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Inside
A Top G-Man Exposes Spies, Lies, and Bureaucratic Bungling Inside the FBI
By I.C. Smith Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2004 Ivian C. Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4185-0843-2
CHAPTER 1
TERROR IN THE SKY
"The facts so far on the public record do not support the conclusion that these tragic events could have been prevented by the FBI and intelligence communities acting alone." Former FBI Director Louis Freeh, testifying before Congress, October 8, 2002
In early January 1995, police in Manila responded to an apartment fire caused by a bomb-making attempt gone bad. One of the two tenants escaped, but the other, a Pakistani named Abdul Hakim Murad, eventually cooperated with Philippine police. His computer database ultimately helped them even more.
The police were awestruck at the digital treasure trove: plans to kill Pope John Paul II, who was to visit Manila in about two weeks; and Project Bojinka—literally "big bang" or "loud bang" in Serbo-Croatian—a plot to blow up American airplanes en route from Asia to the United States. The plan called for terrorists to load explosives in their shoes, change shoes during the flights, then get off the planes during stopovers, leaving the shoe bombs to explode after takeoff. A trial run a month earlier killed a Japanese passenger on a Philippine Airlines jet, though the plane managed to land in Okinawa safely.
Two other discoveries by the police were potentially even more important. First, the plots were planned and carried out by a terrorist group called al Qaeda, funded by Osama bin Laden, a radical Islamic millionaire whose brother-in-law ran a nongovernmental organization in the Philippines that was a front for terrorist activities. Second, Murad's escaped roommate was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, who was eventually apprehended in Pakistan in February 1995.
The police also learned that Murad, who had trained as an airplane pilot, was part of a plot to fly an explosives-laden airplane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. For the 1993 WTC bombing, the terrorists had parked a truck packed with explosives in an underground garage near a structural support column, set the timer, and left the truck. There were similar plots to set off explosives in a "stalled" vehicle in the Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River between Manhattan and New Jersey, and to bomb the United Nations, the George Washington Bridge, and other federal buildings. These plans were evidently put on hold after observing the rapid law enforcement response to the WTC bombing.
But there was a chilling difference in the plan to crash into CIA headquarters: it was a suicide mission, perhaps designed for Murad himself. This was an alarming new development. As a section chief in the Intelligence Division of the FBI, I was briefed on the threat in the weeks before I left FBI headquarters for my new assignment as special agent in charge of FBI operations in Arkansas, President Bill Clinton's home state. When told of the emerging information out of Manila, I responded, "That changes everything!" It was clear to me the terrorist threat had entered a new and more dangerous phase.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it was revealed that not only had the CIA and the FBI been alerted to the Project Bojinka intelligence but also that several boxes of documents had been turned over to the FBI. Like documents of other investigations, they were never thoroughly examined or analyzed. On the day Islamic terrorists destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, more than six years after the fire in Manila, these key warning indicators of the tragedy and essential information about its masterminds sat ignored in cardboard boxes, still in Arabic.
On that September morning, three years into my retirement after twenty-five years with the FBI, I was sitting at the computer working on this manuscript with Imus in the Morning, featuring New York news/talk legend Don Imus, on a television around the corner from my office. Fragments of a newsbreak got my attention, and after a couple of minutes, I walked over and saw the horrific image of an aircraft crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. I knew instantly that it was an act of terrorism. The second plane crashing into the other tower only served as an exclamation point to my belief.
I spent most of the rest of the day watching the news unfold and fielding calls from acquaintances and the media. One of those calls was from Alice Stewart of KARK-TV in Little Rock, where I had spent the last three years of my FBI career. I told her that in my view the attacks were the result of three events: an intelligence failure in the U.S., principally by the FBI; an intelligence failure abroad, principally by the CIA and NSA (National Security Agency); and a security failure at U.S. airports. I explained further that if any one of those three failures had not occurred, the destruction of the twin towers by terrorists could never have happened.
Nothing since then has caused me to change my mind; indeed, subsequent events have reinforced my belief. The FBI and CIA, in particular, dragged their feet, begrudging the release of crucial information. An acquaintance in the FBI called a few days after 9/11, stating the hierarchy at FBI headquarters was more interested in "circling the wagons" than finding out the cause for the failure to prevent the attacks from occurring. The CIA maintained its stance of noncooperation, even to the 9/11 Commission, while the FBI made a show of being, at long last, more cooperative.
In 1998, the FBI pilot in Oklahoma City had been concerned enough at the number of Middle Easterners taking flying lessons at the airport where he flew that he submitted an official memorandum about it. Unfortunately that information was never shared with FBI headquarters, though in theory it should have been accessible under the FBI's Automated Case Support System.
In July 2001, Special Agent Kenneth Williams, an experienced agent with sound investigative instincts, sent a five-page memo to FBI headquarters expressing concern for the number of Middle Eastern residents taking flight lessons in the area. Further, based upon his personal contacts with some of them, he had determined they were Islamic fundamentalists who openly expressed a great hatred for the U.S. He even reported that one of the students displayed a photograph of Osama bin Laden in his room, and that another had been in contact with Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian responsible for operating bin Laden's terrorist training camps.
Though Williams clearly showed a tie between several of the students and al Qaeda or other radical groups closely aligned with bin Laden, his memorandum received little attention. In fact, Williams recommended that the FBI canvass flight schools nationwide to determine if there were similar instances of such activity. The request was declined.
On September 24, 2002, Michael Rolince, a deputy assistant director for the FBI's Terrorism Division, testified that it would have taken seventeen months for the FBI to make contact with the flight schools, obtain the names of Middle Eastern students, and collect visa information on them. That assertion is both absurdly wrong and misleading. There were often times during my career when field offices would receive a directive to conduct a nationwide investigation—for example, to contact all the dealerships of a particular make of a car. Each field office would quickly identify all those dealerships in its division and immediately dispatch agents to each one. The whole process took a day or two at the most, and I suspect there are far fewer flight schools in the U.S. than any number of organizations or businesses that the FBI had to contact in the past. Perhaps the verification of visa information would have taken longer, but certainly the seventeen months cited by Rolince is simply wrong.
Then there was the Minneapolis information on Zacarias Moussaoui, which was essentially an open letter from Special Agent Coleen Rowley to FBI Director Robert Mueller saying that FBI headquarters' failure to act on available information had led to the 9/11 tragedy. In August 2001 the owner of a Minneapolis flight school had expressed his alarm at Moussaoui's attitude while taking flight lessons: he wasn't interested in learning how to take off and land, only how to steer large jet aircraft.
That alarm was ignored. The Minneapolis request to search Moussaoui's computer after his arrest for INS violations was not granted until after the 9/11 attacks. While I am certain, given the swiftness of the approval to grant the search warrant for Moussaoui's computer, that there was no real change of probable cause, apparently someone decided (too late) that the predication was sufficient after all. Moussaoui was later arrested and charged with being the twentieth hijacker and is awaiting trial.
"The facts so far on the public record do not support the conclusion that these tragic events could have been prevented by the FBI and intelligence communities acting alone," FBI Director Louis Freeh said in his testimony before Congress on October 8, 2002. That was the first public statement he had made in the thirteen months following the attacks. What Freeh is essentially saying is that some terrorist attacks are simply not preventable. I do not accept that argument. For if the intelligence community had considered all the available information—and I am certain that all such information has not been made public—and if that information had received proper analysis, the attacks could have been prevented. While the 9/11 Commission, due to the political expediency of reaching a consensus by its members, refused to address the essential conclusion, I am convinced the attacks of 9/11 could have, and should have, been prevented, based on the information that has been publicly released, alone. Further, no one has suffered from the management and operational failures that led to the attacks being successful, an abhorrent situation that is simply unacceptable.
What exactly did the analysts have at their disposal? They had information going back to 1993 and the first World Trade Center bombing, indicating the existence of al Qaeda cells in the U.S. They had Operation Bojinka, proving al Qaeda's interest in aircraft as suicide weapons. There was even information from the French intelligence agency DGSE on a plot to crash an aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. Combine that with other reports from Oklahoma City, Phoenix, and Minneapolis, and I am convinced that even an average analyst would have concluded that al Qaeda was planning to use aircraft against U.S. targets. Admittedly, the evidence does not point specifically to September 11, but it would have given the FBI sufficient information to disrupt the project, if only by arresting those with INS violations and interviewing the others. And these terrorists have had a remarkable propensity to talk once arrested, certainly at a much higher rate than, for instance, members of the Mafia.
The embarrassments did not stop there. Michael Isikoff reported in the September 16, 2002, issue of Newsweek that in September 2000 an FBI informant had actually been living with two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, in San Diego. But the FBI had never made inquiries into their informant's roommates, a fact demonstrating, as I was quoted by Isikoff, "a lack of investigative curiosity." I could not imagine how anyone an informant was living with, regardless of what he was reporting on, would not be the object of some interest. In fact, it was the informant who told his contact agent in San Diego that he had roomed with the hijackers after he heard their names listed among the casualties when a plane hit the Pentagon.
As information began to develop about the hijackers, I became convinced that they were not the accomplished terrorists they were made out to be. In fact, I began to believe they were simply incredibly fortunate, not good. Seymour Hersh wrote an insightful article in the June 3, 2002, issue of the New Yorker detailing how actor James Woods had taken one of the same flights the terrorists later hijacked on 9/11. Woods noticed four individuals in first class who seemed so out of place that he expressed his concern to the cabin staff that the plane was going to be hijacked. The flight attendant shared his feeling, the captain was notified, and Woods was told that a report was made to the Federal Aviation Administration; whether it was or not is unclear.
The article reinforced my belief that the hijackers weren't particularly good compared with the spies I'd encountered personally during the Cold War. They were far too obvious. They traveled in public together as a group; they got speeding tickets; their visas were expired; they flashed large wads of cash at their flight schools. All of this careless behavior brought attention to them. The good spy blends in with his surroundings and goes about his business unnoticed. He goes to great effort to not do anything that would attract attention. The hijackers violated virtually every precept of undercover operations, yet there was, particularly early on, an effort to make them into something they weren't.
I was quoted in the New Yorker about the "superman scenario." This is the idea that it is better to claim you have been beaten by accomplished terrorists than by a scruffy bunch of lucky amateurs, who accomplished their mission because of their willingness to die, as had been previously determined from Operation Bojinka, not because they were skilled operatives. Hersh also correctly quoted me stating, "These guys were not superhuman, but they were playing in a system that was more inept than they were." Nothing since then has changed that opinion either.
FBI Director Freeh's testimony before a congressional panel was preceded by a succession of agents from field offices who recounted their frustrations and anguish that their warnings about domestic terrorism were ignored. An agent from the New York field office, who testified behind a screen to hide his identity, had e-mailed lawyers in the FBI's National Security Law Unit on August 29, 2001—less than two weeks before the terrorist attacks—stating, "Someday someone will die—and [legal] wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama, or rather, Osama bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.'" The agent had searched unsuccessfully for Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers who crashed into the Pentagon.
Then there was the comment from a Minneapolis supervisory agent to his counterpart at FBI headquarters that the purpose of trying to get someone to pay attention to Zacarias Moussaoui was to ensure that Moussaoui did not gain control of a plane and "fly it into the World Trade Center."
From behind his identity screen, the New York agent testified that after the 9/11 attacks he had seen the passenger lists of the flights and observed Almihdhar's name. He testified that he had yelled out, "This is the same Almihdhar we've been talking about for three months!" His supervisor simply responded, "We did everything by the book." I doubt the agent, and certainly the families of the 9/11 victims, found any consolation in that remark.
CHAPTER 2
THE RECRUIT
"By God, he does look like old [name of store owner]." Officer Marvin Johnson, Monroe Police Department
I never considered a career with the FBI until shortly before I left my home in Monroe, Louisiana, for the new agent training facility at Quantico, Virginia, in the spring of 1973. But it was a career choice I felt comfortable with, because in my eyes the FBI stood for the ideals I had been raised to respect and those I believed the American people respected: honesty, patriotism, self-sacrifice, and justice. I felt fortunate, perhaps even unworthy, to have been accepted into the ranks of such an esteemed organization.
I grew up in rural Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, raised by paternal grandparents. I had gone to live with them when I was two, after my parents divorced at the end of World War II. I did not see my mother for the next thirteen years and only on rare occasions afterward; and though my father lived in adjoining Morehouse Parish, I saw him only infrequently. For all practical purposes, neither had any influence on my life.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Inside by I.C. Smith. Copyright © 2004 Ivian C. Smith. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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