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American Morning

'TIME' Reporter Discusses Incriminating FBI Letter

Aired May 27, 2002 - 09:07   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
BILL HEMMER, CNN ANCHOR: To the war on terror now. And this morning, the FBI is turning to the CIA for help. Officials say the agency will send personnel to FBI headquarters and to field offices across the country, to help analyze information relating to terrorism. Meanwhile, "TIME" magazine reporting this week on the letter by FBI agent Coleen Rowley claiming her bosses ignored warnings of 9/11.

"TIME" magazine's Elaine Shannon joins us live from Washington to talk about more about this memo. And there's a whole lot in here.

Elaine, good morning to you. Thanks for coming in on a holiday.

ELAINE SHANNON, "TIME": Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: I want to get right away to this -- one of the statements that is contained in that memo. I'm going to read it from the wards of Ms. Rowley. She says, "I have deep concerns that a delicate shading or skewing of facts by you" -- directed at the FBI Director, Robert Mueller, and others at the highest levels of FBI management -- "has occurred and is occurring.

She continues, "It's at least possible we could have gotten lucky and uncovered one or two more of the terrorists in flight training prior to September 11. There is at least some chance that may have limited the September 11 attacks and resulting loss of life."

There is one heck of a statement contained in there. Is there much merit to this letter that's now been printed by your magazine?

SHANNON: Oh, I think she makes a lot of good points. Some of the facts we don't know, and that will take a lot of study. But certainly, her allegations that there was a culture of fear in the FBI, that people were afraid to complain to the boss if they weren't getting enough help, that -- well, she alleges that a supervisor dumbed down an application for a warrant on Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop. That's a very serious charge. I don't know all the facts, though, but it's quite serious, and it could be right.

HEMMER: You mention the word "fact" two or three times just there. How much fact is contained in there and how much of this is written out of emotion? Because if you read the memo, there's a number of exclamation points, etcetera, written there.

SHANNON: Well, it's certainly a very fervent memo. And I think that -- I can't sit here and tell you today that I know all the facts, because the other people who are accused in the memo of being less than aggressive haven't given their side of it. I wish they would. We tried to reach them.

But it is certainly true that a lot of people I've talked to in the FBI field feel that the bar is too high for opening a terrorism investigation. You have to get so many permissions up to very high levels and not getting an indictment, just opening a case. And then the bar is even higher for getting a wiretap. Often you have to have almost hard proof, and in this risky world, it's hard to get hard proof.

HEMMER: The memo is 13 pages in length. But if you go to the back of it in the note section -- I want to put up another part of this memo here and show it to our viewers -- it's essentially a paragraph or a line. It just says, "It's quite conceivable that many of the headquarters personnel who so vigorously disputed Moussaoui's alibi or predisposition to fly a plane" -- as that memo continues there -- "to fly a plane into a building were simply unaware of all the various incidents and reports worldwide of al Qaeda terrorists attempting or plotting to do so."

What is the suggestion in that statement? Is the suggestion that people were not paying attention, they were connecting the dots, they weren't doing their job? Or they simply were not aware?

SHANNON: Well, I guess all of the above. One of the agents in Minneapolis wrote in the margins of a file, "You know this guy can fly a plane into the World Trade Center." And boy, was that a lucky guess, except he wasn't part of the 19, as far as we know.

But he didn't forward this memo to headquarters. So I don't think you can fault headquarters for not knowing about what he kept on his desk. There were a couple of incidents in which people talked about -- terrorists talked about flying planes into buildings earlier. There's information that it looks like the French head and the CIA head maybe -- that weren't passed along to Minneapolis and may not have been in FBI headquarters itself. This needs a lot more investigation.

HEMMER: Yes. Elaine, was that laptop ever opened, Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop?

SHANNON: Yes. They got -- the agents in Minneapolis got a warrant on September 11. And she charges that almost the same information was available before September 11. But at any rate, yes, it was pretty clear that they...

HEMMER: Was there a smoking gun in there, Elaine?

SHANNON: No. According to FBI officials, at any rate, what was in there was information about pesticides, information about crop dusters. He had on his person a name in a notebook which turned out to be an alias of a roommate of Mohamed Atta. But I don't think that they could have gotten to that in a couple of weeks. They got to it by December and broke through the veils of pseudonyms. HEMMER: As you well know, the FBI still has not concluded as to whether or not they believe Zacarias Moussaoui would have been the 20th hijacker. Nonetheless, examine the credibility for Ms. Rowley, her background, her credibility on this.

SHANNON: Well, she's a lawyer in the Minneapolis field office. She also was the media representative for a time. She's considered a serious person. One of the questions, though, I have in reading this memo is where was the case agent, the person who was actually handling this case, his supervisor, and the special agent in charge of the field office?

They should have been doing battle with headquarters if they felt that their case was getting sufficient attention. It shouldn't have just been on her shoulders, and that's the way it appears from the memo. So I would like to hear from all of them.

HEMMER: I don't have much time left. The Phoenix memo is out there. Now this one is to be examined as well. Is this the beginning of an avalanche? What is your sense on that?

SHANNON: Oh, I think the FBI has already given a lot of interviews to the joint intelligence committee. Forty or 50 people from the FBI have been up there behind closed doors. The CIA also has some questions to answer, because the French intelligence people are telling us that they had a lot of information on Zacarias Moussaoui and his relationship with al Qaeda.

Somehow this never got to the agents in Minnesota. And it went from French intelligence to CIA to FBI headquarters to Minnesota. It got very, very watered down. Just insufficient for a warrant by the time it got to Minnesota. So who dropped the ball there?

HEMMER: Perhaps the plot thickens. We shall see.

SHANNON: Yes.

HEMMER: Thanks, Elaine. Elaine Shannon, "TIME" magazine, this morning -- have a good Memorial Day.

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