, was cosponsored by Republican US Representative French Hill, Democratic US Representative Brad Sherman and seven others. If the US president determines that a threat against Taiwan exists, the bill would require the US Department of the Treasury to report to Congress on funds held by certain members of the
RSS