The US intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center, but the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) did not take the threat seriously, a congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has found.
The August 1998 intelligence report from the CIA was just one of a series of warnings that the US received in the years leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks that were detailed at a congressional hearing on Wednesday.
PHOTO:AP
The existence of the 1998 intelligence report was disclosed in a presentation by the committee's staff director, Eleanor Hill.
The report concluded that there was evidence of a dangerous and growing interest by al-Qaeda and related groups in launching high-profile attacks inside the US years before the attacks on the trade center and the Pentagon.
The congressional report was the first disclosure that there was specific intelligence about terrorist plans to crash airplanes into the trade center, though officials said that those planes did not appear to be connected to the Sept. 11 attack.
But while the joint committee made public several intelligence reports that had been received in the years before Sept. 11 that related to al-Qaeda's intentions to launch a domestic attack inside the US and its interest in using aircraft for terrorist operations, Hill emphasized that the joint committee has still not found a "smoking gun" that could have helped prevent the attacks on New York and Washington.
"People have said there was no smoking gun," said Hill. "But there was still a lot out there that was never pulled together."
In fact, between 1998 and last summer, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies repeatedly received reports of al-Qaeda's interest in attacking Washington and New York, either with airplanes or other weapons. The threat level grew so high that by December 1998 the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, issued a "declaration of war" on al-Qaeda, in a memorandum circulated in the intelligence community. Yet, Hill said, the intelligence community failed to adequately follow up on the declaration, and by Sept. 10 last year the FBI still had only one analyst assigned full time to al-Qaeda.
The 1998 intelligence report about the trade center concerned supposed plans by a group of unidentified Arabs, who the US now believes had ties to al-Qaeda, to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into the trade center. The congressional committee did not identify the foreign country. US intelligence officials said Wednesday that, despite the close similarities between the two, they do not believe that the 1998 report related to a plot that later evolved into the Sept. 11 attacks.
Still, the congressional panel criticized the way in which the intelligence was handled, particularly by the FBI and FAA. The committee said that the FBI's New York office "took no action on the information, filing the communication in the office's bombing repository file." The FAA, meanwhile, "found the plot highly unlikely," because of the state of the unidentified foreign country's aviation program.
The FAA discounted the intelligence report based on the views of the FBI, officials said.
"We did review the technical aspects of the information, but any decisions about whether it was credible was based on an FBI determination," the spokesperson said.
Law enforcement officials agreed that the threat information was evaluated by the FBI and found not to be credible. That conclusion was based on the fact that it seemed difficult for the group to launch an attack from the unidentified foreign country.
While that August 1998 report most closely paralleled the final attack, the CIA also received a series of other warnings during the same period of al-Qaeda's interest in using aircraft as weapons against targets inside the US.
In September 1998, intelligence agencies obtained information warning that Osama bin Laden's next major operation could involve flying an aircraft loaded with explosives into an airport in the United States and then detonating it. That same fall, another intelligence report stated that there was an al-Qaeda plot in the works that involved the use of aircraft in both New York and Washington.
Yet the reports of the potential use of aircraft as weapons did not prompt the CIA or other intelligence agencies to conduct an analysis of that specific type of threat to American aviation, the joint committee found. And the FAA did not change its traditional assumptions that airplane hijackings were not suicide missions. American commercial airlines directed their flight crews not to fight back against hijackers, believing that negotiations for the release of the passengers and crew could begin once a plane was safely on the ground.
But the reports of al-Qaeda's interest in attacks in the United States extended beyond aircraft. In the spring of 1999, the CIA received another report that bin Laden wanted to attack a government facility in Washington, which the committee report did not identify.
In August 1999, another report stated that al-Qaeda had apparently chosen for assassination the secretary of state, secretary of defense, and the CIA director, apparently for assassination.
The CIA had been told the previous year that bin Laden and his lieutenants had also agreed to issue US$9 million bounties for the assassination of four top intelligence officers, whom the report did not identify.
The bounties came in response to the US government's decision to increase the reward for information leading to bin Laden's arrest.
In the spring and summer of 2001, US intelligence picked up a series of threat reports that strongly indicated al-Qaeda's intentions to launch a major attack against American targets. Since Sept. 11, American intelligence officials have said that most of that intelligence suggested that the attack was planned against US facilities overseas.
Still, there were some reports during that period that referred to domestic attacks, the joint committee revealed in its interim report released Wednesday. In April 2001, a source with terrorist connections speculated that bin Laden would be interested in using commercial pilots as potential terrorists. The source warned that the United States should not focus only on potential embassy bombings, and that al-Qaeda wanted to mount "spectacular and traumatic" attacks like the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
The CIA first created a unit inside its counter-terrorism center to track bin Laden in 1996. But the joint committee's report strongly suggests that it wasn't until 1998 that officials throughout the FBI, CIA and other agencies began to recognize the urgent threat posed by al-Qaeda.
The August 1998 bombings of two American embassies in East Africa was a wake up call, the first major al-Qaeda operation to follow a February 1998 fatwa, or religious decree, issued by bin Laden in which he called for attacks on U.S. military and civilian targets anywhere in the world. In May 1998, bin Laden publicly discussed "bringing the war home to America."
The intelligence reports indicating al-Qaeda's desire to launch a major attack inside the United States appear to have been widely discounted, as analysts focused their attention on more specific intelligence threats overseas, the joint committee found. The response of intelligence agencies to the al-Qaeda threat varied widely.
On Dec. 4 1998, Tenet issued his declaration of war. "I want no resource or people spared."
Yet the joint committee found that few of the FBI agents interviewed by it had ever heard of Tenet's declaration.
The panel also concluded that prior to Sept. 11, only one FBI analyst was assigned full time to al-Qaeda, although others were working on individual terrorist cases related to bin Laden's network.
The joint committee report also said that in 1999, the CIA's counter-terrorism center had only three analysts assigned full time to al-Qaeda.
Both the CIA and the FBI disputed those figures Wednesday. Law enforcement officials said the committee's numbers were misleading, because at the time of last year's attacks, a total of about 30 people were assigned to the two units.
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